Shipping News_A Novel

by Annie Proulx

  “Only to save you from accusations of plagiarism, me old son.”

  Nutbeem laughed bitterly. “I see you’ve regained your composure, you Newf dung beetle.” He leaned at Quoyle. “Yes. Incredible protection from plagiarism. Every sentence so richly freighted with typographical errors that the original authors would not recognize their own stories. Let me give you some examples.” He fished in file folders, pulled out a ragged sheet.

  “I’ll read you one of his gibberish gems, just to open your eyes. The first version is what I wrote, the second is the way it appeared in the paper. Item: ‘Burmese sawmill owners and the Rangoon Development Corporation met in Tokyo Tuesday to consider a joint approach to marketing tropical hardwoods, both locally and for export.’ Here’s what Card did with it. ‘Burnoosed sawbill awnings and the Ranger Development Competition met Wednesday near Tokyo to mark up topical hairwood.’ ” Sat back in his squeaking chair. Let the pages fall into the wastebasket.

  Tert Card scratched his head and looked at his fingernails. “After all, it’s only a stolen fiction in the first place,” he said.

  “You think it amusing now, Quoyle, you smile,” said Nutbeem, “although you try to smile behind your hand, but wait until he works his damage on you. I read these samples to you so you know what lies ahead. ‘Plywood’ will become ‘playwool,’ ‘fisherman’ will become ‘figbun,’ ‘ Hibernia ’ become ‘hernia.’ This is the man to whom Jack Buggit entrusts our prose. No doubt you are asking yourself ‘Why?’ as I have many dark and sleepless nights. Jack says Card’s typos give humor to the paper. He says they’re better than a crossword puzzle.”

  The corner at the end of the room fenced with a particleboard partition.

  “That’s Jack’s office,” said Card. “And there’s your little corner, Quoyle.” Card waved his arm grandly. A desk, half a filing cabinet, the sawed-off top covered with a square of plywood, a 1983 Ontario telephone book, a swivel chair with one arm. A lamp of the kind found in hotel lobbies in the 1930s stood beside the desk, thick red cord like a rat’s tail, plug as large as a baseball.

  “What should I do?” said Quoyle. “What does Mr. Buggit want me to do?”

  “Ah, nobody but himself can say. He wants you to sit tight and wait until he’s back. He’ll tell you what he wants. You just come in every morning and himself’ll show up one fine day and divulge all. Look through back issues. Acquaint yourself with Gammy Bird. Drive around and learn all four of our roads.” Card turned away, labored over the computer.

  “I’s got to be out and about,” said Billy Pretty. “Interview with a feller makes juju-bracelets out of lobster feelers for export to Haiti. Borrer your truck, Card? Mine’s got the bad emission valve. Waiting for a part.”

  “You’re always waiting for parts for that scow. Anyway, mine’s not starting too good today. She dies just any old place.”

  Billy turned to Nutbeem.

  “I rode the bike today. I suppose you can take the bike.”

  “Rather walk than snap me legs off on that rind of a bike.” He cleared his throat and glanced at Quoyle. But Quoyle looked away out the window. He was too new to get into this.

  “Ah, well. I’ll hoof it. It’s not more than eighteen miles each way.”

  In a minute they heard him outside, cursing as he mounted the jangling bicycle.

  Half an hour later Tert Card left, started his truck, drove smoothly away.

  “Off to get soused,” said Nutbeem pleasantly. “Off to get his lottery ticket and then get soused. Observe that the truck starts when he wants it to.”

  Quoyle smiled, his hand went to his chin.

  ¯

  He spent the rest of the day, the rest of the week, leafing through the old phone book and reading back issues of the Gammy Bird.

  The paper was a forty-four-page tab printed on a thin paper. Six columns, headlines modest, 36-point was a screamer, some stout but unfamiliar sans serif type. A very small news hole and a staggering number of ads.

