Something for Nothing (11 page)

But instead of driving to Hayward, Martin was with Peter at the marina in Jack London Square, loading the Viking up for a day of fishing and an overnight on the boat. Maybe they'd fish the next day, too. They had some time, because Peter had been suspended from school for the week. They could contest it, Mrs. Bishop had said when she was leaving their house Sunday night—a high-drama visit that had left Peter looking shell-shocked. But this would mean meeting with the principal, and she'd made it clear he wasn't the sort who messed around.

“I don't think we should put him through that,” Mrs. Bishop had said. “Let's just let things cool off.”

Martin suspected the real issue was that she just wanted a break from Peter (and he didn't blame her). But he didn't say this out loud. Instead, he came up with the fishing idea.

At first Linda had looked at him like he was out of his mind.

“Let me get this straight,” she'd said. “Your son gets suspended from school—from fourth fucking grade, Martin—for a whole week. And you . . . your idea is to reward him for it? Take him out fishing? Shouldn't we be
punishing
him? How about making him do some chores? Make him think about what he did.”

Martin had nodded, conceding that she might be right. “I know, I know,” he said.

He also knew what his own father's response would have been: the belt, total lockdown, the works. But, he said, he had a gut feeling that this was the wrong time to come down hard on him.

“It's like she said,” he told her. “I think we should just let things cool off. Something's wrong. I can try to talk to him on the boat. Maybe he'll open up a little bit.”

And that, he went on to say, was probably better—more useful—than slamming the door and throwing away the key. He was a sensitive kid. And he was smart. This wasn't some freaky pet-killer thing, where they'd found a cache of cat carcasses in the basement, for Christ's sake. He wasn't the next Charlie Manson.

Martin was pretty sure that Linda understood this as a reference to the thing with Sarah and the drug classes, a suggestion that it had all been a big waste of time and money (which it most definitely had been). But she didn't say anything, and in fact she seemed persuaded by his reasoning. This surprised him, but he was just as surprised to realize that he probably
was
right. The kid had gotten a little nutty, and although a fishing expedition might not solve anything, it probably couldn't hurt, either. Plus, Martin realized, getting away for some fishing might help him steel himself for his upcoming trip to Mexico. He needed to get out of the house for a day or two, clear his head, and
stop thinking about things. Val, Mexico, and the money. The money, the money, the money.

I
T WAS ANOTHER COOL DAY
on the bay, with low clouds promising protection from the sun for most of the afternoon. The early rush of serious fisherman had long since gone, and now there was a quiet, lazy feeling hovering over the docks. Someone's voice carried across the water, past the sound of running engines and the slow
slap, slap
of the water against the dock. The air smelled of that mixture of salt and gasoline that Martin loved.

He walked along the floating pier, holding an ice chest and on top of it a big tackle box. A big cruiser, forty-five feet at least, chugged by and created a wake, and he widened his stance to help keep his balance. Martin looked over at Peter as they trundled along, side by side. He was wearing jeans and a big hooded sweatshirt that said
BERKELEY
across the front, and carrying their fishing rods and a sleeping bag. He was sucking a big red sour ball as he walked along. A strand of red saliva was dripping down his chin, and, because his hands were full, he wiped it off with his shoulder.

“How're you doing?” Martin asked him. Peter nodded, indicating that he was fine. Martin saw that he was looking at the schools of little fish that were darting back and forth just below the surface of the water.

“We're too late to go out into the ocean today,” Martin said. “It's too far. I was thinking we'd go up to Suisun Bay, and try to hit some sturgeon out by the mothball fleet. Harold told me that it's a good spot right now. He said some guys caught a four-footer out there a week or two ago. It was over a hundred pounds.”

Peter nodded again, raised his eyebrows, and mumbled in approval.

“Plus,” Martin said, “the A's have a day game today, in Boston. It starts at about three, East Coast time, so it'll be on about noon here. How does that sound? Catch some sturgeon and listen to the game. I think Vida Blue might be pitching, but I'm not positive.”

