My family spent the last weeks of school and the first part of that summer high in a twenty-foot cradle at Wilmington Marine, the boatyard everyone called Dinko’s after its Croatian owner, who had a reputation for dishonesty. “When you shake hands with Dinko,” the harbor saying went, “count your fingers afterward.” My grandfather, too, said this, but he didn’t have much of a choice. A wood-hulled boat like ours needed to be hauled out fairly regularly for routine maintenance. It was one of the reasons many people preferred fiberglass hulls. Only two yards in the harbor could handle a wooden boat as big as ours—Dinko’s or San Pedro Boat Works—and Dinko’s terms were better. Besides, my grandfather had had a row with the manager at San Pedro the last time we were in dry dock.
I’m not sure that, technically, we were supposed to be living on board while our boat was up in the cradle, but we had nowhere else to go. So Dinko accommodatingly hooked us up to electricity and water. He turned a blind eye when our kitchen sink and dishwasher emptied out on to the ground, while we, in turn, used them only at night when no one was around but Bill, the white-haired night watchman. If my grandfather disliked Dinko because he charged people for his expensive services, he also respected him because he’d given Bill a job. Bill lived at Dinko’s and, in the evenings, piloted the empty shopping cart he used as a walker around with his dog in the baby seat. He’d had a stroke a while ago. When you talked to him you could sometimes understand the answers, but more often than not, there was a burble, then a nod, and he walked on.
A thirty-foot, rickety metal staircase with open risers connected our main deck to the ground. As nervous as they made me, the stairs were much better than the steep wooden ladder Marilyn and I had used to climb on board our first night at the shipyard, my heavy backpack threatening to pull me backward with every rung. Dinko had been really nice about getting us the stairs, even when we hadn’t asked for them, I liked to remind my grandfather.
“Don’t think he won’t find a way to put it on our bill, thieving Croat bastard,” he grumbled.
But I thought the stairs were worth whatever he wanted to charge. We were living for a month on an 83-foot boat wedged into a high wooden cradle, secured with shims and good wishes, less than twenty-five yards from two jet-fuel storage tanks at the Ultramar Refinery. Stairs seemed like one of those little luxuries that make life bearable, like showers, which we didn’t really have because we weren’t able to pump our sewage tanks overboard whenever we wanted to, the way we could at Donahue’s. Instead, Marilyn and I went up and down the big stairs and across the shipyard to the building where there was a little shower room. It wasn’t that bad, especially on days I took a shower at the Y after swim practice.
My grandfather settled for sponge baths. During our time at Dinko’s, he left the boat only once, his cane in one hand and his hand gripping the railing. I followed behind, willing him not to fall. He creaked down each stair slowly, making sure both feet were steady on each step before proceeding. When he was halfway down, his legs started shaking from fatigue, and he swayed forward. I held my breath. He turned around and handed me his cane, then gripped the rail with two hands. He went down the rest of the stairs backward. I could hardly watch. No amount of coaxing or Milk Bones could convince Charlie or Lisa down the steps. Instead, Charlie would stand on his hind legs and lean against the boat’s rail, whining as we came and went. When they needed to go to the bathroom, they just went on the deck.
Every morning at eight, workmen swarmed the yard, carrying their wood-handled tools in cloth buckets or in clunky belts slung about their waists. During the day, I wandered along the marked safety paths between the boats and the office where, theoretically, I wouldn’t be brained by dropped belt sanders or run over by boats being pulled out of the water on train tracks. I watched the wooden ships high in their cradles, the dark-skinned workers agilely climbing up scaffolding or hanging in slings off towering hulls, hammering and chiseling and caulking, shouting entire conversations in Croatian and Spanish between boats. I did not know it, but I was watching the rare modern practice of an ancient art. As the LA commercial fishing fleet was decimated and fiberglass hulls became more and more popular, the art of maintaining wooden hulls was dying out.
When a boat first came in, its hull would be power hosed, then scraped by hand. Afterward the ground around it would be littered with glistening, green algae and clumps of dying barnacles, flakes of toxic, red paint, and spent zincs. Our own boat now sat high in her cradle, her hull having been hosed and scraped. Soon they’d begin caulking her with oakum and putty, chiseling hemp into the seams between the planks and then sealing them. Then they’d sand it and repaint it with antifouling paint, then attach new zincs.
All in all, except for the height and the shower situation, life in dry dock wasn’t that bad. Away from our usual surroundings, it almost felt like a vacation, and my friend Jill came over for a sleepover on the Fourth of July. And being up so high wasn’t that scary, especially if you stayed inside and away from windows, especially if you didn’t spend too much time contemplating what might happen in an earthquake. I spent a significant amount of time contemplating what might happen in an earthquake. I imagined our boat landing on its side and collapsing under its own weight, the jet-fuel tanks next door exploding. But earthquakes didn’t happen that often, I reminded myself. The last one I remembered had happened four years before.
The only other inconvenience was getting heavy things like big boxes of videotapes, sacks of quarters, and groceries from the car to the boat. From our years at Donahue’s, Marilyn had perfected the art of transporting heavy things over long distances with a hand truck and sturdy cardboard boxes so that we only needed to make one or two trips down the dock. Here at Dinko’s, the trip was similar, only through a boatyard where you had to follow a zigzagged path over rails, hoses, and power cords, then carry the load up the thirty feet of stairs. I was usually spared the task. Roger, a gentle Nicaraguan man who had been an agricultural agent in his own country but who now worked as a laborer for my grandfather, carried the really heavy items, like the boxes of videos. But if Marilyn got home after five, I’d get stuck moving the groceries from the car. And that’s when I first noticed the wine.
