The Shipping News

by Annie Proulx

  Porto Santo (Panamanian) from the High Seas

  Zhok (Russian) from the Fishing Grounds

  Ziggurat Zap (U.S.) from the High Seas

  And so forth.

  At four Quoyle gave the shipping news to Tert Card, whose moist ear lay against the phone receiver, shoulder hunched while he typed. Suffering from the stiff neck again.

  Car doors slammed outside, Billy Pretty’s voice seesawed. Nutbeem snapped up alertly.

  “There’s Mr. Jack Buggit and Billy Pretty back from the car wreck. Moose collision while you were gone, Quoyle. Two dead. And the moose.”

  Saved again, thought Quoyle.

  “I hope they got pictures from every angle, enough to carry us through the thin spots,” said Tert Card, typing Quoyle’s shipping news.

  Minutes passed and the door stayed closed. Billy’s voice had stopped. Quoyle knew they were looking at his boat. Well, he’d taken the plunge. Smiled, rehearsing a story of how he’d decided on the spur of the moment to buy a boat and get it over, how he almost felt transformed, ready to take on the sea, to seize his heritage.

  The door opened. Billy Pretty scuttled in, went straight to his desk without a look at Quoyle. Jack Buggit, hair studded with raindrops, strode halfway across the room, stopped in front of Quoyle’s desk, hissed through a mouthful of smoke, “What the hell you buy that thing for?”

  “Why, everybody was after me to buy a boat! It looked as good as any of them. It had a good price. I can get back and forth a lot faster now. It’s a speedboat.”

  “It’s a shitboat!” said Jack Buggit. “Best thing you can do is get rid of it some dark night.” He slammed into his glass office and they heard him mumbling, striking matches, opening and shutting desk drawers. Nutbeem and Tert Card went to the door and stared out at Quoyle’s boat.

  “What’s wrong with it?” asked Quoyle, throwing out his hands. “What’s wrong with it? Everybody tells me to buy a boat and when I buy one they tell me I shouldn’t have done it.”

  “I told you,” said Billy Pretty, “I told you buy a nice little rodney, nice little sixteen-foot rodney with a seven-horsepower engine, nice little hull that holds the water, a good flare on it, not too much hollowing, a little boat that bears good under the bows. You bought a wallowing cockeyed bastard no good for nothing but coasting ten feet from shore when it’s civil. Hull is as humpy as a lop sea, there’s no motor well, the shape is poor, she’ll wallow and throw in water, pitch up and down and rear and sink.”

  Nutbeem said nothing, but he looked at Quoyle as though, in unwrapping a beribboned gift, he had discovered nylon socks. Billy Pretty started up again.

  “That boat was built by a dumb stookawn of a kid, Reeder Gouch’s kid that run off about a month after he built it. No ability at all. Not only is it no good for nothing, but it makes you cry to look at it. How could anybody build a boat with a stem got a reverse curve in it? I never seen a boat with a stem like that. They don’t make them like that here. Reeder was going to burn it, he said. Too bad he didn’t. I told you, get a nice little rodney, that’s what you want. Or a motor dory. Or a good speedboat. You ought to fill that thing up with stones and launch it to the bottom. Go down to Nunny Bag Cove and talk to those fellers, Uncle Shag Dismal and Alvin Yark and those fellers. Get one of them to build you a nice little craft. They’ll give you something that fits the water, something’s got a bit of harmony between the two ends of the boat.”

  Drumroll of rain. Stupid Man Does Wrong Thing Once More.

  10

  The Voyage of Nutbeem

  “Voyage, an outward and homeward passage; although the passage from one port to another is often referred to in insurance policies as a voyage.”

  THE MARINER’S DICTIONARY

  THE AUNT in her woolen coat when Quoyle came into the motel room. Tin profile with a glass eye. A bundle on the floor under the window. Wrapped in a bed sheet, tied with net twine.

  “Where are the kids?” said Quoyle. “What’s that?”

  “They’re staying over at Dennis and Beety’s house. I thought they’d be better off there, considering. After the experience of this morning. Warren.” She pointed at the bundle. “She died during the day under the bed, just her paws sticking out. All alone. I came in and found her.” She did not cry, nor did her voice skitter. Quoyle patted the black shoulder, felt the pad stiff under his hand. Dog hairs on the sleeve. The aunt hiding deep in her coat somewhere.

  “The girls like it at Beety’s. Playing chip-chip and colors with their kids. The Buggits’ve got kids the same ages. Begged for Sunshine and Bunny to stay over. I didn’t think you’d mind. Considering. I told them Warren had to go away. I don’t think they knew what I meant. Sunshine is too little, but Bunny wanted to know exactly when Warren was coming back. I hope you can explain it better.” Voice even as if reciting the alphabet, halfway between groaning and silence.

  “Poor old Warren. I’m sorry, Aunt.” And he was sorry. Slouched in the chair, levered the cap from a bottle of beer. Thought of Bunny’s murderous dreams that woke them all, the child sweaty, pupils like Billy’s ink bottle. Hoped she wouldn’t rouse Dennis and Beety in the night.

  “What did Dennis say about fixing up the place?” Wearily.

