Shipping News_A Novel

by Annie Proulx

  “Wait a minute,” she said and ran into the kitchen. He heard the refrigerator open. She came back with her hands behind her back.

  “I didn’t have a chance to buy you anything,” she said, then held both closed hands toward him. Uncurled her fingers. In each cupped palm a brown egg. He took them. They were cold. He thought it a tender, wonderful thing to do. She had given him something, the eggs, after all, only a symbol, but they had come from her hands as a gift. To him. It didn’t matter that he’d bought them himself at the supermarket the day before. He imagined she understood him, that she had to love him to know that it was the outstretched hands, the giving, that mattered.

  On Christmas day a hunch of cloud moved in. But the aunt was up from St. Johns, and they had Christmas dinner with Dennis and Beety in Mrs. Buggit’s kitchen, people in and out, the fire bursting hot and stories of old-time teak days and mummers and jannies. Jack skulked around the edges pouring hot rum punch. Some distance away they heard sporadic and celebratory shotgun fire.

  ¯

  Dennis’s mustache white with frost. He and Quoyle on the Saturday morning after Christmas cutting next winter’s firewood back in the spruce at the bottom of the bay. Quoyle with the chain saw, for which he had an affinity, Dennis limbing and trimming. The blue scarf knitted by Sunshine barely wrapped around Quoyle’s neck. At noon they stood over the small fire sucking hot tea.

  “Beety says we ought to take a look in at old Nolan there in Capsize Cove. Seeing as we’re not that far away. Finish up a little early and run in there. Dad or somebody usually goes over early part of the winter to see if he’s got enough wood and food. A little late this year. Beety makes him a cake and some bread. I see his smoke there in the morning, but you can’t tell.”

  “I didn’t even think about him,” said Quoyle. Guilty.

  They went up the bay in a great curve, Dennis shouting stories of drunken snowmobilers who sank forever beneath the ice because they didn’t know the routes.

  “Bloody cold,” he shouted, squinting at the notch in the shoreline. The empty houses of Capsize Cove were in sight like a charcoal drawing on rough paper. A long banking turn onto shore.

  Smoke coming out of the metal pipe of the old cousin’s shack. The snowmobile’s whine throttled back to stuttered idling.

  “Leave it running,” said Dennis.

  Worse than Quoyle remembered. The stink was gagging. The old man too weak or befuddled to get to the outhouse. A skeleton trembled before them. The dog near the stove didn’t move. But was alive. Quoyle could not help it. He retched and staggered to the doorway. In the fenced pasture three humps under the snow. Frozen sheep.

  “Uncle Nolan,” he heard Dennis say. “It’s Dennis Buggit, Jack Buggit’s boy, from across the bay. My wife’s sent you some bread.” He drew the bread out of the carrier bag. The sweet, homely perfume of bread. The skeleton was upon it, crushing the loaf into his mouth, a muffled howling coming out of the twitching crust.

  Dennis came outside, spat. Cleared his throat and spat again.

  “Some stinking mess. Poor old bugger’s starving. Christ in the early morning, what a mess. He’d better go into a home, don’t you think? He’s off his rocker. Burning the walls of his house, there. You see where he’s ripping the boards off? He’s your kin, so it’s up to you. What to do with him. They take him away, I’ll come back over, drown the old dog. Half dead anyway.”

  “I don’t have any idea what to do about him.”

  “Beety will know who to call up about this. She gives time to that Saving Grace place that helps the women. And the Teenage Mothers. Knows all them groups. Her and Wavey.”

  “Beety and Wavey?” Quoyle’s face flaming with guilt. He should have looked out for the wretched old cousin the first time he saw him. Didn’t think.

  “That Saving Grace, Beety and Wavey started it. Couple years ago. Councilman lived over near us beat his wife up one winter, pushed her out naked-ass in the snow. She come to Beety. Blue with cold, deaf and blood in her ears. Next day Beety calls up Wavey. Wavey knows how to set up them groups, get something started, after she got the special ed group up. Get the Province’s ear, see? Make them pay attention.”

  “Some women,” said Quoyle. But thought, oh you should have seen Petal, you should have seen my lovely girl. A preposterous thought, Petal in Killick-Claw, and not funny. She would have screamed, jumped on the next plane out. Never, never to be seen again.

