Shipping News_A Novel Read online

  Partridge labored to improve him. “What don’t happen is also news, Quoyle.”

  “I see.” Pretending to understand. Hands in pockets.

  “This story on the County Mutual Aid Transportation meeting? A month ago they were ready to start van service in four towns if Bugle Hollow came in. You say here that they met last night, then, way down at the end you mention sort of as a minor detail, that Bugle Hollow decided not to join. You know how many old people, no cars, people can’t afford a car or a second car, commuters, been waiting for that goddamn van to pull up? Now it’s not going to happen. News, Quoyle, news. Better get your mojo working.” A minute later added in a different voice that he was doing Greek-style marinated fish and red peppers on skewers Friday night and did Quoyle want to come over?

  He did, but wondered what a mojo actually was.

  ¯

  In late spring Ed Punch called Quoyle into his office, said he was fired. He looked out of his ruined face past Quoyle’s ear. “It’s more of a layoff. If it picks up later on…”

  Quoyle got a part-time job driving a cab.

  Partridge knew why. Talked Quoyle into putting on a huge apron, gave him a spoon and a jar. “His kids home from college. They got your job. Nothing to cry over. That’s right, spread that mustard on the meat, let it work in.”

  In August, snipping dill into a Russian beef stew with pickles, Partridge said, “Punch wants you back. Says you’re interested, come in Monday morning.”

  Punch played reluctant. Made a show of taking Quoyle back as a special favor. Temporary.

  The truth was Punch had noticed that Quoyle, who spoke little himself, inspired talkers. His only skill in the game of life. His attentive posture, his flattering nods urged waterfalls of opinion, reminiscence, recollection, theorizing, guesstimating, exposition, synopsis and explication, juiced the life stories out of strangers.

  And so it went. Fired, car wash attendant, rehired.

  Fired, cabdriver, rehired.

  Back and forth he went, down and around the county, listening to the wrangles of sewer boards, road commissions, pounding out stories of bridge repair budgets. The small decisions of local authority seemed to him the deep workings of life. In a profession that tutored its practitioners in the baseness of human nature, that revealed the corroded metal of civilization, Quoyle constructed a personal illusion of orderly progress. In atmospheres of disintegration and smoking jealousy he imagined rational compromise.

  ¯

  Quoyle and Partridge ate poached trout and garlic shrimps. Mercalia not there. Quoyle tossed the fennel salad. Was leaning over to pick up a fallen shrimp when Partridge rang his knife on the wine bottle.

  “Announcement. About Mercalia and me.”

  Quoyle, grinning. Expected to hear they were having a kid. Already picked himself for godfather.

  “Moving to California. Be leaving Friday night.”

  “What?” said Quoyle.

  “Why we’re going, the raw materials,” Partridge said. “Wine, ripe tomatillos, alligator pears.” He poured fumé blanc, then told Quoyle that really it was for love, not vegetables.

  “Everything that counts is for love, Quoyle. It’s the engine of life.”

  Mercalia had thrown down her thesis, he said, had gone blue-collar. Travel, cowboy boots, money, the gasp of air brakes, four speakers in the cab and the Uptown String Quartet on the tape deck. Enrolled in long-distance truck driving school. Graduated summa cum laude. The Overland Express in Sausalito hired her.

  “She is the first black woman truck driver in America,” said Partridge, winking tears. “We already got an apartment. Third one she looked at.” It had, he said, a kitchen with French doors, heavenly bamboo shading the courtyard. Herb garden the size of a prayer rug. In which he would kneel.

  “She got the New Orleans run. And I am going out there. Going to make smoked duck sandwiches, cold chicken breast with tarragon, her to take on the road, not go in the diners. I don’t want Mercalia in those truck places. Going to grow the tarragon. I can pick up a job. Never enough copy editors to go around. Get a job anywhere.”

  Quoyle tried to say congratulations, ended up shaking and shaking Partridge’s hand, couldn’t let go.

  “Look, come out and visit us,” said Partridge. “Stay in touch.” And still they clasped hands, pumping the air as if drawing deep water from a well.

