The Plover

by Brian Doyle

  Why is he so stubborn about not landing anywhere?

  I’m not sure. I don’t think he had the happiest childhood, for one thing.

  Why is he so gruff?

  He wasn’t always.

  Why does he want to be alone?

  Does he?

  Seems like it.

  I am not sure he does, really. I think some of him is a mask.

  Was he ever married? kids?

  No.

  Girlfriends?

  Yes, but never for very long. I think he was leery about letting anyone on his boat.

  His real boat? This boat?

  Metaphor.

  Was he wilder then?

  He was … looser, I’d say. He’d do anything and go anywhere. He was the one who always wanted to go on crazy trips in the boat. He used to work on his family’s dairy on the Oregon coast and fish on the side, so adventures in the boat were a real kick for him. He was always after me to go with him to lost beaches and remote islands and stuff. That’s why he put in the mast and the strange rigging system, so he could go farther without paying for gas.

  Did you go on adventures?

  Not much. I had my work and Elly and the pip and then Elly got sick, so.

  What happened to Declan’s family’s dairy?

  He didn’t say.

  Why did he take off on his own in the boat?

  Not sure. I think he wanted to cut all cords with his family and town and land and stuff. That’s why he’s weird about landing places, I guess.

  Doesn’t he have any other friends than you?

  I thought he did.

  How did you guys get to be friends?

  Met in a bar on the coast. There was an incident and he jumped in to help me and we got to be friends.

  What incident?

  Hey, look, a frigate bird, said Piko. Lovely bird, although the Hawaiian word for it is ‘iwa, the thief.

  Doesn’t he like us? said Pipa. If he likes us why won’t he come with us to Makana?

  I think he likes people more than he wants to admit even to himself, said Piko gently. And I think he likes you the most of anyone in the world, Pip, which really confuses him. I think he decided to be one kind of guy but liking us is rattling that kind of guy and that’s why he’s gruff and grumpy. I think maybe we just leave him alone and be gentle and maybe things will work out. You can’t make people be who they don’t want to be yet. You just be gentle and let them get there themselves. Your mother taught me that. You taught me that. Maybe someday you will be a teacher.

  Every time I see any kind of bird now I think of Mama a little, said Pipa, and there was a long silence as the frigate bird drifted away and Taromauri looked away and the minister poked at the fire.

  * * *

  Okay, time! said Pipa to her classroom many years later. Now, I know you all took this seriously and started something fun, because I trust you, and your homework for the weekend is just keep taking your projects out for a walk. See where they go. Don’t plan and plot them much if at all. Just let them go where they want to go. Let them have adventures. You would be surprised where projects go if you let them have their heads and sail off free as a bee. Ideas take on lives of their own and become quite real. One of the most fascinating things about human beings is your imagination and how it can create something that was never in the world before in billions of years and will never be in the world again in that form in billions of years to come. Isn’t that amazing? And you yourselves are of course imaginative adventures that never were in the world before and will never be again in this form. Your parents imagined you into being and here you are but you are different every day and every hour and every minute. You are essentially stories yourselves of course, unwinding and unreeling all the time, never knowing your ending; you tell yourselves every moment. Perhaps some aspect of maturity is when you begin to tell the story of yourself rather than other people telling your story.

  Mrs. Kuapapa?

  Yes, Thomas?

  Will you tell us more about that day you were on the boat with your father and the tall lady? When you were little?

  Well … do we have time? How many minutes do we have left in the hour?

  Pause.

  Tenteen!

  No …

  Seven! says Thomas, who has secretly been using his fingers beneath his desk.

  Seven it is, very good, Thomas. All right, I will tell you one more story, and we will save the last minutes today for singing, and then you will all go home and tell your mothers that they are the greatest coolest sweetest mothers ever, okay? And don’t forget your homework, to finish your project.

  Okay, Mrs. K!

  Well, we stayed on that little island all day, and some of us thought maybe we would sleep overnight there maybe, because the weather was fine, but our captain said that islands were dangerous and boats were safe, so we got back on the boat in the late afternoon, and prepared to continue toward these islands.

  This island?

