Happiness of Fish (36 page)

Maybe I knew I'd be coming back.

As dusk sneaks into the yard, Gerry establishes his position. He digs out the boat's extension cord and plugs in the small electric heater he keeps aboard. The inside of the boat smells musty. He turns the heater on high to dry things out. The battery is out of the boat, so he pinches a small table lamp from the club house and takes it aboard. Then he climbs back down the ladder and heads across the road on foot to buy supplies.

Gerry and the woman behind the counter of the nearest convenience store find each other only vaguely familiar in winter. It's as if he's a migratory species, blown off course or inadvertently wintering over. He doesn't fit the winter ecosystem of the town.

“I guess you're working on your boat?” she says. Her usual “Nice day for a sail,” is not applicable in January.

Gerry does the kind of unexpectedly expensive shopping you do when you start from scratch. He buys salt and pepper in expensive, convenience store sizes, teas and more sugar than he'll use if he stays all winter. He picks up onions and potatoes in pricey small-store packages and oriental noodles, assorted canned goods, bottled water and a jar of instant coffee which he knows he won't like, even as he buys it.

When did tastes in coffee change? he wonders. He remembers freeze-dried instant being almost a gourmet taste in the '70s. Now none of it tastes good, and he knows he'll drive to the nearest service station for something brewed.

He tops off his order with a plastic jug of alcohol for the stove. He has to root for it behind cases of paint thinner. It's a summer item.

The woman behind the counter looks at him uneasily as she takes
his money. This is not a convenience store order. This is the commissariat of a one-man retreating army, someone who doesn't have a fixed address. She feels a twinge of the distrust the settled and successful have for nomadic losers. It starts to snow as he leaves the store, lugging handfuls of plastic bags. Big soft flakes at first but smaller and harder by the time he gets back to the boat, making a faint slithering rustle as it blows across his elevated fibreglass burrow.

Gerry simmers a can of meatball stew with Chinese noodles for supper. He's ready for something hot, unhealthy and hearty. He spent a chilling gloves-off ten minutes filling the alcohol stove in the cockpit so as not to slop fuel around the cabin. The interior of the boat takes on the smell of onions and gravy and damp wool. The interior of his shell is taking on his defining scents.

Funny as a fart in a diving suit
. A grade school joke floats through his mind as he does the small things necessary to prepare a hot meal, eat it and wipe up a pot and plate after. He feels pleasantly stuffed after he eats. He has eaten everything he's cooked. His spaceship regimen allows for no storage of leftovers.

Afterwards, with a large mug of tea beside him, Gerry hunches at the playhouse-size galley table with a sack of notebooks beside him on the berth. He pops a disk into his laptop and tentatively pokes a few keys. He calls up fragments he's committed to disk, long ones that have been taken to the writing workshop and some that are no more than a file title.

Capture the rapture with Duane and Gretchen
, he's written, and attached the name of a website that claims to give an accurate “rapture speedometer” to judge how the end of the world is coming along.
Picnic in the Park with Ellen
.

Fragment: George Alone

George sits at the laptop and listens to the wind outside. For days he's felt like a shell-less oyster in a whirlwind of broken glass, too irritated to wrap any of it in nacre and stop the itch. Now, alone, the storm of shards seems to have abated. He feels almost lonely for the irritants he needs to make a pearl
.

What's an oyster to do?

Gerry blows a soft Bronx cheer and stops typing. He highlights the George fragment and hovers over the delete button, then relents, flicks off the highlighting and saves. The laptop is like playing a doll's piano for fat-fingered Gerry.

The hell with it. Save it. You can always throw it away later.

He turns off the laptop and leans back on his berth, nursing his tea mug.

Gerry wakes up in the middle of the night to the purr of his space heater's fan cutting in. The element glows red inside, like a cigarette end, drawn on hard. The heater is only an arm's length away from Gerry tucked up in his sleeping bag along one side of the boat cabin. He's wearing a watch cap as a night cap, keeping his head warm where it protrudes from the end of the bag. The cabin is small and thickly insulated. It doesn't take much to heat it. Now it's cold but only the cold of a country kitchen before the fire is lit.

Gerry decides he needs to pee, and outside and down the ladder in the snow is too much bother. He unzips the bag, turns on the lamp and sits on the edge of the berth. He roots in the galley locker and finds a bottle of water. He empties it into the kettle and then kneels on the cabin sole, hunched and prayer-like as he holds the neck to his cock and feels the bottle become heavier and hot in his hand.

When he is finished he screws the cap on and puts the bottle by the hatch step. He rolls back into his sleeping bag with a satisfied feeling of having dealt with a survival issue.

“House-broken under all and any circumstances,” he says aloud to the fibreglass over his head as he turns out the light.

A tractor-trailer growls by the boatyard, heading from the tank farm down the road to the highway. Gerry squints to make out the luminous face of his watch. It's only half past midnight. Elsewhere, people are just turning off the late edition of the news and getting ready for bed. He's been asleep since nine or so.

Despite the snow, the boatyard lights shed quite a lot of light through the plastic hatch in the forward part of the boat. He can make out the dim shape of the bag of papers he'd brought aboard and the flat, plastic sandwich of the laptop on the galley table.

“Tomorrow,” he says aloud and moulds himself and his cocoon of bag to the curved bulkhead, feeling warmer now with an empty bladder. Tomorrow he'll make up his mind about that
George and the Oyster
bit. Tomorrow he'll start joining up the pieces he's got. Tomorrow he'll probably call Vivian and tell her where he is.