September clapped her chilled hands in relief. “How lucky that you happened along!”
B.D. snorted. Wax and ice sprayed. “What’s luck? Luck is for lubby-landers, leprechauns, and lazybones. I told you it’s my job. More’n my job, it’s my body and soul. I’m the best Klabautermann you’ll ever meet. Can patch a hull in a hurricane, sew a sail in a zombie fight. Or let them all drown, if a ship’s got tired of living and wants a nice patch of seafloor to retire in. Raise anenomes. Take up with a fancy fish. Not so many of us working the routes anymore, mind you. On account of how you can get attached to the sailors. They’re sweet, I suppose. Nice tattoos. But they keep their loyalty in their false legs. Better pay, nicer berths? They’re off like shots fired portside. A Klabautermann’s love is for the ship alone. I’d guess some’d call me old-fashioned but that’s as I see it. You can always get more sailors.” B.D. hopped over to a stack of round boxes, rather like hatboxes made of copper and stone. She opened one and rummaged around inside. “I make the run up and down this road day and night. It’s a good current, steady work. Heard you distressing loud and clear. Sounds like a buoy knocking in a storm, the alarm that sounds in a Klabautermann’s heart when a ship’s about to go down.”
“Go down?” September said. “She’s only out of gas!”
“You’d never even see me if your ship weren’t on its last leg. S’what a Klabautermann is. An early warning system, I guess you’d want to call it if you’re mechanickly inclined, which I am.” B.D. pulled a case from inside the copper hatbox. It was quite flat and thin and shiny, like the chrome on cars much newer than Aroostook. “See, I bet you don’t know anything at all about shipcraft. Take me for a lesson and a cheap one at that. I’m named for the secret, vital core of a ship. Ballast is the weight down in the deep of you that keeps a vessel upright in dark water.” The mariner bent over Aroostook, speaking to the car more than September. “Oh, the cargo you carry will do it for a while, or even the heft of a crew, mates and mettles, if you love them enough. But a ship’s not a ship till she’s got ballast of her own. Down in the belly, a big massy mess of rope and wood and hardtack and love letters and harpoons and old lemons. Anything that ever fascinated the ship, made it sail true, patched it or broke it, anything the ship loved or longed for, anything it could use. Bo’sun gets in a fistfight with a deckhand over a missing cannonball and they bloody each other up some, but that ball’s just circled down into the baby ballast. Some’ll tell you a ship’s not born till she gets a name or has a bottle of wanderwhiskey broke over her bow, but it’s not so. Without ballast, she’s just wood.” B.D. ran a tender paw over Aroostook’s burlaped wheel. “It all just sort of sinks down and jumbles up together into something hot and heavy inside you, and the weight of everything you ever wanted in the world will keep you steady even when the worst winds blow. Me and mine, we get born when the ballast gets born. Come out of an egg if you want to hear private details, if it’s still an egg when it’s a good hemp Turk’s head knot. We don’t peck our way out, we untie. When the ship despairs, we feel all those old ropes tearing us apart until we get to fixing what’s fouled.”
September touched her chest softly. What have I got, where a ship has ballast? she thought. But what she said was: “I don’t think Aroostook has anything like that. I’ve taken her apart and put her back together pretty often and I’ve never found anything that wasn’t meant to be there, apart from a squirrel that up and died in the manifold one time.”
B.D. blinked her great otter eyes. She shrugged. Wax snapped off from her lanterns and drifted down like snow. “I’m not the arguing kind. I won’t go poking about in her just to show up a girl and make her feel wrongly. Little tugger deserves her privacy. I think there’s more under there than an empty belly, but that’s her business. Mind your own charts and no copying, my mother always said. And if it’s only gas you want, I’ve got it, any kind you please.” The Klabautermann nuzzled the hood of the Model A with her furry cheeks as if she was a cat. “I’ll cook it up special for you, my scruffy wee seadog. No charge for strays.”
Ballast Downbound popped open the shiny case and pulled out a tap, the kind you’d use to open a keg of cider. She bounced up onto her tail and crossed the barge, leaving September to scramble behind her toward a stained oilcloth, draped over something with a great number of points and corners and humps. With a tremendous spring of her tail, the Klabautermann caught the top of the cloth and hauled it down, revealing a soda fountain with a clean chrome counter. It was just like the one in town run by Mr. Johansson the pharmacist. When September needed medicine for her father, she would always stay and watch Mr. Johansson mix up sodas for his customers. Once, she parted with one of her precious dimes and he’d whipped her up an orange fizz. It looked like fire in the glass.
Of course, it was not exactly like Mr. Johansson’s soda counter. A silver soda-water fountain took up most of the space, carved into the shape of a huge, ancient fish with spines all down its back. It bent over, its wide mouth pointing downward, its hundred fins aroused and bristling with sticky splashes of old syrup. Row after row of bottles racked up like bowling pins behind the counter: little round globes sloshing with dark, rummy stuff, tall flutes so caked with barnacles September couldn’t begin to guess what bubbled away inside, big-bellied casks fairly glowing with luminous goop. Where Mr. Johansson would have stacked his tall, clean tumblers sat two gas cans all of crystal. Glass spigots arced gracefully out of them, ready to slip into a thirsty tank. September suddenly felt deathly thirsty herself.
“I don’t suppose you have orange fizz?” she asked without much hope. “Or anything to eat?”
Ballast Downbound snorted. Bits of wax blew clear of the lanterns on her shoulders. “S’not for you! This here’s my Memory Fountain and I’ll be mixing up an Egg Bygone for your boat.”
“But what my car needs is gas, not memories! How can you make a car go on memories?”
B.D. scratched under her Admiral’s hat. “What’d you think gas was, girl? ’Course there’s all sorts of fuel, wind and wishes and chocolate cake and collard greens and water and brawn, but you’re wanting the kind that burns in an engine. That kind of gas is nothing more than the past stored up and fermented and kept down in the cellar of the earth till it’s wanted. Gas is saved-up sunlight. Giant ferns and apples of immortality and dimetrodons and cyclopses and werewhales drank up the sun as it shone on their backs a million years ago and used it to be a bigger fern or make more werewhales or drop seeds of improbability.” Her otter’s paws moved quick and sure, selecting a squat, square bottle here and a round rosy one there. “It so happens sunshine has a fearful memory. It sticks around even after its favorite dimetrodon dies. Gets hard and wily. Turns into something you can touch, something you can drill, something you can pour. But it still remembers having one eye and slapping the ocean’s face with a great heavy tail. It liked making more dinosaurs and growing a frond as tall as a bank. It likes to make things alive, to make things go. And that’s what’s in my bottles here-sirops of sunshine, sunshine that remembers so fierce it burns itself right up. Strong stuff, not for the faint! Drink up yesterday to make today go faster.”
Ballast cracked the cork of a copper-strapped globe and let it trickle thickly into one of the gas cans. The liquid glowered dark gold. She tipped in two glugs from a brown beer bottle in a brown bag; it bloomed bloody when it hit the first sirop. “Pleistocene Concentrate and a swallow of Pure Pre-Seelie Dawn.” She broke the cream on a milk bottle-what slid out was black and full of stars. A mere tangerine drop from a test tube; a whole wallop of bronze, greasy bourbon from an oil can. “The trick is in the mixing. Anything you use changes you. I could turn a pixie into an umbrella stand with the wrong sirop at the right time. Go sparing on the Atlantean Applejack, double down on your Cretaceous Demiglace. That’s all it takes-but don’t you go sniping my recipe, girl. Who knows where you’ll end up when you’ve got fancy combustibles in you, and if it’ll be raining when you get there?”