As he pawed through their materials and tools he said, “So how are you guys feeling about your treasure, eh? Are you okay with how it’s being handled?”
The boys shrugged. Roberto said, “It bugs me that it isn’t being put in a museum or something. I don’t think they should melt the coins down. They’ve got to be worth more as ancient coins, don’t they?”
“I don’t know,” Mr. Hexter said. “I bet you’d like one or two yourselves, eh? You could punch a hole in one and make it into a necklace.”
The boys nodded thoughtfully, trying to imagine it. “That would be a blocknecklace for sure,” Roberto said. “What about you, Mr. Hexter? What do you think about it?”
“I’m not sure,” Hexter said. “I guess I think if we come out of it okay, like room and board forever, and a trust fund for you guys as adults, then I’ll be happy. You guys should see the world and all. Me, all I want is a new map cabinet. I mean beyond the necessities. Got to have the necessities, that’s for sure.”
“That’s why they call them that,” Stefan supposed.
While they talked this over they worked on the iceboat. The boys had obtained an aluminum mast with a mainsail on a boom, made to be stepped into a box at the bottom of a rowboat. So they made a footbox and nailed it in place under and a bit behind the front apex of their triangular deck, and cut a hole through the deck into it. The mast would stick through this hole into the footbox. Then they nailed a frame of two-by-sixes to the underside of the deck. Two ice-skate blades could then be screwed into the back corners of this frame, the blades facing permanently straight ahead. The one at the front of the triangle, the bow of their boat, they screwed to a circle of plywood; then they fit that circle inside a square frame nailed to the bottom of the deck just before the mast, under another hole in the deck that allowed a rudder post, screwed to the top of the circle of plywood, to stick up through the deck. The rudder post had a crossbar nailed to its top, and they tied lines to both ends of this crossbar, and ran these back on each side of the mast to the stern, where they tied them to cleats they screwed into the deck. Adjusting the lines would allow them to turn the front skate. With some two-by-four supports nailed in for their mast, they were good to go.
“Add a brake,” Mr. Hexter advised. “Just a hand brake. A two-by-four on a hinge, hanging off the stern. Something you can pull down onto the ice if you want to.” He pawed through their junk and held up an old brass door hinge.
“Will that work?” Roberto asked. “Just wood on ice, I mean?”
“Not very well, but anything is better than nothing, at least sometimes.”
They blew into their hands when they took their gloves off to work, and jumped around to create some heat. The sun, hanging in an opalescent smear over Staten Island, warmed them more than seemed likely, but it was still cold.
“What can we do for our next thing, Mr. Hexter?” Roberto asked as they worked. “We need something new, now that we’ve found the Hussar.”
“Well, there’s nothing like the Hussar.”
“But there must be something.”
Hexter nodded. “New York is infinite,” he allowed. “Let me think about that one … ah. Sure. Well, you know that Herman Melville lived in New York for most of his life.”
“Who’s he?”
“Herman Melville! Author of Moby-Dick!”
“Okay. That sounds like an interesting book.” Both of them guffawed. “Tell us more.”
“Boys, he wrote the great American novel, and when it was published it killed his career. People used it for toilet paper for a century or so, and for the rest of his life he had to find other jobs to support his family. He kept on scribbling, and they found all kinds of masterpieces stuck in shoe boxes after he died, but for the rest of his life he had to scrape to get by.”
“Like us!”
“That’s right. He was a water rat. But he scored a job as a customs inspector, working the docks just south of here. Herman Melville, customs inspector. That’s the title of my own lost masterpiece. But his lost masterpiece was a manuscript he called Isle of the Cross. It was about a woman who married a sailor who got her pregnant and then sailed off and married other girls in other ports, and this girl had to get by on her own after he left.”
“Like Melville after his readers left,” Stefan observed.
“Very good. That’s probably right. Anyway, his publishers rejected this book outright, and it’s been said Melville took it home and burned it in his fireplace.”
“Why would he do that?”
“He was mad. But maybe he didn’t. That’s what Russ said happened, but other people said it was there in another shoe box. And the thing is, he lived on East Twenty-sixth, in a big town house just a block off Madison Square.”
