The Immigrants (57 page)

And then he heard his name called. A man had come off one of the fishing boats, walked past him, turned, stared, taken a few steps back, and then said tentatively, “Dan Lavette?”

Dan looked blankly at a heavyset man in his middle fifties, burned brown by the sun.

“You’re Dan Lavette.”

Dan rose to face him and nodded.

“I’ll be damned. Don’t you remember me? Pete Lomas. I ran your fleet up on the wharf in San Francisco.”

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“Pete? Yes, sure. Glad to see you.”

Lomas was examining him, measuring him with his eyes. “Bad breaks, Dan? Last I heard, you were on top of the world.”

“I climbed down.”

“Well, a lot of them did. Come on, let me buy you a drink. We’ll talk about old times.”

Dan shook his head. “No—no, I’d better not.”

“Are you hungry? When did you eat last?”

“Hell, no, I’m not hungry.”

“Come on. I’m starved. Come on and sit down with me, Dan.

Come on.”

“No—”

“Ah, cut out the bullshit. Come on. We go back a long way.” He took Dan’s arm. “Come along, Dan.”

“O.K.,” Dan said. “I’m lying. I’m broke, I’m hungry. I can’t sponge off you, Pete. You find a bum you haven’t seen for twenty years, you got no obligations.”

“That’s a lousy thing to say. Come on.”

They walked over to a lunch wagon on Harbor Road, and Lomas ordered ham and eggs and fried pota toes and coffee for both of them. The waitress put down a basket of bread, and Dan couldn’t hold back. He be gan to eat the bread. Lomas watched him. The ham and eggs came. Dan looked up and apologized. “Christ, I’m eating like a pig.”

“How long?” Lomas asked softly.

“Two days without anything. They had a soup kitchen going the day before that. Then it closed down.”

Lomas nodded. “The sisters from Saint Mary’s. They keep it going until they run out of money. They’ll start up again soon.

They come to me for fish. Go on, eat. You want more?”

“No, this is enough. What do you fish, Pete?”

“Mackerel. I got my own boat. The wife got asthma about ten

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years ago, and the doctor said she wanted a dry climate. So we came down here and bought a bun galow in Downey. Not that it does her much good, but it’s better than up north, I suppose.”

“Mackerel? How do you take it?”

“Round haul nets, mostly purse seines. Night fishing, we set out drift nets. A lot depends on the season. We pick up blue mackerel and jack mackerel. There’s still a good market, because it’s so much cheaper than meat. We bring in two tons a day and sometimes better than that at three to four cents a pound. I got two men in my crew and we work our asses off. I could use a third.”

“I’m not looking for charity,” Dan said.

“Shit. Your hands will be bleeding and your back broken the first day out, so don’t give me no crap about charity. I got respect for you, Dan, so I’m not feeding you any bullshit. I pay eight dollars a day when we fish. That’s what I pay my other hands, and that’s what I pay you. We go out for ten hours, sometimes more. The pay’s the same, ten hours, twelve hours, so I’m not giv ing you a damn thing I don’t sweat out of your ass. Jesus, Dan, you’re not the first guy’s been on his up pers. If you want a job, I got a job for you. Yes or no?”

“I’ll take it,” Dan said. “Hell, I’m not a bad fisher man.”

“You can say that again.”

Mark Levy mentioned the pains in his chest to Sarah, and she was so upset and so insistent that he see a doc tor that he refrained from mentioning them again. His stomach had been giving him trouble, and he told him self that it was gas and no more. His plans for buying the bait and tackle shop had washed away. He couldn’t see himself standing behind a counter again. For all that he had constantly cautioned Dan through the years, he had played the

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game with him. It was a wonderful game while it lasted, with the big man storming in and out of the office, an overgrown, easygoing kid building an em pire. Well, not precisely an empire; more like an enor mous version of the erector set he once bought for his grandchildren. Yet they had done it, and their ships sailed the seas and their planes flew through the skies when few enough people ever dreamed that ordinary people would travel across the skies as passengers in airplanes. They had built the biggest store west of the Continental Divide and they had built the biggest hotel in the Hawaiian Islands, and they had done it them selves.

