The Plover

by Brian Doyle

  * * *

  Declan emerged scratching his belly and urinating over the stern and then gaping at the troops of terns before noticing the gull. He laughed aloud.

  Sweet blessed Jesus Christmas. Welcome back, bird. Could use another hand around here. Things are intense. Lots of work to be done. Hard work. Messy. You’re a messy race, you’ll be comfortable. We are going to go fishing. Fishing for men as old blessed Jesus Christmas said. Trawling for trawlers. Harvesting a man. Adding to the crew. Which reminds me we have a kid on board. Her name is Pipa. She’s a pipsqueak. You wouldn’t know the word. You’ll like her. She don’t say much. Quiet kid. Add her to the manifest. That’s three of us now with you and we will go get our fourth back. His name’s Piko. You’ll like him. Looks like a tall skinny goat. Good guy. He got borrowed but we are going to borrow him back. O yes. I bet today is the day.

  Indeed today is the day. The minister for fisheries and marine resources and foreign affairs sends a message that a rusty gray trawler has been seen to the northwest, near the atolls the fishermen call Anewetak. There are so many atolls and islets there that no one is quite sure how many there are. Some of them have no names. He, the minister, has enclosed charts and graphs for the Plover’s progress. He, the minister, cautions caution in those waters, as even the charts and graphs enclosed are not perhaps fully accurate, and the shifting sands and tides in that wilderness of atolls and islets, not to mention the effects of storms, make caution the watchword of the wise. He, the minister, wishes that he could be of more direct assistance in the matter at hand, but he trusts that the recipient understands the press of ministerial duties, and the vagaries of communal responsibilities undertaken by the undersigned by virtue of his appointment to the ministry, a signal honor, which he, the minister, wishes to discharge with every iota of his energy and passion for that which we hope someday, by the grace of Atua who made all things, will someday be a republic, not unlike, perhaps, that from which the Plover came, and by the grace of Atua shall safely return. Also we enclose ten shillings as a gift for the child.

  * * *

  Moonless night. Overcast. A thorough and incredible dark, as if the concept of light had never been invented. The only hint of light other than the boat’s running lights is the Plover’s wake, a bioluminescent furl. Pipa had been buckled into her chair in the stern but she mewled so plaintively that Declan finally picked her up and grumbling carted her around the boat until she indicated where she wanted to be; to his amazement, she wanted to sit at the very tip of the stern. This is a particularly and remarkably poor idea, Pippish, said Declan, but she was so weirdly insistent to be exactly there and nowhere else that he finally surrendered, muttering darkly, and he arranged her sitting up, facing forward, and strapped her down with every scrap of rope and line he could find; I may never get you unstrapped, he murmured, and you will forever be the figurehead of the Plover, every ship no matter how small should have a figurehead, isn’t that right, you know what a figurehead is? Heck, sure you know what a figurehead is, you are probably some kind of raw genius and just can’t get your genius out your windows anymore. She stared at him with those eyes like pools like seas like windows. It was so dark he could see only the faintest outline of her head, although her hands seemed to glow gently. The terns that had been with them all day as they roared northwest had faded away as dusk fell, but the gull was again silently floating exactly nine feet above the stern, last he noticed, at sunset.

  Back in the cabin he slows the boat to a crawl and stares into the murk. Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair, said old Ed Burke. Exactly so. Misneach. No way I can see the bastard’s ship, can I? But he can’t see us either. So I’ll smell him. Old shitbucket smelling like rust and oil and dead things. He must be stopped for the night. No one can navigate in this. Should have told the pip to maintain total pip silence. As he thinks this he notices her hands waving madly; is she waving at him to stop? He shuts the engine off. Blacker than the blackest black. The tiniest of lapping wavelets ticking against the boat. She flaps her right hand. Is she signaling? Can she signal? Jesus. He peers and squints; nothing; but there is the faintest whiff of diesel fuel. Isn’t there? Is there? There is. He shuts off all lights. It is the darkest night in the history of the world. How can I still see her hand? How is her hand lit up? Weird. He slips up to the stern. Her eyes are wild. He bends down to whisper directly into her ear. Pipa, don’t move. Don’t make a sound, okay? I’ll be right back. Everything will be okay. I am going to get your dad and we will be back in about ten minutes, okay? We’ll come up the stern as quiet as we can. Don’t make a sound when you see him, okay? It’s real important that you don’t make a sound. Don’t let any of your birds make a sound either if they are around, okay? I’ll be right back. He slips back to the stern and strips down to his black shirt and shorts and eases over the side and vanishes into the darkest night in the history of the world. For a moment Pipa sees a shiver of bioluminescence opening like a fan behind Declan and then the dark closes in again like a tide.

