Читать книгу Sea of Tranquility - Lesley Choyce - Страница 11

Todd Sanger, twelve years old, from Upper Montclair, New Jersey, peered over the side of the steaming ferry boat. “Diatoms,” he said to his little sister,Angeline.“I bet there’s millions and millions of diatoms in there.” Todd was a smart kid who loved science; anything that had to do with science was very dear to him. His father had nicknamed him Beaver after an old TV show, but the kids at Upper Montclair Elementary had shifted it to Beavis.

“Do they all have names?” Angeline asked.

“There are quite a few different subspecies, and yes, they all have names. Scientific names in Latin.”

“Wow.”

“Some of them glow at night.”

“I’d like to meet them.”

Todd just gave her that big-brother look. Girls, what did they know?

Actually Angeline knew a lot. She knew they were going to a magic island where fairy-tale people lived in gingerbread houses. She knew they were going to see whales. Whales and fishermen, and now they were sailing over a bay of diatoms, several million of them with Latin names and a lot of them friends with her brother. This is what Angeline knew and she perceived she was in a happily-ever-after story because that’s the way that all her mother’s stories ended for her.

It was a day like no other she had ever experienced. Sun, sea, gulls like gravity-free dancers in the sky. Angeline’s mother and father by the railing, arms about each other. Angeline had only been on one other ferry before in her life— the Staten Island Ferry, where people spit over the side and ground cigarettes into the floor. Everyone on the Staten Island Ferry coughed and so did she when she traversed the dark waters of New York.

No one was coughing on the ferry to Ragged Island. There were maybe twelve other people on board, and they all looked interesting to her for she knew they must be island people, all torn from the pages of a story book.

“God, smell that fresh air,” Angeline’s father, Bruce, said. The air wasn’t really fresh at all but permeated with diesel exhaust from the big engine turning the propeller that churned the harbour waters beneath them.

“Do you think there’s much poverty on the island?” Bruce Sanger’s wife, Elise, asked him.

“I don’t think they have poverty here in Canada, at least not in the same way as in the States. People in rural areas might be poor but they tend to be self-sufficient.”

Elise gave him that dubious look wives give their husbands when husbands pretend to know things that they really don’t. Elise was very concerned with social issues and volunteered her time to various organizations to stop child labour in Pakistan, to end cruelty to lab animals in Switzerland, and to alleviate educational deficiencies in the inner city in places like Newark and Paterson, New Jersey.“We’ll see,” she said. She knew that if there was any genuine poverty to be found on Ragged Island, she would sniff it out and rub Bruce’s nose in it. It wasn’t that she was cruel. She just liked being right.

“This is going to be extremely educational for the kids,” Bruce said.“I think it was worth the long drive.”

“I wanted to tell the manager of that motel in Maine that the moose head on the wall wasn’t appreciated.”

“It was kind of spooky. But I’m sure it was just an artifact of days gone by.”

“Still. It wasn’t appreciated. Killing animals for sport — that’s not a matter to be taken lightly.”

“I agree.” Bruce hadn’t told Elise yet about every aspect of this curious eco-tour that the Chicago Internet tour agency had lined up for them. She knew about the whales and the island but not about Phonse Doucette’s junkyard. Bruce should not have been attracted to anything involving guns but something about this caught his fancy. He was hoping there would be something else on the island — after the whale boat tour — to attract Elise and the kids and keep them occupied. Poverty might work after all. If there was poverty, Elise would detect it and go to work studying it and he’d have some time to himself. Todd could go with him, maybe, while Angie tagged along with her mom for a look at island poverty. Bruce hoped he was wrong about poverty in Canada, after all. If there was a big junkyard, there must be poor people nearby, Bruce reasoned, but he knew he was far out of his familiar territory.

Familiar territory to Bruce Sanger was his office at Small, Smith and McCall Investments. He had an important job as a stock analyst and advisor for a currently fashionable mutual fund called the Earth First Fund. It was an “ethical” fund, at least as far as anything could be ethical in the investment patch. Right before the trip, he pumped ten million dollars into an environmentally friendly ceramic roofing tile plant in Chile that was reported to be labour friendly. He’d also brought about a big push of the fund’s money into a geothermal power source in California and a super blue-green algae health food product company in Oregon. He wondered if there was something in a place like Nova Scotia that the ethical investing world had ignored. Something that did not diminish the ozone layer or rile Greenpeace and yet returned an 8 percent dividend each year. He wondered.