  ¯

  Quoyle, stuck in bedraggled Mockingburg. A place in its third death. Stumbled in two hundred years from forests and woodland tribes, to farms, to a working-class city of machine tool and tire factories. A long recession emptied the downtown, killed the malls. Factories for sale. Slum streets, youths with guns in their pockets, political word-rattle of some litany, sore mouths and broken ideas. Who knew where the people went? Probably California.

  Quoyle bought groceries at the A amp;B Grocery; got his gas at the D amp;G Convenience; took the car to the R amp;R Garage when it needed gas or new belts. He wrote his pieces, lived in his rented trailer watching television. Sometimes he dreamed of love. Why not? A free country. When Ed Punch fired him, he went on binges of cherry ice cream, canned ravioli.

  He abstracted his life from the times. He believed he was a newspaper reporter, yet read no paper except The Mockingburg Record, and so managed to ignore terrorism, climatological change, collapsing governments, chemical spills, plagues, recession and failing banks, floating debris, the disintegrating ozone layer. Volcanoes, earthquakes and hurricanes, religious frauds, defective vehicles and scientific charlatans, mass murderers and serial killers, tidal waves of cancer, AIDS, deforestation and exploding aircraft were as remote to him as braid catches, canions and rosette-embroidered garters. Scientific journals spewed reports of mutant viruses, of machines pumping life through the near-dead, of the discovery that the galaxies were streaming apocalyptically toward an invisible Great Attractor like flies into a vacuum cleaner nozzle. That was the stuff of others’ lives. He was waiting for his to begin.

  He got in the habit of walking around the trailer and asking aloud, “Who knows?” He said, “Who knows?” For no one knew. He meant, anything could happen.

  A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction.

  2 Love Knot

  In the old days a love-sick sailor might send the object of his

  affections a length of fishline loosely tied in a true-lover’s knot.

  If the knot was sent back as it came the relationship was

  static. If the knot returned home snugly drawn up the passion

  was reciprocated. But if the knot was capsized-tacit advice

  to ship out.

  THEN, at a meeting, Petal Bear. Thin, moist, hot. Winked at him. Quoyle had the big man’s yearning for small women. He stood next to her at the refreshment table. Grey eyes close together, curly hair the color of oak. The fluorescent light made her as pale as candle wax. Her eyelids gleamed with some dusky unguent. A metallic thread in her rose sweater. These faint sparks cast a shimmer on her like a spill of light. She smiled, the pearl-tinted lips wet with cider. His hand shot up to his chin. She chose a cookie with frosting eyes and an almond for a mouth. Eyed him as her teeth snapped out a new moon. An invisible hand threw loops and crossings in Quoyle’s intestines. Growls from his shirt.

  “What do you think,” she said. Her voice was rapid. She said what she always said. “You want to marry me, don’t you? Don’t you think you want to marry me?” Waited for the wise crack. As she spoke she changed in some provocative way, seemed suddenly drenched in eroticism as a diver rising out of a pool gleams like chrome with a sheet of unbroken water for a fractional moment.

  “Yes,” he said, meaning it. She thought it was wit. She laughed, curled her sharp-nailed fingers into his. Stared intently into his eyes like an optometrist seeking a flaw. A woman grimaced at them.

  “Get out of this place,” she whispered, “go get a drink. It’s seven twenty-five. I think I’m going to fuck you by ten, what do you think o
f that?”

  Later she said, “My God, that’s the biggest one yet.”

  As a hot mouth warms a cold spoon, Petal warmed Quoyle. He stumbled away from his rented trailer, his mess of dirty laundry and empty ravioli cans, to painful love, his heart scarred forever by tattoo needles pricking the name of Petal Bear.

  There was a month of fiery happiness. Then six kinked years of suffering.

  ¯

  Petal Bear was crosshatched with longings, but not, after they were married, for Quoyle. Desire reversed to detestation like a rubber glove turned inside out. In another time, another sex, she would have been a Genghis Khan. When she needed burning cities, the stumbling babble of captives, horses exhausted from tracing the reeling borders of her territories, she had only petty triumphs of sexual encounter. Way it goes, she said to herself. In your face, she said.

