Improvisato

by David Crossman

  Albert got up, dressed and, in a stupor, bumped about the cabin collecting anything not welded to the hull and stuffing it in a bag. Where the bag came from, it didn’t occur to him to wonder, and if he had, he wouldn’t have cared enough to inquire. It had been his experience that things that were there one moment were often not there the next, and vice versa. That’s how it was in the world. He felt the boat nudge the dock, heard the tire fenders squeal loudly against the pilings. Taking his bag under his arm, he stepped out into the light of day.

  To say he was met with a marching band would create the wrong impression except among those who have been to small islands with limited forms of musical expression during times of celebration. But there was a band, and its six members pumped and blew and strummed and thumped with enthusiasm that compensated for what was lacking in musicianship.

  In the process of being herded from the ship, sometimes on and sometimes nearly slipping off of the shoulders of the crew as he was transferred to the upstretched arms of the islanders, Albert deduced that there was a celebration going on, and the celebrants were eager to get him out of the way.

  However, the realization slowly dawned that the cheers erupting spontaneously from the throats of the islanders were for him. “Will you look at that, Al!” said Frenchie, whose materialization at his elbow coincided with his being set down by the crowd. “You’re a hero! I’ve never seen anything like this on Chatham.”

  Albert was wrapping his brain around the notion that these people didn’t know or care who he was. They didn’t want his autograph, or to interview him, or to introduce him to a king, queen, president, or potentate. They were celebrating him, he assumed, because he had failed to drown after losing all their possessions overboard. Yet, for some reason, they were saying “Thank you.” To him.

  Something in him broke.

  For the first time in his life, Albert beamed. The awesome, terrible, magnificent, all-consuming, towering, Pythagorean edifice of music that had ridden him since his earliest memory—had kept him off the beach, out of the water, away from the playing field, confined to countless hours of practice in gray rooms with bad acoustics, that had denied him friendship, fellowship and, maybe, even love—suddenly fell away.

  Albert was alive.

  Chapter Ten

  That evening at the Chatham Inn—the memory of the warmth of his welcome gently massaging the cilia of his subconscious—Albert sat at the head of the dining table. To his right and left was an assortment of people he took to be either the distillation or the dregs of the crowd that had earlier honored him with their embrace. The mood, lubricated by beer in prodigious quantities, was convivial, and the conversation, getting no traction from him in relation to his heroism—much as it had on the Sea Queen—became insubstantial or awkward, as often happens when people find themselves in the presence of fame, especially fame on the scale of Albert’s. Especially in a place like Chatham Island.

  That none of them had ever heard him play, or particularly cared to, was beside the point. This night would be midwife to tales both tall and true for generations to come, and each person at the table was absorbing every second as a canvas absorbs paint. What the picture might be, when finished, was anybody’s guess, but the process was exhilarating.

  As the evening wore on, conversation followed the customary template as each participant pursued his or her particular drunken muse through the collapsing labyrinth of reason. One or two became maudlin to the point of over-familiarity, draping themselves over his shoulders and breathing into his face which made Albert cringe. Another, who had been introduced to him earlier as “Woolie One,” became belligerent, first at the government, then at the British, then at Americans and, finally, at Albert in particular who was, in his eyes, the embodiment of the all that was worst in the foregoing. To which was added the offense that he had become wealthy for “just piddlin’ away at a damn piano!” He then concluded this observation with “Real work’s what you want, my laddy! Catch some cray! Shear some sheep!”

  For someone as deeply in the arms of Dionysus as was Woolie One to say “shear some sheep” with any clarity was a feat, but Albert found the man’s T-shirt, which said ‘I Shear Sheep in my Sleep, Dammit!’, an aid to translation.

  A remaining five or six folks at the table who hadn’t over-imbibed and had, therefore, the good sense to be embarrassed, made apologies for those who had. “Pay Woolie no mind, Al. He’s drunk as a skunk and doesn’t know what he’s saying. He gets like this when he’s in drink.”

  “Damn I do!” said Woolie.

  “He’ll be your best friend come morning,” said a round woman with an equally round, pink face. “And he’ll forget everything he said tonight.”

