The Shipping News (5 page)

“Pet, I need to talk to you,” he'd pled in brimful voice. Knew about her latest, an unemployed real estate agent who pasted his bumpers with mystic signs, believed newspaper horoscopes. She was staying with him, came home for clothes once in a while. Or less. Quoyle mumbled greeting card sentiments. She looked away from him, caught her own reflection in the bedroom mirror.

“Don't call me ‘Pet.' Bad enough to have a stupid name like
Petal. They should have named me something like ‘Iron' or ‘Spike.'”

“ ‘Iron Bear?' ” Showed his teeth in a smile. Or rictus.

“Don't be cute, Quoyle. Don't try to pretend everything's funny and wonderful. Just let me alone.” Turned from him, clothes over her arm, hanger hooks like the necks and heads of dried geese. “See, it was a joke. I didn't want to be married to anybody. And I don't feel like being a mama to anybody either. It was all a mistake and I mean it.”

One day she was gone, didn't show up for work at Northern Security. The manager called Quoyle. Ricky Something.

“Yeah, well, I'm pretty concerned. Petal wouldn't just ‘take off' as you put it without saying something to me.” From his tone of voice Quoyle knew Petal had slept with him. Given him stupid hopes.

A few days after this conversation Ed Punch tipped his head toward his office as he walked past Quoyle's desk. It always happened that way.

“Have to let you go,” he said, eyes casting yellow, tongue licking.

Quoyle's eyes went to the engraving on the wall. Could just make out the signature under the hairy neck: Horace Greeley.

“Business slump. Don't know how much longer the paper can hold on. Cutting back. Afraid there's not much chance of taking you back this time.”

At six-thirty he opened his kitchen door. Mrs. Moosup sat at the table writing on the back of an envelope. Mottled arms like cold thighs.

“Here you are!” she cried. “Hoped you'd come in so's I don't have to write all this stuff down. Tires your hand out. My night to go to the acupuncture clinic. Really helps. First, Ms. Bear says you should pay me my wages. Owes me for seven weeks, comes to three-oh-eight-oh dollars. ‘Preciate a check right now. Got bills to pay same as everybody else.”

“Did she phone?” said Quoyle. “Did she say when she'd be
back? Her boss wants to know.” Could hear the television in the other room. A swell of maracas, tittering bongos.

“Didn't phone. Come rushing in here about two hours ago, packed up all her clothes, told me a bunch of things to tell you, took the kids and went off with that guy in the red Geo. You know who I mean. That one. Said she was going to move to Florida with him, tell you she'll mail you some papers. Quit her job and she is gone. Called up her boss and says ‘Ricky, I quit.' I was standing right here when she said it. Said for you to write me out a check right away.”

“I can't handle this,” said Quoyle. His mouth was full of cold hot dog. “She took the kids? She'd never take the kids.” Runaway Mom Abducts Children.

“Well, be that as it may, Mr. Quoyle, she took ‘em. May be wrong on this, but it sounded like the last thing she said was they were going to leave the girls with some people in Connecticut. The kids were excited getting a ride in that little car. You know they hardly ever go anywhere. Crave excitement. But she was real clear about the check. My check.” The colossal arms disappearing into her coat's dolman sleeves, tweed flecked with purple and gold.

“Mrs. Moosup, there's about twelve dollars in my checking account. An hour ago I was fired. Your pay was supposed to come from Petal. If you are serious about three-oh-eight-oh, I will have to cash in our CDs to pay you. I can't do it until tomorrow. But don't worry, you'll get paid.” He kept eating the withered hot dogs. What next.

“That's what
she
always said,” said Mrs. Moosup bitterly. “That's why I'm not so cut up about this. It's no fun working if you don't get paid.”

Quoyle nodded. Later, after she was gone, he called the state police.

“My wife. I want my children back,” Quoyle said into the phone to a rote voice. “My daughters, Bunny and Sunshine Quoyle. Bunny is six and Sunshine is four and a half.” They were his. Reddish hair, freckles like chopped grass on a wet dog. Sunshine's wee beauty in her frowst of orange curls. Homely Bunny. But smart. Had Quoyle's no-color eyes and reddish eyebrows, the left one
crooked and notched with a scar from the time she fell out of a grocery cart. Her hair, crimpy, cut short. Big-boned children.

“They both look like that furniture that's built out of packing crates,” Petal wisecracked. The nursery school director saw untamed troublemakers and expelled first Bunny, then Sunshine. For pinching, pushing, screaming and demanding. Mrs. Moosup knew them for brats who whined they were hungry and wouldn't let her watch her programs.

But from the first moment that Petal raved she was pregnant, threw her purse on the floor like a dagger, kicked her shoes at Quoyle and said she'd get an abortion, Quoyle loved, first Bunny, then Sunshine, loved them with a kind of fear that if they made it into the world they were with him on borrowed time, would one day run a wire into his brain through terrible event. He never guessed it would be Petal. Thought he'd already had the worst from her.

