Sinking Deeper

by Steve Vernon

“Well, you never know,” I argued, even though I didn’t really believe it myself.

  So far, the group had 382 members. They were calling our monster “Fogopogo, the beast of Deeper Harbour.” Fogo was an island just off of the northern coast of Newfoundland, a long way away from Deeper Harbour. Still, at least they got the “pogo” right.

  “Who would do this?” I asked. “Do you think it could be your dad?”

  Dulsie laughed at that.

  “My dad thinks that computers are the cause of global warming,” Dulsie said. “He really doesn’t trust them. He’s a diehard stamp collector and I think he resents the idea that email will replace postage stamps.”

  “A stamp collector?” I said.

  I had never known that about Warren before.

  “It’s a dad thing, I think,” Dulsie said. “Maybe your grandfather did this?”

  I looked at the screen again. I tried to picture Granddad Angus setting up a Facebook page, which was even harder to believe in than a sea monster. As far as Granddad Angus was concerned, websites were somewhere spiders hung out.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Well, somebody started it,” Dulsie said.

  It could have been anyone. Ever since we’d decided to give Deeper Harbour a sea monster, word had really gotten around. Warren had talked to his dart team and Granddad Angus had been telling sea monster stories over at the church bingo hall. I’d heard people talking about sea monster sightings at Nora’s Diner, too. Spreading rumours really was like spreading a cold, and we were sneezing on more people every day.

  “That’s nothing,” I said. “The Deeper Harbour police just reported a sea monster in the harbour.”

  “Your dad saw Fogopogo?”

  “Dad didn’t see a thing. I waited until he was out of the office to use his email.”

  “You didn’t,” Dulsie said, raising her eyebrows.

  “I asked his permission,” I said.

  “You asked his permission to send out a sea monster report?”

  “No, I asked his permission to send some emails. He said okay just as long as I didn’t download a bunch of games. Which I didn’t.”

  I felt bad lying to Dad, but it was for his own good. If I could get tourists to come to Deeper Harbour, maybe I could stay here with him.

  “Is your computer broken?”

  “My computer’s fine. I just wanted the report to come from somebody with authority.”

  “Your dad has authority?”

  “His email address has authority. I figure if more people spread the word about Fogopogo, then more people are likely to believe in it. And who would be more believable than the chief of police?”

  I had sent a message saying that the Deeper Harbour Police Department was flooded with sea monster reports to every address on my list, and made sure the replies would come to my own email address.

  “What if he finds out?” Dulsie asked. “Don’t you think people will ask him about it?”

  “Maybe,” I admitted. “But I think he’d have to agree that I’m doing it for a good cause.”

  “You’re sure about that, are you?”

  “Mostly sure,” I admitted. “More sure of Dad than I am of Mom.”

  “You’ve used your mom’s email, too?”

  “I’m going to. People are bound to listen if they start getting messages from the mayor’s office, aren’t they?”

  “She’ll find out, Roland. There’s no way she won’t find out. She’s the mayor, for crying out loud.”

  “She announced that she’s resigning last night,” I said. “She’s busy worrying about her new job and packing and all that foolishness. Besides, it’s her fault for coming up with the idea of moving to Ottawa in the first place.”

  “She’s still your mother,” Dulsie said. “And she is the mayor.”

  “So what? I hate her. And besides, she won’t be the town mayor for much longer. I hate her,” I repeated.

  Dulsie thought about that.

  “It seems to me that having any kind of mom beats having a dead one,” Dulsie said—and then she closed her mouth and showed me that open-jawed green crocodile tattoo. She turned her back and walked away. I wanted to go after her and tell her I was sorry, but what good would that do?

  It couldn’t bring her mom back, now could it?

  Besides, I really did hate my mom.

  Didn’t I?

  I reminded myself of that fact two hours later when I was standing in Mom’s office talking to her.

  “Mom?” I asked. “Do you mind if I use your computer?”

  I told her the same story I’d told Dad. Mom was just as easy to fool. She felt bad about springing the Ottawa news on me. She left me alone with the computer and I sent more emails—directly from the mayor’s office.

  Just like spreading a cold—achoo!

  Gesundheit.

  Chapter 11

  The Luck of Seagulls

  It took the four of us nearly two weeks to get the dory back into shape.

  Granddad Angus cut the boards with his crosscut saw and Warren used a sheet of plastic and three large steam kettles to make the wood soft enough to bend. After the patching was finished, Dulsie banged in nails while I smoothed the joints with a wood plane. Actually, I tried to smooth the joints, but Dulsie ended up doing that too.

  “You make a pretty good carpenter for a girl,” I told her.

  “Being a good carpenter doesn’t have a thing to do with being a girl or a boy,” Granddad Angus told me. “You ought to know better than that.”

  We sealed the joints with goop that smelled a little like the wrong end of a dead moose. Then we painted the dory, which Dulsie liked best of all. To finish it off, we used brushes for the outside and dumped a gallon of red marine paint into the inside and sloshed it around with a mop that Mom might miss someday.

  Afterwards, Dulsie and I sat on the wharf and looked out at the harbour.