  By day she sold burglar alarms at Northern Security, at night, became a woman who could not be held back from strangers’ rooms, who would have sexual conjunction whether in stinking rest rooms or mop cupboards. She went anywhere with unknown men. Flew to nightclubs in distant cities. Made a pornographic video while wearing a mask cut from a potato chip bag. Sharpened her eyeliner pencil with the paring knife, let Quoyle wonder why his sandwich cheese was streaked with green.

  It was not Quoyle’s chin she hated, but his cringing hesitancy, as though he waited for her anger, expected her to make him suffer. She could not bear his hot back, the bulk of him in the bed. The part of Quoyle that was wonderful was, unfortunately, attached to the rest of him. A walrus panting on the near pillow. While she remained a curious equation that attracted many mathematicians.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, his hairy leg grazing her thigh. In the darkness his pleading fingers crept up her arm. She shuddered, shook his hand away.

  “Don’t do that!”

  She did not say “Lardass,” but he heard it. There was nothing about him she could stand. She wished him in the pit. Could not help it any more than he could help his witless love.

  Quoyle stiff-mouthed, feeling cables tighten around him as though drawn up by a ratchet. What had he expected when he married? Not his parents’ discount-store life, but something like Partridge’s backyard-friends, grill smoke, affection and its unspoken language. But this didn’t happen. It was as though he were a tree and she a thorny branch grafted onto his side that flexed in every wind, flailing the wounded bark.

  What he had was what he pretended.

  ¯

  Four days after Bunny was born the baby-sitter came to loll in front of the television set-Mrs. Moosup with arms too fat for sleeves-and Petal hauled a dress that wouldn’t easily show stains over her slack belly and leaking breasts and went out to see what she could find. Setting a certain tone. And through her pregnancy with Sunshine the next year, fumed until the alien left her body.

  Turmoil bubbled Quoyle’s dull waters. For it was he who drove the babies around, sometimes brought them to meetings, Sunshine in a pouch that strapped on his back, Bunny sucking her thumb and hanging on his trouser leg. The car littered with newspapers, tiny mittens, torn envelopes, teething rings. On the backseat a crust of toothpaste from a trodden tube. Soft-drink cans rolled and rolled.

  Quoyle came into his rented house in the evenings. Some few times Petal was there; most often it was Mrs. Moosup doing overtime in a trance of electronic color and simulated life, smoking cigarettes and not wondering. The floor around her strewn with hairless dolls. Dishes tilted in the sink, for Mrs. Moosup said she was not a housemaid, nor ever would be.

  Into the bathroom through a tangle of towels and electric cords, into the children’s room where he pulled down shades against the streetlight, pulled up covers against the night. Two cribs jammed close like bird cages. Yawning, Quoyle would swipe through some of the dishes to fall, finally, into the grey sheets and sleep. But did housework secretly, because Petal flared up if she caught him mopping and wiping as if he had accused her of something. Or other.

  Once she telephoned Quoyle from Montgomery, Alabama.

  “I’m down here in Alabama and nobody, including the bartender, knows how to make an Alabama Slammer.” Quoyle heard the babble and laughter of a barroom. “So listen, go in the kitchen and look on top of the fridge where I keep the Mr. Boston. They only got an old copy down here. Look up Alabama Slammer for me. I’ll wait.”

  “Why don’t you come home?” he pleaded in the wretched voice. “I’ll make one for you.” She said nothing. The silence stretched out until he got the book and read the recipe, the memory of the brief month of love when she had leaned in his arms, the hot silk of her slip, flying through his mind like a harried bird.

  “Thanks,” she said and hung up the phone.

  There were bloody little episodes. Sometimes she pretended not to recognize the children.

  “What’s that kid doing in the bathroom? I just went in to take a shower and some kid is sitting on the pot! Who the hell is she, anyway?” The television rattled with laughter.

  “That’s Bunny,” said Quoyle. “That’s our daughter Bunny.” He wrenched out a smile to show he knew it was a joke. He could smile at a joke. He could.

