Ernie's Ark (2 page)

“I like your boat,” said a girl stacking books in a corner. “But he’s right, it’s not an installation.” She spread her arms and smiled. “Installations are big.”

Ernie turned to face her, a freckled redhead. She reminded him of his granddaughter, who was somewhere in Alaska sharing her medicine cabinet with an unemployed guitar player. “Let me see,” the girl said, plucking the clipping from his hand. “Oh, okay. You’re talking about the Corthell Competition. This is more of a professional thing.”

“Professional?”

“I myself wouldn’t
dream
of entering, okay?” offered the boy, who rocked backed in his chair, arms folded like a CEO’s. “All the entries come through this office, and most of them are awesome. Museum quality.” He made a small, self-congratulating gesture with his hand. “We see the entries even before the judges do.”

“One of my professors won last year,” the girl said, pointing out the window. “See?”

Ernie looked. There it was, huge in real life—nearly as big as the actual Number Five, in fact, a heap of junk flung without a thought into the middle of a campus lawn. It did indeed look like a Burden.

“You couldn’t tell from the picture,” Ernie said, reddening. “In the picture it looked like some sort of tabletop size. Something you might put on top of your TV.”

The girl smiled. Ernie could gather her whole face without stumbling over a single gold hoop. He took this as a good sign, and asked, “Let’s say I did make something of size. How would I get it over here? Do you do pickups, something of that nature?”

She laughed, but not unkindly. “You don’t actually build it unless you win. What you do is write up a proposal with some sketches. Then, if you win, you build it right here, on-site.” She shrugged. “The
process
is the whole entire idea of the installation, okay? The whole entire community learns from witnessing the
process
.”

In this office, where
process
was clearly the most important word in the English language, not counting
okay
, Ernie felt suddenly small. “Is that so,” he said, wondering who learned what from the heap of tin Professor Life-Burden had processed onto the lawn.

“Oh, wait, one year a guy
did
build off-site,” said the boy, ever eager to correct the world’s misperceptions. “Remember that guy?”

“Yeah,” the girl said. She turned to Ernie brightly. “One year a guy put his whole installation together at his studio and sent photographs. He didn’t win, but the winner got pneumonia or something and couldn’t follow through, and this guy was runner-up, so he trucked it here in a U-Haul.”

“It was a totem,” the boy said solemnly. “With a whole mess of wire things sticking out of it.”

“I was a freshman,” the girl said by way of an explanation Ernie couldn’t begin to fathom. He missed Marie intensely, as if she were already gone.

Ernie peered through the window, hunting for the totem.

“Kappa Delts trashed it last Homecoming,” the girl said. “Those animals have no respect for art.” She handed back the clipping. “So, anyway, that really wasn’t so stupid after all, what you said.”

“Well,” said the boy, “good luck, okay?”

As Ernie bumbled out the door, the girl called after him, “It’s a cute boat, though. I like it.”

At the hospital he set the boat on Marie’s windowsill, explaining his morning. “Oh, Ernie,” Marie crooned. “You old—you old surprise, you.”

“They wouldn’t take it,” he said. “It’s not big enough. You have to write the thing up, and make sketches and whatnot.”

“So why don’t you?”

“Why don’t I what?”

“Make sketches and whatnot.”

“Hah! I’d make it for real. Nobody does anything real anymore. I’d pack it into the back of my truck and haul it there myself. A guy did that once.”

“Then make it for real.”

“I don’t have enough branches.”

“Then use something else.”

“I just might.”

“Then do it.” She was smiling madly now, fully engaged in their old, intimate arguing, and her eyes made bright blue sparks
from her papery face. He knew her well, he realized, and saw what she was thinking: Ernie, there is some life left after everything seems to be gone. Really, there is. And that he could see this, just a little, and that she could see him seeing it, buoyed him. He thought he might even detect some pink fading into her cheeks.

