that had to do with science was very dear to him. His father had nicknamed him Beaver after an old TV show, but the kids at Upper Montclair Elementary had shifted it to Beavis.
“Do they all have names?” Angeline asked.
“There are quite a few different subspecies, and yes, they all have names. Scientific names in Latin.”
“Wow.”
“Some of them glow at night.”
“I’d like to meet them.”
Todd just gave her that big-brother look. Girls, what did they know?
Actually Angeline knew a lot. She knew they were going to a magic island where fairy-tale people lived in gingerbread houses. She knew they were going to see whales. Whales and fishermen, and now they were sailing over a bay of diatoms, several million of them with Latin names and a lot of them friends with her brother. This is what Angeline knew and she perceived she was in a happily-ever-after story because that’s the way that all her mother’s stories ended for her.
It was a day like no other she had ever experienced. Sun, sea, gulls like gravity-free dancers in the sky. Angeline’s mother and father by the railing, arms about each other. Angeline had only been on one other ferry before in her life— the Staten Island Ferry, where people spit over the side and ground cigarettes into the floor. Everyone on the Staten Island Ferry coughed and so did she when she traversed the dark waters of New York.
No one was coughing on the ferry to Ragged Island. There were maybe twelve other people on board, and they all looked interesting to her for she knew they must be island people, all torn from the pages of a story book.
“God, smell that fresh air,” Angeline’s father, Bruce, said. The air wasn’t really fresh at all but permeated with diesel exhaust from the big engine turning the propeller that churned the harbour waters beneath them.
“Do you think there’s much poverty on the island?” Bruce Sanger’s wife, Elise, asked him.
“I don’t think they have poverty here in Canada, at least not in the same way as in the States. People in rural areas might be poor but they tend to be self-sufficient.”
Elise gave him that dubious look wives give their husbands when husbands pretend to know things that they really don’t. Elise was very concerned with social issues and volunteered her time to various organizations to stop child labour in Pakistan, to end cruelty to lab animals in Switzerland, and to alleviate educational deficiencies in the inner city in places like Newark and Paterson, New Jersey.“We’ll see,” she said. She knew that if there was any genuine poverty to be found on Ragged Island, she would sniff it out and rub Bruce’s nose in it. It wasn’t that she was cruel. She just liked being right.
“This is going to be extremely educational for the kids,” Bruce said.“I think it was worth the long drive.”
“I wanted to tell the manager of that motel in Maine that the moose head on the wall wasn’t appreciated.”
“It was kind of spooky. But I’m sure it was just an artifact of days gone by.”
“Still. It wasn’t appreciated. Killing animals for sport — that’s not a matter to be taken lightly.”
“I agree.” Bruce hadn’t told Elise yet about every aspect of this curious eco-tour that the Chicago Internet tour agency had lined up for them. She knew about the whales and the island but not about Phonse Doucette’s junkyard. Bruce should not have been attracted to anything involving guns but something about this caught his fancy. He was hoping there would be something else on the island — after the whale boat tour — to attract Elise and the kids and keep them occupied. Poverty might work after all. If there was poverty, Elise would detect it and go to work studying it and he’d have some time to himself. Todd could go with him, maybe, while Angie tagged along with her mom for a look at island poverty. Bruce hoped he was wrong about poverty in Canada, after all. If there was a big junkyard, there must be poor people nearby, Bruce reasoned, but he knew he was far out of his familiar territory.
Familiar territory to Bruce Sanger was his office at Small, Smith and McCall Investments. He had an important job as a stock analyst and advisor for a currently fashionable mutual fund called the Earth First Fund. It was an “ethical” fund, at least as far as anything could be ethical in the investment patch. Right before the trip, he pumped ten million dollars into an environmentally friendly ceramic roofing tile plant in Chile that was reported to be labour friendly. He’d also brought about a big push of the fund’s money into a geothermal power source in California and a super blue-green algae health food product company in Oregon. He wondered if there was something in a place like Nova Scotia that the ethical investing world had ignored. Something that did not diminish the ozone layer or rile Greenpeace and yet returned an 8 percent dividend each year. He wondered.
The island grew upon the horizon ever so slowly as they steamed on. “We must be travelling at thirty knots,” Todd announced to his sister.
“What do you mean?” In her mind, a knot involved a piece of rope.“How do you know?”
“I just do. It’s a nautical term. Nobody ever says ‘miles per hour’ at sea. You’re always travelling at so many knots.”
“And we have thirty of them, right?”
“Right. I bet the water’s over twelve fathoms deep here.”
“It is?”
“Could be deeper. You could tell if you had sonar.”
“Who is that?”
“It’s not a who, it’s an it. Tells distance from an object, underwater. Pretty cool for old technology, when you think about it.”
Todd had his doubts about old technology, though. He pondered how his father’s generation could have grown up without remotes for TVs. No laptops, no Internet. He was thankful he had been born when he had been and often suffered disbelief over the undeniable fact that people had lived in his parents’ time without the basics.
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
