Float (10 page)

“What’s the problem?” she said as she put the papers back in the envelope. “You need money and he wants to give you money.”

“Osbert Marpol is not the most virtuous man I’ve ever met.”

She handed him back the envelope. “As J. P. Morgan said, you can do business with anyone, but you can only sail a boat with a gentleman. I wouldn’t sail with this man, but you’re just doing business.”

“Mom, you don’t sail with anyone,” said Duncan, folding the envelope into the pocket of his windbreaker. “Does that gas can have a filter?”

Nod looked in the opening and nodded. “Why?” he asked.

“Let’s fire up Slocum’s soup du jour. It’s pretty volatile stuff. You never know.”

Nod and his mother agreed. One of the few things he appreciated about his family was that they never questioned even the most absurd comments or actions. If Duncan believed that soup could combust, well then, go to it. He popped the cap of the tin can and peeked in, sloshing it around to see how many solids were in it. But it didn’t slosh. It
was
a solid.

“Or not,” said Duncan. “Nod, do you have your splicing knife?”

Nod unclipped his knife from his belt and tossed it.

Duncan flipped the instrument open and poked holes around the bottom of the container with the marlinspike while his mother and brother stared at the engine.

“I guess I’ll drive out tomorrow and get that gas can,” said Nod, and he began to put things back to rights on the boat.

Their mother stood up straight and wrung out the tip of her braid, which had dragged in the water. “Coming back up with us, Duncan?”

Duncan stuck the blade in the perforated can and started slicing the metal from hole to hole, and as he did, it crumbled in his hands. The soup must have begun to burn through the can before it solidified. “I think I’ll stay here a bit and watch the sun go down.”

While Duncan continued to work on the can, Nod and his mother pulled the inflatable up the beach and tied it to a metal eye cemented into a rock. Duncan freed the hunk at last and held the amber substance in his hands. It was not sticky, and it didn’t even smell.

“Knife,” said Nod, and Duncan handed it to him. He was about to turn away when he stopped. “That’s a great new video of you on YouTube with an eel finger puppet.”

“Oh, no,” said Duncan. “Not that.” Someone must have shot a phone video during his fight with Osbert. He reached into his pocket and felt around. He had taken his jacket off when he got back to work without emptying his pockets, and now the little head was rank. He let his thumb rub up against the teeth before tossing it overhand into the water. As soon as it broke through the surface, dark shapes came swimming toward it, and it disappeared.

“Noddy, wait,” his mother said. “I forgot to record the water temp for the Log.” She took a small thermometer tied to a piece of string out of her shirt pocket and dipped it in the water. “Fifty-three degrees,” she said. “Still warm. Hmm.” She stood for a moment studying the instrument like an oracle at Delphi, then put the thermometer back in her pocket. “Don’t stand there thinking too much, Duncan. You know how you get.” And then she and Nod headed for the stairs. Chandu swayed slowly behind them, in hopes of dinner.

“No, how do I get?” he asked, but she didn’t look back.

Duncan turned the solidified hunk over in his hands. He looked up at the seagulls flocking in uncoordinated groups across the sky, flying to the islands where they slept. Off in the distance, he could see the lights coming on around Port Ellery, doubling itself in the water’s reflection and making it twice as lovely. He wondered if he called Cora whether she would pick up the phone again, but he knew it was hopeless. He’d blown his chance. A wave of yearning for her washed over him, as intense as the first moment he’d fallen in love.

He hit the hunk of solidified jellyfish against a rock a few times as if there were some answer to his life to be found inside, but it did not break. It didn’t even chip. He batted it around a bit as the tide continued to recede, leaving behind the garbage of modern civilization. Almost all of it was plastic, which would never change, never go away, only keep building up and up until they were trapped alive, living and dying in an indestructible world of their own making.

He held the amber block in his two hands and wondered.

