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

“Peter,” she said, “I think that’s your area of responsibility, down there, the engine and all that.”

“Aye, Mom,” I said, and went below to the engine room and the hold, my dank domain. My mother thought it was foul, and I understood her distaste, but I didn’t share it. It was a fine place for a boy to work, but not a place where he’d want his mom or his girlfriend to go. They’d get themselves dirty down there, and they wouldn’t like it, but I got myself good and dirty down there, and I liked it just fine.

When I crouched to get through the engine-room door (technically called the companionway, I think, but I called it the engine-room door for as long as my mother owned Arcinella, and I’ll do so here) the engine was immediately to my left. Farther forward, ahead of the engine, there was a small open area, and ahead of that a larger open area, the hold, which was also accessible from a large hatch in the forward area of the deck, where burlap sacks full of clams could be stored out of the heat of the sun. I couldn’t stand anywhere belowdecks. In the area beside the engine, I could squat, but forward of that I had to get onto my hands and knees or scuttle sideways, like a crab.

The engine — my engine, I’d begun to consider it — dominated the belowdecks space. While I was cleaning it, removing grease with rags and an old toothbrush, I became aware, gradually, over the course of a few hours, that the bilgewater, instead of being confined to the bilge where it belonged, had risen above the planking. I was standing in it. It sloshed as the boat rocked gently in its slip, and it lapped about my feet. I crouched down and touched the surface of the bilgewater with my hand. It was half an inch or so above the decking. Even as a first-time boat owner I was able to deduce that the rise of the bilgewater over the course of the day meant that the boat was sinking.

I didn’t know what to do, but I knew what not to do: I couldn’t let my mother know. Knowing that she’d floated her dream on a sinking ship would have destroyed her confidence, dashed her hopes. I suppose that goes without saying.

Before I went up into the sunlight, I resolved to protect my mother from the deflating knowledge I’d obtained and to find some way to keep the old girl afloat. Blinking in the brightness, firm in my resolve, I felt that I had in my time belowdecks become a boy far wiser, tougher, and much more manly than the boy who had gone below in the morning.

“You need a good scrubbing,” said my mother, possibly as her way of acknowledging the transformation that I had undergone. I looked at Patti, who was separated from me by the full length of Arcinella. She looked back at me in a curious way; perhaps, I allowed myself to think, she was wondering what I would be like as a lover.

“Well,” said my mother, “that’s enough for today. Tomorrow we can start painting and decorating.” She unscrewed the top of the thermos bottle and poured the cold coffee into the bay. She grabbed me playfully by the ear and said, “Let’s get you home and into a hot shower.”

Chapter 30

An Act of Sabotage, in Reverse

I COULDN’T SLEEP. I’d worked hard enough and long enough to be exhausted, but I bore the burden of disturbing knowledge, and it kept me awake. I was a kid who knew that he still had a lot to learn, but I felt that when it came to Arcinella’s hull, I knew too much: I’d learned something that I’d rather not have known. I lay in my bed, and instead of passing the time before I fell asleep in pleasant recollection of my evening with Patti in Dudley’s study, as I had on every other night since the actual occurrence, I found myself shivering with the chilling memory of what I had discovered below Arcinella’s decks, which came blowing in like a frigid nor’easter. This mnemonic wind did not blow me up; it was strong, but it brought none of the lovely stuff that memories of Patti did. It brought only the sort of thing that keeps me awake now: anxiety, guilt, and regret — deflationary agents all.

(Writing those words, this morning, April 29, 2000, a gray one in a winter that has decided to stay in town well into the spring, I’m sluggish from a night when all of those things kept me awake. I’m anxious about a couple of the jobs I’ve taken on: a website based on the Happy Clam animated television series, for which I have done quite a bit of work but for which I have no contract and only an oral promise that I’ll be paid the fee, which seems to shrink every time I talk to the management of the publishing house that owns the rights to the Happy Clam series; and a little book for high school science teachers that is intended to give them simple, easy-to-implement procedures for getting kids interested in careers in molluscan biology, which must be fully outlined four days from now. Those anxieties lie uneasily atop the run-of-the-mill anxieties I have about the two other jobs I’m doing at the same time: a history of the Seventy-Seventh Street Proctology Group, commissioned by the principals in the practice as part of its lavish seventy-seventh-anniversary celebration; and a recruiting website for Stickley and Garnet, Certified Public Accountants, an outfit “where you can make your future add up to something.” So, you see, my overarching, all-encompassing source of anxiety is the need to figure out how to do all that