The Year of Broken Glass (15 page)

The flaring streak of green they witnessed together at sundown can be similarly explained. Because light moves more slowly in the denser air of the lower atmosphere, the sunlight rays, again, refract. And because higher frequency light—green and blue hues—curves more than lower frequency light, these rays remain, for but a second or two, visible to the eye after the others are gone. This phenomenon is known as a green flash in meteorological vernacular, and is not an uncommon sight over the open ocean. Which is why Miriam, in the sobering light of the day after, has not entirely given herself over to the belief that yesterday's mirages were of supernatural origin. She has seen green flashes before, from the boat with Yule and from the Glass Globe with Horace, and though these were far less dramatic than the one she witnessed with Francis last night, it's enough to make her suspect, though she isn't certain, that there could very well be some plausible, scientific explanation for both of yesterday's sightings.

This still wouldn't, in her mind, completely eliminate the possibility of spiritual attribution. Just because science can explain something, does that then negate all mystical significance or the possibility of otherwordly origin? Regardless, she can tell that Francis is sold, hook, line and sinker, and what she does know is that somehow, as a result of yesterday's happenings, her lust for him has returned to its former fury. Playing into what, as far as she can tell, is his unquestioned conviction that they have been visited upon, seems to be working in her single-minded favour, and she'll drink to that.

And so they do. And for most of the afternoon it seems to spur just the sort of light-hearted palaver and whimsical flirtations Miriam hoped for when she popped the cork.

•

He takes his
shirt off and shows her the scar. “See, that's where the knife went in.” He's been telling her a tall tale about being attacked on board his crab boat by a rival fisherman. As it went, Jerry Phillips, a crabber out of French Creek who occasionally gets the idea to blast across the strait in his overpowered aluminum skiff with a couple strings on board, rammed the
Prevailer
in a fit of rage, then hopped aboard, looking for blood, only to find Francis waiting with a very long, very sharp pike pole at the ready. Francis gave him one good smack upside the head, and that was enough to send Jerry clambering back onto his own boat, very nearly ending up in the drink as he did so. But as Francis tells it to Miriam, it's a gruesome affair, a bloody deck brawl with both men bruised and bleeding as its outcome, a rusty line-knife plunged into Francis's side.

“That's an appendicitis scar,” she says, calling him on his fib. Then she lifts her shirt and shows him hers. Identical. Then she lifts her shirt above her head and off.

•

Her breasts are surprisingly shapely and pert. He's never seen a middle-aged woman's breasts before, not even in the movies, but he's always imagined them to be something akin to deflated balloons pinned to a corkboard. Hers are two cousins of the mirage he saw yesterday, laid on edge. He'd like to hold one. Just one. He's had too much wine.

•

She throttles down and shuts the main engine off. The boat slows, then comes to a standstill. She slips her pants off and strips down to her underwear of fine white silk. She dives in and under as far as she can swim, then re-emerges just beyond the bow, treading water, her whitening hair a waterfall in stasis across her shoulders. Francis dives in, too, coming up beside her. There's over two thousand fathoms of water beneath them. Cold water, dark, saline and thick. But the blue they swim in is warm and clear like the inshore waters of the Georgia Strait never are, never could be, there being too much sediment washed down off the mountain slopes.

“It's a bit creepy, isn't it?” he says. She doesn't respond, floating back with her face to the sky instead, a gesture of absolute trust and surrender. Her answer.

•

“This is the first time we've stopped since we left land,” she says, cradling her dripping legs to her chest. She licks some of the salt water from her knee and looks over at him sitting beside her. “Not exactly,” he corrects her.

“Right, there was your little episode.” She springs to her feet and strides to the cockpit to retrieve the bottle of wine as she says this. “I suppose we should drink to that then, should we not?” She takes a good swig, standing above him with her fine legs and figure, still naked but for her underwear. He takes the bottle when it's offered.
Sweet sin
, he thinks to himself, though there's no god's stricture he's submitted to live under. Just his own law, now three times broken. Three times lucky. Three times gone.

