He did not tell Sig his last name. He did not tell anybody his last name if he could help it. His badge said DUNCAN, and the fishermen who knew who he was mostly did not say the rest out loud, not since the spring. In San Pedro a name was not just a name. It was a list of everything your family had ever done, all the way back, and people read it off you the moment they heard it, the way a customs man reads a manifest.
Whitfield meant his father. It had meant his father for as long as Duncan could remember, since he was six years old in the schoolyard at Fifteenth Street Elementary and a boy named Stipe Lovrich had told him his dad was a rat, and Duncan had not known what that meant either, only that it was the worst thing, and had hit Stipe Lovrich in the mouth, and been sent home. His father had picked him up from the principal's office in the green Ford pickup with the shipyard parking sticker on the bumper. Then he had driven down to Point Fermin and parked by the lighthouse and they had sat there looking at the water a long time.
"Did it make you feel better," his father had asked finally, "hitting him?"
"Yes."
"For how long?"
Duncan had thought about that. "Until the principal came."
His father had nodded slowly. He was a big quiet man with a gray crewcut and a face that never moved much, and he smelled of Lucky Strikes and Lava soap and, underneath that, faintly and always, of beer. "That's about how long it lasts," he said. "Every time."
"Are you a rat?"
He remembered his father's hands on the wheel. He remembered them tightening, and loosening, and tightening again. "I told the truth in a room once," his father said, "when some people wanted me to tell something else. That's all I'm going to say about it, Dunc. When you're older, if you still want to know, you ask me again."
He had asked him again, at twelve, and at fourteen, and both times his father had said, not yet. And then in the spring of 1971, when Duncan was fifteen, his father had gone to sleep in his chair in front of the television with the Dodgers on and the sound turned down, and his heart had stopped, and he had not woken up, and there was nobody left to ask but his mother, who would only say that it had been a long time ago and that talking about it never put food on anybody's table.
So he had grown up with the word and not the story. The story he pieced together the way kids do, out of things overheard in kitchens and on docks. A freighter, the Corvallis Trader, in 1957. A collision in fog off Point Fermin with a little fishing boat, and a man drowned. A Coast Guard hearing on Terminal Island. Thurman Whitfield had been at the wheel, and at the hearing he had pointed his finger at the mate, a man everybody on the waterfront liked, a man who had been torpedoed on the Murmansk run and come home with a chestful of nothing, because merchant seamen didn't get medals. The mate had lost his license and gone on the beach. And the part people said more quietly was that it was Thurman Whitfield who had been asleep on his feet that night, and that he had hung it on the mate to save his own papers.