The Winemaker's Daughter, page 8
Brunella walks up to a boat she has never seen, truant from a good coat of paint, smelling of something five days old and getting riper by the hour, perhaps not even seaworthy. She looks on the side and makes out a name: SoundGardener. Well, at least the owner has decent taste in local rock ’n’ roll. She hears a brisk mumbling from the engine room, looks down, and spots a lanky figure with linguini strings of hair under a cap.
“You the part lady?” he says.
“Who are you?”
“Duff Almvik. You got my part?”
“No, I’m—you have the wrong person.”
“Fucking-A. I’m leaking oil like a grease monkey with a kidney condition, and you got nothing for me. Bad enough, I counted fourteen restaurants today before I came to a place ’long the water where somebody knew ahi from aft.”
“Where you from?”
“Here, open seas, and then here, always here. I got a run of chinook to chase in a few weeks, and my girl’s gone to shit on me.”
“Here?” Brunella hops aboard his boat. “You mean you live here, on this side of Salmon Bay?”
He crawls out of the engine room and wipes his hands on his SPAWN TILL YOU DIE T-shirt. “Living free and living large, but yeah, I’ve parked the SoundGardener here, more or less, going on twenty-two years.”
“But that’s impossible. I looked at all the records. I’ve been over the fishing licenses, talked to the archivists at the Nordic Heritage Museum, scanned every city houseboat permit. This pier does not have a working fisherman.”
“Working’s a relative term, lady.” He lifts his cap, which has a stylized fishhook and the line BITE ME. “My gramps came to Seattle from Oslo, place that’s full of blondies showing their titties this time of year, in case you never been. He came here ’cause the North Sea was fished out. Came here to Salmon Bay and felt like he’d never left Oslo. People used to hang codfish on clotheslines in their backyards and nobody looked at ’em funny. Now I get too close to somebody on land, and the yups are on me with their lawyers. Like their shit don’t stink. My gramps started catching chinook—a very special run of fish, oiled and fat with just the right color—started catching ’em and kept doing it till he croaked on the boat. My old man picked it up, and then he handed the license down to me. If you’re not the part lady, who are you?”
When Brunella explains that she is working on contract for Waddy Kornflint to ensure that his project will not erase a community of cultural significance, Duff starts to laugh. He has a cackle, horsey and deep, honed from solo laughs on the high seas.
“I’m not significant?”
“You could move across the bay, join the people at the new pier.”
“Think they’d let me in?”
“They would have to. Mr. Kornflint has made space for fishing boats.”
“If I don’t fit on this side of Salmon Bay, I don’t fit anywhere.”
“Oh, that’s nonsense. You can adapt.”
“Adapt? And then what? I’m probably the last gill-netter chasing those big spring chinook. Get rid of me, what’re you left with?”
“There are other runs of fish.”
“Not like this one. You got a minute? Let me show you something.” He retreats to a locker in the rear of the cabin, rustles through some papers, and returns with a large stained map, big enough to cover a kitchen table. The map shows the Pacific Northwest, its major rivers and streams, the islands of Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the Pacific shore. There are colored lines, like arteries, running from different parts of the sound and ocean, up the rivers to inland destinations.
“See here? Each of these lines is a run of fish,” Duff says. “They’re genetically extinct, going back to the Ice Age—”
“Distinct. You mean distinct.”
“Now follow me without interrupting, wouldja, please? Hey, you got kind of a nice rack there, you know? Firm little pair—”
“A nice . . . ?”
“Nothing. I catch my chinookies off the northern tip of Whidbey. They’re on their way home after a long life in the Pacific. They dip through the sound to gorge on food before heading out and south again, along the coast, to the Columbia River. They take a left at the Columbia, see, and swim past—oh, shit—half a dozen dams, climbing those worthless fish ladders they got, and then, inland, higher still to the desert, ’bout twelve thousand miles round trip. You following this on the map?”
“Let me see that.” Brunella moves closer. “Oh, my God. This can’t be.”
