Sea of Tranquility Read online

  Angie clapped a hand over her mouth and her eyes burned with happiness.

  “Have a cookie,” she said, “it’s on the house.” She handed over a large chocolate-chip cookie, bigger than any Angie had ever seen. It looked brown and delicious and the size of a dinner plate. The surface was all bumps and valleys, crags and flat-bottomed craters. It reminded her of a big blown-up picture they had of the surface of the moon back in her classroom at the Montessori School on Maple Street.

  Angie held the cookie up to the sky until it perfectly blotted out the sun, creating a wonderful personal eclipse for her.“I know what this is,” she said.

  “Shh,” Sylvie said. Adults approaching. The Sanger family had decided that if there were things to be bought, money should be spent.

  “How much do we owe you?” Bruce asked.

  “That one is a gift. But you can help yourself to the rest if you like. Flax bread, banana bread, oat cakes, gingers there. Carrot muffins and some other stuff as you see.”

  Elise realized that what she really craved was a bagel. A bagel with cream cheese — but she wasn’t that audacious as to open her mouth and say it. Nothing on the table came close to looking like a bagel.

  “Todd, see anything here you’d like to munch on, kiddo?” Bruce asked his son.

  Todd surveyed the home-cooked baked goods before him as if studying Amazon foodstuffs made from smashed bugs, pounded roots, and maybe the lungs of small tropical birds.

  Bruce got the point. “That fresh bread looks really good. You make it yourself?”

  “I did. I love to bake. Just don’t have anyone to bake for.”

  Elise felt a tug at her heartstrings. Old woman alone, out of desperation she bakes for the scant tourist trade, lives in a tarpaper shack without sanitary facilities. Missed the true story altogether, but she now gave Sylvie eye contact as if it was a small monetary offer-ing. Woman to woman. An understanding of the trials and tribulations of life. God, she must be at least ninety. That face, like tanned leather. Something about her so pure.

  “Give me two loaves of this,” Bruce said, picking up a loaf of something that could have been pumpernickel and one lighter brown calf-coloured loaf that might have been made with a high fibre grain. He believed that a woman like this would work with organic goods but he surmised that there was shortening in there too, fats and cholesterol that would clog up his arteries. It would taste good, damn good, and he’d eat it because it was made by this sweet old gal, but he’d lose a day off his life for sure. Price to pay, always.

  Elise reached into Bruce’s wallet when he pulled it out, gave Sylvie a twenty, said keep the change. She tried to wrestle small bills and change out of her dress but the family was already walking away. Only Angeline hung back, the north pole of the cookie moon chomped clean off as she dribbled cookie crumbs for the shore birds to find later.

  The sign was back in place now:“Slaunwhite’s Whale-Watching.”

  “You folks are just in time,” Moses Slaunwhite said, as they arrived to study the spotless, shiny cape islander captained by Moses Slaunwhite.

  “We the only ones?”

  “Looks that way, but not to worry. You get the personal treatment. It’s early in the season. We’re just getting ’er up to speed.”

  “Guess we’re on board then.”

  “Watch your feet. There you go. Where you folks from?”

  “New Jersey,” Elise said.

  “Heard of it,” Moses said. “Heard all about it. Never been there, though. Lots of places I haven’t been. Bet it’s pretty down there in the States.”

  “Sometimes,” Elise said. “But it’s not like this. This is something.”

  “It is something. We all love it here. Couldn’t make me leave the island if you bribed me with a wheelbarrow full of thousand-dollar bills.”

  “I can understand that,” said Bruce, fantasizing what it would be like to have a job where you went out every day in a boat. Not like watching computer screens with numbers, making phone calls to corporate executives of coffee companies in Equador. Not like anything he did.

  “You kids like to go fast in a boat?”

  Todd shook his head yes.

  “Watch this.” Moses gave her the gas and the engine roared. The boat lurched forward and dug a deep wake behind them. It wasn’t what you’d call speed-boat fast but it was good special effects.

  “How fast can she go?” Todd asked.

  “Maybe forty knots, maybe more.”

  Todd smiled and looked at Angie, gloating over the fact he was privy to this nautical terminology.

