Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [52]
“What are those things on the side? Looks like a big beetle with a set of undersize wings.”
“Lee boards. Work like a centerboard. You know. You raise and lower a centerboard in a sailing boat so as to add keel. Some calls it a ‘drop keel.’ You got a shoal draft boat, my boy, she has to work to windward, you’ll bless your centerboard. Now, with your lee boards, see, you don’t loose any stowage space. The things is hung out on the side instead of down in the gut of the boat. A centerboard trunk takes up space.” Billy’s worn shape down to the bones, cast Quoyle as a sliding mass.
A light shone in the cabin. Even through the roaring rain they could see the boat was a treasure.
“Oak hull, I guess,” said Billy Pretty. “Look at her! Look at the mast on her! Look at that cabin! Teak decks. Flat and low and wide. Never saw a shape like that on a boat in me life—look at them bluff bows. Look how she points up on the stem like a Eskimo knife. See the carving?” Her name was painted on an elaborately [116] carved and gilded ribbon of mahogany—Tough Baby, Puerta Malacca. They could hear muffled voices.
“I don’t know how you names a boat that,” mumbled Billy Pretty, walking up the ramp and jumping on the glistening deck. He bellowed “Ahoy, Tough Baby. Visitors! Come aboard?”
A flush-faced man with white hair opened one of the curved-top double doors. He wore madras trousers with a patent leather belt and matching white shoes. Quoyle looked. Everything streaming. Coiled wet rope, dripping ventilator, sheets of water running over the deck. Near the cabin door a wet pigskin suitcase with a worked rope handle.
“Do I know you?” His eyes were bloodshot.
“From the local paper, sir, the Gammy Bird, thought our readers would be interested in your boat, we try to do a little story on the more unusual boats that dock in Killick-Claw, never seen any thing like this.” Quoyle said his piece. The boat felt like the plains under his feet. He smiled ingratiatingly, but Tough Baby was not a welcoming boat.
“Ah yes. That incredible harbormaster, what’s-his-name, Doodles or whatever it is, mumbled something about a visit from la presse locale.” The man sighed hugely. Gestured as though throwing away fruit skins. “Well, my darling wife and I are having this sort of totally terrible argument, but I suppose we can do the dog and pony act. I’ve given lectures on this boat to everybody from Andy Warhol two weeks before that fatal operation, to Scotland Yard. She absolutely draws this crowd wherever we go, whether Antibes or Boca Raton. She’s absolutely unique.” He stepped out into the rain.
“Traditional Dutch barge yacht design, but marvelously luxurious with these incredible details. I think, the finest Botterjacht ever built. When we first saw her she was a total wreck. She was moored in some awful Italian port—belonged to the Princess L’Aranciata—we’d taken a villa in Ansedonia next to theirs for the summer and at one point she mentioned that she had this wreck of a Dutch yacht that had belonged to Hitler but bored her to tears. Well! We went up to see it and immediately I could see the possibilities—it was utterly clear, clear, clear that here was an [117] extraordinary, one-of-a-kind thing.” Rain dripped off the ends of the man’s wet hair, his shirt was transparent with it.
“Absolutely flat bottomed so she can go around without any damage, you can sail her right up onto shore in storm conditions or for repairs. Incredibly heavy. Almost forty tons of oak. Of course, she was designed for the North Sea. Bluff bows. She’s absolutely buoyant. You know, my wife hates this boat. But I love her.”
Billy Pretty’s eyes had fallen on a square of Astroturf which he took for a bit of doormat until he saw cigar dog turds.