The island grew upon the horizon ever so slowly as they steamed on. “We must be travelling at thirty knots,” Todd announced to his sister.

“What do you mean?” In her mind, a knot involved a piece of rope.“How do you know?”

“I just do. It’s a nautical term. Nobody ever says ‘miles per hour’ at sea. You’re always travelling at so many knots.”

“And we have thirty of them, right?”

“Right. I bet the water’s over twelve fathoms deep here.”

“It is?”

“Could be deeper. You could tell if you had sonar.”

“Who is that?”

“It’s not a who, it’s an it. Tells distance from an object, underwater. Pretty cool for old technology, when you think about it.”

Todd had his doubts about old technology, though. He pondered how his father’s generation could have grown up without remotes for TVs. No laptops, no Internet. He was thankful he had been born when he had been and often suffered disbelief over the undeniable fact that people had lived in his parents’ time without the basics.

Todd was looking forward to the whales, of course. He’d read a book on cetology and considered a future in research at sea. Diatoms glowing at night. Lots of high-tech equipment. Maybe go down in a submersible and see really ugly creatures on the bottom of the sea. This boat ride was a good start — give him the feel for life at sea. And he liked what he found so far: on a boat (old nautical technology, but that had already been factored in and was to be expected), travelling at about thirty knots in twelve fathoms of clean salt water. If you fell overboard you’d drown if no one scooped you up right away. That added an element of danger, which he liked. Todd leaned far over the side of the railing and peered into the frothing water by the hull of the metal boat.

“Careful,Todd,” his sister chastised him.

He ignored her but suddenly felt a hand on his shoulder. For a split second he imagined it was someone about to push him overboard. He’d heard about that happening on the Staten Island Ferry. Instead, the hand gently tugged him back, and he turned around to see a young man in greasy overalls, a small blond mustache and a curious kind of smile on his face. “Wouldn’t lean over like that, lad, if I’s you. Could fall in. Chilly still, ya know. Too early to swim. Gots to be careful.” Alistair Swinnemar was missing three teeth where they had been punched out of his right jaw. He still had a hand on Todd’s shoulder.

Alistair lived on the island and often got into trouble, but he was kind and good-natured as a general rule. He feared the little tourist kid might go overboard and he’d have to go in after him. Not much of a swimmer, like most islanders, but what could you do if a kid went splash?

Alistair let go of Todd and laughed at the look on the kid’s face. Todd was wondering how this galumph got away with touching him. If this had been New Jersey, and a stranger grabbed a kid like that, he would have been arrested. Alistair saw the goofball look on the kid’s face and shrugged, looked at the kid’s sister and she shrugged too. Angeline liked the funny-looking islander who had maybe just saved her brother’s life. She wondered if they all talked like that on the island where they were going.

“Going to have to hire an interpreter if we want to understand them,” Todd said to Angeline after Alistair had walked away.

Angeline saw trees on the island now — tall, dark green evergreens like in the picture books her mother read to her at bed time. She saw a few houses that seemed as if they had come out of the pages of books as well. All brightly coloured, the ones along the shore. It was like watching a Disney movie with a really slow but nice beginning. Arriving at a new place, far from home. Diatoms in the water, gulls making noises like “cronk, cronk, cronk” in the air. The sound of the big engine. A sky big like a huge blue bowl turned upside down over your head. She couldn’t help but giggle.

“I’ve never seen a place like this before,” her brother grudgingly admitted. The island slowly grew larger and this reminded Todd of the shots of Jurassic Park in the movie, the helicopter coming in from the sea. If he was lucky, he conjectured, there would be raptors.

Bruce smelled fish as they approached the government wharf on the island. It reminded him of walking past the kitchen at Tomile’s Spanish Seafood Restaurant in Greenwich Village. On the way to the washroom you had to walk past the kitchen and the smell of seafood was not always that pleasant there. Dead fish is still dead fish.