He stayed through lunch, and was set to stay for supper until Marie remembered her dog and made him go home. As he turned from her bed, she said, “Wait. I want my ark.” She lifted her finger to the windowsill, where the boat glistened in the filmy city light. And he saw that she was right: it
was
an ark, high and round and jammed with hope. He placed it in her arms and left it there, hoping it might sweeten her dreams.

When he reached his driveway he found fresh tire tracks, rutted by an afternoon rain, running in a rude diagonal from the back of the house across the front yard. He sat in the truck for a few minutes, counting the seconds of his rage, watching the dog’s jangly shadow in the dining-room window. He counted to two hundred, checked his watch, then hauled himself out to fetch the dog. He set the dog on the seat next to him—in a different life it would have been a doberman named Rex—and gave it a kiss on its wiry head. “That’s from her,” he said, and then drove straight to the lumberyard.

Ernie figured that Noah himself was a man of the soil and probably didn’t know spit about boatbuilding. In fact, Ernie’s experience in general—forty years of tending machinery, fixing industrial pipe the size of tree trunks, assembling Christmas toys for his son, remodeling bathrooms, building bird boxes and planters and finally, attached dramatically to the side of the house, a sunporch to please Marie—probably had Noah’s beat in about a
dozen ways. He figured he had the will and enough good tools to make a stab at a decent ark, and he was right: in a week’s time he’d completed most of a hull beneath a makeshift staging that covered most of the ground between Marie’s sunporch and the neighbor’s fence. It was not a hull he would care to float, but he thought of it as a decent artistic representation of a hull; and even more important, it was big enough to qualify as an installation, if he had the guidelines right. He covered the hull with the bargain-priced tongue-and-groove boards he picked up at the lumberyard, leftover four-footers with lots of knots. Every day he worked from sunup to noon, then drove to the hospital to report his progress. Marie listened with her head inclined, her whispery hair tucked behind her ears. She still asked about the strike, but he had little news on that score, staying clean away from the union hall and the picket lines. He had even stopped getting the paper.

Often he turned on the floodlights in the evenings and worked in the cold till midnight or one. Working in the open air, without the iron skull of the mill over his head, made him feel like a newly sprung prisoner. He let the dog patter around and around the growing apparition, and sometimes he even chuckled at the animal’s apparent capacity for wonder. The hateful boys from Broad Street loitered with their bikes at the back of the yard, and as the thing grew in size they more often than not opted for the long way round.

At eleven o’clock in the morning on the second day of the second week, a youngish man pulled up in a city car. He ambled down the walk and into the side yard, a clipboard and notebook clutched under one arm. The dog cowered at the base of one of the trees, its dime-sized eyes blackened with fear.

“You Mr. Ernest Whitten?” the man asked Ernie.

Ernie put down his hammer and climbed down from the deck by way of a gangplank that he had constructed in a late-night fit of creativity.

“I’m Dan Little, from the city,” the man said, extending his hand.

“Well,” Ernie said, astonished. He pumped the man’s hand. “It’s about time.” He looked at the bike tracks, which had healed over for the most part, dried into faint, innocent-looking scars after a string of fine sunny days. “Not that it matters now,” Ernie said. “They don’t even come through much anymore.”

Mr. Little consulted his notebook. “I don’t follow,” he said.

“Aren’t you here about those hoodlums tearing up my wife’s yard?”

“I’m from code enforcement.”

“Pardon?”

Mr. Little squinted up at the ark. “You need a building permit for this, Mr. Whitten. Plus the city has a twenty-foot setback requirement for any new buildings.”

Ernie twisted his face into disbelief, an expression that felt uncomfortably familiar; lately the entire world confused him. “The lot’s only fifty feet wide as it is,” he protested.

“I realize that, Mr. Whitten.” Mr. Little shrugged apologetically. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to take it down.”

Ernie tipped back his cap to scratch his head. “It isn’t a building. It’s an installation.”

“Say what?”

“An installation. I’m hauling it up to the college when I’m done. Figure I’ll have to rent a flatbed or something. It’s a little bigger than I counted on.”