Whitecaps rolled in sideways from the ocean, little waves hello from a storm tossing around in the Bahamas. A chill wind cast a mist over Seacrest’s beach—not enough to make Duncan close his office window but enough to soften the world. It might be mean weather for September, but inside he was radiating a tropical front. Everything had gone along swimmingly since he’d grabbed the lifeline from Osbert a couple of weeks before. In that time he’d been able to convince himself, through the usual means of daydreams and self-delusion, that his temporary yoke of indebtedness was going to work out just fine. All signs pointed to Yes: The eel puppet video had become a darling of the global-warmites and was actively drumming up business thanks to Nod, who created a YouTube account linking the gull and the eel back to the company. Orders for the spring season were pouring in from nurseries around the country for Go Kelp! And once these retailers were customers, the sales department could hook them on the new hybrid fertilizer, Surf ’n’ Turf, when it was introduced, the thought of which got Duncan so excited he trotted downstairs to the factory floor to be part of the fun. His marketing consultant was even considering putting Duncan’s picture on the label, but they could not do anything at all until they got the formula stabilized. The garbage—or
garpost,
as they agreed to call it—arrived in the middle of the night, and Osbert’s employees took care of it all. Duncan never saw Osbert, who seemed to have crawled back under whatever rock he’d come from. By morning, the grinder and emulsion had done its job, turning garbage into slurry ready to be dried. That day’s batch had just finished coming out of the dehydrator, and Annuncia was beaming at the contents of the barrel like a parent at a newborn. Duncan joined her, and they sighed together in contentment.

“To create the Surf ’n’ Turf mix, I decided to keep the finished lines separate until the last minute for better quality control,” she said and clasped a fistful of light gray powder. “So this is pure garpost.”

“I like it.” Duncan smiled. “I like it even before we blend it with seaweed. There’s something special about it.”

“Then,” said Annuncia, letting the powder drift back to the barrel, “if regulators think to have a closer look, it’ll be easier to deep-six the garpost if it’s kept separate.”

“What could the regulators find?” asked Duncan. “What is there for us to worry about?”

“No worries.” She took a rag out of her smock pocket and wiped her hands clean. “It’s just hard to keep the nitrogen level under control sometimes. We just want to keep our ducks in a row.”

“These ducks,” said Duncan. “Are they … legal?”

She put her rag back in her pocket and turned to him. “Don’t fear change, Dun’n. Change can save you. When was the last time you talked to Cora?”

“I’m not sure what that has to do with anything,” he said, but under her gaze he continued talking. “She needs a little more space.”

“Space?” she said, staring at him. “Seems a funny time for space.”

She delivered this in her flat, uninflected tone, difficult to interpret. Whatever it was she meant, she did not wait for a response—not that he had one—as she flipped on a generator and turned her back on him. He watched her recede down a corridor, toward Wade and his clipboard. Duncan absently dipped his hand in the barrel, letting the smooth powder run through his fingers like sands of time. He put it to his nose.

“Amazing. Barely smells like garbage.”

~

An hour later, in the truck, he felt a momentous headache coming his way. He turned off the iPod, which had cycled to
Playlist #16
, made during his Philip Glass period, which sounded like a piano being pushed down the stairs. Was his life so ordered when he’d made that list a few years ago that he could so easily absorb chaos? He swerved slightly to avoid a plastic trash bag that had fallen into the street. It was pick-up day, and downtown was littered with garbage. Most of it, including the trash bags themselves, was plastic packaging. What was needed in this world was a product that could stand up to use and then dissolve to no harm in a damp landfill. Jellyfish, along with whatever Slocum had added to the soup, might just be the raw material to make that happen. Duncan had sent the hunk of solidified soup to his old college roommate, Trevor, at the state lab, and he was titillated enough to ask for more samples to play with. Duncan and Slocum were going to the beach at low tide that afternoon to gather ingredients to make another batch of “soup.”