And now Dan had gone, and there had not been a word from him since he had left. There was no one he could talk to about Dan, not even Sarah, nor could he put into words what he felt about him. They had been like brothers, but not even brothers had that easy, non-interfering closeness that had marked their relationship.

Through the years he had sat in the office while Dan roamed the country and the world, but vicariously he had reached out and touched and felt everything Dan had touched and felt. Now he did nothing because noth ing interested him particularly. He lived with memories. He would sit in the garden with his eyes closed, trying to recall his first meeting with Dan. Probably Dan was no more than six years old the first time his father, big Joe Lavette, had brought him into the chandler shop. Mark’s father was still alive then, and Mark remem bered how they would talk about the old days when the railroads were being built and there was still gold to be dug out of the earth.

Or else, Mark would wander around the house, room to room, as if he were searching for something he had lost. Sarah watched him in silence, her heart going out to him, unable to help him, unable to bridge the gap that had opened so long ago.

She was not with him when he had the heart attack. She was in the house. He was outside, sitting in the gar den, and she found him

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there, dead from what the doc tor described afterward as a massive coronary. Sarah held herself together. She telephoned the doctor, and then she telephoned Jake at Higate. An hour later, Jake and Clair arrived at the house, and it was not until then that Sarah went into the kitchen and sat down and wept.

A few hours later, having pulled herself together, Sarah said to Jake, “I want you to find Danny. I want him to know about this. I don’t want Papa buried with out Dan here, and I don’t want anyone else to talk about him at the funeral.”

But there was no trace of Dan, no lead, no direction. As far as the Levys were concerned, he had disappeared from the face of the earth. No one of them had any idea where he had gone or in what direction or how far. Sarah told Jake to try to reach May Ling, who was liv ing somewhere in Los Angeles, but not one of them knew that she had taken the name of Lavette, and there was no Feng Wo listed by the telephone company in Los Angeles.

Six weeks after Dan went to work for Pete Lomas, working six days a week, with the mackerel running heavy and kissing the nets, as they put it, Lomas had to put his boat into dry dock and have the bottom scraped. Dan had three days off. The six weeks had changed him. Lean already after the time in prison, his muscles had hardened and his hands had toughened. He was burned brown by the sun, and he felt better than he had in years.

This day, the day the boat went into dry dock, he shaved carefully, put on a pair of cotton twill trousers that he had bought the same morning and a white shirt and a sweater, and took the interurban to Los Angeles. He divested himself of expectations and tried to will himself to anticipate nothing; but it was not easy. He was unable to control his excitement, yet in all truth he had no notion of what

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awaited him. It was more than three years since he had seen May Ling. The boy, his son, would be fourteen years old. How do you approach a boy of fourteen and tell him that you are his father? “I am your father who let you down and threw you away.” How is it done? What does the boy say? What does he feel?

He located his fear among all the other emotions that beset him.

The fear was paramount—fear that May Ling had expunged him from her life. And why not? And then there were other alternatives of fear. May Ling could be dead. As much as he rejected the thought, it kept reoccurring. She could be married to someone else. Her love could have turned into hatred. He had seen love turn into hatred.

No use to think
, he told himself. It was almost two years since he had left the house on Russian Hill, and for two years fear and doubt and his own peculiar need for self-flagellation had kept him away.

He left the interurban car at Vermont Avenue and walked to the campus. It was hot now, and he pulled off his sweater and carried it over his arm. At the campus, he experienced a momentary surge of terror, a feeling that his whole world was collapsing around him.

The buildings were boarded up. The grounds had been uncared for, the plants dry and yellow and wasted—as if the University of California in Los Angeles had been flung on the dust heap of the Depression. But then common sense told him that universities do not vanish so easily, and he prowled around until he found a caretaker, who informed him that the entire university had moved to its new campus in the town of Westwood.

