Within the month she began pestering Greg to look for a place of their own — a little privacy, that was all she wanted, nothing against his family — and when Alma came along and she was nursing and shutting herself up all day in her room just so she wouldn’t have to listen to one more repetition of her mother-in-law’s dicta on the subject of child rearing, it became imperative. By spring of the following year, 1969, she got her wish. Greg came home from work one clammy socked-in evening, swept his hair out of his face and announced in a voice that could hardly contain its excitement that they were moving to the harbor, to live on a boat he’d bought for $3,600, one-third down, the rest due after the first year. But for the baby, she would have leapt into his arms. As it was, she took hold of him in one arm while cradling Alma in the other, and the three of them danced round the room till Greg’s uncle Billy, who worked nights and slept in the room directly beneath them, mounted the stairs to complain about the noise.
The Black Gold was a working boat, a converted thirty-two-foot cabin cruiser with an open rear deck of fiberglass in place of the original wood planking and a compartment for the catch below; the main cabin and sleeping quarters were aft. There was a galley the size of an icebox, an icebox the size of an orange crate, a built-in table that folded up when not in use (which was never), a little upright coffin of a head and a plywood slab, decorated with a disintegrating foam mattress and a sleeping bag that gave off a mélange of festering odors under the bow. Showers, toilets, laundry were available in the marina. Kat liked to joke that the boat gave a new definition to damp. Every garment, every diaper, every towel might as well have been a sponge, and the only relief was when the sun shone and the wind picked up and things could be strung out to dry. On days when she was in harbor, that is. And those days were rare, at least at first.
She’d wake in the dark to Alma’s cries, take her to bed with them to feed her, then get up and make Greg his breakfast, fried rice, four eggs, mackerel or abalone or Canadian bacon seared in the pan, toasted cheese, coffee by the vat. And then, when his partner, Mickey Mans, arrived looking hungover, starved and stoned in equal measures, she took the baby and went up the hill to her mother-in-law’s for the day, or walked all the way up Anacapa Street to the library to sit and browse and play with Alma till she was so bored she could barely draw another breath. But they were living on the cheap and they had their privacy and she was waiting for him at the slip each night with a bag of groceries when he chugged in through the mouth of the harbor. She became a genius of the quick but nutritious meal, stir-fry mainly, cauliflower, bok choy, mushrooms, snow peas, bean sprouts — whatever looked good in the market — augmented by the halibut, lobster, crab and rockfish she’d buy for next to nothing from the fishermen when they came in.
And uni, though she never really developed a taste for it. Uni—sea urchin — was what Greg and Mickey were after, what they were exclusively after, because the abalone fishery was taking a nosedive from over-harvesting, groundfish numbers were down and lobsters seasonal, and Greg’s father had found a niche market for the urchins, which he was selling to a distributor in L.A. for transshipment to Japan. They were among the first to exploit the resource, but by the late seventies, when Alma was working her way through fourth, fifth and sixth grade and thinking that living on a boat was the most natural thing in the world, the real boom set in. Urchins, previously considered pests, were suddenly the hottest thing on the market. The Japanese couldn’t get enough of them. It was the roe they were after — or the gonads actually, tangerine-colored organs arranged in a star shape inside the spiny shell, which were extracted by the wholesaler, packed in ice and flown to Tokyo overnight. Black gold, that was what people called the urchins, though they shaded to red and purple under the sun, and the money was good, the money was boss, out of sight, too good to believe.
By the time Alma was in sixth grade they’d bought their own house on a back street within walking distance of the harbor, and the dampness, the mold, the cramped quarters and the smell of fish so overpowering they might as well have been living in the muck at the bottom of the sea, were behind them. It wasn’t perfect — for the first few months Alma slept fitfully, waking in tears because her bed wouldn’t move and the floor never rocked or gave or swayed, and when she did sleep it was on the carpet beneath the bed, as if she were still squeezed into her berth under the foredeck — but for Kat it was night and day. Having a house away from the water where you had some space to move around in and didn’t have to worry all night about your daughter pitching overboard and drowning and you could walk across the kitchen floor without water squishing under your heels was cleansing, revolutionary, liberating, not to mention what it did for their sex life — she couldn’t count the nights she and Greg had had to steal out of the cabin to make goose-pimpled love on the foredeck or on the truncated leather seat in the cockpit so Alma wouldn’t hear. And then there was the minor miracle of Mrs. Meehan, the woman they found to watch Alma after school, freeing up Kat to work the boat along with Greg and Mickey.
She became their tender, which allowed them to spend more time harvesting urchins and less hassling with the equipment, and the change brought her back to life after the years spent rotating between the library, the Takesue household and the part-time jobs she took just to drive down the boredom once Alma started school. The first few days were rough, but she caught on quickly — Greg was patient with her, even if his partner, especially in the mornings before the first dive, tended to be a bear — but within a month her confidence began to grow along with the muscles in her arms and shoulders, and if it wasn’t exactly feminine to have an upper body made of iron, it felt good. And so did being away from shore, outdoors, under the open sky.
The tender on an urchin boat is responsible for taking care of all the tasks the divers would prefer having done for them, from dropping and setting the anchor over a promising spot, to laying out the wetsuits and hoses, working the winch to bring the catch over the side, keeping an eye on the air compressor when the divers are down in thirty feet of icy swirling water and making a nice hot lunch to fortify them for the afternoon dives. Not to mention digging out the cold beers for the ride home. While they were down, usually in thirty-minute shifts — thirty minutes was about average for filling the steel-rimmed bag with urchins — she would entertain herself as best she could, reading through paperbacks and the piles of out-of-date magazines she got from a friend of Greg’s who worked for a dentist, doing pencil sketches of the island bluffs or just staring off into space and dreaming, one watchful eye fixed on the snaking yellow hoses as they cut the surface and plunged into invisibility. Her life, finally, seemed to fit her wanting. She’d never been happier.
Then there came a morning in August, clear and calm, what fog there was bellying across the water out front of the boat only to fall away to nothing as she sliced through it, as relaxed at the helm as a long-distance trucker cruising the interstate, while Greg and Mickey slept below. She was six months in, six months to the day — she and Greg were going to celebrate by going out to dinner and a movie when they got back that night — and she’d reached a confidence level where she did almost all the piloting, there and back, because why should her divers have to waste their energy when they could be collapsed in their bunks on the way out and slumped over their beers on the way back? Save your energy, she’d told Greg when she’d been on the job a month, squeezing his arm at the biceps as they stood rocking in the cabin and giving him her best imitation of a sex-starved leer, and he’d leered right back, kissed her deep and run a hand over her breasts and then lifted his other hand too and held them there. Sure, he’d said, why not? You know the routine as well as anybody. Just keep your eye on the gauges and listen to the engine — that’s all you need. And it was. No problem. And if anything did go wrong, she had two mechanics aboard, and she’d let them worry about it. A jolt of coffee in the morning to keep her alert, one beer only at night till they were through the shipping lanes. Watch the depth finder. Fix on a point and never deviate because if you run a crooked line you just waste fuel. Easiest thing in the world.