The Boatmaker (8 page)

But it is hard work to keep things frozen inside. She has always known that some man might find a way to
begin to melt that ice. And then it could all be over very quickly. This thought often flickers at the edge of her mind. But the grimy silent little man from the shithole at the end of the world won't be the one to do that. There's not a chance of it, regardless of his unnerving silence. It won't even be much of a challenge.

The innkeeper comes out of the inn. The boatmaker orders two drinks for himself and one for her. While the man in the nightshirt goes to fill the order, the boatmaker slides one seat down until he's directly across from the woman in the dark red dress with the square-cut neckline and the mesmerizing cleft between the two roundnesses.

He reaches into her bag without asking and takes out two cigarettes. Removes the matchbox from her hands, puts both cigarettes in his mouth and lights them, holds one out to her. She is not sure she wants to accept anything from this man. While her mind debates, her hand reaches out, apparently of its own accord, takes the cigarette and brings it to her mouth. She begins to smoke in rhythm with him, taking the smoke in and letting it go when he does.

The innkeeper returns and sets the drinks down: two on his side, one on hers. The blue banknote has plenty of room for these drinks and many more, stored invisibly in the long face of the king, his royal eyes sad and knowing behind his glittering lenses in their oval frames.

CHAPTER 6

The first thing he notices in her room under the eaves are two dresses hanging in an open cupboard, both identical to the one she is wearing. They have the same fitted bodice, square opening and three-quarter-length sleeves, all made of the dark red silk that makes her hair and skin seem tawny. He wants to ask her why she has three of these and why they are the only dresses in her tiny room. But he doesn't ask. These are the mysteries of the woman of the town. And yet if he doesn't speak, he is no longer frozen in her presence. He holds her down and takes her like an animal.

The boatmaker stays in her room for three days with the curtain drawn over the window. From time to time the innkeeper comes up the stairs with a new bottle. They have moved from glasses and ice to a place where glasses are unnecessary. Neither of them feels at home,
yet neither has any doubt that they belong in this room together. They drink from the bottle, fire flaring between them, burning their bodies with the sting of a jellyfish and sealing them in one continuous spasm. Occasionally they ask the innkeeper to bring them a little food.

After a while he moves on from paying with one bill at a time to turning his money over in clumps. When he left Small Island, the money he had seemed to him like a lot. He had worked many jobs to earn it, not drinking and saving. It wasn't the most money he had ever had. And he knew that even on Small Island there are people to whom his cache would have seemed a small thing. Valter, for instance. Or the doctor, who has been stuffing the bills his patients give him under his mattress for so many years he has trouble getting into bed. Or so the people of Small Island like to say. To the boatmaker it seemed like a lot. Now it's going fast, like the ice in spring around Small Island, melting first slowly, then fast. One day it's gone, and the sea opens.

Up in her room he is sometimes her child, other times her father. Sometimes both of them are animals howling in red heat. Regardless of the madness in the little room, the innkeeper always seems to appear with a new bottle at the right moment. The boatmaker slowly understands that the two of them are working together, the woman
of the town and the innkeeper. But his understanding remains distant, and the knowledge unimportant. All that matters is what's happening in this room with its narrow bed and the desk built into the wall under the window.

Sometimes he is rough with her. The boatmaker hasn't been with many women, and he has never been rough with any them. The woman of Small Island didn't arouse this feeling in him, which holds desire and anger, affection and loathing, mixed until they are inseparable. Sometimes he wanted the woman on Small Island more, sometimes he wanted her less, but he never wanted to hurt her. This one, he wants to hurt. He wants to break into her, tear her into pieces. Then suddenly he feels tender. The two feelings seem to intensify each other—the desire to hurt and the tenderness. They are poles; an electrical force runs between them as he raises himself above her. His body fills and empties. She is willing to be whatever he wants. It makes him feel powerful, a feeling he is not used to having in the presence of another person. Usually the boatmaker feels his power only when he is alone.

But if she will be whatever he wants, she remains just out of reach, and she wants to keep it that way. She is frightened. She can feel something inside beginning to give way. The winter ice is beginning to chip, break up. When she feels it, she tells herself:
Be hard. Be as hard as
you can. Don't let that start. Do whatever it takes to make him pay. That's the only thing you need to think about: making him pay.
She aims to keep the stream of the boatmaker's banknotes—yellow, blue and buff—flowing to the cashbox in the office under the stairs where the innkeeper sleeps. She will drain his cache and throw him into the road, like a rag she has used to wipe herself with.

That is what she tells herself. But inside where there are no words, she feels things warming, melting. It enrages her. And so she prods him, does things she knows will make him angry. She wants him to be a beast, to be crude, to hurt her, rip her so that she can despise him. More than anything, she wants the confidence she felt when she first saw the boatmaker walk up the road to the inn looking grimy, confused and out of place. But in the red heat of her room, among the crumpled sheets and the sweat, her confidence is harder and harder to find. And so she puts every ounce of her will into draining his cache.

Days later—he's not sure how many—the boatmaker finds himself at a wooden table sitting across from a large man wearing a broad-brimmed black hat, black coat and trousers stretched tight across his flesh. His face is ruddy and yellowish, the glow of a man who has fed well, drunk well, smoked well. His black clothing is summer weight, elegant despite his bulk. His thick graying sideburns drop
down his cheeks and rise to meet on his upper lip. He waits, fingers knitted on his black vest, in no hurry, as he watches the boatmaker try to drink coffee from a white mug.

They are sitting in a large room with two lines of tables, their surfaces darkened by years of spilled food and drink. The sides of the room are open above waist level; awnings outside offer shade. The smell of the sea fills the room.

