Happiness of Fish (18 page)

“It's a great day out there.”

“You don't have your boat in the water yet, do you?”

“I've got to get over to Wal-Mart. They've got a special on the big bags of dog kibble.”

Their days organize themselves into simple tasks. Everybody wants to get out in the sun and do something.

Gerry drains his coffee and heads for the supermarket. He's got his picnic in his head, peasant stuff, sausage and gooey cheese with a skin to it, or maybe two kinds, sharp cheddar too, to break into hunks on big chunks of bread, a pagan folk sacrament.

“Kielbasa, kielbasa, kielbasa,” Gerry chants under his breath as he mentally goat-dances through the deli section. He buys a crunchy, resistant stick of French bread. He buys bulk olives from a tub. They look sleek, bloated with their own importance and potential, oiled, like some sort of vegetarian ammunition. He picks up a packet of miniature cinnamon buns, tight spirals of scorched brown sugar. Shag diets. It's spring.

He is at the door of the liquor store when it opens at ten and buys a bottle of wine. He buys French. It's cheaper than the domestic now and, after fifteen years off the booze, he's out of touch and not very interested in what's supposed to be good among the new designer domestic wines.

Gerry stops for yet another coffee and reads the
Globe
books magazine at a chain coffee shop in a mall. He collects Viv at home at eleven on the dot.

Gerry had never expected to have a boat, although he has always bought boating magazines. They pile up in the bottom of closets and on basement shelves. When he drank, there was no money for a boat, although for a number of years in the late '70s and early '80s he had real jobs. Now, thanks mostly to Aunt Louise and the house in Ottawa, he seems to have the money, although he doesn't have a real job.

Gerry wonders what his father would have made of the boat. The Old Man saved a 1927 Buick engine in the back of the garage for years. It was a big, old twelve-cylinder out of what used to be called a touring car. Gerry's father said he was going to build a boat and convert the engine to power it. The boat was going to be a cabin cruiser. Each spring, magazines advertising plans for do-it-yourself boats appeared in the house. The engine stayed where it was. The garage was an old one. It had housed the car the engine came out of. When the snow broke some rafters in about 1960, it had to be replaced. Gerry's Uncle Cyril took the engine. Cyril was building a small sawmill, not far from where Duane and Gretchen live now. He was Gerry's mother's brother and he had never had a steady job.

“His nerves are bad from the war,” Gerry's mother or his Aunt Carmen would say. Cyril raised a few sheep and chickens. He trapped muskrats in the winter and when Gerry was about six, he showed him how to set off a spring trap with your nose. There was nothing to it, really. You just tipped one jaw of the trap up and went in from underneath, but it looked impressive as the steel jaws clashed shut, inches from your vulnerable face. Apart from that, Cyril hung out in the Legion with some other bad-nerve victims. His wife Enid worked in a cheese factory down the road to keep them going. It was decided the sawmill might steady Cyril down. After a few years, it settled him down completely. He passed out drunk in his sawmill shed and somehow managed to set the whole thing on fire. Enid was at work and Cyril's sawmill wasn't close to any neighbours. It was a while before the fire was spotted.

About the time Gerry was starting university, Enid married a reliable Dutchman who had a small dairy herd and did business with the cheese factory. Gerry's father never built his cabin cruiser.

“Your Uncle Cyril was a damn fool,” he would say. “But when he
was sober, there wasn't a better man to walk in the woods with.”

Gerry thinks the Old Man would have liked the boat.

Gerry would be the first to admit he's not the world's keenest sailor. Often in the summer, he just potters. He'll spend an afternoon doing small things, like re-sewing the sun-rotted stitching of the zipper on the sail cover. He'll fuss with wear on the plastic covering of the lifelines. In places, it's wrapped with white tape like a cartoon character's sore foot or a vinyl mummy.

Gerry has spent afternoons hemming the Power Squadron pennant or the club burgee that beat themselves to nylon fluff against the shrouds. On a rainy day he knelt in front of the plywood cover that folds down over the marine toilet and makes a chart table of sorts. There he plotted positions in handy places around the bay and punched them into the hand-held GPS. He punched in the middle of approaches and safe-distance-off spots and various obstructions. The rain drummed on the fibreglass over his head as Gerry constructed the boundaries of his little marine universe.

