Float (26 page)

Adoniram and Beaky, another couple for whom the words
whatever works
sprang to mind, came bobbing alongside the Duck in a raft created from remnants of vessels that had washed up in the storm, lashed together with odd bits of rope. The raft was being propelled by a strange makeshift engine, fueled by some unknown substance that smelled of garbage. Two deck chairs were balanced on the uneven surface for sunbathing, and the two men raised their hands in greeting as they passed. Adoniram was well dressed in a pressed suit, as usual, but wore no tie. He had an unlit cigar in his mouth and looked extremely self-satisfied. Fingers sat on Beaky’s stomach and stretched in the warmth of the sun.

Annuncia, who was wearing her red Seacrest’s smock “for the publicity,” sailed behind them in a small boat, with one hand on the rudder stick as if it grew out of her arm. In her other hand she held a long-handled net with which she collected bits of floating debris. Duncan still wasn’t happy that she’d been manipulating him like a puppet in the past couple of months, but maybe he was, as she claimed, not in any shape to save his business on his own. She gave him a rare smile, and he waved.

Duncan hummed to himself as he continued to steer the Duck to its destination, nodding to people in boats as they passed. The mayor’s motor yacht,
Flask
, suddenly cut through the space between them all, churning up the water in its wake and sending Adoniram and Beaky bobbing one way and Annuncia the other. The TV crew was setting up its camera on
Flask
’s foredeck while the mayor chatted up the pretty newscaster in the wheelhouse. Duncan hoped they were watching the time. Weaving in between all the different vessels were Harvey Storer and Syrie, in wet suits, riding a jet ski. Storer was at the wheel, and Syrie had her arms wrapped around him. This was the banker who had refused to lend Duncan money for payroll almost two months before, accusing Duncan of owing more on Seacrest’s than it was worth. Now it was Storer’s company that was underwater, Coastal Bank & Trust having slipped into the harbor during the hurricane. Rumor had it that Storer had gone off the deep end in the aftermath, and maybe this was proof of that. As for Syrie, she waved vigorously at Duncan as the jet ski passed, sending up a spray of water between them and the sun, creating a small rainbow as a shower sprinkled down on all their heads.

“I heard about the kiss, you know,” Cora said to Duncan. “Were you really going to regress to high school and start over?”

They smiled without looking at each other. He notched up the Duck’s speed a knot or two to get to the meeting place on time, and as the water burst smoothly at the bow, Duncan felt life breaking against his own. He had run aground, but he felt he was finally off the rocks, and this made him feel buoyant and full of life, instead of the unsalvageable wreck full of free-floating anxiety he seemed to be not so long ago.

“What’s that smell?” asked Cora. She sat up straight and looked around as the color drained from her face.

“Lunch,” said Duncan. Slocum was starting up the oil barrel grill that he’d hung over the stern, using a squirt of his jellyfish soup as a propellant for the fire. Yet another use. His jellyfish plastic was moving along through the lab, but it would take time to produce anything close to a product. Adoniram still held the processing rights for it, if and when that time finally came—a good reason to have him on board at Seacrest’s. He’d even been hinting that he might give the rights to Duncan’s unborn child as a baby present. Another Leland saddled with the business, born with a silver thorn in his side. But at least he or she would have a business. Much better to have something to worry about than nothing at all.

Josefa came up to the bridge. “Almost to Chester,” she said, and she handed Cora a can of ginger ale with a straw.

“Why did we have to come all the way out here?” asked Cora, taking a sip. “Couldn’t we have done this from the beach?”

“Gulls roost on that island at night. If Kelp and the others can figure out where they’re going to sleep tonight, they’ll be more relaxed.”

“Not to mention that Chester Island is a pretty sweet backdrop for the six o’clock news,” said Duncan.

“Doesn’t hurt to think of these things,” said Josefa, looking out at the island.

“What deserving Kelp is this, Josefa?” asked Duncan. “Number three? Four?”

She kept her eyes on the horizon. “I’ve got a new van, new cages, soon even a new shelter. Can’t say it hasn’t all been worth it.”

