41

She woke once, calling my name.

I said that I was here, there was nothing to worry about.

“We have to go back!” she said.

The car lurched as I aimed and re-aimed, never getting it right, always overcompensating, the gravel of the shoulder crackling under the tires. “Back where?” I asked, trying to sound jaunty, Dad out for a Sunday spin.

She didn’t speak for a moment. “It was a dream,” she said.

Sometimes the accelerator stuck, or the fuel line clogged. The car lost power, only to roar ahead arbitrarily.

“It was one of those nightmares,” Rebecca was saying, “where I had a recital in ten minutes, and I had to hurry, but I hadn’t practiced the piece. Had never heard of it.” She tried to laugh. “I had to go back for something. Something that would save me.”

“You had to go back and practice,” I suggested.

“No, it was something else. I had to be quick or something terrible would happen.”

A bridge, girders and brakelights, hulked ahead. I patted my clothing. I needed money, and all I could find in the glove compartment was a map of Yosemite and every gas station receipt the car owner had ever collected. The brakes made an asthmatic exhalation every time I slowed the car. I knew I would not be able to steer the car past the tollbooth of the Richmond/San Rafael Bridge. I would scrape something off, a doorknob, a toll taker.

The wrinkled palm thrust itself out, a young woman in a knit cap, chewing a fresh stick of gum. The smell hit me, artificial mint, with a drugstore waft of lipstick and cologne. The woman did not look at me, and then, when her hand continued to be untouched by money, she looked into the car, into my eyes.

We aren’t here.

There was a Highway Patrol car parked to one side. I accelerated as smoothly as I could.

“I can hardly wait to play the piano again,” she said. She stretched out on the backseat. Her gown rustled, her hands, I sensed, searching her body. “The fire didn’t burn me,” she said, her voice nearly fading.

San Quentin was to our left, the famous prison a fortress, tiny windows. “I got there in time,” I said. I hated how I sounded, cheerful, upbeat, the officer in a war movie who goes around reassuring the GI’s. Everything’ll be fine, men. After all, we’re already dead.

She said, “But I have all these wounds.”

I didn’t want to say it. He cut you so many times.

At last I was able to escape the freeway, and drove with fanatical care past pasture with its scent of manure and pond-mud, ducks lined up along the mire. A mailbox leaped out of the darkness, and a fence post and a tangle of barbed wires barely avoided the right fender.

The Pacific. I could smell it. I rolled down the window and drank in the delicious promise. The car slowed stubbornly, iron wanting to turn back into stone, into earth. I let the vehicle glide to a dead stop.

We left the car at the edge of a salt marsh. A stilt or sandpiper broke out of the brush, its cry piercing the dark. The tide was in, the water shimmering around black reeds. Translucent plates of living matter caught starlight and glowed, jellyfish abandoned by the tide. A great bird, a heron, parted his wings but did not take the air, observing us warily.

I carried her. The wooden pier creaked under my feet, the dark water glittering through knotholes and the cracks between the boards.

“I have a better plan,” I said, carrying her down wooden steps to the wharf.

“I think you were right,” she said. “There was something wrong with the car.”

My father owned a sailboat when I was young, a fiberglass vessel I recalled as remarkable for its whiteness. The hull was bright white, and the sails were so dazzling that one of the first times I ever wore sunglasses was on San Francisco Bay the day after Christmas. I had learned to tie a knot called a fisherman’s bend, and I could read a compass. But now I untangled two faded lifejackets and wished I had some of my father’s sailing skill.

The craft I chose was a cutter, with a single, bare mast. The hull was a flaking powder-blue, weather and sun having bleached what had been a darker shade. The small cabin was secured in a very unseamanlike way with a locked bicycle chain. The decking was weathered and peeling, and the quantity of rope coiled in the well was kinked and stiff with salt.

It was an old-fashioned craft, a bit of history, with a box of tholepins in the stern for no reason that I could detect, along with a toolchest of old hammers and nails, dusted with rust. Whoever owned this craft would not immediately notice its loss, while the other, racier vessels along the wharf smelled of brass polish and Valvoline.

I broke the chain. The interior of the cabin was tidy. A bunk, a shelf, a small radio. I made sure Rebecca was secure on the bunk, a folded wool blanket for a pillow. I kept my head down so I wouldn’t hit it on anything.