  “Don’t want to scare the whales,” Elise said, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the engine. Moses winked at Bruce and then throttled back the engine to a dull roar.

  “We’re gonna come around the southern tip of the island now and be on the open ocean side. See them birds on the rocks drying their wings. Cormorants. Might see a few seals up there too lolling around on the flat rocks. Eiders there off to the left. See the baby ones. The male, he’s the one with colour, the females just lookin’ kinda dull. That’s how you tell them apart.”

  Elise turned away from the overt sexism of the eiders, stared into the sun, adjusted her Raylon sunglasses, and reached for her zinc sunblock tube in her pocket. Men and talk.

  “How’s the fishing?” Bruce asked

  “What fishing? Fish all killed, dragged to death, vacuumed up, gill-netted, what have you. Still some lobsters. See those lobster pots over there. Belong to Gillis Jobb. Yep, still a few lobsters but it’s not enough to carry a family through the winter. Cod’s been racked and ruined. Mackerel comes and goes and herring — if the big ships find ’em first with their sonar, they suck the bejesus lot of them all up and nothing left for the inshore. I don’t know what comes next.”

  “Sounds like a hard life for a fisherman.”

  “That it is, me son, that it is. Oh well, naught for it. You folks like a coffee? Cappuccino? Got a cappuccino machine inside, the kind they have in the Irving gas stations.”

  Elise thought he was joking. She blinked. Bruce wasn’t sure. He was way off his home turf where even the whimsy of the stock market was predictable within a margin of error. The very word,“cappuccino,” came as a shock to his neural network here on this boat at sea.“I wouldn’t want to cause you any trouble.”

  “No trouble. Here killer, take the wheel.” Moses tugged Todd over to hang on to the steering wheel. “Just keep her aimed to sea, that’s it.”

  Captain Moses went below and came back in a few minutes with two steaming china cups of cappuccino. He had installed the cappuccino machine last year on the advice of the tourist agency in Chicago. Up until then he’d never even heard of cappuccino and if he had he would have assumed it to be an alcoholic drink, something rich people gulped down to get loaded in places like Monte Carlo or Rome. Turned out, he liked the stuff himself. And the cappuccino caught all the tourists off guard. The word of mouth on Moses’ cappuccino probably brought him an extra thirty clients last year, more loot in his pockets. Moses was a man with good instincts when it came to business. All he needed today was to get in close to a couple of whales, send this innocent family back to Jersey with stories of sea wonder, and more Yanks would come this summer, almost guaranteed.

  He prayed to the sea gods that today there would be whales. Had to be sooner or later. But it had been a bad year, a real bad year for sightings, and that had never happened before. The only whales he’d seen this year were miles and miles off shore, too far to take the tourist trade, took too much time to get there, much more dangerous, all wrong. Why were they not coming in this year to the Trough? Another bloody thing gone wrong with the sea. If the whales disappeared, what would he do next? Had to stay one step ahead. Not enough money to be made in a lobster season — too few of them, season too short. Tried the sea urchin thing but the starfish population got out of control, ate up most of the urchins, left the gourmet-goers in the Tokyo sushi bars starved for the little pink mess.
Price went through the roof but not an urchin to be found on the sea floor. So, there had to be whales.

  Chapter Eight

  Well, there was more sun and more sea, a little cooling salt breeze, a fresh slingshot of a wind with bits of saltwater to hit you in the eye or on the cheek every now and then. To Angie it was all magic, every bit of it. Magic Ragged Island, magic sea. A captain of a boat who smiled a lot and looked like he came straight out of a storybook, but most of all she kept thinking about the old lady. Could she have been even older than anyone thought? Angie guessed she might be two hundred years old and that was her secret. She’d been around for a long time. The little old lady who lived in a shoe, maybe. Certainly her skin had a leathery look. Angie hoped she would see the old woman again. Her pockets were stuffed with leftover cookie crumbs. Cookies made from the moon, crunched up and ground around in her pockets.

  The real moon had just let go of the tide about two hours ago and the water was rising. The Trough would be full and deep soon, the best time for visiting the whales.

