From Chapter One, "Another Herring in Paradise":
Morning appeared over water smoothed like a mother’s apron and flushed the crimson of keen embarrassment over the soft shoulders of the hills beyond the bay. A cottony shawl of fog draped across Angel Island, trailed out of sight past Lime Point, the Potato Patch, out to open ocean. Seabirds untucked heads from under wings with eyes alert for the morning’s first silvery herring or some scrap tossed aside by ferrygoers as they gaped across the expanse. A lone figure in a dark sliver of rowing shell pulled against the current, silhouetted in sunrise.
In the small park across the road from the riprap — scuttling ground to orange-clawed crabs alert to passing shadows that might foretell an imminent reduction in the crustacean census — one of our chief practitioners of petty theft of public property crouched over his work.
Name was Bel, short for Belmont. Bel’s momma, a horse player, had a hunch she had a winner with this entry, when in fact he turned out to be a dark horse, immense and tar-colored and none too quick out of the gate. On this morning, Bel was on guard for approaching enemies of his own; namely, any officer of the law or flunky who oversaw these grounds. “Hafta git these … and prolly these, pay attention, Bel,” he reminded himself while nudging clumps of lilies and marigolds from their municipally maintained beds. These liberated blossoms he would sell on the houseboats, to replenish the window boxes and marine-flotsam planters.
In nearby Old Town, Mephisto, our defrocked professor of higher learning in the yellow Thomas-tumbledown cottage choked in wisteria vine, was preparing a morning meal for Marilyn the macaw from overripe fruit pilfered with a gleaner’s eye from the “you buy now” box at Willie Yee’s market. Then they would mount the gleaming Indian Chief and take their habitual cobweb-clearing run — to drink strong coffee and plot who-knew-what questionable deeds with Jake the Anchor Out and possibly others in their loose knot of miscreants. And what of Maggie, our lovely Maggie of the kelp forest hair? She was deep in her dreams in Galilee Harbor after a night of typhoon-force creative gales, and she would remain asleep until the sun sat high above Point Bonita.
All in all, another fine day in the paradise asylum of Sausalito.
But this was not, in fact, just an ordinary day. Inside the Earthquake Shack, on this particular day, Will was making one hell of a racket. Making such boomings and bangings that it woke the exhausted sexual Olympians Putty and Princess next door. They briefly feared for their lives as the ornately framed mirror five feet above their heads shook and threatened to flatten them like ecdysiasts under glass; they both bolted upright, bedcovers flung off, wide-eyed and disoriented. Then, recognizing Will’s voice behind the noise, fell back into their pillows like a pair of synchronized swimmers.
Soon all of the boardwalk, and all of Old Town, was awake. The sirens screamed as they turned a sharp right and then left and left again, coming to a halt where Main meets the bay. The rescue squad, followed by a conga line of tan-uniformed police, scurried down the low sea wall, onto the brown beach, and between the toredo-pocked pilings beneath the Valhalla. By this time Will was waiting beside the white-faced, bloated figure in dull green curled into a fetal crouch. Officer Mack, displaying his lavish gift for the obvious, knelt next to this unexpected morning visitor and deduced — quite correctly, it turned out — “Jumpsuit. Must be a jumper.”
“Godammit, Mack,” Will blurted back with startling fury. Pointing out that, of the multitudes who choose this famous exit of high drama, none was required by fashion or logic to crawl into a jumpsuit to hurl himself from the Golden Gate Bridge. Declaring he knew exactly whereof he spoke, given his line of work. Telling Mack that when first he spotted the patch of color, he thought another marina anchor ball had worked loose and floated in with the tide. Coming for a closer look, saw it was a dead man in institutional coveralls.
Mack held his ground.“Been no report of an escape from San Q. Look at him. He ain’t fresh. Been in the water more than an hour or two. Either jumped, fell out a boat in that getup, or—”
“Or what?” demanded Will.
“Or he didn’t,” Mack retorted. “You seem awful worked up about this, if you don’t mind me saying so, Will.”
Will didn’t appear to like hearing that, and he seemed on the edge of saying something you don’t say to law enforcement, even if it’s Mack.
“Didn’t know this fella, did you?” Mack asked with casual interest, fishing in the corpse’s pockets for an ID. Will said nothing, causing Mack to pause and look up from his search. “No,” replied Will in a low voice. At this point Mack gave Will an odd look and thanked him for his professional opinion and for doing his duty as a citizen and said this was a police matter now.
But Will wasn’t quite done. “Don’t like jumpers is all . . . if that’s what he is.” Mack was ignoring him, signaling at the coroner’s transport unit that had arrived to begin work. “Something incredibly . . . selfish . . . showy.. . .” He didn’t seem to care Mack wasn’t listening. “Not saying it isn’t sad, Mack, course it’s sad, if he wasn’t already on his way out from something, that is. But it’s not like popping pills or opening a vein in the privacy of your own home.” Mack was rising heavily to his feet, brushing coarse dark sand from his uniform trousers. “Someone who ends it with a swan dive, Mack, out in public, right in front of the damn toll takers, people passing by, total strangers . . . family maybe . . . like he’s flipping us all the bird. . . .”
Then, to no one in particular, “And why? Why?”
Will fumed a little more before leaving the green-clad floater to the authorities, which surprised his friends and neighbors hearing about it afterwards at The Glad Hand and the No Name. When calm again reigned on the boardwalk, only One-Eyed George, the brown pelican who adopted Will after he freed him from a fisherman’s hook, noticed he was not his usual self. That he was still shaken. George cocked his head and fastened his good brown eye on his friend, uncertain how to read what he saw in this man whose natural bond with all creatures of the sea, birds and mammals included, was a subject of local conversation and wonder. Hopping quickly aside as Will passed on the boardwalk when normally he would extend his head for a soothing scratch.
Perhaps it was only natural we failed to see something was weighing heavily on Will. He just let off some steam, went the talk around town afterwards. Shock over the morning’s events, that’s all. But what was that ruckus in Will’s place about? That had happened even before the sun blinked awake, before Will had even made his grisly beach discovery. This bafflement lingered. And it was not to be answered the next day or next week—for such questions take time to consider fully, take a look back over a most unusual year, take even more than that.
