The long looming multi-pillared structure of Stearns Wharf, with its restaurants and trinket shops and tramping lines of tourists, suddenly breaks through the mist like a giant centipede humping across the water, and then it vanishes again and they’re through the mouth of the harbor and out onto a sea as flat and scoured as a stainless-steel pan. “At least it’s calm,” he says, thinking of how the channel can look so placid when you get up in an airplane or you’re coming down San Marcos Pass on a sunny day, as if it’s nothing, as if you could paddle across it in twenty minutes.
“At least. But I’d trade calm for some sun any day.”
That’s the last thing Wilson has to say because within minutes, given the gentle rocking of the boat and the somnolent thrum of the engine, he’s gone. The beer, still clutched between his thighs, is in no danger of spilling, and at this point it’s mainly suds and backwash anyway. His head tips forward till his chin is resting on his chest. Very lightly, he begins to snore. For the next hour, Dave lets him be, content to focus on the task before him, keeping an eye on his instruments, staring out into the fog till the fog is all there is, heaven and earth and sea swallowed up and spat out again and still no sign of clearing. He’s thinking his thoughts, but those thoughts are greatly reduced, until eventually he’s thinking nothing, his mind gone free of his body the way it always does at sea. He’s just alive, that’s all. His heart’s beating. He’s breathing. And the fog props him up on a smooth cool sheet of nothing as if he’s floating — or no, flying.
They’ve just passed midpoint when Wilson wakes with a start. “Oh, shit,” he murmurs. “What’d I do, doze off?”
“More like deep R.E.M. time. You’ve been out almost an hour.”
From below, the tremolo of the girls’ voices, giggling, a snatch of music fading in the background. Wilson, adjusting himself to his surroundings, discovers the bottle clamped between his legs, raises it experimentally and lowers it again. “You want a beer? I think I need another one at this point.”
“Not till we get there.”
“Right. Steady on, Dave.” There’s a silence, nothing but the soft wash of the bow, the engine, chatter from below. “At least the girls are having a good time, sounds like. But shit, this stuff is thick. How in Christ’s name are you navigating through it — I mean, I wouldn’t know the middle of the channel from the back end of the island. Or the rocks. Or the cold briny bottom, full fathom five and all that. You going to keep us off the bottom, Dave?”
“That’s my intention. Here, just look at the chart on the screen — here, yeah, this one.”
After a moment, Wilson says, “Yeah, but I still don’t like it if I can’t see where I’m going.”
“You don’t have to.”
“This is what I like, this kind of chart here”—he leans forward to pull one of the laminated sheets out of the rack to his left. “Old school, you know what I mean? Something you can hold on to. But what’s this yellow thing here in the middle?”
“What, you need glasses now?”
Wilson squints, holds the chart out at arm’s length. “Only when I’m on the job,” he says. “But I can make it out: ‘East Santa Barbara Channel Weather Buoy.’ But you already knew that.”
“We just passed it. We’re like halfway to the island, then we’ve another bit to get around the west side and all the way out to Coches.”
“So we’re in the”—quoting—“ ‘Northbound Coastwise Shipping Lane’?”
“No, see here, on the GPS — we just left it. We’re in the zone in between.”
“The Separation Zone.”
“Right. And once we cross the southbound lane, in about five minutes, we’re home free. Until we get to the western tip of the island and head into the Santa Cruz Channel, which is where the rocks are, since you’re asking. So no beer, no cocktails, nothing, not for me. Not till we drop anchor and I can relax, because you know as well as I, you don’t want to fuck around out here. Especially in conditions like this.”
“I hear you. But your copilot, he can drink himself into a coma — in fact, isn’t that required, I mean, by regulation? Unless you have a heart attack. You’re not going to have a heart attack on us, are you, Dave?”
The wash of the waves, the stray giggle from below. No birds, not even shearwaters. The strained half-light of the sun up there somewhere trying to break through. And the calm. The calm you can’t buy. Or maybe you can, because isn’t that what they’re doing?
“You know something I didn’t tell you — or Alicia or Anise even?”
Grinning now, leaning over his knees, the hat pushed up high on his crown with a quick nervous flick of his fingers, Wilson awaits the answer. He likes surprises, likes parties. “What?” he says and the grin expands.
“It’s not just rabbits we’re setting loose today. You know that guy from Texas, the one your friend or uncle or whoever knows? The snake man?”
“Get out of here.”
“Yeah, we’ve got ten primo condition rattlesnakes down there in the hold in burlap sacks. And that’s just the start — guy says he can get as many as we want.”
“Can I see them?”
“Not till we get there.”
“Aw, come on, what are you afraid of? The Sequeclass="underline" Snakes on a Boat. I can see it now. Come on, man, I used to handle snakes when I was kid. I had like six terrariums, with a rubber boa, a racer, couple of gopher snakes, kings and rattlers, rattlers too. Did you know that the ones in the San Gabriels, down in L.A., are going through a whole weird evolutionary change where the snakes with the smallest rattles get to mate more because the big ones, the noisy old pissed-off cascabeles, are all getting killed off?”
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t doubt it. But these ones are going to be just fine.” And this is his vision — he can see it right there before him — coming to fruition, because the snakes he’s bringing out here where nobody’s going to bother them can grow till their rattles drop off, and if that isn’t conservation, he doesn’t know what is.
“Come on. Just one. Just let me see one.” Wilson’s eyes — he’s never noticed this before — palpitate ever so slightly, nerves jumping under the whites like the snakes moving silently in the loose grip of their bags.
“I said no. Can you hear me? Am I talking loud enough for you?”
Wilson’s shoulders go tight and his mouth draws down. He smoothes his goatee a moment, as if thinking things through, then pushes himself up from the bench, jamming the chart back in its rack and swiping up the empty bottle in the same motion. “All right, fuck it. But I’m going down there — to get a beer — and if I happen to take a look then that’s my business, right?” And then he turns, puts both hands on the rails and disappears down the steps.
He’s calm. He’s been calm all day, all week. But this just turns his burners on high because Wilson can be such a jerk sometimes, and what is he anyway but just a carpenter and a wiseass who thinks he can rain on anybody anytime he wants, and before he can stop himself Dave is up from the controls and hammering down the steps shouting, “No, you’re wrong — it’s my fucking boat and it’s my fucking business!”
The Tokachi-maru, a twelve-thousand-ton freighter out of Nagoya, bound for Long Beach with a load of Chinese-made textiles and machine parts, was one of the oldest ships still flying a Japanese flag. She’d been commissioned in the late 1960s and except for brief spells in port or dry dock had been at sea continuously ever since. She was etched with rust from the waterline all the way up her six decks to the bridge, and though paint had been applied belowdecks and above in various eras (elephant-gray and dirt-adherent white for the most part), she tended to stand out in any harbor as an eyesore, if not a derelict. Still, she was a moneymaker for her owners, who intended to sail her until it was no longer economically feasible — or better yet, till she went to the bottom in some fortuitous South Sea typhoon, fully insured, of course, and with all hands spared. There had been surprisingly few accidents aboard, given the miles she’d logged and the years she’d been at sea (the usual broken bones, heart attacks and cases of alcohol poisoning, and just one man overboard, off the coast of Georgia in the late 1980s, who was, regrettably, never found), but for all her unsightliness and the problems the crew had with doors that rusted shut and the galley that still relied on the original four-burner gas range and three antiquated microwave ovens, her instruments were state of the art and her captain, Noboru Nishizawa, nephew of the ship’s first commander, was among the most reliable and cautious in the entire fleet.