A red interurban car, bouncing and jolting, carried him to Westwood, and now a new fear assailed him. Why was he so certain that she remained in the same job? What if this were a dead end?

What if nothing but dead ends awaited him?

He walked slowly and uncertainly across the campus, asking directions to the library. The place was bigger than the old campus,

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new parts of it still in construc tion, winding pathways and red brick buildings, boys and girls striding past him as if he did not exist. He reached the library and stood in front of it, and now that he was here, his courage failed him, and for per haps ten minutes he stood without moving. It was al most four o’clock now. There was a pile of lumber about the height of a bench on the edge of the walk, and he went to it and sat there, unable to bring himself to enter the library building.

The minutes passed. He had a dollar Ingersol watch, and, sitting there, he was so high-strung, so desperate, that he could hear it ticking away in his watch pocket. He looked again, and it was four-fifteen. He rose to go to the library and then dropped back onto the pile of lumber. Students drifted by and in and out of the li brary, and still he waited.

At four-thirty, May Ling came out of the building. She wore a pleated gray skirt that fell to below her knees, a white blouse, and a black sweater. Her long hair had been bobbed. There was a distance of about twenty yards between where he sat and the front of the library, and with the distance, she appeared almost girl-like, the same slender, ivory-skinned girl he had met in the apartment in San Francisco in another life and in another time.

She stood there a moment, breathing the fresh air, and he had a sudden sense of panic. She would turn and walk away, never seeing him, and he would remain frozen where he was. But then she looked at him. She remained frozen for a long moment, and finally she walked over to where he was. He stood up, facing her, and she paused about four feet from him, studying him, the heavy work shoes, the twill trousers, the white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the strong, muscular brown arms, and the lean face. She had never seen his face so lean, the skin drawn tight over the ridges of bone. He was not the same man, and yet he was. She came closer and reached out and touched his cheek, in a gesture so typical that

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he felt tears welling into his eyes. He was unable to speak. He just stood there, staring at her, no ticing now that age had not left her untouched, the gray streaks in her hair, the tiny wrinkles around her eyes. The dark eyes met his, directly, searchingly; and sud denly he felt weak and totally drained. He moved back and sat down on the stack of boards, covering his face with his hands, trying to control the dry sobs that wracked his body. He had not been able to weep since he was a child.

May Ling sat down next to him. For almost ten min utes, the two of them sat there in silence, neither speak ing. Then May Ling said, “I thought you were dead.” Her voice was a whisper. “It was like being dead my self. I read about what had happened to the company, and I waited, and then I telephoned Stephan Cassala at San Mateo, and he told me that Mark had died and you disappeared—”

“Mark died?” he asked woefully. “Oh, my God! When?”

“Four months ago, I guess. He had a heart attack.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Where were you, Danny?”

“In jail.”

“Oh, no. No.”

“I’m all right now. I was there only three months. But Mark—oh, Christ, this lousy, rotten world!”

“It’s a good, beautiful world, Danny.”

“We’re here and Mark’s dead. He wasn’t old. He was fifty-one.”

“We’re here, Danny. I wept enough for you.”

He was crying openly at last. Students passing by turned to look at the big, brown-faced man who sat weeping next to a small.

Chinese woman who clutched his hand so tightly.

“Don’t, Danny, please.”

He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. “Poor Sarah,”

he said. “Is she all right?”

“I think so. I don’t know.”

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Then he remembered and said to her, “God, you’re not married, are you?”

“Who would marry me, Danny?”

He was grinning and weeping at once, rubbing his eyes. “I got a job,” he said. “I’m a fisherman again.” He shook his head and bent to hide the tears that started again. “I don’t know why I’m doing this. God Almighty, I can’t sit here crying.”

“Come home with me, Danny.”

She took his arm, and he rose and walked with her. Even the pain of knowing that Mark was dead could not lessen his sense of being, of existing, the knowledge that this strange, small Chinese woman whose name was May Ling and who was in some way a part of himself was here beside him.