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

world in which they find themselves stranded. To the eager lad who has learned a little bit about solvents, washing all of that away seems like a good idea, but sometimes the patient suffers for it.

I want to be clear about an essential fact: I didn’t fix anything down below; I just fixed things up. In most phrasal verbs, such as blow up, do in, and buy out, the particle intensifies the base verb, often suggesting that the action is brought to a state of completion. In fix up, however, the particle weakens the base, suggesting an action performed only on the surface, something that falls well short of the simple power of fix alone. Just compare

I don’t want you driving that old wreck until I’ve fixed it, Mom.

with

Let’s fix up that old wreck and sell it to some sucker.

Instead of merely fixing Arcinella’s engine up, I could have asked Patti to entice one of her drag-racing admirers to come over and give the engine a thorough overhaul, to fix whatever needed fixing, change the oil, give it a ring job, adjust the carburetor and the timing, replace the points and plugs, and all of that. I knew the words, and the small part of me capable of a detached, logical assessment of our situation told me that bringing in expert help would be a very good idea, but all the rest of me resisted it, and the rest of me won.

So, at the end of the week, Arcinella looked neat and elegant, trim and sound, but while we stood on the bulkhead admiring her, her pennant fluttered in the stiffening breeze, straightened, and displayed the initials of Ella’s Elegant Excursions, so that she seemed to wail, “EEE,” and I knew why.

Chapter 35

My Confidante

THE NIGHT BEFORE the shakedown cruise, I excused myself from the dinner table and said that I was going to walk over to the Purlieu Street School to see if I could get into a handball game, but I didn’t head for the school. Instead, I crossed the highway and went to the diner, to use the pay phone there. I dialed Patti’s number and listened to the ring. My hand was shaking, my heart was pounding, and my throat was dry.

“Hello?” said a voice.

“Hello, Mrs. Fiorenza, it’s Peter.” I could hear the tremor in my voice. “May I speak to Patti?”

“It’s me, Peter,” said Patti. “What’s wrong? You sound upset.”

“I am,” I admitted. “Can you meet me tonight, late? Can you slip out of the house?”

“Sure,” she said. “What time?”

“Midnight.”

“I like the sound of that. At Dudley’s?”

“Huh? Oh. No. At the boat.”

“Arcinella?”

“Yeah. If I’m not there, wait for me, okay? Sometimes I have trouble getting out of the house. But wait for me. I’ll be there.”

“What’s this about?”

“It’s about Arcinella. She’s — ” I hesitated. The desire to have someone share the burden was strong, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell Patti the whole truth.

“She’s what?”

“She’s — um — she’s kind of like a person, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. I do. She’s very sophisticated, you know?”

“Sophisticated?”

“Yeah, now that she’s all dressed up and elegant, ready for a night on the town?”

“Oh. Right. But — um — what about beneath the surface?”

“Hm?”

“What about — well — her heart?”

“You mean her engine? You’ve got that all fixed up.”

“Oh, sure. That’s no problem. That’s all fixed up. Maybe I don’t mean her heart. Maybe I mean what about — what about — her soul?”

“Her soul? Does she have a soul? She’s a boat. Do boats have souls?”

“For that matter,” I said, seeing and seizing an opportunity to step aside from the issue that had prompted me to call, “do we have souls? And what, exactly, do we mean by a soul? Let’s omit the religious notion of a soul, since, as Dudley always used to say, ‘That’s a mythical quality, very much like the unicorn’s horn.’”

“Ahhh, Dudley,” she said knowingly.

“Personally,” I went on, “I think that what we mean by the soul is the essence of the self — what we boil down to — not the us we know at this moment, right now, or at any other single moment, but what we are when we ignore the daily variations, the distortions of the self caused by temporarily strong but essentially fleeting influences, such as those brought on by joy or vexation.”

“The essence of the self.”

“Yes. But I wouldn’t say that the soul is the ideal self, because some people have souls as rank and nasty as the viscous gunk that I cleaned from the bottom of Arcinella’s bilge.”

“Ick,” she said.

“However,” I continued, “even though we have to factor out the distortions of transitory influences, I don’t think we should deny the fact that the soul can be altered by experience.”

“Like when people say that something is ‘good for the soul’?”

“Right,” I said.

“So a charitable act is good for the soul.”

“Right.”

“But some other things are bad for the soul.”

“Like vicious acts, or miserly acts.”

“I think you’re saying that the soul is a container — ”

“Yes! Yes! That’s what I think!”

“A gas bag.”

“Yes. A gas bag. And it enlarges or shrinks as we fill it or empty it.”

“And the things in it can be good or bad — or a mixture — and each of us has a mixture that’s unique.”

“Yes, but remember that the soul doesn’t hold everything. That’s the self. The soul is within the self, but it is smaller than the self, since it is only the heart of the self. I should say the soul of the self.”

“Like the nucleus of a cell if the self is the whole cell.”

“Um — yeah — okay.”

“You were going to say something different.”

“I was going to say that it’s like the living clam inside its shell.”

“Of course!” said Patti. “The shell is just the outward self, the protective coating.”

“But the innards are the real person, and the clam makes both of them, the inner and the outer, by sticking its neck into the soup of stuff around