They got to the berth for
By a Nose,
and Peter set his load onto the dock with a clatter. He took the sour ball out of his mouth and nodded, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“I think you're right,” he said. “I think Vida Blue
is
pitching today.”

Martin had taken Peter to a game last year when Blue was pitching. They'd had good seats, not too far from the first-base dugout: close enough that you could hear the ball pop loudly into the catcher's mitt. People said that both Gene Tenace and Ray Fosse, the A's other catcher, put extra foam in their mitts when Blue was pitching. That told you how hard he was throwing.

Peter climbed onto the boat. “Did you know that Gaylord Perry uses a spitball?” he asked Martin. “It's an illegal pitch. No one can hit it. But he doesn't use spit—he uses Vaseline he hides on his hat, or on his uniform. And no one can catch him. The umpires always try, but they can never find anything.”

Peter went into a mock windup, and then followed through as if throwing a pitch. He looked awkward, both because the boat was rocking a little bit and because he was uncoordinated and didn't really know what he was doing. He'd go out in the backyard and throw tennis balls against the side of the house—he'd drawn a target with chalk—but it didn't seem to have helped his form very much. Martin knew he should get out there with him, try to help before the other kids were too far ahead, but Peter was no athlete. And Martin was always too busy. Or too tired out from worrying.

Martin nodded, smiling, and climbed onto the boat. “Perry's been around for a while,” he said. “He used to pitch for the Giants. Did you know that? He and Willie Mays played together for a long time. But, yeah, he's really good. Maybe he'll pitch against the A's when they play here later in the season.”

“You're right,” Peter said, staring at Martin. “They probably will play here. I bet he
will
pitch. Oh my God. Do you think we could get tickets? Could I invite someone?”

They talked like this off and on for a couple of hours, first as Martin
got the boat ready and maneuvered it out of the marina and up the Oakland Estuary, and then as they sped up and headed north toward Suisun Bay, the tributary bay that pushed out from the northern half of San Francisco Bay. Martin was enjoying himself. He liked listening to Peter yak at him like this. He'd been increasingly quiet and withdrawn lately, and it killed Martin to think that he might be unhappy, and that for the most part he himself was powerless to do anything about it. There was plenty of time to be miserable when you were older—when insecurity and disappointment came knocking, and you discovered that happiness was something you chased but couldn't ever quite catch up to. Couldn't there be a rule of some sort about childhood? Couldn't someone mandate a carefree existence at least until you were, say, ten years old, one in which there were no fears or worries and no crippling self-consciousness? This was why he decided against quizzing Peter about what had happened at school. If it came up, so be it. They'd certainly grilled him pretty hard when Mrs. Bishop was at the house. Martin had done everything but tie him to a chair and put a desk lamp in his face. And where had it gotten them?

The gist of the issue, Mrs. Bishop had explained after pulling up in her crappy Volkswagen Bug (Martin had watched through the living room window, and seen with disappointment that she was wearing jeans, not one of her short dresses), was that Peter was suspected of sending a nasty note to a student in class. Martin had scoffed when he heard this—had felt relieved, even. But Mrs. Bishop had put him straight pretty quickly. The note, she'd explained, was strange. Or disturbing—that's how she'd put it. “It's a disturbing note,” she'd said, sitting there on the couch in the living room, looking back at Martin and Linda as they looked at her. Martin hadn't been able to wrap his brain around the fact that she was actually there, in their house. He felt strange, and anxious, sort of like when he was visiting a doctor, whether it was for him or the kids. He'd suddenly start larding his sentences with big words, misusing half of them, probably, making a fool of himself, unable to stop.

“Disturbing how?” Linda had asked. “What did it say?”

“It said, ‘Jesus hates you,'” Mrs. Bishop said. She said it quietly and succinctly, and Martin could tell immediately that she'd been practicing her delivery, that she'd been going over it on the way to their house, in her car. “It was typed. And written with all capital letters.”

Martin stared at her for a second, trying to process what she'd said, but feeling the words slide away from him.

