Float (11 page)

“Josefa, I’m sort of surprised.”

“Why? A little lie … to benefit an entire species? It’s not like I’m taking the money to go live in Aruba. Keeping Kelp ‘alive’ is going to help everyone. New clean housing, medicine, veterinary care … a flight cage … all the things I could never afford. Hard to be in a position to want to help … only to have your hands tied by lack of money. We’ll bring seagull rescue to a new level. I have a crew of volunteers now who search the beaches and help … feed and clean. I’ve been swimming hard to keep up with the tide … now I want to float in with it.”

Duncan put his hands in his pockets and made fists. Of all the people he knew, Josefa had seemed the most honest and trustworthy. What did it say about the human species if even she could be tempted by money and fame? “It’s the thin edge of the wedge, Josefa.”

“Think about the greater good … speaking of which.” She turned away, back to the storage bin, and took out a lumpy trash bag. A webbed claw broke through the plastic. “Could you dump this at Seacrest’s?”

“No!” Duncan said. “With all those tourists hanging around waiting for me to rescue another gull, you want me to dispose of one?”

“Two,” she said. “It was a bad day. That’s why I put the ‘closed’ sign up … so I could move bodies around. Go ahead. Do it after closing. Who’s to know?”

“I’ll know. And lately everything that I know, the world soon knows. I couldn’t even drive here today without a constant report on my progress. I can’t do it.”

And yet he followed Josefa out of the yard and through the gate to his pickup, where she dropped the bag in the cargo area. “Duncan, I’ve never seen a man fret so much over the silliest things … it’s a couple of dead gulls. Give them a useful afterlife.”

“Josefa, I’m worried enough about what’s going in the mix as it is. It’s not all coffee grinds, eggshells, and apple peels. Annuncia says the nitrogen is spiking like a slaughterhouse floor, and a few chicken bones wouldn’t cause that.” He looked around and lowered his voice. “I worry, you know, it being Osbert, that there are things that shouldn’t be there.”

“Such … as?” she asked.

“What if he’s looking for a place to dispose of bodies? Think of Marsilio. How does a simple drowning pull a man apart like that?”

“Oh, Duncan … you are a suspicious bugger. Marsilio probably just met his end with a clean chop of the boat propeller. You go from oblivion to paranoia … don’t you have any middle ground?”

“Something is going on. This night delivery thing, for one. If it were all above board, it wouldn’t have to be done in the dark.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “Osbert’s company gathers garbage during the day and disposes of it at night. Simple.” She turned to go back inside, then stopped. “How are you … and Cora doing?”

“Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

“Winter’s coming … time to hunker down with your mate.”

Duncan looked down at his feet, and they seemed a long way off. “I’m not sure she wants to hear from me. We haven’t talked in a while. I think … I think there’s someone else.” He looked at Josefa to watch her reaction, and he thought he saw a flash of knowledge cross her face.

“If you don’t ask, you won’t know.”

“That’s it. I don’t want to know. ‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over,’ as Uncle Torkle used to say.”

His wife, Aunt Bert, had cherished her yellow parakeet, Tim, and because of this, Uncle Torkle checked its cage every morning before Aunt Bert woke up. Once every couple of years, he’d find it on its back with the little feet sticking up. Then he’d just pick up the cage, say he was bringing the bird to the office for the day, and come home with a new yellow parakeet. He did this throughout their entire thirty-eight years of marriage. Aunt Bert believed she had the world’s longest-lived parakeet, but Torkle intercepted her letters to Guinness. Tim finally died for good soon after Torkle died, there being no one to keep up the pretense. Aunt Bert bought herself a green parakeet to replace them both.

When Duncan told this story to Cora years before, thinking it was a touching example of a loving marriage, she only shook her head. “Enabling is practically a genetic trait in your family, isn’t it?” she’d said, and he still didn’t know exactly what she meant.

Josefa sucked her lips in concentration. “If you won’t talk to her … write a letter. A love letter.”

“I don’t think she wants to hear from me.”

One of the seagulls squawked, and they both turned to look at it. “Good-bye, Duncan … do what I say.”

