The Year of Broken Glass (30 page)

“It would. But then where would it leave you? You say you work with a woman who is fighting the aquaculture companies. But what if this thing that Vericombe is doing works and all your efforts amount to nothing while his fantasy changes the world? Of course you don't want to believe it could be so. It's not the corner of the ship you're sailing on. Not right now, at least.”

Figgs stands up and clears his bedside table—a wooden produce crate turned on its side, strapped with two bungee cords to the wall—of his ashtray and books. He unhooks the bungees and carries the crate over to the table I'm seated at, places it on the floor and sits across from me. Then he rolls the sleeves of his flannel work shirt up to his elbows.

“This one,” he says, pointing to a faded tattoo of a pirate flag on his left forearm. “It was given to me by the third mate on a Swedish carrier after we passed through the Malacca Straits. I was twenty-one, having just entered the merchant marine. Back then I was the great explorer. The sailor. The drinker. Me and my mates brawled in the streets of Bombay and Cape Town. This one,” he continues, pointing to the tattoo on his right forearm, one of a white whale with a harpoon pierced in its side. “I got that done at a parlour in Tierra del Fuego. I was a bit younger than you are now, in my late twenties, working on a Norwegian whaling ship. A mate of mine in the merchant marine gave me an old copy of
Moby Dick
. He told me I had the mind of a scholar but the sensibility of a snake, and that I better get out of the sailor's gutter before it was too late.
Before you end up like me
, he'd say, then he'd drink himself sick on Jim Beam. So I became the whaling adventurer, fisherman and poet. You'll like this one,” he says, lifting his shirt off his back.

There's a tattoo across his entire chest of a wave with the heads of a flock of big-horn sheep rising from the cresting foam. “I got this one at a parlour in San Francisco. This was me in my mid-thirties. Eventually the lustre wore off on the whaling and all the blood got to me. I had what I guess you'd call a mid-life crisis, so I did an about-face and signed on with Sea Shepherd. I engineered on the
Farley Mowat
for five years, fighting the fleet I'd just been working with. Then I was the storied sailor who'd seen the world and wrought destruction with his own hands, and I was doing penance. I drank more than ever then.” He turns his right shoulder to me.
Live and let Live
, is written in black across it, arched over a black and gold crucifix. “Here's where I had AA and God. I did two years in a rehab centre up the Fraser Valley. A working farm for drunks and addicts. At first I loved being off the sea and I blamed her for all my troubles with the bottle. But after a couple of years I couldn't take it any longer so I got a job on the tugs out of Vancouver.”

He turns his left shoulder to me and there's a tattoo of a black, red and white tug with the name
Husky King
scrawled beneath it in black ink. “This one was done by an artist on Commercial Drive, Quincy, a Native guy I met on the farm. He also did this one for me.”

He turns around and shows me the tattoo on his back. It reaches from his waist to his shoulder blades, a circle of red and black Coast Salish art. “It's a whale swallowing a serpent swallowing a grizzly swallowing the whale,” Figgs explains. The three figures are wrapped around a ball of black with a reddened centre. “And that thing in the centre of the circle?” I ask. “That's the earth. It's Quincy's depiction of my life upon the earth. I'm the bear.” Figgs sits back down and puts his shirt on.

“And the serpent's the bottle?” I ask.

“The bottle, and everything that leads to it, and everything that threatens to take its place. For me, really, I think it's anger Anna. Maybe it is for everyone, I don't know. I'm not sure of much anymore. Which is why I've taken this job working for Arnault. It's a quiet life this one. And I think for now I've heard and seen enough.”

“So what about that whale on your back. Is it not worth fighting for anymore?”

