The Shipping News

21 Poetic Navigation

WHEN they came again into the maze of rocks the fog bank was two thousand yards away.

“Give us ten minutes to get clear of the rocks and the currents and take a course on Killick-Claw and we’ll be all right,” said Billy, steering the boat through a crooked course Quoyle could only guess at.

“These was the rocks the Quoyles lured ships onto.” Shouted. Quoyle thought he felt the haul of the current sweeping along the cliffs, stared into the water as though looking for waterlogged hulks in the depths. They cut around a fissured rock that Billy called the Net-Man.

“ ‘Cause you’d lose something, floats or pots or a good piece of line and it was uncanny how it’d end up wrapped around the Net-Man. Some kind of swirly current carried things onto it, I suppose, and they stuck in the clefts.”

“There’s something on it now,” said Quoyle. “Something like a box. Hold on, Billy, it’s a suitcase.” Billy came around the gurgling rock, handed Quoyle a gaff hook.

“Be quick about it.” The suitcase was stranded high on a rock, washed up by the now-retreating tide. It rested on a small shelf, as though someone had just set it down. Quoyle hooked the rope handle and yanked. The weight of the suitcase sent it tumbling into the sea. As it bobbed to the surface he clawed with the hook, drew it near. At last he could reach over and grip the handle. Heavy, but he got it aboard. Billy said nothing, worked the throttled boat through the sunkers.

The suitcase was black with seawater. Expensive looking but with a rope handle. There was something about it. He tried the latches but it was locked. The fog came on them, thick, blotting out everything. Even Billy in the back of the boat was faded and insubstantial. Directionless, no horizon nor sky.

“By God, Quoyle, you’re a wracker! You’re a real Quoyle with your gaff, there.”

“It’s locked. We’ll have to pick it open when we get back.”

“That might take a little while,” said Billy. “We’ll have to smell our way in. We’re not out of the rocks yet. We’ll just marl along until we gets clear of them.”

Quoyle strained his eyes until they stung and saw nothing. Uneasiness came over him, that crawling dread of things unseen. The ghastly unknown tinctured by thoughts of pirate Quoyles. Ancestors whose filthy blood ran in his veins, who murdered the shipwrecked, drowned their unwanted brats, fought and howled, beards braided in spikes with burning candles jammed into their hair. Pointed sticks, hardened in the fire.

A rock loomed on the starboard bow, a great tower in twisting vapor.

“Ah, just right. ‘Tis the Home Rock. Now we’re on a straight run. We’ll smell Killick-Claw’s smoke pretty soon and sniff along in.”

“Billy, we saw the Home Rock on the way to the island. It was just a low rock barely a foot out of the water. This thing is enormous. It can’t be the same rock.”

“Yes, it is. She sticks up a little more now because tide’s going out, and she’s in the fog. It’s fog-loom makes it look big to you. It’s an optical illusion, is the old fog-loom. Makes a dory look like an oil tanker.”

The boat muttered through the blind white. Quoyle clenched the gunwales and despaired. Billy said he could smell the chimneys of Killick-Claw, fifteen miles across the water, and something else, something rotten and foul.

“I don’t like that stink. Like a whale washed up on a beach the third week of hot weather. It seems to get stronger as we go. Maybe there is a dead whale floating along in the fog. You listen for the bell buoy that marks the Ram and the Lamb. We could easy miss the entrance in this fog.”

After nearly an hour Billy said he heard the rut of the shore, the waves breaking on stone, and then a pair of needle-shaped rocks rose in the gloom of fog and encroaching night.

“Whoa,” said Billy Pretty. “That’s the Knitting Pins. We’re east of Killick-Claw by a bit. But not far from Desperate Cove. What do y’think, put in there and wait until the fog lifts before heading back up the coast? Oh, there used to be a good little restaurant in Desperate Cove. Let’s see now if I can remember how to get in. I never come in here by water since I was a boy.”

“For God’s sake, Billy, this water is full of rocks.” Another foaming mass of black reared from the fog. But Billy knew his way by a rhyme pulled from the old days when poor men sailed by memory, without charts, compass or lights.