  This very one, says Pipa. Now here’s my story: there was a storm on the horizon, and the captain was worried about that, so my friend Danilo and I sat in the bow and decided to sing the storm away. He said if we closed our eyes and sang from the bottom of the bottom of our bones we could make a song bigger than any storm, and the storm would dissolve and vanish, and the captain would be delighted, so we did it. Believe it or not, when we opened our eyes after singing, that storm was gone!

  All gone?

  As gone as gone could be, says Pipa. Not a hint or sign or suggestion of a storm. If you had never seen the seed of a storm you would have stared at that sky that day and never consider that there could ever be something anything like a storm.

  Three minutes, Mrs. K! sings out Thomas.

  Thank you, Thomas. All right, now, let us sing ourselves out of class today, out of the week, into the weekend, ready, all together …

  * * *

  This fecking hole, says Declan to the hull patch, refuses to surrender. This is a hell of a hole. You wouldn’t think water could punch a hole so thoroughly in wood but you would be stone cold wrong about that, my wooden friend. Because this is not fecking water. This is the ocean. The ocean is a killer, my friend. Everyone’s always talking about how beautiful it is and how it’s the mother of all life and how it’s the food factory of the world and the hope of the future and how a million new medicines are hidden in it and eventually we will be living in it comfortably somehow in undersea cities and everything will be sweetness and light and we will be chatting amiably with the fish and all but that is crap deeper than the ocean in its deepest parts. The ocean is a professional assassin, my friend. The ocean kills more beings per second than you could count in a million years. The ocean is a vast collection of good ways to die. You and me are just fighting a holding action here. In the long term the ocean will eventually rise and wash over everything and we will all start over again from scratch as monocellular beings in the swashing tide. In the short term you know and I know that I will have to eventually retire you and thoroughly rebuild the hull here and stitch all sorts of materials into this hole in a vain effort to make the repair of the hole stronger than the wood which used to be there before the hole. But the ocean knows it cut a hole there once, see, the ocean is smart and never forgets, and it will poke and probe and question and examine my work and we will always be niggling and negotiating about this particular piece of the boat forever after. Fecking fecking feck. You, however, my friend, are doing a fine and excellent job of holding off the mother of all life. You are a terrific crew member, working harder and saying less than a lot of the people who have supposedly worked on this boat over the years. I name no names. But you, my friend, you are going to have a permanent place of honor on the boat. I think I will mount you in the cabin when you are done down here, so that every time I look up and see you I will think you were a damned fine hull patch, yes you were. You were the best hull patch we ever had. In the long history of hull patches you are an all-star patch and
no mistake. If ever I sell the boat, God forbid such blasphemy, I will take you off the wall of the cabin and bring you with me, to the ends of the earth, from sheer respect. You did good. Your mama would be proud, whoever she was, deep in the woods. You did good.

  * * *

  Taromauri can smell the islands now, full in the face—a rich redolent soiled muddy seething flowering sort of orange smell, she says. Smells have colors? asks Danilo. O yes, she says. Don’t they for you? They do for me. My daughter had a gray-green smell. My husband for some reason has a brilliant yellow smell, almost golden but not quite. Pipa smells white with hints of green and blue. The minister agrees wholly with this line of talk. O yes, he says, I concur with the lady. I knew a man who had the deepest black smell. You would think this intimated evilry or criminosity on his part but this was not at all true and he was the most calm gentle generous man you ever met. Lovely man. By skin color himself a very light brown, rather like cinnamon, but a deep robustuous black smell as regards personally. And there was a woman in my office who smelled purplish—something like a cross between magenta and maroon. Wonderful woman, remarkably honest. I suspect she is unemployed at present as a result of her unfortunate honesty. A brief woman, but filled with a serene energy that was a real pleasure to work with. A serenergy, as it were. I believe she was the shortest mature person I ever met, but perhaps as a counterbalance to her height her gifts were quite tall. A rich field for speculatory activity, that. Because how very often I have met large muscled powerful men who are quite gentle, and short thin men who are quite violent. Indeed the latter seem to employ the generally reluctant former, as a rule, in matters of criminacious pursuit. If other fields of employment could be found for the large muscled latter, possibly they would retire en masse from service to the short thin former, leaving the former without their usual and traditional troops, and if the violent do not have assistance, would not their efficiency rating, violence-wise, decline and plummet? What good are generals without privates to do their work for them? And imagine the new areas to which the strength and energies of the large muscled persons could be gainfully applied. Ship repair, for example, which would certainly please, for example, our captain. I should say here that even in a career in politics and government, in which a good deal of cursing and foul and vulgar language is common, even quotidian, I have not heard quite the parade and procession of phrases we have heard in the last hour from belowdecks. Imagine that man’s verbal acuity and creativity turned, for example, to poetry, or to song.

