The Plover: A Novel (4 page)

About midday the lurking mist finally burned off completely and it became the single most beautiful day he had ever spent at sea, and Declan had spent a thousand days afloat;
this
day, though—this day was ridiculously beautiful, embarrassingly beautiful, egregiously beautiful, as if the ocean were preening, or apologizing, or waking slowly, naked in the perfect light, and stretching luxuriously, showing off its glorious parts, giving the spotless sky a half-hooded come-hither smile; the water grew bluer than the bluest blue, bluer than Oregon’s Crater Lake ever even
imagined,
a glittering translucent limpid lucid pristine generous blue that gave you the happy willies just staring at it, my
God
what a world, to dream up a color like
that
!

The quietest and steadiest of breezes aft; sea ducks in meticulous geometric triangles and rhombi; flying fish fully a foot long sailing glittering for fifty yards and more; the first storm petrels he had seen, flying so low over the placid sea that they seemed to be running on it; the first shearwaters he had seen, sailing effortlessly along and suddenly slicing down for fish, and once for a bright orange squid, wriggling wildly for an instant before it was shredded, what in heaven’s name was a squid doing at the surface, did squid rise to savor such days also? And whales, taking turns as if their pods were on parade or procession; a raft of sperm whales and calves, sighing through the extraordinary water as big as buses; two humpback whales who slid along the sides of the
Plover
to port and starboard, lifting it inches higher for a moment, perhaps a quiet cetacean joke; and by far the biggest sunfish he had ever seen, easily seven feet long and a thousand pounds, dozing on the surface, and looking uncommonly like a small dance floor, or the wall of a cabin. The fisherman in Declan, which was a lot of him after long years of plowing the sea for meat, stared hungrily at all that placid toothless food, so easily caught as it basked; but something else rose in him to trump the hunter, and he hove to for a while alongside the creature, to simply gaze in wonder at the thing, until finally it woke with a start, snapping awake just like a child in the last row of math class first period on a muggy hot day, and slid effortlessly away into the deep.

*   *   *

If an ocean, thought Declan, is the sum of all the rivers pouring into it, then we are on various braided rivers, really, rather than the sea, and this thought occupied him for quite a while. He dug his charts out and counted the fattest rivers surrendering themselves to Pacifica—the Columbia, the mighty river of the West, the Father of Rivers; the Stickeen, the great Canadian river cloudy with the sperm of salmon in the old days; the roaring Fraser and Yukon and Skeena, all ice and silted melt from mountains so remote no one knew some of them; the poor Colorado, with so many names over the years, the River Red, the River of Embers, the River of Good Hope, draining the vast American desert, giving itself away to everyone, and finishing as an exhausted trickle; the Mekong, the Xi Jiang, the San Joaquin, the Shinano, the Rio Grande de Santiago, all diving headlong finally into the greatest of waters, losing their names as they joined their brothers and sisters in their mother and father, from which they would again rise into mist and cloud and be reborn as rain and river; and then there were the even larger rivers called seas bellying into Pacifica, noted Declan, checking them off with his nubbed pencil: the Sulu and the Coral, the Celebes and the Tasman, the Seas of Japan and China; not seas at all, really, but only fists and fingers of the mother of seas, poking and lapping and dissolving the placid land. Everything was in motion all the time, he thought, the water dissolving the land, the land rising and falling, the sky slurping the sea, the seas trading places, the rivers sprinting as fast as they could go to their wild dissolution; tall mountains were slowly melting as others were thrusting up to be born, and beings beyond count or calculation also arose and melted, were born and dissolved, their shells and husks sliding finally back into the ocean; so that everyone and everything was a boat, he thought; but none of them as dashing as the
Plover,
with its deep green paint the color of shadowed cedar groves, and its bright red sailcloth the color of salmon on their way to sex and death.

