The Shipping News Part 2

"Have to let you go," he said, eyes casting yellow, tongue licking.

Quoyle's eyes went to the engraving on the wall. Could just make out the signature under the hairy neck: Horace Greeley.

"Business slump. Don't know how much longer the paper can hold on. Cutting back. Afraid there's not much chance of taking you back this time."

At six-thirty he opened his kitchen door. Mrs. Moosup sat at the table writing on the back of an envelope. Mottled arms like cold thighs.

"Here you are!" she cried. "Hoped you'd come in so's I don't have to write all this stuff down. Tires your hand out. My night to go to the acupuncture clinic. Really helps. First, Ms. Bear says you should pay me my wages. Owes me for seven weeks, comes to three-oh-eight-oh dollars. 'Preciate a check right now. Got bills to pay same as everybody else."

"Did she phone?" said Quoyle. "Did she say when she'd be [22] back? Her boss wants to know." Could hear the television in the other room. A swell of maracas, t.i.ttering bongos.

"Didn't phone. Come rus.h.i.+ng in here about two hours ago, packed up all her clothes, told me a bunch of things to tell you, took the kids and went off with that guy in the red Geo. You know who I mean. That one. Said she was going to move to Florida with him, tell you she'll mail you some papers. Quit her job and she is gone. Called up her boss and says 'Ricky, I quit.' I was standing right here when she said it. Said for you to write me out a check right away."

"I can't handle this," said Quoyle. His mouth was full of cold hot dog. "She took the kids? She'd never take the kids." Runaway Mom Abducts Children.

"Well, be that as it may, Mr. Quoyle, she took 'em. May be wrong on this, but it sounded like the last thing she said was they were going to leave the girls with some people in Connecticut. The kids were excited getting a ride in that little car. You know they hardly ever go anywhere. Crave excitement. But she was real clear about the check. My check." The colossal arms disappearing into her coat's dolman sleeves, tweed flecked with purple and gold.

"Mrs. Moosup, there's about twelve dollars in my checking account. An hour ago I was fired. Your pay was supposed to come from Petal. If you are serious about three-oh-eight-oh, I will have to cash in our CDs to pay you. I can't do it until tomorrow. But don't worry, you'll get paid." He kept eating the withered hot dogs. What next.

"That's what she she always said," said Mrs. Moosup bitterly. "That's why I'm not so cut up about this. It's no fun working if you don't get paid." always said," said Mrs. Moosup bitterly. "That's why I'm not so cut up about this. It's no fun working if you don't get paid."

Quoyle nodded. Later, after she was gone, he called the state police.

"My wife. I want my children back," Quoyle said into the phone to a rote voice. "My daughters, Bunny and Suns.h.i.+ne Quoyle. Bunny is six and Suns.h.i.+ne is four and a half." They were his. Reddish hair, freckles like chopped gra.s.s on a wet dog. Suns.h.i.+ne's wee beauty in her frowst of orange curls. Homely Bunny. But smart. Had Quoyle's no-color eyes and reddish eyebrows, the left one [23] crooked and notched with a scar from the time she fell out of a grocery cart. Her hair, crimpy, cut short. Big-boned children.

"They both look like that furniture that's built out of packing crates," Petal wisecracked. The nursery school director saw untamed troublemakers and expelled first Bunny, then Suns.h.i.+ne. For pinching, pus.h.i.+ng, screaming and demanding. Mrs. Moosup knew them for brats who whined they were hungry and wouldn't let her watch her programs.

But from the first moment that Petal raved she was pregnant, threw her purse on the floor like a dagger, kicked her shoes at Quoyle and said she'd get an abortion, Quoyle loved, first Bunny, then Suns.h.i.+ne, loved them with a kind of fear that if they made it into the world they were with him on borrowed time, would one day run a wire into his brain through terrible event. He never guessed it would be Petal. Thought he'd already had the worst from her.