  He had never seen so many ads. They went down both sides of the pages like descending stairs and the news was squeezed into the vase-shaped space between. Crude ads with a few lines of type dead center. Don’t Pay Anything Until January! No Down Payment! No Interest! As though these exhortations were freshly coined phrases for vinyl siding, rubber stamps, life insurance, folk music festivals, bank services, rope ladders, cargo nets, marine hardware, ship’s laundry services, davits, rock band entertainment at the Snowball Lounge, clocks, firewood, tax return services, floor jacks, cut flowers, truck mufflers, tombstones, boilers, brass tacks, curling irons, jogging pants, snowmobiles, Party Night at Seal Flipper Lounge with Arthur the Accordion Ace, used snowmobiles, fried chicken, a smelting derby, T-shirts, oil rig maintenance, gas barbecue grills, wieners, flights to Goose Bay, Chinese restaurant specials, dry bulk transport services, a glass of wine with the pork chop special at the Norse Sunset Lounge, retraining program for fishermen, VCR repairs, heavy equipment operator training, tires, rifles, love seats, frozen corn, jelly powder, dancing at Uncle Demmy’s Bar, kerosene lanterns, hull repairs, hatches, tea bags, beer, lumber planing, magnetic brooms, hearing aids.

  He figured the ad space. Gammy Bird had to be making money. And somebody was one hell of a salesman.

  Quoyle asked Nutbeem. “Mr. Buggit do the ads?”

  “No. Tert Card. Part of the managing editor’s job. Believe it or not.” Tittered behind his mustache. “And they’re not as good as they look.”

  Quoyle turned the pages. Winced at the wrecked car photos on the front page. Sexual abuse stories-three or four in every issue. Polar bears on ice floes. The shipping news looked simple-just a list of vessels in port. Or leaving.

  “Hungry Men,” a restaurant review by Benny Fudge and Adonis Collard running under two smudged photographs. Fudge’s face seemed made of leftover flesh squeezed roughly together. Collard wore a cap that covered his eyes. Quoyle shuddered as he read.

  Trying to decide where to munch up some fast food? You could do worse than try Grudge’s Cod Hop. The interior is booths with a big window in front. Watch the trucks on the highway! We did. We ordered the Fish Strip Basket which contained three fried fish Strips, coleslaw and a generous helping of fried chips for $5.70. The beverage was separate. The Fish Strip Basket was supposed to include Dinner Roll, but instead we got Slice of Bread. The fish Strips were very crispy and good. There is a choice of packet of lemon juice or Tartar Sauce. We both had the Tartar Sauce. There is counter service too.

  Billy Pretty’s work, “The Home Page,” a conglomeration of poems, photographs of babies, write-away-for hooked rug patterns. Always a boxed feature-how to make birdhouses of tin cans, axe sheaths of cardboard, bacon turners from old kitchen forks. Recipes for Damper Devils, Fried Bawks, Dogberry Wine and Peas and Melts.

  But the one everybody must read first, thought Quoyle, was “Scruncheons,” a jet of near-libelous gossip. The author knitted police court news, excerpts of letters from relatives away, rude winks about rough lads who might be going away for “an Irish vacation.” It beat any gossip column Quoyle had ever read. The byline was junior Sugg.

  Well, we see the postman has landed in jail for 45 days for throwing the mail in Killick-Claw Harbour. He said he had too much mail to deliver and if people wanted it they could get it themselves. Guess it helps if you can swim. Poor Mrs. Tudge was hit by a tourist driving a luxury sedan last Tuesday. She is in hospital, not getting on too good. We hear the tourist’s car isn’t too good, either. And the Mounties are looking into the cause of an early morning fire that burned down the Pinhole Seafood fish plant on Shebeen Island; they might ask a certain fellow in a certain cove on the island what he thinks about it. A snowmobile mishap has taken the life of 78-year-old Rick Puff. Mr. Puff was on his way home from what Mrs. Puff called “a screech-in and a carouse” when his machine fell through the ice. Mr. Puff was a well-known accordion player who was filmed by a crew from the university. In the 1970s he served four years for sexual assault
on his daughters. Bet they aren’t crying either. Good news! We heard Kevin Mercy’s dog “Biter” was lost in an avalanche on Chinese Hill last week. And what’s this we read in the overseas papers about kidnappers mailing the left ear of a Sicilian businessman they are holding hostage to his family? The way the foreigners live makes you wonder!

  The editorial page played streams of invective across the provincial political scene like a fire hose. Harangues, pitted with epithets. Gammy Bird was a hard bite. Looked life right in its shifty, bloodshot eye. A tough little paper. Gave Quoyle an uneasy feeling, the feeling of standing on a playground watching others play games whose rules he didn’t know. Nothing like the Record. He didn’t know how to write this stuff.

