Glimmering

“What is it?” Trip finally asked.

“Hmmm? Oh, well…” Martin leaned back so that the front of his Windsor chair lifted from the floor. “Well, I’m just wondering, how are we going to get the boat into the water?”

Trip gaped. “Holy cow! I never even thought—how are we going to get it into the water?”

Martin stared thoughtfully at the pile of charts. “Well, in the olden days we could’ve just gotten Allen Drinkwater to come over with a flatbed and a lift, or someone from Belfast with a big hydraulic trailer.”

“Do they still do that?”

“I doubt it. There’s no gas for the trucks, for one. Plus we could never afford it, even if there was gas.”

Trip looked stricken. “But then—what are we going to do?”

“Well, in the really olden days, to launch a boat you’d have to build a launching ways. Like a wooden ramp, down to the water. And you’d have to build a wooden cradle around the boat, and then you’d let it go, so it’d go down onto the skids and kind of slide into the water at high tide.”

“Jeez.” Trip’s expression went from stricken to sheer disbelief. “It slides into the water?”

Martin shook his head. “No, really—we saw it once, at the Rockport Apprenticeshop. They were launching a Friendship sloop they’d built for someone. You make this long ramp, and you grease the boards up. They used vegetables—”

“Vegetables?”

“I swear to God.” Martin laughed. “They used lard, and vegetables—pumpkins, squash. All those zucchini you never want to eat. And some Shell gear lube, but we don’t have enough of that. You build the ways at a gentle enough slope, the boat can pretty much launch itself. They had about a hundred people there, apprentices and people watching, and if it started moving too fast, they threw sand on the skids, to slow it down.”

“A hundred people? But—”

“But you could do it,” Martin said, staring beyond Trip to the window that framed the Wendameen, resplendent in its new paint beneath a glowering sky, “if you had crowbars, and were really, really careful, and took it slow, and if the ways was done right—you could do it, I think, with two.”

And that’s how they did it; though first they had to build the launching ways. Mrs. Grose, of course, came to watch (she had been there all along, on her decrepit porch with her pug, occasionally wandering over to offer advice on avoiding paint drips and foul weather), and Doug from the Beach Store and a few of his cronies, who donated some more beer and valuable scrap lumber. The rest of the wood came from warped boards and planks and plywood stored beneath the boathouse, augmented by birch trees that Martin had Trip take down, Martin himself being too weak to handle an ax. One of the Graffams heard about Martin’s plan, and dropped by one windy morning to inspect the ways.

“Not too bad, there,” he pronounced, ducking his head to light a hand-rolled cigarette, “but you’re going to have t’weight that cradle, else it ain’t going to fall away when you get her into the water.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Martin said glumly, and Dick Graffam’s look told him that’s about what he would’ve expected, someone from away trying to launch a twenty-six-foot gaff cutter in hurricane season and sail down to New York City.

So then Martin had to figure out what to weight the cradle with. Lead is what you’d use, if you had it; but who had lead in their summer bungalow? He kicked around for most of the morning after Graffam left, bad tempered and shaking with fatigue. A raw wind was blowing from the southwest, a tropical storm brewing somewhere. Martin swore and paced down the beach, the hood of his anorak flapping back from his face. The sheer lunacy of his plan had all been there in Graffam’s look. It was the first week of October, the butt end of the season even for experienced sailors, of which Martin was not one. In the best of times, you wouldn’t get underway this late.

And this was, in every possible way that Martin could imagine, not the best of times. But it was done, the boat was done, and the launching ways would be completed soon. He slid his hand into the pocket of his anorak, felt the smooth wooden box that he carried always. A voice stirred in his head like a breeze from a warmer place.

“Go with him. You won’t lose your way, Martin. I’ll find you…”

His hand tightened around the sextant’s box, and he looked out to sea with something like dread. Something like resignation, and relief. Knowing for the first time, and with absolute certainty, that he would not be coming back.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Pyramid Meets the Eye