CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Who are they? What are they, A was thinking, not just these ones who were merely representative, but all of them. The Sylvia question was merely concerned with the mystery of sex - all those stars and magical symbols they plastered over a woman's skirts - as if she owned the answer to the secret and was not caught in its mystery as much as they. A didn't know either who or what Sylvia was, but she was scared. The sky was dark and lashed with rain and the three hummocked slicker-covered shapes in the front of the boat were unknown to her. Speed, bonny boat, she thought. "Raptus," she said, "to be carried away." In a rapture of terror she thought anywhere for harbour. "O wynde of wynde the wedder gynneth clere," then realized, when the others turned, that she had spoken out loud. Suomen leinnen tutte, she said, her grandmother's words. "Little Finnish girl." The others looked distinctly nervous. A wept and longed for the sweet green place on the island, where she'd been born. "The sisters of mercy, they are not departed and gone," she shrieked. "Polymorphous perversity of the dialogical imagination," she warmed up, suspecting that her survival might depend on pretending to be crazy. She knelt on the bottom of the boat and made the conventional sign. Prostrating herself before her amazed captors, arms outstretched, she kissed the bottom of the boat, gagged and vomited neatly over the side as brackish sea water rose in her gorge. The boat had obviously been standing in water for some time. Not only that, but it was slowly filling with water. It was not a seaworthy vessel, A realized. Or was it a vessel at all? Nearly as suddenly as it had begun, the squall subsided and as A gazed about her, she understood that this was not a boat. It was a tub, outfitted as a motorboat.

Meanwhile a completely inebriated D was fighting for what he thought were the controls of a Bell helicopter, not realizing that in truth if not fact he was aboard a white cabin cruiser, and what he was fighting for was the untimely erection being sported by a large friendly dog named D-d-d-dog. D-d-d-dog suffered, if that indeed is the word, a condition known in his land of origin as "Dooba-twickism," an affliction whose victims have hard-ons except when they are rescuing people who are in danger of drowning. D had no knowledge of medicine. He grabbed for the canine phallus.

Pink-Meadow grabbed for D, seeking to protect his old drinking buddy from the consequences only he knew.

But Read Only, who was holding the wheel of the cabin cruiser in one hand and a Singapore Sling in the other, saw only that his crew appeared headed for an altercation, and grabbed for Pink-Meadow, letting go of the wheel but not of the tall pink drink with its perfect little umbrella.

The cabin cruiser jigged.

Read jogged, over the side and into the American chuck. He bobbed to the surface, but the umbrella was gone. He took a sip of the Sling and grimaced his approval.

But Pink-Meadow had already jagged. He landed like an Orca atop the salinated cocktail.

And before he could resurface, D-d-d-dog lost his tumescence while making a lovely doggy-dive into the dangerous element, where he splashed on his unimmersing master.

D wracked his spirits-filled brain for the right word. The music of "I went to your wedding" had disappeared thence the moment the doggy was no longer in the window. "Aha!" he shouted into the slight breeze, but he knew that was wrong. The cabin cruiser performed a circle about the two water-treaders and the one dog paddler. "Oho!" tried D. He saw Read sipping from the tall glass. "Ahab!" shouted D.

Now the desired word slid into D's brain, as if typed there by G on a big dull Underwood. "Ahoy!" he shouted, in an accent usually assigned to mariners in The Bight and northern East Anglia.

The cabin cruiser circled in its own wake. The two sailors and their dog in the water turned their bodies to keep it in sight.

"How does a chep steer a boat?" shouted D. "I mean in this instance a chep who knows not how to control an automobile."

"I cannot hear you," asserted Read. "It's either your accent or the combination of wind and motor. There is no hope of understanding anything more than a single word, or perhaps two in these circumstances."

But now D-d-d-dog had his canine teeth firmly in Pink-MeadowPink-Meadowame's half-Eton collar and was swimming toward the saloon on the beach. Read threw his empty glass out to sea and prepared to follow them. He turned and shouted instructions to D. Unfortunately D was unable to hear them.

But he knew that D-d-d-dog would do his duty and remain ensheathed while doing so. He also knew now that this water craft was not a helicopter. He remembered the shore-to-ship phone call and the earlier one. For a moment he wondered what had happened to the lissome Sylvia, but with A to be rescued and G and M to be joined, there was no time in his thoughts for an S. He hissed when the thought elbowed its way past the mind-altering chemicals in his cranial lobes. Now there were more important things at hand. Such as the method whereby one guides a sea-going vessel toward a bay that seemed less and less English all the while.

For the first time in his creative life, D was having trouble handling his craft. But he fought the wheel and that other thing, some kind of vertical stick, all the way around each headland. Other small boats veered out of the way as their passengers espied his eccentric approach. Otters scattered. Herons took to the skies like gossamer pterodactyls. Canada Customs stayed in the shed. Loose logs floated out of the way. His Byronic hair flying behind him, D stood at the helm and sang into the salt air.

My old chum went swimmin'
The skipper went swimmin'
And D-d-d-dog went swimming' too
In Canadian waters
I can't find the god-damned/ Loo!

The verse may not have amounted to much in terms of the furtherance of plot, but at last he had got the scansion aright.

Miraculously the powerful boat made its way around the beautiful Point Grey, and in a moment that would beggar belief, D saw the west wall of the Freddy Wood Theatre at the university. Then it disappeared behind some trees, and D looked into the maw of English Bay. There has to be a way to slow this sloop's forward progress, he mused, and began to push and pull things. The Evinrude engines responded with a surge of power, and the bow of the vessel lifted from the water. As it did, D saw a pillar of fire and water just this side of what he did not recognize as the Burrard Bridge. Had he looked away from the pillar of fire and water he might have seen to its right the tall yellow wall of the brewery, and to its left the ivy-covered walls of the Sylvia Hotel.

"Mein Gott! What have I done?" asked D, who was holding on to the wheel with whitened fingers.

"One: you haven't done anything," came a voice in the roar of the Evinrudes. "And two: I am not your Gott. Your Gott is Fame." (Big G - knew how to project).

Pieces of the Bathtub Topham Island fell into the water beside him, as the pointed end of his boat fell back into the water and the cabin cruiser slowed nearly to a stop, having consumed all its purple fuel. D looked at the fragments of the unfortunate thirty-two-footer that floated about him.

"They look like forlorn pages of a jerry-built novel," mused D, his hair still sticking out straight behind him, though Read's boat was only floating shoreward on the waves.

"My recent sentiments, exactly," said a good-natured Finno-Canadian voice behind him.

He had not even noticed a tipping of the boat as she had climbed the ladder affixed to its side. But it was A, indeed, her hair and clothing clinging to her frame.

For a moment he was filled with regretful affection, but he was made of stern stuff. His parents had conceived him at the very back of the Calais ferry. Perhaps the instinct for driving a boat had been born with him.

"Where is Sylvia?" asked A.

"The nose of your rescue ship has just nudged the sand a hundred yards from her beverage room portal," he replied. "Where that large Oldsmobile is idling at the curb."