Walt

Walt

Ian Stoba

Dedication

This book is for the cast and crew of the 37 Corbett, San Francisco Municipal Railway, and also for MMS (of course).

I

W
alt leaned out over
the gunnel of his boat and reached into the water. His hand wrapped around the wet hemp line and began to pull.

Fishing for lobsters, called crawfish by the locals, has been a way of life on Tristan de Cunha for hundreds of years. Walt’s family had been fishing these selfsame waters for seven generations.

Pulling up a lobster trap was not a new thing for Walt.

After loading his day’s catch onto his narrow wooden boat, Walt rowed to the dock of the Processing Plant. The Plant was the center of industry on the tiny island, the place to which all crawfish were brought. There they were scientifically killed and their tails were removed and preserved by means of deep freezing for their long journeys to the restaurants and dining tables of the world.

Walt himself had never tasted lobster. As far as he knew, not one individual in the seven generations of Tristanian lobster fishermen in Walt’s family had ever tasted a lobster. Curiously, he had never even wondered what a crawfish tail might taste like. This was just as well for him as no one on the island, not even the foreman of the Plant, who had been brought from England, could afford to buy a lobster.

Just as curiously, I myself had never tasted lobster at that point, and in fact still never have. Although, as may be seen by and by, my reasons were, and are, altogether different from Walt’s.

Only one small item interrupted Walt’s afternoon, one point of malaise intruded into his brain: for the third straight day now Walt had been hearing music in his head. The same song had been playing nonstop inside his skull, closer in than his ears somehow, as if he was not really hearing it but somehow feeling it vibrate in his jaws and cheekbones.

Walt was becoming just the slightest bit concerned. He had had difficulty sleeping last night because of this strange music, so unlike anything played on Tristan, that played nonstop inside his head. The sound was metallic and thin. He was aware of a voice but could not hear the words. What he perceived most clearly was the sound of an electric guitar, one played in a manner he had never heard before. The sound was odd, drifting into atonality in bits and often seeming a little off, yet still fitting somehow.

Walt had never been particularly curious or imaginative. Perhaps if he had, he would have paid more attention to this strange music, and he might even have wondered what was causing it. As it was, his fisherman’s interest was only in finding out what piece of music it was, since he was certain that he could not have made it up. Walt was not a composer, he was a fisherman.

Having rid himself of the day’s catch at the Plant, Walt resolved to go see Mrs. Wilkins, the island’s only piano teacher. Walt of course had never studied music; his family considered him far too simple-minded for such things. Walt’s only real tie to Mrs. Wilkins was that he had once courted her daughter Leonore. Leonore worked in Tristan’s other great industry: postage stamps. Tristanian stamps are valued by collectors all over the world for their beauty and rarity.

As with most means of employment, the reality of the Tristanian Postal Service, Philatelic Bureau, was not nearly as glamorous as it sounds. Leonore was one of four women who licked each beautiful stamp, stuck it to a first day card, canceled the stamp by hand with an ancient postal implement, and finally sent it on its way over the ocean to a stranger eager for the rare and beautiful stamp.

In retrospect, Walt’s courtship now seemed to him doomed from the beginning. He and Leonore had little in common but hormones, and did not even really enjoy each other’s company very much. It was an extremely rare burst of imagination on Walt’s part which brought them together at all. Entirely out of character, and all by himself, he had imagined that women who licked things for a living might have mysterious erotic powers. The idea took hold of him until he could scarcely think of anything else during the long hours he spent one each day in his little boat.

As the other three stamp-lickers were already married, he had no alternative but to pursue Leonore or perhaps die wondering about her tongue. She herself did not seem overly enthusiastic about Walt. It took him some time to convince her that he was indeed serious about marrying her. It took some time after their initial encounter for her to do anything but run to her house and hide at the slightest hint of Walt’s proximity.

His curiosity remained strong, though, and ultimately overcame her repugnance. She never actually agreed to marry Walt, but she did after some time become civil, and finally affectionate. This was the undoing of their romance; finally, after months of wondering, pursuing and fantasizing, Walt actually kissed Leonore. Her mouth tasted like paste. Her tongue was swollen and covered in cuts from the serrated edges of the stamps.