Crates of lobster in seaweed were waiting on the island dock for a trip to the markets on the mainland. Several hundred confused lobsters, kidnapped from their deep private lives and hoisted aloft into an alien world. Lobster intelligence, brain evolution asleep at the wheel for a thousand years. Exoskeletons did not always protect. Some sort of evolutionary trade coming on here: a family arriving from the greater New York area, just getting off the boat as bug-eyed crustaceans from the local sea floor head south to feed the fat faces of businessmen from the same locale. An exchange of hostages. The lobsters getting the raw end of the deal. Nutcrackers, claw crackers, who knows what awaiting them. Pliers maybe, electric cutting tools, vice grips to help get at their meat. Destiny awaiting.

“This place reeks with authenticity,” Elise said. Colourful old lobster pot floats hung from a big poplar tree. Cars without mufflers idled on the concrete wharf and greeted returning husbands, wives. Alistair Swinnemar lollygagged, talking to the hangashores, and then threw one leg over his Yamaha dirt bike and started it up, spit broken clam shells under the tires, and roared off, the engine sounding like a bumblebee amplified through an old Marshall amp with a really big stack of concert speakers.

The Sangers disembarked and clung together like they had just gone back in time. Bruce surveyed the shoreline; saw a square white building with particle board walls and a sign: “The Aetna Canteen”; saw people driving big, old, rusty cars slowly up a gravel road. No license plates. Men and women with tanned, creased faces like potatoes left in the bin too long. Bruce knew he had found what he was looking for — something completely unlike his familiar Wall Street world or the claustrophobic backyard universe of his neighbours back in Upper Montclair. Something like this. Authentic. All his life he had dreamed of authenticity, felt he was trapped in an artificial world where nothing was true. This was the proverbial real thing.

He walked down the wharf toward land and Angeline picked up a small dried starfish that had been dropped by a passing gull.“Poor thing,” she said.“Can we bring it back to life?”

Todd harrumphed.“Sure. If we had the right enzymes.”

“Can we buy enzymes here?” Angeline asked.

“I doubt it,” Elise said, looking at the marker buoys hanging in the trees and then at the small garden patch behind where aluminum pie plates dangled from spruce posts in the light sea breeze.

“Your brother’s not telling the truth,” Bruce said.

“I read it somewhere. You can bring things back to life with the right enzymes. Not people maybe, but some things.”

“Perhaps. Angeline, I’m afraid it’s dead. You can keep it if you want. A souvenir.”

“I don’t want a souvenir. I’d rather it came back to life.” She tossed it into the clear water near the wharf and it floated a second, then sank to the bottom.

Bruce scanned the hill ahead until he saw what he was looking for: sunlight glinting off the windshields of junk cars, what looked like hundreds if not thousands of them. He cupped his ear to listen for the ting of rifle bullets hitting car doors but heard nothing. Too early in the day, perhaps.

Elise wondered if the reading levels of the children in the island school were far below the national norm. She considered other assorted problems that might beset an isolated island like this. Incest, inbred families maybe. Already she’d seen signs of a critical need for dental help here. True, it didn’t appear to be anything like the urban poverty of New York or Newark, but she was sure there was a quiet desperation here, people in need of help, her help. A report could be made to her club back in Montclair. It was always on the lookout for unsung charitable causes. Some people in a place no one had heard of before in need of real assistance. This could be the ticket.

The Sangers had walked right past Moses Slaunwhite’s whale tour boat. The sign was down for painting, touching up. So instead of loitering and asking for information on whale-watching, the New Jersey family sauntered toward the only commercial establishment on the shore: the Aetna. “Lobster sandwiches $4.95,” the hand-painted sign read. “With or without Sauerkraut.”“Beans and Bread $3.95.”“German Food Upon Request.” Elise wondered what the German food could be: things made from intestines and ground kidneys, no doubt, or fatty sausages with dry, caked blood. She was not a fan of anything German, particularly their food.

Bruce asked the girl at the cash register inside if she had any bottled water. Niva? Aquafina? Perrier? But the girl shook her head no.

“Got some pop in the cooler. Pepsi, Doctor Pepper, Sprite.”