The mist changed to spitting rain, and he put his hood up. Josefa went back into the house, joyfully welcomed by the dogs, with their muddy paws and muzzles caked with seagull dung. She loved them anyway, and her love for them would find them homes. He heard the door lock, and he looked over the yard to the cage that held the false gull. Poor Kelp. After all that effort to save him, he’d died anyway. But Duncan knew that going into it. It was hard to pin too many hopes on life, considering its competition. He stood for a moment as the wind funneled up the hill from the harbor. Then he picked up the bag of dead birds and threw it in the back of the truck.

It wasn’t until the next day that Duncan was able to get back to the office and write to Cora. After he left Josefa and her seagulls, he’d spent the afternoon with Slocum gathering jellyfish on the beach, then labored through the night at Manavilins, boiling them up in industrial stockpots as Slocum added fistfuls of what he called his “proprietary ingredients,” the dusty roots and stems he gathered along the roadside over the course of the year. Rather than, oh, say, open a book and find out what a plant was useful for, or not, he liked to just play with them in the kitchen. “Nothing worse than preconceived notions to botch creativity,” he claimed. It would be up to the lab to sort it all out and identify the plasticizing elements. Duncan’s head still hurt from breathing in the fumes, no doubt the cause of his disturbing dreams before dawn. He was underwater, slithering armless along the trashy sea bottom, moving in and out of shopping carts and oil drums, nudging bits of plastic with his nose to see if they were edible. On the shore, a repellent sea creature sat on a pier looking down at him, like an unformed turtle without its shell. He came across a small overturned hull, its shiplapped planks undulating with algae. An octopus sat on top of it and acted as a hinge, bending itself back to reveal the insides of the broken boat, and there was his father, serene and confident as always, huddled in the ribs of the vessel like a soft-bodied clam, and then the dream ended. Duncan lay awake for the rest of the night, listening to the sound of mice tunneling through the eelgrass insulation in his bedroom walls.

He sat down at the desk and clicked on
Playlist #24
, a collection of love songs, to put him in the mood. Marvin Gaye. Bonnie Raitt. Dave Matthews and even, God help him, Barry White. From a sheaf of creamy paper tied with a blue satin ribbon, he pulled out a piece of stationery as thick as leather, with his name embossed in navy at the top of the page. It was Aunt Ned’s college graduation present. “For serious business,” she’d said, but this was the first time he’d used it. Had his life been so frivolous before this moment?

Dearest Cora,

Phone talk has been difficult with us, so I am writing you a letter and maybe that will help bridge whatever problem we’ve been having. What is this problem? I don’t know. I was wrong, whatever it was. I’m sorry. Let’s not live apart anymore. You are my boat, the water beneath, the stars above to guide me and the very air that moves me forward.

I think it’s all been a misunderstanding due, no doubt, as you have so often said, to my total lack of communication skills. We are so different in this regard. But isn’t that why we are attracted to one another? Loving opposites! I can see how you might need a break from me but maybe you’re ready to have me back. I won’t be morbid anymore. I will embrace life. I will embrace more counseling! I will embrace you if you will let me and I will embrace …

Then, just as he was about to write the words
our baby,
he stopped with his pen in midair and put it down. He ran his fingertips across the dry linen fibers, and for an instant the words became distant and unreal. He rested his forehead on the linen paper and imagined he could smell papyrus and see a basket hidden in the reeds. Was he hesitant to bring another generation into the world shackled to the business of dehydrated fish scraps? Was he subconsciously fighting the transformation from son to father? Or was he just being a selfish, self-absorbed jerk? Somewhere in all these questions he heard Cora’s voice. But above them all was the shrill warning in his brain that any child of his would run the risk of madness.

Rather than commit to anything so specific as a baby, he finished the sentence with an awkward …
the future.
He stared at the paper. So much empty space. He looked outside the window to focus but could see nothing through the fog that now coated the harbor, and he considered the water, how it could change its very nature, turning into fog or ice with only the most delicate swings of temperature. Yet underneath it was water, no matter the form it took. His mind continued to stalk the essential nature of matter and meaning before snapping him back to the task at hand: the letter.

The thing to do was to throw in words Cora liked to use. Harmony. Peace. Openness. Adjustment disorder with mixed emotional features.

