She turned a page. "Davor said you were the best one on the boat. He said you could mend net faster than Uncle Zoran." Another page. "He said you were going to be a skipper someday."
He walked down the hill to his car and sat in it a long time before he could drive.
He looked for Sig Aasen all the next week, on his afternoons off and in the hour between the lunch rush and supper prep, when Ilda would wave him out the door with a dish towel and tell him to go do whatever it was he was doing with that face on. He told himself it was because the old man had paid with everything he had over a misunderstanding. That was part of it. The other part was that Sig Aasen was the only man alive who had been on that bridge with his father, and Duncan had been waiting since he was six years old for someone to tell him what happened on it.
At the Seamen's Center, the woman at the desk, a retired schoolteacher with a pencil in her hair, knew him at once. "Mr. Aasen reads the shipping news every day, cover to cover. He hasn't been in this week." She lowered her voice. "He's had a terrible time with the VA. He's been up to Westwood three times. They tell him merchant seamen aren't veterans, so he doesn't qualify for the domiciliary or a pension or anything. He showed me his card from the War Shipping Administration. He was sunk going to Russia in 1942. Six days in a lifeboat in the Barents Sea. He lost two toes. He says there's a lawsuit back east, and he'll be dead before it's settled, so it's a good joke on somebody."
At the Hotel Cabrillo on Fifth, the clerk behind the wire cage said Aasen had been put out on the first of October owing two weeks, and his sea bag was in the back if anybody wanted to pay forty-two dollars for it. Duncan paid forty-two dollars. He put it on the back seat of the Datsun, an old canvas bag stenciled S. AASEN in faded black with a length of tarred line through the grommet, and every time he got in the car that week he felt it behind him like a passenger.
At the Sailors' Union hall, the dispatcher said he'd never heard of any Sig Aasen. A very old man in a cardigan on the bench under the shipping board said, "Sig Aasen hasn't been in this hall since Eisenhower. Not after the Corvallis." He squinted. "I know you. You're Thurm Whitfield's kid." He did not say anything else.
Duncan tried the bars along Pacific Avenue that were left since they bulldozed Beacon Street and put up Ports O' Call with its saltwater taffy for the tourists. He found Zoran and Jure Bakota instead.
They were mending net on the fish dock on Terminal Island in front of the Marija, Zoran's boat, the one they had both gone on after March. Duncan came around the corner of the Van Camp warehouse and there they were, the two brothers on upturned fish boxes with the black seine spread across the planks between them and their shuttles going, the way he had sat with them a hundred times.
Zoran stood up slowly. He was thirty-five, with a black mustache and a belly and hands like shovels. Jure stood too, younger, Duncan's age, thin and quick, the one who had pulled Duncan into the skiff that night by the collar and held on to him for three hours while they drifted.
"You going to the hearing?" Zoran said.
"It's a subpoena."