“Any ginger beer?” Elise asked.“Or Snapple?”

“Sorry, just what’s in them cans.”

But everything in “them cans” was Pepsi, Doctor Pepper, Sprite. Bruce bought four cans of Sprite and they retired to the lawn outside, where they discovered an old woman sitting at a picnic table with a display of home-baked goods in front of her. She had no sign or anything, and Bruce silently asserted that here was the least aggressive salesperson, if she were indeed selling anything at all, that he’d ever seen. It would be worth a laugh back at the office where his colleagues prided themselves on being the most aggressive traders in the ethical stock markets of Wall Street, if not in North America.

The old woman was looking at them. Not begging them to buy with her look, just smiling, being friendly. Angeline ran over to her and looked the old woman straight in her eye.

“How old are you?” she blurted out;to her, the woman looked positively ancient. She had never seen any woman who looked this old before. Both of her grandparents were dead and she had been privately in search of a grandmother for the last year of her life.

Sylvie looked at the child whose parents remained at a cautious distance. “I’m eighty,” Sylvie whispered, “but if your folks ask, I want you to tell them I’m a hundred and one.”

Angie clapped a hand over her mouth and her eyes burned with happiness.

“Have a cookie,” she said, “it’s on the house.” She handed over a large chocolate-chip cookie, bigger than any Angie had ever seen. It looked brown and delicious and the size of a dinner plate. The surface was all bumps and valleys, crags and flat-bottomed craters. It reminded her of a big blown-up picture they had of the surface of the moon back in her classroom at the Montessori School on Maple Street.

Angie held the cookie up to the sky until it perfectly blotted out the sun, creating a wonderful personal eclipse for her.“I know what this is,” she said.

“Shh,” Sylvie said. Adults approaching. The Sanger family had decided that if there were things to be bought, money should be spent.

“How much do we owe you?” Bruce asked.

“That one is a gift. But you can help yourself to the rest if you like. Flax bread, banana bread, oat cakes, gingers there. Carrot muffins and some other stuff as you see.”

Elise realized that what she really craved was a bagel. A bagel with cream cheese — but she wasn’t that audacious as to open her mouth and say it. Nothing on the table came close to looking like a bagel.

“Todd, see anything here you’d like to munch on, kiddo?” Bruce asked his son.

Todd surveyed the home-cooked baked goods before him as if studying Amazon foodstuffs made from smashed bugs, pounded roots, and maybe the lungs of small tropical birds.

Bruce got the point. “That fresh bread looks really good. You make it yourself?”

“I did. I love to bake. Just don’t have anyone to bake for.”

Elise felt a tug at her heartstrings. Old woman alone, out of desperation she bakes for the scant tourist trade, lives in a tarpaper shack without sanitary facilities. Missed the true story altogether, but she now gave Sylvie eye contact as if it was a small monetary offer-ing. Woman to woman. An understanding of the trials and tribulations of life. God, she must be at least ninety. That face, like tanned leather. Something about her so pure.

“Give me two loaves of this,” Bruce said, picking up a loaf of something that could have been pumpernickel and one lighter brown calf-coloured loaf that might have been made with a high fibre grain. He believed that a woman like this would work with organic goods but he surmised that there was shortening in there too, fats and cholesterol that would clog up his arteries. It would taste good, damn good, and he’d eat it because it was made by this sweet old gal, but he’d lose a day off his life for sure. Price to pay, always.

Elise reached into Bruce’s wallet when he pulled it out, gave Sylvie a twenty, said keep the change. She tried to wrestle small bills and change out of her dress but the family was already walking away. Only Angeline hung back, the north pole of the cookie moon chomped clean off as she dribbled cookie crumbs for the shore birds to find later.

The sign was back in place now:“Slaunwhite’s Whale-Watching.”

“You folks are just in time,” Moses Slaunwhite said, as they arrived to study the spotless, shiny cape islander captained by Moses Slaunwhite.

“We the only ones?”

“Looks that way, but not to worry. You get the personal treatment. It’s early in the season. We’re just getting ’er up to speed.”

“Guess we’re on board then.”

“Watch your feet. There you go. Where you folks from?”

“New Jersey,” Elise said.

