I nodded. “Buddy, too. Buddy was always fine. He had people lining up to take him to chemo, his brothers and his brothers’ wives and my cousins and other fishermen and the waitress in the diner where he had breakfast every morning. The fact that he asked me to go with him meant a lot.”
“Everyone was in love with Buddy Zabriskie,” Eddie said.
“Thenurses,” I said. “Oh my god, the nurses came over to check his line every two minutes. As soon as Buddy came in, they were all putting on lipstick. Who tries to pick up a guy with a port? It really was a sight to behold. All my life I’d thought of my father as an obligation that I wasn’t attending to. I felt guilty about not seeing him more. Come to find out my father was doing fine.”
“What was it he had?”
“Metastatic melanoma, same as Candy Fuller.”
“Oh, that’s right. You told me that.”
“He’d already had a melanoma taken out of his ankle. It looked like he’d been bitten by a small shark. He was fine for about three years and then he started coughing. The cancer hadspread to his lungs, his pelvis.”
Eddie shook his head. “How old was he?”
“When he died? Fifty-four.”
Eddie and I looked at each other. “How had I not thought of that?” I said. I was fifty-four.
“If you searched ‘picture of health’ on the internet right now, I bet you’d still get a picture of Buddy Zabriskie. He was the man least likely to die young.”
“It’s funny, but when I was growing up, he used to tell me there was nothing healthier than working on a boat. He said your body stayed strong because you used all your muscles pulling in the nets and stocking the ice, and your brain stayed sharp solving problems because something you’d never thought of before was always going wrong with the engine or the nets or the fish. You had to be fast, use tools, have good balance on the slippery deck. He said fishermen always had friends, both the immediate family of your own boat but also the other people on other boats. Everyone helped each other out and would go looking for you if your boat didn’t come back. They all met up for a beer at the end of the day to tell their fish stories and the socialization was good for you and the beer was good for you. You stayed outside in all kinds of weather so you built up your immune system. And on top of that there were long stretches of nothingness spent staring out at the beautiful ocean, seeing dolphins and porpoises, maybe a whale, and that gave you a sense of wonder and maybe peace. I grew up thinking my father, who I pretty much never saw, lived some magical existence, and then one day I realized that fishing was hard, dangerous work and he was telling me a story so I wouldn’t worry about him drowning.”
The nurse came in to check the bag. “Still good?”
“I get to see you,” Eddie said. “I get to see her. What’s not to love?”
“Your friend has an excellent temperament,” the nurse said to me.
“My father,” I said. Buddy wouldn’t have minded that; Buddy, who was always happy to share.
She looked at us, one and then the other.
“Genetics are a mystery,” Eddie said.
The nurse nodded. “Do you want anything to drink? Coke? Ginger ale?”
“All good,” Eddie said. He waited until she was down the hall. “Did he die in the hospital? I hate the thought of dying in a hospital.”
“You’re not going to die,” I said.
Eddie laughed. “I hate to break this to you.”
I corrected myself. “You’re not going to die anytime soon. You’re not going to die in a hospital.” What was it about death that made people lie this way? I had no idea how or when or where Eddie would die; I only knew I couldn’t stand the thought of it. Like Buddy, I hoped that telling a story would make the story so.
“Buddy,” Eddie said, steering the conversation back.
I looked out the window. We were high enough up to see the East River, and yet the East River had disappeared beneath the low-hanging clouds. “He said he’d become an old boat. There’s a leak in the starboard, and while you’re plugging it up, a leak springs up in the aft, and you plug it, but then there’s water seeping up between the boards of the deck and you don’t know where it’s coming from, but the starboard leak is going again and then you’re not trying to plug anything, you’re bailing, and the pumpchokes.”
“I get the picture.”
“Later on they’d found a melanoma in his brain, a small one but still, bad news. Then he got pneumonia from the chemo. His lungs were shot anyway. They had to put him back in the hospital then.”
“So he did die in the hospital.”
I shook my head. “Don’t get ahead of me. This is when Jonathan Fuller arrives. Well, we’d already met him a few times before that. The hospital in Gloucester was small. There were plenty of opportunities to run into the friendly administrator.”
“You must have looked like springtime to Jonathan, like wildflowers in a glass.”