  Woolie’s neck, a fairly rubbery object by this time, spun toward the speaker, and his head, surprised by the sudden motion, struggled to catch up. “Damn I will!” He leaned into Albert, instantly his closest friend and confidant. “Mind like a steel trap, this!” he said, tapping his skull. “Keeps everything out.” He made a pained expression. “No. Wait. That’s not right. I mean to, what I mean to say is . . .”

  What he meant to say eluded him, so he improvised. “Fishin’!” he proclaimed. “That’s what we’re gonna do, you and me, Ally-pally! First light. We’re goin’ fishin’!” He slapped Albert’s back soundly.

  Where beer tended to make some convivial, it rendered others pensive. Frenchie fell into this group. Woolie’s declaration, however, called her from the shadows of herself. “Don’t be daft, Woolie,” she said, “If that’s not bein’ redundant. Al’s no fisherman.”

  Woolie thrust Albert from him. “Not a bloody man of any kind, you ask me. Damn piano player, is all. He needs mannin’ up.” He squeezed the place where Albert’s bicep would have been, had he had one. “Ain’t that right, Al?” He tossed a boneless arm around Albert’s neck. “Fishin’, right? Me an’ you. First light.”

  Woolie, the little sack of his mental resources punctured by overmuch advance planning, deflated loudly onto a nearby chair, from which he oozed to the floor where, in direct contravention of the axiom that there is no rest for the wicked, fell promptly, profoundly, and loudly to sleep.

  “Not a bad sort, really,” said someone to Albert’s right, a dark woman with curly, salt-and-pepper hair who had earlier been introduced to him as Signet. “Woolie lost his boy not a week since.”

  “Lost?”

  “Mm. His name was Woolie, too. Walter is their Christian name, but both went by Woolie.”

  “Woolie-Woolie”, said a solid-looking man on the other side of the table, whose chief adornment were tattoos attesting his undying love and devotion for a succession of women whose names, crossed out one after the other, made a lengthy list down his arms. “That’s what they called the boy. Woolie-Woolie. Sometimes Woolie Two, sometimes Woolie squared. Mostly just Woolie-Woolie, though. Which is why we call Woolie, Woolie One”

  Wooly is what Albert’s brain was feeling. “Oh.”

  “Went out to haul his traps,” said Frenchie. “They found his boat up on the beach just south of Owenga. No sign of Woolie-Woolie.”

  “He fell overboard?” said Albert, with sudden affinity.

  “Dragged over in his riggin’, most likely,” said the tattooed man, “Pink” by name. “Happens, don’t it?”

  “Careless foot gets tangled up in the ropes. That’s all it takes. Weight of the trap and ballast and . . .” Signet made a going-overboard motion with her fleshy arm, the underside of which undulated like a wave.

  “He’d had a good day, in all,” said Pink. “Over a hundred kilos of bugs aboard.”

  “Bugs?”

  “Cray,” Frenchie said. “Crayfish. Lobster, to you.”

  “Must’ve have been his last haul of the day,” said Pink. He was now talking shop with the islanders, and Albert was merely eavesdropping. “He’d wound up. Everything ship-shape for the trip home.”

  From subsequent conversation, Albert gathered that, like concert piani
sts, fishermen had their habits. Each had his own idiosyncrasies and personal traditions, and followed them in everything from the way they wound their ropes and painted their buoys, to the distance from shore they were before they applied full throttle to their engines.

  “I’d like to go fishing,” Albert’s ears heard his mouth say and, if the space between them hadn’t been occupied by his head, they would have stared at one another in disbelief.

  Frenchie took the declaration in stride. “Be ready for an early morning, then. Woolie usually puts out at 5.”

  That would give Albert all the following day to prepare, but a concern occurred to him. “That won’t give us much time before it gets dark.”

  “Dark?” said Frenchie. “At 5 in the morning?”

  “Morning!” Albert wasn’t consciously aware there were two of them.

  “Too right. Best get some kip.”

  It was Frenchie, who apparently never slept, who knocked on his door in the wee hours the following morning and, without being invited to do so, prepared him for his day at sea, down to rubber coveralls and hip boots. “You’ll be baitin’, I expect,” she informed him. “About the nastiest job this side of hell. Got a good stomach?”

