THE BEST PLACE TO see a boat leave Talinas was Bear’s Landing. These days it was a campground but, according to Alejandro, it had first been settled by Ed Vaquero, an American who gathered abalone and whose last name was not actually Vaquero. No one knew his real name, Alejandro said, but it was not Vaquero. In any case, if you climbed up on the dunes behind the campground at Bear’s Landing, you had a panoramic view of the bay and the ocean and this is what Uffa, Berg, and Alejandro did the day Pat left for Mexico.
It was a cold day, with the wind coming from the west, like always, and Berg was wearing a jacket and a beanie. The three of them watched the Alma approach the mouth of the bay with some trepidation. The shoal by the mouth often produced breakers at the beginning of the ebb tide. Every year at least one fisherman died near the mouth, Alejandro said, usually caught unawares by a breaker. One year thirteen people died.
But Pat and his crew passed through the mouth with no problems. As Berg watched the boat head out into the vast cabbage-green sea, he thought about all the lives it would lead. For so long the boat had been sitting in Alejandro’s shop, inanimate, but now it was out in the world, departing on its first adventure. He understood then what Alejandro had meant when he told Berg that he saw boats as living things. They had been in his study, late at night, looking at lines.
“You see all of these boats,” he had said. “They have spirits. They are animals to me.”
Berg felt connected to the Alma, invested in its future. He imagined, years later, running into the owner of the boat, whoever that was at the time, and learning about everything that had happened to it. He imagined crawling inside the cabin and looking around, seeing how everything had aged.
Later that night he lay in bed, in the cubby, with Nell. She had wanted to come up earlier in the day to see the boat depart, but she couldn’t make it. She was working a shoot in the city that ran late. It was a fast-food commercial and they couldn’t get the lighting right for the cheeseburger.
“I’m not even kidding,” she said. “They were fixing the lighting on this cheeseburger for like four hours.”
Nell was absentmindedly flipping through one of the Persian poetry books in the cubby. Alejandro had lots of different books in the main house—ethnographies and novels and histories, books on architecture and sailing and keeping bees—but up in the cubby, for some reason, there was only Persian poetry. All of the books were inscribed in the top right corner with Alejandro’s initials, A. V.
“Does Alejandro ever take the boats down to Mexico?” Nell asked.
“No, he just builds them.”
“Why do they need so many of them?”
“I think the business keeps expanding. And also they don’t want to keep sending the same boats down there. It would look suspicious.”
“Do you know what kind of drugs they traffic?”
“Just weed.”
“No opioids?”
“No opioids,” Berg said.
Nell laughed. “This is a sketchy little scene you’ve gotten yourself wound up in,” she said.
“Nah, it’s not that sketchy.”
She flipped a page in the book she was looking at.
“These poems are pretty good,” she said. “Is Alejandro Persian?”
“I don’t think so,” Berg said.
“Do you think his children know how strange their life is?”
“I feel like the older ones do. I don’t know about Tess.”
“She reminds me of myself as a kid,” Nell said. “Just this floating orb of energy, drifting from one imaginary narrative to the next.” She paused for a second. “I didn’t even know what I was at that age, didn’t have a sense of myself as possessing a body. It was so liberating. You could become anything. I remember this one week, when this huge imaginary playground battle took place. I was in kindergarten, probably about Tess’s age, and a feud developed between Ellen Wilson and Danny Sartori. It had to do with something insane, like him thinking she cut him in line for the slide. But everybody took sides, and it became this vast rooftop playground battle. Our playground was on a rooftop. We were city kids.
“For that whole week, Ellen Wilson was this queen, commanding her army. At the beginning of every break, the respective armies would line up at either end of the playground, and then they’d rush each other. Combat consisted of tagging another person. If you got tagged then you were taken to the opposing army’s jail. You could be rescued from jail if someone from your army was able to run up and tag your hand without first getting tagged by one of the other army’s jail guards. We were riffing on Capture the Flag but it was also something else. Ellen had jesters and courtesans who surrounded her while she sat on her throne, which was two milk crates stacked on top of each other. I was one of the jesters. I told stories and sang songs for the court. I invented this whole mythology about our people and their culture. I was so nerdy. Pathologically nerdy. Also, I was obsessed with Ellen Wilson. She was the coolest and I was always trying to impress her.
“I remember the yard monitors were so perplexed by the whole thing. They had none of the background story, had no idea why we were doing this or how the dynamics of this game had been so quickly and widely disseminated. But for us, playing was so intuitive. We found a common thread and boom, we were off to the races. That’s what Tess is like right now. It’s beautiful. I hope she gets to keep that for as long as possible.”
She closed the poetry book and put it back on the shelf. Then she scanned the spines to find something new.
“Nell?” Berg said.
“Yeah?” she said, craning her neck to look at him.
“I love you.”