No, no, that was all wrong. Truth be told, he’d rather not be using words at all. Cora had once said that their marriage would last forever because there was something in each other they couldn’t reach, and it was that unknown quantity that fueled erotic tension. Over the years, his hands had traveled miles over her body, searching for that something. When they’d first met, they made love as if they were an endangered species, but then it all changed when it seemed as if that could very well be the case. When they had to act on precisely timed couplings meant for procreation, there was no more searching for anything other than the right fertile moment. Conscious action had been his undoing. He picked up the photo of her he kept on his desk. He had taken it a couple of years ago, in their backyard, a landscape she kept in a perfect balance of nature and cultivation, very much as she kept herself. Her dark hair flew around her oval face in delicate wisps, and she wore no makeup except for a little pink on her lips to make them more kissable. Her eyes were a soft, animal brown, so wide and alert she seemed like some beautiful creature of the forest. Sometimes she dabbed cover-up under her eyes because she hated what she considered bags, and what he thought of as depth.

He reread the words he’d written, and with elaborate precision he ripped up the page. He pulled out a fresh sheet and, starting at the upper left corner, he wrote “Cora, my sweets, I love you, I love you, I love you” down the page to the very bottom, turning it over and covering the back, until he reached the lower right corner, where he signed his name.

When he was done, he folded it up as carefully as a memorial flag and slipped it into its Florentine-lined envelope. He closed his eyes as he wet the flap with his tongue. He was oozing with warmth as he picked up his pen to address the envelope, but when he was done and saw his former street—his real home—written out in his own hand, he began to feel remote, even from himself. How was it possible that he could live in the same city with Cora and yet be so far away? What was keeping them from getting back together? He hoped it was not someone new.

“Duncan?”

Nod, wearing sailing shorts, a light windbreaker, and a baseball cap with the logo of a sailmaker on the front, stood at the door, looking down at his boat shoes. He left the house so infrequently these days, it was a shock to see him. With his bald head covered by the hat, he looked more like the Nod of their childhood—rounded cheeks and cherubic lips, a perennially burnt nose, and a shy but determined look about him. He would be thirty-seven in a few weeks. Who could have foreseen that this would be his life? Nod was the oldest son—why wasn’t he sitting here, at their father’s desk with all these worries, freeing Duncan to live his own life far away?

“Hey, Nod. Did you sail here?”

Nod shook his head and looked around the office. “I just came back from Portland. I went to buy a Duck.”

“Duck?”

Nod inched slowly into the room, as if he were a lobster entering a trap. “You know, a Sea Duck, an amphibious vehicle. Army surplus.”

They stared at each other for a minute, both unable to bring the topic to its next natural step. Duncan broke the spell. “Why?”

Nod smiled and cleared his throat. “I thought about, you know, the money thing. I was thinking, here Mom and I just drain the company of dividends, when I should be doing something to help.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “The bank let me borrow against the house. Mom is all for it.”

“The house? I couldn’t borrow against it to save Seacrest’s, but it’s okay to do it for a boat?”

“Not a boat. A business. I’m going to run sea-land tours here in the summer, right off this beach. I’ll do Kelp-in-the-Wild tours. That’s why I’m here.”

“Here?”

“I need more funding to get
Sea Turtle
off the ground. Bear is going to refit the engine to run on used cooking oil. I’m getting that from Slocum in exchange for an ad painted on her side. He says that if his ship comes in by next summer, he’ll even invest in the business, but I wanted to offer it to you first. For a price, Seacrest’s Ocean Products can be her main sponsor.”

“Who knows if there’ll be a Seacrest’s next summer?” said Duncan. “If I don’t come up with the money to pay the loan sharks back in a few months, they’ll own it, not me.”

“Maybe I should talk to them.”

“If I lost the company to Osbert, you wouldn’t do business with him, would you?”

“You know, Duncan,” said Nod, looking out at the blank wall of fog outside the window, “in sailing, to change direction is a risk because if you’re caught in the eye of the wind, you stop dead and go in irons. You have to have momentum to change.” He turned to look at Duncan. “One of the benefits of the Duck is that it can adapt quickly to changing conditions, on land or sea. It might be our salvation. It might be yours.”

“What is your point?”

Nod laughed in his peculiar way, a prolonged
haa
that sounded like the whiz of the wind. “No point.”

Duncan stood up with his envelope. “I’ve got to go to the post office,” he said. “I guess you’ll just have to see who’s sitting at this desk when you’re ready to paint a sponsor’s name on the Duck.”

“Sounds like a deal,” Nod said, not understanding that Duncan was being snarky. No matter. If Duncan lost Seacrest’s, he would be out of this town in a heartbeat, so he wouldn’t have to look at some treacherous ad on the Duck.