After their first, and only, kiss, Walt told Leonore that he was breaking off the engagement and wanted nothing more to do with her. Walt then walked down to the beach where his boat was kept, threw himself into it bodily and sobbed. If he had looked back towards Leonore’s house, which he didn’t, he would have seen her stand there for a long moment before walking away, confused.

Walt remembered all these things as he walked up the familiar path to the house that Leonore shared with her mother, Mrs. Wilkins. He remembered, too, the times that he had run to the house breathlessly behind Leonore, only to see her flee inside the door, slam it, then run to the windows and slam shut the shutters.

As much as he wanted to speak to Mrs. Wilkins, he felt the he was not ready just yet to face Leonore again.

So, with no better idea coming to him at the moment, he decided to walk home.

Walt lived in a shack. The walls had been built from the planks of a sailing ship that had run aground off Tristan sometime in the mid-eighteenth century. Time since then had allowed gaps to open between the planks so that Walt, if he were so inclined, could peek out unobserved from any of at least a dozen spots in his little home.

His housetop was a comical imitation of a roof. Sometimes he felt that it let in more rain than it kept out. Most of Walt’s pots and all three of his pans, as well as all but one of his cups, were spread on the floor in an unsuccessful battle against the besieging rain. Next to Walt’s canvas cot was stacked a rather large and messy pile of sweaters. The climate of Tristan leaned heavily in the direction of cold and wet, so that Walt, with his creaking and leaking little shack, found that he always had to wear at least two sweaters to bed. Now that he was home and feeling the chill of the wind more than when he had been out, he pulled a grey wool sweater over the two similar ones he was already wearing. The continual dampness combined with Walt’s penchant for decaying wool sweaters gave the shack a smell very much like that of a wet sheepdog.

Walt built a fire in his wood-burning stove that provided heat as well as a cooking surface for the shack. With the music in his head still playing nonstop, he prepared a meager supper.

Composing himself, he carried a steaming plate of less savory parts of fish to his simple table. The music was really beginning to get to him now. He remembered his sleeplessness the previous night and wondered what would happen when he tried to lie down on his cot tonight. He took a bite of his food. He had a thought that would no doubt have occurred to most people sooner: he wondered if he could be losing his mind. The enormity of this thought took Walt so much by surprise that he dropped his fork. Fortunately for Walt he did not know that one of the earliest and most accurate signs of impending madness is that one may feel that he is losing his mind.

He picked up his fork. He carefully drew and released three deep breaths. He then took another bite of his supper. The music continued to play in his head. Calmly, more calmly than he could ever have imagined himself doing so, he picked up his plate and threw it across the room. The plate hit the wall with a satisfying thwack and a clang. The plate, being metal, was not damaged beyond a few minor dents, but the assorted parts of fish made an impressive display on the wall.

Walt strode the four strides it took him to cross the room and stood facing his steamer trunk. The trunk, salvaged from another shipwreck, this one around 1880, provided storage for Walt’s few possessions. He opened the hasp and lifted the lid. He brought out two bottles from inside the trunk, one of port and the other of rum.

Walt was not one to drink. In fact, he could not remember the last time he had had anything to drink besides water and the strong tea that he brewed on winter mornings. He remembered that the port had been a gift. He had once accidentally saved a man from drowning. The man had fallen off another boat and had gotten his leg fouled in one of the lines leading to Walt’s lobster traps. Looking to see what he had caught that day, he was very surprised to find a saturated Tristanian fisherman and no lobsters. To the end of his days on Earth, Walt maintained that the flailing of the overboard fisherman had scared away all the lobsters that day.

The man was, of course, grateful to be saved. It is a tradition on Tristan, as in most places, to be grateful to a person who saves one’s life, and to show that appreciation in the form of gifts. The problem was, no one was quite sure what Walt liked or what it was that he might want. So, by default, the man with a continued opportunity to be alive gave Walt a blue wool sweater, which was enjoyed immensely; a black wool cap, which went overboard the very first time Walt tried to wear it fishing; and this bottle of port which had lain unopened in Walt’s steamer trunk for some years now.

