Float (4 page)

“Hmm,” Slocum said at last. “No response.” He gave Duncan a worried look, then smiled. “We’ll have to preserve you in a specimen jar and bring you to the science fair—the non-responsive wonder.”

Annuncia appeared at Duncan’s side. She was still in her work clothes. Her red smock, with
Seacrest’s
embroidered in white on the pocket, strained at the hips and was streaked with black fish powder. Her bushel of dark hair was pulled up under a tight red snood. “Hull-sucking sea worm,” she said, turning back to face Kendrie, who did not look up from his mountain of onion rings. “There are fishermen who make a living fishing, and then there’s an industry that wants to make a killing,” she said even louder. When Kendrie refused to rise to the bait, she picked up her takeout bag. “Don’t look at me like that, Dun’n.”

“We need every customer we can get right now, Annuncia. Don’t single him out for killing off the human race. You’re as subtle as a pile driver.”

“Whale balls. Puddingheads like Kendrie, they’ve got to understand what the stakes are. It’s not like we can go somewhere else when we fuck it all up.
This
band of temperature,
this
mix of oxygen—it’s all we can live in, and it all depends on the ocean to keep it stable. Kendrie’s Neanderthal skull can’t compute that saving the ocean means saving his own sorry ass.”

“Can this wait until
our
business is a little more stable?” Duncan whispered.

“Dun’n, don’t compromise yourself for money.”

“I have nothing left to compromise myself for.”

She looked around the restaurant. “Where’s Wade? He’s giving me a ride home.”

“Here!” Wade stepped out of the walk-in cooler behind Slocum. After work, he sometimes ran fish from his cousin’s boat to local restaurants. He wanted to save family fishing boats in the same way that family farms had become a national cause. He was so disgusted with the corporately owned industrial fleet that he frowned on Seacrest’s accepting its fish waste, which was substantial. Between Wade’s local fishing and Annuncia’s green fish, Duncan felt as if the financial health of Seacrest’s was far down on his employees’ lists of priorities.

“We’re leaving, Dun’n,” said Annuncia. “Come on, Wade. See you Monday, boss.”

“Wait.” Wade picked up a
Support local fishing
bumper sticker from a pile on the counter and handed one to Duncan. “I know you’ll want one of these. To save the fishes.” And with this he slapped his heart.

“Of course,” said Duncan, and he moved to put it in his pocket, but Wade pulled it from his grasp.

“I’ll put it on the truck for you on my way out,” he said. “No problem.”

Duncan cringed. Yes, local boats needed every extra consideration to survive, but so did he. He hoped Kendrie, or any of the other factory boat captains, would not recognize his truck.

Annuncia and Wade smiled at him as they turned away, but come next Friday when there was no paycheck, they would eat him alive. He wanted to reach out and pull them to his chest so he could point to the crumbling edge of the cliff on which they all stood. But that would only cause panic, and God knows he already had plenty of that.

When the door closed behind them, he looked around the restaurant, as long and narrow as a shipping container, filled with the comforting warmth of human bodies. Young lovers dipped fried oysters in tartar sauce and brought them to each other’s mouths; children licked ketchup from white paper cups and got it on their noses; married couples eyed dishes sprung from Slocum’s misplaced imagination, smiled, and dared each other to go first. They were happy. Duncan could be happy. He should take Josefa’s advice and devote his energy to getting back with Cora and let Seacrest’s sink or swim on its own. He could not play God; he could not part the sea. And besides, maybe next week the banks would reconsider. After all, wouldn’t they rather keep him as a customer they could continue to suck dry than lose him to bankruptcy? He felt light and free at the thought, as if he were floating above his earthly troubles. He smiled as he saw Slocum pack up his order, he smiled as he handed him the credit card, and he kept right on smiling past the point when his card was rejected.

“Sorry,” said Slocum, handing it back to him.

Duncan ran his thumb over the raised, useless numbers on his plastic. The bank must have found out that he’d paid out of pocket for payroll that day, and to make sure he didn’t put it on his card the following week—which he’d been considering—they must have canceled it altogether.

“I’m supposed to cut it in half,” whispered Slocum. “But you keep it. Pay me whenever. And wait.” He held up a batter-coated finger and called to a waitress. “Bag up a special for Duncan here.”

Duncan adjusted his glasses as if it had all been a matter of faulty vision. Either an embarrassing silence had swept across the room or else he had a case of hysterical deafness. Slocum placed a bag on top of his box. “Pulpo gallego! That’ll cure what ails you.” He lowered his voice and put a hand on Duncan’s shoulder. “Call me, my friend, we’ll get you back on course. Remember—a dead calm comes before a new wind.”