“Heard of it,” Moses said. “Heard all about it. Never been there, though. Lots of places I haven’t been. Bet it’s pretty down there in the States.”

“Sometimes,” Elise said. “But it’s not like this. This is something.”

“It is something. We all love it here. Couldn’t make me leave the island if you bribed me with a wheelbarrow full of thousand-dollar bills.”

“I can understand that,” said Bruce, fantasizing what it would be like to have a job where you went out every day in a boat. Not like watching computer screens with numbers, making phone calls to corporate executives of coffee companies in Equador. Not like anything he did.

“You kids like to go fast in a boat?”

Todd shook his head yes.

“Watch this.” Moses gave her the gas and the engine roared. The boat lurched forward and dug a deep wake behind them. It wasn’t what you’d call speed-boat fast but it was good special effects.

“How fast can she go?” Todd asked.

“Maybe forty knots, maybe more.”

Todd smiled and looked at Angie, gloating over the fact he was privy to this nautical terminology.

“Don’t want to scare the whales,” Elise said, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the engine. Moses winked at Bruce and then throttled back the engine to a dull roar.

“We’re gonna come around the southern tip of the island now and be on the open ocean side. See them birds on the rocks drying their wings. Cormorants. Might see a few seals up there too lolling around on the flat rocks. Eiders there off to the left. See the baby ones. The male, he’s the one with colour, the females just lookin’ kinda dull. That’s how you tell them apart.”

Elise turned away from the overt sexism of the eiders, stared into the sun, adjusted her Raylon sunglasses, and reached for her zinc sunblock tube in her pocket. Men and talk.

“How’s the fishing?” Bruce asked

“What fishing? Fish all killed, dragged to death, vacuumed up, gill-netted, what have you. Still some lobsters. See those lobster pots over there. Belong to Gillis Jobb. Yep, still a few lobsters but it’s not enough to carry a family through the winter. Cod’s been racked and ruined. Mackerel comes and goes and herring — if the big ships find ’em first with their sonar, they suck the bejesus lot of them all up and nothing left for the inshore. I don’t know what comes next.”

“Sounds like a hard life for a fisherman.”

“That it is, me son, that it is. Oh well, naught for it. You folks like a coffee? Cappuccino? Got a cappuccino machine inside, the kind they have in the Irving gas stations.”

Elise thought he was joking. She blinked. Bruce wasn’t sure. He was way off his home turf where even the whimsy of the stock market was predictable within a margin of error. The very word,“cappuccino,” came as a shock to his neural network here on this boat at sea.“I wouldn’t want to cause you any trouble.”

“No trouble. Here killer, take the wheel.” Moses tugged Todd over to hang on to the steering wheel. “Just keep her aimed to sea, that’s it.”

Captain Moses went below and came back in a few minutes with two steaming china cups of cappuccino. He had installed the cappuccino machine last year on the advice of the tourist agency in Chicago. Up until then he’d never even heard of cappuccino and if he had he would have assumed it to be an alcoholic drink, something rich people gulped down to get loaded in places like Monte Carlo or Rome. Turned out, he liked the stuff himself. And the cappuccino caught all the tourists off guard. The word of mouth on Moses’ cappuccino probably brought him an extra thirty clients last year, more loot in his pockets. Moses was a man with good instincts when it came to business. All he needed today was to get in close to a couple of whales, send this innocent family back to Jersey with stories of sea wonder, and more Yanks would come this summer, almost guaranteed.

He prayed to the sea gods that today there would be whales. Had to be sooner or later. But it had been a bad year, a real bad year for sightings, and that had never happened before. The only whales he’d seen this year were miles and miles off shore, too far to take the tourist trade, took too much time to get there, much more dangerous, all wrong. Why were they not coming in this year to the Trough? Another bloody thing gone wrong with the sea. If the whales disappeared, what would he do next? Had to stay one step ahead. Not enough money to be made in a lobster season — too few of them, season too short. Tried the sea urchin thing but the starfish population got out of control, ate up most of the urchins, left the gourmet-goers in the Tokyo sushi bars starved for the little pink mess. Price went through the roof but not an urchin to be found on the sea floor. So, there had to be whales.