The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories Page 15

  On Thursday, May 3, 1990, a message from his daughter Lisa was on my machine when I came home from work. Les had died the Sunday before. It was a stroke. He had expected to die from an aortic aneurysm he had been cultivating. Instead, it was a blood clot that had traveled to his brain from his foot.

  A final vignette, told to me by a friend of Les. In the late eighties when The Forty Fathom Bank had been out for several years, he and Les had gone to dinner at a very good fish place in San Anselmo, California. It was a weekend evening and the restaurant was packed, the tables pushed so closely together that you could not help but hear your neighbors’ conversation. At the table nearest Les was a couple engrossed in talk about fishing and books. They were young, in their earliest twenties, but they knew what they were talking about. Les figured the young man must be a commercial fisherman, and both he and his woman friend knew the best books about the sea. Before either of them could object, Les had joined in their conversation, and in a moment the young man turned to him and said, “Oh, next you’ll be telling us you’re the author of The Forty Fathom Bank!”

  I can visualize Les’s reaction: his eyes take on a sudden shine, his mouth falls open just a little, in surprise and delight, but in wonder, too, at how the world works. And he says, the lines in his face smoothing into a smile, “Why, yes, I am.”

  Having recently reread The Forty Fathom Bank, I was impressed again by its classic structure. Each character acts out of personal longing, his desire converging with the desire of the opposing character, both blind to what must happen, so as to create a tragedy. Though the story is told in first person, the reader has the sense that the author is not telling a tale but relating the events leading up to a disaster. Tragedy and individual want were Les’s forte. If he had written nothing else, the perfect lines of this small book would be enough to ensure its place in the literature of the English language.

  LES GALLOWAY (1912–1990), while still a teenager, shipped out to New Zealand as a seaman; a few years later he dropped out of college to enlist in the Bolivian army. For most of his life he was a commercial fisherman out of San Francisco. His stories were published in Esquire and Prairie Schooner.

  JEROME GOLD is a writer and the publisher of Black Heron Press. He lives in Seattle.

  Copyright © 1984, 2004 by Lisa Galloway. Afterword copyright © 2004 by Jerome Gold. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Some of the stories in this collection have previously appeared in the following magazines: “The Caspar” in The Arizona Quarterly; “The Albacore Fisherman” (a shorter version) in Esquire; and “Where No Flowers Bloom” in Prairie Schooner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available. ISBN 978-1-4521-2714-9

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