  * * *

  Declan calls a business meeting at dusk, when they are all back on board and Danilo and Taromauri have established Enrique back in the tent, and he says by my calculation this is our last night before we hit the main islands tomorrow, probably in the afternoon. The plan is to unload Piko and Pipa and Taromauri, who have offered to take the burned guy with them and leave him at a hospital; Danilo and the minister have asked to be let off also, closer to a town. I have to stand in at some point for fuel and fruit and maybe bless me a cigar, but after that I am back on the road. Questions?

  But for once there were no questions, no answers, no jokes, no teasing, no requests for songs, no moaning about o my God fish for dinner again, no remarks about the terns flickering around Pipa in her chair, no stories unfolding and unreeling of Taromauri’s life on her island or Danilo’s wanderings through the forest, no halting examination of Enrique as to who he might be and why he had lived his life as he had, no questions for Declan about the boat or his past on land or his plans for the future, no stories of Elly from Piko or Pipa, no discussion of Pipa and the gull, no mention of the albatross who still floated behind them nine feet over the stern in the place where the gull had floated for so long, no teasing the minister for his bright pink feet, no further questions of the minister as to the shape of the immense new blue nation he saw before him like a horizon, no piercing questions from Pipa to Declan about why he doesn’t want to come with her and her dad and Taromauri instead of sailing off alone are you afraid of people afraid of us what are you afraid of anyway, no remarks from Piko about the changing color of the sea as they approached a line of ancient seamounts or the subtle change in species of fish, no dark mutterings from Declan about the hull patch or the ridiculous embarrassing fecking sailcloth that looked more like fecking old laundry hung out to dry than it did anything fecking else, no quiet speculation about Pipa’s hands working infinitesimally better than they did weeks ago although her feet remain pure useless dangle that’s for sure, no declaiming of the wit and wisdom of Edmund Burke as the last light fails and the bow and stern lights were lit, no laughter from below as someone discovered yet another blessed bag of desiccated almonds o my God how many bags of these things did you start out with o my God, no quiet laughter as Piko says to Declan sweet Jesus Dec were you really going to attack that guy with a bow and arrows, no songs from Danilo and Pipa their voices so braided and embracing that Taromauri sat rapt with her hands folded as if in prayer, no halting beginnings of stories from Enrique about his brothers and their dusty childhood and the smell of mesquite and juniper and pine in the mountains above their village, no stories from the minister about how as a boy he and his friends swam down into sea caves and fought with eels and octopus, no halting stories from Pipa as for the first time she tried to explain how she would leave the warm coffin of her body and send her spirit even unto the depths of the sea.

  Not a word, not a sound, not a smile; and again they went to bed early, without dinner around the hatch cover, for no one was hungry at all.

  * * *

  They sailed all morning without the engine, Declan conserving what fuel he had left, and the wind being perfect for scudding along toward what looked like a cloud bank on the horizon but that slowly turned green and revealed itself as a mountain with a crown of mist, and by early afternoon they could see the soaring green cliffs of a large island and the low brown profile of a lean low smaller island to the west.

  As everyone else puttered around the boat doing whatever they were doing, Declan pretended to pore over his charts. West and then west, that was the plan, and here I am going east blessed east. Jesus. There were to be no emotions and no feelings and no discussions or misunderstandings or misapprehensions or expectations or illusions or complications on this trip and now there’s nothing but complications and emotions. Jesus blessed Christmas. Emotions all over the boat like fish guts. And not even the gull is here anymore. Some fecking crew. I had one who died and now I have six, not counting the albatross. At this rate if I keep going I’ll have twelve, soon enough. The Jesus blessed apostles. Weren’t there thirteen of those? One got cut from the team. Poor bastard. Like the gull. Should I land with them? Should I? I need food and fuel and I have to fix the fecking hull. You know you have to hove to sometime and do that, man. Face the facts. This is the time. Stay with them for a while. Hang out with the pip. I could do with a month of the pip. Maybe work her hands and get her back up to speed. Cigars with Piko. Fresh fruit. Start over. The best captain keeps his crew. Fish a little, farm a little. Sit in the sun, smell the orchids. Watch the pip grow up. Could do worse. Way worse.