  “My God, I didn’t recognize her.” She yelled in the direction of the bathroom. “Bunny, is that really you?”

  “Yes.” A belligerent voice.

  “There’s another one, too, isn’t there? Well, I’m out of here. Don’t look for me until Monday or whatever.”

  She was sorry he loved her so desperately, but there it was.

  “Look, it’s no good,” she said. “Find yourself a girlfriend-there’s plenty of women around.”

  “I only want you,” said Quoyle. Miserably. Pleading. Licking his cuff.

  “Only thing that’s going to work here is a divorce,” said Petal. He was pulling her under. She was pushing him over.

  “No,” groaned Quoyle. “No divorce.”

  “It’s your funeral,” said Petal. Irises silvery in Sunday light. The green cloth of her coat like ivy.

  One night he worked a crossword puzzle in bed, heard Petal come in, heard the gutter of voices. Freezer door opened and closed, clink of the vodka bottle, sound of the television and, after a while, squeaking, squeaking, squeaking of the hide-a-bed in the living room and a stranger’s shout. The armor of indifference in which he protected his marriage was frail. Even after he heard the door close behind the man and a car drive away he did not get up but lay on his back, the newspaper rustling with each heave of his chest, tears running down into his ears. How could something done in another room by other people pain him so savagely? Man Dies of Broken Heart. His hand went to the can of peanuts on the floor beside the bed.

  In the morning she glared at him, but he said nothing, stumbled around the kitchen with the juice pitcher. He sat at the table, the cup shook in his hand. Corners of his mouth white with peanut salt. Her chair scraped. He smelled her damp hair. Again the tears came. Wallowing in misery, she thought. Look at his eyes.

  “Oh for God’s sake grow up,” said Petal. Left her coffee cup on the table. The door slammed.

  Quoyle believed in silent suffering, did not see that it goaded. He struggled to deaden his feelings, to behave well. A test of love. The sharper the pain, the greater the proof. If he could endure now, if he could take it, in the end it would be all right. It would certainly be all right.

  But the circumstances enclosed him like the six sides of a metal case.

  3 Strangle Knot

  “The strangle knot will hold a coil well… It is first tied

  loosely and then worked snug.”

  THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

  A YEAR came when this life was brought up sharply. Voices over the wire, the crump of folding steel, flame.

  It began with his parents. First the father, diagnosed with liver cancer, a blush of wild cells diffusing. A month later a tumor fastened in the mother’s brain like a burr, crowding her thoughts to one side. The father blamed the power station. Two hundred yar
ds from their house sizzling wires, thick as eels, came down from northern towers.

  They wheedled barbiturate prescriptions from winking doctors, stockpiled the capsules. When there were enough, the father dictated, the mother typed a suicide farewell, proclamation of individual choice and self-deliverance-sentences copied from the newsletters of The Dignified Exit Society. Named incineration and strewing as choice of disposal.

  It was spring. Sodden ground, smell of earth. The wind beat through twigs, gave off a greenish odor like struck flints. Coltsfoot in the ditches; furious dabs of tulips stuttering in gardens. Slanting rain. Clock hands leapt to pellucid evenings. The sky riffled like cards in a chalk-white hand.

  Father turned off the water heater. Mother watered the houseplants. They swallowed their variegated capsules with Silent Nite herbal tea.

  With his last drowsy energy the father phoned the paper and left a message on Quoyle’s answering machine. “This is your father. Calling you. Dicky don’t have a phone at that place. Well. It’s time for your mother and I to go. We made the decision to go. Statement, instructions about the undertaker and the cremation, everything else, on the dining room table. You’ll have to make your own way. I had to make my own way in a tough world ever since I came to this country. Nobody ever gave me nothing. Other men would of given up and turned into bums, but I didn’t. I sweated and worked, wheeled barrows of sand for the stonemason, went without so you and your brother could have advantages, not that you’ve done much with your chances. Hasn’t been much of a life for me. Get ahold of Dicky and my sister Agnis Hamm, and tell them about this. Agnis’s address is on the dining room table. I don’t know where the rest of them are. They weren’t-” A beep sounded. The message space was filled.