But the first thing is that there’s got to be some pilings set, some kind of dock built so Dennis can get back and forth, bring over the building supplies by boat. There’s a fellow, he says-I forgot his name-used to build wharves all up and down the coast. He’s retired now, but he could take on a small job like this and finish it up in a few days if he had a crowd to do the heavy bits. Be a lot faster, Dennis says, than driving all the way around.”
Quoyle nodded, but his face was dull. The aunt sighed, thought that if she could scrape away her old flesh down to the young bones she would do it herself.Shecould tackle a new job, master a boat, rebuild the house, get over the loss of a cheating mate. She hauled out a wad of sketches and lists, long columns of arithmetic, spread them over the table. Stubby fingers, the nails cut straight across.
“I wish I could find my calculator,” she said. “Dennis figures everything up, has to add it three times, loses his place. I can’t add at all anymore, seems like. They say if you do sums ten times a day you’ll never get senile. But that argues that bankers should be geniuses, so that’s not right. Thickest heads in the world.” Quoyle hitched his chair around, pretended to take an interest. Man Lukewarm on Ancestral Home Way Out on the Point.
“The biggest problem is putting in the insulation. If we’re living in the house, can’t very well tear out all that old plaster and lath. Take forever and choke you to death. So he had this other idea. What he’d do is put in new studding right over the existing walls in every room, then lay up the insulation and put your wallboard over it. Be like a double house. Especially since I don’t want that vinyl stuff outside. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘that vinyl siding makes a warm house, never has to be painted, you can buy it on time.’ I said I wouldn’t have it on my coffin.”
She drank her whiskey in two swallows, the single ice cube clanking. Quoyle was surprised to see her pour another. Losing the old dog.
“What do you want to do about Warren?”
“There’s no sense trying to bury her,” she said. “It’s all rock. I’d like to take her out to sea for a sea burial. A short service, you know, a few words. I thought I could drive up the coast and find a likely spot. Consign her to the waves. Poor Warren. She never got to be happy here. Never had a chance to enjoy a real outing, a good walk along the shore. Dogs love that.”
“I bought a boat today, aunt. Too bad I didn’t get a motor, too. We could have taken Warren out to sea. If I knew how to handle it.”
“You didn’t!”
“I did. But Jack Buggit says it’s not worth a damn. About all I paid for it. Guy practically gave it to me. Fifty dollars. I mean, Aunt, even if it’s not that good it was cheap. I rented a trailer. Now I’ve got to get a motor. I can learn with this boat.”
The aunt peered out into the parking lot. “Can’t see it from here,” she said. “But you did the right thing. Maybe you could go out with Dennis a few times, see how he manages and all.”
“I heard a story about Dennis today. Part of it anyway.”
There was a knocking on the door, a knock with a peculiar rhythm. Again the fluttering beat like a drummer striking taut skin. Where had he heard that before? Nutbeem.
“Hello, hello,” said Nutbeem, his long legs opening and closing as he came across the room, shook the aunt’s hand, handed her a bottle of brown wine,Vin du France Réserve de Terre Neuve . Shook Quoyle’s hand, looked around smiling as if admiring novel sights. He sat in the chair nearest Warren, his flexed knees halfway up to his shoulders. Glanced at the shroud.
“Thought I’d come by,” he said. “Go on telling you about my boat. It’s impossible to talk at the paper. Give you the odd pointer on the boat you bought. Old Buggit was rather fierce about it, but you can get some use from it. Just be careful. There’s no one else here I can talk to. I haven’t talked to anybody since I got here. Eight months, I haven’t exchanged a civilized word with anybody. I said to myself ‘I’ll just drop around after supper, meet Miss, Mrs.-”
“ Hamm,” said the aunt. “Ms. Agnis Hamm.”