Sometimes he just goes aboard and takes naps.

Lately, Viv humours him with the boat although she used to complain that they never went anywhere. Now they agree that she's not happy to be left at the helm to spell him off, so short cruises are their best bet.

Gerry has tried to teach the rest of the family to sail. Early on, when she was still in high school, Tanya had brought out several boyfriends and had looked on as Gerry tried to be polite to them and let them steer. Melanie had sailed with other people before she married Darren and had been useful as crew. Darren was only moveable ballast.

The last couple of seasons, they have cut their losses.

Vivian spends a weekend or two on short, overnight trips to nearby places. She's come to terms with the heel of the boat and is sufficiently at ease to take a nap or read below if she gets tired of just watching the water roll by. On weekend trips they have made love in the V-berth, which is arguably the roomiest part of the boat.

“If the boat is rocking, don't come knocking,” people joke over drinks at the club or at weekend anchorages. Mostly though, Gerry
day-sails single-handed or rounds up a few buddies to race on the weekends.

Gerry hasn't planned a very busy day at the boat. As they drive to the sailing club, a patch of overcast sidles across the sky and seems to threaten rain, but it blows by when they get to the boatyard. A pale sun skims across the yard like spotlights at a skating show as the wind parts the clouds. Then it clears again.

The boat is on its cradle and they have to un-padlock the chained-on ladder and scramble up into the cockpit. Gerry guides Vivian up first and then passes up the tool box and the lunch and the various bags and bundles he's brought along. They find a piece of frozen snow in a corner of the cockpit and throw it over the side to smash on the boatyard gravel. They fiddle companionably with little things. He takes off the winter covering he screws over the hatch every fall. Vivian passes him tools as he wrestles the screws out of the damp plywood. The sun heats the wood and it gives off a faint forest smell. When they get the plywood off, they unlock and open the hatch. Vivian sniffs the crypt-cold air of the cabin.

“It's not too musty.”

“It shouldn't be. I put pie plates of Kitty Litter around to absorb some of the damp,” Gerry says. “All the cushions and cloth stuff went home so there's not much to mould.”

“It's probably bad in the cupboard under the sink.”

“Locker,” he corrects her. “Besides, I've got to have a major clean-up in there anyway. I'll hit it with the Pinesol and the Murphy Oil when she's in the water.”

Opening lockers is like unpacking Christmas decorations. You forget what you have and familiar things become surprises. Salt-crusted sunglasses at the back of shelves and plastic bottles with dregs of sunscreen are artefacts.

The cabin is bare without its cushions, but the boom and a lot of the fenders are stored inside. They move stuff out to the cockpit lockers to make room in the cabin.

“Last year Darren helped you get ready,” Vivian says.

“For what it was worth, “Gerry says. “I mean he poodled away with a scraper for a bit, but he got tiresome to listen to.”

“He respected you,” Vivian says.

“I doubt it,” Gerry replies. “Are you ready for lunch?”

Vivian has always been impressed with Gerry's ability to make picnics. They were not a feature of her previous existence. Gerry has his picnic-prone aunts in his genes and he and Patricia had spent a good deal of time out of doors. He sometimes feels he has scored some easy points with picnics.

They use the boat's emergency knife to cut up chunks of cheese and spicy sausage and slices of crusty bread. He opens the wine with the corkscrew on his Swiss Army jackknife. He's brought a big thermos of coffee for himself.

The wind is cool, but the sun comes more than it goes and the day is almost warm if you stay out of the breeze. Gerry sits on a cockpit seat and leans on the cabin. Vivian leans back against him. The boatyard is spread out below their ladder.

“We're like kids in a tree-house,” she says.

More people arrive as the afternoon ripens. Orange and yellow extension cords snake around the yard. The whir of sanders and drills emerges from under boats, and here and there, there's the iron flatulence of a winterized diesel being turned over for the first time.

