Twenty-Seven Point Four

The Petrel went down the Fore River at eight knots, and Win was already regretting his breakfast.

It was twenty to ten on Wednesday morning, bright and nearly calm, sixty degrees on the pier when they cast off. Aggie had put a tin of ginger tablets in his coat pocket and told him to keep his eyes on the horizon. He was standing at the back of the wheelhouse with his eyes on the horizon and two of the tablets under his tongue. Spring Point Light slid by to starboard. Beyond it the bay opened out, blue and wide, with a long low swell coming in from the southeast.

“You’ve gone a colour,” Ursula Baptiste said beside him.

“I’m told it’s grey.”

“It’s nearer green. Do you get sick?”

“On the Peaks Island ferry.”

She gave a bark of laughter. “A Lathrop. Does the yard know?”

“One banker knows. I’d be obliged.”

“I’ve had a turbine technician throw up in my own hat. You’re safe with me.”

There were eleven people aboard. Lyle Sprague, who had been a Lathrop tug captain for twenty years, had the wheel, and he handled eighty-five feet of new catamaran as if it were made of eggs. Toby Keegan stood at his shoulder. Vera Nadeau sat on the port settee with her book open on her knee. There was a man from the engine builder, two of Toby’s mechanics and Danny Arsenault, who had been brought to hold things and had not stopped smiling since the lines came off.

Nell was at the engineer’s station, on the starboard side aft.

She had a laptop strapped to the desk with a bungee cord. A grey cable ran from it down through the deck hatch, to a strain gauge no bigger than a postage stamp. She had glued it on Monday to the round nose of the bracket on frame 14, port. It was the first frame she had cut out of this boat, with forty men watching. She had told Win at breakfast that if the boat was going to complain anywhere, she would complain there first.

She had her braid down her collar and a pencil behind her ear. She had not looked up in ten minutes.

He had sat at her drafting board eleven nights ago with a column of seven figures. It had begun with one million eight hundred seventy-six thousand and ended with the monthly interest on a line of credit at Casco Trust. He had turned it face down when she spoke. He had told her it was the vote. She had kissed him on the head and gone back to bed, and he had sat there in the dark until five.

It was thirteen days until the first of June. He had not rung Simon Farrar, and he had not told her. He was keeping both courses open, and he had a fair idea that this was what a man did when he was afraid to take either.

“Portland Head coming up,” Sprague said. “We’ll run the mile southbound first, with the tide, then turn and come back against it. Ms. Baptiste, you want to call it?”

“It’s your builder’s trial. I’m watching.”

“Mr. Keegan?”

Toby glanced over his shoulder. “Thibodeau. You ready back there?”

“Recording,” Nell said. “Give me thirty seconds at each step. Don’t just lay the throttles down.”

“You heard her.”

The lighthouse stood up white on its headland a mile to starboard, with the swell breaking at the foot of the rocks. Sprague brought the throttles forward a third.

The sound changed first. The engines went from a mutter to a deep steady drone, and the two bows lifted, and the water began to come past the windows. Sixteen knots. Win took hold of the grab rail. Twenty. The swell that had been rolling them stopped mattering. The boat had risen onto it and was running across the tops, flat, with a fast light drumming under the wet deck.

“Twenty-two,” Sprague said. “Twenty-four. Everybody hold on to something. Here’s the rest.”

He pushed the throttles to the stops.

Win had read the contract speed forty times. It was a figure in a schedule: not less than 26 knots at full load, sea state 2. He had not understood until now that it was also a sensation in the backs of the knees. The headland was moving past the windows much faster than he liked. A lobster buoy went by like something thrown.

“Mark,” Toby said. He had a stopwatch, though the plotter was doing the same job in green figures over his head.

Nobody spoke for the mile. It took a little over two minutes. Win watched the horizon and found that at this speed it did not move, and that his stomach had quietly settled.

“Mark. Twenty-seven six with the tide.”

“Turn her,” Ursula said. “That one doesn’t count till I’ve seen the other.”

Sprague eased back and brought the boat round in a wide curve. She leaned into it a little and came out level. Then they were pointed north, with the light on the port bow and the tide against them, and the throttles went down again.