  “Well,” said the aunt, hanging her coat away, tugging off her boots, “he thinks if he rouses into it with somebody to help him, he could have it so we could get into it—roof over our heads—in two weeks. Believe it or not. With that in mind I tackled the desk clerk and got us the famous bachelor apartment through that door”—pointing at the side wall—“for the rest of the time we’re here plus this room for what we’re paying for this room alone. Look.” She opened the other door, displayed a single bed and a tiny kitchenette. “You can sleep in there. I’ll stay on in here with the girls. At least there’ll be a little more privacy and a little more room. At least we can fix coffee in the morning, something to eat and not have to test our constitutions downstairs. I’ll pick up some food tomorrow.” Got out her whiskey bottle, poured a little.

  “Now, as to what young Dennis is going to do to the house. Says if you’ll help him on the weekends it’ll go right along. It’ll be rough, but we can manage. It can’t be any worse than this place. Fixing up the rest of it will take right on into fall. He thinks we’d want to look into a generator, get a gas stove and couple tanks of propane. He can get hold of a fellow’s got a bulldozer to clear a road from the old glove factory to the dooryard. Can do that tomorrow, he says, if we can afford it. I told him we could because we had to. But the first thing is that there’s got to be some pilings set, some kind of dock built so Dennis can get back and forth, bring over the building supplies by boat. There’s a fellow, he says—I forgot his name—used to build wharves all up and down the coast. He’s retired now, but he could take on a small job like this and finish it up in a few days if he had a crowd to do the heavy bits. Be a lot faster, Dennis says, than driving all the way around.”

  Quoyle nodded, but his face was dull. The aunt sighed, thought that if she could scrape away her old flesh down to the young bones she would do it herself. She could tackle a new job, master a boat, rebuild the house, get over the loss of a cheating mate. She hauled out a wad of sketches and lists, long columns of arithmetic, spread them over the table. Stubby fingers, the nails cut straight across.

  “I wish I could find my calculator,” she said. “Dennis figures everything up, has to add it three times, loses his place. I can’t add at all anymore, seems like. They say if you do sums ten times a day you’ll never get senile. But that argues that bankers should be geniuses, so that’s not right. Thickest heads in the world.” Quoyle hitched his chair around, pretended to take an interest. Man Lukewarm on Ancestral Home Way Out on the Point.

  “The biggest problem is putting in the insulation. If we’re living in the house, can’t very well tear out all that old plaster and lath. Take forever and choke you to death. So he had this other idea. What he’d do is put in new studding right over the exis
ting walls in every room, then lay up the insulation and put your wallboard over it. Be like a double house. Especially since I don’t want that vinyl stuff outside. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘that vinyl siding makes a warm house, never has to be painted, you can buy it on time.’ I said I wouldn’t have it on my coffin.”

  She drank her whiskey in two swallows, the single ice cube clanking. Quoyle was surprised to see her pour another. Losing the old dog.

  “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-doo-dle-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 stern 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 halfinch 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 stern. 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 t
o Fly-By-Night. It’s my plan to keep on around the world.”

  “You’re still here. Saving up money for the next leg?” asked the aunt.

  “Ah, that, and I’m finishing some serious repair work. I had planned to go up the St. Lawrence to Montreal, but there was a storm and I got blown off course. I’d never intended coming to Newfoundland at all. If I could help it. It was bad luck I hit one of the worst parts of the coast. Bad rocks. Poor Borogove, all that way and her bottom smashed out in Fly-By-Night, a very strange place. That’s where I heard the chin-music boy.”

  “I could go take care of Warren,” said Quoyle to the aunt in a low voice. Saw she’d twisted her napkin into a white rope.

  “No, no. You stay with Mr. Nutbeem. I’d rather do it myself. Rather be alone.” And got up and went out.

  “Her dog died,” said Quoyle.

  Nutbeem waved for more lager.

  “My treat,” he said, took a fresh breath. But before he started on Fly-By-Night, Quoyle forced an oar in.

  “I heard some of Dennis Buggit’s adventures on the Polar Grinder this afternoon. From Mr. Shovel, the harbormaster. He’s quite the storyteller.”

  “Oh yes. That was something, wasn’t it? Makes your flesh creep. My pulse races when Jack comes in. Weird chap. Fellow can read your mind.”

  “Jack? He didn’t say anything about Jack, just that he was mad when Dennis signed on the ship. It was the way he described the storm and abandoning the ship. A sea story. But he had to stop before he got to the end.”

  “My god, Jack’s part is the best part of the story. Well!” Nutbeem leaned back, looked for the waitress with the lager, saw the glass already in front of him.

  “As I heard it, Search and Rescue finally gave Dennis and the others up for lost. They picked up two rafts of survivors and all but one of the lifeboats. Six men all tied together with plastic line. Four men still missing. Including Dennis. A week of searching and then they had to call it off. Aircraft, Coast Guard, fishing boats. All this time Jack hardly slept, down by the Coast Guard wharf, pacing back and forth, smoking, waiting for a message. Mrs. Buggit up at the house. Mind you, I wasn’t there. Heard it all from Billy and Tert Card—and Dennis himself, of course. They came out and told Jack they had to abandon the search. It was as if he didn’t hear them. Stood there, they said, like a stone. Then he turns—you know that sharp way Jack turns—and he says ‘He’s alive.’