“Yeah, it’s a goddamn miracle. Every time I explain what a good bunch of hikers these chinookies are, I get the same reaction.”
“I know this run of fish,” says Brunella. “I know it well.”
“Then you know they hang a left just after Wenatchee and crawl up a creek to their final spawning ground, here next to a little coulee. You can’t see it on the map, but that’s where they end up, near this little desert coulee. Spawn. Die. Then, come spring, my meal ticket heads out to sea.”
“Are you sure?”
“Guy at the U-Dub fisheries school tagged a bunch of ’em. That’s my run of fish, the Coulee Kings. You know anything about the desert in eastern Washington?”
“Yes, I grew up there. This coulee . . . what if the creek were dry?”
“Impossible. It’s a spring-fed stream. I been there myself.”
“But what if? I mean, what if the creek were dry when the fish came back, what then?”
“I’d be done. End of the line for me and my Coulee Kings. Why, you know somethin’?”
On the top floor of the oldest skyscraper on the West Coast, Brunella steps outside to the observation deck. She had written her speech weeks ago, before going east of the mountains, but it looks like pablum now, like somebody else wrote it, somebody she doesn’t like. People are crowding into the showcase room in the Smith Tower, and she is five minutes away from feeding them—this? Remember now to keep the hands down, she reminds herself, hide the Italian and don’t talk with your hands, the refrain she heard time and again when she first moved to this city of Asian and Scandinavian reserve. Of course, a livable city needs a past, blah-blah, and what’s more we have a tradition of not erasing our heritage, blah-blah, and Waddy Kornflint’s project will keep that tradition alive because it will have No Significant Impact on anything of lasting cultural value, and don’t forget to staple the hands and pander and tell three jokes before the serious stuff.
She has invited the press, the mayor, the city council, and a few philanthropists and professional goo-goos to the Smith Tower to announce the finding of No Significant Impact. Kornflint is the fourth richest person on earth, an anorexic-looking tycoon given to elliptic non sequiturs that are overinterpreted by aides in sweatshirts, a man who does not have a community-minded thought that he does not inflict on the community through the filter of his sycophants. But to his credit, Brunella believes, Kornflint has both good taste and a sense of restraint, a rare combination for somebody who likes his money to be visible. The Salmon Bay development is her biggest project, and she was surprised at how little opposition there was. Not a peep from the museum boards, the arts councils, the self-appointed cultural watchdogs. It wasn’t because they didn’t care about Salmon Bay. They cared, at least in the abstract; it was funky and quirky in the Seattle tradition, if nothing else. But Kornflint is a Medici in a plaid shirt; the concerns of nonprofit boards for old piers and diminished rituals does not extend to those coveted by the city’s biggest benefactor.
Brunella’s reputation is gold. She has fought on behalf of the city’s public market and waged several high-profile campaigns against Kornflint in the International District. When they hired her, she was given an unlimited budget and no interference. With her finding of No Significant Impact, Kornflint can tear down the clot of warehouses, cedar shacks, docks, and fishing boats, and the goo-goos can sleep at night and the editorial boards won’t so much as burp. In writing her report, Brunella’s argument is simple: There are no fishermen left on the south side of Salmon Bay; therefore, there is no culture worthy of preservation. To save Salmon Bay as it is would amount to enshrining ghosts and doing so in unsanitary firetraps. But then, this morning she met Duff and found out about the Coulee Kings.
Brunella looks radiant, her shirt unbuttoned three from the top, a short skirt over long legs bronzed by the high-alpine sun of eastern Washington. Just as her presentation is set to begin, she dashes out of the room, past the assembled power brokers and into the bathroom. She stares at her notes, nibbles at her fingernails. Christ. This is truly lame. We can still be the Paris of Puget Sound, yadda-yadda-yadda, as long as we respect our past and honor the future. Through the window, she looks at Mount Rainier, a skirt of smoke at its midsection. Five hundred feet below her, she eyes the half-built empire of the city Kornflint is remaking.
She feels something, a jolt, and freezes in place. Is this it? The movement of plates, the shake and relief of crustal slabs, the strain and groan of an aging planet? A sense of sudden horror runs through her.