The aunt, in a black and white checked pantsuit, sat on the sofa, listened to Quoyle choke and sob. Made tea in the never-used pot. A stiff-figured woman, gingery hair streaked with white. Presented a profile like a target in a shooting gallery. A buff mole on her neck. Swirled the tea around in the pot, poured, dribbled milk. Her coat, bent over the arm of the sofa, resembled a wine steward showing a label.

"You drink that. Tea is a good drink, it'll keep you going. That's the truth." Her voice had a whistling harmonic as from the cracked-open window of a speeding car. Body in sections, like a dress form.

"I never really knew her," he said, "except that she was driven by terrible forces. She had to live her life her own way. She said that a million times." The slovenly room was full of reflecting surfaces accusing him, the teapot, the photographs, his wedding ring, magazine covers, a spoon, the television screen.

"Drink some tea."

"Some people probably thought she was bad, but I think she was starved for love. I think she just couldn't get enough love. [24] That's why she was the way she was. Deep down she didn't have a good opinion of herself. Those things she did-they rea.s.sured her for a little while. I wasn't enough for her."

Did he believe that pap, the aunt wondered? She guessed that this was Quoyle's invention, this love-starved Petal. Took one look at the arctic eyes, the rigidly seductive pose of Petal's photograph, Quoyle's silly rose in a water gla.s.s beside it, and thought to herself, there was a b.i.t.c.h in high heels.

Quoyle had gasped, the phone to his ear, loss flooding in like the sea gus.h.i.+ng into a broken hull. They said the Geo had veered off the expressway and rolled down a bank sown with native wild flowers, caught on fire. Smoke poured from the real estate agent's chest, Petal's hair burned. Her neck broken.

Newspaper clippings blew out of the car, along the highway; reports of a monstrous egg in Texas, a fungus in the likeness of Jascha Heifetz, a turnip as large as a pumpkin, a pumpkin as small as a radish.

The police, sorting through singed astrology magazines and clothes, found Petal's purse crammed with more than nine thousand dollars in cash, her calendar book with a notation to meet Bruce Cudd on the morning before the accident. In Bacon Falls, Connecticut. There was a receipt for seven thousand dollars in exchange for "personal services." Looked like she had sold the children to Bruce Cudd, the police said.

Quoyle, in his living room, blubbing through red fingers, said he could forgive Petal anything if the children were safe.

Why do we weep in grief, the aunt wondered. Dogs, deer, birds suffered with dry eyes and in silence. The dumb suffering of animals. Probably a survival technique.

"You're good-hearted," she said. "Some would curse her mangled body for selling the little girls." The milk on the verge of turning. Tan k.n.o.bs in the sugar bowl from wet coffee spoons.

"I will never believe that, that she sold them. Never," cried Quoyle. His thigh clashed against the table. The sofa creaked.

"Maybe she didn't. Who knows?" The aunt soothed. "Yes, [25] you're good-hearted. You take after Sian Quoyle. Your poor grandfather. I never knew him. Dead before I was born. But I saw the picture of him many times, the tooth of a dead man hanging on a string around his neck. To keep toothache away. They believed in that. But he was very good-natured they said. Laughed and sang. Anybody could fool him with a joke."

"Sounds simpleminded," sobbed Quoyle into his teacup.

"Well, if he was, it's the first I ever heard of it. They say when he went under the ice he called out, 'See you in heaven.' "

"I heard that story," said Quoyle, salty saliva in his mouth and his nose swelling up. "He was just a kid."

"Twelve years old. Sealing. He'd got as many whitecoats as any man there before he had one of his fits and went off the ice. Nineteen and twenty-seven."

"Father told us about him sometimes. But he couldn't have been twelve. I never heard he was twelve. If he drowned when he was twelve he couldn't have been my grandfather."

