Writing

Dave Holper studied creative writing with Jorie Graham, Jim Galvin, and Judith Minty at Humboldt State University, where he was editor of Toyon, the campus literary magazine. Later he attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he studied with John Wideman, Valerie Martin, and other writers. He received his MFA in English in 1991. He has published a number of short stories in such journals as Grand Street, The New Virginia Review, and Quarterly West.

"A Song about Luck"

This story explores a difficult relationship between a father and son. Although I don’t always write in this mode, I’ve chosen realism from the viewpoint of a child. I wrote this based on memories I have of my father taking me crabbing at Ft. Baker when I was a child. The rest of the piece is superimposed over that. The piece was originally published in Quarterly West, Number 31.

After you left, you wrote me once about the past. The good past. You described how the two of you used to own boats together, which was something that I'd never known. You wrote that after dabbling in row boats, aluminum-hulled skiffs, and even a small sailboat, you two bought an 18-foot ruby-red power cruiser brand new in 1951. It cost plenty. It was a two seater, long and sleek as a bird diving over the tops of the waves. It had an enormous outboard engine which could lift its red-flecked hull clean out of the water all the way down to the prop.

Your letter sounded like an apology.

When I was done reading, I went and asked him to tell me about the past.

"What did she write you?" he asked sarcastically.

"Boats," I said.

That seemed to make him feel better. So I asked him again. He took out an old photo album and showed me the pictures of you and him riding in style down the Delta, sipping casually from a half-gallon jug of white wine. You two were stretched out in the sun on the sparkling vinyl seats grinning playfully at one another. You looked happy in the tuck of his arm, your hair picked up in the wind, slightly covering your eyes. You were just reaching to brush it away. In the picture he still looked like someone's father: his arm slung around you, one eye jacked shut from a trail of smoke curling off his cigarette, a big, burly chest of hair and a playful wink just sealing his weather eye.

When he came to the end of the pictures, he shut the book. I asked him what became of the boat, and though I could tell he didn't want to talk about it, he explained how he'd gotten the boat stuck in the Carquinez Straights a couple of years later, shortly after I was born. It was mid-morning; you two were heading up the Delta when the engine block split right down the middle and oil flooded the bilge. To make matters worse, he'd just sent the radio in for repair and there wasn't another boat in sight. Still, it was a warm, calm day, and there was a freshening breeze which kept things cool in the hot sun. You two fished all morning, he explained, waiting to signal to a passing boat.

But none came.

What came was the wind, and with it large waves that began to slam the boat on its belly in the shallow water. He tried to anchor the bow into the wind, but each time he seemed to have gotten things set, the anchor pulled loose and the boat started to drift. The waves came over the side all afternoon, but he managed to keep the bilge pump running and the anchor down long enough to keep the bow pointed homeward.

I've often imagined him out there since. At first he probably cursed and knelt over the ruined engine, as if expecting a miracle. But the only thing that came were the long rows of muddy brown waves and the faltering sound of the pump. What else could he have done but pray? Still, it wouldn't have been enough. After all, what did he believe in? He knew he couldn't swim well. And worse, he must've known that if they'd gone down out there, they wouldn't have found him until Monday morning, washed up in Benicia with seaweed crowning his head.

You, I imagine, would've survived. It wasn't just that you were a strong swimmer. He said you were quiet the whole time and somehow seemed to know things would be all right. I imagine you stood near the gunwales with your back to him, furious with him for coming out so unprepared, disappointed in his fear. I imagine you baled muddy water until your arms stiffened and sang something sweet to yourself like you used to sing to me when electric storms blew out the power down our valley and I would start to cry.

"How did you two survive?" I asked

He hesitated again. "Your mother spotted a boat that I couldn't even see, and she had the good sense to fire off a flare. Luckily, they saw it and came and towed us back to the canal."

*****

Later, I asked him once or twice about getting another boat, but he told me it was absolutely out of the question. Something had happened out there that had changed things between you two. Although he never explained it to me, I think I must've known it had something to do with the way he had handled himself in front of you. It was as close to dying as either of you had ever come. What his words didn't explain, his silence seemed to answer.

He never bought another boat. Instead, shortly after your letter arrived, he bought a star-shaped crab pot and would take me down to a pier underneath the bridge on Saturday mornings.

I remember in particular this one trip we took. He woke me early, before it was even light. Told me to dress for crabbing: jeans, T-shirt, sneakers, and a canvas coat he'd bought me at the army surplus. We ate a quick breakfast and then drove the back way to Sausalito for bait. The shop is gone now. We went in and had steaming cups of coffee in white porcelain mugs. The same man who served us coffee got us bait. He wore a white apron which was streaked with blood. He knew my father's name. With the cups still steaming in our hands, we walked down along the front of the glass case where there were salmon, cod, haddock all laid out glassy-eyed on a bed of ice with little green signs in front of each of them with the names and the price. My father pointed to a piece of gray cod that looked like it had been there too long. "We'll take half a pound." The worse it smelled the better, he explained to me. Crabs ate by their sense of smell.

