The boat people had been scrupulous about keeping their part of the bargain: Mission Creek was a pretty decent place these days, a haven for boat lovers, artists, artisans, and average citizens who disliked conventional city living. There were more than fifty authorized slips, all of them occupied, extending in a nice orderly row up the middle of the creek, with several security-gated ramps giving access to them from the Channel Street embankment. Most of the craft in there now were houseboats of one type or another, sailboats, and cabin cruisers; and most of them were well cared for, if a little on the funky side.
I parked in one of the slots down toward Fourth Street, walked past a gaggle of geese and one of the Port-O-Johns that were strategically placed along the embankment—most of the berthed craft would have chemical toilets, but that kind of waste disposal can be a problem—and went to the nearest access ramp. The security gate there was standing open; it was probably kept locked only at night. I descended onto a narrow board float set almost flush with the murky water of the creek, bordered on one side by the slips and on the other by horizontally arranged logs along which were strung electrical cables and water hookups. The first person I saw was a bearded guy in his thirties, doing some work on the deck of a green cabin cruiser; the smell of creosote coming off him and the boat was strong in the thin cold air. I asked him where I could find the boat belonging to Melanie Purcell, and he pointed back toward Fourth Street and said, “Eight slips that way. Houseboat with the decals.”
I moved along in that direction. Gulls and something I took to be a heron wheeled overhead; the water made little slapping sounds against the float and the moored boats. The sounds of the freeway traffic and the SP trains seemed remote, as if they were coming from some dimension or continuum once removed. The houseboat in the eighth slip down had decals all over the front of it—big flower things made out of wood and painted different pastel colors. It also had a peaked roof, some odd angles, varnished wood siding, a pair of bubble skylights, and a round stained-glass window high up under the eaves of its roof.
I didn’t see a door anywhere; it had to be around on the aft side. I stepped on board and started that way along a narrow starboard walkway. But I got only as far as a shuttered window halfway along before the noises coming from inside stopped me. Two people were having sex in there, and they weren’t being quiet about it. For that matter, they weren’t even being civilized about it.
Voyeurism isn’t one of my vices; I backed away in a hurry and disembarked onto the board float. Once, several months ago, Kerry had rented an X-rated videotape and played it for us on the new VCR she’d bought, just so we could see what one of those things was all about. What it was all about embarrassed the hell out of me, as old as I am. I quit watching after about five minutes, but Kerry stuck with it for another twenty or so. It wasn’t because it made her hot, she said; it was because she thought all those moans and groans and gyrations were funny—in a perverse way, of course. I hadn’t believed her for a minute, not before she half dragged me into the bedroom and definitely not afterward.
I climbed up to the embankment and walked along it a ways, killing time. Down where Channel Street right-angles into Sixth, in the shadow of the freeway looming high overhead, some of the Mission Creek residents had turned an acre or so of ground into a surprisingly impressive vegetable garden. Corn, beans, zucchini, strawberries, some other things. It really was a whole different world down here, a little self-contained community that continued to flourish outside the mainstream of city life. Somehow, in a way that I couldn’t quite define, it gave me a feeling of hope.
After about ten minutes I went back down to the float, along it to Melanie Purcell’s houseboat. This time, when I got as far as the starboard window, nobody was making any noise inside. So I kept moving aft. Around back there was a little oblong deck floored in green Astro-turf and, in the middle of the decal-decorated superstructure, a door that I proceeded to bang on. Nothing happened, so I banged on it again.
It opened abruptly and I was looking at a bulky guy in his early twenties, naked except for a pair of Levi’s. He had sandy hair puffed out in one of those frizzes, and judging from the scowl on his face, he also had a lousy disposition. He looked me over, decided I was nobody he knew or wanted to know, and said, “What is it?”
“Richard Dessault?” That was the name of the guy Melanie was living with. His occupation, according to Ben Klein, was “poet.” Some occupation.
“So?” he said. “You want something?”