The Shipping News (33 page)

Another common sight is black oil scum along miles of landwash, like the shoreline along Cape Despond this week. Hundreds of people watched Monday morning as 14,000 metric tons of crude washed onshore from a ruptured tank of the
Golden Goose.
Thousands of seabirds and fish struggled in the oil, fishing boats and nets were fouled. “This is the end of this place,” said Jack Eye, 87, of Little Despond, who, as a young man, was a dory fisherman with the schooner fleet.

Our world runs on oil. More than 3,000 tankers prowl the world's seas. Among them are the largest moving objects ever made by man, the Very Large Crude Carriers, or VLCCs, up to 400 meters in length and over 200,000 deadweight tons. Many of these ships are single hull vessels. Some are old and corroded, structurally weak. One thing is sure. There will be more oil spills, and some will be horrendous.

Nobody hangs a picture of an oil tanker on their wall.

Tert Card read it, laid it on the corner of his desk and looked at Quoyle.

“You too,” he said. “You bloody fucking too.”

When the newsroom was empty that evening he stood by the window, addressed an absent Quoyle.

“Keep your bloody American pinko Greenpeace liberalism out of it. Who the hell are you to say this? Oh yes, Mr. Quoyle's bloody precious column! It's against our whole effort of development and economic progress.”

And he rewrote the piece, pasted it up with bold fingers, went out and got drunk. To quell the pain of the irksome canker sores. How could they know he swallowed glassful after glassful to comprehend a harsh and private beauty?

A day or two later Tert Card brought in a framed picture from a shipping company's wall calendar. He hung it behind his desk. The gargantuan
Quiet Eye
nosed through a sunset into Placentia Bay.
LARGEST OIL TANKER IN THE WORLD
. The first time the door slammed it went askew.

Quoyle thought it was funny until noon when Card came back from the printer with the ink-smelling bundles of
Gammy Bird.
Took a copy, turned to see how his Shipping News story came out.
His column had been condensed to a caption accompanying the same calendar page photo that hung on Tert Card's wall.

PICTURE OF AN OIL TANKER

More than 3,000 tankers proudly ride the world's seas. These giant tankers, even the biggest, take advantage of Newfoundland's deep-water ports and refineries. Oil and Newfoundland go together like ham and eggs, and like ham and eggs they'll nourish us all in the coming years.

Let's all hang a picture of an oil tanker on our wall.

Quoyle felt the blood drain out of his head; he went dizzy.

“What have you done!” he shouted at Tert Card, voice an axe.

“Straightened it out, that's all. We don't want to hear that Greenpeace shit.” Tert Card whinnied. Feeling good. His cheap face thrust out.

“You cut the guts out of this piece! You made it into rotten cheap propaganda for the oil industry. You made me look like a mouthpiece for tanker interests.” He pressed Card into his corner.

“I told you,” said Nutbeem. “I told you, Quoyle, to watch out, he'll cobble your work.”

Quoyle was incensed, some well of anger like a dome of oil beneath innocuous sand, tapped and gushing.

“This is a
column,”
bellowed Quoyle. “You can't change somebody's column, for Christ's sake, because you don't like it! Jack asked me to write a column about boats and shipping. That means my opinion and description as I see it. This”—he shook the paper against the slab cheeks—“isn't what I wrote, isn't my opinion, isn't what I see.”

“As long as I'm the managing editor,” said Tert Card, rattling like pebbles in a can, “I've the right to change anything I don't think fit to run in the
Gammy Bird.
And if you don't think so, I advise you to check it out with Jack Buggit.” Ducked under Quoyle's raised arms.

And ran for the door.

“Don't think I don't know you're all against me.” The thick candle that was Tert Card gone somewhere else with his sputtering light.

“You're a surprise, Quoyle,” said Billy Pretty. “I didn't believe you had that much steam in your boiler. You blew him out of the water.”

“You know how it is, now,” said Nutbeem. “I tried to tell you on the first day.”

“You watch, though. By tomorrow he'll be back afloat on an even keel. Tert Card snaps right back for all he's a vitrid bugger.”

“I'm surprised myself,” said Quoyle. “I'm going to call Jack,” he said, “and get this straightened out. Either I'm writing a column or I'm not.”

“Word of advice, Quoyle. Don't call Jack. He is out fishing, as I assume you know. He don't like
Gammy Bird
business to come into his home, neither. You just leave it alone and let me drop around to the stage tonight or tomorrow night. The crab approach is best with Jack.”

