"His sister asked him to name all the women he’d been with and he’d think he had them all, and then he’d remember, oh my god, there was someone else."
Scuttle by David Vann
It began his first night on the boat, a scuttling in the head. He imagined them in the shower, in the sump, armies of them, coppered and searching, their antennas flexed. He was alone and it was otherwise very calm and quiet in the marina. No clanking, no footsteps, no voices, no sound of wind or even a breeze. He was entombed. The hull seemed the outer shell of his thoughts, but somewhere inside a scuttling, or something. He was afraid to get up and look further, but he did. He flicked on the tiny light above his berth, gazed for a moment at all the teak, the round bronze porthole, still not quite believing. He stuck his toes in his shoes and, flashlight held ready, walked otherwise naked to the door to his head, swung wide the door and flicked on the beam.
A lattice of teak in the shower and shadows below. He didn't want to pick up the lattice, but the sound was much louder now, insistent, a crackling and scuttling and biting all around him, thousands of them. So he searched the other things in the head first: the sink, all ten square inches of it, the cabinet below, the switches, "Sump Pump" and something else, unmarked. Searched the cabinets, lifted the lid to the toilet. The shower had a rounded opening, framed all in teak, a vast bubble of wood. All he could think of each time was 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. Inside, white walls and the teak lattice to stand on. He saw a hook on the wall and knew that this lattice could swing up, so he did it quickly and shone the light and saw nothing but bits of hair and shower slime on the blue floor and a small, crème-colored sump pump sitting in its own little recess. No armies, not even one scuttling thing, and still the sound all around him, clicking in a frenzy. So they were deeper still.
He returned to bed and lay listening to them tear at the hull and each other until he lost himself and woke in the morning to knocking and a man's voice calling him sir. He tried to yell out "Sorry" as he sat up and reached for his pants, but very little sound came out. He stood up too fast and cracked his head on the beam that came in too low over the berth. The boat had a canoe stern, came to a point in back to cut following seas, but it meant no room in the stateroom. The walls slanted in and the ceiling cut low. And the radar cable was still hanging in here for some reason. He had no idea what that was about.
When he made it to the stairs and out the hatch on deck, a cop was standing there on the dock, gun and all, with papers in his hand.
"Are you Roy Fenn?" the cop asked.
"No. I mean yes." He still couldn't think. He had a terrible headache and needed a sinus wash. The sun was very bright, not like inside.
"I need your height and weight."
"What?"
The cop repeated. Looking down on the cop like this, from the deck, he could see the freckles on top of the cop's head, the milkiness otherwise of his skin. It was very odd for a cop not to wear a hat.
The third time and he came to. "Five foot nine and a half, or ten, something like that, I don't know, a hundred and fifty pounds, I guess. What's going on here?"
"I'm here to serve you a warrant on behalf of the State of New York."
"A warrant?"
"A warrant."
"What? But we're in California."
"You don't have to tell me that," the cop said. "I know where I am." Then he divided some forms and handed a few up and started walking.
"Wait. What's the warrant for?"
"Don't know," the cop said, and continued on his way down the dock.
So he went below, back to where it was not so bright. He sat at the chart table and laid out the documents. He could smell the head. They had left it sitting full for almost five months before the auction. Nothing could touch it now. It owned the place, would remain forever.
He was being sued. By the State of New York. For what, it was hard to tell. Then other names appeared. Angelina and Carmelina Martinez, Anna Martinez. He was being sued for child support, but he didn't have any children. Then he saw these children were five years old now, twins, and he was wanted for backpay. "If you do not respond within ten days, all of your possessions may be confiscated by the state," it said, and this was what panicked him. He had just bought this boat. He didn't want to give it all to Angelina and Carmelina. And who the hell was Anna? Ann? Annie? Ann-o? Annalina? He could not remember this woman. But who had he been with five years ago? And he'd have to count back nine more months, but how could he be sure?
