The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories (20 page)

I never saw Pete again. Karl Swenson said he'd seen him getting on the ferry early the following morning. He was dressed up in his Sunday clothes and was carrying a suitcase. Karl had hollered at him, but he hadn't answered. As far as I know, he has never been seen around Sausalito since.

In 1980, out of money, I took a break from graduate school and went back into the army. I thought I would be stationed in Hawaii but found myself at Fort Baker, on the Sausalito side of San Francisco Bay, and living in the Bachelor Officers Quarters at Presidio. Evenings, I would take a book and walk out to one of the restaurants off post for a cup of coffee. It was important to get away from the army at least once a day if I could.

The first time I saw Les Galloway was in the International House of Pancakes, the IHOP, on Lombard. I was sipping coffee over a book and I heard two people talking about writing. One, a twentyish, black-haired waitress, was saying how much she loved to write, that she wrote every day in her journal and she wrote poetry too. Her writing meant everything to her, she said. She was telling this to an older man dressed in a windbreaker and work pants and seated in a booth at an angle to mine. A manuscript was spread out on the table in front of him.

The man said he did not write poetry. He wrote fiction, although he had written a teleplay on Mark Twain once that had been produced. He started talking craft and authors to her, but she only said again how much her own writing meant to her. Continuing to eavesdrop, I understood that the man knew what he was talking about and seemed to have a lot more experience than I had. When the waitress
left I thought about going over and introducing myself to him, but I was unable to think of something to say beyond the introduction and so I let the moment pass.

A couple of weeks later I saw him again, this time in the cafeteria at Presidio. In those days the army ran the cafeteria, but the Presidio was an open post and the cafeteria was open to civilians. Les was a small man with thin white hair and a right leg shorter than his left. He used a cane as he walked into the building and he carried a brown paper shopping bag in his other hand. He set the bag down at a vacant table and then got himself a cup of tea and an English muffin and returned to his table with his tray. From his bag he extracted a papaya and a lime. He glanced around the room but did not see me watching him. At least his eyes did not stop at mine. He cut the papaya into halves with a serrated butter knife and then he cut the lime into halves. He scraped the seeds out of the papaya and placed them on a paper napkin on his tray and folded the napkin over them. Then he squeezed lime juice onto the yellow fruit. I would later learn that this was habitually his lunch. Tea or maybe coffee and maybe a muffin, but always a papaya with lime or occasionally a scoop of vanilla ice cream, which he would buy at whatever restaurant he was in. He always carried the papaya and the lime in the bag with him, regardless of what restaurant he went into, and in the bag also were manuscripts he was working on and a few books, though all I ever saw him read in a restaurant, other than a manuscript, was the newspaper.

When he was almost finished with the papaya I walked over to his table and introduced myself. I told him I'd seen him talking with the waitress at the IHOP but he didn't remember her or what he had said to her. Still, he was friendly and when I asked if I might sit down with him, he agreed readily.

I told him that I also wrote. When I said this his eyes lost
their quizzicality and fixed themselves on me. He mentioned some things about craft and technique and I commented on what he said, and he thought about what I had said and commented back. And so we began to trust each other.

He said he had written a novel that he had not been able to place with a publisher. It was titled
The Forty Fathom Bank
. It was too short for a book, editors said, and too long for a story. One journal in the Pacific Northwest had accepted it, then bumped it for a story by Joyce Carol Oates. The editor said if Les could reduce it from one hundred pages to six the magazine would publish it. Les refused and decided that he could not stand Joyce Carol Oates' writing.

He did not like Henry Miller either, did not like him personally. Once, in the fifties, Les was in a jazz bar when Henry Miller and his wife came in. There were a couple of empty chairs at Les's table and Miller asked if they could sit there. After the set, they talked about this and that and then about writing and Les said something witty, catching Miller by surprise. Miller turned to his wife and said, “Isn't it amazing what you can find in some of these places?” Les never forgave him that, that arrogance that placed him at a station below Miller's own, and he had not read any of Miller's work since.

He did like Dreiser's work and he liked Djuna Barnes'
Nightwood
and said she had really known Paris whereas Hemingway had not, though how he could know who had known what, he did not say. He liked Jean Rhys' writing. I had not read her and he said he would lend me a couple of her books. We agreed to meet the next Saturday and exchange manuscripts.