Duncan gave him a sickly smile and left. In a time like this, if all his best friend could do was to give him some oily octopus and a maritime platitude for comfort, then the end could not be very far away.

Balancing the grease-stained bag of pulpo on the box of calzone, Duncan climbed the irregular steps of the wraparound porch of his childhood home, the octagonal beast that had come down through his mother’s side of the family. All was dark except for the third floor, whose glow extended up into the glass cupola that topped the roof, like a baby beacon to match the lighthouse at the curved tip of Batten Cove. When he paused at the door to straighten out the sea-grass welcome mat with his foot, the fibers clung to his sole. The mat created more debris than it caught, and yet it stayed, year after year, deteriorating but not going away. His legs became immobile, and he could not move. As the heat of the food dissipated into the air, he felt his own body cooling down with it. How had he regressed to this? Neither he nor Cora had intended that he go live with his mother. He wasn’t even sure she knew he was here. She’d have a field day with that, but he could not continue to live above Manavilins. Sleeping on Slocum’s sofa, numb from the barstool remedies for marital woes pressed upon him by friends and wrapped in a blanket of fryer fumes, he felt himself sliding back into the stupor of college life. Every night he seemed to sink deeper into emotional time, until one day he went to his mother’s house to do his laundry and never left. Now it was beginning to feel normal, and he worried he might never find his way out again.

A mosquito buzzed his ear. “On we go,” he said, with weak determination. He grabbed hold of the unpolished knob as he pushed his shoulder against the door, a rough-hewn slab that looked like a boat hatch. Its ornate keyhole served many purposes—decoration, spying, letting in the northwest wind—but locking was not one of them. It had no key. According to family lore, his mother’s great-great-grandmother, Ethel Tarbell, asked to be buried with it so she could let herself back in “later on.” It wasn’t that she was crazy enough to ask—which, by all accounts, she most certainly was—but that old man Tarbell was daft enough to grant her wish, and for generations the house stood waiting for a ghost that never arrived. No one thought to have the lock replaced or to have another key made, but after his recent encounter with Beaky Harrow, security was much on Duncan’s mind.
The only deterrent to intruders was the fact that the doors and windows in the house were usually swollen shut from the damp sea air. With one practiced shove, the door released with a start, and then he closed it behind him with a kick. He’d offered to take the door off its hinges and plane it, but his mother refused, claiming that the kick forced people to knock the
sand off their shoes.

“One shoe,” he said. “It gets the sand off of one shoe. What about the other?”

“Oh, Duncan, dear,” she said, with a laugh. “The things you think about.”

So the house was always filled with sand. Mrs. McNordfy, the cleaning woman, came twice a week to push the small dunes around with a broom, abrading the teak floors white before she sat down for a two hour mug-up with his mother. The Oriental carpets were heavy from the weight of the sand, but by his mother’s reckoning, this was a good thing. It was only half as much as it could be! “If you live on sand, you’re going to live with sand,” she always said. Ethel had built the house sometime in the 1860s on this sandy basin surrounded by a ring of stone outcroppings. It was during a brief period when architects promoted octagonal homes in the belief that they were not only more economical but increased sunlight and ventilation to boot. In reality, they did exactly the opposite. The rooms themselves were not octagonal, which meant the interior was a confused warren of wasted triangular space and halls, leaving most rooms with only a single window clouded with blown salt, making them dark as well as disorganized. Few octagonal homes remained standing today, and the ones that did were both a curiosity and a cautionary tale.

And yet, for all its faults, the house could be lovely, especially at night, when moonlight illuminated the romantic architectural details—porthole gables, shapely balustrades, and an ivy-covered dovecote. It was strong daylight that revealed a house that looked as if it had been built by pirates. The exterior was covered in rounded shingles that overlapped like scales, with so many of them loose or curled it looked as if it had a fish disease. The building had lost a few foundation stones, like missing teeth, but that had given it a strange stability, allowing rogue storm tides to come and go underneath without causing significant damage, though, like most things, it all depended on a person’s definition of the word. His mother believed only total annihilation could be considered real damage; everything else was just regular maintenance. Bits and pieces of the house had been torn off by wind and water over the years, replaced with inappropriate styles and patched with whatever was on hand. Old masts served as joists, fishing nets replaced trellises, and briny driftwood was fitted and nailed to fill in the blanks. Duncan had been begging his mother for years to get a structural inspection, but she waved him away, and the house mocked him by staying firmly in place. It was no use even trying to get things properly repaired because she was proud of its strange ruination. “Shows the world we can survive any disaster!”