  * * *

  Beneath the boat there are fish so tiny no eye can see them. There are fish bigger than the boat. There are mammals and mollusks and cetaceans and crustaceans. Far below sprawled at an awkward angle as if its neck was broken by the fall there is a warship so covered with mud and kelp that its name and numbers are lost. Barracuda swim through its corridors. Fifty feet away there is another warship from another country. It too is now a reef. Once it was designed for death and now it is a nursery. The two ships sank together one evening. It took all day for them to sink. Men rode them down through the darkening water. On one ship there was a boy of fourteen. He was tall for his age and had learned that if he did not speak when questioned but only nodded assent his interlocutors assumed he was older than he was. He had loved the sea ever since he could remember and probably before. He first heard it when his father carried him down to the shore when he was two years old. They lived in an apartment in the city and his mother and father borrowed a car and they drove down to the sea with the boy and his sister. His sister was afraid of the sea. He could not imagine how that could be so. He ran to it like it was waiting for him. It thrummed and seethed in his dreams. He wanted to be in it and of it and on it and under it. At age ten he ran away from home and tried to go to sea and his father was desperate and searched the docks all night and found him just before dawn huddled near a crab boat. At age twelve he ran away again and boarded a freighter and was loading cargo until the bosun discovered him and put him ashore. At fourteen he stood as tall as he could and nodded silent assent to questions and the navy took him and he had been at sea one month and one day when his ship sank. The ship was terribly damaged in the morning and the bow half sank first and then the stern half. The bow sank in the morning and the stern sank at dusk. The boy huddled in a room alone as the ship sank. He could see his sister’s face and hear his mother weeping and feel his father’s hand on his shoulder. His father had lean long hands as hard as wood but they had never touched the boy with anything other than the most gentle and tender affection. Everywhere else in the stern as it sank there was roaring and rending but in the room where the boy was the sea whispered in ever so politely and slowly. The boy kept his head above water for as long as he could not from duty but from love, because he loved his mother and father and sister and wanted to see their amused faces and feel his father’s hand on his shoulder, but finally he closed his eyes and opened his mouth and sank to the bottom of the room and the last thing he heard was the thrumming and seething of the sea just as he had heard it in his dreams when he was small.

  * * *

  The Tanets is stopped for the night. Enrique in the pilot house, smoking a cigarette, absorbed in charts. Piko in the stern. The impassive crewman amidships, watching Piko. The silence of a darkened stage just before the play begins. Enrique thinking of Something Somethingivić. A loss is a loss. Men have been lost before. Many men. The way of the world. The song of the sea. We all lose what we start
with. The nature of the beast. It happened to me. It happens to everyone. An excellent pilot. He had a brother. The brother who sang like an angel. I had brothers. Not one of us could sing, however. Mama told us that! It comes time to leave and you leave. The way of the world. The nature of the beast. The world is a beast. You make your way. You leave and you do not come back. What is there to go back for? An ocean of dust. I made my way. I have a boat. I go where I want. The laws do not apply to me. What laws? I take what I like. Who is to say no to me? They will not come for me. They will not take anything of mine. I am the shark now. I go where I want. I take what I want. They think the law will protect them but there is no law. There are only people who believe in law. If you do not believe in law there is no law. I am the law. I teach them the true law. The true law is that there are sharks and there are the things that sharks eat. That is the law. If I want fish I take fish. If I want timber I take timber. If I want guns I take guns. If you can take something, take it. That is the law. So much talk about the law. What is there to talk about? Talk talk talk. My papa talk talk talk about the law and they came for him and said they were the law and so much for his talk talk talk about the law, where was the law then? There is no law. The law is I am the law. If I want a pilot I take a pilot. This pilot is not so good as Something Somethingivić. Perhaps he will be lost too. A loss is a loss. His child will learn the law. The small child. Better to learn the lesson young, like I did. I am doing his child a great service. The shark is a great teacher.