The boat had a donkey engine, good for escaping the barnacle-crusted piers of the wharf, but little else. The engine coughed at my touch, and churned forth smelly exhaust. The propeller kicked up the dark water of the marina, foam and a floating napkin, a jellyfish.

The tide and the churning propeller compelled the vessel outward, the low hills embracing Tamales Bay on either side of the black. A light at the end of a distant wharf did not appear to move. After what seemed like half the night, at last it took up a new position behind us.

Points of light crept by. The keel sliced water, the fresh air soiled by the smell of engine exhaust and the sulphuric fume of the marsh on either side of the bay. The tide was falling, exposing wrinkled littoral. And if we were going to run aground this was where it would happen, where the current had silted the mouth of the bay, water swirling around limpet-spiked rocks.

Seabirds sprinkled the water, asleep or hypnotized by the rising swells, puffins, surf scoters. The bluffs where the land ended were pale, the surf busy, erupting and spilling along the beach. I guided the boat toward the northwest, with a light breeze on the starboard quarter.

But the weather was changing. As the keel cut the water I found the craft battling, swinging wide with the rising seas. I worked the bow up into the wind. Moderate waves, with rolling, breaking crests, tackled us, driving us south and, at the same time, gradually farther from land. Far to the southwest glided the lights of a great ship, a tanker approaching the Golden Gate.

When day simmered to the east I lashed the tiller and killed the engine. I did not question myself. I could only proceed, discovering what I knew only after I had acted. I nearly grieved when I wrapped Rebecca with rope, making an impromptu body sling out of this weathered cordage.

I fastened two large iron hammers into her bodice, lashed there by the ropes that cocooned her. She woke as I tied the last knot. “Tell me when we’re there,” she said.

How could I even talk to her? Where, I wanted to ask her. Where do you think we are going, so trusting?

“I will,” I said.

“Are you cold?” she asked.

“No,” I answered truthfully. I felt no cold, only an intensity of feeling.

“You sound cold, or scared. I dreamed,” she said. “There were flowers, all different colors.”

What couldn’t I make myself sound jaunty now? Where was my spirit, now that I needed it most? “That sounds beautiful,” I said.

“And a piano. A beautiful piano, and I could smell the gardenias.”

Daylight seeped into the gray east. The sea was even heavier now, rolling, breaking crests. Foam broke from the crest of a wave and spun through the weakening dark. “I wish I had dreams like that,” I said.

“Is it morning?”

“Not yet.”

“We’re in a boat,” she said.

“It’s a kind of yacht,” I said. “A small yacht.” I wanted to tell her there were people on the boat, cabins with bright lamps and crystal vases.

“You are cold,” she said. Then, “I can’t move my arms.”

I put my hands over her eyes. I kissed her. Sleep, Rebecca. All will be well.

I carried her to the stern and held her, not wanting to release her. I tested the knot around the rail with one hand. It was my best knot, one I had learned to tie in my boyhood.

The air was seething, and a gull lowered itself over the boat, its wings alive to the strata of the breeze. It was able to hover, resting on the wind like a swimmer too lazy to kick, carried by the current.

Dawn was only moments away. The gull cocked his head, and I knew he was searching the boat for fish, for carrion. I seized one of the tholepins and threw it. To my surprise, I hit the bird, sending it tumbling, recovering, swinging far out above the boat.

I tried to lower Rebecca carefully, but at the last instant she slipped from my hands and was gone. The swell winked and shrank around the rope where it entered the water. I had a confused but vivid fantasy—barracuda, sharks.

Don’t think.

I filled every pocket with nails, old iron spikes so rusty they were turning to stone, bristling handfuls of encrusted metal. I worked a hammer into my belt, a great iron battle weapon, and with my stiff fingers I fastened my rope beside Rebecca’s, a stopper knot around the taffrail.

The water felt warm, bathwater rising up around me as I sank. I knew it was only the relative chill of my own body that made it feel so pleasant, but I welcomed the illusion. I sank downward, and found her, already unconscious, lost to the world the way the living rarely are. Her heartbeat was stopped. Then, after a long minute it pulsed, once, and fell still for another age.

I clung to her there, where sun was something out of a story-book, a tale that was not true.