“It's not that it's not worth fighting for. I just don't have the fight in me. And I think maybe there has to be another way. Those five years I spent with Paul Watson and Sea Shepherd, what did we accomplish? We saved a few whales from the harpoon. So what? At one point we were all out on deck: Paul, the crew and a group of young volunteers, university kids who had come with us to the whaling grounds to help stop the Japanese fleet. We'd just been through a major confrontation with one of the whalers who had sent his crew out on deck with semi-automatic rifles and threatened to open fire on the
Mowat
if we didn't get out of the way of his fishing. So Paul had us all, the twelve kids included, surround the deck to make a human shield. He'd just put all those young people in the line of fire. And there we were, victorious, but all I could see in the eyes of those around me was anger. Those young kids with the same anger and defiance I had when I was their age. And I couldn't blame them, but I couldn't feel it any longer. I realized then it was a life source for them as it had been for me, but I'd grown to want something different. Which isn't to say that's what I've found. But in leaving it behind at least I've left myself open to possibility.”

“Did it work?” I ask.

“I don't know if I can say it worked. But I think it's working,” he replies, misunderstanding my question.

“No. I mean putting those kids out on that deck. Did it keep the whalers from killing whales?”

“Oh. Yes, for a time. But it didn't stop the rest of the fleet from filling the quota. Which means the whales got killed and would have even if the Japs had fired on those kids.”

“But what if there were more
Farley Mowat
s out there? What if there was a fleet large enough to actually rival the whalers?”

“Then armies would be sent in to clear them out. That's the thing. If the defiance gets large enough they snuff it out. You can't fight their fire. You have to unfuel it. And anger is the fuel, I think.”

“I think it's ignorance.”

“Ignorance has nothing to do with it Anna. Ignorance is benign. We all live with it because we have to. You know a lot about fish farms and salmon, but what do you know about engineering, or physics, or plumbing? What about the struggles of women in Sierra Leone? Or Afghanistan? What about the life beneath us now at the bottom of the sea? There are people who've made it their life's work to know about these things and would call you ignorant. But that's just their place on the ship. We can't know it all Anna. So we all do what we can with what we have. There's a guy right now driving cab in London trying to figure out how he's going to get his wife and children out of Bombay. That he's there at all means his life has been, for him, lucky. It's all he can handle. Does it make him ignorant that he doesn't protest the war or the WTO? He knows more about survival, I mean in the emotional sense, about living life stripped of certainty and dignity, than you or I could possibly imagine. So who's ignorant Anna?”

Figgs lights himself another smoke while his question lingers in the air between us. There's this knee-jerk reaction in me that wants to thrash against the wall of his logic. “It's an endgame then,” I say, taking another smoke, too.

“Possibly. Or maybe there's much more going on here than we can account for. Maybe Arnault's little tale is the truth and we're caught inside a curse long cast and not for us to undo.” He takes a hard drag, then places the butt still burning in the ashtray. “Give me a moment,” he says, and walks to the sink at the far end of his room. There he flicks on a fluorescent light over a wall-mounted mirror and again takes his shirt off. From the under-sink cabinet he takes a cordless hair clipper and begins shaving off his scraggly grey hair. He keeps his back to me as I watch the strands drift slowly down his tattooed back to the floor, then he turns the fluorescent light out and comes back to the table. He sits and bows the crown of his head toward me.

There's a bright blue and white tattoo of a coiled, scaly, snake-like creature on the top of his head. It has a tail with three fins fanned out at its tip. “Sohqui,” he says, his head still bowed down. “At this point Anna, they're both as real and fictitious as any hope we have.” He sits up and pulls his shirt once more over his broad shoulders. Quite hairy, I realize now, in light of the shaven contrast he's just created. And I can't help but laugh at the thought, and he laughs too, though I don't share with him the source of my humour, as he doesn't share his with me. We just laugh like that together for a good long time while our cigarettes burn down side by side in their tray.

•

When I finally climb back to the stern quarters, well into the early hours, I find Willow in the galley with Fairwin' playing cards and drinking warm cups of Krakus, milk and honey. I couldn't feel more like a rotten mother, though Willow seems happy enough to be up with the old kook, and Fairwin' seems happy too for his company. “He's teaching me a game called hearts,” Willow says as I sit down beside him. He's putting up his cute-boy shield to deflect the shit he expects me to give him for being out of bed so late, but under these circumstances I'm just happy he's happy and I can't blame him for not sleeping.

