The Shipping News

8 A Slippery Hitch

“I DON’T think I can handle this job,” said Quoyle. Who had swallowed two beers and eaten a bag of stale popcorn at the Sea Anchor in Killick-Claw wondering if he was strapped into a mistake like a passenger in a plane that briefly rises, then crashes on the runway.

The aunt looked up. She sat on the round bed, knitting a cloud of angora as fast as a machine, Warren slumped at her feet, only the scarlet-rimmed eyes moving. Bunny tear-stained in a chair with a torn cushion. The chair faced a corner of the room. Sunshine ran at Quoyle, bellowing.

“Daddy, she bit me. Bunny bit me on the leg.” She showed Quoyle two semicircular dents on her thigh.

“She started it!” shouted Bunny. Scowling like Beethoven.

“You’re a rotten bitey shit!” bawled Sunshine.

“For God’s sake, pipe down,” said the aunt. “Nephew, we’ve got to do something. These children need a place to go. Out at the house, if we had a lion tamer, we could have them weeding potatoes and sweeping, washing dishes and windows instead of clawing and biting each other. They’re cooped up here. And Warren ’s half dead from lack of exercise.”

“Guess what, Dad,” said Sunshine. “ Warren threw up under your bed.”

“She’s not herself, that’s certain,” muttered the aunt. “What did you say about your job?” Brittle voice.

“I said I don’t think I can do it. This paper’s not like anything I know. The editor’s kind of crazy. Jack Buggit. I don’t know the area or the people yet and he wants me to cover car wrecks. I can’t cover car wrecks. You know why. I think of what happened. Car wrecks. Ships. I doubt we can move out to the house, either. The station wagon won’t last a week on that road. How will I get back and forth to work? I suppose we could buy a truck with four-wheel drive and heavy-duty shocks, but it means hours of driving. What about renting something here in Killick-Claw?”

The aunt drove her needles furiously. Wool twitched through her fingers.

“Of course you can do the job. We face up to awful things because we can’t go around them, or forget them. The sooner you get it over with, the sooner you say ‘Yes, it happened, and there’s nothing I can do about it,’ the sooner you can get on with your own life. You’ve got children to bring up. So you’ve got to get over it. What we have to get over, somehow we do. Even the worst things.”

Sure, get over it, thought Quoyle. Ten-cent philosophy. She didn’t know what he had been through. Was going through.

“Now, I’ve spent the whole week looking, dragging these kids around Killick-Claw in Tom Rock’s taxicab looking for some, thing-a house, apartment, even a couple of rooms. I’ve got to get my business started up. I’ve mentioned this every night. But your mind is somewhere else.” Wondered how long he would keep wallowing in the dead woman’s grave. “We’ve all got to get a grip here and pull together.”

“You’re right, Aunt. And I’m sorry you’ve had to do all the looking.” He was here and there was nothing to go back to.

“Well, I haven’t found much, either. There is a dark little room with old Mrs. Speck. The government told her to change the sheets and put out a bed-and-breakfast sign. It is worse than this dump, though cheaper. But there’s only room for one person. Seems to be a housing shortage in Killick-Claw. Place is having a boom.” Her sentences speeding up, tripping out as if to catch time with the clicking needles.

“It’s like I said, we need a boat. Cross the bay in half an hour. Foolish to waste money renting a house when we have the old family place right over there that only needs fixing up. I talked today to a carpenter. Dennis Buggit, lives in Killick-Claw. He’s not doing much. Says he can work on it right away. His wife is going to take care of the girls tomorrow and I’ll go over to the house with Dennis, work up some estimates, see what’s involved. Beety, that’s the wife. Thinking of starting a day-care in her house. Best news I heard since we got here. These two,” jerking her head, “could be the first and best customers.”

Bunny kicked the wall. Sniveled.

The only word Quoyle heard was “boat.” “Aunt, I don’t know anything about boats. They are expensive. They are uncomfortable. They are dangerous. You need a dock or something. I don’t want a boat.”

“Afraid it’s the sensible answer. Unless you want to stay here at a hundred and something a night. That’s two days work for the carpenter.” Barking. Her eyes hot.