“Come see my baby,” said Nod, turning to the door. “She’s in the parking lot.”

“She is? You own her already?”

Nod smiled. “I took my car to Portland and drove the Duck back. The dealer took the car as part of the down payment.”

“You have no more car?”

“I won’t need one anymore. I’ve got the Duck. Now I’m going to motor it home along the harbor.”

Duncan had a hard time imagining Nod doing errands around town in a massive barge-like vehicle, whether he came by land or sea. But it was harder still to believe that Nod had the initiative to start a business, or that come next summer he would give up racing in order to run it. He wondered if his mother understood what changes lay ahead.

~

“
Sea Turtle.
” Duncan said her name out loud as he walked around her metal hull. There were restaurant and ferry ads painted on her side, remnants of her former life running out of Portland. Under the scratches, he saw her old camouflage paint, and he wondered if she’d been at the D-Day landings. Osbert, with his Churchill fixation, would love that.

“I thought I’d have big, colorful turtles painted on her sides,” said Nod, holding his arms out and wiggling them. “Have the paddled arms and shells available for sponsors’ ads. Come on up—have a look at these controls.” Nod arranged himself in the captain’s seat while Duncan stood on the wheel bumper and watched him push a lever to change it from land to sea. The frame sank slightly as the wheels raised up. “It’s not any harder than changing to four-wheel drive. Want to come along for her maiden voyage?”

“She’s not exactly a maiden,” said Duncan, jumping down to the pavement. “I think I’ll let her show you the ropes first.” He looked out at the fog. He heard the sea breaking on the opposite shore, and the bell buoy clanged a warning. “Are you sure you should be going home by way of water? Is your radio working in case something goes wrong?”

“Bear is going to install new electronics this winter. I’m going to hug the shore until I can beach her at the Boat Club landing. Then I can just drive around the corner to home.”

“Do you have a mariner’s license to drive her?”

“Don’t need one,” said Nod. “I have a driver’s license, so I’m halfway there.”

“Halfway there,” mused Duncan, patting the side of the vehicle. “Maybe Mom’ll go for a ride with you someday. Maybe this could get her back into the world.”
Nod fiddled with some controls. “She’s not out of this world now.”

“Nod, her feet have barely touched earth since Dad died.”

“Just because she doesn’t want to leave the house? She’s perfectly sane. Just cautious.”

“Not cautious. Nuts.”

Nod laughed his breezy laugh again and put
Sea Turtle
in gear. With that, he turned the heavy vehicle slowly around, her parts and panels creaking with the effort, and headed for the water, where she transformed into a seagoing vessel. She was not elegant, she was not graceful, but she moved forward, churning and bobbing happily into the harbor before disappearing into the great banks of fog.

“Good luck,” Duncan whispered.

As he zippered his jacket, he looked up at Seacrest’s. It was slab-sided and flat-topped, but in the softening mist, it seemed magisterial in its bulk, and as much as he resented the drain it took on his psyche, there were times when it had a pull on him that went beyond reason. He was glad he had risked doing business with Osbert to save it. It would have been much nicer if he could have avoided it, oh, say, by mortgaging the family home as Nod had just been allowed to do—Nod with no business experience and no work experience. But still. It was nice to know that Seacrest’s was safe for the moment. He touched the envelope in his jacket. Now he had to secure his marriage.

As he left the parking lot, he waved to the men on the loading dock. The savory odor of marijuana cut through the motionless fog. It used to be that the smell of rotting fish parts covered up all other scents, but now that the new system contained all the vapors, pot smoke was the predominant note outside the factory. He ignored it. If he had to handle shipments of decaying chum all day, he’d want to hover a few inches above it, too. He wished he had such a simple chemical solution to all his problems.

Maybe he did. Pheromones. He took the envelope out of his pocket and slipped it under his shirt and against his skin, where his essence would rub off on his walk into town. Cora would vaguely wonder why she could not put his letter down. He hurried his step up the hill toward the post office. It had been unseasonably hot before the fog rolled in, so the damp pavement gave off an urban smell of cement and asphalt. He missed the city. He yearned for those years of anonymity again, when he could be anyone he wanted, as opposed to being here in Port Ellery, where it seemed the most intimate details of his daily life were played out in the open.