“Mark.”

The drumming under the deck was sharper this way, into the swell. Win looked across at Nell. She was bent to the screen with one hand flat on the desk, feeling the boat through it. She seemed to have forgotten there was anyone else aboard.

“Mark,” Toby said. He did the sum on the back of his glove with a pen and then looked up at the plotter to check himself. “Twenty-seven two against. That’s twenty-seven point four on the mean.”

“Against twenty-six,” Vera Nadeau said, and wrote it down.

Danny whooped. One of the mechanics pounded the engine builder’s man between the shoulders. Sprague, who had not smiled all morning, patted the top of the console twice, as he might have patted a horse.

Nell turned around on her stool.

She was grinning. Win had seen her pleased with a four, and brimming under a bow with a bottle in her arms. He had not seen this. It took ten years off her. It was the grin of a girl on a staging who has just been told by her father that her first seam is square. She held up the laptop as far as the bungee would let her, to show the whole wheelhouse.

“Look at that. Look at fourteen.”

“I can’t read it from here,” Toby said.

“There’s nothing to read. That’s the point. Win, come here.”

He crossed the wheelhouse, hand over hand along the rail. On the screen a thin green line ran from left to right. It rose in four shallow steps where the throttles had gone forward, and above the last step it trembled a little. A long way over it, near the top of the screen, there was a red line, dead straight.

“The red’s the limit for that bracket. It’s what the class rules let me have.” She put her finger on the green. “That’s what she’s actually carrying, flat out, into a swell. It’s under a third. The old bracket would have been up through the red before we passed the lighthouse.”

“A third of the allowance.”

“Twenty-nine per cent at the worst peak. I’ve been through it twice.” She looked up at him, with her eyes shining. “She’s not working, Win. She’s hardly noticed. I could give her another two knots and she wouldn’t care.”

“Don’t give her anything,” Ursula said from the back. “I’m paying for twenty-six. I’ll take the one point four as a present and say thank you.”

“Term four,” Win said, before he thought.

Nell laughed out loud. Nobody else in the wheelhouse knew why, and Toby looked from one of them to the other and shook his head.

He would have stayed there. He wanted to stand at her shoulder for the rest of the day and watch a green line refuse to climb. But she had turned back to the screen, and Vera had come over with her glasses on, and the two of them had their heads together.

He went out through the after door for air.

The working deck was wide and bare, with the wake standing up white behind in two long ridges that met a hundred yards astern. Sprague had brought her back to twenty knots for the endurance run. The wind had some warmth in it.

Ursula Baptiste came out after him. She zipped her windbreaker to the chin and leaned on the rail, studying the wake as other people studied a balance.

“Clean,” she said. “No hump. Whoever drew these hulls knew something.”

“That was before her. She’d tell you so.”

“She told me so at the launch. I like a person who won’t take credit for the part she didn’t do. It means I can believe her about the part she did.” She turned her back to the rail. “I’m going to say something to you now so that you have it plain, and not from a lawyer in three weeks.”

“Please.”

“My board met on Monday. We’ve got sixty-two turbines going up over the next four years and three boats on order to service them. Three isn’t enough. They’ve authorised me to exercise the option for the four more, at nineteen million, the day two things are true.”

He waited.

“One. This boat is on my dock in New Bedford by the thirtieth of June, with her class certificate and no list of things you’ll fix later.”

“Toby’s schedule has her there on Friday, the eleventh of June.”

“I’ve seen Toby’s schedule. I believe about two-thirds of any schedule. If it’s the eleventh, I’ll buy the crew a lunch.” She held up a second blunt finger. “Two. I know who’s going to own that shed. I read the business pages, Mr. Lathrop. I know there’s a Dutch outfit with a billion dollars on your table and a vote on the eighteenth. I’ve read what they do with shipyards. I’m not signing seventy-six million dollars of orders with a yard that’s going to be condominiums before my fifth hull has a keel.”

“That’s reasonable.”