  Albert had never thought about his stomach as good or bad. It hadn't gotten sick on the Sea Queen. That was a good thing. “I. . .”

  “Nevermind,” said Frenchie. “Get somethin’ in it before you go, shall we? Somethin’ you won’t mind seein’ again.” She laughed, held him at arm’s length and regarded him with satisfaction. “Best not shave. Them whiskers fit the dress code down at the dock. You look a natural!” She laughed again, five descending tones and a semi-tone. B flat below middle C.

  Albert smiled.

  He was not smiling when, Woolie having welcomed him aboard his boat, the Mermaid’s Tale, he was made acquainted with his job for the day, filling little netted bags with fistfuls of liquefied fish remains from a barrel and tying them off in a way patented by Woolie himself.

  The smell of the rotten fish completely overwhelmed the capacity of Albert’s nose to take it in, which was fortunate, for otherwise he’d have fainted. As it was, though he became dizzy for a minute or so, his senses adapted and—once they were convinced the smell wasn’t necessarily life-threatening—yielded to the rhythm of the chore.

  “Well, you can’t judge a book . . .” said the fisherman.

  No less impressed were his compatriots who, going about their activities in preparation for a day at sea, often stopped—individually and in clusters—to remark upon Albert’s handiwork.

  “That’s trademark Woolie,” said Pink, pointing at a bag of bait as Albert tied it off and placed it in the box Woolie had designated for the purpose. “You couldn’t tell it from the original.”

  Woolie accepted this, with a grunt, as a tribute to his pedagogical abilities though, if pressed, he would have admitted that the piano player had the knack.

  The next few hours were, to Albert, the best of his life. It was with a gusto he’d never known that—hot, sweaty, and smelling of fish innards, and with hands sore for the first time from something other than practice—he raised the sandwich Frenchie had made to his mouth and took a bite.

  It was the best sandwich the world had ever known. Whatever she had put in it, tasted the same as his fingers smelled, but was just what someone should put in a sandwich to be given as a mid-day meal to a man at sea.

  He sat on the gunwale opposite the one on which Woolie had taken up his position for lunch, and chewed, and smiled.

  “Well,” said Woolie.

  Albert nodded in complete agreement.

  Lunch continued in silence, during which Woolie stared at his hands, or the deck, or his gear, but never at anything beyond the boat. Albert, on the other hand, was looking at the world through the eyes of a newborn, and, like the Lord on the Sixth Day liked what he saw.

  The sea was, in Woolie’s vernacular, smooth as malt whiskey. To the east, the high, green bluffs of Chatham Island’s mid-section undulated north and south, ultimately dwindling to beach-fringed downs and moorlands, punctured here and there by quivers of unobtrusive trees.

  Albatross and seagulls floated and wheeled lazily in the vicinity of the Mermaid’s Tale in confident expectation of a free meal, which was forthcoming when, as each trap was hauled, old bait was removed and tossed overboard. Another of Albert’s jobs.

  A small, quarreling armada of more industrious and self-reliant gulls were floating and feasting on a raft of flotsam twenty yards away, eventually drawing Albert’s attention which, having nowhere in particular to go, focused on a branch or limb rising from the middle of the mass, pointing accusingly at the heavens.

  Then he saw the fingers.

  It would not have been said of those who knew him best and loved him most that Albert was quick to put two-and-two together. He would have agreed. But at the sight of a body floating in the ocean in the vicinity where, not a week before, Woolie-Woolie had last been seen, his brain abandoned precedent and formed the conclusion that it was none other than he that the birds were fattening themselves upon.

  “I want to go back,” he said, turning quickly to Woolie and, at the same time, positioning himself between the man and a sight that, once seen, Albert knew, would haunt him forever. “I don’t feel well.”

  “Seasick?” said Woolie matter-of-factly. He’d been expecting as much, but was surprised it had taken so long. He stood and shook the last few, cold drops of coffee from his cup and screwed it back onto the thermos of which it formed the cap. “Only one line left anyroad,” he said. “It’ll keep ’til tomorrow or next day.” Not wishing to burden himself with a sick deckhand, he untied and dropped the buoy to which the boat was tethered, turned on the engine, slipped it into gear, turned the bow toward the distant shore. He bumped the throttle forward with the heel of his hand.

