“Day’s Work, consists, at least, of the dead reckoning from
noon to noon, morning and afternoon time sights for longitude,
and a meridian altitude for latitude.”
THE MARINER’S DICTIONARY
“WANT to talk to you, Quoyle.” Jack, shouting down the wire. “Pick you up tomorrer morning. So they know who you are down to Misky Bay.” Bristling cough. Hung up before Quoyle could say anything. If he’d had anything to say.
By January it had always been winter. The sky blended imperceptibly into the neutral-colored ice that covered the ocean, solid near shore, jigsaw floes fifty miles out and heaving on the swells. Snow fell every day, sometimes slow flakes, as if idling between storms. Deepened, deepened; five, eight, eleven feet deep. The roads were channels between muffling banks, metal, wood silenced. And every ten days or so, by Quoyle’s reckoning, another storm.
Jack’s truck heater blasted, yet their breaths iced the side windows. Quoyle scraped with his fingernails to look for the harp seals that began to dot the far ice now like commas and semicolons. Half listening to Jack. Thinking of seals. Wavey’s older brother, Oscar, had a pet seal. Devoted to the local scallops. Jack had things on his mind and talked like a rivet gun. The new groundfish fishing season had opened, a maze of allocations and quotas that threw him into reverse.
“Einstein couldn’t understand it. They’ve made a fucking cockadoodle mess out of it, those twits in Ottawa who don’t know a lumpfish from their own arse.” Jack at his medium range of temper.
“It’s like this.” Combing his hair with his hand so it bristled up. “Goddamn, you just get something working good and it quits. Seems like I’m always lashing things up with wire.”
Quoyle slouched in his enormous maroon anorak. Had remembered the name of Oscar’s seal. Pussels. What they called the local scallops.
“O.k. Quoyle, Billy wants to stay with the Home Page so you’re the new managing editor. You’ll do Tert Card’s job, put it together, handle the phone, assignments, bills, advertisers, printer. You got to watch the son of a bitch printer. Why I’m taking you down there. If a mistake can be made, he’ll make it. Let’s see. Want you to keep writing the Shipping News.”
Quoyle startled, hand halfway to his chin.
“Like to try Benny Fudge on the court reports and auto wrecks, the sexual abuse stories. Drop the restaurant stuff and the foreign news. Everybody knows all the restaurants and nobody cares about what happens somewhere else. Get that off the telly.”
The truck climbed the twist of road over the headlands and they came into a zone of perpetual light snow.
“What do you think, get a new slant on the home page? Can call it ‘Lifestyles.’ See, Billy and me been knocking this ‘round for a couple of years. There’s two ways of living here now. There’s the old way, look out for your family, die where you was born, fish, cut your wood, keep a garden, make do with what you got. Then there’s the new way. Work out, have a job, somebody tell you what to do, commute, your brother’s in South Africa, your mother’s in Regina, buy every goddamn cockadoodle piece of Japanese crap you can. Leave home. Go off to look for work. And some has a hard time of it. Quoyle, we all know that Gammy Bird is famous for its birdhouse plans and good recipes, but that’s not enough. Now we got to deal with Crock-Pots and consumer ratings, asphalt driveways, lotteries, fried chicken franchises, Mint Royale coffee at gourmet shops, all that stuff. Advice on getting along in distant cities. Billy thinks there’s enough to make the home section a two-page spread. He’ll tell you what he’s got in mind. You work it out with him.”
“We could get some who’ve gone away to write a guest column in the form of a letter once in a while. Letter from Australia, Letter from Sudbury, how it is,” said Quoyle.
“Guess I’d read that if I was twenty-one and had to get moving. It’ll be a different paper. In more ways than one.”
“Nutbeem handled touchy stories very well. I don’t know how Benny will be with the sex crime stuff.”
“Well, let’s just wait and see how the feller does before we sink our graples in him, eh? You live with this, Quoyle?” Coming into the Misky Bay traffic, a circle of unnamed streets and steep one-way hills complicated by mounds of snow.
