But his father had never sailed again either, and Duncan had never understood that. If he had saved his papers, why hadn't he used them? He had worked at the shipyard as a rigger and then as a night watchman and never once gone near the union hall, and old sailors on Pacific Avenue looked the other way when he passed. And Duncan's mother, Myrna, who had married a bosun with a good name and planned on a house in Palos Verdes someday, had lived the rest of her marriage in a rented bungalow on Thirteenth Street with a husband who drank a six-pack of Lucky Lager every night in silence and a son who got in fights.
Talking cost us everything, his mother said, when she said anything. That was the lesson. That was the whole inheritance. You kept your mouth shut. You didn't stand up in rooms.
And now there was a letter on Duncan's dresser in the room he rented over the Croatian bakery on Ninth Street, on Coast Guard letterhead from the Marine Safety Office on Terminal Island, informing Mr. Duncan T. Whitfield that a Marine Board of Investigation into the capsizing and sinking of the fishing vessel Santa Rosalia, O.N. 248113, and the death of crewmember Davor Perovich, would convene on Wednesday, the twelfth of November, 1980, at nine o'clock in the morning, and that his testimony was required.
He had read it so many times the creases had gone soft.
The thing about the Santa Rosalia was that everybody already knew what had happened to her, and almost nobody knew the truth, and Duncan was beginning to understand that those were two different things, and that a town could live a long time on the first one.
What everybody knew was this. On the night of the nineteenth of March, the Santa Rosalia, a sixty-eight-foot wooden purse seiner built in Tacoma in 1947 and owned and skippered by Branko Perovich, had been running home loaded with mackerel from the grounds off the east end of Catalina when a large sea struck her about four miles south-southwest of the Point Fermin light. She rolled to starboard and went down in less than five minutes. Four men got into the seine skiff. The fifth, Davor Perovich, nineteen, the skipper's son, had been below in the engine room. County divers found him nine days later, still inside the hull. A rogue sea. An act of God. At the Fishermen's Fiesta in September the priest had said his name at the blessing of the fleet, and Branko had stood on his cousin's deck with his hat in his hands and his face like a stone.
What Duncan knew was something else.
He knew that three weeks before the sinking, the Santa Rosalia's freeing ports, the long slots at the foot of her bulwarks that let a boarding sea run off the deck, had been plated over with three-eighths steel, bolted from the inside, because Branko was tired of losing fish over the side when he deck-loaded. Duncan had helped bolt them on. He knew the high-water alarm in the engine-room bilge had been going off for no reason since January, and that Branko had pulled the wire off the float switch and taped the end and said he'd fix it at haul-out. He knew the forward hatch coaming was cracked, because Duncan had found the crack himself, and Branko had said, "We'll put some cement in it," and they had. He knew that at eight that night the radio had given a small craft advisory for the outer waters, southeast twenty to thirty and building, that the hold was already full, and that Branko had stood in the wheelhouse with the bank's letter about the overdue payments on the new Puretic block in his shirt pocket, looked at the sounder full of fish, and said, "One more set." They had brailed forty tons of mackerel onto the open deck until it stood knee-deep against the plated bulwarks, and started home so low that green water came over the rail every fourth or fifth wave and stayed.
And he knew that at about ten-forty, when the boat had started to take a list to starboard and wouldn't come back, Branko had sent Davor below to check the bilge, and the bilge had been full, and the pump had been running dry because the intake was choked with fish scales, and Davor had shouted up that he was going to clear it, and Duncan, who was at the top of the engine-room ladder, had said, "I'll come down," and Davor had said, "No, stay there, hand me the light," and Duncan had handed him the light.
That was the last thing. He had handed him the light, and then the boat had lain down, and he had been in the water.
He had told the Coast Guard some of this in April, in a small office on Terminal Island with a tape recorder going, to a lieutenant commander named Craig Speck who had a mustache and reading glasses and a way of writing things down that made you want to stop talking. He had told them about the deck load. He had not told them about the plates, or the alarm, or the hatch. When Speck asked if there was anything else about the condition of the vessel, Duncan had thought of Branko on the dock at Fish Harbor the morning after, in the rain, waiting for news of his son, and he had said, no sir, nothing else.