I reached for the brass latches and tried to loosen them. The metal was corroded, green with flaking brown bits. The hinges screeched as they gave way and both latches opened. The smell of musty books, damp wool, and mothballs triggered another montage of memory as I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. I saw my father, back when he seemed so big, bellowing at us, telling us to stay out of the garage, out of his trunk, away from his tools and all his gear. My father, who fell apart after Mother died, until one day when there was no more food in the house and Pit was crying because Maddy was beating on him. That day Red had come into my room and taken me and my brothers to the Winn Dixie and bought boxes of macaroni and cheese and cans of soup. He learned to cook and clean and wash and made us do our share and brought some order to the house and our family and our lives.
And then I saw the three of us, his grown children, so lost that morning after his death. When, by two in the afternoon, all the paramedics and cops had gone, and they had taken his body away, we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We wandered from room to room, out to the dock and then to the garage, and back into the house, not one of us knowing what to say or do for the others, each of us so alone in our loss and unable to imagine our lives continuing without Red.
The footlocker was only about half-full, just as I remembered it. It didn’t look as though Pit had disturbed the contents. I wondered if he had ever opened it or if he just took it out of the house and stored it at Tina’s, unopened.
I reached in and ran my fingertips over the navy wool of the peacoat, remembering how silly Pit had looked wearing the huge thing. He’d never had the shoulders of his father. Maddy was built more like Red, while Pit had the slim build of our mother.
“You’re lucky,” B.J. said. “I never knew my father. When I was young, I used to make up stories about him—my father, the hero. My mother was a Polynesian dancer, and I spent lots of time in dressing rooms reading books, making up my own stories.” He pointed to the contents of the trunk. “Your dad really was a hero in the navy, and then saving boats and lives with his tug.”
“Yeah, he was.” I paused to get my voice under control.
The way we were sitting, our knees nearly touching, made it easy for him to reach up and give my shoulder a reassuring squeeze. Then he pointed into the trunk. “What are those pictures?”
Some were scattered loose and others were bound into packets. A yellowed envelope contained a few dozen slides. Reaching for a packet of photos, I explained. “Mother was into photo albums and organizing pictures into books and all that. Each of us kids had a baby book. I remember she used to ask Red to give her these photos so she could put them into a book, and they argued about it. He didn’t want her to touch them. I was just a kid, I may not have even understood what the arguments were about, but I knew it was a big deal. It would usually send my mother into one of her bad spells.”
My mother had her good days and her bad days. Today, she probably would be diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but back then Red just told us our mother had her moods. When things were good, she laughed and painted and took us on adventures and picnics, and she made the world seem a brighter, more wonder-filled place. When she was having her bad spells, however, we had to tiptoe around the house and take meals to her in bed. I remembered feeling that I wanted her to be the mom, to take care of us, and the fact that it was often the other way around didn’t seem fair. I was eleven years old the day she just walked out into the water and drowned on a calm day off Hollywood Beach. I was the only one of the family with her that day, and I failed to stop her, failed to save her.
I picked up the packet of photos. When I pulled on the rubber band, the old rubber snapped and fell in a limp tangle onto the blue wool jacket. The photos spilled across the contents of the trunk, and several fell to the floor outside the trunk. They were all color photos, but most of them had a greenish tint, as though they had been exposed to too much heat before developing. They were boating pics, shots of people standing around on a sailboat, working the sails, talking on the docks. I didn’t recognize the place, but as I picked them up and stacked them on my lap, I did recognize in one photo a much younger version of my father.
I angled the photo toward the late-evening light slanting through the cottage’s kitchen windows. Instead of the big square man I remembered, the man in the photo had broad shoulders that narrowed to slender hips. He was wearing swimming trunks that showed his well-muscled legs. He still had the red beard, but his hairline was different, his forehead less broad. I had been looking so intently at this younger version of my father, I had not paid much attention to the other man in the photo. It wasn’t until I turned the photo over and looked at the back that I realized why he looked familiar. In pencil on the back, Red had scrawled, “With Joe D’Angelo, Cartagena, 1973.”
I flipped the photo over and looked more closely at the man standing opposite my father. He, too, wore a mustache and beard, brown, streaked with blond, like a golden halo surrounding his mouth. I recognized the eyes, and then the legs, of course. Where Red looked like he was in his late thirties, Joe looked like he was ten years younger. They were horsing around, acting as though they were fighting over a dock line, but they were smiling. The yacht in the background was a classic wooden schooner, gleaming white hull, pristine bright work, the name Nighthawk in gold leaf on the bow.
My mother had often talked about this trip. She brought it up several times when she was arguing with Red over something, and she’d asked him why he didn’t go into the yacht delivery business because he had made so much money on that Nighthawk trip. I had no memory of his leaving—I was only three years old in 1973—but I seemed to remember hearing that he had been gone for two or three months.
The way I’d heard it, he had been just over halfway through the building of Gorda. I’d seen photos of the aluminum hull, deck, and deckhouse all taking shape over time amid the sheds and changing backdrop of boats at Summerfield Boatworks. He eventually got to the point of nearly finishing, but he still needed to power his new boat. He was out of money and in danger of never finishing, of having to go to work for somebody else. He had thought his pension from the Navy would stretch further than it did. That was when he got this offer to go down to Colombia and help a friend deliver a schooner back to Fort Lauderdale. When he got back, he’d made enough money to buy the engine and finish off the boat. Gorda was launched in early 1974.
When Joe said he and Red had worked together, why hadn’t he mentioned this adventure?
“You know that guy?”
“Huh?” I looked up and blinked, tried to focus on B.J.’s face. The last of the light was leaving the room; I would need to turn on a light soon.
“You’re staring at that picture as if you know that guy.”
“Yeah, well, it’s pretty weird. The guy in this picture is Mike’s buddy. You know, the guy from yesterday who was on the Outta the Blue, who’d been out fishing with Mike all night? Mike tried to make out like the dead battery was this guy’s fault. He said the guy wanted to turn on every light on the boat.” Mike had made it sound like Joe didn’t know much about boats. Had that been Mike’s way of shifting the blame? Joe knew a hell of a lot more than Mike if he was on a delivery crew back in the seventies.