No, he couldn’t. Whereas earlier he’d been disgusted that Josefa was replacing dead Kelps with live ones, after his experience with Adoniram he now understood that the symbolic rendering of an object could substitute for the real thing, sometimes even more so. The important thing was the idea. Get the idea right first: Birds needed to be helped back to health; the world needed to be saved with giant diatoms—if not diatoms, then something; it hardly mattered that this was not the original Kelp or that those particular diatoms were extinct. Executing a well-planned, bizarre gesture made people curious, and it made them feel. As Adoniram said, there was not nearly enough feeling in the world.

“You below the mark, Cora?” asked Josefa.

“Bleh.”

Josefa patted her on the shoulder. “Rheya was sick like that, too.”

They were all quiet and did not look at one another. Slocum’s sister had not been found after the storm, nor had her dory. Suspiciously, Slocum did not seem overly concerned, which confirmed rumors that she was alive and just hiding from the law. It would not be the first time a storm had been used as a cover to fake a death and start a new life. But it was a very fine line between faking death and death itself.

“I wish Nod would show up, one way or another,” said Duncan. He scanned the rocky shore, and he knew that for the rest of his days, he would always be expecting to see a waterlogged body washed up on every cove and inlet.

“There are some who just can’t be saved,” said Cora.

“Could be he didn’t want to be saved,” said Josefa. “We can’t judge.”

“He had problems,” said Cora, sitting herself upright again, “but I never really thought of him as suicidal.”

“I’ll just have to find a way to live with the fact that he died proving how fatal it is to be a fool,” Duncan said, and no one argued the point. He remembered what Adoniram had said to him when the Coast Guard abandoned the search on the third day: “Self-destructive behavior is as close to self-sacrifice as you can get, my friend. Try to think of Nod in that way.”

Thinking of Nod in that way hadn’t really changed the pain he felt when he thought of him at all, but it kept his mind busy when the dark times came on him.

Again they heard his mother’s voice travel across the water as
Avocet
came sailing back. “You’re luffing, Everard! Head down! Down!”

“She really needs to work on her emotional management,” said Cora.

“Annabel is certainly a strong cup of grog,” said Josefa as they watched the boat move up on them.

Cora put her hand on her forehead. “Please, don’t say the word grog.”

The mayor’s boat sounded a horn, which started all the other boats going like a pack of dogs.

“It’s time,” said Josefa. “I’ll go get Kelp.”

“Off we go,” said Duncan. He pointed the Duck into the drowsy breeze, turned off the engine, and helped Cora stand.

“I can get up by myself,” she said.

“Drop sail!” his mother shouted as Everard’s boat swept right up next to
Sea Turtle.
“Bumpers!” She ran to the port rail and threw rubber cylinders over the side to protect it from the Duck as her long braid whipped the air.

Cora went to help Josefa carry Kelp’s cage onto the open bow of the boat, forward of the wheelhouse. “You stay,” Josefa said to Duncan. “Help your mother tie up.”

“The drogue!” his mother shouted. “Throw the drogue in the water!”

Duncan watched Everard toss the floating sea-anchor overboard. Then his mother picked up the coil of line that had been stored on Chandu and yelled “Catch!” to Duncan. He had to lean out over the water to grab it; then he tied it to the rail so they could raft together. Other boats nosed in closer, each tying up to the other, until they formed a long line of boats, from the largest, like the Duck, to the middling sailing yachts and lobster boats, to a wide assortment of Boston Whalers and rowing dinghies, but there was no hierarchy among them. In Port Ellery, people were not judged by their boats but the way they handled them. After lines were secured, people began to move freely from deck to deck and ladder to ladder until they were close enough to the Duck to see the birds set free.

As the boats swapped slaps with the water, Slocum and his family opened coolers of beer and soda and threw food on the grill: marinated calamari, pumpkin slices, roast oysters, lamb kidneys wrapped in bacon, whole whiting, pale seafood sausage, and suspicious sauces and condiments of Slocum’s own making. It looked and smelled unusually appetizing to Duncan, but Cora, even upwind in the bow, was in no mood.

“I’m going to be sick,” she said.

He got her another ginger ale and sat down beside her on the deck, their legs hanging over the sides. They rested their arms on the low rail that edged the bow, whose deck was heavily ridged, like the throat of a whale.