"Ah, you don't know Newfoundlanders. For all he was twelve he was your father's father. But not mine. My mother-your grandmother-that was Sian's sister Addy, and after young Sian drowned she took up with Turvey, the other brother. Then when he he drowned, she married c.o.key Hamm, that was my father. Lived in the house on Quoyle's Point for years-where I was born-then we moved over to Catspaw. When we left in 1946 after my father was killed-" drowned, she married c.o.key Hamm, that was my father. Lived in the house on Quoyle's Point for years-where I was born-then we moved over to Catspaw. When we left in 1946 after my father was killed-"

"Drowned," said Quoyle. Listening in spite of himself. Blowing his nose into the paper napkin. Which he folded and put on the edge of his saucer.

"No. Afterwards we went over to stinking Catspaw Harbor where we was treated like mud by that crowd. There was an awful girl with a purple tetter growing out of her eyebrow. Threw rocks. And then we came to the States." She sang " 'Terra Nova grieving, for hearts that are leaving.' That's all I remember of that little ditty."

Quoyle hated the thought of an incestuous, fit-p.r.o.ne, seal-killing child for a grandfather, but there was no choice. The mysteries of unknown family.

[26] When the police burst in, the photographer in stained jockey shorts was barking into the phone. Quoyle's naked daughters had squirted dish detergent on the kitchen floor, were sliding in it.

"They have not been obviously s.e.xually abused, Mr. Quoyle," said the voice on the telephone. Quoyle could not tell if a man or a woman was speaking. "There was a video camera. There were blank film cartridges all over the place, but the camera jammed or something. When the officers came in he was on the phone to the store where he bought the camera, yelling at the clerk. The children were examined by a child abuse pediatric specialist. She says there was no evidence that he did anything physical to them except undress them and clip their fingernails and toenails. But he clearly had something in mind."

Quoyle could not speak.

"The children are with Mrs. Bailey at the Social Services office," said the mealy voice. "Do you know where that is?"

Suns.h.i.+ne was smeared with chocolate, working a handle that activated a chain of plastic gears. Bunny asleep in a chair, eyeb.a.l.l.s rolling beneath violet lids. He lugged them out to the car, squeezing them in his hot arms, murmuring that he loved them.

"The girls look a lot like Feeny and f.a.n.n.y used to, my younger sisters," said the aunt, jerking her head up and down. "Look just like 'em. Feeny's in New Zealand now, a marine biologist, knows everything about sharks. Broke her hip this spring. f.a.n.n.y is in Saudi Arabia. She married a falconer. Has to wear a black thing over her face. Come on over here, you little girls and give your aunt a big hug," she said.

But the children rushed at Quoyle, gripped him as a falling man clutches the window ledge, as a stream of electric particles arcs a gap and completes a circuit. They smelled of Sierra Free dish detergent scented with calendula and horsemint. The aunt's expression unfathomable as she watched them. Longing, perhaps.

[27] Quoyle, in the teeth of trouble, saw a stouthearted older woman. His only female relative.

"Stay with us," he said. "I don't know what to do." He waited for the aunt to shake her head, say no, she had to be getting back, could only stay a minute longer.

She nodded. "A few days. Get things straightened up." Rubbed her palms together as if a waiter had just set a delicacy before her. "You can look at it this way," she said. "You've got a chance to start out all over again. A new place, new people, new sights. A clean slate. See, you can be anything you want with a fresh start. In a way, that's what I'm doing myself."

She thought of something. "Would you like to meet Warren?" she asked. "Warren is out in the car, dreaming of old glories."

Quoyle imagined a doddering husband, but Warren was a dog with black eyelashes and a collapsed face. She growled when the aunt opened the rear door.

"Don't be afraid," said the aunt. "Warren will never bite anyone again. They pulled all of her teeth two years ago."

4.

Cast Away "Cast Away, to be forced from a s.h.i.+p by a disaster."