"Who knows who they were with five years ago?" he said aloud. And he had been living in New York then, he knew that much. And his name was Roy Fenn, and it said it right there.
The scuttling was driving him crazy. He didn't need that, too, on top of this. And the smell of the head was making his mouth taste bad.
He ran up the steps and down the boarding ladder, all this teak lattice shit, even the ladder, and ran up by his dock box to switch on the shore power. Let the refrigeration start up, and the water heater, and the battery charger with its annoying buzzing, and let them just drown everything else out.
The problem was he couldn't say for certain it wasn't him. He sat at the chart table holding his ears and then lay down in bed and then walked around on the deck, back and forth, all of it needing deck treatment--that A and B stuff, and the tropical teak sealer--and probably recaulking sometime soon, and the problem was he had no memory of anything. Just blank. He couldn't say he'd done it, but he couldn't say he hadn't done it, either. He figured out after tearing at every part of his brain from the inside that yes, he'd been in New York then, and yes, he'd been having sex then, but it was probably in December, right after Joanna dumped him, and if it was then, he'd gone through a whole chain of women, sometimes double-linked, and though he remembered no Anna or Ann or Annie or even any Latina, other than Laura, who came several years later, he couldn't say for sure that he hadn't been with some other woman whom he'd forgotten by now. And this had happened before, is what scared him. His sister asked him to name all the women he'd been with, and he'd try just for the ones in high school, or in one college or the other, or even just in one year, and he'd think he had them all, and then he'd remember, oh my god, there was someone else.
The day was supposed to be for rebuilding the fuel filters and replacing the copper tubing with rubber fuel line, but he was back and forth several times because the fittings weren't right and then he hadn't estimated enough fuel hose, so after dark he was still buried down in the engine room, in the bilges, trying to fit the wire holding ring on the top of the Racor filter, ready to just light a match to the boat, when he decided he should call a lawyer. He'd call the next morning, because he couldn't figure a way out of this one, it was the State of New York, for chrissakes, and he wished he'd never slept with anyone.
There was a black box just to his left that ran constantly as he tried to work down there. It was metal, with slats on the side, heavy it looked, and bolted to the wood, and he had no idea what it was for. Refrigeration maybe, or heating. A pit of diesel, several inches of it below him from where the dick who had come today to polish the fuel tanks had spilled a bunch out the inspection port. Fumes and he couldn't move, and he still didn't know how this filter went back together. So to hell with it. He switched off the shore power and got in bed.
They weren't just living down there, there were eating the sides of his boat, or each other, or cables or something. It sounded like they were ripping off tiny pieces of fiberglass from the hull and then eating them. This didn't seem likely, but what else was there to go on?
He tried to think back to a time when there was nothing, an age of no concern. When did he not care? Had there ever been a time when it didn't matter really whether the baby slop was banana or peach? He imagined going through this in detail on a talk show and being considered very wise. If it was true, he'd have to pay them everything, and keep paying. He'd be working for them the rest of his life, and he didn't even know them. This thought kept coming in. He couldn't make it stop. They probably didn't even speak English. He didn't want to be a pig, God he didn't want to be a pig, but this was too much.
So he got up with his flashlight and wandered naked through the boat flicking it on suddenly in corners and under the dinette table, in a closet, under the salon settee, forward in the V-berth, lifted a floorboard in the mid-ship stateroom and dove down into it, saw only spare hoses and the base of the main mast. Whatever it was, it knew how to hide. But the thing was, it didn't seem to be hiding or to change anything it was up to while he looked. The sound was still there, even as he pointed his flashlight at the bowels of the boat and saw fiberglass and nothing moving over it and still the scuttling, the ripping, clicking, whatever it was. He was always right next to it, but never any closer.
He called his mother in the morning. She gave him the number of a lawyer. When the lawyer asked if he was the father, he said no, I mean I don't think so, and there was an exceptionally long pause. The lawyer obviously thought he was guilty.
"The blood test is 100% accurate," she told him. "If you're the father, it'll show up."