Josefa was behind them, getting Kelp out of the cage, while Clover held the door open. “There you go honey,” she said as she helped tuck Kelp attractively in Josefa’s arms. “You two look like a postcard.”

The mayor sounded another horn and, with the help of an address system, gave a speech on the maritime history of Port Ellery and the importance of fighting to keep the industry afloat, while somehow avoiding the paradox of wanting to save the oceans and still needing to fish from them, before finally turning to the subject of how all of Josefa’s years of “broken wing” work were about to pay off.

As he continued to babble, Slocum wandered to the bow with a platter of grilled whiting, and three gulls swept down from the sky to get them. Clover’s son, Harley, came running from the stern with a mooring stick raised over his head and chased them off.

“Good boy,” said Clover. “It’ll be your job to keep those flying rats away from the food.”

“The birds are just jealous,” said Slocum. “You think they like eating raw fish? They want what we have—a cuisine. We are the only cooks on the planet!”

“Thank God for that,” said Cora.

The boaters must have felt the mayor had talked quite long enough because they began to honk their horns, and he wrapped up his speech with a heartfelt thank you. After a brief moment of confusion about what to do next, the TV crew gave the signal to Josefa, who gave her assistants the nod. She opened her arms and released Kelp into the air, and then Clover, Slocum, and Harley tossed the other saved birds aloft with a cheer. The birds all faltered a bit—one small tern almost dropped in the water—but they all regained their wings and soared up, soon becoming bright white spots in the sky. A breeze rose at the same time, and all the boats shifted as one, moved by the unseen hand of the wind.

The boaters cheered. “Fly free, Kelp!” “We love you!”

“What is your mother doing, Duncan?” asked Cora.

On the deck of the yacht, his mother was directing Everard in maneuvering a small signal canon to the fore. When the birds were fully airborne, she shouted “Now!” and Everard lit the fuse. When the canon erupted, the noise sent the terrified birds out over the sea.

There was a moment of stunned silence, then more cheers. Chandu stood up and began to bark. “At least she didn’t kill them,” said Josefa.

“That’s a start,” said Duncan. He took Cora’s hand as they watched Kelp float away on a current, until he was just a speck in the sky. Maybe Nod had floated away, too. Maybe he had concocted an elaborate scheme to leave Port Ellery forever with Rheya and Judson on
L’Ark
. It could be he just pretended to go out on the water to do his mother’s bidding as the storm came in, but instead had already made plans to meet up with Rheya out in the bay. They could have helped each other, the dory pulling the inflatable, the inflatable pushing the dory, struggling through the rising waves to
L’Ark
outside the harbor. It would have been a stiff pull, but it was possible. Maybe Judson had managed to get the yacht safely from the Boat Club to deep water on his own and was there waiting for his captain and crew. Judson would have had a few suitcases of cash on board and three forged passports in his briefcase. Duncan imagined them spending the rest of their lives in gray water, one step ahead of the law. Maybe Nod was in love with Rheya, maybe he was in love with
L’Ark,
or maybe he was just in love with the sea. It didn’t matter. Duncan could keep Nod alive this way forever, sailing in the warm trade winds, finally free with his own life, a baby coming, blue skies, tropical bays. Why not? They had the means, and they had the will. Between them all, they could be content; they could even be happy. What else was there, really?

As the excitement of the release ebbed, people began to crowd up on the Duck. Slocum and Clover passed some trays down the sides to the attached vessels and sent Harley around the deck with a cart. Out of deference to Cora, Duncan waved the food away, then checked his watch. The tide would be turning before they knew it. He was already feeling the tug of it, pulling them back to land. It would mean a smooth ride home for Cora’s stomach. He gazed out at the vastness of the ocean where Kelp and the others had flown, unidentifiable now from the thousands of others in the sky, and let them all go.

by Erica Jong

People who live by the sea

understand eternity.

They copy the curves of the waves,

their hearts beat with the tides,

& the saltiness of their blood

corresponds with the sea.

They know that the house of flesh

is only a sandcastle

built on the shore,

that skin breaks

under the waves

like sand under the soles

of the first walker on the beach

when the tide recedes.

Each of us walks there once,

watching the bubbles

rise up through the sand

like ascending souls,

tracing the line of the foam,

drawing our index fingers

along the horizon

pointing home.