THE MARINER'S DICTIONARY

QUOYLE'S face the color of a bad pearl. He was wedged in a seat on a ferry pitching toward Newfoundland, his windbreaker stuffed under his cheek, the elbow wet where he had gnawed it. face the color of a bad pearl. He was wedged in a seat on a ferry pitching toward Newfoundland, his windbreaker stuffed under his cheek, the elbow wet where he had gnawed it.

The smell of sea damp and paint, boiled coffee. Nor any escape from static snarled in the public address speakers, gunfire in the movie lounge. Pa.s.sengers singing "That's one more dollar for me," swaying over whiskey.

Bunny and Suns.h.i.+ne stood on the seats opposite Quoyle, staring through gla.s.s at the games room. Crimson Mylar walls, a ceiling that reflected heads and shoulders like disembodied putti on antique valentines. The children yearned toward the water-bubble music.

Next to Quoyle a wad of the aunt's knitting. The needles jabbed his thigh but he did not care. He was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with nausea. [29] Though the ferry heaved toward Newfoundland, his chance to start anew.

The aunt had made a good case. What was left for him in Mockingburg? Unemployed, wife gone, parents deceased. And there was Petal's Accidental Death and Dismemberment Insurance Plan money. Thirty thousand to the spouse and ten thousand to each eligible child. He hadn't thought of insurance, but it crossed the aunt's mind at once. The children slept, Quoyle and the aunt sat at the kitchen table. The aunt in her big purple dress, having a drop of whiskey in a teacup. Quoyle with a cup of Ovaltine. To help him sleep, the aunt said. Blue sleeping pills. He was embarra.s.sed but swallowed them. Fingernails bitten to the quick.

"It makes sense," she said, "for you to start a new life in a fresh place. For the children's sake as well as your own. It would help you all get over what's happened. You know it takes a year, a full turn of the calendar, to get over losing somebody. That's a true saying. And it helps if you're in a different place. And what place would be more natural than where your family came from? Maybe you could ask around, your newspaper friends, tap the grapevine. There might be a job up there. Just the trip would be an experience for the girls. See another part of the world. And to tell the truth," patting his arm with her old freckled hand, "it would be a help to me to have you along. I bet we'd be a good team.

The aunt leaned on her elbow. Chin on the heel of her hand. "As you get older you find out the place where you started out pulls at you stronger and stronger. I never wanted to see Newfoundland again when I was young, but the last few years it's been like an ache, just a longing to go back. Probably some atavistic drive to finish up where you started. So in a way I'm starting again, too. Going to move my little business up there. It wouldn't hurt you to ask about a job."

He thought of calling Partridge, telling him. The inertia of grief rolled through him. He couldn't do it. Not now.

Woke at midnight, swimming up from aubergine nightmare. [30] Petal getting into a bread truck. The driver is gross, a bald head, mucus suspended from his nostrils, his hands covered with some unspeakable substance. Quoyle has the power to see both sides of the truck at once. Sees the hands reaming up under Petal's dress, the face lowering into her oaken hair, and all the time the truck careening along highways, swaying over bridges without railings. Quoyle is somehow flying along beside them, powered by anxiety. Cl.u.s.ters of headlights flicker closer. He struggles to reach Petal's hand, to pull her out of the bread truck, knowing what must come (wis.h.i.+ng it for the driver who has metamorphosed into his father) but cannot reach her, suffers agonizing paralysis though he strains. The headlights close. He shouts to tell her death is imminent, but is voiceless. Woke up pulling at the sheet.

For the rest of the night he sat in the living room with a book in his lap. His eyes went back and forth, he read, but comprehended nothing. The aunt was right. Get out of here.

It took half an hour to get a phone number for Partridge.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n! I was just thinking about you the other day." Partridge's voice came fresh in the wires. "Wondering what the h.e.l.l ever happened to old Quoyle! When you going to come out and visit? You know I quit the papers, don't you? Yeah, I quit 'em." The thought of Mercalia on the road alone, he said, made him go to the truck driver school himself.