  Albert, now standing at the stern, watched in horror as the cloud of gulls, briefly stunned aloft by the engine’s awakening, settled once more to the task appointed them by nature: clean up.

  Once ashore, he made hurried excuses, which Woolie attributed to pressing need for a public convenience, and ran up the hill to the main road, at the junction of which was a small store he’d seen that morning. Not only was it open, which he had feared it might not be, but Frenchie was there. “Well, look at you, Al!” she said cheerily then, immediately detecting the storm in his eyes, asked. “What is it?”

  Albert pointed toward the ocean. “Woolie-Woolie,” he said, breathlessly.

  “Woolie?”

  “Woolie-Woolie,” Albert repeated, accenting the third and fourth syllables.

  “Woolie-Woolie?” said Frenchie.

  “Woolie-Woolie?” said the shopkeeper, Signet, whom he’d met at the inn the night before.

  “Out there,” said Albert on the inhale. “He doesn’t know.”

  “Who doesn’t know?”

  “Woolie.”

  “Woolie doesn’t know, what?” said Signet.

  “You saw Woolie-Woolie out there?” said Frenchie, once again channeling Albert to perfection. “But you didn’t tell his father?”

  Albert nodded.

  The women absorbed the information then, as if their heads were connected by some invisible thread, nodded. “Good on ya,” said Frenchie. “That would’ve sent him off into the shoals good and proper.” She tapped her forehead. “Siggy, you ring Patuai,” she said. “Constable,” she reminded Albert. “Where were you?”

  Albert had been expecting this question, but unfortunately he didn’t have an answer. “I don’t know.”

  With a quick tug at his collar, she drew him along with her as she left the shop and headed down toward the dock. “Was he near the end of his line?” sshe asked over her shoulder.

  “Yes. He said he only had one more. That’s when I saw . . . I pretended to be sick.”

  “Not hard, that, I shouldn’t think.”

  At the dock, Woolie had finished straightening up his gear
and was sluicing the deck with water from a bucket. Out of his hearing, Frenchie quietly spread the news to the other men tending their gear and lying to one another.

  The conversation, which had been boisterous and rowdy, slowly subsided to a murmur and, as if some invisible mechanism had been set in motion, all but two of the fishermen returned to their boats. These jumped down into the Mermaid’s Tale and, as if at some unspoken command, took up stations to either side of its captain. One of them unobtrusively drew the key from the ignition and slipped it in his pocket.

  “What are you lot up to?” said Woolie, standing from his labors and massaging the hollow of his back. His eyes were drawn to the dock as he became conscious of the unusual activity. “Where’s everybody going?”

  “They’ll be back before long, Wool,” said the dark-skinned man on his right, who now sat on the gunwale.

  Woolie had been a seaman too long not to recognize what was going on. “Someone found him?” he said, his legs becoming boneless.

  “Maybe, Wool,” said Pink, at the same time taking Woolie by the elbow and lowering him to a seat on the engine box.

  “Who?”

  “Your man, Al,” said the Moriori.

  Woolie looked as if he’d been slapped, but—a pragmatist at heart—his eyes dropped to the deck. “He wasn’t sick, then.”

  “He did right, Wool,” said Pink. “After a week in the water, well, best you remember your boy as was.”

  Woolie had seen bodies after a week or more or in the water. “Right,” he said beneath his breath. “Right.” The eyes he raised and turned from one to the other of his guardians welled with tears. “Somethin’ to bury, then. That’s good. It’ll mean a lot to his ma.”

  He stood up slowly, but Pink, with a cautionary squeeze to his elbow, said, “Wool, why don’t you just sit a spell? I’ll get you some coffee from the café.”

  “No,” said Woolie. He withdrew his arm from Pink’s light grasp and resumed setting his boat to rights. “I’m all right. I’ll get this lot in order and . . . and go tell the news to his ma. Don’t worry. I won’t let her come down when they bring him in.”