  * * *

  Pipa hears everything there is to hear. Fish sliding beneath the boat. Spirits overhead. Stars singing. The boat groaning gently in its oaken voice. The rigging keening. The engine box yearning for the engine. An albatross, very low, a foot above the surface, waiting for that one moment in a thousand when a fish has risen too close to the glittering night. The flitter of water against the boat. The keel yearning for motion. The infinitesimal shifting of stale almonds in their hidden bags and corners. The keen atomic whine of the steel belts with which she is belted in place. Her mother’s gasp as her father made love to his wife slowly silently slowly in their room down the hall which they did not think she heard but yes she did and knew it for a rich ancient sound, not fearful but densely mysterious, a summer night forest sound, thick and moist. The sigh of their grizzled dog by the fire. The plummeting of woodcocks in love. The probing tongues of flickers. The thump of an owl against a vole. The shimmer of snakes. The roil of squid far beneath the boat. The infinitesimal dissolution of the pages of Declan’s six-volume set of sight reduction tables. The shimmer and slosh of fuel in the tanks. The clench of barnacles against the hull. The shriveling of the last oranges and lemons and limes. The infinitesimal rocking of Piko’s cigars in their redolent box. The sizzle of the match he used to light his cigars on their porch in the woods at the end of the day when he sat barefoot and weary with Pipa on his lap and told her stories of the seethe of the sea. The plop of her mother’s tears on the furl of ferns as she hung the laundry after she knew she would die during the summer the osprey came and sat every night in the trees outside Pipa’s window which osprey never do Papa said so but they did that time. The hiss of a cigar doused by the sea; two splashes deep in the dark not far from the Plover; and then a third splash, quieter but more thorough, as if something larger but more familiar with water had entered the sea; something that knew the sea and the sea knew that something; something that spoke the language of the sea and knew what song to sing on entering; so that the sea accepted it gently, and knew it as a native child with salt in the blood.

  * * *

  The Plover slides away through the epic dark. Piko dripping in the bow with Pipa in his arms. Declan steering, one eye on his charts, one ear for any hint of a hint of pursuit. Wavelets murmuring lapping licking the boat. Boy, it is dark. Thank God it’s so dark. No one can find us if we stay quiet and slide out of the picture. South by west. Am I bleeding? Feck. Fecking feck. Don’t bleed on the charts. All right. Minor hole. A dent in Dec. Had worse holes. A hole man. Holistic. All right. No stars no moon no fecking comets we might just make this. We might just pull this off. Jesus blessed Christmas. Assault and fecking battery on the high seas. Kidnapping. Armed kidnapping. Jesus. A guy sets out on his boat for a little solo voyage and it turns into a fecking adventure novel. All right. Check charts again. There’s a glob of little tiny islands and atolls and such southwest of here, Declan had explained that morning to the gull on the roof, who looked interested but noncommital. We could get good and lost in there if we pull this off. We get Piko back, we slide away into the endless, we’re golden. No bigger boat will ever find us if we just stay low. There’s a million little islands out here. We could hide out awhile. We get good and lost and then slide east. He doesn’t know which direction we went and we get lost and then cut east. You with me? North we hit weather we don’t want, west we hit countries we don’t want to hit, south we hit countries we don’t want to hit, east is good, man. East is water followed by water. Water is the country we want. You with me here, bird? You know, if you were a good traveling companion, you would say something sometimes. Didn’t you ever read books where birds can talk and things like that? Maybe the pip can talk to you. Maybe she can talk to birds. Are gulls like the silent punks of the bird world? Are you guys all in a gang or what? Is that the deal with the red dots on your beaks? Like tattoos? Man, you can talk to me—I won’t tell anyone you squealed. No? Yes? No.

  * * *

  They ran all night, Declan at the wheel; he wanted to be as far away as far away could be when the sun came up. If it came up. You never know about the sun, you know. People get all cocky about the sun coming up tomorrow, I don’t get cocky about the sun coming up. The sun comes up, then you can say the sun came up, but don’t be getting all expectatious about it, one thing I have learned is to have no expectations and assumptions, man, that’s the road to hell. Whatever you are sure of, don’t be. Can’t be crushed if you never expected anything. Vote for the man who promises least; he’ll be the least disappointing, says old Ed. There’s a guy who never expected anything. Born on one island, died on another. That’s what I’ll expect, to die on an island. Some tiny island out here in the endless friendless. Bleached bones a harbor for coconut crabs. That’s about right. Something will use me for shelter. So I’ll be useful at last. The old man told me enough fecking times I would never be useful but how wrong he was, the old shark. I caught a lot of fish from old mother ocean, didn’t I, and I own the fecking boat free and clear, and no one owes me a penny, and I owe no one, and we got Piko back on the boat, and I am so tired I couldn’t spit if you gave me the spit and a running head start.

