by Peter Colt
“Where I grew up, gay was not an option. To be gay was worse than being black, and I grew up in Alabama when Jim Crow was a fact, not a historical footnote. Then the army wasn’t exactly the place to be gay.” The army considered homosexuality a crime when we were in. You could be kicked out or even sent to the stockade. “I didn’t even know that what I felt was okay. For a long time, it was the work of the Devil—that was what they taught us in my church. There were no gay people in my town. The army wasn’t much better. I didn’t want to get busted out of the army. Even worse than that, I was afraid team guys wouldn’t want to work with me. The thing of it is, Red, at the end of the day I had to face up to the fact that I was who I was. There was no changing that.
“In the end, I left, got out. Then I went to be a mercenary in Africa. I traveled. I got used to who I am. I became a Buddhist and a biker. I try not to hurt people who don’t deserve to be hurt. I earn money the best way I can.” He was uncoiling years of fear that his brothers wouldn’t understand. That I wouldn’t. It had to be a hard burden to carry.
“Hey, man. I won’t pretend that at twenty-one years old I was mature enough to not say stupid shit . . . but you were always my brother. I trusted you with my life then and now. Your personal life . . . I am not one in a position to judge. Even if I were . . . I wouldn’t know how.”
When the waitress brought the check, Chris had wrapped me in an awkward bear hug. It was awkward because we were sitting in the chairs, turned to face each other. I could feel tears falling on me and could barely breathe. She must have thought it was weird, two grown men hugging and crying.... On the other hand, we were in San Francisco, a city that had a premium on weirdness. For her it was probably just a slow night.
Chapter 18
I woke up on the couch the next morning to the smell of fresh coffee. My tongue felt like it was made of imitation velvet, and my head felt as though I had lost a fight with Marvelous Marvin Hagler. The whiskey that followed the beers at the pizza joint turned out to have been just as vicious Haggler’s straight left jab. We had stayed up late, talking about our war and reminiscing about old and absent comrades we would never again see.
A hot shower and then a hot fresh coffee from the Chemex. Chris had gone out and bought fresh doughnuts from a bakery named Viera’s. The combination of all three turned around what could have been a rough morning. The doughnuts were small and brown, and the inside was yellow cake, sweet but not cloying. They were worlds better than doughnuts from any chain back home. They were still hot, and I could eat about a hundred of them. The doughnuts were made by hand. Some guy stood over a hot fry machine and cranked an old-time doughnut machine, dropping moist dough in the hot oil, and cooked it until it was a soft brown on the outside and yellow inside. When they came out of the fry machine, they were either dipped in a mix of sugar and cinnamon or had one side dipped in chocolate. You could get plain ones, but what was the point?
When we finished breakfast, Chris poured coffee into a thermos and we left. We took our maps and chart and got into Chris’s truck. He had a .45 tucked into the small of his back and handed me a small revolver.
“We have some trouble with a rival gang. If I am going up north, I have to be careful, heeled.”
“Okay, thanks for the piece.”
It looked like a Colt Detective Special and a Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special had had a love child . . . except this child was uglier than its parents. The cylinder looked like a .22 instead of a .38. The grips were wrapped in grip tape that was bent at the end to form a tab. The idea was, after shooting it, you held on to the tab and dropped the gun. The tape unwound and, voila, no fingerprints on the grip. It had some rust on it, but the internals were well oiled. The trigger was a little stiff but broke cleanly when I dry fired it. Mercifully, it still had serial numbers. The blue tapered barrel had CHARTER ARMS, BRIDGEPORT CT embossed along its right side. He handed me a small box of bullets.
“Here are rounds for it.”
“How hot is this piece?” I asked Chris.
“Lukewarm . . . but I figured the tape couldn’t hurt.” He meant that it had a history but no bodies on it. Maybe stolen or maybe used in a robbery but no murders.
