A gust struck, and rather than tilting like a sailboat, the iceboat simply shot faster across the ice, a startling acceleration marked by louder scraping and a new hiss. Stefan and Roberto looked at each other round-eyed, and they might even have been nervous if Mr. Hexter had not been grinning a huge gap-toothed grin, a joyful smile the likes of which they had never seen on him. Clearly he was familiar with iceboating, and loved it. So Roberto kept the sail taut, and Stefan pulled the front skate a little more to the right, pointing them up into the wind a bit more, and they clatterswooshed across the mighty river, which from this vantage appeared like an immense ice lake, like one of the Great Lakes maybe. Or, given the giant towers of the city and Hoboken to each side, like an ice hockey rink for Titans. They hissed along like some kind of ice hydrofoil!
But the wind was cold out here, and they huddled down into their jackets and pulled their wool caps over their ears, their hands chilling despite their gloves. “Point right up into the wind!” Mr. Hexter shouted.
Stefan uncleated his lines and pulled hard on the right one, which made the boat curve to the right, upriver and upwind, until the sail fluttered hard, and they scratched over the ice to a halt, with only the flapping sail moving.
The wind still gusted by, throwing a mother-of-pearl sky south over them. The very hardest gusts scraped the whole boat backward a foot or two at a time.
“Amazing!” Roberto said.
“I forgot how cold iceboating is,” Mr. Hexter said, looking a little chastened. “Ours was more like a regular boat, so we had a cockpit we could get down into and get some protection. We’d always have a lot of blankets too, and thick gloves, and hot chocolate in a thermos.”
Roberto, white-lipped and already shivering a little, said, “I think we could borrow some gloves and blankets. I think Edgardo has some.”
“We should have thought of it before,” Stefan said.
“Let’s just sail back in,” Mr. Hexter said. “We aren’t that far out yet.”
To the boys it looked like they were already most of the way to Jersey, but Mr. Hexter shook his head and told them to look at the size of the boats on the Hoboken docks compared to the ones back in the city. The boys still couldn’t see it, but they were willing to take his word for it. Stefan pulled on his lines, twisting the front skate left to get them to turn the front back toward the city as they were being shoved backward. When they had slid until they were pointed toward Manhattan, Roberto pulled the sail taut, and the boat scraped a little sideways downwind, then began hissing and scronching toward the city. “Don’t let the boom hit you!” the old man cried, as with a sudden ferocious rush they accelerated. Roberto hauled with all his might on the sheet and cleated it down before he lost it, and Stefan lay down to stay under the boom, which was now angled over the right side of the boat instead of the left.
Loud clattery hiss, tremendous acceleration: they’d never felt anything like it. Astonishing speed. Even Franklin Garr’s zoomer couldn’t have beat it.
Then there came a loud snap from the bow and the deck dropped at the front. Quickly they ground to a halt, the three of them sliding down the plywood toward the ice.
“Uncleat the sail!” Mr. Hexter said to Roberto. “Loose the sail, quick.”
When Roberto got the sheet loose from the cleat, the sail was freed to flap downwind on the boom, which swung wildly back and forth. They regained their composure, stood and walked around on the ice. In some places it was translucent, even transparent. These patches were creepy, as below their ice the black water still clearly moved.
It turned out the front skate and its circular mounting had together broken away from the square framework, now split on both sides.
“Too much stress,” Hexter said. “And from a new direction.” He inspected the damage, shook his head. “Too bad. I don’t think we can fix it.”
“Oh no! What are we going to do?”
“Let’s walk it back in. Here, wrap those steering lines around the very front of the bow, and lift up on the lines, and we’ll walk it in on its back skates. It won’t be that heavy.”
They stood on the ice next to the boat and wrapped the lines in the way he had suggested. When they were done they could lift the bow enough to pull the boat along behind them. After a while they stopped and unstepped the mast and laid it and the sail and boom flat on the deck. After that, tromping back toward the city felt quite satisfying.
“This is cool,” Roberto said. “Usually when we mess up, we’re stuck.”
Mr. Hexter laughed. “It’s another reason to like iceboating. When you capsize in water, you can’t just walk home like this. I think we just have to figure out a stronger frame to put the front skate in. Maybe there’s an assemblage you could buy and just tack it in place. There must be iceboat makers all around this harbor by now, right?”
The boys agreed it must be so. “But we don’t have any money to pay for anything.”
“Yes you do! Give them a gold guinea, hey? See what kind of change they give you for that.”
It was still cold, so they tried to hurry the old man a little, but he was slowing from time to time to look around. The boys tried to be indulgent, but then he stopped outright and stood looking around. “What?” Roberto complained.
“This is the spot! This is the spot, right here!”
“What spot could be out here?” Stefan wondered.
“This is where I met Herman Melville! I can tell from the way our dock lines up with the Empire State Building.”
“So you knew this Melville guy?”
“No.” Hexter laughed. “No, I wish I had. I bet it would have been really interesting. But he was before my time.”
“So how is it you met him?”
“It was his ghost. I ran into him out here and talked to him. Very weird, to be sure. An uncanny encounter. He had a great accent, a bit like a New York accent, but kind of stiff. Maybe a little Dutch in it still. It was right out here, about where we’re standing. What a great coincidence. Maybe that’s why the boat broke here. Or why I was thinking about him earlier. Could be he’s out here still, tweaking my head.”
Stefan and Roberto stared at him.
He looked at them and smiled. “Come on, we’ll keep walking. You boys look cold. I’ll tell you about it as we go.”
“Good idea.”
So as they trudged over the ice, which was mostly white in this area, and crusted with low lines of compacted snow that Hexter called sastrugi, he told them the story.
“I was out here one night in a little rubber motorboat, kind of like yours, a zodiac we called them then.”
“We still do.”
“Good to know. So I was out here—”
“Why were you out here at night?”
“Well, that’s a long story, I’ll tell you that another time, but basically I was out here to receive some smuggled goods.”
“Cool! What’s that?”
“What’s smuggled goods, or what was I receiving?”
“What’s a smuggled good?” Stefan clarified, glancing at Roberto.
“Well, some things were not supposed to be brought into the country without being taxed. Or not at all. So if you snuck them in, that was smuggling.”
“And what were you receiving?” Roberto asked.
“Let’s talk about that part later,” the old man said. “For now, I want to get to the important part, which is that I’m out here in the dark, a moonless night, sea mist coming up off the water, really glad I had GPS to tell me where I was, because there would have been no way without it, because it was getting to be like a regular sea fog, what they call a pea soup fog, very thick. I did get a glimpse of the Empire State once or twice, because it was lit up then too, but nothing else was visible. I was just out there in a white blackness, or a black whiteness. And then out of the fog a man comes rowing. Pretty big wooden rowboat, single man in it. He had white hair cut close, and a long white beard that kind of came down in two points. Big barrel-chested old man. And rowing pretty hard in the fog, so he almost ran me down, because of course when you’re rowing you’re not looking the way you’re going. Although in his case, the moment I called out to him, he swung his boat around by rowing forward one way and backward the other. He turned on a dime, and then he was rowing at me stern forward, so he could look at me. He spun around as neat as you please. That was my first impression, that he was a really good rower. As of course made sense.”