“Shit,” he said. “Water.” So there was the task of getting water out of the fuel, and then filling the tank, and starting the engine in a cloud of foul smoke while Trip cheered, and then praying that when the time came, the engine would remember what it had to do.
“This is a beautiful boat, Martin,” said Trip one afternoon. The Wendameen was almost ready, as ready as boats get, and they were having lunch in her shadow, eating mealy tomatoes from Diana’s garden. Martin swallowed them all, even the rough nub where the stem had been. Trip fastidiously ate around the soft core as though it were an apple. He leaned happily against a jack stand, flushed and pearled with sweat, his blond hair capped by a red bandanna that had been John’s, every inch of him speckled with white and red paint. His face was sunburned, which worried Martin; but Trip shrugged it off. “A really beautiful boat. You took good care of it.”
“Not really.”
“Someone did. Some cunnin’, this boat.” Trip’s voice roughened easily into the broad northern accent, and he grinned. “Ayah. She’ll do, Martin. She’ll do.”
Martin laughed. “She’ll have to do pretty goddamn good, if we’re going to get to New York before hurricane season.”
Trip tossed his head back, staring at the sky. His eyes flashed a deeper blue, and for an instant Martin saw him lying on the beach, weeds snarled upon his breast, eyelids parting to reveal that same distant flame. “I never been sailing. Just once, over to Jonesport, when I was a kid. I threw up.”
“Yeah, well. I’ve thrown up, too.” His brow furrowed. “You sure you want to do this, Trip? I mean are you sure you’re up to it? We could—we could wait a little while.”
But it would not be a little while. It was September now, it would be eight or nine months of waiting out the long Maine winter, almost another year. The boy here for that long… Martin’s heart pounded at the thought.
Trip shook his head. “Might as well go now,” he said cheerfully, Martin could hear what was underneath the brightness. He wants to go. He knows and he wants to go…
“Right,” Martin said, finishing another tomato. He grimaced, his stomach thrashed inside him like a snake—that was what happened when he ate, these days—and thought how Trip never wondered how he was; never commented on how Martin looked flushed, pretended not to notice when he was sick in the middle of the night, said nothing when they stripped off their shirts to race into the cold water of the bay and Martin stood there, ribs like the fingers of an immense hand pushing out from within his chest.
He’s afraid, thought Martin. But also perhaps he was being polite, the way Mainers were when they were uncomfortable, or embarrassed, or just plain shy. Talking to you with eyes averted, you right there beside them and them focusing several feet away in front of the woodstove.
“Well,” Martin said, wiping his hands. “Let’s get going, then.”
That night he got the charts out, and the Coast Guard light list, and the Coast Pilots showing the Atlantic from Eastport to Cape Cod, Cape Cod southeast to King’s Point.
All hopelessly out of date—the most recent one read 1988—but there was nothing to be done, except maybe visit the Graffams and see if they had anything to offer in the way of advice. They piled the charts on the dining-room table, and the faded pilots, stiff and cumbersome from age and water. Trip was enthralled, and spent an hour exclaiming over the chart that showed Moody’s Island, but Martin was puzzling over something else.
“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.