“Delighted, Ms. Hamm. You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music. I brought some of my tapes. Some Yemenite tin-can stuff, a little Algerian Rai, some of the dub-poets. That sort of stuff. In case you had a tape player. No? This is rather a dump, isn’t it? Well, you must come visitmeand hear them. Although my place is rather small. I live in a trailer. But you’ll see. You’ve got to come for one of my curries. I’ve even got some tapes from here, you know. There’s a weird youth I taped in Fly-By-Night, where I wrecked, he’s an expert at what they call chin-music, no instruments, just decides on a tune and then pours out this incredible, nasal stream of nonsense syllables. Like a tobacco auctioneer. “Whangy-uddle-uddle-uddle-uddle-whangy-doodle-ah!’ ”
The aunt got up. “Gentlemen, I’ve had a long, hard day and I’m half dead with starving. What do you think about going down to the one-and-only Tickle Motel dining room for a nice plate of cod cheeks? Mr. Nutbeem?” Wondered whether his splayed nose was the original edition or had been flattened.
“Oh, I’ve had my dinner. Curry, actually. But I’ll come down with you. You can eat and I’ll talk. Well, maybe I’ll have a beer.”
Quoyle ordered the fried bologna dinner. It was the only thing on the menu he hadn’t tried, but night after night he’d watched diners at neighboring tables wolfing and gnashing, guessed it was a house specialty. The plate came heaped with thick bologna circles, fried potatoes and gravy, canned turnip, and a wad of canned string beans, all heated in a microwave. The overwhelming sensations were of sizzling heat and salt content off the scale. The aunt leaned on her hand, seemed to listen to Nutbeem.
“So there I was, hanging around the boatyards, hanging around the pubs where the builders went, making my pint of bitter last, listening to everything, asking a few questions. Mind you, I knew nothing about boats, had never built anything except a shelf for my uncle’s toaster, had never been sailing, never even made a voyage. I always traveled by air. But I listened very assiduously and determined to do it. The idea gripped me.
“Eventually I puzzled out something I could build that would float. A modified Chinese junk built of plywood with a full-batten lug rig.
You know, the Chinese have forgotten more about sailing than the rest of the world ever knew. They invented the compass, they invented watertight compartments, they invented stem rudders and the most efficient sail in the world. junks are ancient boats, more than five thousand years old, and extremely seaworthy, good for long voyages. And I’ve always been mad for the Chinese poets.”
“This is pretty salty,” Quoyle said apologetically to the waitress. “I’d better have a pint. If you get a chance.”
The aunt’s red face bent down, parentheses around her mouth set like clamps. Impossible to know if she was listening to Nutbeem or flying over the Himalayas.
Nutbeem swallowed his lager and signaled for more. As long as the girl was standing there. “I’d been working all this time writing book reviews for a rarefied journal devoted to criticism incomprehensible to anyone but the principals. Bloody dagger stuff. And by sponging off my uncle and living on mutton neck broth I managed to save up enough money to hire a boat designer to draw me up a junk pattern, simple enough that I could build myself out of half-inch marine plywood at home.
“Ah, Ms. Hamm, you should have seen it when I was done. It was ugly. It was a rough and ugly thing, an overall length of twenty-eight feet, a five-foot draft and just that one junk sail, but with a respectable three hundred and fifty square feet. A trim tab rudder hung on the stem. She was heavy and slow. And very ugly. I made her more ugly by painting her rat brown. Piece of foam for a mattress, my sleeping bag. Wooden boxes for chair and table. And that was it. At first I just muffed about near the shore. Surprised how comfortable she was, and she handled well. The sail was a wonder. It’s interesting how I gotthat .”
The aunt finished her tea, swished the pot about, got another half cup from the spout. There was no stopping Nutbeem, roaring along now with a bone in his teeth.
“You see, I had a friend who worked at Sotheby’s, and he mentioned one day that they were going to auction off a lot of marine and nautical curios. So I went-idle curiosity. just what you might expect, scrimshaw walrus tusks, a nameplate from one of theTitanic’slifeboats, Polynesian palm-rib charts, antique maps. The catalog listed only one item that interested me, and that was a bamboo-batten junk sail from Macau in good condition. I ended up with it for less than the cost of a new one. Bit of a miracle.
