Widowmaker

LIFE IS DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN TO ANYBODY WHO HAS NEGLECTED TO LIVE IT. I have committed criminal acts for my own gain, on which the statute of limitations has now expired.

Before the war I shrimped and trawl-fished out of Astoria, on the north Oregon coast, and spent winters in college, desiring, or so I thought, to be a small-town stockbroker. During the war I lived on the Mekong River, at first roaring up and down it in boats, shooting at the enemy and getting shot at by them, later working in a repair yard on the river, hastily patching together boats that had been blown less than to pieces, getting them back onto water and into battle.

After my part of the war was over, I placed an application, hoping to get a small job with a big brokerage. The interview was in Portland, about mid-level up a 20-story building, with a view out the window toward a new 30-story building across the street. The sleeves of the suit I’d borrowed from my brother were 2 inches short; I kept trying to pull them down, which I thought the interviewer would have trouble not noticing. He pointed out the window at the building looming next door, said, “Your job for the first five years with our firm will be to knock on every door in that building, sell stock to whoever opens those doors.” I didn’t have an answer to that; I simply sat stunned and staring up at the top floors of that building. My glum look must have informed him not to offer me a job, because I would clearly not have accepted it.

I went back to Astoria, a few miles up the broad Columbia River from the vast Pacific Ocean, and back to boats. I had $10,000 saved from being frugal through my brief military years, and now with no need to waste any of it on such stupidities as suits, I paid half of them for a 26-foot Klipper Kraft boat I found sitting on a flat-tired and rusted-out trailer in a boatyard down the coast. The boat had a fracture from rail to keel in its port bow. All its cabin windows were smashed out. I crawled through the grass that had grown tall around the abandoned trailer to look at the boat’s underside. The drive shaft was bent, prop ground up, and rudder busted. It looked to me like somebody had smacked it into rocks, then driven it over them.

“You heard what happened to that one?” The yard guy who had crept up behind me nearly got knocked down.

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “I’ve been over—”

“I can tell where you’ve been, son,” he said. He put a hand on my shoulder, a reassuring movement with which I’d become unfamiliar. “You must be just back.”

I turned the subject to the boat. “Looks like it tangled with a jetty,” I said. “Anybody hurt in it?”

“It’s a widowmaker.”

“How many?”

“Three.”

“Got lots of bad luck attached.”

“That’s why it’s been sitting here for two years,” he said.

Everybody who works at sea is superstitious, and I am no exception. Still, it was a Klipper Kraft, all banged up and let go to hell and hung with an albatross, but it had those lovely lines. Boats are like bodies, but always undressed. You can tell at a glance if they’re beauties or beasts. The Klipper is a modified dory design, built of wood, lapstraked, with a raised and pointed bow, flat-roofed cabin with windows raked forward at a slant, stern drawn in just a bit and tilted just enough to give the driven end the upswept look of a puddle duck’s butt. A boat built on those kinds of lines rides a bit rough in all weathers, but keeps its feet — its keel — in the worst of weathers.

The bow was where the boat’s beauty slept, to me. I left a girl in Viet Nam; that bow was shaped precisely like one of her upturned tits.

I towed the boat home to Astoria, negotiated a part-time job in the repair yard we’d used when I worked on the shrimper. Bad things were happening in big cities in those years, but small-town America was accommodating to boys who came home with wounds. The foreman let me cradle the boat in an unused shed, use yard tools to work on it on my own time.

It took a winter, at the end of which the interior and exterior of the boat were reconstituted to newness, the structure stronger rather than weaker, the Chevy 328 engine tuned and bolted back into its raised walk-around box at the aft end of the open stern deck. The shaft was straight, the prop replaced, the rudder repaired. It was all good therapy for me, though I wasn’t aware I needed that then.

I took the paint down to bare wood, stained it light and varnished over the stain. In an attempt to humor or appease or at least acknowledge and perhaps thereby disarm the boat’s albatross, I painted Widowmaker across its stern.