"Can't they see?" I asked him

"Sure, but it's not what they rely on."

Driving there was usually quiet. Once we came over the hill by Fort Baker, you could see the bridge still nestled in its white blanket of fog, the foghorns bellowing in the distance. As we drove in underneath the bridge, the sound got so loud it made my head hurt. There were a few cars by the pier and a handful of fishermen standing around next to their cars, drinking coffee out of thermoses. We went over and had another cup of coffee with the group. They talked about baseballs, fish, and tides. All of them looked older than my father.

"This your boy?" one man asked playfully, picking me up under my arms and swinging me around.

"Ain't mine," my father said laughing. "Just followed me here."

"Might make good bait," another man suggested, "though he looks a little stringy."

Everyone laughed at that and I thought about the gray-colored cod in my father's rucksack.

"Tide's changing about now," the first man said, looking at his watch. The man put me down. Everyone finished their coffee and my father and I took our trap, bucket, and gear out to our usual spot on the pier. The tide was just changing and my father had me half-fill our bucket with salt water by lowering it down off the pier with a rope. While I did this, he quickly unwrapped the bait, cut the pieces into small chunks, and tucked them under the wire net at the bottom of the trap. Then he carefully twisted the chicken wire closed, snugged the line, and the trap closed up like a flower going to sleep.

The first throw of the day was always his. He told me to stand back so as not to get fouled in the line, then he scooted the rope into a pile at his feet and gave the pot a toss. It went spinning out over the water and I ran up to the edge to watch it go down. The pot made a smack, then widening ripples spread around the place where it had disappeared in the slate green water.

"Now we wait," he said and looked at his watch.

"Fifteen minutes?" I ask and he nodded.

I went to see how the other fisherman were doing. The man who said I looked like bait was sitting in a green lawn chair, listening to the news on a radio he had next to him. His fishing rod was wedged into a hole in the pier, just within his reach.

"Any bites?" I asked.

He smiled at me. "Not yet pup," he said and rubbed his rough dry hands in my hair.

He looked back over to where my dad sat by himself. "You two come here a lot, don't you?" he asked.

I looked over the edge into the water. "Almost every weekend." The line was bobbing softly up and down against the water.

He nodded as if he knew something about us. "I've seen you. Your old man always sits off there by himself. Not like you, huh?"

I didn't know what to say to that, so I said that it was true, we came every weekend.

"Your mom don't like to fish?" he asked.

"She ain' around."

"What? She die?" he asked.

I shook my head.

He turned down the radio. "Divorced?"

"No." I thought before I said it. "She just left."

"That happens," he said, as if he were apologizing for her.

"We get letters from places she goes to sometimes," I started. I was going to tell him about what you'd written me about the boats, and how you sometimes wrote me about my coming to live with you. But it only seemed like a story, so I kept quiet.

He put his hand on my shoulder and I noticed his fishing pole was leaning over slowly as if a wind was bending it over.

"Look at that," I whispered.

Just then, his pole groaned and doubled over so far I was sure it was going to break. His reel started letting out line so fast it began to whistle. He spun around, yanked the rod out of the hole he'd wedged it into in the pier, and started to reel in something so heavy it made his face immediately tighten up like the skin was formed over a tough piece of wood. Then he began to sweat and work. He leaned forward and then pulled and reeled as if another man were pulling just as hard on the other end of the line. It took him a long time to bring in that fish. Everyone came to watch.

We all stood at the edge and peered down into the water waiting for a chance to see what he'd hooked. The fisherman took long, deep breaths and at the end of each tug now he let out a great breath like a balloon shooting across a room on its cloud of air. Even my father came and watched. At first there was nothing but the sound of the waves sloshing against the pilings. Then I saw a shadow moving through some kelp. It was big as a man.

"Do you see it?" I whispered to my dad.

"It looks like a shark," he said uncertainly. "You be careful when he brings it up." Then he walked back over to our crab trap.

The man pulled in another twenty feet of line and the shark came up to the surface. It was about six feet long, all gray and moving slowly through the water fanning its enormous tail. I didn't think the fisherman's line would hold such a fish, but it did. He had another man help him and together they lifted that shark clear of the water. You could see the shark's muscles bunch under his skin as he jerked helplessly on the line. The two men flung the shark onto the pier and the fish beat itself stupidly against the gravel. Someone else had brought out a pistol from his car and fired four shots into the shark's head, but the shark's mouth kept opening and closing as if it meant to get even for dying. No one was quite sure if it was really dead or not.