We met again at the Presidio cafeteria. I handed over a manuscript copy of my novel,
The Negligence of Death
, and he gave me a copy of
The Forty Fathom Bank
and a book by Jean Rhys,
Good Morning, Midnight
. He settled in to eating his papaya while I read the first paragraphs of his manuscript. I
could see it was something I would want to pay attention to and I set it aside, telling Les I would read it later in my room. He had been watching me as he ate and after I said this he relaxed and said he would read my book later too, when he was alone.

We talked writing again. He had had a story published in
Esquire
back in the forties, and another one in
Prairie Schooner
. He was not enthusiastic about academic publications because nobody read them, he said, but he was pleased that
Prairie Schooner
had done “Where No Flowers Bloom.” We sat for a while without speaking. He puffed at the pipe he was trying to light.

It was an exceptionally clear day, I remember, and as we looked out at the bay through the big windows Les remarked how close the land on the other side appeared when the sun was out and there was no mist. He used to teach fiction writing at Fort Mason, he said, and he once had a student, an elderly woman, who had been a little girl at the time of the San Francisco earthquake and fire. Her mother had taken her out on a ferry with other people fleeing the fire and the ferry had brought them all out to the middle of the bay where it was safe and had stopped so they could see the city burn. She told the class seventy years later how it had looked, the city burning down to the water, how she had seen the section where her house had been all red with the fire's glow, how worried she had been about her father and her brother who had stayed behind. She had held the class in thrall when she told this, but she did not write a word about it. Instead, she wrote light romances.

Les and I got together again the following week. Each of us had wonderful things to say about the other's work. His little book seemed to me a near-perfect piece of writing. The character development was solid, and the book had a theme! I was not accustomed to recent American novels, other than some science fiction, having something to say about the
nature of our species. I told Les this. He came back with “Character and theme are everything. If you have character and theme, everything else will follow.” He wagged his finger at me as though he were a schoolmaster trying to impress his student to remember something.

I asked Les about Conrad. It seemed to me that
The Forty Fathom Bank
was a kind of converse of
The Secret Sharer
. Les said he had read
Heart of Darkness
while writing his book and thought that might have been an influence. I mentioned
The Secret Sharer
again but Les only shrugged.

In 1982 I left the army and returned to Seattle to finish graduate school. In the fall I went to Samoa to do anthropological fieldwork. While there I met an American who, though earning his living as a teacher in Samoa, was also an editor for a small press in Milwaukee. It had published one book and on its title page was “Milwaukee and Pago Pago,” which meant that while John lived in (or near) Pago Pago, the other editor lived in Milwaukee. The book they had published had been written by the Milwaukee editor. John said they were looking for other manuscripts. I wrote to Les, asking him to send me
The Forty Fathom Bank
. I gave it to John as soon as I received it. He liked it very much and sent it to his co-editor. They had an arrangement whereby both had to agree to publish a book; neither had the authority to acquire a book on his own.

The Milwaukee editor turned it down. The rejection letter was perfunctory, but he told John that if Les were a younger man he would be willing to publish the book, but Les was not young.

John was dumbfounded and I was angry. To both of us a book was to be judged by its quality. The press finally died because John's friend would not agree to publishing a second book.

From this experience and listening to John I had learned some of the rudiments of publishing. He had been an editor for the University of California at Berkeley and was a poet and literary critic, so he knew publishing, at least certain aspects of it, from both the publisher's vantage point and the author's.

When I returned to the United States I went to San Francisco to see Les. I suggested we publish his book ourselves. Les equivocated. He did not like the idea of being both author and publisher. My argument was this: Editors select books for publication that fall within the parameters set by the companies they work for. Les and I both knew he had written a good book. Quality was not the issue. The issue was the acquisition policies of the large publishing houses. Still, Les was unsure. Finally I said: “How will you feel five years from now if you don't do it?” And so we put together our own press, Black Heron Press, to publish
The Forty Fathom Bank
. The book appeared in 1985.

As a boy, Les had developed a high fever and had to be hospitalized. He never learned the nature of the fever but it left him with a stiffened hip and a leg that would not grow much longer. Ater high school he sailed to the South Pacific on the last clipper ship put out of San Francisco. Later, he dropped out of the University of California to go to South America. He was a motorcycle courier for a Bolivian general during a war against Paraguay, but always an admirer of competence, he deserted because he did not think the general knew what he was doing. Following travels in South America, Les lived in Mexico City for a year. Except for on unpublished novel,
Beyond the Dark Mountain
, much of which concerns a Pacific voyage, he did not write about any of this. Instead, he wrote some exquisite stories about the sea, including
The Forty Fathom Bank
, “Where No Flowers Bloom,” and “The Albacore Fisherman.”