“Gammy Bird.
Tert Card speaking. Oh, yar, Jack.” Tert Card held the phone receiver against his sweatered chest, looked at Quoyle. The morning light unkind.

“Wants to talk to you.” His tone indicated bad taste or madness on Jack's part.

“Hello.” Braced for abuse.

“Quoyle. Jack Buggit here. You write your column. If you put your foot in a dog's mess we'll say it's because you was brought up in the States. Tert will keep his hands off it. Put him back on.”

Quoyle held the phone up and motioned to Card. They could hear Jack squawk. Slowly Tert Card turned his back to the room, faced the window, the sea. As the minutes went by he shifted from foot to foot, sat on the edge of his desk, foraged in ears and nostrils. He rocked, switched the phone from one side of his head to the other. At last the phone went quiet and he hung up.

“All right,” he said blandly, though the red cheeks flamed, “Jack thinks he wants to try running Quoyle's columns as they come. For now, anyway. So we'll just go along with that. We'll go along with that. But he's got an idea on the car wreck feature. You know there are weeks when we don't have any good wrecks and have to go into the files. Well, Jack wants to include boat wrecks. He says at the fisherman's meeting they said there was more than three hundred dangerous boat accidents and vessel losses last year. Quoyle, he wants you to write up boat wrecks and get some photos, same as you do the car wrecks. There's enough so we'll always have a fresh disaster.”

“There's no doubt about that,” said Quoyle, looking at Tert Card.

26

Deadnvan

“Deadman
—An
‘Irish pennant,' a loose end hanging about the sails or rigging.

THE MARINER'S DICTIONARY

THE END of September, tide going out, moon in its last quarter. The first time Quoyle had been alone at the green house. The aunt was in St. John's for the weekend buying buttons and muslin. Bunny and Sunshine had howled to stay with Dennis and Beety for Marty's birthday.

“She's my best friend, Dad. I wish she was my sister,” Bunny said passionately. “Please please please let us stay.” And in the Flying Squid Gift & Lunchstop she chose a ring made from pearly shell for Marty's present, a sheet of spotted tissue for wrapping.

Quoyle came across the bay in his scorned boat on Friday afternoon with a bag of groceries, two six-packs of beer. All of his notes and the typewriter. A stack of books on nineteenth-century shipping regulations and abuses. In the kitchen, stooped to put the
beer in the ice cooler under the sink, then thought of ice. He'd meant to get some, but the empty cooler was still empty, still in the boat. It didn't matter. In the evening he drank the beer as it was, scribbled by the light of the gas lamp.

On Saturday Quoyle stumped around the underfurnished rooms; dusty air seemed to wrinkle as he moved through it. He split wood until lunch; beer, two cans of sardines and a can of lima beans. In the afternoon he worked at the kitchen table, started on the first draft, banging the keys, swearing when his fingers jammed between them, writing about Samuel Plimsoll and his line.

“FOR GOD'S SAKE, HELP ME”

Everybody has seen the Plimsoll lines or loading marks on vessels. They mark the safe load each ship can carry.

These loading marks came about because of a single concerned individual, Samuel Plimsoll, elected MP from Derby in 1868. Plimsoll fought for the safety of seamen in a time when unscrupulous shipowners deliberately sent overloaded old ships to sea. Plimsoll's little book, Our
Seamen,
described bad vessels so heavily laden with coal or iron their decks were awash. The owners knew the ships would sink. They knew the crews would drown. They did it for the insurance.

Overloading was the major cause of thousands of wrecks each year. Plimsoll begged for a painted load line on all ships, begged that no ship be allowed, under any circumstances, to leave port unless the line was distinctly visible.

He wrote directly to his readers. “Do you doubt these statements? Then, for God's sake—oh, for God's sake, help me to get a Royal Commission to inquire into their truth!” Powerful shipping interests fought him every inch of the way.

When he stopped the evening was closing in again. Cooked two pounds of shrimp in olive oil and garlic, sucked the meat from the shells. Went down to the dock in the twilight with the last
beer, endured the mosquitoes, watching the lights of Killick-Claw come on. The lighthouses on the points stuttering.

The Old Hag came in the night, saddled and bridled Quoyle. He dreamed again he was on the nightmare highway. A tiny figure under a trestle stretched imploring arms. Petal, torn and bloody. Yet so great was his speed he was carried past. The brakes did not work when he tramped them. He woke for a few minutes, straining his right foot on the dream brake, his neck wet with anxious sweat. The wind moaned through the house cables, a sound that invoked a sense of hopeless abandonment. But he pulled the sleeping bag corner over his upper ear and slept again. Getting used to nightmares.