  “My son,” said Dennis, “you don’t know the half of it,” and gunned the snowmobile out onto the wind-scoured bay.

  35 The Day’s Work

  “Day’s Work, consists, at least, of the dead reckoning from

  noon to noon, morning and afternoon time sights for longitude,

  and a meridian altitude for latitude.”

  THE MARINER’S DICTIONARY

  “WANT to talk to you, Quoyle.” Jack, shouting down the wire. “Pick you up tomorrer morning. So they know who you are down to Misky Bay.” Bristling cough. Hung up before Quoyle could say anything. If he’d had anything to say.

  By January it had always been winter. The sky blended imperceptibly into the neutral-colored ice that covered the ocean, solid near shore, jigsaw floes fifty miles out and heaving on the swells. Snow fell every day, sometimes slow flakes, as if idling between storms. Deepened, deepened; five, eight, eleven feet deep. The roads were channels between muffling banks, metal, wood silenced. And every ten days or so, by Quoyle’s reckoning, another storm.

  Jack’s truck heater blasted, yet their breaths iced the side windows. Quoyle scraped with his fingernails to look for the harp seals that began to dot the far ice now like commas and semicolons. Half listening to Jack. Thinking of seals. Wavey’s older brother, Oscar, had a pet seal. Devoted to the local scallops. Jack had things on his mind and talked like a rivet gun. The new groundfish fishing season had opened, a maze of allocations and quotas that threw him into reverse.

  “Einstein couldn’t understand it. They’ve made a fucking cockadoodle mess out of it, those twits in Ottawa who don’t know a lumpfish from their own arse.” Jack at his medium range of temper.

  “It’s like this.” Combing his hair with his hand so it bristled up. “Goddamn, you just get something working good and it quits. Seems like I’m always lashing things up with wire.”

  Quoyle slouched in his enormous maroon anorak. Had remembered the name of Oscar’s seal. Pussels. What they called the local scallops.

  “O.k. Quoyle, Billy wants to stay with the Home Page so you’re the new managing editor. You’ll do Tert Card’s job, put it together, handle the phone, assignments, bills, advertisers, printer. You got to watch the son of a bitch printer. Why I’m taking you down there. If a mistake can be made, he’ll make it. Let’s see. Want you to keep writing the Shipping News.”

  Quoyle startled, hand halfway to his chin.

  “Like to try Benny Fudge on the court reports and auto wrecks, the sexual abuse stories. Drop the restaurant stuff and the foreign news. Everybody knows all the restaurants and nobody cares about what happens somewhere else. Get that off the telly.”

  The truck climbed the twist of road over the headlands and they came into a zone of perpetual light snow.

  “What do you think, get a new slant on the home page? Can call it ‘Lifestyles.’ See, Billy and me been knocking this ‘round for a couple of years. There’s two ways of living here now. There’s the old way, look out for your family, die where you was born, fish, cut your wood, keep a garden, make do with what you got. Then there’s the new way. Work out, have a job, somebody tell you what to do, commute, your brother’s in South Africa, your mother’s in Regina, buy every goddamn cockadoodle piece of Japanese crap you can. Leave home. Go off to look for work. And some has a hard time of it. Quoyle, we all know that Gammy Bird is famous for its birdhouse plans and good recipes, but that’s not enough. Now we got to deal with Crock-Pots and consumer ratings, asphalt driveways, lotteries, fried chicken franchises, Mint Royale coffee at gour
met shops, all that stuff. Advice on getting along in distant cities. Billy thinks there’s enough to make the home section a two-page spread. He’ll tell you what he’s got in mind. You work it out with him.”

  “We could get some who’ve gone away to write a guest column in the form of a letter once in a while. Letter from Australia, Letter from Sudbury, how it is,” said Quoyle.

  “Guess I’d read that if I was twenty-one and had to get moving. It’ll be a different paper. In more ways than one.”

  “Nutbeem handled touchy stories very well. I don’t know how Benny will be with the sex crime stuff.”