•

One thing that can be said of fishermen, as a rule—and to be clear there are not many things can be said of fishermen inclusively, them being a motley and unruly bunch the world over—is that they almost invariably have a somewhat manic-depressive, red-hot to icy-cold temperament. Either it comes with them to the job, or the job, by nature of its ups and downs, bonanzas and busts, infuses it. Whichever the case, it's there, and it is why Francis rushes to the stern and heaves Chardonnay-laced bile over the rail almost immediately after their first kiss.

•

“I actually thought it was quite nice,” she says, making light while handing him a wet towel. “I can't do this Miriam,” he says, not interested in making their drunken kiss smaller than it is. “It's not right.”

“There's just you and me on this boat, Ferris.”

“Francis,” he says. “My name is Francis.”

“What?”

“My name is Francis. Francis Wichbaun. Do you think you could just be one of the few people in this life who actually call me by my real fucking name.”

“Gladly. It's much more suiting of you, Francis.” She walks toward him and puts her slender fingers on his flushed cheek. “Are you okay?”

“I've already got one woman too many in my life,” he says to her, realizing as he does that he's not entirely sure what that means, which woman he's referring to.

“Perhaps, Francis. Or maybe you've got one too few of the kind of woman you need.”

“And which is that Miriam, your kind?” He's angry now, at her brashness, her lack of obvious boundaries, of decency. “Jin Su and Anna are the mothers of my children, for Christ's sake. What are you? Some rich woman with a thing for antique fishing floats and men half her age?”

“That's unfair,” she shoots back, her voice quavering slightly.

“Is it?” he counters, unrelenting. It's his downfall in arguments. At the first sign of weakness he eschews the opportunity to diffuse things with compassion. He goes in for the kill instead, against his better judgment and his heart's intent. She wants none of it. And knows enough to see a man whose deepest vulnerabilities have surfaced, the aggravation that inspires, and how alcohol elevates such emotions to unreasonable proportions.

So she says nothing in response. Instead she scissors her legs over the starboard rail and dives back into the sea.

Albatross, Albatross

THE
ALBATROSS
ARRIVES with the wind. High noon, and the smooth sea starts to ripple, then curl. Francis and Miriam made their peace over a breakfast of oatmeal, orange juice and canned peaches. Only eight days out. What choice but to do so? “I'm sorry,” she'd said to him, ending the silence. “I shouldn't have pushed you.”

Through the night he'd lain awake thinking through it all, Anna and Jin Su and the alcohol, and now Miriam too caught up in it, his little shitstorm of confusion, until his anger had melted back to self-derision. “You didn't push me. I should have been more clear from the get-go. I need to keep off the booze out here.” This is spoken not as an emphatic statement but as a request, for support, and Miriam understands it won't be an intoxicated entry party into his heart. His is of the heavier sort, and if he's to be opened to her it will have to be by virtue of a gentler lever. A quiet affection. She's beginning to know him for the old-fashioned romantic that he is. Which is fine. There's still weeks and weeks to go on this expedition, together, alone.

So, in answer to his declarative question, she takes his empty bowl from him and climbs down into the galley. Minutes later she emerges with Francis's blue tote emptied of the float and filled instead with bottles of liquor and wine. She hauls it with great effort through the companionway and drops it at his feet. Saying nothing still, she tosses one of the bottles over the stern. “Miriam don't,” he says, reaching up and holding her wrist firmly. She looks him square in the eye.

“It's fine,” she says. “I want to. I do.” She nods at him lightly until he releases her arm, then she proceeds to throw the rest of the bottles overboard. The full ones sink fast where they fall. The others, the half-full or near-empty, float in a line behind them so they look like a string of glass floats, from a time now past, glinting in a new day's sun.