But first he had to drop off his truckload of donations for Josefa. People had been leaving all sorts of things at the plant for Kelp and the other rescued seagulls: Cases of sardines, medical supplies, stuffed animals, and, most important, checks. Leaf peepers swung through town to see the beach where Kelp had been saved, with hopes to meet Duncan, the gull’s savior. Wade kept them out of the factory but profited from them by selling photocopied, handwritten directions to Josefa’s for $2.00 a pop. “A public service,” he called it, and in a way it was. The city’s streets had been laid out in the 1700s on top of mule paths, then randomly marked as one-ways, so getting into the center of downtown was a challenge even for natives. Duncan wished he had one of those maps now as he found himself on multiple dead-ends, often driving against the traffic as he tried to navigate the inner world of Port Ellery, a grim corrective to its public face of beaches and clam shacks. Narrow streets rose up sharply from the water, joined at the top to create a high mound of old brick buildings. Altitude had protected them from the sea over the years, but the salted wind and reflected sun had aged them. A wet day like this gave them a dark luster. Josefa lived on the other side of the hill, where the newer housing—meaning built sometime in the last century—looked older still. Vinyl clapboards were chipped and bent back, exposing foil innards, and satellite dishes sprung from eaves like warts. Dirt yards were landscaped with swing-less playsets, and the only color in the neighborhood came from plastic flowers at the Madonna bathtub shrines. As he circled the streets, lace curtains opened, then closed, and he felt himself being scrutinized. With some sense of accomplishment, at last he pulled up to Josefa’s, a single-family home that was this side of complete dilapidation and had the acrid smell of penned birds. The lawn was white with droppings. On the locked, chain-link gate, there was a sign:
Shh: Kelp is sleeping
. Josefa was nowhere to be seen, but Duncan heard her dogs barking inside. In the course of looking for sick gulls, she often picked up other needy animals, especially in the weeks after Labor Day when the summer people left, abandoning their pets. She found homes for them all eventually, but this time of year she still had a full house of dogs, cats, cockatiels, guinea pigs, and even a ferret. He thought of Beaky Harrow’s ferret and shuddered. When he climbed down from the pickup, he noticed a half dozen cats sitting in the branches of a tree, as solid as sandbags, looking him over.

He took his cell phone out of the zippered pocket of his windbreaker and dialed Josefa. She opened the upstairs window, and even though they were only twenty feet apart they continued to talk on the phone. “Mrs. Delaney called to say you were on the way,” she said. “So did Mr. Potts.”

“And then you locked the gate?”

“Oops,” she said. “No … forgot. They won’t leave us alone.”

“They?”

“Kelp’s fans … dear souls. Money’s pouring in through the website. If this keeps up … I’m going to have my dream. A proper seagull rescue home.” She looked wistfully down at the yard. A blinding white cockatiel came up behind her with a flurry of wings and settled on the windowsill. Josefa did not believe in cages in the house, and even the ferret ran free.

“I have money for you, too,” said Duncan. “Does that let me in?”

“Goody,” she said, and she clicked off the phone. She brushed the cockatiel back into the house with her arm and closed the window.

As he waited for her to come down, he examined the yard. A few gulls were in cages, but most of the others were just limping around, dragging a wing or two behind them, trying to maneuver around the piles of flotsam Josefa had assembled over the years. It was a maze of buoys and lobster pots, tangles of driftwood and buckets of sea glass. There was a mountain of seine nets—ghost nets, she called them, the ones that floated loose to entangle porpoises and diving gulls. She took what she could off the beaches so they could not be washed back out again, then found homes for them during tomato season as trellises.

The door to the house opened in an explosion of dogs who stormed the gate. Two little ones still clung on as Duncan stepped inside, his arms full of cases of sardines. Josefa pushed the dogs back with her foot as she latched the gate again. “What are you wearing?” asked Duncan.

She pulled the bottom edge of her baby-blue sweatshirt out so Duncan could admire the words
Go Kelp!
superimposed over a soaring gull.

“Nice advertising for both of us,” said Duncan. “I’ll sponsor the next batch.”

“Look who’s talking money,” said Josefa.

“It’s nice having money again. I just hope it stays this way. You’re doing pretty well yourself.” He set down the sardines and pulled a wad of envelopes out of his pocket, filled with checks.

Josefa took the envelopes and splayed them out like a hand of cards before putting them in her back pocket. “My daughter, Lavinia … the architect? Wants to come home … make her name by designing my ‘facility,’ as she calls it. She sees a white building with arched wings to create shade for the outdoor cages.”

“Seems like a lot of design for a place gulls will come to die.”