“It is a .22 Magnum. Fires a small bullet really fast and loud. No recoil but a lot of flash and bang. In the unlikely event you don’t hit what you are aiming at, you will seriously scare the shit out of them. That little round will make them think you are shooting a real Magnum at them.”
“Huh, okay.” I would have liked something bigger, but, at the end of the day, it was more about where you put the bullets than how big they were. It was better than just trying to defend myself with my highly developed sense of humor. After all, it was the thought that counts.
“It’s a Charter Arms Pathfinder.” I loaded six rounds in the cylinder, and put twelve in my jacket pocket. I put the partially full box of rounds into another pocket. I grunted and stuck the gun in my waistband behind my right kidney, which was possibly my favorite kidney.
Today, we were going to drive around the Bay Area taking the highways and byways, looking at the area around Suisun Bay. I needed to get a fix on what we were dealing with. I had a tentative plan formed in my mind, but there was only so much that the maps and charts could tell me. In-country, we had aerial Reconnaissance photos to help with the planning, which was a luxury I didn’t have here. The drive could help us figure out what type of boat I would need to get out to the Adams.
If I had my choice, it would be a battleship with big guns. Lately it seemed like I was outgunned and outnumbered. Since that was not an option, I wanted a Zodiac with twin Mercury seventy-five-horsepower outboards and a squad of marines to go with it. In reality, it was going to have to be either an inflatable boat with paddles or some sort of kayak. Inflatables were easy to hide and set up. I could row one silently out to the Adams and get on board and have a look around. The problem was that they were just not superefficient, they were ungainly, leaked air, and sucked if there was any sort of headwind. Suisun Bay was named for an old Indian term meaning windy.
My best bet would be a kayak. The army had spent some time teaching me and other SF guys how to use them. The problem was that I didn’t know where I could get a folding one like the SF used. The commercial ones were fiberglass and heavy. I had to be able to hide it while I was on board the Adams. I could tie it off and partially sink it but that meant at some point I would have to get it out of the water and drain it. That was slow, and I might have to leave in a hurry.
I was thinking about all of these things as we took the I-80 east. We crossed over Treasure Island, which was man made for a world’s fair; in World War II, the navy took it over. Now, it was a naval base that was innocuously placed between San Francisco and Oakland. Briefly, we were on the I-580 and then back onto the I-80.
I marveled at how different the climate, the architecture, and the feel of the place were from the East, from New England, where clapboard and shingled houses with white trim and blue shutters were the word of the day. Brick was exotic. Here, there were red tile roofs, stucco sides, and palm trees. Here, ranch houses made sense and were the norm. The roads and highways were wider, more clearly marked and straighter. The roads didn’t have potholes that could swallow a car whole.
The I-80 took us to Route 4 east. Heading east felt strange. I wasn’t heading home but rather heading farther into the country I wasn’t familiar with. We picked up the I-680 north, passing through Vine Hill and Mococo at highway speed. I am sure they are nice towns, but we slipped through them too fast to get a feel for them. We crossed the bridge over the part of the bay where the San Pablo gives way to the Suisun. To my right were railroad bridges that support the industrial areas, the Goodyear plant, and refineries.
From the highway I caught my first glimpse of the fleet. There were rows of pale gray ships stacked together bow to stern in groups of ten. Each group was separated by hundreds of yards of water. They were a few hundred yards, maybe even five hundred,
off the shore. The navy had chosen Suisun Bay to moor the Mothball Fleet because the water was deep enough for large ships, and it was brackish, which cut down on the rate that the ships would rust.
The shore itself was a wide band of salt marsh with industrial catch basins that were separated from the bay by a narrow strip of marshland. Then farther inland was the industrial area. It was a desolate mixture of industry and nature. There were no houses, no Dairy Queens, no signs of regular life or regular people along that part of the bay. It was the perfect place to store obsolete ships, ships that were waiting for the next war, the next time to be useful, the next chance to have some meaning. I could relate to those boats. Many days I felt as though my relevance ended when the last helicopter left the embassy in Saigon.