•

They hoist the main sail, then the jib, and as the latter takes the first of the trade winds to billow it full Francis feels the dark bird's shadow cast a stream of cool across his skin. Above him its wide, grey wings, six feet tip to tip, glide. He viewed a flock of Laysan albatross through the binoculars while off the coast of Oregon, but this is his first up-close visitation. Those Laysan, the albatross he's seen in photos and movie footage, even his dream albatross, have all been of a predominately white plumage, so Francis doesn't recognize this black-footed albatross for what it is. But Miriam does, and she quickly begins reeling in the hook they're trolling behind the boat. “Albatross,” she says to Francis, winding the reel. “Lucky it didn't dive on the hook before we noticed it.” The bird turns its black beak down at them, assessing, and issues a loud shriek. “Let's feed him,” Francis says, and leaps down into the galley to open a can of tuna.

“And a good south wind sprung up behind. The Albatross did follow, and every day, for food or play, came to the mariner's hollo!” Miriam recites to Francis when he emerges back on deck. “It's from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.'” Francis responds with a blank look. “Samuel Taylor Coleridge?” she tries.

“I was never really into that old poetry stuff,” Francis finally offers her, tossing the tuna into the sea. The albatross dives, nabs it in its bill succinctly, and chokes it down, twisting back up into the air.

“Me neither,” she says. “But Yule was always reciting verses from that poem. He knew the whole thing, word for word. Every time we'd see an albatross while trolling, without fail, he'd pipe in.” She puffs her chest out, pulls her shoulders up and back, reciting in a deep-voiced caricature of her late husband. “At length did cross an Albatross, through the fog it came. As if it had been a Christian soul, we hailed it in God's name.” Then she relaxes back into herself. “It's always stuck. It's funny what we retain, isn't it? I've got this song in my head, from when the girls were little, when we lived with my second husband.” She leans back this time, relaxed, a crooning posture. “One two three, four five six, seven eight nine, ten eleven twelve, ladybugs came to the ladybug picnic,” she sings. “There's more to it, but that's all I remember. The thing is, I swear to God, that song runs through my head a good ten times a day. It's totally random.”

“I know the thing,” he pipes in, laughing at her display. “Here comes the rain again, falling on my head like a memory, falling on my head like a new emotion…” he belts out.

“Annie Lennox,” she says, “I love Annie Lennox.”

“You can have her. I hate the shit. But I swear, every time it starts to rain, doesn't matter where or when, I hear that stupid song.” The albatross squawks at them for more scraps, to which Miriam puffs out her chest once more. “‘God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends that plague thee thus!—Why look'st thou so?'—‘With my crossbow I shot the Albatross,'” she bellows up at the bird, which watches her display curiously, then again squawks its request.

“Yule used to shoot them?” Francis asks.

“No,” she replies, her tone rising back to her own, turning serious. “But we killed our share. It was the seventies. Back then we didn't think much of them as by-catch. It was just the way things were, always had been.”

“And always would be,” he interrupts, an unveiled accusatorial tone to his voice.

“That's right. I wouldn't expect you to understand. It was a bit before your time.”

“Not before Rachel Carson's though, was it?”

“No. But chemicals and fishing by-catch are two different things.”

“Are they?” He's starting to grow agitated again.
Short fuse Ferris
, she thinks to herself, pondering what to say next to redirect the conversation.

“It certainly seemed so at the time. You do use toilet paper, don't you?” she asks, throwing his own critique back at him. He wants to refute the point, but he knows he'd be wrong in doing so. Which is the crux of the entire thing. Where's the line, and who draws it? For a time, when he and Anna were first living together, they lived with no toilet paper in the house, using instead an old yogourt container in the bathtub to wash with after shitting. Then Anna got pregnant and it started to seem unsanitary to her. The neighbourhood health food store sold 100 percent post-consumer recycled toilet paper, nowadays a regular grocery store item, but back then a rarity. It seemed a reasonable compromise. And of course they never went back to the yogourt container and tub routine. So instead of a bit of tap water there's energy-consumptive manufacturing, bleach, plastic packaging and shipping.
DDT
and by-catch. Oceanic acidification and ass-wipe. There's nothing to be said, and he knows it. Touché.