"Let it sit," the man with the gun said. "It'll die when it's good and ready."

After a while, everyone went back to their gear.

When I got back over to where my dad was looking down at the line to our pot, I asked him why he didn't stay to see the shark brought up.

He put one hand on the crab pot line as if he was testing its weight. "I've seen sharks before."

"As big as that?" I asked.

"Bigger," he said.

I wasn't sure I believed him. "Where?"

He looked at me, almost annoyed, then seemed to change his mind. "In Mexico. Baja. I saw a man bring in a shark that would have made that one look like a minnow," he said. He told me how at the end of the day people in town came to see which fisherman had taken the largest fish. One man from Florida brought in a shark that was over twelve feet long. But it had come with a cost. One of the crew had been careless and lost his hand to the shark in a single bite. They hurried the man off the boat with his stump wrapped in towels, soaked through with his own blood.

I looked over the edge into the water. The sun was out and you could see starfish and barnacles down along the pilings even about three or four feet down. The shadow that the line cast wavered in the pale green water. I wondered what else was down there.

"About time now," he said.

I took ahold of the line. "Now," he pointed, "bring her up."

I started to pull, one hand over another like he'd showed me. The pot under water made the rope heavy. I stood with one foot braced on the big tarry beam at the edge of the pier and the other behind me. The rope dripped salt water on my hands which was cold and stung a little in my palms.

"Don't let up the tension," he said standing over me, "otherwise the trap will open and the crabs will swim away."

"I know," I said.

He put a hand on my shoulder. "Then do it right."

I pulled until my hands ached from the cold. All the time I could hear his breath in my ear, smell his cigarette. Finally the line went easy on me as the pot cleared the water. The trap was filled with crabs, scuttling on their spiky legs around the bait. I couldn't really see how many there were until I had lifted the trap up on the pier. My father opened the trap part ways and we both looked. I counted eleven. They were orange and red, some lightly dappled with barnacles, others draped with tiny strands of kelp. They waved their claws in the air at each other, snapping them shut, and danced around the bait triumphantly.

My father reached down carefully with one hand and grabbed a big crab from behind its claws, by its small back legs, and tossed it into our plastic bucket, which was half-filled with salt water.

"Some haul, hey?" he said laughing and clapped me on the back. As he plucked the crabs off the bait he started singing something in Russian that I didn't understand. It sounded like a song about luck. He sang in a deep, rough voice that sounded altogether strange for him. I thought about the story it was meant to tell: maybe it was a song for fishermen, for good weather to fish in and good catches. But somehow that wasn't enough, somehow even then I knew it meant something more that seemed to have to do with luck and happiness. It was so beautiful I meant to ask him to teach it to me, but looking at the smile on his face, I thought better of it.

As he finished unloading the trap, I looked into the bucket at the crabs. They seemed almost cheerful in their bucket of salt water. They scrambled over one another for a chance at the top, but didn't seem too concerned with escaping. The crabs were easily fooled; they thought it was their home. My father threw a burlap sack over the top.

We crabbed all day until the fog rolled back in. The foghorns kicked in, sad as a pack of old dogs, and I could see the lights come on along the bridge. When the fog finally covered these lights and it was getting dark, he turned to me and asked, "You think that's about enough to eat?"

I uncovered the bucket. There were almost thirty crabs inside. "That ought to be enough for me. You can always have a slice of bread or something," I said and we both laughed.

We loaded the car, drove home, and ate.

Afterwards, because he was in a good mood, he told me about how good things used to be before you left. It was one of those rare times that he'd ever talked about it, either then or now. When I think of it after all these years I still wonder what it was that loosened his tongue. I wonder what you would have thought of the way he talked about you to me. He sat at the kitchen table with his hands spread out in front of him. I remember how he leaned toward me with a cigarette in his hand, one eye jacked shut from a curl of smoke, his face just starting to show what he felt. He talked as if you were sitting there with us, and all that he had to do was remind himself and me what it was that we had forgotten about you to get things straight. He talked about going up the Delta with you in the summer and how good things were. The story rolled forward and at the edge of it I knew he'd have to come back to that afternoon the two of you had almost drowned. But he didn't. He just kept telling me about the pleasant afternoons on the Delta and I realized it was the story he would always tell. He went on until I couldn't watch him anymore.

I stared at the stainless steel bowl of crab shells that rested between us as he talked. I ran my finger over one of the empty shells just to see how it felt. The shell was as smooth and red as the boat in the pictures he showed me. You know, the ones where you are holding onto his arm, smiling from beneath him, as he steers the boat back down the river toward the bay, telling you above the sound of the stiffening wind it's just about time to be heading home now.

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