“It’s more than reasonable. It’s the only way I keep my job.” She looked through the door, to the starboard corner, where the end of a dark braid showed above a stool. “I’ll tell you what I can’t put in a letter. I came up here in December ready to cancel. I had a yard in Louisiana on the telephone. I’m not ready to cancel now, and it’s because of her and that crew, and maybe a little because the man who signs the cheques turned up on trials when he gets sick on a ferry. But I buy boats from yards. If the yard’s gone, I can’t buy her.”

“If the sale fails on the eighteenth?”

“Then I’ll be sitting with a pen on the morning of the nineteenth. I don’t care that it’s a Saturday. You can tell your people that, the ones who are voting. I’d tell them myself if it were my place.”

“It may become your place. I may ask you.”

“Ask. I’ve got a loud voice.” She pushed off the rail. “Now go and sit down amidships. That’s where the motion’s least. You’ve been very brave, and you’re green again.”
***
They were alongside the fitting-out pier at ten past two. The lines went over. Toby was already on the dock, shouting for shore power. Nell had not left her stool. She and Vera and the engine man were going through the recording minute by minute, and she had waved Win off without looking round.

“Go and tell Aggie. She’s been pretending all week she doesn’t care.”

He came up the pier with his coat over his arm and the ginger tin rattling in the pocket. He was working out the day. Twenty-three days to the eleventh. Thirty to the vote. Seventy-six million dollars had just been hung on both.

A truck was parked at the head of the pier with Thibodeau Boat Works on the door.

Rémy stood beside it. He had his hands shoved into the pockets of his work jacket. He had not shaved, and his dark curls were flat on one side, as if he had slept against a window or had not slept. His face was the colour of the concrete.

Win’s first thought went through him cold.

“Is it Leon?”

“Dad’s fine. He beat Faye at cribbage last night.” Rémy looked past him down the pier. “Where is she?”

“Aboard. She’ll be an hour. Rémy, what’s happened?”

“Get in the truck.”

“I’d rather—”

“I’ve been standing here since noon working out how not to hit you. Get in the truck.”

Win got in. The cab smelled of coffee and cutting oil. Rémy climbed in on the other side and shut the door, and sat with both hands on the wheel.

“Your uncle telephoned me last night,” he said. “On the house line, at ten past nine. Dad had gone up.”

Win did not move.

“He called me Mr. Thibodeau. He asked how my father was getting on and he used his name. He said he’d admired the frames. Very nice. I thought he was after a price on something.” Rémy’s knuckles were white. “Then he said he understood his nephew and my sister had come to an arrangement in January, and that every term of it had been hers. He said a woman who bargains in terms writes them down. He said there’d be a paper, and that the yard would have a copy of it.”

“What did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything. I was trying to work out how he knew. Then he said he’d pay fifty thousand dollars for sight of it. A photograph would do. Nobody would ever know where it came from, and I’d have the money by Friday.” He turned his head. “Fifty thousand. That’s two of our payments and change, and I think he’d done that sum before he rang. He said he knew how hard I’d worked, running the floor by myself.”

“And?”

“I told him where he could put his fifty thousand, and which end first. Then I hung up, and I sat in the kitchen till two.” His voice was shaking. It was the quiet voice, the one from behind the wheelhouse module, and it was a good deal worse than the temper. “So now you tell me. How does that man know there’s a paper? I didn’t tell him. Faye would cut her hand off. And don’t give me budget, or whatever you’ve been giving her, because I’ve watched you walk out in the rain with that phone for a month.”

Term seven had two halves, and he had broken both. He had no stomach for a third time, in the cab of this truck.

“He doesn’t know there’s a paper. He’s guessing, and he’s guessed right.” Win took off his glasses. “He does know the rest. He read the lender’s report. He went to the loan file and found the marriage certificate, the freeze on your note and the reinstated purchase order. All three are dated the twenty-ninth of January. He put them on his desk in front of me on the fifth of April.”

“April.” Rémy stared at him. “That’s six weeks.”

“Forty-four days.”

“Don’t you count at me.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“What does he want?”