There's a lot of anticipation in the air since we arrived in Hawaii. This morning we pulled in close to shore—I'm not sure where, some large, sandy bay with a long man-made spit stretching across it—and Arnault's man Smith launched the skiff and left the boat on a “reconnaissance mission.” These guys think they're in some kind of 007 flick or something. And as ridiculous as it all seems, the three of us at this table tonight want nothing more than to find Ferris and the woman, and so it's contagious, Arnault and Smith's sense of seriousness and urgency. I suppose it's testament to how much Willow has grown up into a little man over the past year, how much like his father he's becoming, that he's woken up without me and sat down calmly to a game of cards with Fairwin' instead of turning hysterical.

“Couldn't sleep, hey Bub?” I ask him, taking a sip of his Krakus. I give Fairwin' my very best, adult-to-adult,
Thank you, and is this okay?
look, to which he responds with kinder eyes than I would have expected he were capable of, and I realize again that I've been judging Fairwin' on an erroneous assumption of who he is. Were I to pursue the kind of life that Fairwin' has cultivated, the choice to do so would be based in misanthropy, that disposition in me which is tempered only by my love for my son, Ferris and my parents, and by my stubborn though dwindling belief that people are, despite it all, inherently good. So I've assumed Fairwin', being a man who, as far as I know, has no children or close family, must logically be himself a deeply misanthropic person, and so consequently hardened to others. That he is again challenging my assumptions with his warmness toward my son and myself irks me, as it is just one more hand on the rope pulling down the little walls I've been living behind.

“I'm tired,” I say, and stand from the table, wanting to make my exit before my disharmony disrupts the friendly countenance between them. “I'm going to bed, Bub. Why don't you finish up here and come to bed, too.” Willow looks up at me with his pleading-child eyes. He's clearly not tired, wired on the restless energy that seems to crackle in the air on this boat like the static charge preceding the electrical storms that gather in the mountains where I was born. “When you're ready,” I say, and tousle his hair. I thank Fairwin' and head to our stateroom knowing I should get some sleep, but not feeling the least bit tired.

I lie awake in the dark for a while thinking about what Figgs and I talked about, about Ferris and his role in all this, and about his role in our son's life, in my life, in our life together. I have a mind to write him another letter, but there's too much and too little to say. I can't seem to sort it all out, flooded as I am with the awareness of so many different things I've kept myself from, with my fighter's will, and flooded too with the awareness of all the ways in which I've done so. How I've narrowed everything and everyone down to positions and players in a war, and in so doing made my life, my family's life, one of conflict. War eliminates possibility, compassion and diversity. That's not a sentence I'd have applied to myself, not readily, not without the qualifier that such sacrifice is the nuts and bolts of necessity and this war, this one in which I've enlisted myself, and so too my family, demands it. And the war
is
, whether one admits it or not, which is the point that always hangs up my free-fall into self-doubt.

What choice do I have? That others, Ferris included, find within themselves the ability to ignore the war only makes it all the more impossible for me to do so. But perhaps there's a way of acknowledging that some people prefer to remain civilians; to find a different way of assessing those who continue on with life-as-usual, despite the deaths and the deep, deep damage. Ferris has surrendered to join the ranks of the disillusioned and the conscientious objectors, those who concede the war is on, but opt out of the fight. Does this have to mean I can no longer love him? Can no longer share my life with him? Perhaps turning my sights on him and on my parents and on others who have been close to me in the past is a product of the enemy's elusiveness, of its ability to obscure itself, avoid definition or direct engagement, to hide behind its walls of wealth, litigious language and institutions. And so in my very human limitations I've fought against those I love and who love me, and have risked losing the very ground that needs more than any other to remain protected, undefeated. It's what Ferris has been saying all along. If they destroy our ability to love, to laugh and feel joy with one another, they've won.