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

“Hello,” I said. “Hi.”

“I think you’re doing a great job.”

“Um, thanks.”

“You haven’t hit anything yet.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean no. Not yet.”

“Do you suppose you could show me how to drive the boat?”

“Um, well — ”

She wriggled in between me and the wheel. After a minute or so of moving the wheel a little this way and a little that way, she turned herself around so that she was facing me and asked, “Can you keep your mind on your driving and on me at the same time?”

I was flattered, excited, flustered, and suddenly shy. Here was a grown woman showing the kind of interest in me that grown women ordinarily exhibited only in my dreams, and, on top of that, admiring my boat-handling skills.

“I can try,” I said, and she snickered lasciviously.

Wham! Patti slid the window glass aside. “Peter!” she spat. “Would you tear yourself away from what you’re doing and turn this damned boat around? I’m black and blue!”

“Um, sure, yeah,” I said.

Patti glared at the drunken bimbo I was more or less embracing, and the drunken bimbo glared right back. Patti stormed off. I began turning the boat slowly toward home.

In another moment, my mother was at the window. “Peter!” she said. “Take us home! Full speed!” She turned away, shaking her head and saying, “This is not what I had in mind, not at all.” I assumed, of course, that she was talking about my conduct in the wheelhouse, conduct unbecoming the helmsman of an excursion boat, a young man in a position of trust.

“You’ll have to go now,” I said to the woman.

“Game called on account of mom?” she said. Then she raised both eyebrows, winked, and shrugged, and ducked under my arms and wobbled out of the wheelhouse.

When Arcinella was secure in her slip and the drunken excursionists were all gone, we climbed into my mother’s car and went home without a word.

Chapter 45

My Mother Aphorizes

THEN FRIDAY CAME AROUND AGAIN. We were to sail at seven, and as seven approached, we preened (and, secretly, we prayed; at least I did, and I suppose that Patti and my mother did; I was still a believer then, and the god I believed in was a god of gifts, omniscient, avuncular, and capricious, who could give or take, and despite his apparently total lack of interest in my needs and desires, his complete unwillingness to give me help when I asked for it, I asked him for help now; I asked him to make this night a success for my mother, and I promised to keep my room neat and clean if he would; I probably should have offered more).

Aboard Arcinella, preparing her for the evening, we anxiously asked one another whether we looked all right, whether everything was ready, whether we had enough supplies, and so on, and so on, never asking whether anyone would show up. I started Arcinella’s engine and nudged the throttle as low as I dared go, so that she rumbled low, ready and steady.

Patti and my mother paced the foredeck in their satin gowns, striking poses, adjusting each other’s hair, and pretending not to watch the road for signs of excursionists.

In time, some excursionists did arrive. There were only four of them, but they were two young couples with stars in their eyes, and Patti and my mother greeted them enthusiastically and for the next few hours did a very good job of pretending that four excursionists were ideal for Arcinella, that everything was as it should be, and that they would consider Ella’s Elegant Excursions a success if those two couples left the boat happy, but the look in my mother’s eyes whenever she glanced in my direction told me that it wasn’t so.

When the night was over and the two couples had driven off, we were sitting in my mother’s car, and I was silently congratulating myself for having kept Arcinella afloat for the entire week, when my mother and Patti burst into tears.

“Now, now, what’s all this?” I said, leaning forward from the back seat and giving each of them a comforting squeeze. “Don’t let it get you down. I grant you that it wasn’t the night we’d been hoping for, but don’t let a little setback make you lose heart. We’re going to use tomorrow and Monday to figure out how to bring lots and lots of excursionists on board next week.”

They continued to sniffle and blubber miserably.

“Come on, chin up! And stop crying now. We’ve got a lot of work to do, you know. Let’s see some gumption!”

More tears than gumption, I’m sorry to say.

“Please stop crying. Please? Aw, come on — hey! — I’ve got an idea! What do you say we stop at the malt shop and have a strawberry soda? That’ll cheer you up, won’t it? When you get a strawberry soda into you, everything’s going to look different. You’ll see that we’re really not that far from being a success, a big success, a huge success. All we have to do is make some adjustments. We’ve got to roll up our sleeves, and — ”

They turned toward me with nearly identical expressions, in which weak smiles showed their gratitude for my attempt to cheer them up, but their fallen faces and sad eyes betrayed the overwhelming sorrow that we feel when we have experienced a crushing failure, when we can see nothing in the past but the path that led to that failure, each of the thousand minor misfortunes that brought us to our current sorry state seeming now, upon reflection from the position of failure, to have been inevitable, and our future looming now not as the sun-dappled beckoning path it ought to be but as nothing but a continuation of that pattern, a series of new misfortunes, equally inevitable, a path so unappealing that we recoil from following it, and so we either return to the past, where things were certainly bad, but not as bad as we