BY MICHAEL TAPSCOTT
Copyright is held by the author.
VIEWED FROM above while crossing the Noyo River Bridge on Highway 1, Noyo Harbor looks like a gaping mouth along the Mendocino Coast. The inlet is a weird, unusual, and foreboding spectacle, especially on a dismal day.
A young couple eased their hatchback down the curved road to the water’s edge. The boy smiled with anticipation and licked his lips with pride for finding such an obscure and dismal spot for exploration. His new wife frowned. She had imagined their honeymoon differently.
“How many times do you think you’ve met a murderer?” the boy asked as he parked the car behind a rusty pickup truck on the hardened sand of the road’s shoulder.
“Oh my god,” the girl said. “Never!”
“I think we’re meeting murderers all the time.”
Like the millions of other tourists who visit the harbor each year, the young couple was awed and terrified by the atmosphere as they skirted the brown puddles that filled the pockmarks of North Harbor Drive. They noted the shady surroundings: the burnt-out husks of automobiles, dirt-caked buildings that sagged from the weight of neglectful years, and paunchy, tacky families stopping to eat overpriced fish tacos before they rode the Skunk Train. This was disturbing to the young couple’s self-image.
“Are you looking for the cute little seals?” said a voice nearly startling them from their matching Hunter boots.
An old, scraggly vagrant emerged from behind the dumpster next to the cabin that served as Captain Steve’s Noyo Harbor Tours headquarters. The girl’s eyes widened with alarm. The voice was threatening enough, but the man’s blackened and missing teeth, the dirt under his fingernails, the bowling ball bags beneath his eyes, the random tufts of hair missing from his head, and the yellow pallor of his skin signified desperation. The maniacal barking of the unseen and aforementioned seals spiked the temperature of this strange encounter.
The boy puffed out his chest and assumed a more erect posture. He was putting on a display for the stranger and his young bride, trying to show that he was not panic-stricken. But he was. Yeah, he was. The boy’s audience knew it, too.
“Is the tour worth it?” the boy said, his voice trumpeting up from deep in his chest.
“Captain Steve runs a good tour. For the value, you can’t beat it,” said the stranger. “What you’d pay at Safeway for ten crabs. That’s the limit, ten crabs. You can take ten crabs from the ocean. Ten crabs per person. Per day. If you go on one of Steve’s combo trips, you get some salmon too. You can start fishing for the salmon fifteen or twenty minutes after leaving the harbor. For all that you’d catch with Steve, for what you’d pay for the same thing at Safeway, there’s no comparison. So yes, it is a good deal.”
Having delivered his educated assessment, the stranger’s face turned blank and he stared off at a space in the near distance.
“It’s a good deal,” he added with a whisper. “A good deal.”
The boy was proud of himself. Most other tourists would avoid this cretin like he was another puddle on the road, but he, by engaging this eccentric local in light, patronizing conversation, had provided succor to the stranger’s dangerous mental illness.
“Well, why isn’t there anyone out on the water with Steve today?”
The boy nodded at a boat docked in the water 50 yards away. The same boat with its unmistakable blue and yellow trim was depicted in a pixelated photograph on a piece of paper taped to the window of Captain Steve’s cabin.
The old man furrowed his brow so deeply that his bushy white eyebrows covered his eyes. The question seemed to pain him.
“Look at the weather you idiot,” he said.
The boy popped the collar of his Mackinaw coat as if to set up a defensive front and flashed a cocksure smile. The day was a blustery, cold, and grey one. The question had been rhetorical.
“Not even the dumbest tourist wants to go out in this weather. Normally, the surf is ankle-high or less, maybe thigh-high on a particularly bad day. These big offshore swells we’re seeing today would have even Captain Steve puking over the side of his dinghy.”
The girl used all of her psychic charms to will the boy away from this confrontation, but the boy kept asking questions and grinning out of the side of his mouth. The irritable stranger was now moving his body in strange, jerky motions. In his right hand was an unlit and unfiltered cigarette which he waved about as if he were painting with it on an invisible canvas. It was an ominous and pathetic paintbrush. The girl took note of the giant plastic banner advertising a controversial candidate for president that hung from the seafood market and deli across the road. The political ad dwarfed the banner that announced the presence of barbecued oysters. In reply, Captain Steve’s humble cabin had a soothing placard on the window behind a metal security grate that noted, “This is a non-political business.” She did not feel comforted.
