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

said, as if it were the kind of arcane knowledge that would ordinarily have been revealed only after a secret ceremony involving blood.

“Oh,” I said, despondently, since a dead battery was so, well, fatal.

“We’ll use the bat’ry from your mother’s car,” he whispered, and then, loudly, he said, “Good idea, boy! Very good idea! I’ll get it for you.” He grabbed a wrench from the box of rusty tools the captain had left behind, went above, where he told Patti and my mother that I’d had the inspired idea of replacing the dead battery with the one from my mother’s car, then removed the battery from her car and carried it belowdecks, where he installed it in place of the dead one.

“Give her a whirl,” he said when he was done.

In the wheelhouse, I pressed the starter button, and something whirled, but the engine didn’t start.

I bent over and peered down into the engine room.

“Well,” he said, grinning for some reason, “the pinion gear on your starter motor is not engaging the rack on the flywheel.”

“Ah-ha!” I said, as if I knew what he was talking about. “I thought it sounded like that. Is there anything we can do?”

“Oh, sure,” he said, still grinning.

“What?”

“Well, old Mac used to whack her with a hatchet. Didn’t he leave you the hatchet?”

“The hatchet? Yeah. He left a hatchet. I keep it in the cupboard in the wheelhouse, with the slickers — just in case.” (Secretly, I had assumed that the hatchet was for battling sharks. I had never seen a shark in the bay, but when I discovered the hatchet, I came, through an erroneous process of reasoning, to the conclusion that if Captain Mac had carried a hatchet there must certainly be sharks in the bay but that through a lack of coincidence they just never happened to be around when I was around.)

Mr. Lodkochnikov, without asking “in case what?” said, “Well, you get that hatchet.”

I did.

“Now,” he said, “you give a couple of whacks on the end of the starter motor — not too hard — here, wait a minute. I’ll show you.”

He said all of this as if it were as it should be, as if everyone ought to know that the captain of a clam boat kept a hatchet for whacking a recalcitrant starter motor, as if he were surprised that I had not mastered a skill that every boy my age ought to have mastered, and perhaps he was right in thinking that I was insufficiently educated, but starter-whacking wasn’t the sort of operation that I ever saw in the industrial documentaries I watched on Saturday mornings.

He demonstrated how to whack the housing of the starter motor with the flat end of the hatchet. “Not too hard, now, because you don’t want to knock the damn thing right off the bracket, but you got to give her enough of a whack to free up the shaft in the starter and get it to engage.”

He gave it a whack. He gave it another.

“If a couple of whacks don’t do it,” he said, “then you give her another spin with the starter button up there so’s you get the teeth into a different position and then you whack her again.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Do that,” he said.

“What?”

“Hit the starter again.”

“Oh. Okay.”

I pressed the button, and almost as soon as I had he called out, “That’s enough. Come on back down here.”

He handed me the hatchet.

I gave the end of the starter motor a timid whack. He made a sweeping motion with his hands to indicate that I ought to give it a less timid whack. I did, and I was rewarded with a metallic clunk from the opposite end of the housing, a clunk that, even to a neophyte starter-whacker like me, clearly meant success.

When I pressed the button, the starter engaged, and the engine started. My mother and Patti cheered.

Chapter 40

The Shakedown Cruise

MR. LODKOCHNIKOV made his way through the wheelhouse and was headed for shore when my mother stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Mr. Lodkochnikov,” she said, “won’t you accompany us on our shakedown cruise?”

Embarrassed, awkward, he said, “Oh, I couldn’t — I — ”

“Please,” said my mother.

“You can stand in for all the paying excursionists who’ll be aboard when we begin regular service,” said Patti.

“I’m not very elegant,” he said, offering as evidence his callused bayman’s hands.

“Tonight,” said my mother, “you are.”

When he was seated comfortably in a deck chair forward of the hatch, drinking a glass of champagne, we made our way downriver and onto the bay through the stillness of the evening and its fading light, the Champion Six rumbling easily, just loafing, and the slick smooth hull of the sleekest and prettiest clam boat on the bay hardly parting the water, barely leaving a wake. Arcinella was a smooth thing, and she rode gently on the water when her bilge was dry. She seemed confident and capable, ready, a reliable underpinning for our venture. So she seemed.

My mother and Patti, dazzling in long, slinky, bias-cut satin gowns of a silvery moonlight-white, were busy, going through the motions of providing the attentive service that they hoped would bring to Ella’s Elegant Excursions admiration, renown, and paying customers, offering Mr. Lodkochnikov little pastel sandwiches from a silver tray and working through my mother’s checklist of policies and procedures, circulating among the phantom excursionists and chatting them up, offering almonds, which my mother considered the only really elegant nut, and lengths of celery filled with cream cheese tinted rose and mauve, like the picturesque clouds that floated along the horizon, pouring invisible champagne into invisible glasses, making mock introductions, priming silent conversations, pointing out landmarks on the shore, and encouraging the proper admiration of the summer sunset, but although they were in constant motion they never gave the impression of working hard. They were as smooth as Arcinella. All of us were gliding, enjoying our buoyancy and the beguiling belief that from now on life would