We followed the I-680 north, rising through the hills and passing by Lake Herman Road eventually getting off on Marshview Road. We doubled back down Goodyear Road. Mostly, it was just bleak marshland on one side and bleaker industrial hulk on the other. As we moved closer to the fleet, houses and buildings started to spring up. There were boats moored in the Goodyear Slough, which could have also been named Mud River. We came to a boatyard and a marina, both of which looked like they had been built in the late forties or early fifties, offering GIs the dream of boating that didn’t involve yacht club snobbery or prices.
On Goodyear Slough, you needed a boat and mooring fees. No Mayflower pedigree was needed. That had been during its height. Now it was as grim, as dented and faded as a crushed can of Falstaff beer. I have nothing against it, but its glory days were long over. The buildings were faded with peeling paint, and the boats in the basin weren’t faring much better. They were tied off with care, but all of the brass was spotted with green. The teak on many of the boats sported varnish that had blistered in the sun and salt. They were all power boats, almost all wooden hulled, and the youngest one had been launched when Kennedy was president.
We kept driving south through barren marshland on either side of the road. Gulls wheeled in the sky, and the low tide stank of rotting fish. We passed a marshalling yard and crossed Morrow Lane, still moving south. We turned toward the water and made our way on smaller roads and tracks. They didn’t have names, and we ended up dead ended with nothing but marsh in front of us more than once. Finally, we ended up on a service road near the water, and after following that we ended up facing the bay.
We got out, and Chris put up the hood. He fiddled around with the engine while I scanned the rows of ships, moored, straining against their anchor lines in the wind. We were in luck; the only row of Liberty ships was closest to us, which meant that it was last in the row of ships. Chris scanned it with binoculars while I snapped away with the camera. I was able to make out the name John Quincy Adams in fading letters on the stern of the northernmost ship. I made some quick snaps of the patrol boat on its circuit around the ships. The navy seemed quite serious about protecting the fleet. They had regular patrols, and once in a while the boats were armed with M60 machine guns. The occasional Coast Guard cutter with its white hull and slanted orange stripe would tool around the bay. We saw boats that went out to different ships, either to bring out workers to service them or to cannibalize parts to be used elsewhere in the fleet. There were tugboats that were used to push, pull, and tow ships in or out of the stacks as needed.
We spent about five minutes watching and snapping pictures. Any more than that would have seemed suspicious. Chris put the hood down, and we climbed back in the truck. We noticed that a patrol boat started to head our way and then went north, patrolling the coast, then circled back around the ships. We headed south. An older green Ford pickup truck driving down a dusty road, nothing suspicious about that. Occasionally, a car or truck would pass us heading north, but all in all there was very little traffic on the road.
We turned inland, to the west, passing by the buildings used by the navy Shore Patrol. We saw the SP’s, the Navy’s version of MP’s, were hanging around in their white uniforms. They were the ones who were guarding the Mothball Fleet. I noticed that some of them were carrying .45 caliber M3A1 Grease Guns. It seemed like they were toting some heavy artillery around just to watch some old ships rust in the bay. Some of them had holstered 1911 pistols on their hips and white Billy clubs on the other side of their belts. They wore white polished helmet liners with “SP” on the front. Suspicious eyes tracked us as we drove past them, making our way back to the I-680.
We followed the I-680 north. One option would be to put in at Goodyear Slough and follow the coast south to the fleet. The problem with that was they seemed to patrol it well. I could also try to navigate the maze of canals through the marshes, but it seemed easy to get lost in there. That could end in disaster. Also, I had no idea what chemicals were being pumped into those relatively stagnant waters, and I wasn’t eager to go swimming around in them.
Instead, we needed to head farther east away from the water. There were two islands in the bay that were a couple of miles from the fleet. They might make a good place to stage and watch the fleet before trying to infiltrate the ship. It seemed like the patrols kept relatively close to the Mothball Fleet, and the commercial traffic, fishing boats, stayed away.