"But I don't think I am the father," he said.
"Then you have nothing to worry about," she said.
He called the district attorney and told her he had never heard of this woman and they had the wrong man.
"So, for the record," she said. "You don't remember having intercourse with Anna Martinez."
But he parried her. "Don't remember? What are you trying to make me say here? I'm saying I've never met or heard of this woman before. You're trying to make it sound like I did it but I just can't happen to remember it right now, the old 'I have no recollection of' that all you government people like to use." He was perhaps a bit defensive.
They decided he would send a photocopy of his driver's license, with picture, along with a written statement saying where he'd been at the time of the crime, and what he'd been doing, and everywhere he'd been before and since.
The fuel line was the wrong stuff, it turned out. When he went back just for two more ninety degree brass nipples, he was told that he needed Coast Guard approved fuel line that would collapse if it burnt but also not burn or melt, etc., and that what he had gotten before was just regular fuel line, which would work fine, yeah, but it wasn't Coast Guard approved. They did show him how to get his filter back together, though. And he got these cool towels that would absorb the diesel fuel out of his bilges without picking up the water or dirt, so then he could just pump the rest overboard. So that was a nice fix for the guy who had polished his tanks.
He finally overcame his fear concerning the crackling, the embarrassment of it, and asked the boat shop guy what it might be.
"Crackling?" the guy said. "I don't know. I wouldn't live on a boat, ha ha." And he got a good laugh out of that one.
The sound didn't stop, and this time he couldn't sleep. He went naked over every inch of the boat he could get access to, heard the sound everywhere, especially down low, in the dirtiest parts of his bilges, but never saw a thing. By sight alone, he appeared to be the only living organism on that boat. Nothing else showed itself. But the sound was there, tearing his home apart piece by piece right there beneath him. He finally decided it was inside the hull, between the outside and what he could see. He had heard that these boats sometimes had water tanks built right up against the hull, and the surface he was looking at on the walls of the bilges was convex, which meant space between it and the concave hull beneath, perhaps. His tanks were elsewhere, he knew, three of them out of stainless steel, a hundred gallons apiece, but in this space lived an army, and how could he know how long it would take them to chew their way through to him? What he wanted was only peace.
It wasn't until much later that he learned the truth. The Coast Guard approved line was not in fact required, nor was most the work he had done on his engine. He put it all back together and was able to motor, finally, to the pump out station, where he stuck a thick orange hose with a window in it into his deck fitting and watched the five-month-old shit and piss of people he didn't even know come swirling and cavorting out of the holding tank. The District Attorney let him know months after, in the fall, that oh, yeah, she had shown the driver's license picture to Anna Martinez several months earlier and she had said that it wasn't him. And when he was getting coffee after that up at the dock house, trying to hit on the woman taking his money, thinking I'm lonely and telling her yeah, it's weird to live on a boat, mine has these crackling sounds at night I've never been able to figure out, maybe it's the heat transferring, she told him, that's just the pistol shrimp. Wait till you hear the hum fish.
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David Vann's writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire and National Geographic among other magazines. His latest book Legend of a Suicide is published by Penguin.
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Thursday, 19 November, 2009
In Short stories
- Scuttle by David Vann
- The Rose Tango by Mieko Kanai
- In Search of Tommie by Zoe Wicomb
- From Round Here: Lays of a Sicilian Life Told to Andrei Navrozov. By Manlio Orobello
- The Wake by Zoe Green
- Milgram by Tommy Wallach
- Jersey Tiger by Maggie Bevan
- Woman at Window by Alex Sheal
- Aldeia da Luz by C. D. Rose
- Bourgeois by Mikey Cuddihy
- Troy and Me by Drew Gummerson
- History Lesson by Tony Peake
- Mufti Day by Katy Darby
- Frank by Mercedes Helnwein
- Notes On A Grave by Lauren Frankel
- The Poison Factory Conference by Divya Ghelani
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