One afternoon, I went to get the groceries out of Marilyn’s minivan with the hand truck. I opened the red van’s sliding door: there were four paper sacks crammed tight with groceries, dozens of cans of cat food, frozen dinners, cereal, meat, and chicken, then also sacks of dog and cat chow, and four bags of kitty litter from the dollar store. I loaded them into the boxes, then climbed inside to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. Tucked behind the middle passenger seat, set away from all the other groceries, were two double-paper bags reinforced with plastic sacks and in each, two big bottles of red wine. They seemed twice as big as normal bottles; my hand couldn’t wrap around them. Next to the wine, shoved under the seat, was a plastic sack with two cartons of Virginia Slims, menthol and regular. That was how I knew I wasn’t supposed to see the bottles of wine. Marilyn tried hard to hide her cartons of cigarettes from me because I was always nagging her to quit.
I left the wine in the car, so that she could sneak it in later, and rolled the groceries home, turning backward to yank the hand truck over a train rail. The wine bothered me, even though I didn’t really think Marilyn had a drinking problem. She never seemed drunk, really. But there was so much of it, and Marilyn was the only person in our family who drank. We hardly ever hosted dinner parties anymore, unless you counted Sunday lunches with Pete and our store’s clerk, Norm, where no one drank. I wended my way around a forty-foot sailboat and weaved the hand truck wheels over hoses and cables. Why was she hiding it, unless she thought it was wrong; unless she thought she’d get in trouble?
• • •
“It’s like there’s no end in sight,” Marilyn told my grandfather one night after dinner, shoving her napkin onto the table. “When is this going to stop?” They were talking about money. That day, Dinko’s workmen had found dry rot in half a dozen planks and two ribs. It was going to be very expensive to replace them.
I didn’t know if she meant there was no end in sight to the work at Dinko’s or to work on the boat in general. Every time the boat seemed close to being finished, it ended up needing something else—an autopilot, navigation equipment, a mahogany rub rail, a tender.
“Well, we’ve got to fix them. If they’re rotten, when we go out to sea, they might give way.” Marilyn said nothing. “They’re like the foundation of a house,” he insisted.
“I thought with your eye money…I thought we’d be able to start getting out of debt. Or at least not add more,” she sighed. She already sounded defeated.
Every month Marilyn juggled credit card payments, using cash advances from one credit card to make a payment on another, or using corporate lines of credit for the store to make payments at places like Dinko’s and West Marine. At my grandfather’s behest, she took cash from the arcades at the store and didn’t deposit it into our corporate account at the bank or into our personal account—deposits that she would have needed to report as income for taxes. Instead, once a month, she took a paper grocery sack of money to the post office in San Pedro, walked past the homeless men who hung out on the steps, and waited in the long line beneath a Works Project–era mural of heroic, muscle-bound mailmen. When she finally got to the window, she’d buy money orders for the exact amount of bills we owed—$241.23 at Macy’s, $129.45 at the dentist, my swim club dues—all from a list written neatly in cursive. She’d lay out the bricks of money beneath the old-timey brass teller’s cage, then tilt her chin up strongly to meet the clerk’s studied, neutral gaze. Money orders left no record.
I watched Marilyn do it all the time: make money out of thin air. We lived really well on thin air. But while my grandfather seemed perfectly happy with this system, Marilyn and I were waiting for the whole structure to collapse.
“Well, when I die,” my grandfather continued, “I want you to be financially secure. I’m building this nice home for you, like a house. I want it to be in good working order for you, so you won’t have anything to worry about.”
Marilyn said nothing but got up to clear the table. I heard the squeak of a cork coming out of a wine bottle.
• • •
One morning toward the end of our stay in dry dock, I was lying in my bunk, awake, luxuriating in summer vacation. It was seven thirty, and the shift horn had already sounded through the boatyard. I knew I needed to get up because the likelihood of a stranger hanging suspended outside of my porthole, face-to-face with me in my bed, was growing every minute. But my sheets were cool and crisp against my skin, and it felt so good to stretch.
First there was a weird rumble, then the slowing down of time that allowed me to methodically eliminate several possibilities in a split-second: Was it our generator? We couldn’t run them in dry dock. A large truck? There was no road close enough to us. A boat being pulled into the space next to ours? What was it? Then the trembling and shaking began, and I remembered: that sound, that’s the way earthquakes sound just before the shaking starts.
I threw off my covers and jumped off the high bunk, not bothering to step on the lower one on the way down. I heard Marilyn say “shit” from her office; she didn’t sound scared as much as dismayed and puzzled. Crybaby stood stunned on Marilyn’s bed, then slinked off to hide. I stumbled to the doorway of my cabin and was bumped against its frame. Marilyn’s makeup mirror fell over; knickknacks jumped around on their shelves but were stopped from falling off by pin rails. I waited for it to get worse, for everything to collapse, but it didn’t. Then it was over. The boat was still on its cradle. The cats and dogs were spooked but fine. My grandfather and Marilyn, the workers outside, me—we were all absolutely fine.