She was a sleek twenty-eight-foot all-wood cabin cruiser, solid-built, with butternut bulkheads and teak trim throughout, a real beauty, but she’d been dry-docked and neglected during the war, from which her owner, a Navy man, had never returned. Till spotted the boat listing into the weeds at the back of the boatyard and had tracked down the Navy man’s quietly grieving parents — their boy had been burned to death in a slick of oil after a kamikaze pilot steered himself into the St. Lo during the battle of Leyte Gulf — in whose living room he’d sat with his hat perched on one knee while they fingered the photographs and medals that were their son’s last relics. He sat there for two full hours, sipping tepid Lipton tea with a bitter slice of lemon slowly revolving atop it, before he mentioned the boat, and when he did finally mention it, they both stared at him as if he’d crawled up out of the pages of the family album to perch there on the velour cushions of the maplewood couch in the shrouded and barely lit living room they’d inhabited like ghosts since before they could remember. The mother — she must have been in her fifties, stout but with the delicate wrists and ankles of a girl and a face infused with outrage and grief in equal measures — threw back her head and all but yodeled, “That old thing?” Then she looked to her husband and dropped her voice. “I don’t guess Roger’ll be needing it now, will he?”
Over the course of the fall and winter, Till had devoted himself to the task of refitting that boat, haunting the boatyard and the ship chandlery and fooling with the engines until he was so smudged with oil Beverly told anybody who wanted to listen that he half the time looked like he was rigged out in blackface for some old-timey minstrel show. Her joke. Till in blackface. And she used it on Mrs. Viola down at the market and on Warren and the girl he was seeing, Sandra, with the prim mouth and the sweaters she wore so tight you could see every line of her brassiere, straps and cups and all. Careful, that was what Till was. Careful and precise and unerring. He never mentioned it, never complained, but he’d given his right arm for his country and he was determined to keep the left one for himself. And for her. For her, above all.
He had to learn how to make it do the work of his right arm and wrist and hand, punching tickets for the Santa Monica Boulevard line while people looked on impatiently and tried to be polite out of a kind of grudging recognition, the dead hand clenching the ticket stub and the newly dominant one doing the punching, and he learned to use that hand to fold his paycheck over once and present it to her like a ticket itself, a ticket to a moveable feast to which she and she alone was invited. At night, late, after supper and the radio, he’d let the hand play over her nakedness as if it knew no impediment, and that was all right, that was as good as it was going to get, because he was left-handed now and always would be till the day he was gone. And when they launched the Beverly B., he was as gentle and cautious with his boat as he was with her in their marriage bed, the right arm swinging stiffly into play when the wheel revolved under pressure of the left. The first few times they never took her out of sight of the harbor. Till said he wanted to get a feel for her, wanted to break her in, listen to what the twin Chrysler engines had to say when he pushed the throttle all the way forward and watched the tachometer climb to 2,800 RPM.
Then came that Friday evening late in March when she and Till and Warren motored out of the harbor on a course for the nearest of the northern Channel Islands, for Anacapa and the big one beyond it, Santa Cruz, because that was where the fish were, the lingcod as long as your arm, the abalone you only had to pluck off the rocks and more plentiful than the rocks themselves, the lobsters so accommodating they’d crawl right up the anchor line and dunk themselves in the pot. A man at work had told Till all about it. Anybody could go out to Catalina — hell, everybody did go out there, day-trippers and Saturday sailors and the rest — but if you wanted something akin to virgin territory, the northern islands, up off of Oxnard and Santa Barbara, that was the place to go. They’d brought along the two biggest ice chests she’d been able to find at Sears, Roebuck, both of them bristling with the dark slender necks of the beer bottles Warren assured her would have vanished by the time all those fish fillets and boiled lobsters were ready to nestle down there between their sheets of ice for a nice long sleep on the way home.
“We’ll have fish for a week, a week at least,” Till kept saying. “And when they’re gone we can just go out again and again after that.” He gave her a look. He was at the helm, the weather calm, the evening haze with its opalescent tinge clinging to the water before them and the harbor sliding into the wake behind, the beer in his hand barely an encumbrance as he perched there like some sea captain out of a Jack London story. “Which,” he said, knowing how sensitive she’d been on the subject of sinking money into the boat, “should cut our grocery bill by half, half at least.”
She’d made sandwiches at home — liverwurst on white with plenty of mustard and mayo, ham on rye, tunafish salad — and when they settled down in the cabin to take big hungry bites out of them and wet their throats with the beer that was so cold it went down like mountain spring water, it was as if they’d fallen off the edge of the world. After dinner she’d sat out on the stern deck for a long while, the air sweet and unalloyed, everything still but for the steady thrum of the engines that was like the working of a sure steady heart, the heart at the center of the Beverly B., unflagging and assured. There were dolphins, aggregations of them, silvered and pinked as they sluiced through the water and raced the hull to feel the electricity of it. They seemed to be grinning at her, welcoming her, as happy in their element as she was in hers. And what was that story she’d read — was it in the newspaper or Reader’s Digest? The one about the boy on his surfboard taken out to sea on a riptide and the sharks coming for him till the dolphins showed up grinning and drove them off because dolphins are mammals, warm-blooded in the cold sea, and they despise the sharks as the cold agents of death they are. Did they nose the boy’s surfboard past the riptide and back into shore, guiding him all the way like guardian angels? Maybe, maybe they did.
The last of the sun was tangled up in the mist ahead of them, due west and west the sun doth sink, the lines of a nursery rhyme scattered in her head. She lifted her feet to the varnished rail and studied her toes, seeing where the polish had faded and thinking to refresh it when she had the chance, when the boys were fishing in the morning and she was stretched out in the sun without a care in the world. The engines hummed. A whole squadron of dark beating birds shot up off the water and looped back again as if they were attached to a flexible band, and not a one of them made the slightest sound. She lit a cigarette, the wind in her hair, and watched her husband through the newly washed windows as he held lightly to the wheel while his brother sat on the upholstered bench beside him, talking, always talking, but in dumb show now because the cabin door was shut and she couldn’t hear a word.