Vivian's hair is against Gerry's chin. It smells lightly of herbal shampoo but seems to have additional scents of warming wood and clean new rope.

“How are you doing there, sport?”

“Great. How about you?”

This is how things might endure, Gerry thinks, scented moments of nothing. Think too hard and you'll destroy them.

Good weather arrives the way parcels from faraway places did when Gerry was a child: slowly, unbelievably, tightly wrapped and hard to get into.

His wandering aunts once shipped a cuckoo clock from the Black Forest. There was no way they could carry the thing. They were coming back by ship, the
Empress of Britain
to Montreal. They sent the clock by what used to be called “surface mail.”

Does “surface mail” exist anymore? Gerry wonders.

Some German clockmaker shipped the clock in a huge, stiff box, wrapped with hairy cord. He had wrapped the clock in layers of what seemed to be lint sandwiched between paper. The lint was grey like the German uniforms in the movies. Perhaps it was those uniforms, shredded by the late '50s. The pine cone weights of the clock were rolled in cocoons of the stuff. They felt like hand grenades dressed for winter. Every space in the box was stuffed with shavings.

“There can't be much of the Black Forest left,” Gerry's father said, surveying the mess of packing on the kitchen floor.

In the end, Gerry's aunts had found the clock kept them awake. When
his parents bought a cottage in the '60s, the clock was banished. Its tick and cuckoo seemed less annoying when you were already listening to nighthawks, frogs and whip-poor-wills.

“Is there still surface mail?” Gerry asks Philip. Perhaps Philip knows. He's still mailing books to Toronto so maybe he has inside information. They're sitting at a table outside the coffee shop. So far this year, there have been very few days when you could do this.

“I suppose. I mean if you mailed an anvil overseas, I guess they'd put in on a ship.”

“You know you can't get airmail forms anymore?” Gerry says. He found this out a couple of weeks ago when he got a sudden urge to write to a former flat-mate in the U.K. He felt saddened by the loss. When he'd gone abroad for a year in 1969, little blue airmail forms had seemed the perfect amount of news to send or receive.

“I think I knew that,” Philip says. “I think they've been gone for a couple of years.”

Philip will soon be gone. He's bought a plane ticket for the end of June. He says the call centre is getting too crazy for him. A couple of weeks ago, one of his California crazies called about her website. Something was wrong with it. Philip connected to her site and found a gallery of nude photos.

“Do you think I ought to get my other nipple pierced?” the woman asked.

“This was not an unattractive woman,” Philip says. “She did not need to be doing this.”

“You both probably brightened your supervisor's night. I assume you still have the random monitoring of calls.”

“Anyway, this is not what I came to Newfoundland to do. I thought I'd sit by the ocean and read.”

“You do read and the ocean is, verifiably, out there. Maybe you missed it. It's the big wet thing I took you sailing on a couple of times. I'm pretty sure I pointed it out though.”

It occurs to Gerry that he, himself, is supposed to be living beside the ocean and writing. This morning's notebook entry, written before Philip came along, started as a description of his ball cap with the sailing-club crest and goes downhill fast.

My sailing hat is looking a bit the worse for wear after launch a month ago: bottom scrapings and crud blended with a dust of blue anti-fouling. It has a sort of a Danish navy-blue cheese look.

Pretty much resolved to quit work although I wonder if that's just sublimation of a desire to quit altogether. I think I may go fishing this week or just hang out on the boat and eat Chinese noodles and canned tuna. It's been a year or more since I drove across the island. Then again, how long is long enough?

Gerry and Philip go inside to fetch refills. In the line, they're behind a loud twit who seems convinced the world needs to know how he feels.

“...just totally blown away, you know?”

He has one of those stand-up haircuts which have come back into fashion from Gerry's childhood. He's professionally boyish like a '50s peanut-butter ad. He wants elaborate sprinkles on some kind of boiled-milk coffee.

“Please, Mom, can I have some more?” Gerry says. “Can I lick the bowl? God, I'm getting sour and old.”

“Or you just want a second cup of coffee,” Philip says.

They return to their table on the street. Philip brings one of the coffee shop's complimentary newspapers. It's full of federal election.