“He wants me to stand aside. He wants the Trust’s votes, so the sale goes through. If I won’t, he means to put those three papers in front of every employee before they mark a ballot, with the dates. They’ll read it as the president buying himself a wife with the company’s loan book.” He made himself go on. “Your sister’s terms would prove the bargain in her own hand. That’s why he wants the vellum.”

He had left out a date and a newspaper. He knew it. He had told himself in the last half minute that the Courier would never come to print if he acted first, and that there was no use in handing this man a thing to drive home with. He recognised the sentence. It was getting easy to write.

Rémy sat back. He breathed out through his teeth.

“She doesn’t know any of that.”

“No.”

“She’s been down there building your boat, sleeping in your house, and she doesn’t know your uncle’s got her wedding in a folder.”

“No.”

“Then she hears it tonight. You tell her or I do. I’m not picky.”

“I’m asking you to wait.”

Rémy laughed, one short ugly breath. “Course you are.”

“Hear the reason, and then call me what you like. That boat did twenty-seven point four knots an hour ago. The owner told me on the after deck that she’ll order four more if hull 1 is on her dock by the thirtieth of June. Toby has her there on the eleventh. That’s twenty-three days, and your sister is on that boat twelve hours of every one of them. All of it is her work.” He put the glasses back on. “If I tell her tonight, she won’t sleep, and she’ll do one of two things. She’ll want to fight it in the open, on the floor, in the middle of commissioning. Or she’ll decide she’s the damage and take herself out of it. Either way she doesn’t finish the boat in peace. She’s waited since Seattle to hand over a hull with her name on the drawings. I want her to have that first. The eleventh of June. I’ll tell her that night, all of it.”

“You’re deciding for her.”

“Yes.”

“She’ll skin you. You know that. It won’t matter what your uncle’s done. It’ll be that you knew and she didn’t.”

“I expect so.”

“Then why—” Rémy hit the wheel with the flat of his hand. “It’s a mistake. I’m telling you now, to your face, so you can’t say afterwards that nobody did. Dad already knows something’s off with you. He told me so, in about three words. She’s the only one in that family who hasn’t seen it, and that’s because she thinks it’s something else.”

“What does she think it is?”

“Ask her. I’m not doing that for you as well.” He looked out through the windshield, down the pier, to where the blue hulls lay against the fenders. He looked for a long time. “She cut those frames with me on Saturdays,” he said. “She was happy. I hadn’t seen that in three years.”

“I know.”

“Until the eleventh. That boat goes on that woman’s dock, and you tell my sister before she sleeps. If you don’t, I’m in Portland Saturday morning and I tell her in front of you.” He turned. His eyes were bloodshot and perfectly steady. “And hear this part. I won’t bring it up. But if she asks me a straight question between now and then, she gets a straight answer. I’m not lying to her for you, and I’m not lying to Dad. That’s her term, and it’s the only thing on that paper I ever liked.”

“That’s fair. It’s more than fair.”

“It’s not fair. It’s stupid, and I’m doing it anyway.” Rémy pulled the door handle. “I told you about the water in March. I haven’t forgotten where it’s deep.”

They got out. The wind off the river had freshened.

Nell was coming up the pier.

She had the laptop under her arm and her hard hat in her hand, and she was walking fast, half turned to say something to Danny behind her. Then she saw the truck. She stopped, and her whole face lit.

“Rémy! What are you doing here?”

Her brother’s shoulders went up and came down.

“I cut twenty-two frames for that thing,” he said. “I thought I’d come and see if she ran.”

“Did she run! Twenty-seven four. Come and look at fourteen. I’ve got the whole trace. You won’t believe how little she’s carrying.” She had him by the sleeve already. “You look terrible. Did you drive down this morning? Have you eaten?”

“I’m fine. Quit pulling.”

“Win, did you tell him what Ursula said?”

“I told him.”

“Four more boats. That’s four more wheelhouses, Rémy. That’s the option.” She was towing him down the pier. Danny had fallen in on his other side and was describing the turn off Portland Head with both arms.

Win stayed by the truck.

Halfway down, Rémy looked back over his sister’s head. He did not scowl. He held Win’s eyes for about as long as it takes to read a date. Then Nell said something and pointed at the boat, and he turned and went aboard with her.
***