Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

Though I had throttled her down, Arcinella displayed a troubling reluctance to retard her forward motion. Her engine was turning over slowly, but her momentum carried her toward the slip and that looming bulkhead with reckless haste. Time to shift into reverse and calm her down, bring her in sweet and easy.

The clutch. It was a metal pedal projecting through the floorboards in the wheelhouse. I put my right foot on it and pressed. Nothing happened. It didn’t move at all. Ordinarily, in a car, the driver would have been given some mechanical or hydraulic advantage so that the effort of depressing the clutch pedal was eased, but here all such landlubbin’ frippery had been stripped away, deemed, I suppose, an affront to the masculinity of a clamdiggin’ bayman, so that to depress this clutch pedal, I had to stand on it. This I did, and with the clutch in, I shifted into reverse. Arcinella raced on toward her rendezvous with the bulkhead. What was required of me now, I knew, was to release the clutch in a smooth manner so that reverse was engaged but Arcinella didn’t stall. This, I realized as the sweat began to run into my eyes, I could not possibly do, since I was standing on the clutch pedal, with all my weight employed in keeping it depressed. I could remain standing on the pedal and allow Arcinella to run headlong into the bulkhead, or I could step off the pedal and hope that she would not stall despite the violence with which reverse would be engaged. Better to do something than to do nothing, I thought, and so I stepped off the clutch pedal.

She shuddered, seemed to hesitate for a moment, as if trying to understand what had happened to her, then with a sound like a sigh she stalled, and in the sudden silence glided smoothly, swiftly, single-mindedly directly into the bulkhead, which she struck with such force that all hands would have been thrown to the deck or perhaps even overboard had not all hands seen it coming, watched, indeed with mounting horror as Arcinella raced toward the impact. When she struck, she shook herself like a wet dog, then rebounded in the direction of the opposite bank, which she nearly reached before the captain managed to restart the engine.

With me standing glum and mute in the bow, ready to take a line ashore when we were close enough, Captain Mac brought her in sweet and easy, and this time her bow never even touched the bulkhead.

When we were all ashore, he turned to my mother and with an unwelcome hand on my shoulder said, “There’s been no harm done, most likely — but,” he added, in a lowered voice, “of course, I can’t say for sure that there hasn’t, and I can’t take responsibility if there has.”

Chapter 29

Trouble Down Below

WHEN THE CAPTAIN was out of earshot, if not yet out of sight, my mother stood on the bulkhead with her hands on her hips, her feet planted firmly, looked out over Arcinella, shook her head, and said, “What a mess!”

I felt the sudden onset of fear, like a punch that I hadn’t anticipated. Did she regret the purchase, regret everything? Was it all going to fall apart before we even got underway? Was it my fault?

“You said it!” said Patti, and for an awful moment I really thought that all was lost, but then I saw that what my mother had said and what she felt did not match. She was smiling at the boat, smiling at the task that lay ahead of her, and so was Patti. They could hardly wait to get to work. We had brought a thermos of coffee, and the plan was to go through the lists my mother had made and parcel out the work while we drank our coffee, but my mother couldn’t wait. She got right to work, and Patti and I followed her example.

In a certain kind of endearingly sentimental movie, a Cinderella story, a moment comes when the Cinderella character is invited to the plot’s equivalent of the Prince’s ball and discovers that she has nothing to wear, a lack that makes her feel unworthy of the invitation and hopeless of ever being worthy of the Prince character’s attentions. Her champions, who should be appalled that she has confused couture and character, instead work miracles to transform her appearance by scrubbing her clean and fashioning the illusion of a fashionable costume. They improvise a gown from a tablecloth and duct tape, and a tiara from a colander and candy sprinkles. The old lady next door, whom everyone had till now shunned as a shriveled harridan, drifts into a bittersweet reminiscence of the days, long gone, when she was the reigning beauty of the block; she teaches our Cinderella how to curtsey and flirt, bestows upon her a treasured brooch, and offers the sort of motherly advice that young girls ignore, as their mothers did before them.

That Cinderella transformation was what my mother hoped to effect. We spent the day trying to persuade Arcinella to forget the trying years she’d spent as a clam boat under the callused hand of Captain Mac, removing all the leavings of her years as a working boat, the dirt, the broken bits of clamdigging gear, the trash that accumulates on boats and never seems to get removed until there is a change of ownership, the detritus of one phase of a life, one way of life, cleaning her up and scrubbing her down in preparation for the next day, when the plan was to repaint her and dress her up for a very different sort of life from the one she late had led.

At one point, early in the day, my mother was about to go below and see what ought to