The Plover: A Novel (15 page)

*   *   *

Of course it was crowded on the
Plover
now. Sure it was. Pipa in her pipibunk, her tiny cabin, her tiny wooden boat, and Declan and Piko sleeping to her east and west; Taromauri, after some experimentation with her weight and the balance of the boat, slept in the stern, in a sort of tent Piko invented from tarpaulin and rigging; you could furl and unfurl the tent like a sail off the stern railing, and, with a second ingenious rope, pull it close against the body of the sleeper like a coat. Piko was inordinately proud of his invention and crowed about it for a while until Declan swore not only the gull but Pipa was snickering.

And there was the gull, the fifth passenger, who sometimes surfed behind the boat, exactly nine feet above the stern, smiling and silent; and there were two young island rats,
kiore,
the sixth and seventh passengers, which had boarded the boat in the harbor, drawn by the sweet smell of almonds, and were now shyly exploring the hold, which, having held many tons of salmon and halibut and crab and scallops, smelled and tasted and reeked of
kiore
heaven; and there was a tiny warbler,
bokikokiko,
the eighth passenger, who had been flying past the boat in the deeps of the night and had struck the mast a glancing blow and fallen unconscious to the deck and rolled under a water tank and upon waking found itself sore ill and bruised, and so stayed hidden under the trammeled waters until further developments unfurled; and there were several snails, comprising the ninth through twelfth passengers, and there were a scatter of seeds of the screw pine, which could be considered incipient or prospective passengers, of the numbers thirteen through nineteen; and there were the barnacles who rode below, in troops beyond number, whose allegiance to the ship was so firm that it would be severed only by violence; and also beyond counting were the clans of kelp and the tribes of weed, which fixed themselves in and among the barnacles, and so built a tiny wilderness, some twenty feet long by ten feet wide along the keel, around which teemed a vast populace of tiny fish of a hundred species, who came and went as they pleased, treating the boat like a country on the move, from which they emigrated and rejoined as tides fondle and flee a beach. So the
Plover
carried not four beings but a dozen, a hundred, a thousand passengers at any one moment; and no man not even the captain knew the number, or the sweet shape of their days, but only that they traveled together, not one among them sure of their final harbor. It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact, said old Ed Burke, who knew whereof he spoke.

*   *   *

One morning Pipa, sitting with Taromauri in the bow, her fingers fluttering like feathers, signaled to Declan that there was some sort of island ahead. Declan hove to, puzzled; he had scoured his charts for any land whatsoever in the days to come, and there was no record of even vanished atolls or reefs of any kind. But indeed the pip was right; ahead lay a long flat low island where no island officially could be. They drifted closer, puzzled.

It’s … rippling, said Piko. Is that normal?

No.

What kind of island is that?

I don’t know, man. There’s no island on the charts.

Wae,
said Taromauri suddenly.
Inai.
A mat of used things.

And indeed it was, as they soon saw; a mat of garbage maybe a mile wide, garbage as far as the eye could see, jostling and rippling and clinking, gathered by wind and weather and current into a vast blanket of shards and shreds, a shawl of tattered things: bottles, tampons, bags, sneakers, diapers, toothbrushes, fishing line, fishing nets, plastic bags, straws, packing pellets, toy scraps, gloves, syringes, cups, packing crates, boxes of every size and description, glass balls, logs, jackets, boots, shoes, slickers, bobbing oil drums, and even something that looked like a huge refrigerator, all baked by the sun to the desiccated color of a desert.

They rocked at the edge of the plastic island for a while and stared. Turtles slid in and out of the shadows beneath the mass; terns and gulls hovered above it; and Taromauri was sure she saw crabs skittering through the bright chaos of the island’s landscape. It was like a small city, thought Piko, all jumbled and brilliant and faded and fouled, but lit with life; and Taromauri, realizing that a reef of even this breathtaking falsity, an anti-reef, would be a haven for the small and hunting ground for the large, broke out the fishing gear and caught two large trevallies before they turned and headed east. Inside one of the fish, when she opened it, was a pink plastic bow tie on which was stamped, in ink fading but still visible, entwined wedding rings.

