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

are now convinced they will be in the future, revisiting the history of our misfortune again and again, poking at each painful memory like a sore tooth, or we freeze in the present, surrendering to defeat, unwilling to try again, unwilling to continue the struggle, convinced now that there is nothing at all that we could possibly do to reverse our fortunes because the task we have undertaken is not only beyond our ability, but beyond anyone’s ability, that, as my mother put it that night, with a twisted smile, “You can’t inflate a dead dog.”

Chapter 46

A Dead Dog, Beached (Afflatus, Part 4)

“YOU CAN’T INFLATE a dead dog.” My memory of my mother’s saying that, looking at me with teary eyes and a bittersweet smile, lay dormant for very many years — nearly forty — until one wintry morning when I was walking along a deserted beach on East Phantom island, the largest in the Phantom archipelago that stretches between Montauk Point and Block Island, and came upon a dead dog in the surf. That encounter triggered the memory of what my mother had said that night, and that memory led to my writing this book about my mother and her lunch launch, but not directly, because the course of book-writing never does run true, never along a predictable line, but much more like the meandering course of a man walking with no particular motive for walking other than to see what he will discover and what may befall him, who is diverted here by a shadow, there by a little crowd of people, or by an unusual way that one building juts out and the next stands back from the street — finally arriving at a place that he had never intended to reach. Inherent in the development of any book that its author intends to be a book about its author, which is to say any book whose author recognizes the truth that every book is about its author as much as it is about any other subject that its author might decide to explore, is a certain likelihood that the author will stray from the course that he intended or expected to follow when he began it. I began this book intending to tell the story of my attempt to earn money for my college expenses by digging clams during the summer following my graduation from Babbington High School, and I was well along in telling that story when Albertine and I accepted an invitation from friends to get away to the splendid off-season isolation of their house on East Phantom.

I took the book with me, on a laptop computer, and spent the first day working on it, feeling throughout the day that the work was going well, enjoying the reconstruction of some of the memories of that summer, the leaky clam boat that my friend Raskol and I bought, the days on the bay in the sun, our clownish ineptitude as clamdiggers, and our struggles to keep the boat afloat, but I finished the day nervous and anxious because somehow in the course of that day that had from moment to moment seemed so successful, I had lost the thread of the work. I didn’t know what to do next, didn’t even in a sense know who I was, who I ought to be next in the story that I was telling, who I wanted to be. I couldn’t even tell what had gone wrong, or where it had gone wrong, or why the story that I had set out to tell no longer appealed to me.

Our friends’ neighbors, people unknown to us, knocked at the door. They were on their way to a party and invited us to come along. It was the annual winter-solstice party thrown by the owner of the East Phantom Inn, who went by the sole name of Stanton, for all the stalwarts who were still on the island when winter arrived. It was held not in the public portion of the inn, which was closed now, but in Stanton’s quarters, in a barn behind the inn that had been made into a rather nice house, unless, perhaps, it had been built to resemble a barn that had been remodeled as a house, which I thought a possibility. A number of little old ladies, relatives of Stanton’s, were performing hostess duties. It seemed that every time I turned around there was another one of them, cleaning up, or just sitting there, watching. Two or three of them were in the kitchen, handing out beer and wine and making snacks.

Stanton took us on a tour. A young woman, short, a little chubby, pretty in a bland way, tagged along. Stanton hardly seemed to notice her. The highlight of the tour was Stanton’s description of what the master bedroom, downstairs, had been like when he first saw the place, several years earlier. The owner had been a crack addict, dying of AIDS, who hadn’t left his built-in bed in months. According to Stanton, he had spent his last winter lying in bed and shoving two-by-fours into the fireplace, shoving them in a little more as they burned. Listening, I asked myself whether that technique would work, and I concluded that it could only work for a short while, when the two-by-fours were long enough to push. As they burned, they would become too short for the dying man to push any further. And then I asked myself who delivered those two-by-fours to him? Who stacked them beside the bed? Some AIDS support group? Friends? The lumber yard? If they went to that trouble, why didn’t they keep a proper fire burning for him, with decent hardwood logs? And, the most important question of all, why was Stanton telling us this implausible story? What was his motive?

I WAS STILL ASKING MYSELF that question later that night, lying awake at two o’clock, reading a brochure about colonoscopy. I was scheduled to undergo the