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

making sure that the bilge was as dry as I could get it before I returned home. What I knew about bailing came from childhood experiences that had made me think of it as a form of play, part of the pleasure of sailing with my grandfather. He had a dinghy that he sometimes trailed behind the Rambunctious when we were going to go crabbing in the waterways that wandered among the islands in the flats on the other side of the bay, and the dinghy often took on water during the crossing. When we reached the flats, we would pull the dinghy to the stern of the Rambunctious and clamber into it, and then before we began crabbing we would bail the little boat. My grandfather had fashioned bailers for us from empty cans, adding handles to make them easier to hold and trimming the cans to a scoop-like shape that made them more efficient than unmodified cans would have been, but I knew that a plain old empty can would work, and that was what was available to me, in a trash barrel in the shadows beside one of the houses across the street from the creek, so I used a simple empty can to bail Arcinella.

For anyone older than, I’d say, eight, bailing is not play. It’s just a chore, and it is one of the chores that brings no satisfaction at all. It is never really completed, for one thing. There’s always a little water in the bilge that you can’t get out. That bit of residual water is the kind of thing that can bring a compulsive type to tears.

I bailed, and I bailed.

It was slow, and it was boring.

However, it became one of those tasks, like painting the mullions and muntins of windows with many lights, that invite the mind to wander, and during my nights of bailing, I began to think more and more often about how my nights in the bilge might be represented in a story, my story. I didn’t think of it as a story that I would tell, though here I am telling it to you now; instead, at the time, I thought of it as a story that someone else would write; specifically, I thought of it as an interview in the series of interviews that appeared in the Babbington Reporter under the rubric “We Pay a Call.”

    You haven’t seen him. He takes great care to ensure that you do not see him. But he is at work, every night, while you’re asleep. He’s the Night Bailer of Babbington, a legendary figure who turns out to be an actual person, a fascinating young man — a boy, really — whose name I am not at liberty to divulge. I’ll call him Larry, as he suggested. Actually, “Larry” is the current incarnation of not one but two of Babbington’s legendary figures: the aforementioned Night Bailer and also the Night Walker of Babbington, who is the lone figure abroad at night, slipping from shadow to shadow and occasionally — legend has it — peeking into the windows of virgins.

    “And not just virgins, Egbert,” he avers with a laconic chuckle.

    “‘Larry,’ the responsibilities attendant to two legendary roles must really keep you hopping.”

    “Yes, they do, Egbert, but along with the responsibilities, there are rewards, and the rewards are enough to make the work worthwhile.”

    “The peeking into windows.”

    “Heh-heh. No, no. That’s really a very minor part of the job. The greatest rewards come from inflating the boats.”

    “Inflating the boats?”

    “Yes. That’s what bailing really is, you know, Egbert.”

    “Huh?”

    “A lot of people think only of the negative aspect of bailing — removing water from the bilge of a boat. But the Night Bailers—all of us in the long line of Night Bailers — don’t look at it that way.”

    “You don’t?”

    “Oh, no. Not at all. You see, Egbert, bailing is an inflationary process; when we remove water from a bilge, we are simultaneously drawing air into the bilge.”

    “I’m afraid I don’t follow —”

    “Nature, as you know, abhors a vacuum. So, when I evacuate the water from a bilge, I’ve made a vacant space for Nature to fill, and she does fill it — with air; in other words, she blows the boat up.”

    “That’s amazing.”

    “Yes, it is, Egbert, but even more amazing is the fact that inflating these boats gives me the ability to dilate or compress time.”

    “Really! Just how do you accomplish that?”

    “Well, not to be too technical about it, but time is really nothing more than the progress of things from a state of relative orderliness to a state of relative disorder, and ultimately to a state of complete disorder, so every time I empty a bilge I am returning Babbington to a state of relatively greater orderliness than the state that obtained before I began bailing, and so I am, in a very real sense, reversing time.”

    “Where did you learn to talk like that?”

    “Huh?”

    “Never mind. Let me just explore the implications of what you said. Are you suggesting that without your nightly bailing, time would actually move more quickly than it now does?”

    “Yes, Egbert. That’s correct. Each night, by inflating sinking boats, I make up for lost time; that is, for time lost during the day, when the bilges were filling.”

    “So when I find myself wondering where the time goes, or if I am in search of lost time, now I know where to find it: in the bilges of the boats of Babbington!”

    “Right you are, Egbert.”

    “Ah-ha! Now I think I see the secret to your amazing ability to bail — or I guess I should say inflate — so many boats. By making up for lost time, you find the time to bail all the boats in Babbington — am I right?”

    “Yes and no. Yes, making up for lost time is the way I find the