  We watched the waves rolling in and slipping away.

  “The ocean is always waving goodbye, isn’t it?” Dulsie asked.

  “It might be saying hello,” I pointed out.

  “Might be.”

  We looked at the water some more.

  “Speaking of progress,” I said. “I got two more emails. One of them came all the way from Vancouver.”

  “I phoned the Chronicle Herald in Halifax,” Dulsie said. “I told them I’d seen the sea monster last week.”

  “What did they say?” I asked.

  “They’re going to pass the story on to a reporter who might travel down here to look into it.”

  “Do you think they’ll really send somebody?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Dulsie said. “I know a ‘we’ll see’ when I hear it.”

  “You never know,” I said. “A ‘we’ll see’ can always develop into a ‘let me think about it,’ which might evolve into a fully grown ‘why the heck not?’”

  Dulsie giggled at that.

  “Keep up the good work,” I said.

  “I don’t know about that,” she said. “My dad’s awfully worried about his phone bill.”

  “Tell him he can pay his phone bill with the money he makes giving tourists dory rides.”

  “Maybe so,” she said. “But what if this doesn’t work? What if you and your grandfather make this sea monster and your mother still wants to leave?”

  “It’ll work,” I said.

  It had to work.

  We watched the water some more. A seagull flew overhead and dropped something on my t-shirt. Something that smelled bad.

  “Eew,” I said, trying to wipe it off.

  “Don’t do that,” Dulsie said. “Mom always said that if a seagull does his business on you it’s good luck.”

  I thought about that
.

  “It sounds stupid to me,” I finally decided.

  “It’s just something they say, is all,” Dulsie said.

  “Why do you suppose they say that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dulsie said. “Maybe they just say it so you won’t feel so bad about getting turded on by a seagull.”

  Then she laughed.

  I had to laugh along with her.

  I knew that if I did have to go I would miss Dulsie and I knew that Dulsie would miss me. Right now, we were just happy to sit there by the harbour and laugh at each other while the waves kept on washing ashore.

  If those waves were saying hello or goodbye, neither of us really cared to notice.

  Chapter 12

  Invasion of the Venusian Vegan Monster Hunters

  Remember when I told you about that squadron of wandering Martian death-bots swooping down in a shower of meteors into the middle of a crowded schoolyard and ray-gunning everybody into extinction? Well, they showed up while Dulsie, Dad, and I were sitting in Nora’s Diner eating ice cream.

  Well, Dulsie was eating ice cream and I was watching mine melt while Dad chowed down on his deep-fried grilled cheese sandwich. He was dunking it in a bowl of homemade tomato soup between mouthfuls, drizzling soup drool and cheese strings down the steel wool tangle of his beard.

  I’m not saying it was pretty.

  What I’m saying is that all three of us were trying our best not to worry about Ottawa. We each did that in our own kind of way. I didn’t feel like eating, so I didn’t eat. Dad ate with the single-minded dedication of a grizzly bear getting ready for an ice-age-long hibernation. As for Dulsie, she was there just to eat ice cream and keep an eye on me, which was probably why she had painted an extra eye directly above the bridge of her nose.

  Dad was working on his second sandwich when a bright, shiny, purple minivan pulled up in front of the diner.

  “Look, Dad,” I said. “Tourists.”

  Dad glanced up at the three strangers walking into Nora’s Diner looking as out of place as a carton of eggs at a steamroller convention. The tall one smiled nervously in Dad’s direction. He cleared his throat with an honest-to-goodness ahem.

  Wow.

  I thought that ahem-ing only happened in comic books.

  “My name’s Bertram,” the tall one said. He pointed at the man and woman standing beside him. “This is Tim and this is Linda. Are you the town sheriff?”

  Sheriff?

  “I’m the police chief,” Dad said. “Sit down and join us. Nora makes a mean grilled cheese.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bertram said. “But we’re vegans.”

  “Does that mean you aren’t allowed to eat sandwiches?” Dad asked.

  I knew better than that.

  Vegans were people from Venus.

  “Being vegan means you avoid anything that comes from animals, like meat or leather,” Bertram explained. “We don’t eat cheese because it comes from cows.”

  Whoops.

  “Nora cooks a lot more than cheese here,” Dad pointed out.

  “What kind of oil does she fry with?” Bertram wanted to know.

  “WD-40,” I said.

  “She drains it from her pickup truck every second week or so,” Dulsie added.

  Bertram looked at us with a sort of bunny-in-the-headlights stare.

  I guess vegans aren’t big on bad jokes.

  “So what are you folks doing in town?” Dad asked.

  “We’re a team of cryptozoologists,” Bertram said in the kind of voice you’d expect a court herald to use while announcing the entrance of the Right Royal Duke of Garlic Calzone. “We investigate legendary and unexplained animals like the yeti, phantom cats, lake monsters, and sea serpents.”

  Double wow.

  Monster hunters.

  “You know,” Linda said. “Cryptids.”

  “What’s a cryptid?” Dad asked.

  “A cryptid is what cryptozoologists study,” Tim explained cryptically.

  That didn’t help much.