He also recalled the genesis of his bottle of rum. He had actually bought it for himself the day he got his own boat. This was also the day his father, to whom the boat had previously belonged, had died. One of the few things that Walt could bring to mind about his father was a saying of his to the effect that anyone old enough to have his own fishing boat was old enough to drink rum. This saying was repeated to Walt’s mother on an almost nightly basis whenever she complained about the old fisherman’s drinking. It was so ingrained into Walt’s impressionable thought process that it was the most natural thing in the world for him to buy a bottle of rum with the money from the first catch he delivered all by himself to the Plant. And with just as little thought, he had delivered that bottle to his steamer trunk where it had remained up until this very moment.

Only with extreme difficulty was Walt able to uncork the bottles. Of course he had no bottle opener. He was forced to make creative use of a thin knife usually reserved for cleaning fish. He made a mess of it, shredding the corks into so many pieces that they could never hope to reseal the bottles, and dropping showers of cork fragments onto the floor and into each of the liquors.

So, trying to put out the music in his head, Walt, for the very first time in his life, got drunk.

The quantity Walt drank that night would be enough to level the most experienced drunk. A whole bottle of rum and another of port were consumed within the space of an hour and a half. Although he had no idea at the time, that amount of alcohol could easily have killed Walt or caused irreparable brain damage. As it was, he lapsed into a coma that was only temporary.

Walt awoke in a most peculiar position. He was lying down on his stomach on his cot with his head hanging over the edge. He had no memory of putting himself in that position. He was fortunate that he had, though, as almost any other contortion of his body would have resulted in him choking on his vomit, which now covered nearly the entire floor of the shack.

Walt’s vocabulary contained no words for how he felt. No hyperbolic extension of “hangover” could come close to the feeling of desolation in his body. If had cared to, he might have compared his body to a city that has been ransacked and looted in time of war, abandoned by the invading troops after everything of any possible interest had been consumed or broken or violated.

It was doubtful that Walt possessed such imagery even at the best of times. Now, even the thought of speech was far beyond his capabilities. The only thing that he knew for certain was that he needed water desperately.

Painfully he stood up. He fell immediately, face first into a pool of vomit which oozed through all three of his sweaters and made his skin tingle. Unable to stand, he crawled through the muck to the basin where he kept water.

He dipped ladle into basin and sipped the cool clear water. He felt his strength returning with each sip. Impulsively he took a deep drink, and immediately started vomiting again. If anything, he now felt worse than before, and worse still when he remembered the sensation of being drunk. He was indifferent to the drunkenness itself, it was the music that scared him. Instead of numbing the effects of the endlessly repeating music as he had hoped, the drink amplified the sound until it echoed back on itself in his head. With each passing moment, as the sound grew worse and worse, he could think of no other remedy but to drink more.

His vision failed him long before he passed into unconsciousness, but in those moments before exhaustion and alcohol poisoning carried him into a parody of restful sleep, in a sense beyond, or below, vision, he became aware of a spiral and felt its emptiness in the darkness.

When he was finally able to walk, he struck out for Mrs. Wilkins’ house. As soon as he came with sight of the house he heard a shriek from inside, soon followed by the familiar sound of the slamming of the shutters.

He forced himself up the two steps to the porch and to the front door. Even in his current state he knew that knocking would be useless. He called out to the house as loud as he was able, which was not very loud at all, that it was Mrs. Wilkins that he was here to see, that he was not interested in marrying Leonore anymore and, for that matter was not interested in Mrs. Wilkins as a spouse either. Only when he said that he had a problem to do with music did he hear any response inside the house. Cautious footsteps now edged down the hall and toward the door. Finally the door opened a crack.

Mrs. Wilkins’ face peered out at him with an odd mixture of revulsion and pity. She asked him what could possibly have worked him up to such a state. He was unable to answer. Finally, hesitantly, she invited him inside.

Walt had never been good with words, and now he faced attempting something that was for him nearly impossible: explaining to a woman he felt his superior by so much that she must be scarcely able to understand his speech that music was driving him crazy. He managed to get across to her that he was now in the fourth day of a continual and involuntary listening session. He said that he had gotten drunk, or that the music had gotten him drunk, and that the worst part of the whole thing, the only reason he had come to her rather than diving off his boat with a bucket of rocks tied around his neck, was that he did not even know what the music was. The only thing that he was sure of was that, even though he was not familiar with the music before it started playing in his head, it was not if his invention. He was convinced that it was, as he said, real music; that is, actually played by someone.