"October of '57. We were inbound from Yokohama. Midnight to four, my watch, and the fog came down off Point Fermin about one o'clock like somebody dropped a blanket. Your father had the wheel. He was bosun, but we were short an AB and he took the wheel himself. We had a kid from Oklahoma on lookout who couldn't have told a running light from a Christmas tree. I had the radar. That was my job. To watch the scope and keep us off anything in the fog and slow her down."
"And you didn't."
"I had a bottle of aquavit in the chart room. I went in to look at the chart about half past one and I sat down on the settee and I don't remember anything after that until your father was shaking me." He looked at Duncan, straight. "I was passed out. Not dozing. Drunk. Your father came in the chart room twice. The first time he said, Mr. Aasen, there's a whistle off the starboard bow, and I said something to him, God knows what, and he went back to the wheel. And the second time he said, Mr. Aasen, I've got a light, there's a light close aboard, and I didn't wake up at all."
Rain went across the window in a long gust.
"Now you have to understand how it was on a ship then," Sig said. "An AB at the wheel doesn't change course on his own. He doesn't ring the engine room. That's the mate's job. A seaman who takes the ship from an officer, that's a kind of mutiny. Your father had been at sea since he was sixteen, waiting on officers his whole life. So he waited. He stood there with that light coming closer and called me, and waited. He told me later it was about a minute. Then he put the wheel hard over and rang full astern himself, and it was too late. We cut the Buena Fe nearly in half. Little lampara boat out of Fish Harbor, coming in from the squid. Ten men in the water and we got them all out. The cook was asleep in his bunk forward. Cayetano Villaseñor. Fifty years old. A wife on Terminal Island. They never found him."
Duncan found that he had put his hand flat on the counter, as if the floor were moving.
"Before the hearing the company sent a lawyer down from San Francisco with a gold watch chain," Sig said. "And the captain and the company had a story. I was at the radar doing my job. The Buena Fe was showing no lights and came out of the fog across our bow and nothing could be done. Fishing boats, you know how they are. Everybody would have believed it. I'd keep my license. Nobody would hang." He looked down. "And the only man who could say different was your father."
"Did they ask him to say it?"
"Everybody asked him. The captain asked him. The lawyer offered him money, I think, though he never told me so." Sig was quiet. "I asked him. The night before the hearing. In my room at the Hotel Seaman, on Beacon Street, that's gone now. I asked him to say the Buena Fe had no lights. I got down on the floor, Duncan, on my knees, on that floor, and I begged him."
"What did he say?"
Sig closed his eyes.