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

a length of hose that was clamped to a domed housing at the upper front of the engine and ran to an outlet at the side of the hull, above the waterline.

“Uh-huh.”

“Here’s the deal,” she said. “This valve controls the flow of cooling water through the engine block. If you turn it the way it’s turned now, bay water comes in down there, flows through the block, and then exits there. That’s the way it’s supposed to be set up normally, for a boat that’s not sinking. But if you turn the valve the other way, the engine will pump the water out of here — ”

“Bilgewater.”

“What?” she said, glaring at me in wonder and incipient anger.

“The water in here — it’s bilgewater. That’s the bilge.”

“Oh. I thought you were saying you didn’t believe me. When you said, ‘Bilgewater.’ It sounded like the nautical equivalent of ‘bullshit.’”

“I guess it is, actually.”

“Anyway, the engine will pump the bilgewater out of here and send it out into the bay — back into the bay, I guess you could say.”

“How do you know this?”

“I asked.”

“Asked?”

“I asked your grandfather.”

“Oh.”

“I was talking to your grandmother, doing some research.”

“What?”

“Doing some research. I’m still working on the question of your paternity, you know.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

“Anyway, we were talking, and your grandfather came by, and I told them both about Arcinella and asked if they’d like to see her all fixed up. Your grandmother didn’t come, but your grandfather did, and he spent about an hour with me, looking her over.”

“Did he tell you she was sinking?”

“No, but he did point out the valve, and told me what it was for, and told me how to use it.”

“Knowing that you’d tell me.”

“Yeah,” she said sweetly and softly. “And from that I figured out that she was sinking, but he didn’t want to tell me that she was — ” She hesitated, but then went on to add, “ — because he didn’t want me to think that you were a jerk.”

“I should have asked him to take a look at Arcinella before we bought her,” I confessed. “If he had — ”

She put her hand on my arm and said, “You’re right. That’s what you should have done, but it’s too late now, so you might as well forget about it,” describing in a few words an attitude toward life that I wish I had adopted at the time and maintained without alteration ever since, instead of the attitude I did adopt, the one that makes me wake in the night and lie there sleepless and fretful, my memory full of every mistake I have ever made, every misstep, every folly, my anxiety asking which among my little ships is sinking fastest.

“I wonder why Captain Mac hasn’t been using the engine to pump the old girl dry,” I said, to get us off the subject of my culpability.

“He probably didn’t want to attract attention. It’s awfully quiet down here along the river at night, and there are houses right across the street. Somebody would be sure to wake up and call the cops, don’t you think?”

“You’re probably right,” I said. I had been thinking that I would start the engine and use it to bail Arcinella, to pump her full of air, but I understood that I couldn’t, and I said so. “I guess I don’t want to attract attention, either. If somebody did call the cops, they’d want to know what I was up to, and my mother would find out that the boat’s sinking.” I sighed and said, “I’d better start bailing,” hoping that Patti might offer to help. She didn’t.

I bent to my work, and a voice from over my shoulder said, “Bailing is for chumps.”

I knew who it was without looking. It was my old friend Raskol. When I did turn and look, I found that he was squatting on deck, looking in at us through a porthole, grinning. In another moment he was down in the hold beside us.

He was smiling. He had a couple of lengths of garden hose coiled over his shoulder, and in his hand he held a small metal device. He handed the device to me and said, “If you knew enough about old clam boats to know what to pray for when yours is sinking, this would be the answer to your prayers.”

It was a length of tubing, threaded at both ends, with an opening along one side.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a jet pump,” he said.

I looked at it carefully.

“It has no moving parts,” I said. “How can it be a pump?”

“Give it here,” he said.

I did, and he went to work. In a few minutes, he had connected a garden hose to either end of the jet pump. One hose he ran through the hatch and into the Bolotomy. The other he attached to the nearest of the faucets that sprouted at intervals along the docks and supplied boat owners with fresh water from the town tank. Then he did what I had been telling myself he surely didn’t intend to do. He turned the water on.

“You’re putting her out of her misery?” I asked, and I tried to sound as if I were kidding when I said it.

“Nope,” he said, soberly, “I’m bailing her out.”

“By filling her up?”

“Come here,” he said, and he led Patti and me onto the foredeck. He bent over and pulled the end of the other garden hose from the dark river. Water was rushing from it.

“Now come below,” he said, dropping the hose into the river again.

When we were below, he lifted the pump from the bilge and held it so that the opening was just at the surface of the bilgewater. We could hear, and even see, the bilgewater rushing into the opening and out into the Bolotomy.

“What a little sucker!” exclaimed Patti.

“That’s amazing,” I said. “How does it work?”

Raskol gave me a look. “Very well,” he said drily.

“But I mean, what makes it work?’’

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s one of the great