He nodded. Swore to himself by St. Pussel there would never be a typo.
“Come up the stage tonight and I’ll tell you the rest of it. O.k., now here’s where you makes your turn, see, then you cuts along behind the firehouse. It’s the shortcut.”
“Well,” said Quoyle, sitting where Tert Card had sat, although he had cleared off the desk and torn up the picture of the oil tanker, “what have we got for news this week. Benny, how’d you do with the S.A. and the police court stories?” Pitching his voice low.
Benny Fudge sat with his hands folded tightly on his clean desk as though at an arithmetic lesson. His puffed hair made Quoyle think of Eraserhead.
“I’ll tell you. I read about fifty of Nutbeem’s stories to see how he handled the abuse cases but I can’t string it together the way he did. I tried, because I felt like I owed it to Nutbeem. After the boat. But I couldn’t get it rolling. Best I can do.”
A charge of incest against a 67-year-old Misky Bay man was dismissed Tuesday when his 14-year-old daughter refused to testify.
Dr. Singlo Booty, 71, of Distant Waters has been arrested and charged with nine counts of sexual assault involving seven patients from May 1978 to July 1991. He will appear in provincial court January 31.
Waited, biting his thumbnail.
Quoyle looked at Billy who moved his eyebrows very slightly. Nutbeem would have squeezed out two heart-wrenching stories.
“The other stuff was excellent. The other court stuff? I’ve got lovely stuff.”
“What might the lovely stuff be?” asked Quoyle.
“Two fellers here charged with everything in the book. Had a run-in with wildlife officers. Charged with carrying firearms in closed season, obstruction of wildlife officers doing their duty, assaulting wildlife officers with sharp branches and lobster pots, breaking wildlife officers’ Polaroid sunglasses, uttering threats against wildlife officers. Another story about buddy here, charged with possession of copper wire. About four thousand dollars worth. He’s also charged with trafficking in hashish. And I got a Youth on a Crime Spree. Stole a bicycle in Lost All Hope, rode it eleven miles to Bad Fortune, there he stole a motorcycle and made it to Never Once. But the boy was ambitious. Abandoned the motorcycle and stole a car. Drove the car into the sea and swam ashore at Joy in the Morning. Where two Mounties by chance were parked in their patrol car, eating doughnuts. And five Unemployment Insurance fraud charges. And four dragger captains fined two thousand apiece for fishing redfish in closed waters. A guy down in No Name got thirty days for jigging fish in inland waters. All kinds of car wrecks. And a lot of photos. I like taking photos. See, I can have a dual career. Reporter and photographer.”
“Write them up with a little more detail than you put into the S.A. stories.” Quoyle acted gruff, hard-boiled.
“Yeah, I could write crime stuff all day. But not the sex stuff.” A prim mouth. “I see the crime stories and the camera work as my big chance.”
Chance for what, Quoyle wondered. But there he was at Tert Card’s window frame with the phone against his ear, running the stories through the computer, pasting up the pages, driving the mechanicals down to Misky Bay to the print shop. When the paper came out that week he tore out the editorial page where the masthead ran and mailed it to Partridge. Managing Editor: R. G. Quoyle.
And so it went, stories of cargo ships beset by ice, the Search and Rescue airlift of a sailor crushed in power-operated watertight doors, a stem trawler adrift after an explosion in the engine room, a factory freezer trawler repossessed by the bank, a sailor lost overboard from a scientific survey vessel in rough seas, plane crashes and oil spills, whales tangled in nets, illegal dumping of fish offal in the harbor, plaques awarded to firemen and beauty queens, assaulting husbands, drowned boys, explorers lost and found, ships that sank in raging seas, a fishing boat hit by an icebreaker, a lottery winner, seizure of illegal moose meat.
And he sent a copy of a police bulletin to the aunt. Mrs. Melville captured in Hawaii with the steward from Tough Baby. A handsome man thirty years younger than she, wearing Giorgio Armani clothes and driving a Lexus LS400 with the cellular telephone. “I did it for love,” she confessed. The steward said nothing.
All in the day’s work.