“Our square?”
“That’s right. I tell you, that little bacino you live in has had an amazing life. It’s some kind of power spot.”
“A manuscript isn’t going to hold up underwater like gold,” Roberto pointed out.
“No. No, that lost novel is probably lost for good. It’s too bad. But anything from Melville’s house would be great to find. And it’s like the Hussar, in that you could dig around at the bottom of the canal where his house used to be, without anyone minding.”
“But that underwater digging turned out to be hard,” Stefan pointed out. “We needed Idelba and Thabo.”
“True. But we could probably get them again, if you found the right place. And finding the old address shouldn’t be hard, because we know right where it was. So, you know, if you could find anything, some wood, or something like Melville’s toothbrush cup, or a scrimshaw inkwell or something like that …”
“Great idea,” Roberto enthused.
Stefan looked unconvinced. “We left our diving bell up in the Bronx. After it almost killed you.”
“We could go back and get it.”
“Looks like we’ve about finished making this iceboat,” Mr. Hexter observed.
“Let’s give it a try!” Roberto cried.
There was a gusty north wind whistling down the Hudson, not too strong, not crushingly cold. So they lifted the craft down onto the ice just offshore, and got on its plywood deck, and shoved off with their shoes against the ice, while pulling the sail taut.
Immediately the wind filled the sail and Roberto wrapped the boom sheet once around a cleat they had screwed into the middle of the plywood. Stefan tugged on the two lines running up to the rudder post until the front skate pointed a little to the right, up into the wind, then wrapped those lines to their own cleats. At that point they were on a beam reach headed west, out across the mighty Hudson, scraping and screeching along.
A gust struck, and rather than tilting like a sailboat, the iceboat simply shot faster across the ice, a startling acceleration marked by louder scraping and a new hiss. Stefan and Roberto looked at each other round-eyed, and they might even have been nervous if Mr. Hexter had not been grinning a huge gap-toothed grin, a joyful smile the likes of which they had never seen on him. Clearly he was familiar with iceboating, and loved it. So Roberto kept the sail taut, and Stefan pulled the front skate a little more to the right, pointing them up into the wind a bit more, and they clatterswooshed across the mighty river, which from this vantage appeared like an immense ice lake, like one of the Great Lakes maybe. Or, given the giant towers of the city and Hoboken to each side, like an ice hockey rink for Titans. They hissed along like some kind of ice hydrofoil!
But the wind was cold out here, and they huddled down into their jackets and pulled their wool caps over their ears, their hands chilling despite their gloves. “Point right up into the wind!” Mr. Hexter shouted.
Stefan uncleated his lines and pulled hard on the right one, which made the boat curve to the right, upriver and upwind, until the sail fluttered hard, and they scratched over the ice to a halt, with only the flapping sail moving.
The wind still gusted by, throwing a mother-of-pearl sky south over them. The very hardest gu
sts scraped the whole boat backward a foot or two at a time.
“Amazing!” Roberto said.
“I forgot how cold iceboating is,” Mr. Hexter said, looking a little chastened. “Ours was more like a regular boat, so we had a cockpit we could get down into and get some protection. We’d always have a lot of blankets too, and thick gloves, and hot chocolate in a thermos.”
Roberto, white-lipped and already shivering a little, said, “I think we could borrow some gloves and blankets. I think Edgardo has some.”
“We should have thought of it before,” Stefan said.
“Let’s just sail back in,” Mr. Hexter said. “We aren’t that far out yet.”
To the boys it looked like they were already most of the way to Jersey, but Mr. Hexter shook his head and told them to look at the size of the boats on the Hoboken docks compared to the ones back in the city. The boys still couldn’t see it, but they were willing to take his word for it. Stefan pulled on his lines, twisting the front skate left to get them to turn the front back toward the city as they were being shoved backward. When they had slid until they were pointed toward Manhattan, Roberto pulled the sail taut, and the boat scraped a little sideways downwind, then began hissing and scronching toward the city. “Don’t let the boom hit you!” the old man cried, as with a sudden ferocious rush they accelerated. Roberto hauled with all his might on the sheet and cleated it down before he lost it, and Stefan lay down to stay under the boom, which was now angled over the right side of the boat instead of the left.