The aunt, in a black and white checked pantsuit, sat on the sofa, listened to Quoyle choke and sob. Made tea in the neverused pot. A stiff-figured woman, gingery hair streaked with white. Presented a profile like a target in a shooting gallery. A buff mole on her neck. Swirled the tea around in the pot, poured, dribbled milk. Her coat, bent over the arm of the sofa, resembled a wine steward showing a label.

“You drink that. Tea is a good drink, it'll keep you going. That's the truth.” Her voice had a whistling harmonic as from the cracked-open window of a speeding car. Body in sections, like a dress form.

“I never really knew her,” he said, “except that she was driven by terrible forces. She had to live her life her own way. She said that a million times.” The slovenly room was full of reflecting surfaces accusing him, the teapot, the photographs, his wedding ring, magazine covers, a spoon, the television screen.

“Drink some tea.”

“Some people probably thought she was bad, but I think she was starved for love. I think she just couldn't get enough love.
That's why she was the way she was. Deep down she didn't have a good opinion of herself. Those things she did—they reassured her for a little while. I wasn't enough for her.”

Did he believe that pap, the aunt wondered? She guessed that this was Quoyle's invention, this love-starved Petal. Took one look at the arctic eyes, the rigidly seductive pose of Petal's photograph, Quoyle's silly rose in a water glass beside it, and thought to herself, there was a bitch in high heels.

Quoyle had gasped, the phone to his ear, loss flooding in like the sea gushing into a broken hull. They said the Geo had veered off the expressway and rolled down a bank sown with native wildflowers, caught on fire. Smoke poured from the real estate agent's chest, Petal's hair burned. Her neck broken.

Newspaper clippings blew out of the car, along the highway; reports of a monstrous egg in Texas, a fungus in the likeness of Jascha Heifetz, a turnip as large as a pumpkin, a pumpkin as small as a radish.

The police, sorting through singed astrology magazines and clothes, found Petal's purse crammed with more than nine thousand dollars in cash, her calendar book with a notation to meet Bruce Cudd on the morning before the accident. In Bacon Falls, Connecticut. There was a receipt for seven thousand dollars in exchange for “personal services.” Looked like she had sold the children to Bruce Cudd, the police said.

Quoyle, in his living room, blubbing through red fingers, said he could forgive Petal anything if the children were safe.

Why do we weep in grief, the aunt wondered. Dogs, deer, birds suffered with dry eyes and in silence. The dumb suffering of animals. Probably a survival technique.

“You're good-hearted,” she said. “Some would curse her mangled body for selling the little girls.” The milk on the verge of turning. Tan knobs in the sugar bowl from wet coffee spoons.

“I will never believe that, that she sold them. Never,” cried Quoyle. His thigh clashed against the table. The sofa creaked.

“Maybe she didn't. Who knows?” The aunt soothed. “Yes,
you're good-hearted. You take after Sian Quoyle. Your poor grandfather. I never knew him. Dead before I was born. But I saw the picture of him many times, the tooth of a dead man hanging on a string around his neck. To keep toothache away. They believed in that. But he was very good-natured they said. Laughed and sang. Anybody could fool him with a joke.”

“Sounds simpleminded,” sobbed Quoyle into his teacup.

“Well, if he was, it's the first I ever heard of it. They say when he went under the ice he called out, ‘See you in heaven.' ”

“I heard that story,” said Quoyle, salty saliva in his mouth and his nose swelling up. “He was just a kid.”

“Twelve years old. Sealing. He'd got as many whitecoats as any man there before he had one of his fits and went off the ice. Nineteen and twenty-seven.”

“Father told us about him sometimes. But he couldn't have been twelve. I never heard he was twelve. If he drowned when he was twelve he couldn't have been my grandfather.”

“Ah, you don't know Newfoundlanders. For all he was twelve he was your father's father. But not mine. My mother—your grandmother—that was Sian's sister Addy, and after young Sian drowned she took up with Turvey, the other brother. Then when
he
drowned, she married Cokey Hamm, that was my father. Lived in the house on Quoyle's Point for years—where I was born—then we moved over to Catspaw. When we left in 1946 after my father was killed—”

“Drowned,” said Quoyle. Listening in spite of himself. Blowing his nose into the paper napkin. Which he folded and put on the edge of his saucer.

“No. Afterwards we went over to stinking Catspaw Harbor where we was treated like mud by that crowd. There was an awful girl with a purple tetter growing out of her eyebrow. Threw rocks. And then we came to the States.” She sang “ ‘Terra Nova grieving, for hearts that are leaving.' That's all I remember of that little ditty.”

Quoyle hated the thought of an incestuous, fit-prone, seal-killing child for a grandfather, but there was no choice. The mysteries of unknown family.