“Then I learned just how much of an aerodynamic wonder the batten sail is-it makes a sort of flat curve. It’s only reed or canvas sheetlets stiffened horizontally with the battens-the principle of the folding fan, in a way. You fold it and open it up rather like an unhinged fan. One can control the sail very well because of the battened panels-reef or douse in seconds. No stays or shrouds. The small sections let you adjust trim to a fine degree. They say that even with the canvas half full of holes the sail draws. The Chinese call it ‘The Ear that Listens for the Wind.’ The old junk sailors even used to roll up a reed sail and use it for a life raft if they were shipwrecked. And my auction sail was a good one.
“And so then, that summer, I just set out. Across the Atlantic. There’s a point, you know, when you must go forward. I lived off those little packages of Oriental ramen noodles, dried mushrooms, dried shrimp. I had a tiny stove, size of a teacup. You’ve seen them. Sixty-seven days to Fly-By-Night. It’s my plan to keep on around the world.”
“You’re still here. Saving up money for the next leg?” asked the aunt.
“Ah, that, and I’m finishing some serious repair work. I had planned to go up the St. Lawrence to Montreal, but there was a storm and I got blown off course. I’d never intended coming to Newfoundland at all. If I could help it. It was bad luck I hit one of the worst parts of the coast. Bad rocks. PoorBorogove , all that way and her bottom smashed out in Fly-By-Night, a very strange place. That’s where I heard the chin-music boy.”
“I could go take care of Warren,” said Quoyle to the aunt in a low voice. Saw she’d twisted her napkin into a white rope.
“No, no. You stay with Mr. Nutbeem. I’d rather do it myself. Rather be alone.” And got up and went out.
“Her dog died,” said Quoyle.
Nutbeem waved for more lager.
“My treat,” he said, took a fresh breath. But before he started on Fly-By-Night, Quoyle forced an oar in.
“I heard some of Dennis Buggit’s adventures on thePolar Grinderthis afternoon. From Mr. Shovel, the harbormaster. He’s quite the storyteller.”
“Oh yes. That was something, wasn’t it? Makes your flesh creep. My pulse races when Jack comes in. Weird chap. Fellow can read your mind.”
“Jack? He didn’t say anything about Jack, just that he was mad when Dennis signed on the ship. It was the way he described the storm and abandoning the ship. A sea story. But he had to stop before he got to the end.”
“My god, Jack’s part is the best part of the story. Well!” Nutbeem leaned back, looked for the waitress with the lager, saw the glass already in front of him.
“As I heard it, Search and Rescue finally gave Dennis and the others up for lost. They picked up two rafts of survivors and all but one of the lifeboats. Six men all tied together with plastic line. Four men still missing. Including Dennis. A week of searching and then they had to call it off. Aircraft, Coast Guard, fishing boats. All this time Jack hardly slept, down by the Coast Guard wharf, pacing back and forth, smoking, waiting for a message. Mrs. Buggit up at the house. Mind you, I wasn’t there. Heard it all from Billy and Tert Card-and Dennis himself, of course. They came out and told Jack they had to abandon the search. It was as if he didn’t hear them. Stood there, they said, like a stone. Then he turns-you know that sharp way Jack turns-and he says ‘He’s alive.’
“Went to his brother William in Misky Bay and says ‘He’s alive and I know where he is. I want to go out for him.’ William, you see, had a new long-liner, very seaworthy. But he was worried about going too far offshore. The sea continued rough, even a week after the storm. Never said he wouldn’t, mind you, he just hesitated the fraction of an instant. That’s all Jack needed. He spun around on his heel and tore back up to Flour Sack Cove. Got a crowd to help him haul his trap skiff out of the water and onto the trailer, and there went Jack, off for the south coast. He drove all night to Owl Bawl, got the skiff in the water, loaded up with his gas cans, and away he went, out to sea alone to find Dennis.
“And he found him.