  “Well, let’s just wait and see how the feller does before we sink our graples in him, eh? You live with this, Quoyle?” Coming into the Misky Bay traffic, a circle of unnamed streets and steep one-way hills complicated by mounds of snow.

  He nodded. Swore to himself by St. Pussel there would never be a typo.

  “Come up the stage tonight and I’ll tell you the rest of it. O.k., now here’s where you makes your turn, see, then you cuts along behind the firehouse. It’s the shortcut.”

  ¯

  “Well,” said Quoyle, sitting where Tert Card had sat, although he had cleared off the desk and torn up the picture of the oil tanker, “what have we got for news this week. Benny, how’d you do with the S.A. and the police court stories?” Pitching his voice low.

  Benny Fudge sat with his hands folded tightly on his clean desk as though at an arithmetic lesson. His puffed hair made Quoyle think of Eraserhead.

  “I’ll tell you. I read about fifty of Nutbeem’s stories to see how he handled the abuse cases but I can’t string it together the way he did. I tried, because I felt like I owed it to Nutbeem. After the boat. But I couldn’t get it rolling. Best I can do.”

  A charge of incest against a 67-year-old Misky Bay man was dismissed Tuesday when his 14-year-old daughter refused to testify.

  Dr. Singlo Booty, 71, of Distant Waters has been arrested and charged with nine counts of sexual assault involving seven patients from May 1978 to July 1991. He will appear in provincial court January 31.

  Waited, biting his thumbnail.

  Quoyle looked at Billy who moved his eyebrows very slightly. Nutbeem would have squeezed out two heart-wrenching stories.

  “The other stuff was excellent. The other court stuff? I’ve got lovely stuff.”

  “What might the lovely stuff be?” asked Quoyle.

  “Two fellers here charged with everything in the book. Had a run-in with wildlife officers. Charged with carrying firearms in closed season, obstruction of wildlife officers doing their duty, assaulting wildlife officers with sharp branches and lobster pots, breaking wildlife officers’ Polaroid sunglasses, uttering threats against wildlife officers. Another story about buddy here, charged with possession of copper wire. About four thousand dollars worth. He’s also charged with trafficking in hashish. And I got a Youth on a Crime Spree. Stole a bicycle in Lost All Hope, rode it eleven miles to Bad Fortune, there he stole a motorcycle and made it to Never Once. But the boy was ambitious. Abandoned the motorcycle and stole a car. Drove the car into the sea and swam ashore at Joy in the Morning. Where two Mounties by chance were parked in their patrol car, eating doughnuts. And five Unemployment Insurance fraud charges. And four dragger captains fined two thousand apiece for fishing redfish in closed waters. A guy down in No Name got thirty days for jigging fish in inland waters. All kinds of car wrecks. And a lot of photos. I like taking photos. See, I can have a dual career. Reporter and photographer.”

  “Write them up with a little more detail than you put into the S.A. stories.” Quoyle acted gruff, hard-boiled.

  “Yeah, I could write crime stuff all day. But not the sex stuff.” A prim mouth. “I see the crime stories and the camera work as my big chance.”

  Chance for what, Quoyle wondered. But there he was at Tert Card’s window frame with the phone against his ear, running the stories through the computer, pasting up the pages, driving the mechanicals down to Misky Bay to the print shop. When the paper came out that week he tore out the editorial page where the masthead ran and mailed it to Partridge. Managing Editor: R. G. Quoyle.

  And so it went, stories of cargo ships beset by ice, the Search and Rescue airlift of a sailor crushed in power-operated watertight doors, a stem trawler adrift after an explosion in the engine room, a factory freezer trawler repossessed by the bank, a sailor lost overboard from a scientific survey vessel in rough seas, plane crashes and oil spills, whales tangled in nets, illegal dumping of fish offal in the harbor, plaques awarded to firemen and beauty queens, assaulting husbands, drowned boys, explorers lost and found, ships that sank in raging seas, a fishing boat hit by an icebreaker, a lottery winner, seizure of illegal moose meat.

  And he sent a copy of a police bulletin to the aunt. Mrs. Melville captured in Hawaii with the steward from Tough Baby. A handsome man thirty years younger than she, wearing Giorgio Armani clothes and driving a Lexus LS400 with the cellular telephone. “I did it for love,” she confessed. The steward said nothing.

