I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger

Author:Leif Enger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2024-03-12T19:08:46+00:00

Early light and the wind did not abate.

Slowly the cabin came visible, a slaughter of pans and cans and paper trash. Such was the violence before heaving to that lockers flew open, lazarettes disgorged. Every book came off the shelf. Even the heavy icebox lid bounded away and most of Evelyn’s vegetables migrated to new quarters. Moving slowly I salvaged what food I could. Onions in the bilge well, a yam crouched in shadow. Sometimes I put my head out. I never saw land, just lowering clouds and ranks of foamy spume and rain-lashed waves. Life was soaked and stiff with cold. Lighting both stove burners I held my hands and face over them, then put water on to boil while stringing things up to dry.

In this interlude of relative quiet, my stealthy lodger returned. First the dreaded quiet tap, then a skid, the sound of something rolling, all escalating into a bellicose rhythm prompted by the boat’s repetitive pitch and heel. In its absence I’d forgot this irritation. Now it was back and worse. As if my filthy guest had finally gone away only to fetch a bunch of even more irksome friends with whom to play his wretched tune—skid roll tap, skid roll tap, skid roll—this I endured while mopping up and twice pumping the damn bilge, at which point a brassy clang joined the act. It had an amplifying or proliferating effect. I’m no frantic person but I hissed and crashed around like a cat in an oven until finally—stretching an arm into fetid spidery diesel-adjacent darkness—something loose and heavy rolled straight into my fingers.

A gleaming steel cylinder, so out of context it took me a moment.

It was one of Kellan’s nitrous canisters.

Of course he’d helped with a project or two, so he’d spent some time on the boat. But why would he stash it here? Not that it made any difference—it was clearly his, even though all that clanking and skidding around gave it a bruised appearance.

The threaded top wobbled, came off in my hand. I peered inside. It was stuffed with what looked like tightly rolled cellophane.

I suppose at that point I knew what it was.

I pulled it out anyway—took a knife and reached down in and shoehorned that fat plastic worm from its cocoon.

It was sturdily taped. Heavy as the cylinder it came from. Held to the light, these thousands of dissolves shone green and iridescent like the willow they were named for.

And that is how, hove to in the belly of a gale in the heart of the sea in the center of the continent, I realized there’d be no simple slipping off. Werryck wasn’t about to forget me as I’d wistfully hoped, for here in my hands were the thousands of deaths—or millions of dollars, depending on your angle—that were his job to recover.

So what should I have done here?

Thrown the whole thing overboard, the better to plead ignorance?

Sought out my pursuers and bargained for my life?

At the very least I might

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