E. Proulx - The Shipping News

“What do you want to do about Warren?”

“There’s no sense trying to bury her,” she said. “It’s all rock. I’d like to take her out to sea for a sea burial. A short service, you know, a few words. I thought I could drive up the coast and find a likely spot. Consign her to the waves. Poor Warren. She never got to be happy here. Never had a chance to enjoy a real outing, a good walk along the shore. Dogs love that.”

“I bought a boat today, aunt. Too bad I didn’t get a motor, too. We could have taken Warren out to sea. If I knew how to handle it.”

“You didn’t!”

“I did. But Jack Buggit says it’s not worth a damn. About all I paid for it. Guy practically gave it to me. Fifty dollars. I mean, Aunt, even if it’s not that good it was cheap. I rented a trailer. Now I’ve got to get a motor. I can learn with this boat.”

The aunt peered out into the parking lot. “Can’t see it from here,” she said. “But you did the right thing. Maybe you could go out with Dennis a few times, see how he manages and all.”

“I heard a story about Dennis today. Part of it anyway.”

There was a knocking on the door, a knock with a peculiar rhythm. Again the fluttering beat like a drummer striking taut skin. Where had he heard that before? Nutbeem.

“Hello, hello,” said Nutbeem, his long legs opening and closing as he came across the room, shook the aunt’s hand, handed her a bottle of brown wine, Vin du France Réserve de Terre Neuve . Shook Quoyle’s hand, looked around smiling as if admiring novel sights. He sat in the chair nearest Warren, his flexed knees halfway up to his shoulders. Glanced at the shroud.

“Thought I’d come by,” he said. “Go on telling you about my boat. It’s impossible to talk at the paper. Give you the odd pointer on the boat you bought. Old Buggit was rather fierce about it, but you can get some use from it. Just be careful. There’s no one else here I can talk to. I haven’t talked to anybody since I got here. Eight months, I haven’t exchanged a civilized word with anybody. I said to myself ‘I’ll just drop around after supper, meet Miss, Mrs.-”

“ Hamm,” said the aunt. “Ms. Agnis Hamm.”

“Delighted, Ms. Hamm. You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music. I brought some of my tapes. Some Yemenite tin-can stuff, a little Algerian Rai, some of the dub-poets. That sort of stuff. In case you had a tape player. No? This is rather a dump, isn’t it? Well, you must come visit me and hear them. Although my place is rather small. I live in a trailer. But you’ll see. You’ve got to come for one of my curries. I’ve even got some tapes from here, you know. There’s a weird youth I taped in Fly-By-Night, where I wrecked, he’s an expert at what they call chin-music, no instruments, just decides on a tune and then pours out this incredible, nasal stream of nonsense syllables. Like a tobacco auctioneer. “Whangy-uddle-uddle-uddle-uddle-whangy-doodle-ah!’ ”

The aunt got up. “Gentlemen, I’ve had a long, hard day and I’m half dead with starving. What do you think about going down to the one-and-only Tickle Motel dining room for a nice plate of cod cheeks? Mr. Nutbeem?” Wondered whether his splayed nose was the original edition or had been flattened.

“Oh, I’ve had my dinner. Curry, actually. But I’ll come down with you. You can eat and I’ll talk. Well, maybe I’ll have a beer.”

Quoyle ordered the fried bologna dinner. It was the only thing on the menu he hadn’t tried, but night after night he’d watched diners at neighboring tables wolfing and gnashing, guessed it was a house specialty. The plate came heaped with thick bologna circles, fried potatoes and gravy, canned turnip, and a wad of canned string beans, all heated in a microwave. The overwhelming sensations were of sizzling heat and salt content off the scale. The aunt leaned on her hand, seemed to listen to Nutbeem.

“So there I was, hanging around the boatyards, hanging around the pubs where the builders went, making my pint of bitter last, listening to everything, asking a few questions. Mind you, I knew nothing about boats, had never built anything except a shelf for my uncle’s toaster, had never been sailing, never even made a voyage. I always traveled by air. But I listened very assiduously and determined to do it. The idea gripped me.

“Eventually I puzzled out something I could build that would float. A modified Chinese junk built of plywood with a full-batten lug rig. You know, the Chinese have forgotten more about sailing than the rest of the world ever knew. They invented the compass, they invented watertight compartments, they invented stem rudders and the most efficient sail in the world. junks are ancient boats, more than five thousand years old, and extremely seaworthy, good for long voyages. And I’ve always been mad for the Chinese poets.”

“This is pretty salty,” Quoyle said apologetically to the waitress. “I’d better have a pint. If you get a chance.”

The aunt’s red face bent down, parentheses around her mouth set like clamps. Impossible to know if she was listening to Nutbeem or flying over the Himalayas.

Nutbeem swallowed his lager and signaled for more. As long as the girl was standing there. “I’d been working all this time writing book reviews for a rarefied journal devoted to criticism incomprehensible to anyone but the principals. Bloody dagger stuff. And by sponging off my uncle and living on mutton neck broth I managed to save up enough money to hire a boat designer to draw me up a junk pattern, simple enough that I could build myself out of half-inch marine plywood at home.

“Ah, Ms. Hamm, you should have seen it when I was done. It was ugly. It was a rough and ugly thing, an overall length of twenty-eight feet, a five-foot draft and just that one junk sail, but with a respectable three hundred and fifty square feet. A trim tab rudder hung on the stem. She was heavy and slow. And very ugly. I made her more ugly by painting her rat brown. Piece of foam for a mattress, my sleeping bag. Wooden boxes for chair and table. And that was it. At first I just muffed about near the shore. Surprised how comfortable she was, and she handled well. The sail was a wonder. It’s interesting how I got that .”

The aunt finished her tea, swished the pot about, got another half cup from the spout. There was no stopping Nutbeem, roaring along now with a bone in his teeth.

“You see, I had a friend who worked at Sotheby’s, and he mentioned one day that they were going to auction off a lot of marine and nautical curios. So I went-idle curiosity. just what you might expect, scrimshaw walrus tusks, a nameplate from one of the Titanic’s lifeboats, Polynesian palm-rib charts, antique maps. The catalog listed only one item that interested me, and that was a bamboo-batten junk sail from Macau in good condition. I ended up with it for less than the cost of a new one. Bit of a miracle.

“Then I learned just how much of an aerodynamic wonder the batten sail is-it makes a sort of flat curve. It’s only reed or canvas sheetlets stiffened horizontally with the battens-the principle of the folding fan, in a way. You fold it and open it up rather like an unhinged fan. One can control the sail very well because of the battened panels-reef or douse in seconds. No stays or shrouds. The small sections let you adjust trim to a fine degree. They say that even with the canvas half full of holes the sail draws. The Chinese call it ‘The Ear that Listens for the Wind.’ The old junk sailors even used to roll up a reed sail and use it for a life raft if they were shipwrecked. And my auction sail was a good one.

“And so then, that summer, I just set out. Across the Atlantic. There’s a point, you know, when you must go forward. I lived off those little packages of Oriental ramen noodles, dried mushrooms, dried shrimp. I had a tiny stove, size of a teacup. You’ve seen them. Sixty-seven days to Fly-By-Night. It’s my plan to keep on around the world.”