“Did you feel it?” she asks a friend, as she reenters the room.
“Feel what?”
“Just now. That . . . that tremble?”
The friend shrugs. “You shouldn’t go out there showing so much leg, Brunella.”
“What, and hide my best asset?” She strolls to the front of the room, one of the most elegant age-encumbered salons in the city: the Chinese Temple Room, a big-windowed attic of collections from across the Pacific, with views over Puget Sound and also east to the mountains, shielded today by smoke. Ethan Winthrop has taken a reserved seat in front. He is scratching his bug-bitten legs.
“You’re sunburned,” she says to him.
“I’m seeing the dermatologist this afternoon. They’re promising clouds later in the week—thank God. Are you ready? You seem a little preoccupied.”
“Did you feel something, Ethan, just a minute ago? Some movement?”
“I did not. Maybe we should call this off if you’re not ready.”
“I’m ready,” she says. “I think.”
But Brunella’s mind is unclear. She goes to the front, faces the mayor, two deputy mayors, most of the city council, Kornflint’s aides, public policy lawyers, architects, designers, and a ponytailed bank president. The foundations—Bullitt and Gates, Weyerhaeuser and McCaw, Allen and Boeing—have sent staff members. Television cameras turn on their lights as Brunella introduces herself.
“You can’t know who you are,” she begins, “if you don’t know where you are. Where we are today is the top floor of what used to be the tallest building west of the Mississippi. We have memories, those of us attached to this city—call it our sentiment equity—of the times when this building touched the periphery of our lives. The Smith Tower isn’t going anywhere, so can you stop looking at me that way. And keep those cell phones off until I’m finished, please.”
“Where’s Kornflint?” comes a shout from the audience.
Kornflint never makes a public appearance, unless it is on a screen, pretaped. Kornflint never gives interviews. She glances at the row of Kornflint’s sweatshirted aides.
“Mr. Kornflint asks the city to condemn several blocks on Salmon Bay. I have spent the last eight months going over this neighborhood. It has seen better times. Once, you could argue, it was the most storied part of a small corner of the world that has always looked to the sea for life. But now? It is an eyesore. It is polluted. It is—well, I thought it was deserted.”
She pauses, moves her lips, but nothing comes forth. She bites her nails. “Ummmm.” Silence. The glare of the cameras. A labored moment. She folds her notes and looks straight ahead, trying to hold her hands in place.
“As I started to say, the law requires the city to have a living memory. That means preserving buildings and patterns of life that remind us of our heritage. This is a town sustained by Puget Sound from day one. We don’t want to become a city no longer connected to the sea, a city of people whose hands are without blisters. A city that . . . ummmm—”
“Get to the point!” comes another shout. She shields her eyes and tracks the room for the voice of the heckler. In the back, leaning against the wall, his foot on a cooler, is Duff Almvik, still wearing his SPAWN TILL YOU DIE T-shirt.
“Excuse me?”
“I said, ‘Get to the point,’ ” says Duff.
“We—ummm—Duff?”
“Yeah?”
“Could you come forward, please?”
Walking, his cooler in one hand, Duff looks tall, perhaps six feet six inches, with a weathered face and glassy eyes.
Another long silence. The camera lights make Brunella blink.
“Ummmm. . . . Oh, shit, I have—” She begins again. “I have . . . I guess . . . some questions.”
Ethan shoots her a threatening look, furiously scratching at his legs.
“Mr. Almvik here—Duff Almvik—is a commercial salmon fisherman. Isn’t that right, Duff?”
“You betcha. Third gen.”
“And as I’ve just been informed this morning, he has . . . he’s got a permit to take salmon, which he brings home to a pier. Is that correct, Duff?”
He nods in agreement.
“And as we think about this, it seems like it’s—well, the very pier Mr. Kornflint wants to destroy for lack of fishermen.”
“Got more’n a permit,” says Duff. “Got fish.” He opens his cooler and removes a good-sized salmon, gutted, the head still on. “Meat’s nice and red. Plenty of oil. Caught this puppy last night on a troll line. Tell you what. Four dollars a pound gets this fish out of my hands and into yours.”
