Todd was looking forward to the whales, of course. He’d read a book on cetology and considered a future in research at sea. Diatoms glowing at night. Lots of high-tech equipment. Maybe go down in a submersible and see really ugly creatures on the bottom of the sea. This boat ride was a good start — give him the feel for life at sea. And he liked what he found so far: on a boat (old nautical technology, but that had already been factored in and was to be expected), travelling at about thirty knots in twelve fathoms of clean salt water. If you fell overboard you’d drown if no one scooped you up right away. That added an element of danger, which he liked. Todd leaned far over the side of the railing and peered into the frothing water by the hull of the metal boat.
“Careful,Todd,” his sister chastised him.
He ignored her but suddenly felt a hand on his shoulder. For a split second he imagined it was someone about to push him overboard. He’d heard about that happening on the Staten Island Ferry. Instead, the hand gently tugged him back, and he turned around to see a young man in greasy overalls, a small blond mustache and a curious kind of smile on his face. “Wouldn’t lean over like that, lad, if I’s you. Could fall in. Chilly still, ya know. Too early to swim. Gots to be careful.” Alistair Swinnemar was missing three teeth where they had been punched out of his right jaw. He still had a hand on Todd’s shoulder.
Alistair lived on the island and often got into trouble, but he was kind and good-natured as a general rule. He feared the little tourist kid might go overboard and he’d have to go in after him. Not much of a swimmer, like most islanders, but what could you do if a kid went splash?
Alistair let go of Todd and laughed at the look on the kid’s face. Todd was wondering how this galumph got away with touching him. If this had been New Jersey, and a stranger grabbed a kid like that, he would have been arrested. Alistair saw the goofball look on the kid’s face and shrugged, looked at the kid’s sister and she shrugged too. Angeline liked the funny-looking islander who had maybe just saved her brother’s life. She wondered if they all talked like that on the island where they were going.
“Going to have to hire an interpreter if we want to understand them,” Todd said to Angeline after Alistair had walked away.
Angeline saw trees on the island now — tall, dark green evergreens like in the picture books her mother read to her at bed time. She saw a few houses that seemed as if they had come out of the pages of books as well. All brightly coloured, the ones along the shore. It was like watching a Disney movie with a really slow but nice beginning. Arriving at a new place, far from home. Diatoms in the water, gulls making noises like “cronk, cronk, cronk” in the air. The sound of the big engine. A sky big like a huge blue bowl turned upside down over your head. She couldn’t help but giggle.
“I’ve never seen a place like this before,” her brother grudgingly admitted. The island slowly grew larger and this reminded Todd of the shots of Jurassic Park in the movie, the helicopter coming in from the sea. If he was lucky, he conjectured, there would be raptors.
Bruce smelled fish as they approached the government wharf on the island. It reminded him of walking past the kitchen at Tomile’s Spanish Seafood Restaurant in Greenwich Village. On the way to the washroom you had to walk past the kitchen and the smell of seafood was not always that pleasant there. Dead fish is still dead fish.
Crates of lobster in seaweed were waiting on the island dock for a trip to the markets on the mainland. Several hundred confused lobsters, kidnapped from their deep private lives and hoisted aloft into an alien world. Lobster intelligence, brain evolution asleep at the wheel for a thousand years. Exoskeletons did not always protect. Some sort of evolutionary trade coming on here: a family arriving from the greater New York area, just getting off the boat as bug-eyed crustaceans from the local sea floor head south to feed the fat faces of businessmen from the same locale. An exchange of hostages. The lobsters getting the raw end of the deal. Nutcrackers, claw crackers, who knows what awaiting them. Pliers maybe, electric cutting tools, vice grips to help get at their meat. Destiny awaiting.
“This place reeks with authenticity,” Elise said. Colourful old lobster pot floats hung from a big poplar tree. Cars without mufflers idled on the concrete wharf and greeted returning husbands, wives. Alistair Swinnemar lollygagged, talking to the hangashores, and then threw one leg over his Yamaha dirt bike and started it up, spit broken clam shells under the tires, and roared off, the engine sounding like a bumblebee amplified through an old Marshall amp with a really big stack of concert speakers.
The Sangers disembarked and clung together like they had just gone back in time. Bruce surveyed the shoreline; saw a square white building with particle board walls and a sign: “The Aetna Canteen”; saw people driving big, old, rusty cars slowly up a gravel road. No license plates. Men and women with tanned, creased faces like potatoes left in the bin too long. Bruce knew he had found what he was looking for — something completely unlike his familiar Wall Street world or the claustrophobic backyard universe of his neighbours back in Upper Montclair. Something like this. Authentic. All his life he had dreamed of authenticity, felt he was trapped in an artificial world where nothing was true. This was the proverbial real thing.
He walked down the wharf toward land and Angeline picked up a small dried starfish that had been dropped by a passing gull.“Poor thing,” she said.“Can we bring it back to life?”
Todd harrumphed.“Sure. If we had the right enzymes.”
“Can we buy enzymes here?” Angeline asked.
“I doubt it,” Elise said, looking at the marker buoys hanging in the trees and then at the small garden patch behind where aluminum pie plates dangled from spruce posts in the light sea breeze.
“Your brother’s not telling the truth,” Bruce said.
“I read it somewhere. You can bring things back to life with the right enzymes. Not people maybe, but some things.”
“Perhaps. Angeline, I’m afraid it’s dead. You can keep it if you want. A souvenir.”
“I don’t want a souvenir. I’d rather it came back to life.” She tossed it into the clear water near the wharf and it floated a second, then sank to the bottom.
Bruce scanned the hill ahead until he saw what he was looking for: sunlight glinting off the windshields of junk cars, what looked like hundreds if not thousands of them. He cupped his ear to listen for the ting of rifle bullets hitting car doors but heard nothing. Too early in the day, perhaps.
Elise wondered if the reading levels of the children in the island school were far below the national norm. She considered other assorted problems that might beset an isolated island like this. Incest, inbred families maybe. Already she’d seen signs of a critical need for dental help here. True, it didn’t appear to be anything like the urban poverty of New York or Newark, but she was sure there was a quiet desperation here, people in need of help, her help. A report could be made to her club back in Montclair. It was always on the lookout for unsung charitable causes. Some people in a place no one had heard of before in need of real assistance. This could be the ticket.
The Sangers had walked right past Moses Slaunwhite’s whale tour boat. The sign was down for painting, touching up. So instead of loitering and asking for information on whale-watching, the New Jersey family sauntered toward the only commercial establishment on the shore: the Aetna. “Lobster sandwiches $4.95,” the hand-painted sign read. “With or without Sauerkraut.”“Beans and Bread $3.95.”“German Food Upon Request.” Elise wondered what the German food could be: things made from intestines and ground kidneys, no doubt, or fatty sausages with dry, caked blood. She was not a fan of anything German, particularly their food.
Bruce asked the girl at the cash register inside if she had any bottled water. Niva? Aquafina? Perrier? But the girl shook her head no.
“Got some pop in the cooler. Pepsi, Doctor