  The cappuccino had not been bad at all. Elise would not report it to her friends back home, however, for it detracted from the concept of an island with some kind of endemic poverty or social ills, the story she wanted to tell at her women’s group. No, the cappuccino on the whale boat would not do at all. Cars without mufflers, men without teeth — that was much better, and an old indigent woman trying to eke out a living by selling baked goods to scant tourists. Nice.

  Bruce Sanger was staring off into the Atlantic, conjuring Jacques Cousteau. Hadn’t they just said on the news that Cousteau had died last week? The passing of a legend. Like Cousteau and like this Moses Slaunwhite, Bruce Sanger reckoned the sea was in his blood. This very sort of maritime adventure was what he was cut out for. Maybe ethical funds, even Earth First, were not enough. Maybe he’d missed his calling as an eco-warrior of some sort. There would be Zodiacs to be launched and Norwegian whaling ships to be stopped single-handedly, French nuclear testing to be halted during countdowns, that sort of thing. God, what a life it’d be. Not like Jersey and Wall Street at all.

  “See that old house out near the cliff there,” Moses said to Todd, who looked a little green around the gills, maybe a tad seasick. “I was born there. Yep, that’s the place. Looked out my window one morning and saw a water spout headed my way.”

  Todd’s eyes lit up.“Like a tornado at sea.”

  “That it was. So I ran outside like a fool. I was just a boy like you, not much to look at, just a thin strip of a lad. I ran out on our little wharf to see it better and wham, before I knew it, the thing was upon me. I lay down and held onto the boards and thought I could hear the nails ripping out. I saw my rowboat lift out of the sea and then I felt this pummelling of water and I thought I was a gonner. But just like that, the spout disappeared.”

  “Wow. Think we’ll see one today?”

  “Not likely. Haven’t seen another since. Freak thing of nature. That’s the way the sea is, though. You just bloody never know.”

  The wind slackened as they rounded the front of the island, and Moses guided his boat into the Trough. He dropped an anchor just this side of the shoal and cut the engine. “Should be some minkes and right whales to see today. Maybe something bigger.”

  Todd and Angie peered over the side. No whales. Todd spied a big jellyfish that he called a Portuguese man of war but he was guessing.

  “What does it eat?” Angie asked.

  “Diatoms,” Todd guessed.“Plankton, maybe.”

  Two and half hours slipped by and no whales. Greenpeace Zodiac daydreams had worn themselves out. Bruce didn’t want to hurt the captain’s feelings, but it was getting late. He cleared his throat.“I think we might as well go back now. We all understand, all of us in this family, that this whale-watching is not like Disney World or something. You can’t just make a whale appear, after all.”

  “Why not?” Angie asked, for she still believed this was an enchanted place. There was the magic island right in front of her.

  Maybe the whales were all off somewhere grieving, holding a wake for Jacques Cousteau, Bruce imagined; that would explain it. But he would not say this out loud.

  “Right you are,” Moses said. “Guess I’ll owe you folks a freebie. That’s what I do, you know. No whale, no pay.”

  “We couldn’t allow you to do that,” Elise said.“We’ll pay as agreed. It’s been a good ride to sea. The cappuccino was lovely.”

  “Well, okay. As long as you are satisfied. What say we go back and lunch is on me. The Aetna Canteen. Fresh-cooked lobster all around.”

  The engine roared to life, the anchor was hauled up, and the boat arced around in a U-turn, headed back to the island’s government wharf. Once underway, Bruce sidled up to the captain and quietly asked about the other island attraction, the shooting range.

  “Of course. It’s part of your package. I just wasn’t sure you were a gun man.”

  “I’m not. It’s just…” But Bruce didn’t have the right words for it. A fantasy of sorts, was what he had meant to say. Despite the fact that he supported gun control, donated money to the Lobby for the Elimination of Handguns, voted for congressmen who demanded better gun legislation, Bruce knew that he just had to get his hands on some sort of gun and shoot at things. When he’d read about this salvage yard and the interesting angle — “Get back at the technology you hate the most”— well, it stuck in his head like an old piece of chewing gum on the bottom side of a sixth grader’s desk.

  Elise would never understand.

  “Can we go visit the old woman?” Angie asked.“After lunch?”