Mr. Little began to look nervous. “I’m sorry, Mr. Whitten, I still don’t follow.” He kept glancing back at the car.

“It’s an ark,” Ernie said, enunciating, although he could see how the ark might be mistaken for a building at this stage. Especially if you weren’t really looking, which this man clearly wasn’t. “It’s an ark,” Ernie repeated.

Mr. Little’s face took a heavy downward turn. “You’re not zoned for arks,” he sighed, writing something on the official-pink papers attached to his clipboard.

Ernie glanced at the car. In the driver’s seat had appeared a pony-sized yellow Labrador retriever, its quivering nose faced dead forward as if it were planning to set that sucker into gear and take off into the wild blue yonder. “That your dog?” Ernie asked.

Mr. Little nodded.

“Nice dog,” Ernie said.

“This one’s yours, I take it?” Mr. Little pointed at Marie’s dog, who had scutted out from the tree and hidden behind Ernie’s pants leg.

“My wife’s,” Ernie told him. “She’s in the hospital.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Mr. Little said. “I’m sure she’ll be on the mend in no time.”

“Doesn’t look like it,” Ernie said, wondering why he didn’t just storm the hospital gates, do something sweeping and biblical, stomp through those clean corridors and defy doctor’s orders and pick her up with his bare hands and bring her home.

Mr. Little scooched down and made clicky sounds at Marie’s dog, who nosed out from behind Ernie’s leg to investigate. “What’s his name?” he asked.

“It’s, well, it’s Pumpkin Pie. My wife named him.”

“That’s Junie,” Mr. Little said, nudging his chin toward the car. “I got her the day I signed my divorce papers. She’s a helluva lot more faithful than my wife ever was.”

“I never had problems like that,” Ernie said.

Mr. Little got to his feet and shook his head at Ernie’s ark. “Listen, about this, this . . .”

“Ark,” Ernie said.

“You’re going to have do something, Mr. Whitten. At the very least, you’ll have to go down to city hall, get a building permit, and then follow the regulations. Just don’t tell them it’s a boat. Call it a storage shed or something.”

Ernie tipped back his cap again. “I don’t suppose it’s regulation to cart your dog all over kingdom come on city time.”

“Usually she sleeps in the back,” Mr. Little said sheepishly.

“I’ll tell you what,” Ernie said. “You leave my ark alone and I’ll keep shut about the dog.”

Mr. Little looked sad. “Listen,” he said, “people can do what they want as far as I care. But you’ve got neighbors out here complaining about the floodlights and the noise.”

Ernie looked around, half-expecting to see the dirt-bike gang sniggering behind their fists someplace out back. But all he saw were
FOR SALE
signs yellowing from disuse, and the sagging rooftops of his neighbors’ houses, their shades drawn against the sulfurous smell of betrayal.

Mr. Little ripped a sheet off his clipboard and handed it to Ernie. “Look, just consider this a real friendly warning, would you? And just for the record, I hate my job, but I’ve got bills piling up like everybody else.”

Ernie watched him amble back to the car, say something to the dog, who gave her master a walloping with her broad pink tongue. He watched them go, remembering now that he’d seen Mr. Little before, somewhere in the mill—the bleachery maybe, or strolling in the dim recesses near the Number Eight, his face flushed and shiny under his yellow hardhat, clipboard at the ready. Now here he was, trying to stagger his way through the meanwhile, harassing senior citizens on behalf of the city. His dog probably provided him with the only scrap of self-respect he could ferret out in a typical day.

Ernie ran a hand over the rough surface of his ark, remembering that Noah’s undertaking had been a result of God’s despair. God was sorry he’d messed with any of it, the birds of the air and beasts of the forest and especially the two-legged creatures who insisted on lying and cheating and killing their own brothers. Still, God had found one man, one man and his family, worth saving, and therefore had deemed a pair of everything else worth saving, too. “Come on, dog,” he said. “We’re going to get your mother.”