The Shipping News

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 wi

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.

36 Straitjacket

Straitjacket: A coat of strong material, as canvas, binding the

body closely for restraining the violently insane or delirious,

violent criminals, etc. Some confine the arms to the body,

others have long sleeves, without openings, which may be

knotted together.

THE NORTH tilted toward the sun. As the light unfolded, a milky patina of phytoplankton bloomed over the offshore banks along the collision line of the salt Gulf Stream and the brack Labrador Current. The waters crosshatched in complex layers of arctic and tropic, waves foamed with bacteria, yeasts, diatoms, fungi, algae, bubbles and droplets, the stuff of life, urging growth, change, coupling.

A Friday afternoon. Quoyle at home, changing into old clothes. He watched through the kitchen window for Jack’s skiff. Rain-colored distance though none fell where Quoyle was. A stem trawler left the fish plant, probably heading offshore for the Funk Island Banks. Ten days with a fourteen-man crew, towing the net, the slow haul back, the brief moment of excitement when the cod end of the net came up, the cod pouring into the hold. Or nothing much. And down to gut and bleed. And tow again and haul back. And mend net. And again. And again.

There was Jack’s skiff, working down toward Flour Sack Cove. The rain curtain sagged east, left smears of blue behind it. Quoyle picked up the phone.

“Hey, Billy? I’m going along to Jack’s now. See him heading in.”

“You just had a call from the States. I gave him your number there so you might wait a minute. And heard a rumor Sea Song might be closing down three fish plants next month. Anonymous source. No Name Cove supposed to be on the list. You tell Jack. If it’s true, I don’t know what people are going to live on down there.

“You talk to somebody at Sea Song yet?”

“Ar, the manager’s got the face of a robber’s horse and he’ll give me the brazen old runaround. But we’ll try.”

Quoyle gave it five minutes, had his hand on the doorknob when the phone rang. Partridge’s voice, almost five thousand miles away, lagging and sad.

“Quoyle? Quoyle? This is a lousy following co

“Some,” said Quoyle. “They give it about ten seconds on the news here. It looks bad.”

“Bad, all right. Not only LA. It’s like the whole country got infected with some rage virus, going for their guns like it used to be you’d look at your watch. Remember Edna the rewrite woman on the Record?”

“Yeah. She never smiled at me. Not once.”

“You had to earn Edna’s smiles. Listen. She just called me up. They had a disaster, a tragedy at the Record. Some nut came in yesterday afternoon with a fucking machine gun and killed Punch, Al Catalog, three or four others. Wounded eight more.”

“Jesus! Why?”

“Oh, it’s part of the scene here and something to do with the Letters to the Editor. If you can believe it. This guy sent an anonymous letter saying riots were necessary to purge the system and redistribute wealth and they didn’t print it. So he came down with a machine gun. Edna says the only reason he didn’t get her was because she was under the copy desk looking for paper clips when the shooting started. Remember how there was never enough paper clips? Quoyle, they shot at Mercalia on the freeway last week. Show you how crazy the scene is, I made a joke about living in California, about LA style. Fucking bullet holes through her windshield. Missed her by inches. She’s scared to death and I’m making jokes. It hit me after Edna called what a fucking miserable crazy place we’re in. There’s no place you can go no more without getting shot or burned or beat. And I was laughing.” And Quoyle thought he heard his friend crying on the other side of the continent. Or maybe he was laughing again.

A deep smell to the air, some elusive taste that made him pull in conscious breaths. Sky the straw-colored ichor that seeps from a wound. Rust blossoms along the station wagon’s door panels. He could have been dead in Mockingburg, New York.

Jack stood in the skiff, pronging cod onto the stage. Quoyle pulled on a slicker, his gloves. He seized his knife, picked up a cod. In the begi

“Hands might as well be doing something while we talk,” said Jack, scrambling up. “Always hated the sight of five, six grown men sitting around a table, doing nothing but work their jaw. You see them doodle away, rip pieces of paper, wagging their foot, fooling with paper clips.”

Quoyle didn’t want to think about paper clips. Told Jack about the machine gu

“Well known how violent it is in the States. Worst you’ll get here,” said Jack, “is a good punch-up and maybe your car pushed over the cliff.” They worked silently.

Jack said the cod were small, five or six pounds on average, you rarely got one that went more than fifty nowadays, though in early times men had caught great cod of two hundred pounds. Or more. Overfished mercilessly for twenty years until the stocks neared collapse. Did collapse, said Jack, up at the table, his knife working.

“Why I don’t stop fishing, see,” he said, deftly ripping up, jerking out the entrails, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, “even if I wanted to, is because I’d never get my licenses for lobster or salmon fishing again. Don’t know why, I loves lobster fishing best. You let your cockadoodle license lapse just one season and it’s gone forever.”

“Billy said to tell you there’s a rumor Sea Song might be closing three plants next month. Says he hears No Name might be one.”

“Jesus! You think it can’t get worse, it gets worse! This business about allocating fish quotas as if they was rows of potatoes you could dig. If there’s no fish you can’t allocate them and you can’t catch them; if you don’t catch them, you can’t process them or ship them, you don’t have a living for nobody. Nobody understands their crazy rules no more. Stumble along. They say ‘too many local fishermen for not enough fish.’ Well, where has the fish gone? To the Russians, the French, the Japs, West Germany, East Germany, Poland, Portugal, the UK, Spain, Romania, Bulgaria-or whatever they call them countries nowadays.

“And even after the limit was set, the inshore was no good. How can the fish come inshore if the trawlers and draggers gets ‘em all fifty, a hundred mile out? And the long-liners gets the rest twenty mile out? What’s left for the inshore fishermen?” He spat in the water. Watching Quoyle’s clumsy work with the knife. “You got the idea. That’s all there is to it. Just keep at it steady.”