  ¯

  On his second Monday morning the door to Jack Buggit’s office gaped. Inside, Buggit himself, a cigarette behind his ear, leaning back in a wooden chair and saying “hmm” on the telephone. He waved Quoyle in to him with two hoops of his right hand.

  Quoyle in a chair with a splintered front edge that bit into his thighs. Hand to his chin. From beyond the partition he could hear the mutter of Nutbeem’s radios, the flicking of computer keys, old Billy Pretty scratching out notes with a nibbed pen he dipped in a bottle.

  Jack Buggit was an unlikely looking newspaper editor. A small man with a red forehead, somewhere, Quoyle thought, between forty-five and ninety-five. A stubbled chin, slack neck. Jaggled hair frowsting down. Fingers ochre from chain-smoking. He wore scale-spattered coveralls and his feet on the desk were in rubber boots with red soles.

  “Oh yar!” he said in a startlingly loud voice. “Oh yar,” and hung up. Lit a cigarette.

  “Quoyle!” The hand shot out and Quoyle shook it. It was like clasping a leather pot holder.

  “Thick weather and small rain. Here we are, Quoyle, sitting in the headquarters of Gammy Bird. Now, you’re working at this paper, which does pretty good, and I’ll tell you how it is that I come to do this. Set you straight. Because you can see I didn’t go to the school of journalism.” Shot jets of smoke from the corners of his mouth, looked up at the ceiling as if at mariners’ stars.

  “Great-great-grandfather had to go to cannibalism to stay alive. We settled Flour Sack Cove, right here, only a few families left now. Buggits fished these waters, sealed, shipped out, done every thing to keep going. It used to be a good living, fishing. It was all inshore fishing when I was young. You’d have your skiff, your nets. Finding the fish was a trick. They say true ‘the fish has no bells.’ Billy Pretty one of the best to find the fish. Knew the water like the hollows in his mattress. He can name you every sunker on this coast, that’s the God’s truth.

  “You worked your cockadoodle guts out, kept it up as long as you could, snatched a little sleep here and there, work in the night by torchlight, sea boils come up all over your hands and wrists, but the work went on. Well, you know, I never got sea boils after I learned a cure. You cut your nails on a Monday, you won’t have none. Everybody does it now! You know how fast a clever hand can split fish? No, I see you don’t. It won’t mean anything to tell you thirty fish a minute. Think of it. Clean thirty fish a minute! My sister could do it in her sleep.” He stopped, sat there, breathing. Lit another cigarette, spurted smoke.

  Quoyle tried to imagine himself struggling to keep up with fish-splitting athletes, buried in a slippery tide of dulling bodies. Petal swam forward in a long dress of platinum scales, bare arms like silver, white mouth.

  “It was a hard life, but it had the satisfaction. But it was hard. Terrible hard in them old days. You’ll hear stories would turn your hair blue overnight and I’m the boy could tell ‘em. There was some wild, lawless places, a man did what he wanted. Guess you know about that, being who you are! But things changed. When the damn place give up on the hard times and swapped ‘em in for confederation with Canada what did we get? Slow and sure we got government. Oh yar, Joey Smallwood said ‘Boys, pull up your boats, bum your flakes, and forget the fishery; there will be two jobs for every man in Newfoundland.’ ” He laughed mirthlessly, showing Quoyle four teeth, lit another cigarette.

  “Well, I was a sucker, I believed him. I went along with everything the first ten years or so. Sure, I wanted them things, too, the electricity and roads, telephone, radio. Sure I wanted health care, mail service, good education for me kids. Some of it come in. But not the jobs.

  “And the fishing’s went down, down, down, forty years sliding away into nothing, the goddamn Canada government giving fishing rights to every country on the face of the earth, but regulating us out of business. The damn foreign trawlers. That’s where all the fish is went. Then the bloody Greenpeace trying to shut down the sealing. O.k., I says, back when I see I couldn’t make it on fish no more, o.k. I says, I’ll get smart, I’ll get with it, get on the government plan. So, I goes to the Canada Manpower office at Killick-Claw and says, ‘Here I am. Need a job. What you got for me to do?’

  “And they says, ‘What can you do?’

  “ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘I can fish. Worked in the woods in the winter.’