*   *   *

Declan’s buddy, the guy with the daughter who got hit by the kindergarten bus, had lots of names. People called him all sorts of things. People kept
giving
him new names, for reasons they couldn’t articulate. The easy explanation was the urge to nicknamery, especially from men, who use names as handles and jokes and forms of glancing affection and respect; but women did it too, and more than the pet names lovers give each other. Something about him invited christening, perhaps, in the way that people have the irrepressible urge to name mountains and pets; perhaps naming is a grappling to understand, or a way to assert control, or an attempt to manage mystery; if something has a label, a name, a category, a definition, the beginning of an explanation, it’s not so wild and inchoate anymore, even if the name applied is a total misnomer, like the Pacific Ocean, which isn’t. So Paco, Peco, Polo, Pavel, Placido, Pomo, and Piko he was variously labeled, the only nomenclatural consistency being that initial
pop
—which is what his daughter had called him, before she stopped speaking, after the bus stop. Popa and Pipa, they had called each other when she was little, and the way she had told the story to her friends in kindergarten, with the absolute conviction of someone who had spent
five whole years
on this planet and knew the score, was that they gave each other those names when she was
little,
she used to produce spit-bubbles to make her dad laugh, and he would do the same, the two of them sprawled in the warm country of the quilt, bubbling and snorting and giggling and slobbering, until her mother his wife their hero came in pretending to be annoyed but sometimes brandishing the spit-slurping mop in their faces which only made them laugh all the harder, which was the best time of all because then we would all be tangled up like a big vine on the bed, she would say, those were the best times
ever,
better than
any
other times
any
one ever had, even times that you would
think
would be the best times ever couldn’t be even
half
as good as the times we were all laughing and tangled up like a big knot in the big bed in the little house. Those were the best times
ever
. If you were a brand-
new
time, she would say, and you wanted to be a
great
time when you grew up to be an older time,
those
would be the times you would try to be like. Those were the best times
ever
.

*   *   *

Just after the sun melted into the sea and dusk slid into the boat there was a silence so absolute and profound that Declan sat in the stern to listen. Is it listening if there’s no sound, does that make sense? A great silence is an enormous thing, a positive negative, the full null, he thought. You could actually
hear
a really deep silence; it was like a held note on a musical scale so big some of the notes didn’t have names yet. The sea was glass, so there was none of the usual lapping and yammering and slapping of water on wood; not a being to be seen, no splish of fish or whir of wing; the engine at rest in its tiny wooden house; even the boat, usually a mansion of creaks and groans and thumps and clanks, of tools falling and freight jostling, of weights shifting with a sigh, of the mast making squeaking love to the cabin, was as silent as an empty crib. He remembered a line from watery old Herman Melville:
all profound things and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence, and Silence is the general consecration of the universe.
Hmmm. A melvillacious line, that. So very many silences, and kinds of silence: chapels and churches and confessionals, glades and gorges, pregnant pauses and searing lovemaking; the stifling stifled brooding silence just before a thunderstorm unleashes itself wild on the world; the silence of space, the vast of vista; the crucial silences between notes, without which there could be no music; no yes without no. Perhaps silence was the ocean and sounds be boats upon the deep, he thought. Perhaps silence was the mother and sounds her yearning children. Do we not yearn for silence at the deepest level, and merely distract ourselves with stammer and yammer? Isn’t that why I am out in the middle of nowhere? The ceiling of the silent sea. The silent She.