  Toward dawn he saw dimly ahead what he so wanted to see, a welter of tiny islets and atolls, some baked naked and some dense with low trees and bush; he eased the boat into a particularly bushy one, slid into a tiny inlet, and tied into some trees. He was so weary he could not move, and he stood there, head hanging, unable to even run through the automatic closing-up-shop checklist in his head, the one he had run through every night for years, depthtideanchorsenginehousedpee. For an awed moment nothing moved, not the sift of the sea beyond the inlet, not a leaf, not a grain of sand, not a crab on the beach; and then everything moved gently all at once, a swirl of sand, a crash of surf, a clash of crab, a quiver in the thicket of trees; Declan shivered awake from his standing sleep, and gaped as a bird with a titanic wingspan floated silently across the mouth of the inlet; gray above and white below, wings easily six feet wide, a pink bill, hooked at the very tip; an albatross! But it was gone as quickly as it had appeared. Declan turned to go below, but turned again to see if the gull was still sitting there on the roof; and there it was, wide awake, startled, staring at the air where the albatross had been.

  IV

  0° SOUTH, 169° EAST

  IN HIS OFFICE on Tungaru the minister for fisheries and marine resources and foreign affairs is being interviewed by the editors of the three largest newspapers in the islan
ds; both radio stations are also represented, and there is a man with a stylus drawing pictures of the event in wax for reproduction on cloth and paper, and there is the single television station’s single television camera, operated by a man standing on a box that once contained bullets, and there is a man with an ancient camera that may or may not be loaded with film, and there is such a crowd of clerks and secretaries and shopkeepers and burbling children in the building that the staircase outside his open office door groans with the weight of their quiet dreams. The minister for fisheries and marine resources and foreign affairs is today announcing his candidacy for first minister, minister of all affairs, minister to whom all other ministers must report and apply, and his announcement is remarkable news for many reasons; he is respected and liked by everyone, and so all would wish him well no matter what he wished to achieve; he is attempting to leap, in one electoral day, from the populous third tier of the ministry to the lonely pinnacle of the first, disregarding the tradition of years spent in the Kabuki theater of the second, where ministers pose and preen and take mistresses and conduct quietly savage campaigns against one another as they jockey for the final prize; and he is announcing not only his candidacy, which is a surprise but not a shock, but his platform, which is stunning.

  I wish to make all the poverties die, he says, to the scratchy music of skittering pens and slowly revolving ceiling fans. I wish to establish a republic of free people beholding to no fading empire or nation or country at all. I wish to establish a republic where every tenth person, male or female, young or old, is chosen a National Dreamer. I wish to catch every drop of rain that falls on every island in such a manner that we do not ever again have to purchase water or pay for other nations to construct factories for the cleaning of the water of the sea which is our mother. I wish to teach every child to read and write starting at the age of one, and have annual competitions for the most amazing stories written by children between the ages of one and nine. I wish to make the use of automobilities in the islands an enterprise so burdened with onerous taxes that eventually automobilities are used only for a national taxi service. I wish to file judicial cases in the courts of various former empires and nations and countries for the repayment of one-fifth of the profits accrued by commercial endeavors over the last three centuries, such funds, if collected, to be stored untouchably in the National Dreamer Bank until further notice, the other four-fifths of the profits acknowledged to be our contributions to the health of their children over the last three centuries, our best wishes. I wish to establish a new ministerial position, the ministry for children, such position to be held by a child between the ages of seven and eleven. I wish to establish a police force with two boats for every island of whatever size or nature, including atolls. I wish to establish an army of thinkers who will imagine and execute ways for the republic to borrow the energy of the sea which is our mother. We can use our mother’s muscle; that is not silly talk. Do we not each of us use our mother’s energies every moment of our lives? Are we not in fact made by and shaped by and consist of the energy of our mothers? Well, then. I wish to establish many more things, gently and respectfully, without guns or shouting. I think we are all children even if we have old bodies and we should make a republic that runs on the wonder of children whether we are old or young children. I think because we are poor and tiny that we are out of the way of war finally and so we can invent new ways to live that bigger countries cannot invent yet because they still are in the way of war. I think we could be such an amazing place that people all over the world will come to see what we became. I think many people who live here agree with me in the chapels of their hearts. The symbol of my candidacy is the lorikeet, which as you know is a most beautiful little bird, friendly and gentle, which used to be everywhere here but was wiped out, but now there are a few living here again, and if Atua is gracious to us, and we work hard and gentle together, the lorikeets will come back and be everywhere here in the trees like they used to be. We will be like the lorikeets, almost dead but coming back amazing! That is all I have to say this afternoon. Thank you for the gift of your ears. As my gift to you, we have water here for anyone who is thirsty. Ti abu, farewell.