We took the wide, flat, black and yellow ribbon of the I-680 north and traded its three wide lanes that ran more or less north and south for a brief reacquaintance with the I-80 proper. Then we headed west on local Route 12, two lanes each, east and west. It wasn’t as wide, and there was more traffic, but we drove by the Jelly Belly factory that made the very jellybeans that the president had sitting on his desk in the Oval Office. Chris drove well, always reading the road ahead of him and constantly checking the mirrors to see if any threats were sneaking up on him.
We turned south toward Montezuma on increasingly smaller, narrower roads. We crossed a dam that bridged the Montezuma Slough and headed farther south into more marshland. We then followed a series of back roads east toward Grizzly Bay. We crossed a rickety bridge, drove on more dirt roads, and ended up at the water on a road that hugged the beach, raised above the marsh. We stopped. Three miles away, bobbing like small toys on the water was the fleet. In front of us lay Ryer Island, and the map told me in front of that was Roe Island.
The islands were far enough away that a lone man with training and experience could lay up and watch the fleet undetected. With a kayak or small, quiet powered boat, I could slip the mile and a half to the fleet in the dark and get on board one of the ships. It meant crossing open navigable water with ships moving around. In the dark, at sea level, I wouldn’t even register on a tired watchman’s radar screen. I would be invisible, which was cool, but also meant that I could be run over by a tanker, cargo ship, or anything, and no one would know or care. But I was a Recon man . . . and being invisible was my best defense against a security force looking to keep people off the ships.
I could kayak out to Ryer Island at dawn and build a hide, probably little more than a camouflage nylon poncho made into a low tent in the scrub brush by the marsh. I could spend the day there, watching and sleeping. I could shoot an azimuth with the compass to the ship, and then, late at night or early in the morning, kayak out in the dark. The compass had luminous paint on the arrows so it would be simple navigation. I could get on the Adams, find a way in, and hide my kayak. I could explore and sleep on board during the day and slip away at night. Then I would head back to shore and have Chris pick me up. If I found the gold, then we could figure out what to do with it.
I told Chris my plan, and he added useful suggestions. We followed the marsh road back to Route 12. It took us to the I-680 back by the Goodyear plant and the refinery. To my right was the industrial sprawl of postwar California. To my left, gulls wheeled over the marsh and bay, whose conservation had been sacrificed in the name of industrial progress. We followed the I-680 south through a valley and took a right onto Route 24 in a town called Walnut Creek. We took 24 up into some hills and crossed over the ridge, then down toward the water. We drove through Roc
kridge and picked up the I-80, which was to take us back to San Francisco. We drove over the Oakland Bay Bridge; the Alameda Naval Air Station was down to my left and Treasure Island to the right.
Chris nosed the truck through the city, and we found a place to park. It was late in the afternoon, and we had missed lunch. Chris took me to a funky sandwich joint. It was as if in San Francisco there was a city ordinance stating that 75 percent of all businesses had to be funky, quirky, or similarly original in content and style. This place was no different. The front of it was brick faced and a cigar store Indian was out front. Instead of a cigar, the wooden Indian held a bottle of pop. We went in and stood in line to order. Chris assured me that this place would be memorable.
The sandwich options were written in different colored chalk on one wall that was painted to be a chalkboard. There was a wooden barrel filled with half-sour pickles cut into quarters and a pair of tongs on string that was attached to the side of the barrel. You were supposed to help yourself to as many half-sours as you wanted. It is a well-known fact in the greater Boston area, among those who care about such things, that I am crazy about half-sour pickles. You can keep dills and your bread and butter pickles. I am not saying that those aren’t fine pickles—it’s just that the half-sour is where it’s at.
Chris ordered a turkey sandwich on whole wheat bread with mayo, sprouts, Brie, and avocado. I ordered a roast beef with tiger sauce, which turned out to be a mixture of cream cheese and horseradish, with sprouts on pumpernickel. We helped ourselves to pickles while we waited. I had two and took another one to have with the sandwich.