The boatmaker looks at the light from overhead reflected on the surface of his coffee. It reminds him of the moon on the nights he sailed. He wants to pick up the coffee and drink, but he knows that when he does, his hands, which he is holding together under the table, will shake like an otter's tail. He curls over his stomach, waiting for the spinning to stop and the burning to subside.

“Sick, eh?” asks the man in the black coat, sipping his coffee: a normal, healthy man after a hearty breakfast. The idea of food makes the boatmaker wish to die. Like a thoughtful walrus, the large man whistles breath through large teeth to cool his coffee. “We've all been there. Though perhaps not so far in as you.” He appraises the man across the table while he lets the coffee run down his walrus gullet.

The boatmaker knows he can't lift the mug with one hand, but he wants coffee so much he doesn't care. He
reaches one hand toward the handle, the other steadying his arm. He begins to raise the cup, all his vital force concentrated on not spilling. The mug shakes and some of the hot liquid dribbles onto the stained table anyway. But he manages to get the mug to his mouth and slurp a little.

More coffee spills as he uses both hands to set the cup down. He feels he's going to be sick, but he fights that. He may tremble like a maple leaf, he may have to reach for his coffee with both hands, but he will never allow himself to be sick in front of this fat man who looks like a bull walrus sunning itself on a flat rock.

“We've all been there. And it's not a problem. But the thing is,
we can't have fighting on Big Island
. The drinking, what you do up to the Mandrake with Elise and Enrik—that's your business. No one cares about that.”

“Enrik?”

“The innkeeper. Her husband. Don't tell me you don't see him up there, scurrying around in his nightshirt. Elise and Enrik seem to go their separate ways. But somehow it turns out they're always together—and more than it would appear.” The walrus whistles through his teeth onto his steaming coffee.

The boatmaker wants to throw up whatever is in him, which can't be much. But it's not what the walrus is telling him that is making him sick. So they are married and
working together. It doesn't matter. Not at all. The boatmaker felt what he felt. She felt it too. He knows that. He reaches with both hands for his mug and manages to get it to his mouth without spilling more than a little pool.

“We don't care about that. Elise is Elise. She does what she does. Or perhaps I should say: She is what she is.” He sets his coffee down, gives a fat walrus smile, showing tusks. “That's as may be. No one's going to change that. But the thing we don't take to on Big Island is
fighting
.”

The boatmaker's face hurts. A purple moon circles one eye, and there is a scythe of dried blood on his cheek. His body is sore, as if he'd been punched and kicked when he was down. What he doesn't want to admit, even to himself, is that he doesn't remember much of how he got the marks. The last thing he remembers is being in her room at the Mandrake, thinking his money would soon be gone.

That is all his memory holds before he woke up in a big room above the one where they are sitting: a bare open space with iron-framed beds extending from the walls. On most of the beds, the mattresses were rolled up on metal springs. One or two had the mattresses down flat, their sheets crumpled. When he woke, there was no one else in the room. At first, he thought he was still on Small Island, dreaming. Then he knew he was awake.
Slowly the story came back, up to the moment when he knew he had to leave the Mandrake. After that: nothing.

A woman with an apron around her middle approaches their table, supporting the bottom of a coffee pot with a dish towel. “I'll have some more, thanks. I think our friend still has most of his,” the walrus says. The woman pours coffee into his mug, looks at the boatmaker, turns and walks away.

The few others who were sitting at the tables when the two of them sat down have left. They are alone in the big room open on one side to the bluff and the harbor below, its blue surface etched by the long commercial piers.

The boatmaker lifts the white mug and manages to get some coffee down without spilling. The feeling of being sick is subsiding. He knows that soon he will need to find an outhouse and sit for a long time while everything leaves his body. He sets the mug down with only a slight tremor.

“As I was saying, the one thing we can't have on Big Island is fighting. And you seem to find a lot of that. Or it finds you. Maybe you should think about leaving and going back to where you're from—to your people.”

His people, the boatmaker thinks. Who are they? His mother, with her drunken breath and beautiful needlework? His father, in the shack on Gallagher's Point? His brother,
under the rectangle of dark turf? The boatmaker doesn't know who his people are—or if he has any people at all.

He also doesn't understand what the walrus is upset about. On Small Island fighting is just fighting. From time to time, every man on Small Island, even Valter and the doctor, gets drunk and gets in a fight or two. It's nothing special, and no one tells you to leave the island—or mentions any punishment whatsoever. Unless you've killed someone.

“I'm not going back,” he says. The two men regard each other, one round and flushed, the other drawn, a sickle of dried blood on his cheek. They lift their mugs. The boatmaker can now pick his up with one hand and convey it to his mouth almost like a normal person.

“That may be,” says the walrus. “I'm not going to lock you up—yet. But I'm warning you: Big Island is a civilized place. We don't tolerate people behaving like animals here.”

The boatmaker looks in his mug. At the bottom he can barely see the moon on the sea. He picks it up and drains it, pushes himself off the wooden bench and stands. He is not steady on his feet, but he manages to turn and walk away, placing his boots with care. There is no doubt in his mind about where he is going after he stops at the outhouse and sits a good long while.

The woman of the town is where she was when he first saw her. Her drink, translucent and brown, sits in
front of her. The smoke from her cigarette is almost invisible. He wonders which of the three dresses she's wearing. The one she took off the night they went upstairs? Likely not. That one will need mending.

Through the open door, his carpenter's eyes can make out the stairs in the hall. They were cut from the edge of a walnut tree and were never perfectly square. Their edges ripple and curve, scalloped, no two alike. With time and wear, the grain is showing. The Mandrake is older than almost any building on Small Island.

“You're back,” she says, smoke streaming from her nostrils. He stands, sweating a cold sweat in spite of the heat. He's thirsty but everything in him turns away from water and alcohol. He stands with his boots planted as if he were a tree that had sprouted in the road outside the Mandrake and grown there for centuries.