That remained to be seen. Duncan reached his hand out blindly for the Chinese porcelain lamp on the hall table, tripping over a pile of canvas shoes and a sail bag, but he managed to keep dinner safe. Working his way to the kitchen, he zigzagged through the dark rooms, turning on a series of iron floor lamps as he went, like marks on a course. There were no wall switches. The only overhead lighting in the entire house was the dust-glazed Venetian chandelier in the dining room, which was all blue-green glass frills, designed to look like seaweed. It could only be turned on by standing on the walnut table underneath, which was inlaid with marquetry compasses and other nautical motifs that popped out with every footstep. It was missing its North compass point altogether.

He switched on the electrified whale oil lamp on the mantel in the living room and was, as always, briefly startled by a single eye staring at him. The eye belonged to the marlin mounted over the beach-stone fireplace. The tail was rotting along the edges, and the once brilliant silver scales were dull with age and smoke. His mother had caught it in the Bahamas during her honeymoon decades before. She had fought the fish on the line for five hours and was severely dehydrated when she finally pulled it in. Then she scratched herself on the fin, bled profusely, and got nauseous. As soon as she finished posing with her fish at the weigh-in, his father rushed his young bride to the emergency room. She’d won the tournament but spent a feverish week in the hospital, and it was the last time she ever set foot on a moving boat. As much as she wanted to be out on the water, she blacked out the moment she approached a gangplank. After that, she threw her life into being onshore navigator for her husband, Brendan. When he died, Nod took over the tiller of the bunged-up catboat, and she managed his racing career, such as it was. Duncan did not sail anymore, and his mother called him a nonstarter. Cora suggested he had psychosomatic sympathetic seasickness, but it didn’t make him ill. He just didn’t care for being on the water anymore, which set him apart from most of the community who regarded the sea as an extension not just of the land but of themselves.

When he got to the kitchen—a stark, stuccoed affair built for servants—he took off his jacket and began to open cabinets and drawers, the sound of which drew his mother’s Newfoundland shuffling into the room.

“Chandu!” said Duncan as he took out some tarnished silverware. “No one feed you yet?”

Chandu sat and drooled. Of course not. Dogs had discovered centuries ago that to live in comfort it was only necessary to feign affection for humans, but they had apparently not reckoned with sailing season. Duncan scooped up some kibble and filled a bowl, then crouched next to Chandu as he ate. The dog spent his days on the water’s edge, staring out to sea, ever hopeful for a sinking ship. “Old man,” Duncan whispered, and patted him on his back. His thick black fur was matted and smelled of the tide. After washing his hands, Duncan turned his attention to human food, but first he had to move from the counter the empty wine bottles, which gathered in corners and under tables waiting for his mother to refill them from wooden casks in the basement. Great-Uncle Fern, Ethel’s son, had gotten it in his mind to raise silkworms and planted fifty mulberry trees on the property. When the trees were big enough, he sent to Japan for cocoons, and they hatched into millions of worms, all of whom got to work on the business of spinning. Then came a nor’easter that blew the worms into the sea, so Fern had to content himself with the berries. He took up wine-making, hence the pyramid of casks in the basement from which his mother still drank. It was a sticky liquid, fermented from slightly unripe fruit. Duncan would rather eat the worms, but his mother loved the stuff and had ramped up her consumption in the years since his father died.

Cora thought his mother was an alcoholic. “Wine has drowned more people than the sea,” she’d say after another woozy dinner with her mother-in-law, but Duncan knew better. Great-Uncle Fern was no vintner, so the mulberry wine had minimal alcohol content. It was not much more than stale juice. It certainly did nothing to relax her. On race days, she hunkered down in the cupola with her binoculars and her jelly glass of mulberry wine, her nostrils puffed up in excitement like sails. She tried to give direction to Nod by running signal flags out on a pole, but he was always too flustered to look up for help. Poor Nod. He was out to sea in more ways than one. The onslaught of hormones at puberty had acted as poison to his system. Something had gone wrong, but no one, least of all Nod, could say just what. Cora called him NQN—Not Quite Normal—but that was an opinion, not a professional diagnosis. His mother insisted Nod was fine and didn’t need help. He spent one miserable year at boarding school and never went back. He attended Port Ellery Regional High instead and refused to go to college. He’d sometimes helped his father down at Seacrest’s, doing inventory or processing orders, but other than that he never held a real job or had a girlfriend. When Duncan lived in New York, he could never get Nod to visit. Finally, when Nod was in his late twenties, he made plans to move out of the house, but then their father died, and he felt he could not leave his mother. The only thing that made living back at home bearable for Duncan was the knowledge that at least he’d once left it.