“You’ll be glad for good design … when your time comes. Maybe it’ll be all that matters.” She pushed the dogs back into the house so she and Duncan could move the supplies in from the truck without them running away. “We’ll even have a crematorium. No more chute funerals.”

“It’s all about disposal, isn’t it?” He carried the sardines through the yard to the storage shed while Josefa brought bags in from the truck. He put the boxes down and picked up a sign—
Wooden buoys, $10.00
. “Since when have you started to sell your collection?”

“When people started to buy it,” she said, pawing through a bag of stuffed animals. “Selling eel, too.” She pointed to a white five-gallon bucket up on a cage, out of reach of the dogs. Scrawled on the bucket were the words
Eel puppets—as seen on TV, 2 for $5.00
.

“Gross,” said Duncan, peeking in. “Old, dried-up eel heads.”

“You made them a hot commodity. I get them for free down at the dock … dry them out in the sun. Kids love them. The heads don’t hardly smell after a while.” She picked one up and gave it a good sniff, but there was no trusting a nose that lived with that many animals. She put it down and showed him a box of white and gray feathers. “Their favorite is still seagull feathers.” She lowered her voice. “I say they’re all from Kelp.”

“How is my boy?”

“Oh … he’s fine.”

“Can I see him?”

“Duncan, when you’ve seen one seagull … you’ve seen them all.”

This was not like Josefa. Usually she bombarded him with the minute differences between individuals. He looked over by the fence, and in the finest of her cages was a gull and a thickly lettered sign reading
Kelp
.

“There he is,” he said, and walked toward him.

“Oh … Duncan,” she said, then turned to busy herself with creating order in the shed.

Duncan squatted next to the cage and greeted the bird, which stood in profile, looking rather noble with its blunt beak. He thought of the bird’s beginning, its dramatic break out of its isolating shell to discover itself in a cozy nest with other young gulls, with doting parents who brought food, and, in time, independence, showing it how to lift its wings and leave that nest, off to lead the life of a bird, floating over land and sea, swooping like an angel. To think that a creature so intricate and grand could be brought down by a lowly piece of plastic.

“Hi, Kelp,” he said. The bird looked at him with its yellow eye, turning its head from side to side to bring him into its vision, appraising him with no recognition. Some gratitude. It moved a step closer to the wire and tilted its head with a look that read:
Food?
When it saw that Duncan had none, it turned its back. Its feathers were dirty, and the injured wing still hung limp by its side. There was not much that could be done for these injured birds. If they weren’t already in shock when they were picked up, aggressive treatment might stress them into it, a point from which very few returned. Sometimes the only thing to do was to give them a quiet place to wait it out and hope they would heal themselves, which seemed to be the ticket for Kelp’s head. The area around the beak where the six-pack holder had dug in was completely healed over. In fact, the feathers had even grown in … Duncan considered the wing hanging by its side and thought back to when he held the bird under his arm. He was sure the bad wing had been on the left. This gull’s injured wing was the right. He stood up and turned to Josefa.

“That’s not the gull I saved.”

“Isn’t it?” she asked, continuing to stack boxes.

“No,” he said. “It’s not. Unless he healed one wing and then broke the other.”

She put her finger to her lips, leaving her work to join him by the cage. She looked around and spoke in a whisper. “I have something to tell you, Duncan. It didn’t heal … Kelp died.”

Duncan looked at the bird and felt a silly twinge of sadness. Even though he knew the chances were slim, they were chances nonetheless, and now they were gone. “Then who’s that under the sign that says ‘Kelp’?”

“Let’s call him … Kelp the Second. You have to swear, Duncan … not a word. People will lose enthusiasm. I won’t ever get the new place.”

“You’re lying?” Duncan asked. “About a stupid seagull?”

“People have gotten very attached … no one can know.” She reached her hand through the cage, and the gull pecked at it. “I’m on the alert for gulls that look like Kelp … or can be made to look like Kelp. I’m going to need one in a few weeks that’s only a little injured … so I can tidy him up and set him free. I’ve talked to the mayor about calling it Kelp Day. A national TV station wants to cover it.”