Most days, she drives too fast. She takes great pleasure in carving the thirty-minute drive down to twenty, twenty-five tops. Today is different. She goes slowly and tries to pay attention. It’s been years since the collapse of the benevolent hippie dictatorship of the yammering mystics at Esalen, but this stretch of Highway 1 continues to retain a modicum of its upscale stoner cachet nonetheless. As she crosses the bridge, she watches in the rearview mirror as a line of identical rental RVs falls into place behind her like the segments of a mechanical worm. At Monastery Beach, a motorcycle speeds past her on the left, the cyclist howling as he extends the middle fingers on both gloved hands.
When she reaches Cannery Row, she pulls the truck into the loading zone adjacent to the Hopkins Marine Station. She thinks of the Chinese fishing village that once stood on this spot, of the fire that consumed it: a fire her father didn’t start. She closes her eyes and tries to see the flames. She tries to see herself reading the daily paper. She tries to see yesterday’s squid beaching, but when she sees nothing, she presses on. Through the automatic gates and into the aquarium’s employee parking lot. Through quarantine and straight to her least favorite exhibit: the one devoted to Ed Ricketts and his lab.
Or perhaps “exhibit” is putting it a bit too strongly. It’s more like a display, small and unpopular, an enclosure barely four feet high and six feet wide, a preserved fetal dogfish or two arranged in their jars as if on a liquor store shelf, the only known snapshot of Ricketts and Steinbeck in a thick black frame. A wooden beer crate. A disembodied drawer from one of his file cabinets. Approximately twenty sheets of sketchbook paper on which one can see the shadows of someone else’s doodles. The lighting here is strange—half-natural, half-incandescent—which makes everything look like an object in a bad still life, especially the Humboldt squid in the big glass cylinder. It’s the one they anesthetized and preserved on their final night together, its body grown flaky and stiff from a half century of formaldehyde immersion, its actual length and girth so much more modest than memory always seems to insist.
Then the part that should trouble her the most but doesn’t. No explanation of a life is complete without an explanation of the life’s end, and in this regard, everyone did their level best. A carefully worded informational placard in the trademarked font, a photo of the immediate aftermath. The image is out of focus, the action framed at a slippery diagonal, a huge train engine looming in the background. There’s the wreckage of an old black Buick, emergency personnel and onlookers, a body laid out on a stretcher. She remembers how slyly she stole one of the tourists’ cameras, how expertly she lined it all up, how decisively she pressed the button even though her hands were shaking. It was not her fault, she recalls repeating to herself. It was not murder. She simply sent him out for more booze and he never came back. She had nothing to do with how the Buick stalled on the tracks. She had nothing to do with the train conductor: a weepy, tongue-tied fool who, having seen the obstruction, had neither the time nor the inclination to stop.
“So. You made it back alive.”
Does Arthur understand? He must. He once suggested that, when Ricketts’s body flew through the windshield, it probably looked like a fish-meal sack full of cats.
“Word traveled, then?” she asks.
He nods.
She cringes and closes her eyes. The crew of the squid boat will likely tell this story for years to come: how they noticed her buoyancy was incorrect the second she hit the water, how one of them was able to dive down and retrieve her before she got too deep. Usually, she doesn’t feel like she’s seventy-three years old; not even close. But as they hoisted her back onto the deck of the boat, her body limp and brittle in their arms, her weight belt jammed with too many weights, her BCD underinflated, she felt like the smallest, most decrepit soul in existence. She was too embarrassed to let them take her to the hospital. Instead, she made them drive her home, and now, if she’s thinking of her long-ago accident in the tide pools and the brief convalescence that followed, it’s not in the spirit of forcing parallels. Not in the least.
“You know it’s the same one, right? The train engine at the playground?”
She nods. Of course she knows. They’ve joked about it—darkly, nervously—for years. What he doesn’t know is that she’s never found it funny. She used to go there, not all that long ago, and watch the action in secret. She would watch the kids climb to the top of the same Del Monte Express engine that killed Ricketts. She would watch them laugh and fall and howl, and she knew that if she had ever had her own daughter, she wouldn’t have been craven and she wouldn’t have been foolish. She would have let her daughter climb all the way to the top and hit the big bell with the edge of a quarter. And when her daughter fell from the engine’s tallest point, which she doubtlessly would have—because there is, after all, a symmetry to these things that makes them worth pondering in the first place—there would have been nothing in the way of hindsight or regret. They would have simply held each other and cried, shocked by their sudden reacquaintance with the type of thing that, as the old saying goes, should have only made them stronger.
“There are those who still think it was planned. That he did it on purpose.”
“That’s insane,” she snaps. “He wasn’t that kind of man.”