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 He’d been increasingly quiet and withdrawn lately, and it killed Martin to think that he might be unhappy, and that for the most part he himself was powerless to do anything about it.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.
THEY 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.
There was no fog today, just a light breeze from the north. They could smell the stink of the oil refineries in Benicia and Martinez and Vallejo.
Those old towns actually had some character—more than the made-up character of Walnut Station, that’s for sure. Benicia had even been the state capital for a year or two at one point. But they’d been bought out and overrun by the oil companies. Standard, Shell, Gulf, Exxon, and the rest of them. He couldn’t even keep the names straight anymore. They’d plopped down their giant production facilities right on the edge of these towns. Crazy mazes of pipes winding hundreds of feet in the air, huge smoke stacks, big fat holding tanks the size of city blocks, practically. At night, when the facilities were lit up with different-colored lights, it looked like an amusement park, or th
e Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz. Nothing could have been further from the truth, of course. For one thing, it really did stink. Martin couldn’t imagine how anyone could live there. Could you get used to something like that? Martin didn’t think so. But you never knew, maybe if you’d grown up there you wouldn’t notice. In fact, maybe if you were from Martinez or Benicia or one of the other little towns up there—maybe towns like Walnut Station smelled bad to you, or smelled wrong, somehow.
In the first two hours of fishing they caught an ocean trout, a few bullheads, and a stingray. The stingray was big—almost two feet across from wingtip to wingtip. They laid it out on the deck on its back, so they could see its whitish-gray underbelly. Its mouth looked strangely human. It opened and closed as they stood there looking at it.
“It’s like it’s trying to tell us something,” Peter said, looking at the ray and then at Martin.
“You think?” Martin asked.
“Yeah,” Peter said. “Maybe it’s some kind of warning.”
Martin smiled, but he wasn’t sure if Peter was joking or not. It was hard to tell with him these days. He was tempted to ask, but he decided against it. He picked up the ray and threw it off the side of the boat, back into the water. They watched it float there for a second, hard to see in the brackish green of the bay, and then it glided away.
After an hour of no action (not even a bite), and after they listened to the game for a while, Martin told Peter stories about ghost pirates looking down at them from the ships, rattling their sabers and warning them off, maybe shooting a few ghost muskets and cannonballs at them. A while after that, Peter got up in the prow, shooting his pretend gun at the pirates, ducking and firing in some sort of pitched battle with Captain Kidd or whoever it was he was imagining out there. It was a nice game, nice to watch him play. Eventually, Martin joined in, and then they started battling each other. They climbed all over the boat—up onto the bridge, along the narrow side ledges, into the cabin. Finally, Martin used his favorite maneuver: he slipped down through the forward hatch, snuck through the bedroom and cabin, and then came up behind Peter and scared the shit out of him. Maybe, he said to Peter, the ghost pirates on the battleships had been helping him.
“Yeah, right,” Peter said. “You wish.” But Martin could see him thinking about it, glancing up at the boats and wondering.
Martin looked upward along the steel side of the O’Brien. It was like standing next to a building. A ship like this would be a great place to hide, he thought, if you really needed a getaway. Fill the Viking with provisions, take it out there, sink it, and then climb up the big ladder that was still affixed to the side of the O’Brien. You could last a year or more up there, Martin thought, especially if you caught some fish. You could capture rainwater in buckets. Shit off the side of the boat—whatever. And the beauty of it was that they’d think you’d been lost at sea. When they did finally track you down (because in the end they always did), you could go out fighting, shooting at the police and whoever else it was that was after you until you were out of ammunition and too tired to care, anyway.
After the stingray, they couldn’t catch anything. Finally, Martin suggested that they both jump off the boat and into the water.
“Come on,” he said. “It’ll be great. We’ll jump at the same time. I dare you.”
“No way,” Peter said.
“Why not?” Martin asked. “What’s wrong? It’s not that cold.”
“Aren’t there sharks?”
But Martin persisted, and then he started in with the bribes. “I’ll give you a box of baseball cards,” he said. “How many packs are in a box? Twenty? Thirty? Come on—you can’t turn that down. And think how impressed Mom will be. Plus, you can tell your friends about it when you get back to school. They’ll wish they’d gotten suspended, too.”
It was Martin’s first reference to what had happened, and he knew he was taking a chance.
Peter stared at the water, and Martin felt as if he could hear him thinking. He looked at Martin, then shrugged. “All right,” he said. “But we’re both doing it, right?”
“Absolutely,” Martin said. “But we’ve gotta take our clothes off. Once you’re wet, your clothes will be too heavy. You’ll get tired out right away. You’d drown if you had to swim very far like that.”
So they stripped and on the count of three they jumped in. The water was cold—really cold, Martin realized after about a second or two. His head started to hurt even before he surfaced after his dive. He came up splashing and a little panicked, gasping and turning immediately to look for Peter. If he was this cold, how did Peter feel?