“‘Jesus hates you'?” he asked. “What do you mean, ‘Jesus hates you'? In capital letters? Are you certain about this? That sounds vaguely implausible. Or indeterminate, anyway.”

“There are some other notes,” she said in response, giving Martin a quizzical look and then directing her attention toward Linda. “All of them were typed. And they all play mean psychological games. They really are kind of nasty. One says, ‘Everyone thinks you're ugly. Do you?' That kind of thing. But the bad one—the worst one—was the one about Jesus hating someone.”

“There are other notes?” Martin asked. “That Peter sent? Where did he send them? To their houses?”

“
Martin,
” Linda said, giving Mrs. Bishop what he knew was an apologetic glance. “They get them at
school
. Where do you think they get them? They just get them. Don't you get it? Our son is sending weird notes to people.”

Linda and Mrs. Bishop had taken over after this, talking and talking. It was as if he were a car wreck that they'd finally been able to move off the road, so that traffic could start flowing again. And eventually, after they called Peter in and questioned him for half an hour or so, he'd given them this much: that the idea for the notes, and in particular the Jesus note, must have been lifted from the book he'd been reading, the one about the spy and the notebook. It was the sequel to
Harriet the Spy,
Peter said (of course, Martin thought, the thing with the notebook). But Peter also said he'd talked to lots of other kids about what happens in the books—including the secret note-leaving. So, he
concluded, it could have been anyone. Maybe someone he'd talked to, or maybe someone who'd heard about it from one of these people.

“But it wasn't me,” he said, his face a study of blank confusion.

And then they were standing again at the front door, with Mrs. Bishop exiting instead of entering.

Martin remembered that he'd insisted on shaking her hand, and that she had surprisingly rough skin. “Thank you for coming over, Mrs. Bishop . . . or Allison. Or whatever we're supposed to call you.”

She'd smiled at him, but it was a confused smile, one that indicated that she wanted to get the hell out of there (or get the hell away from him, he realized, even before they were done shaking hands). He also remembered watching her as she walked toward her car, and knowing as he was doing it that he was letting his gaze go a couple of seconds too long. And then he'd looked over and seen Linda looking right at him. Her arms were folded across her chest. Martin had thought at that moment—he remembered it clearly, standing there with Peter on the deck of the Viking, the wind blowing in his face—that his wife was very attractive, and that he was actually a pretty lucky guy. But before he could say this (or before he could reach over and hug her, which is what he was about to do) she'd turned and walked inside.

T
HEY MADE IT OUT
to the mothball fleet by about one. It was a big group of older ships, most of them from World War II. There were hundreds of them, floating patiently out in Suisun Bay, waiting for someone to remember that they were still around. Some of the ships had seen serious action during the war. The one they were heading for, the SS
O'Brien,
had been some serious action—had taken part in D-Day and served in the South Pacific (and now, Martin knew, it was a good spot for sturgeon fishing).

The official line was that the ships were kept in reserve in case of an emergency of some sort: to carry military supplies, or even grain or coal. But according to Hal Weaver, the truth was that it was too
expensive to even scrap them. It was, he told Martin, cheaper to buy Japanese steel.

“Pretty ironic, huh?” Hal had said. “We build the ships and win the war, but now they're kicking our asses in business. I mean, we can't even afford to get rid of the ships! I've actually contracted to scrap a few of them, but I lost money on it. Unbelievable.”

Martin looked up at the ships as they drew near to them and slipped in and out of the long shadows they cast on the greenish-gray water of the bay.

“Wow,” Peter said. “I forgot how big they are.”

Martin nodded—he knew what Peter meant. Looking down at them as you drove past (the Martinez Bridge gave you the best vantage point), the ships looked like little toys that some kid had set down on a pond. But from where they were now, on the water and only a couple hundred yards away, you saw them for what they were: giant steel monoliths that towered silently overhead. And it was this combination of immensity and silence that made it feel eerie out there when you pulled close to them. This was especially true on a foggy day—sometimes you wouldn't see them until you'd practically run into them. Then it was as if a ghost fleet of pirate ships had suddenly emerged out of the fog.