*   *   *

A long gray calm gray moist gray day; everyone slept in late; there was no particular rush to get anywhere; it’s like a parenthesis in a sentence, noted Piko drowsily; and even Declan, who usually turned becalmings instantly into Fixit Days by command of the captain, even unto buffing the deck, forbore to issue orders, and instead started talking about buffing the deck, one time with bless me a fecking holystone some British imperialist slavemaster fish-tourist left on the boat after he and his jolly mates chartered me for halibut one time, o God that was funny, they were as rollicking courteous johnbully as you can imagine and they had no fecking idea what to say at all when I gave them the old man’s stump speech about how the fecking British enslaved the Irish worse than they ever enslaved any of their possessions elsewhere, why they hammered and shat upon the island next to them worse than they ever did the hindoo or arabesque populations is a mystery to me, what is the story with the ancient enmity between the angles and the celts, I hope our dear blessed Jesus can forgive the imperialist slavemaster pagan bastards their foul and lurid crimes against the chosen people because we cannot and I am not alone in praying they burn luridly in the seventh circle of hell where roast the violent who have sinned against the innocent, that slime Cromwell the worst among them, he will be riven by rough arrows and mauled by savage dogs with slavering jaws and upon him will rain flakes of fire from the sky all day every day unto the end of days, and etc. in that vein, the old man would go off raging like a fecking volcano unless he had a pint or eight in him which weirdly cooled him off, the reverse of the usual arithmeticalculus. O God that was funny watching those poor anglers, get the joke, hey,
anglers
? They scuttled off the boat fast as crickets, leaving behind among other things bless me a holystone which the poor Irish innocents in the imperialist fecking slavemaster navy used to have to scrub the decks white as snow with every blessed morning, the decks made from Irish oak stolen from the blessed land leaving it naked as a bird and twice as helpless. Jesus. God knows why they had a holystone. Roll on thou deep dark blue ocean, roll! Not blue though. Gray as slate, gray as the face of the old man as he trudged out to his cows in the morning. The ocean of the mud. The desert of the sea as the prophet says. The sea, the ocean, the billowing deep, everybody has some blessed fecking poetic name for it, but there is no It. It isn’t It. It’s just a roaring amount of water with untold fantastic beings peeing in it all day. World’s biggest pisspot. Beings unknown and unknowable. Like the old man. Seething above and below. Oceanic rages. Depths no light ever reached. And his oldest son then went to sea, riven by dark tides he did not know, and thereupon voyaged interminably, never finding that which he sought with might and main, but sentenced to a watery exile, to be fed by salt alone as he wended weary through the trackless waters; yet he was granted companions in his exile, though none knew their destinations, nor the manner of their roads thereto; and they proceeded on, fearful yet armed with hope as if with arrows of fire in quivers of gold.

*   *   *

Night on the boat, Taromauri and Pipa asleep, Declan and Piko smoking cigars in the stern, watching the stars.

See, that’s the Southern Cross, see that? says Piko. That’s how you know you are in the South Pacific. You basically can’t see that if you are north of the line. And right near it, see, there’s the star Hadar, I always liked that name, Hadar, sounds like a Viking star.

What’s the other bright one there?

Rigel Kentaurus.

Bless you.

Haw.

You know your stars.

Well, the sky always seemed like another ocean to me, you know? Like we live between two incredible oceans, and we’ll never get to the bottom of either of them. A wet one and a dry one, both of them unfriendly to air.

Don’t we know the wet one pretty well after all these years? People been in and around the ocean for half a million years, don’t we know it pretty well?

Nope. That’s what I found most interesting in my work, to be honest, that we don’t hardly know a thing. There’s places six miles deep in the ocean, man, and there are caves and tunnels and halls and valleys no one has ever been in, and whole forests bigger than any forest on land, who knows what’s there? No one knows what’s down there. There’s millions of species of plants and animals in there we don’t even know what they are. We might never know.

Millions?

Millions, man. Probably thousands of kinds of fish we can’t even
imagine
. Isn’t that wild? Maybe there’s fish that look like you.

Tall fish. Handsome.

Ugly with a capital u. I mean, there could be some new kind of living things there we don’t have words for yet, you know? Not animals or plants but something else. What if there was a kind of living rock down there? Or plants that are smart and swim fast? Or a kind of underwater bird? Or animals made of water and whispers? That could be. No one knows. Basically the thing I learned most in my work is that whatever you are sure of don’t be, and as soon as you think you know something for certain, you don’t.

