The old man always came in at ten minutes past two and sat on the last stool at the counter, by the window that looked down Sixth Street to the water.
From that stool you could see a slice of the main channel between the hardware store and the Bank of America, and in that slice, about every forty minutes, something went by: a Crowley tug pushing a fuel barge, a Matson containership riding high and empty, a tuna clipper with a crow's nest and a speedboat lashed on its stern, coming home from the Eastern Pacific with nobody waving at it. The old man watched them all. He watched them leaning a little, as if he had money on the outcome.
Duncan Whitfield had been waiting tables at the Anchor Light Cafe for seven months by the middle of October 1980, and he had learned that most people who sat at the window stool did it so they would not have to look at anybody. The old man was different. He looked at everybody. He just did not expect anybody to look back.
He had come in for the first time on a Monday in late September, during a heat wave, when the Santa Anas were blowing the wrong way out of the canyons and the sky over the harbor was the color of weak tea from the fires up in the hills. The old man came in wearing a navy pea coat buttoned to the collar, with a knitted watch cap folded twice over his ears, and he sat down on the window stool and put a handful of coins on the counter and pushed them around with one finger the way you would sort screws.
"Coffee," he said. "If that's thirty-five."
"It's thirty-five," Duncan said.
The old man moved a quarter and a dime away from the rest of the coins and slid them across. What was left was a nickel and four pennies and a Canadian dime, and he looked at those for a while and then put them back in his coat pocket, carefully, and buttoned the flap.
He was big, or had been, a frame made for lifting things, wide through the shoulders and long in the arms, with nothing left on it. His wrists came out of the coat sleeves like the ends of broom handles. His face was long and creased and burned a permanent dark red across the nose and cheekbones, the way a face gets after a lot of watches in a lot of weather, and his eyes were a very pale blue, almost white, the color of a sky just before fog comes in. On the back of his left hand, faded to the blue-green of an old bruise, was a full-rigged ship, and across the knuckles, one letter each, it said HOLD. Duncan did not need to see the right hand. The old man had all the marks of the trade and none of its money.
He drank the coffee in small sips for an hour and a half. When Duncan came back with the pot he covered the cup with his hand.
"Refills are free," Duncan said.
The old man looked at him for a moment, those white-blue eyes measuring something, and then he took his hand away. "So they are," he said. "Thank you."