The old man brought the boat around behind the Knitting Pins and felt his way along current and sucking tide.

“There’s a dozen tricks to find your way-listen for the rut of the shore, call out and hear the echo off the cliffs, feel the run of current beneath you-or smell the different flavors of the coves. Me dad could name a hundred miles of coast by the taste of air.”

A hump of rock, the sound of licking water, then a slow putter along a breaking ridge of rock. In amazement Quoyle heard a car door slam, heard the engine start and the vehicle drive away. He could see nothing. But in a minute a glow on a stagehead showed and Billy brought the boat up, climbed out and slipped a mooring line over a bollard.

“That stink,” he said, “is coming from the suitcase.”

“It’s probably the leather,” said Quoyle. “Starting to rot. How far to the restaurant? I don’t want to leave it here.”

“The place was right across the road. The tourists come in the summer with their cameras, you know, at, they’ll sit here all day long and watch the water. It’s like it’s a strange animal, they can’t take their eyes off it.”

“You’d know why if you came from Sudbury or New Jersey,” said Quoyle.

“Here. It’s here. I can smell cooking oil stronger than the stink of that suitcase. You leave that suitcase outside.”

There were no customers, the waitress and the cook sitting companionably at one of the tables, both tatting lace doilies. A smell of bread, the daily baking for the next day.

“Girl, we’re that starved,” said Billy.

“Skipper Billy! Give me a start coming in out of the fog that way.”

The cook put her tatting aside and stood next to the chalkboard.

“That’s all there is now,” she said, erasing COD CHEEKS, erasing SHRIMP DINNER. “There’s fried squid, m’dear and meatballs. You know that moose Railey got, Skipper Billy? Well, we ground up so much of it like hamburger, you know, and I was wantin’ to get the freezer emptied out so I made it up in meatballs this morning in a gravy. It come out good. Mashed potato?” All vertical lines, her face riven, the dark pleats of her skirt.

Billy telephoned Tert Card, leaned against the wall with a toothpick in his teeth.

“Me and Quoyle is down to Desperate Cove, fogbound. I’m going to leave my boat here if you can get us a ride back to Killick-Claw. He’s got his car over there and I left my truck down the wharf. Yeah. I’ll get it tomorrow. Wracker Quoyle here picked a valise off the Net-Man. We don’t know. It’s locked. Fog’s that thick, so you go easy. There’s no hurry. We’re eating dinner over here. Yep. No, she made Railey’s moose up into meatballs. At, I’ll tell her.”

Quoyle had the squid and a side dish of onion hash. The squid were stuffed with tiny pink shrimp, laid on a bed of sea parsley. Billy worked at his platter of meatballs. The waitress brought them hot rolls with butter and partridgeberry jam.

The cook stuck her long face out of the kitchen.

“I made a old-fashioned figgy duff for Railey, Skipper Billy. There’s quite a bit of it on hand. P’raps you’d like to refresh your mouth with some?”

“I would. And Tert Card is comin’ down to pick us up. He wants an order of the meatballs to go if you got enough.”

So, a dish of figgy duff with a drop of rum sauce, and coffee.

“I’m going to open that suitcase,” said Quoyle.

“Wracker Quoyle, that’s all you can think of, that bloody suitcase. Go ahead and open it. Pick it open with a fork tine or bash it with a rock. And I hope it’s crammed with prizes from the treasure troves of Gaze Island.” Billy held his finger up for more tea.

Quoyle dragged the suitcase under the single wharf light. He found a piece of pipe and jabbed the lock. The pipe clinked against the brass. The lock held. Quoyle looked around for something to pry, a screwdriver or chisel, but there was nothing but stone and broken glass. In frustration he raised the pipe over his shoulder and swung as hard as he could at the lock. A metallic crack and, with a frightful wave of stench, the suitcase sprang open.

Under the light he saw the ruined eye, the flattened face and blood-stiff mustache of Bayonet Melville on a bed of seaweed. The gelatinous horror slid out onto the wharf.