"We're a driving team, now. Bought a house two years ago. Planning on buying our own rig pretty soon, doing independent contracting. These trucks are sweet-double bunk, little kitchenette. Air-conditioned. We sit up there over the traffic, look down on the cars. Making three times the money I was. Don't miss newspapers at all. So what's new with you, still working for Punch?"

It only took ten or eleven minutes to tell Partridge everything, from falling in one-way love to riding the nightmares, to leaning over a tableful of maps with the aunt.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h, Quoyle. You been on the old roller coaster. You had the full-course dinner. Least you got your kids: Well, I'll tell you. I'm out of the newspaper game but still got some contacts. [31] See what I come up with. Gimme the names of the nearest towns again?"

There was only one, with the curious name of Killick-Claw.

Partridge back on the line two days later. Pleased to be fixing Quoyle's life up again. Quoyle made him think of a huge roll of newsprint from the pulp mill. Blank and speckled with imperfections. But beyond this vagueness he glimpsed something like a reflection of light from a distant hubcap, a scintillation that meant there was, in Quoyle's life, the chance of some brilliance. Happiness? Good luck? Fame and fortune? Who knows, thought Partridge. He liked the rich taste of life so well himself he wished for an entree or two for Quoyle.

"Amazes me how the old strings still pull. Yeah, there's a paper up there. A weekly. They looking for somebody, too. You interested, I'll give you the name I got. Want somebody to cover the s.h.i.+pping news. Guess it's right on the coast. Want somebody with maritime connections if possible. Quoyle, you got maritime connections?"

"My grandfather was a sealer."

"Jesus. You always come at me out of left field. Anyway, it works out, you got to handle work permits and immigration and all that. Deal with those guys. O.k. Managing editor's name is Tertius Card. Got a pencil? Give you the number."

Quoyle wrote it down.

"Well, good luck. Let me know how it goes. And listen, any time you want to come out here, stay with Mercalia and me, you just come on. This is a real good place to make money."

But the idea of the north was taking him. He needed something to brace against.

A month later they drove away in his station wagon. He took a last look in the side mirror at the rented house, saw the empty porch, the forsythia bush, the neighbor's flesh-colored slips undulating on the line.

[31] And so Quoyle and the aunt in the front seat, the children in the back, and old Warren sometimes with the suitcases, sometimes clambering awkwardly up to sit between Bunny and Suns.h.i.+ne. They made her paper hats from napkins, tied the aunt's scarf around her hairy neck, fed her French fries when the aunt wasn't looking.

Fifteen hundred miles, across New York, Vermont, angling up through Maine's mauled woods. Across New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on three-lane highways, trouble in the center lane, making the aunt clench her hands. In North Sydney plates of oily fish for supper, and no one who cared, and in the raw morning, the ferry to Port-Aux-Basques. At last.

Quoyle suffered in the upholstery, the aunt strode the deck, stopped now and then to lean on the rail above the shuddering water. Or stood spraddle-legged, hands knotted behind her back, facing wind. Her hair captured under a babushka, face a stone with little intelligent eyes.

She spoke of the weather with a man in a watch cap. They talked awhile. Someone else reel footing along, said, Rough today, eh? She worried about Warren, down in the station wagon, tossing up and down. Wouldn't know what to make of it. Never been to sea. Probably thought the world was coming to an end and she all alone, in a strange car. The man in the watch cap said, "Don't worry, dog'll sleep the 'ole way across. That's 'ow dogs are."

The aunt looked out, saw the blue land ahead, her first sight of the island in almost fifty years. Could not help tears.

"Comin' 'ome, eh?" said the man in the watch cap. "Yar, that's 'ow it takes you."

This place, she thought, this rock, six thousand miles of coast blind-wrapped in fog. Sunkers under wrinkled water, boats threading tickles between ice-scabbed cliffs. Tundra and barrens, a land of stunted spruce men cut and drew away.