He put the calzone in the microwave, then opened the refrigerator for bottled water. Standing in the wash of cool light, his thoughts turned to his vial of orphaned semen in the fertility clinic freezer. He closed the refrigerator without taking anything out and stood there with his forehead on the door. The appointment for implanting the fertilized egg had been scheduled for the week he’d left home. The day had come and gone without a call from Cora, and he knew she’d given up on him. It was just as well. Any child of his was bound to be unbalanced.

The microwave timer dinged and pulled him back to shore. He got the calzone out, and as he cut through the crust, small tendrils oozed from the cheesy filling and curled in on themselves. It was a far cry from dinner with Cora. They used to cook elaborate meals together; she’d taught him to chop and sift, to stir and have patience. She educated his palate, explaining how subtle differences in seasoning made big differences in the finished product. “Taste this,” she’d say, holding a spoon of some new dish to his mouth. “Close your eyes and tell me how it makes you feel.”

He took his glasses off and wiped them. She’d make a great mom.

After Chandu finished his kibble, Duncan let him outside through the back door, then started upstairs with the tray of food. The third floor had its own staircase, which was tight and winding, narrowing as it went, making him feel as if he were being forced through a nautilus shell. He passed a plaster niche in the wall, which, according to family lore, had housed a wooden saint that crumbled away to dust the night Great-Aunt Cecilia died of a broken heart when her sailor never returned from Barbados. Love notwithstanding, the entire house was crumbling away. Powderpost beetles gnawed at it night and day, leaving small piles of sawdust under all the furniture and rafters. His mother had replaced the saint with one of the many sailing trophies won by his father, and in it she stored Duncan’s caul, the withered snot of birth sac considered lucky for sailors, protecting them from a death from drowning. Nod had arrived tangled in his umbilical cord and hence no caul, but Duncan was born so lethargic that he couldn’t be bothered to break his ahead of time and was delivered encased in his egg, floating in the middle like a yolk. When his mother left the hospital, she held the boxed caul in her lap as his father wheeled her to the car. A twelve-year-old candy striper walked behind them, carrying baby Duncan in her arms.

“Shouldn’t the caul be in the boat?” he once asked her when he was old enough to wonder what it was and why it was on the stair landing. “We’re not likely to drown in the house.”

“Of course we’re not going to drown in the house,” she’d said. “We’ve got the caul!”

While the caul was busy protecting the house, his father slid off the boat one day in a squall and drowned. Duncan sometimes wondered if he should have just ignored his mother and put it in the boat himself. But then if he did that, he’d be buying into her wacky belief in the caul to begin with. There was never a right answer where she was concerned.

When he got to the top of the stairs, he slipped off his shoes as if entering a temple. The third floor was different from the first two stories in that it was not divided into strange little rooms but had been gutted to create one huge, well-lit space. It was smaller than the other floors because it gave up footage to the widow’s walk that circumnavigated the house, making it look like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake. French windows faced out in every direction, and any surface that was not glazed was paneled in teak. On one of those spaces hung a photograph of his father in a seashell frame, fixed with a medal and the insignia from his uniform. His parents had known each other since childhood but had not fallen in love until he joined the Navy. She still kept his uniform under their bed. Faded racing pennants hung from the beams, and one wall held a trophy case displaying the family’s glory, the mounted silver boats and urns won by his father or grandfather, his aunts or uncles, his cousins or in-laws, and the many variations thereof. There were no trophies won by the living. It was a room where the present was measured against the past and had come up empty-handed. But it was not through lack of trying. The focus of the room under his stockinged feet remained the same. Beautifully painted in marine paint on teak floorboards was the coastline of Port Ellery. The map had been commissioned by Ethel Tarbell, who paid a local teenager two dollars to recreate the harbor as a teaching aid to her children. The young artist signed and dated it in the far corner—
Benjamin Bellamy Dodge, 1875—
and then moved out West to create the luminous American landscapes he was to become famous for. This floor was his only surviving New England work. Museums made increasingly frequent inquiries about buying it, but his mother ignored their pleas. “No oyster ever profited from his pearl,” she’d tell them before hanging up.