  “The old woman?” Moses said. “You mean Sylvie. Sure, heck, Sylvie would love to have visitors. She’s all alone. Some think she’s a bit daft. Not me, mind you. Sylvie is something else. Four husbands. All dead. What a tragic streak of luck for a woman. But she’s got the courage to keep on. I’ll take you and your ma over there if you like. Remember, I got to make up to you folks for all this disappointment.”

  “No disappointment,” Elise said. “Everything is fine. But yes, why don’t I take Angie to visit this woman. Perhaps we can help her with some chores or something.” Elise had no real affinity for “chores.” She had hired help to clean her house, a top-of-the-line Maytag dishwasher for the dishes, professional men to call when things broke down. But today she would go slumming in the boondocks. Maybe down on her knees with a bucket of well water, a hand scrub brush, and some lye soap. Would be good for her. She was even looking forward to it.

  Bruce had just seen the heavens open up and a favour granted from the gods of munitions.“Maybe Todd and I will go look around that old junkyard up on the hill. That’d be a real education for the boy.”

  Moses winked, understood. Todd endorsed the idea.“Maybe I’ll get some good idea for a science project or something.”

  Sylvie was not there at her table by the Aetna but the family sat and ate cold, cooked lobster. Todd pretended to be dissecting his, collected all the little hard-cased eyeballs on crustaceous stalks and set them together in a pile. Angie could not eat hers, said it looked like something she’d like to keep as a pet, thought it might still be alive. Bruce knew enough to keep his mouth shut and to not report that it had undoubtedly been boiled alive, screaming even as it met its scalding fate.

  Elise sucked the lobster meat out of the legs and Bruce wrenched his apart like he was wrestling it, savoured the sweet tail meat and even ate the green stuff that Todd mistakenly thought must come out of the lobster’s brain.

  They tore off big pieces of Sylvie’s bread and ate it without butter. Delicious. Never had anything like it before from the best of the gourmet bakeries in Upper Montclair. There was a raspberry pie for dessert and ice cream. And then the women were off with Moses to find Sylvie. Before he departed, Moses scratched his forehead, pointed a finger up the hill towards Phonse’s junkyard, and, cautious that Elise wasn’t looking, raised a thumb, crooked a finger, and mimed the firing of a gun
. The great conspiracy of men. Todd smiled, although he didn’t quite understand.

  Phonse Doucette greeted Bruce Sanger like a long-lost cousin, introduced him to Alistair Swinnemar, who looked vaguely familiar. Phonse’s office looked like maybe a front-end loader had tipped the roof off temporarily and dumped in a load of car parts and technological junk. It had a chaotic lived-in look that Bruce and Todd both found very attractive. It was the antithesis of their orderly lives. Weapons in a glass case lined one wall. Old World War II rifles, shotguns, handguns.

  “Guess you heard about us on the Internet?”

  “No. Actually it was the tourist agency.”

  “Oh, right. Chicago. They think we’re onto something here. Cutting edge, so to speak. ‘Get back at technology.’ They think we need to copyright the idea or patent it or something. Personally, I’m not in it for the money. It’s just good, clean, safe entertainment. What’s your pleasure?”

  “This for real?” Todd asked his dad.

  “We’ll have to explain it carefully to your mother.”

  “Can I shoot, too?”

  “What do you think?” he asked Phonse.

  “Parental discretion advised, but I’ve seen boys younger than him put a bullet hole or two in an old Caddie and come up smilin’.”

  “Okay then, but only if it’s safe.”

  “Safety first, that’s our motto. Alistair, you wanna unlock the gun cabinet? I think we’ll stick with the shotguns today for the first-timers.”

  “Right, Phonse.”

  Twenty solid minutes of safety instructions and father and son were deep in the centre of the junkyard in a dug-out kind of quarry adjacent to Oickle’s Pond. Bruce had elected to shoot the bejesus out of a faded piss-yellow Volvo station wagon. Todd blasted away at a rusty VW bug with stick-on flowers.

  “Lock and load,” Phonse said. Nothing he liked more than to watch the smiles on the faces of trigger-happy tourists. Father-son bonding at its best, this time around.