But just a second later he spotted Peter. He was whooping and smiling at Martin and giving him a thumbs-up sign. Martin laughed, and they started back to the boat. The water was pretty calm, but even the slight swell of the bay made it a little harder to swim than Martin had expected. Peter wasn’t much of a swimmer, and Martin saw that he had to kick and stroke with real energy to move the ten or fifteen yards to the boat (it had begun to drift away from them the second they dove).
They climbed up the little ladder on the stern. “Jesus,” Martin said. He was breathing hard and shivering. He wrapped a towel around himself. “I feel like we just swam a mile—at least a mile. How do those guys who swim out to Alcatraz do it? My head hurts, it’s so cold.”
“I know,” Peter said, adjusting the towel that Martin had given him. “It’s fucking freezing.”
This caught Martin off guard, and he laughed.
“Hey,” he said. “Watch the language.”
He watched Peter hop up and down, trying to pull his pants on. Martin saw that he was smiling. It was the first time he’d seen that in a while.
THEY HADN’T CAUGHT A sturgeon—not even one that was under the limit (which, Martin knew, he would have kept). And Peter hadn’t offered up a sudden confession about his notes, his eyes brimming with tears, repentant, suddenly, for his actions (and Martin tearful as well, grateful for Peter’s honesty). But that night, back in the marina, neither of these things seemed very important. The plan had been to go out to a fish place like the Sea Wolf, but Martin was tired, and he was able to talk Peter into settling for dinner on hot plates down in the cabin—canned Chef Boyardee raviolis and Campbell’s chicken soup and toast. Martin had a few beers, and Peter had hot chocolate. Peter read a book with a knight on the cover (Martin had a feeling the notebook days were over), and Martin read a couple of semirecent issues of Sports Illustrated.
Peter was asleep by eight-thirty. Martin didn’t fall asleep right away, though. He was uncomfortable, tucked with Peter into the V-shaped bunks up in the prow. He tried listening to the calm lapping of the water against the hull and to Peter’s deep, regular breathing, but hovering at the edge of his thinking was what lay ahead. Very soon, Martin knew, things were going to change. He wasn’t sure how, exactly, but he knew it would be different. Lying there in the Viking, Martin hadn’t stepped over the line yet, at least not officially, and so he tried to relax and focus on the present moment—being there with Peter, listening to the sound of the water. But he knew that it was like Val had said back at the track: once you were in, you couldn’t go back again.
TWO
CHAPTER SIX
Val’s instructions had been simple and succinct. First, fly down to the tiny airport in Santa Barbara and meet up with Derek Hano. Then, once it was dark, fly with him down to Ensenada. Or just outside of Ensenada, to Ramirez’s ranch. Once they got the dope, they’d pack it into the plane, and then retrace their steps. Hano would get out in Santa Barbara with half of the heroin. Martin would gas up the plane and then fly up to Hayward and give the rest of the shipment to one of Val’s guys.
And so now—finally—he was on his way. He was really doing it. From the air, five thousand feet up and moving along at about 120 mph, the coastal hills looked to Martin like the little papier-mâché hills you might see in the garage of one of those people who built miniature railroad sets. Alan Guthrie,
the guy who lived across the street from Martin, had one of these crazy setups. He was a sales guy for IBM in San Francisco—which was a little surprising, because in point of fact he was basically a redneck from somewhere in Georgia. He had a whole little world out in his garage, built on a bunch of big sheets of ¾-inch plywood: toy tracks snaking through a landscape of hills and plants, with little bridges and buildings, and signs with actual corporate logos, even mini people in frozen postures of activity. What a fucking waste of time, Martin thought whenever he saw Guthrie in his garage, hunched over and gluing some little piece into place, or watching his HO scale trains zip past and disappear into a fake tunnel. Guthrie loved to call them over to see some new bridge or grain silo he’d put in—he’d stand there sucking on his bourbon, yakking about his train dealer out in Detroit, how he had the best and most realistic stuff.
Martin guided his Cessna 182P Skylane along past San Luis Obispo, bobbing on the prevailing trade winds that swept along the West Coast. Down below, Highway 101 was like a little string that some kid had set down as a pretend road, and the cars were like busy ants, hurrying along the string, happy that it was there but knowing it might not last—that soon they might have to make their way off-road again, through the grass and trees and over the hills.
Near Pismo Beach, the coastline jutted in to the east. Martin swung right, out over the water. It was a clear day, and down below he could see a few sailboats, as well as a few larger commercial boats. It was an open expanse of white-capped water, deep blue and endless. If he wanted, he could simply veer off to the west and keep flying, out and out and out until he ran out of gas and plunged into the Pacific. No one would know where he was or what had happened to him. Fifteen or twenty minutes from now he could disappear into the ocean, drifting down to the sandy coastal bottom and lie there for years, maybe forever.
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