He holds the fish over the head of Ethan, who turns away in disgust. Duff kisses the fish on the snout and puts it back into the cooler. Then he kisses Brunella on the cheek and offers up a goofy smile, warming to the rare opportunity to entertain somebody other than himself.
Ethan is stunned. Kornflint’s aides whisper back and forth. They know Brunella has done an exhaustive search of every commercial fisherman at the pier. She has tracked them down in trailers, in jail, in law firms, in beach houses in Hawaii, in graduate schools, in bars where they picked up their mail. The ones she could find were bought out by Kornflint. The cashouts were generous; in some cases, more than half a million dollars per fisherman. By terms of modern social mitigation, it was nothing. But here is Duff Almvik. Brunella never mentioned him. Where the fuck did he come from?
“Duff may be the last of the line,” Brunella continues, her words picking up speed as her hands spring loose, a full flutter of fingers and motion in the air, the Cartolano in her set free. “Or maybe he is the start of a renaissance, a thread to a future where salmon again run through the waterways of our city. But as long as Duff lives on as the sole surviving fisherman on the old side of Salmon Bay and continues to do what the Almvik family has done there for three generations, I’m not sure the Building Department can give Mr. Kornflint his permit.”
“What?” From Ethan, a rare shout. “I don’t believe what I’m hearing!”
“It would seem to violate the law. Because Salmon Bay is, in fact, a living community. If you tear it down, what would that do to Duff? I’m sorry. I didn’t know about any of this until just this morning, and I’ve been trying ever since to process it and do the right—”
Ethan stands and points a finger at Brunella. She has never seen him look so physical, so aggressive. It scares her. A Kornflint aide rises next to him.
“Ms. Cartolano, you are completely out of line,” says the aide. “You have violated the terms of your contract, which you can consider terminated as of this moment. We’ll be in touch about recouping fees. But more important, to everyone here—you are wrong.”
“Tell me.”
“The statute says a building permit cannot be issued if, and I quote, a community of historical or cultural significance is at risk. I’m reading from your notes, by the way. What you have here with your friend, Mr. Duff, is not a community. As you just said, he may be the last of the line and sole surviving member of his own ethnic subspecies. Fine. Whatever. But he is solo! One. Unto himself. Not a community. You have no case.” The aide sits down.
A woman, a friend of Brunella’s, breaks into the room, breathless, her face downturned and red. “Yes?” Brunella says. “Something I missed?”
“No, no. It’s not good. I must talk to you. I must talk to you now. I have terrible news.”
The mayor rises and starts to leave, followed by the deputy mayors and several city council members.
“Wait!” Brunella says. The cameras are trained on the mayor, a well-fed man with eyelids at half mast and premature jowls. He pauses for dramatic effect, sensing the sound bite at full ripeness.
“Ms. Cartolano. We’ll keep the file open for another six months to see if there is in fact a community at risk—and that means more than one person, just to be clear. But then this forward-looking city must get on with its business. No matter what some people may say about Mr. Kornflint, he is a visionary, and visionaries are not tripped up by phony process. Oh, and Duff: I’ll take that fish off your hands.”
Ethan is furious. He grabs Brunella by the elbow and tugs her to one side, his bony fingers deep in her skin.
“Why did you flip on me?” Ethan says. “Did you spend a night slumming with the fisherman?”
“Ethan, that hurts. Get your fingers off my arm, and I’ll tell you. We’re connected, that fisherman and I.”
“As I suspected.”
“I only met him this morning. Walking to the podium, I realized that we are connected by water. His fish, my father’s grapes. The water links us together.”
“What, that little half-dead salmon stream?”
“Yes!”
“Then you’re doomed.”
The woman who has rushed into the room pulls her aside and whispers in her ear. Brunella looks at her as if she is staring at a cipher. Oh, no. No, it can’t be. It can’t be. Oh, no. She collapses on the ground and buries her face.