Quoyle pressed the buttons of the television set, forgetting it was dead.

“It doesn’t work, Daddy,” sobbed Sunshine.

“I hate this place.” Bunny, kicking at the wall with her scuffed shoes. “I want to go in a boat. I want to go fix the green house where the aunt was born and have my own room. I will sweep the floor if we can go, Daddy. I’ll do everything.”

“Let’s go have supper,” muttered Quoyle. “I can’t handle this right now.”

“The dining room is closed to the public tonight. It’s the curling championship dinner. They fixed us some chowder, but we’ll have to go get it ourselves and eat it here in the room.”

“I want meat,” said Bunny. “I want meat chowder.”

“Too bad,” said the aunt rather savagely, “it’s not on the menu.” To herself she added, eat fish or die.

Tert Card in a red shirt and white necktie, on the phone: Billy Pretty on the other line. Billy laughing, choking out dark sentences Quoyle couldn’t understand, almost another language. Drumming rain, the bay stippled. The gas heater howled in the corner.

Quoyle looked at Nutbeem. “Is a guy named Dennis Buggit related to Jack? A carpenter? The aunt’s talking to him about fixing up the old house. We’ve got to do something. We can’t stay in that damn motel much longer. And the road out to the Point is lousy and there’s nothing for rent in Killick-Claw. I don’t know what we’re going to do. I’ll move back to the States before I buy a boat.

Nutbeem dragged his jaw down, raised both hands in mock horror. “Don’t like boats? Can be rather amusing, you know. Practical for a place that’s all coast and cove and little road. That’s how I ended up here, you know, because of my boat. Borogove. I call her that because she’s mimsy, a bit.” Nutbeem’s transitory talk. Theatrical speeches like a stump-jumper’s spiel, urgent at the time, but forgotten by morning and the speaker on the way to another place.

Quoyle’s notebook propped on his tea mug, a half-finished paragraph on a truck accident in the manual typewriter. Everyone else had a computer.

“You’ll get one when I give you one,” Jack Buggit had said. But not meanly.

“Dennis is Jack’s youngest son,” said Tert Card, who heard everything, leaning toward them, his foul breath spouting across the room. “He don’t get along with the old man. Used to be the apple of the old man’s eye, especially after they lost poor Jesson, but not now. You never know, Jack might take it wrong if Dennis works for you. Then again, he might not.” The phone trilled like a toy whistle.

“That’s him now,” said Card, who always knew, and picked it up.

“Gammy Bird! Yut, o.k. Got you, Skipper.” Hung up, swiveled his chair, looked at the marred sea. Laughed. “Billy! What do you think. He’s up at the house with double earache. Says ‘You won’t see me until tomorrow or next day.’ ”

“I thought it would be cracked ribs this time,” said Nutbeem. “Earache is good. We haven’t had that one yet.” The phone rang.

“Gammy Bird! Yut, o.k., o.k. What’s your number? Hold on. Nutbeem, Marcus’s Irving station down in Four Hands Cove is on fire. You take it?”

“Why don’t you get a boat, Quoyle?” Billy Pretty shouted from his corner. He had two laundry baskets on his desk, one of molded plastic, the other of hand-woven stems.

Quoyle pretended he had not heard. But couldn’t avoid Nutbeem at the next desk who pushed his radio away, looked excitedly at Quoyle. His face creased, his fingers tapped a beat, remnant of his time in Bahia mesmerized by afoxés and bloco afros, the music of drums and metal cones, spangled thumb cymbals, the stuttering repique. Nutbeem influenced by the lunar cycle. Had a touch of werewolf. At full moon he burst, talked himself dry, took exercise in the form of dancing and fighting at the Starlight Lounge, then slowly fell back to contemplation.

Before Bahia, Nutbeem said, he had hung around Recife, working for a rum-poached ex-London Times man who put out a four-pager in a mixture of languages.