Story of my whole life so far, says Declan, and Piko can
hear
him grinning in the dark.

Me too, man.

Ah, at least you were sure of Elly.

I guess.

You guess?

We had some hard times.

Sorry, man.

It was like when things were all good we were all good but after the pip got smashed things got smashed too and they never really got back to where they were. We didn’t talk to each other much down deep, you know? We just poured ourselves into the pip. And then Elly got sick and we never got all the way back, Elly and me. Not that going back was the best thing, she used to say we
couldn’t
go back and neither of us would want to anyways, but maybe we could find a new forward, you know? But we never found that. It was like she was walking ahead of me and I couldn’t quite catch up. And when she got sick she poured herself into the pip even more. There were days when they would stay in bed all day just holding each other and making bird sounds. I would take care of them, sure, but it was just taking care of them, is all. And all this was after we decided not to have more kids because we would be taking care of the pip forever. Sometimes I could feel the kids we didn’t have, you know what I mean? Like sometimes I would be sitting at the table and suddenly there would be three kids there instead of the one who wasn’t even
there
there anymore. After the pip got smashed, you know, she couldn’t eat at the table anymore, and Elly was always the one who fed her in her bed, so I didn’t set the table anymore, you know what I mean?
I didn’t set the table anymore
. No plates and napkins and fork on this side and spoon on the other and exactly the right glass for the pip,
not
the pretty one from Grandma but the chipped one the wolverine man gave us, the guy I knew who studied wolverine in the mountains, he gave the pip a glass he said a wolverine bit a piece from, and she
loved
that glass, man, she just would not use any other glass, and she would always only drink from the place the wolverine’s mouth had been, even though I told her not to. I used to look at that poor old wolverine glass every day, stuck in the cupboard, never making it to the table anymore. It was like it had died and was buried in the cupboard behind all the other more polite glasses. Jesus. I finally threw it in the ocean one night, man. I just couldn’t stand seeing it anymore. Jesus.

*   *   *

The next day for some reason everyone aboard got totally into making and hanging flags and pennants and banners, so by the end of the day the
Plover
looked like a floating laundry barge, with flags and pennants and banners of every conceivable shape and sort and color flittering and snapping and flappering in the wind from the west: Taromauri’s dream of what a national flag from her country might look like if ever her country was officially a country which she had high hopes it would eventually be, said country’s flag featuring
tabakea,
the turtle, oldest of all beings, the first of all things in the world, on a background of sea and sun and sky; Piko’s flag, a frigate bird, mighty
’iwa,
the happy thief, against a field of the bluest blue; Declan’s Oregon flag, done from vague memory of the state flag, featuring a football on a background of mist and sage and salmon guts; Piko’s flag for Elly, featuring a kestrel in flight against the greenest green he could find on the boat; Pipa’s flag, a fairy tern on what seemed to be a
kukui
tree, thought Piko—Taromauri had cut and painted the tern without even asking Pipa what she wanted, but when Piko had begun to paint a black background with stars, to allow the painted tern to leap off the flag, colorwise, Pipa had mewled steadily. Piko knew what this meant, and he set aside the night sky with stars, and kept painting different backgrounds, but she kept mewling until he arrived at tree branches, at which point her music changed and her hands calmed. They concocted a flag for the
Plover,
a testy-looking burly golden plover against a bilious gray sea, and they invented a flag for the gull hanging effortlessly in their wake, and they rigged banners of every color they could find, and they hung blankets and mats and bags for fun and sun, and spent the rest of the day laughing at the cracking and whappering and flippering of the flags and pennants and banners, and reveling in the wild music of it all; a grand day altogether and no mistake, said Declan to Piko that night, as they tucked the pip in tight as a tick in the bunk, and not one of the five of them ever forgot the sheer headlong pleasure of that day the rest of their lives; and for all five of them the day would sneak back into their memories early in the morning, or in fever dreams, and they would lie there, not even half-awake, and suddenly feel the peppering of wind from the west in their faces, and hear the snap and smile of flags, and see, at the very top of the pole, the turtle, oldest of all beings, first of all things in the world, flying over sea and sun and sky.