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

not jump, if you turn and walk away, then we are parted, we are citizens now of different lands, speakers of different tongues, and you are no longer my friend, cannot be my friend.”

I reached my grandparents’ house and stopped at the edge of the front yard, where I was still out of sight, behind a hedge. I thought about the conversation that my grandfather and I would have if I went inside.

I would be contrite.

He would be kind.

I would feel like a fool, ashamed of the folly that my pride and vanity had brought me to.

He would do his best to make me feel that I was no more foolish than he had been at my age.

I would not be convinced.

He would tell me a story involving some petty foolishness of his.

We would laugh together, and I would pretend to be relieved.

He would give me sound advice.

I would go on my way, wiser but humbled.

I would turn to wave good-bye, and I would catch him smiling indulgently, thinking that I still had a lot of growing up to do, a lot to learn.

I decided against it. I turned around and went on my way. I was on my own.

Chapter 34

Arcinella, All Fixed Up

MY DUTIES as the Night Bailer of Babbington left me tired every morning, and my secret knowledge of Arcinella’s secret status as a sinking ship made me glum, but my mother and Patti were full of energy and hope, and they began each day chipper and chirping. They worked at a furious pace throughout the day, hardly pausing for lunch, just grabbing a bite of a sandwich now and then, and several times during the day their excess of hope and energy would inflate them to such a dangerous degree that they would burst into song as a way of letting off steam.

They went over Arcinella, topside, from stem to stern, fixing her up, making her look good — trim, shipshape, and, above all else, elegant. My mother from the very beginning had imagined the boat looking elegant, and for her the concept of elegance was encapsulated in the words “a black-tie affair.” So she dressed Arcinella in a tuxedo. She and Patti painted her black and white — I should say that they painted her a rich, gleaming black and a pure, shining white, because those were the terms they invariably used — and an elegant job they did, too. In a week, Arcinella looked good. She really did.

Her hull and deck and the roofs over the cabin and the hold and the hatch cover forward were shining white. All her vertical surfaces and all the trim were gleaming black. The exhaust pipe that rose straight up from her engine was glossy black, gleaming, and the bucket that capped it to keep rainwater out when the engine wasn’t running was gleaming black, too. On the starboard forward corner of the cabin, Patti and my mother had mounted a long pole, gleaming black, and from the top fluttered a satin pennant, white, with EEE embroidered on it in black satin script.

Throughout the week, while they were working abovedecks, I worked below. I had no idea what I should be doing, so I began doing what they were doing, fixing things up. This meant that from time to time Patti and my mother saw me bringing an armload of something damp and dirty up from Arcinella’s innards. They would wince at the sight of the load of muck I was carrying and shrink away from it. I could see that they were grateful to me for being willing to take on such a task, and they left me to my dirty work. Sometimes they asked how it was going, but they never came below to take a look, so they didn’t discover the awful flaw that I had found.

While I worked, I praised myself, often, for enabling them to stay above in the sun where they could remain happy and hopeful, praised myself for working below, hiding the misery that came from knowing what I knew, suffering in silence so that they could enjoy the bliss of ignorance. (I discovered, then, that self-praise, in the form of silent fantasies about receiving unlikely rewards, from medals to money to murmured declarations of awe and affection, can keep a guy going during a disagreeable job, and that discovery has served me well throughout my working life.)

Once during the week, and only once, my mother paused in her work as I was passing on my way to the trash barrel at the roadside, sighed, and said, “Peter, are you sure you wouldn’t like us to give you some help down there?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “It’s hot and cramped and dirty down below, no place for you and Patti. You two just go on fixing things up abovedecks, and I’ll fix things up below.”

She didn’t ask again, and I did as I had promised, after a fashion, although, to tell the truth, I didn’t work all the time. Sometimes I snoozed in the area forward of the engine and aft of the hatch, where I wasn’t likely to be discovered.

What did I accomplish? I disposed of everything I found that didn’t seem likely to be useful during an elegant excursion. I swabbed and scrubbed. Most of all, I cleaned Arcinella’s engine as thoroughly as I could. When I had finished, I thought the old Champion Six was a thing of beauty. That may not have been so to eyes other than mine. Beautiful it may not have been, but it was clean. However, I have since come to understand that in the case of Arcinella’s old engine cleanliness may not have been a good thing. Old engines acquire a protective coating of dirt and grease that shields them from the harsh reality around them the way that certain old people acquire a coating of beliefs and prejudices that they use to shield them from the annoying actualities of the changed