  All in the day’s work.

  36 Straitjacket

  Straitjacket: A coat of strong material, as canvas, binding the

  body closely for restraining the violently insane or delirious,

  violent criminals, etc. Some confine the arms to the body,

  others have long sleeves, without openings, which may be

  knotted together.

  THE NORTH tilted toward the sun. As the light unfolded, a milky patina of phytoplankton bloomed over the offshore banks along the collision line of the salt Gulf Stream and the brack Labrador Current. The waters crosshatched in complex layers of arctic and tropic, waves foamed with bacteria, yeasts, diatoms, fungi, algae, bubbles and droplets, the stuff of life, urging growth, change, coupling.

  A Friday afternoon. Quoyle at home, changing into old clothes. He watched through the kitchen window for Jack’s skiff. Rain-colored distance though none fell where Quoyle was. A stem trawler left the fish plant, probably heading offshore for the Funk Island Banks. Ten days with a fourteen-man crew, towing the net, the slow haul back, the brief moment of excitement when the cod end of the net came up, the cod pouring into the hold. Or nothing much. And down to gut and bleed. And tow again and haul back. And mend net. And again. And again.

  There was Jack’s skiff, working down toward Flour Sack Cove. The rain curtain sagged east, left smears of blue behind it. Quoyle picked up the phone.

  “Hey, Billy? I’m going along to Jack’s now. See him heading in.”

  “You just had a call from the States. I gave him your number there so you might wait a minute. And heard a rumor Sea Song might be closing down three fish plants next month. Anonymous source. No Name Cove supposed to be on the list. You tell Jack. If it’s true, I don’t know what people are going to live on down there.

  “You talk to somebody at Sea Song yet?”

  “Ar, the manager’s got the face of a robber’s horse and he’ll give me the brazen old runaround. But we’ll try.”

  Quoyle gave it five minutes, had his hand on the doorknob when the phone rang. Partridge’s voice, almost five thousand miles away, lagging and sad.

  “Quoyle? Quoyle? This is a lousy following connection. Listen, you the riots?”

  “Some,” said Quoyle. “They give it about ten seconds on the news here. It looks bad.”

  “Bad, all right. Not only LA. It’s like the whole country got infected with some rage virus, going for their guns like it used to be you’d look at your watch. Remember Edna the rewrite woman on the Record?”

  “Yeah. She never smiled at me. Not once.”

  “You had to earn Edna’s smiles. Listen. She just called me up. They had a disaster, a tragedy at the Record. Some nut came in yesterday afternoon with a fucking machine gun and killed Punch, Al Catalog, three or four others. Wounded eight more.”

  “Jesus! Why?”

  “Oh, it’s part of the scene here and something to do with the Le
tters to the Editor. If you can believe it. This guy sent an anonymous letter saying riots were necessary to purge the system and redistribute wealth and they didn’t print it. So he came down with a machine gun. Edna says the only reason he didn’t get her was because she was under the copy desk looking for paper clips when the shooting started. Remember how there was never enough paper clips? Quoyle, they shot at Mercalia on the freeway last week. Show you how crazy the scene is, I made a joke about living in California, about LA style. Fucking bullet holes through her windshield. Missed her by inches. She’s scared to death and I’m making jokes. It hit me after Edna called what a fucking miserable crazy place we’re in. There’s no place you can go no more without getting shot or burned or beat. And I was laughing.” And Quoyle thought he heard his friend crying on the other side of the continent. Or maybe he was laughing again.

  ¯

  A deep smell to the air, some elusive taste that made him pull in conscious breaths. Sky the straw-colored ichor that seeps from a wound. Rust blossoms along the station wagon’s door panels. He could have been dead in Mockingburg, New York.

  Jack stood in the skiff, pronging cod onto the stage. Quoyle pulled on a slicker, his gloves. He seized his knife, picked up a cod. In the beginning it had seemed a strange way to conduct an editorial meeting.

  “Hands might as well be doing something while we talk,” said Jack, scrambling up. “Always hated the sight of five, six grown men sitting around a table, doing nothing but work their jaw. You see them doodle away, rip pieces of paper, wagging their foot, fooling with paper clips.”