  “ ‘No, no, no. We don’t want fishermen. We’ll train you in a marketable skill.’ See, they’re bringing in industry. Jobs for everybody. First thing they got me into a damn tannery down to Go Slow Harbor. There was only ten or fifteen men working there because it wasn’t in full production. The skill they learned me was throwing these stinking hides, come from where, Argentina or somewhere, into vats. I done that all day long for four days, then they ran out of hides and no more come in, so we just stood around or swept the floors. Couple more months the tannery went belly-up. So I goes back home and fishes long as I could. Then to Canada Manpower again.

  “ ‘Fix me up,’ I says. ‘I needs another job.’ ”

  “ ‘What can you do?’ they says.

  “ ‘I can fish, I can cut wood, I can throw hides in a vat all day long, sweep floors.’

  “ ‘No, no, no. We’ll train you. Industrialization of Newfoundland.’ They send me down to St. John’s where there’s a big new plant that’s going to make industrial machinery, all kinds of machines, feed mills, crushing machinery for rocks and peanuts, diamond drills, grinders. That was one hell of place. Big. I never seen nothing like it. Five-million-dollar plant. But nobody in it. So I go down there, I get a room I shared with some stinking old bug, I wait. I was down there, half starving, finding what I could for a quarter a day waiting for that damn plant to open up. Son of a bitch never did. Never turned out a single thing. So I goes back home and fishes the season.

  “Come fall, I hit Manpower again and says, ‘It’s gettin’ rough. I need that job.’ At that time I still believed they was going to find something for me, what with the industrialization and all. ‘Well,’ the Manpower feller says, never misses a beat, ‘there’s heartbreak in every trade, Jack. But we’re looking out for you. We’re going to put you in the Third Mill over to Hyphenville. Going to make cardboard liners.’ I worked in that nuthouse for three months. It closed down. They told me next, with my experience, I could get a good job either at the new oil refinery at Bird Wing or at the Eden Falls power project. The refinery wasn’t operative yet they said, so they helped me fill out this job application about two miles long, told me to go home and wait for the letter from Eden Falls. I’m still waiting. Yar, they started it up, all right, but there’s only a very few of jobs. So I stayed home, doing what fishing I could. Lean times. My wife was sick, we’re on the pinch end of things. It was the worst time. We’d lost our oldest boy, you know. So back I goes.

  “ ‘Look, boys, things is hard. I needs a job.’ They said they had the perfect thing for me. Saving it all these trial years. And it was right across the Omaloor Bay, a glove factory! Right out there, Quoyle, right out there by your place on the point. They was going to make gloves there, leather gloves. Made it sound like the government built the thing just for me. They said I was a natural for a job due to my experience in the tannery. I was practically a master craftsman of the leather trade!
I could prob’ly get an overseer’s job! Wasn’t I some glad? They got the ferry going. Big crowd showed up to go to work first day. Well, you believe it, we went over there, went inside, there was a lot of people standing around, a nice cafeteria, big stainless steel vats for dyeing, sewing machines and cutting tables. Only two things they didn’t have-somebody who knew how to make gloves, and the leather. See, the leather for the gloves was supposed to come from the tannery I worked at years before, but it had folded and nobody ever told the guys building the glove factory, nobody ever told Canada Manpower. That was that.

  “So I’m on my way home across the bay, the ferry’s making its second and last run. And I’m thinking. I’m thinking, ‘If I’d knew this sucker didn’t have no leather I could have saved myself a trip.’ Now, how do you know things? You read ‘em in the paper! There wasn’t no local paper. Just that government mouthpiece down to St. Johns, The Sea Lion. So I says, not knowing nothing about it, hardly able to write a sentence-I only got to ‘Tom’s Dog’ in school-but I made up my mind that if they could start a glove factory with no leather or nobody that knew how to make ‘em, I could start a newspaper.

  “So I goes over to Canada Manpower and I says, ‘I want to start a newspaper. You fellows think you can help me out?’

  “ ‘How many people you gonna employ?’ they says. I takes a wild flyer. ‘Fifty. Once I gets going,’ I says. ‘ ‘Course there has to be a training period,’ I says. ‘Develop skills.’ They ate it up. They give me boxes and boxes of forms to fill out. That’s when my trouble begun, so I got Billy Pretty to give over his fishing and come on board. He writes a beautiful hand, can read like a government man. We done it.