*   *   *

But after midnight the weather grew worse and the ocean swelled and roiled so furiously that Declan finally made his way up to the cabin, clipped onto the jackline, and went over his charts with a flicker of fear. The
Plover
was roughly at 45 degrees north and 140 degrees west, and if he stayed on the 45th parallel, as had been his vague disgruntled plan, he would be driving right into the belly of the North Pacific’s winter storm season, which no sane man would do unless he had a much bigger ship and the smell of serious money in his nose. He could turn south, and ride down the 140-degree-longitude line along California and Mexico, but coasting meant Coast Guard and traffic and pirates and drug smugglers and harbormasters asking questions. He could turn north, and ride along the much wilder emptier coasts of British Columbia and Alaska, where the fishing was better but the weather, let’s face it, was horrendous, and somehow the last thing he wanted right now was the prospect of ice; his soul felt like ice as it was, and even the thought of a long black cold winter in some dank dark inlet crammed to the gills with dripping spruce and cedar and pale moist silent people smelling like fish and last night’s lurching drunk made him shiver. He went over the charts carefully again as the boat bucked and shimmied. I’ll be good and damned, he finally said aloud, to where the gull used to be. I’ll be damned good and fine. We have to go fecking south. Damn my eyes. I don’t believe this. The fecking South Seas. This is a joke. What is this, an eighteenth-century novel? Is this some weakass movie where we sail into a lagoon and are greeted with flowers and songs? Fecking fecking feck. I don’t believe this. I just want to get lost, is all. The fecking islands of the South Seas. God help me. Can’t a guy just sail west without issues and problems? What have I ever done to deserve this? Hey, Ocean, I killed some of your fish, all right? But they would have died eventually anyway, you know that, I just borrowed the ends of their lives, is all. Is that so bad that you have to drown me? I didn’t add any garbage to your fecking pristine waters. I just tried to eke out a living, is all, and feck all a living it was. I thought we had an agreement. I thought we were silent partners. I never took more than I needed. I didn’t shoot your seals or flay your whales. I didn’t catch that fecking sunfish the other day you showed me. I was respectful. I returned fish parts I didn’t need to your cleaning crews. We had a deal. You didn’t kill me and I didn’t foul you. And now this. Jesus fecking Christmas. You’re forcing this decision on me. I don’t want to make decisions. That was the whole point. No decisions, no thinking, just go. But no. Now I have to make a fecking decision. The whole point of the thing is shot. Fecking
fine
. South and west. Unbelievable. Fecking feck.

He wrenched the wheel 45 degrees to the left. Instantly the storm abated so noticeably that he stopped cursing and listened intently; and after a few minutes he locked the wheel in position and went back to bed, sleeping far past dawn.

II

24° NORTH, 159° WEST

BUT ONCE IN VIEW
of the islands of the archipelago, Declan found himself leery of land, and for reasons he could not explain he hove to, north of the last and loneliest island, and plunged into his collected Edmund Burke. The sun shone, the sea murmured gently, birds he had never seen circled curiously, and he sat in the stern reading and eating the last of his shriveled oranges, the pips like faded juicy leather. Old Ed gave a terrific speech sort of about ships, did he not? He flipped through his green volumes until he found Burke’s speech in Parliament after the Americans, sick of being bullied from afar, calmly ransacked the British ships
Dartmouth, Eleanor,
and
Griffin,
and he read it aloud to the fork-tailed terns sailing around the
Plover
like huge butterflies:
You wish to condemn the accused without a hearing,
shouted old Ed to his snarling countrymen,
to punish indiscriminately the innocent with the guilty! You will thus irrevocably alienate their hearts.… They cannot, by such means, be made to bow to authority; on the contrary, you will find their obstinacy confirmed and their fury exasperated.
… Rip it, Edmund my boy! No flies on old Ed! Exactly right too. Authority cannot be assumed, it must be earned, and earned by example, not by force; or authority could be conferred if you sailed alone, captain of the absent crew, the untenanted berth, the empty manifest; better that a man sail alone than that he sail in tumult and confusion, subject to the various winds of others; indeed men
were
islands, John Donne was an idiot, and the wise man owned up to this cold reality, shipping alone, leaning on no one, no one leaning on him, wary of shoals and reefs, disappointing no one, and proffering no false harbors to friend or lover. Such a man, sailing alone, encumbering none, would in fact be a benefit to the common good, if there are those who believe in such an ephemera, by removing widows and former wives and former lovers and dependent children from the general tumult; Burke himself says
a man that breeds a family without competent means of maintenance, encumbers other men with his children,
and who am I to add to the maelstrom of the gene pool, already a trackless ocean producing more valleys than peaks, am I right? Better to sail alone, and let the battered vessel wander where it will. The only honest course. Assume nothing, trust no one, encumber not and be not encumbered, make your own way, steer your own ship and none other, exactly so. Besides, what do I know?
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods,
says old Ed. Which is exactly so. No flies on old Edmund B.