"You found my bag," he said.
"I've been looking for you for two weeks."
"I know. The lady at the Seamen's Center told me. And old Olaf Tollefsen at the hall." Sig turned the mug a quarter turn. "I've been sleeping under the Vincent Thomas, by the pilings on the Terminal Island side. There's a place out of the wind." He said it the way he might have said he'd been berthed forward. "I was going to hitch to Bakersfield and take the Greyhound north. I've got a friend in Ketchikan. Then I didn't go."
"Why not?"
Sig was quiet a long time.
"Because I said a thing to you that I shouldn't have said," he said, "and I said it the wrong way, and you're his son. And I have been carrying around the wrong thing said to a Whitfield for twenty-three years, and I'm sixty-five years old, and I don't have room for another one."
The longshoremen paid and left. In the kitchen Ilda turned the radio down, and Duncan knew she was standing just inside the door, listening, and he didn't care.
"What happened on the Corvallis Trader," Duncan said. "Tell me. Nobody ever has. Not him. Not my mother. Nobody."
Sig nodded slowly, as if he had expected that, and had come in out of the rain to do it.
"I was a drunk," he said. "That's where it starts. Not in the fog. In 1942, in a lifeboat off the North Cape, nine men in it and four alive at the end, and a bottle of rum somebody had the sense to bring. I came home and got my mate's license in '46 and I was good, I could take a star sight in a gale and put you on a buoy you couldn't see, and I drank on every watch I stood for eleven years and nobody said one word. Because I'd been on the Murmansk run, and the old men in the hall bought me drinks for it."
He drank some coffee.