  But he caught himself musing, and corrected course. Someday. Sure. One of these days. Better keep moving. Misneach. Stay with the boat. The old bucket has served me well. We’ll be back. Sure we will. We’ll check in here and there. Absolutely. No worries. More to see. More sea. There’s always time to land and stand. Absolutely. They’ll all be fine. They don’t need me. I’d be a burden. They have their plans, two by two. Not me. Solo voyage. Safer that way. West and then west. Stay with the plan. Stay with the boat.

  But when he turned away from his charts and stepped out of the cabin to reef the sail and start the engine, he felt Pipa staring at him; and for all his sinewy strength, and testy courage, and prickly defiant personality, and absolute assurance that on this boat, on these worn cedar planks, on this pitching little sunburned stage he was unquestioned and unquestionable master and island resolute
, his decisions irrevocable and his independence untrammeled, he quailed, and felt a tiny shiver of shame. He stepped back into the cabin. Through the bullet hole in the window he called to Danilo to furl the sail, as the island grew closer and its sharp cliffs ever more clear and distinct.

  * * *

  Their last hours on the Plover were hurried and harried and there was no time for conversation or lingering farewells. They packed up Enrique, who could now stand and walk with help, and Taromauri furled and stored the tent below; they also dismantled Pipa’s chair. Declan insisted that they take it with them but Piko said politely nope, there’s chairs there, you’ll need the parts for something or other, you know you will. Danilo and the minister packed up and picked up below, and scrubbed all extant surfaces to a shine; Taromauri and Pipa scrubbed the cabin roof, removing all traces of the gull’s naturally excretatious behavior, as the minister said. When they were done on the roof Taromauri knelt by the water tank and said something quietly and the warbler came out shyly and flew up on her shoulder. Declan said let’s have one last meal on the hatch cover what say but still no one was hungry. Piko apologized for not getting around to fixing the bullet hole in the window, I really should have got to that, Dec, and Declan said no worries, you had a lot to do, I’ll get to it, I have putty somewhere or chewing gum or I can always use albatross poop or something. Danilo and the minister shook Declan’s hand and said formally that they were most grateful for their passage and while they were not at the moment in a position to fully reimburse the captain for his remarkable generosity they were in a position to make a down payment, which Declan refused, grinning, at which point Danilo said this debt will not be forgotten and will not go unpaid, and Declan said damn right, you guys owe me serious, pay up whenever I am back this way next, plus interest, just kidding. Enrique, supported by Piko, stood and shook Declan’s hand and said quietly thank you and Declan said yeh and Enrique said I am deeply grateful and Declan said yeh, good luck. Piko put his hand on Declan’s shoulder and said Dec, I can’t thank you enough for the lift, we really needed it and you were so generous, you pretend to be a grump but you’re not, and Declan said no worries, brother, anytime, we’ll do it again sometime, you take care of the pipster, I’ll miss you guys, I really will, who ever thought I would say such a sappy thing but it’s true. Taromauri sat on the stern railing with Pipa in her lap and Declan knelt and said listen, Pippish, sailing with you has been the most fun I ever had on the boat and I have been on the boat a long time, you can come with me on the boat anytime you want in this lifetime or any next lifetimes we get, I think you are a cool and amazing person, and being with you has been a pleasure and an honor, if I ever have a kid I hope she will be half as great as you, and it was cool to see you get your voice back, and I will keep your mom in my heart okay? and Pipa stared at him silently until Piko cleared his throat and she said thank you, Dec, I love you, Dec, I do, I love you, I love you, and she started to cry and Declan went to the cabin to be absolutely sure of his charts because what if he was off course, what if he thought he was headed in the right direction but had got turned around somehow, wouldn’t that be bad?