“That’s where I got my first idea of owning a boat,” said Nutbeem, choosing a date from the packet on his desk. “It was living on the coast, I think, seeing boats and water every day. Seeing the jangadas-these extraordinary little fishing boats, just a platform of half a dozen skinny logs-something like balsa-pinned together with wooden dowels and lashed with fiber. Wind driven, steered with an oar. The world was all knots and lashings once- flex and give, that was the way it went before the brute force of nails and screws. Tells you something, eh? From a distance the fishermen look like they’re standing on the water. In fact, they are. The water washes right over the platform. Over their feet.” He was up and pacing, raising his chin to the ceiling.

Billy kicked in. “That’s how the old komatiks, the sleds, was made. There wasn’t a nail in them. All lashed with sinew and rawhide.”

Nutbeem ignored the interruption. “I liked the way the boats looked, but I didn’t do anything about it. After a blowup with the feculent Times bloater-lying there on his waterbed playing the paper comb and drinking black rum-I flew up to Houston, Texas-don’t ask me why-and bought a touring bike. A bicycle, not a motorcycle. And I pedaled it to Los Angeles. The most terrible trip in the world. I mean Apsley Cherry-Garrard with Scott at the pole didn’t have a clue. I endured sandstorms, terrifying and lethal heat, thirst, freezing winds, trucks that tried to kill me, mechanical breakdowns, a Blue Norther, torrential downpours and floods, wolves, ranchers in single-engine planes dropping flour bombs. And Quoyle, the only thing that kept me going through all this was the thought of a little boat, a silent, sweet sailboat slipping through the cool water. It grew on me. I swore if I ever got off that fucking bicycle seat which was, by that time, welded into the crack of me arse, if ever I got pried off the thing I’d take to the sea and never leave her.”

The phone rang again.

“Gammy Bird! Yut. Yut, Jack, he’s here. No, Nutbeem’s just gone to cover a fire. Marcus’s Irving station. Four Hands Cove. I dunno. They just give me a number. Yut. O.k. Soon’s he comes in. Quoyle, it’s Jack again. For you.”

“What stories you done this week?” Voice bullets shooting out of the receiver and into his ear.

“Uh. The truck wreck. I just finished that.”

“What wreck was that?”

“A semi lost it on the curve coming down into Desolation and rolled. Loaded with new skimobiles. Half of them fell in the water and every boat in the harbor started hauling them out with grapnels. Driver jumped. Nobody hurt.”

“Don’t forget the shipping news.” The phone went dead.

“NUTBEEM! You better get on that fire before it’s out and you can’t get any nice pictures of leaping flames. And take the camera. It’s helpful when you have to take pictures.” Scratchy sarcasm.

“Why don’t you get a nice little rodney?” said Billy Pretty. “Oh now’s the time to pick up a beauty. You could jig for guffies on the weekend, get your picture took by tourists. You’d look good in a boat.”

But Nutbeem wasn’t ready to leave. “So, Quoyle, there I was back in London, starving again. At least I had my tape collection intact. But I knew I had to have a boat. I was in despair. You may think that the equation is ‘boat and water.’ It’s not. It’s ‘money and boat.’ The water is not really necessary. That’s why you see so many boats in backyards. Not having any money I was in despair. I spent an entire year reading books about boats and the sea. I began to hang about boatyards. There was one place where two young chaps were building a rowboat. They seemed to be doing a lot of planing-I’ve always thought planing rather jolly-and it came to me. Just like that. I would build my own boat. And I would sail it across the Atlantic.”

“NUTBEEM!” roared Card.

“Oh go spell ‘pterodactyl,’ ” said Nutbeem, hauling on his jacket and tam-o’-shanter, crashing out the door.

“Christ, he’s forgotten the camera. Quoyle, Jack wants me to remind you about the shipping news. Go down to the harbormaster’s office and copy off the list of ships. You get the name, the date, vessel’s country of origin. They won’t give it to you over the phone. You have to go get it.”

“I was going to go this afternoon,” said Quoyle. “But can do it now. Where’s the harbormaster’s office?”

“Next to Pubby’s Marine Supply on the public wharf. Upstairs.”

Quoyle got up, put on his jacket. At least it wasn’t a wreck, all glass and dripping fluids, and the ambulance guys fumbling inside smashed mouths.