Part 13 (1/2)

There is a defined half moon accompanying the sun. Lydia and I drive down to say bon voyage to the crew and their company boat. Helmut invites us on. All the men are tanned, with thick forearms and tall. Most are American. I leave the crutches and hop aboard. A famous marine artist has painted a school of tuna across the bow The navigation is tied to satellite imagery. Helmut shows us St John's harbour on a screen as it looks from the sky. We let him have a minute with Iris.

Boyd Coady says, loudly, I'd rather fly to Boston. Saw one of those tupperware boats caught in ice last year. Sunk before you could blink.

Helmut asks Lydia to take the video camera, to catch them heading for the Narrows. He starts up the auxiliary outboard and spews forward, ducking under the boom. He describes a wide curve and returns to the dock, cutting power. Helmut leans to collect the camera, waves, then slips on the wet gunwale. He falls into the boat, hitting his head, and two of the crew come to a.s.sist him. But he's up quickly and laughing and opens the outboard throttle, embarra.s.sed.

Iris jogging to Cabot Tower, to wave them off. Gulls sit with their chests against the pavement.

They will sail to Boston on a dry run before heading to Brazil, where Iris will meet them.

Boyd: You wouldnt catch me in one of those contraptions. He's German, I say, as if that explains something.

27 As I walk up Cabot Street a ten-year-old girl asks me to stop the ball. I stop it with my crutch. I look tough with the crutches swung over my shoulder. The neighbourhood so shoddy. A dog in a second-storey window, silently clawing at the inside gla.s.s. A man with an ap.r.o.n opens the door to a house adjacent to Leo's Fish and Chips. He's smoking. He goes back inside.

Often I am afraid of new life. Of pus.h.i.+ng into the new. Maisie says when you have a kid there's an eight-hundred-dollar-a-month grocery bill. I watch Boyd Coady feeding a baby in the back seat of a Chevette, his seven-year-old standing beside him Boyd looks fiercely down Long's Hill to the Narrows. Helmut in that storm last night. Lydia saying to Iris, He must be some loner to do that. And Iris: Helmut is looking for love. He's mad at me.

28 The caplin are sighted in Flatrock and Torbay. I have two five-gallon buckets in Jethro's trunk. I pick up Lydia and Tinker b.u.mbo and we head north.

There are men on the stone beach preparing cast nets and as evening falls they light three bonfires on the landwash and this will guide the fish in. There are wheelbarrows and buckets and families making it a picnic.

The caplin will look like a force of bad weather. And they will strike fast and roll.

The men wade in a little with their cast nets.

The water is green and darker green and there are white boulders and kelp fanning in slow motion and I can see a flounder sitting pa.s.sively in the green.

The green pitches to black. It swarms black and darts like a vision behind the eyelid. About ten square feet of soft grey-black curve and then a slick of silver pins as the curve darts and separates around our feet like a beaded curtain. There's no way to get them in a bucket.

But in a few minutes a wave launches in full of their silver bellies. The bonfires light up their silver and they wriggle in the smooth wet sand and stone.

The caplin crest and tumble on a high tide and we fill the two buckets in a minute. We watch children scooping up these frantic deaths into carts and dumping them into buckets. The rims of these buckets flicking and dying.

29 We are in a Chinese restaurant ordering won ton soup, spring rolls. Lydia puts her hand on the belly of the teapot. It's hot, she says. The restaurant is full, bathed in yellow spotlights. Lydia admits she a.s.sumed she'd be with a social animal. Her idea of a partner.

This makes me wonder if Lydia is good for me. How her work requires her to be in the centre, where possibilities can grab her. The world notices her waiting and snaps her up to direct and act. Whereas I need the small, ignored corners of the earth, to write about them so that people won't forget. Or even know for the first time.

There's a woman two tables down who looks like Lydia at forty-two. I could love that look.

30 I am making lamb as the Moroccans might cook it. Lydia: Youre a good cook for a guy. But then, I've always gone out with good cooks. Usually, men dont waste time on salads.

She says she's been keeping tabs on her food and noticed a bunch of bananas and a jar of caviar went missing.

Lydia, I dont know what to say. You think I'm sneaking stuff out of the house?

She looks at my heel and says it's full of blood. The bruise in my calf has sunk to my foot. I can't forget that she has said she's keeping tabs.

You dont rave, do you, Gabe? Earl used to rave. But you know what? He'd shut up if you told him to.

I want to say something about the tab, but this shuts me up. Lydia convinces me to drive her to Cape Spear to see the humpbacks. Warm and sunny. The whales are heading north. They loop up their dorsal fins five times, then arc and slink up their tails and dive deep. It's as if their size grants them a different speed dimension to work in. All the movements appear in slow motion.

One humpback heads straight for us in smooth torpedo form. The white of his flukes crimped over to the top black like a pie crust. A blast of spray from his spout. The spray drifts up and along the horizon, like an exhausted fireworks.

July.

1 I grab another beer from Oliver's fridge. Craig Regular is telling Alex that all new computers have a clipper chip installed so the CIA can backtrack into any computer and scan information stored there. His colleagues in Seattle have told him this. Also, if Quebec separates, the U.S. will invade.

Alex is wearing plastic bracelets the colour of apple juice. People won't go for bar codes on the wrist, she says. They'll rebel at the objectifying of the body.

Craig: But that's not the same as a chip encoded with information. It'll start with criminals. Then we'll all be given a telephone number for life.

Craig is working on a science-fiction television drama on the side. He doesnt care about story or character. He's interested in creating moments of suspense. Learning how to do that. If you can do that, he says, there's room for you in TV. It's important, he says, for writers to watch TV. Craig says this with utter conviction, as a point of fact. There is something women like in an opinionated Buddhist. It doesnt matter the opinion. It's the decisiveness. Men are not as attracted to it, especially in women.

2 I'm at the s.h.i.+p to join Max. Max is at the bar with Oliver. There are strong words and Oliver raises his gla.s.s of gin and tonic and pushes it into Max's eye. Max recoils and swings. You can hear his knuckles on Oliver's temple. He grabs Oliver in a headlock and hits him twice again with his left hand and Oliver slumps over his stool for a flash his dull face is towards me, his cheek on the stool, a string of saliva an extension of the chrome rod of the stool. Then he regains his feet and staggers past me to the door.

Max: That's one f.u.c.ked-up man.

Me: What did you say to him?

Max: Nothing. It's a musk I give off.

Me: If Oliver wasn't drinking he could level you.

Yeah, but he's always drinking. I was sticking up for Maisie and he went aboard me.

Were you obnoxious?

Max: I said to him, Oliver, you can't say you didnt try.

I order a pint. What you have to realize about Oliver, I say, is that he's sensitive. If you challenge him on what he knows he gets defensive.

Sensitive people, Max says, are the most insensitive of people. They are sensitive only to what hurts them.

3 The phone rings, and I get out of bed to answer. It's Alex Fleming.

Gabe? I thought I was calling Max. But you'll do. What do you know of Craig Regular?

He's thirty-eight, I say. He went to school with Earl Quigley. He's a software a.n.a.lyst. He owns a house in the Battery I mean, what do you think of him?

I think of a mean thing. Lydia says he's not that funny.

Alex: Yeah, he lacks a sense of humour. But he wants to see me.

I really can't advise you, Alex.

Would you miss me if I started seeing him?

That would just make it all more interesting.