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

told myself. “I should start out earlier next time.” I knew that I would be walking at night again (but I didn’t know then that it would become my custom, that I would actually become Peeping Peter, the Night Walker of Babbington).

I suppose it took me an hour to get to the stretch of the Bolotomy where Arcinella was. As I came along the bulkhead, I tried to pick her out, and I thought I recognized her up ahead, but then I changed my mind, because someone was aboard the boat I’d taken for Arcinella. Mixed emotions arose within me. I felt a kinship with the person, whoever it might be. We were walkers in the night, a breed apart. We might sit on the bulkhead and swap stories of the things we’d seen, I thought, and as soon as I thought of our swapping those stories I knew that mine would be lies, that in my versions of the sights I’d seen, pretty girls would be performing the undressing dance. Immediately there arose a conflicting emotion: jealousy. I was jealous of my position as the night walker of Babbington. There should be only one of us. I was sure of that. The town couldn’t have more than one. If Babbington could have two, why not three, and if three, why not a dozen, and if a dozen, why not half the town, and if half the town, why not everyone? If everyone took to walking at night, there would be nothing at all odd about it, and if there were nothing at all odd about it, there would be nothing interesting in doing it, at least not for me. I wanted to be outside the main stream. If there were more than one night walker, then I would have to stay home. “This town isn’t big enough for both of us,” I muttered.

I slipped into the shadows. There wasn’t much cover on the water side of the road, so I backtracked until I could cross the street without being seen by the pretender to the office of night walker. On that side of the street, there were shadows and cover aplenty — hedges, trees, and shrubs, and lawns over which I could creep without a sound. I crept. When I was across the street from the boat, deep in the shadows, behind the trunk of a tree, I saw that the boat was indeed our Arcinella, and I saw that the other night walker was Captain Macomangus.

What was he doing? For a moment, it occurred to me that I must be witnessing a poignant scene, Captain Mac bidding a tender farewell to his beloved old boat, and I thought that I really ought to make a silent withdrawal or retreat, absent myself from this touching tableau and leave him alone to make his adieux, but curiosity kept me in my peeping role. Just how, I wondered, did one go about saying good-bye to a boat? Maybe there was an old established ritual that I ought to know. If there was, I didn’t learn it. Captain Mac closed the hatch on the forward deck, wiped his hands on his pants (and I took note of that, since it was clearly comme il faut in the unwritten book of clamboat-captain procedures and practices), and stepped off the boat onto the bulkhead. He glanced around quickly — furtively, I thought, checking to see whether anyone had seen him. He didn’t notice that I had. Then off he went, on down the road toward the south, toward home, I supposed.

When he had passed out of sight, around the bend that the road took at a canal, I came out of hiding and went over to Arcinella. I stepped aboard and gave her a careful inspection. With one exception, everything seemed to be as we had left it. I couldn’t see that anything was missing. I couldn’t see that any harm had been done. But I did notice that something had been done. The bilge had been pumped dry.

Chapter 31

Night Walker, Night Bailer

PAINTING AND DECORATING Arcinella, which my mother had expected to take a day, took a week. Throughout that week, night after night, I would wait until my father, who sat up later than my mother, had turned the television set off and gone to bed, then throw some clothes out the window of my bedroom and creep down the stairs in my pajamas, so that if I were intercepted I could claim that I’d come downstairs to use the bathroom. I’d spend a couple of minutes opening the back door very slowly and quietly and closing it equally slowly and quietly, and then I’d grab my clothes, dress in the shadows, and make my rambling way through sleeping Babbington, pausing at all the lighted windows, coming at last to the slip where Arcinella lay at rest, quietly taking on water.

Captain Mac and I seemed to be on the same schedule, because every night I would arrive at the boat while he was still at work. I hid in the shadows across the street to observe him, and when he had finished and disappeared around the bend in the road on his way home, I dashed through the streetlamp light and slipped quietly aboard the boat. After two or three nights, I came to understand what the captain was up to: he was bailing Arcinella, but he was pumping a little less water from her bilge each night. He wanted it to seem that she had begun leaking only after we had bought her, so that he would be able to claim that the poor old girl hadn’t been leaking when he sold her to us, that we must somehow be to blame for her leaking now (and if we protested, he would certainly invite us to recall that fatal collision with the bulkhead, my fault).

When I found that he was leaving the bailing job unfinished, I began finishing it myself,