The man squinted into the morning light and raised the unlit cigarette to his lips. It was a precious item. Once or twice a day, he was able to beg, steal, or borrow a beautiful, pert, brand-new cigarette, but those were an unearned luxury. This tube was hand-crafted by himself from dozens of discarded and stepped-on butts that littered the roadside of Noyo Harbor.
“You’ll get yourself converted to hopelessness by talking to old men,” he said.
“Who said that?” the boy replied.
“You’ll want to get on that boat. All we have are our memories.
The stranger closed his eyes tight and rocked back on his heels. He took the cigarette from his mouth and put it back again. It remained unlit.
“OK then,” said the girl.
She grabbed the boy’s right arm and gently guided him down a different road. The boy’s thumbs were hooked onto his belt.
“I’m an engineer,” the stranger said.
As confirmation, his soiled t-shirt read, “Don’t ask me to fix your computer,” and had a graphic of a skull and crossbones on a laptop screen.
“We feed the world here. Six million pounds of seafood were pulled from these waters last year.”
“That’s a lot,” said the boy.
The stranger opened his eyes and gave the boy a look indicating the stupidity and obviousness of that statement.
Further heightening the tension, an ambulance, followed by two police SUVs from Fort Bragg, sped by the couple and the stranger and rushed toward the ocean. Other harbor visitors along the road stopped in their tracks and gaped as the vehicles whizzed by. Stopping at the parking lot beneath the Noyo River Bridge, the EMTs and police officers got out and hurried toward the water. People who had been headed to the sounds of seals and the smoking strove pipes now turned heel and rushed toward the commotion.
The boy and girl watched this new spectacle along with everyone else, but the stranger seemed unaffected.
“All we have is our memories,” he said once again.
“Once I had a happy home. Once I was living with a woman. She lost everything she owned.”
He snapped his fingers to dramatize the precipitancy of this event.
“She lost everything she owned in a fire. Her dog, family photos, clothes, TV. All of it. Gone. Yes, all we have is our memories. Keep that at the top of your precious little minds.”
He scrunched up his nose as he said these last words, which caused his upper lip to curl and exposed his thick, dry tongue which lapped at the gaps in his teeth. He then backed away whilst nodding his head and disappeared behind the dumpster from where he came.
The boy smiled at the girl and they resumed their leisurely walk. They came to the edge of the harbour and stopped to observe the pinnipeds, who were lolling on floating docks. The retired fishing boats lay snug in their slips nearby. They entered a roadside fish and chips stand to order baskets of food and sodas. At the counter, the proprietor and her teenage cashier discussed the to-do at the harbour’s mouth.
“They must have found that kid whose phone Dan Tucker found on the bridge,” the cashier sai
“His poor mother,” the proprietor said.
“They said a camera caught the boy walking onto the bridge at 8:30 on Sunday night, but neither of the cameras on either side of the bridge saw him leave.”
The cashier seemed delighted with her knowledge of the tragedy.
“I still don’t understand what Dan was doing with the boy’s phone though,” she continued.
“He probably thought he could sell it,” said her boss. “Dan walks along the One early in the morning looking for cans and bottles. He finds all sorts of things out there
“It’s awfully suspicious.”
“You can’t possibly think that little old man would hurt anyone. He turned the phone in as soon as he heard they were looking for it.”
“Where does that guy even sleep? I know he doesn’t shower.”
“Oh, I heard he’s got a tent somewhere up the river in the redwoods.”
“He just stands out on the road all day scaring tourists.”
“A little local colour never hurt anybody.”
As curious as this conversation might be, the young couple were irritated by the wait. The boy looked at the girl and jerked his head at the road. The girl rolled her eyes and they left before being addressed by the proprietor or the cashier. As they returned to their car, they saw the stranger talking to another couple by the dumpster on the opposite side of the street. He was hopping from one foot to the other like a medieval court jester and punctuating the air with his unlit cigarette.
***
Michael James Tapscott is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer, musician, and songwriter. Since 2004, he has been recording, releasing, and performing under various names. His works of journalism and criticism were previously published in Freedom Fiction Journal, Stirring, Dusted Magazine, and Nuvo. He was the publisher and editor of the Bloomington, Indiana-based magazine Revolution Blues for one brief, beautiful moment.