  “A cryptid is an animal that has been reported to exist but whose existence has yet to be proven,” Bertram explained. “The Loch Ness Monster is a cryptid. So is the Alberta lake monster, Ogopogo.”

  “Oh, you mean like Bigfoot?” Dad asked.

  “The proper term is sasquatch,” Tim said.

  “Don’t mind Tim,” Linda added. “He’s a stickler for detail.”

  “Actually, I’m a librarian in Halifax,” Tim explained. “Bertram is a waiter, and Linda works at Woozles.”

  Wow.

  A cryptozoological Woozle.

  “What’s Woozles?” Dad asked.

  “Only the best children’s bookstore in Halifax,” Linda said with a quick grin.

  “So this is just some sort of a hobby,” Dad said.

  “Well, there isn’t much money in it,” Bertram said. “Still, we hope the publicity of this new sighting will help us set up a long-term study. We’ve put out a press release to newspapers across the province, and TV and radio stations.”

  Wow to infinity!

  A press release!

  I tried very hard not to grin. My plan was working. If every monster hunter in Canada sent out enough press releases, sooner or later the tourists would have to start coming to have a look at our sea monster. We’d have tourists and money and a future and Mom would give up on her plan to move us to Ottawa.

  Perfect.

  “What new sighting?” Dad asked.

  “The sighting of the Deeper Harbour sea monster,” Bertram said. “We received several reports on our Facebook page.”

  Several?

  “Oh yes,” Dad said, nodding knowingly. “It seems to me I’ve heard talk of something like that.”

  For some reason, Dad was looking right at me while he said that.

  “We’ll be setting up a base camp down by the shores of the harbour,” Bertram said, “if that’s all right with you.”

  “It’s all right by me,” Dad said, “if you folks want to tent out on the beach and get chewed up by mosquitoes.”

  Bertram gave Dad one more of those bunny-in-the-headlights stares before he, Linda, and Tim turned and left.

  “Sure hope they see something worth looking at,” Dad said.

  I looked over at Dulsie. She stared right back at me with all three of her eyes.

  “Me too,” I said.

  Chapter 13

  Dear Prime Minister

  It took three days for us to build the frame for the monster out of plastic pipes and chicken wire. Deciding on what Fogopogo should look like took the longest. We wound up with a cross between a mallard duck and a Komodo dragon.

  “Time for a break,” Warren said. “I want to show you something, Roland.”

  The two of us sat down in the back room of the boat shed. Warren insisted on making us a pot of tea, even though I would have preferred cocoa.

  “Tea is how a Maritimer passes time,” Warren explained as he boiled the kettle and fished out the tea bags. “We Maritimers practise our deepest thinking while sitting and waiting for the tea to properly steep.”

  So we sat and sipped our tea. I wanted badly to find out just what Warren had to show me, but I knew better than to rush him. Besides, I was still thinking about what Dulsie had asked me the other day at the wharf.

  What if we made the sea monster and followed through with our plan and my mom still wanted to leave?

  “Do you think this is going to work?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know,” Warren answered, “but I’m having the time of my life. I’ve spent too long waiting for some sort of a sign to show me what to do.”

  I nodded and sipped my tea, not knowing what else to say.

  Warren reached for a pad of paper and a pen and be
gan to write. He peeled the sheet of paper off the pad, crumpled it up, and threw it into the garbage. He began writing again. He got halfway down the page before tearing that one up too.

  I had experienced more excitement watching paint dry in the sun, but I didn’t want to interrupt Warren’s concentration. If I did, he might start all over again and the two of us would be here until several days past infinity.

  When Warren was halfway through his third attempt, I couldn’t wait any longer. I finally asked, “So what are you writing?”

  “A letter to the prime minister,” Warren replied, still furiously scribbling. “I’m going to tell him about our sea monster.”

  “The prime minister of Canada?” I asked. “What are you going to write?”

  “I’m telling him that the Deeper Harbour sea monster is an endangered species and that it’s his prime ministerial duty to come here and pay his respects.”

  I had to admit that sounded like a pretty good idea.

  “It’s not quite David Suzuki and I don’t even think the man actually reads his own mail,” Warren admitted. “But I just wanted to do something to help.”

  He sealed the letter up in a huge envelope.

  “It just needs the proper stamp, is all.”

  “Can’t you just buy one at the drugstore?” I asked.

  “We can’t send it with just any old stamp,” Warren said. “This is the prime minister of Canada we’re talking about. No sir, the choice of a stamp is downright critical.”

  And then Warren dug out his stamp collection.

  Oh my golly. I was pretty sure that staring at Warren’s stamp collection might be enough to kill me from sheer boredom.

  Only I was wrong. As Warren spread his stamp albums out I began to get interested, in spite of myself. There were stamps of all shapes and sizes; stamps with pictures of spaceships on them; stamps with pictures of dinosaurs; and stamps with pictures of all kinds of strange and wonderful wild animals.

  “My own grandfather worked the merchant marine,” Warren told me. “He used to send me an envelope full of stamps from whatever port he docked in. After he died I started ordering stamps through the mail.”