Loud clattery hiss, tremendous acceleration: they’d never felt anything like it. Astonishing speed. Even Franklin Garr’s zoomer couldn’t have beat it.
Then there came a loud snap from the bow and the deck dropped at the front. Quickly they ground to a halt, the three of them sliding down the plywood toward the ice.
“Uncleat the sail!” Mr. Hexter said to Roberto. “Loose the sail, quick.”
When Roberto got the sheet loose from the cleat, the sail was freed to flap downwind on the boom, which swung wildly back and forth. They regained their composure, stood and walked around on the ice. In some places it was translucent, even transparent. These patches were creepy, as below their ice the black water still clearly moved.
It turned out the front skate and its circular mounting had together broken away from the square framework, now split on both sides.
“Too much stress,” Hexter said. “And from a new direction.” He inspected the damage, shook his head. “Too bad. I don’t think we can fix it.”
“Oh no! What are we going to do?”
“Let’s walk it back in. Here, wrap those steering lines around the very front of the bow, and lift up on the lines, and we’ll walk it in on its back skates. It won’t be that heavy.”
They stood on the ice next to the boat and wrapped the lines in the way he had suggested. When they were done they could lift the bow enough to pull the boat along behind them. After a while they stopped and unstepped the mast and laid it and the sail and boom flat on the deck. After that, tromping back toward the city felt quite satisfying.
“This is cool,” Roberto said. “Usually when we mess up, we’re stuck.”
Mr. Hexter laughed. “It’s another reason to like iceboating. When you capsize in water, you can’t just walk home like this. I think we just have to figure out a stronger frame to put the front skate in. Maybe there’s an assemblage you could buy and just tack it in place. There must be iceboat makers all around this harbor by now, right?”
The boys agreed it must be so. “But we don’t have any money to pay for anything.”
“Yes you do! Give them a gold guinea, hey? See what kind of change they give you for that.”
It was still cold, so they tried to hurry the old man a little, but he was slowing from time to time to look around. The boys tried to be indulgent, but then he stopped outright and stood looking around. “What?” Roberto complained.
“This is the spot! This is the spot, right here!”
“What spot could be out here?” Stefan wondered.
“This is where I met Herman Melville! I can tell from the way our dock lines up with the Empire State Building.”
“So you knew this Melville guy?”
“No.” Hexter laughed. “No, I wish I had. I bet it would have been really interesting. But he was before my time.”
“So how is it you met him?”
“It was his ghost. I ran into him out here and talked to him. Very weird, to be sure. An uncanny encounter. He had a great accent, a bit like a New York accent, but kind of stiff. Maybe a little Dutch in it still. It was right out here, about where we’re standing. What a great coincidence. Maybe that’s why the boat broke here. Or why I was thinking about him earlier. Could be he’s out here still, tweaking my head.”
Stefan and Roberto stared at him.
He looked at them and smiled. “Come on, we’ll keep walking. You boys look cold. I’ll tell you about it as we go.”
“Good idea.”
So as they trudged over the ice, which was mostly white in this area, and crusted with low lines of compacted snow that Hexter called sastrugi, he told them the story.
“I was out here one night in a little rubber motorboat, kind of like yours, a zodiac we called them then.”
“We still do.”
“Good to know. So I was out here—”
“Why were you out here at night?”
“Well, that’s a long story, I’ll tell you that another time, but basically I was out here to receive some smuggled goods.”
“Cool! What’s that?”
“What’s smuggled goods, or what was I receiving?”
“What’s a smuggled good?” Stefan clarified, glancing at Roberto.
“Well, some things were not supposed to be brought into the country without being taxed. Or not at all. So if you snuck them in, that was smuggling.”
“And what were you receiving?” Roberto asked.
“Let’s talk about that part later,” the old man said. “For now, I want to get to the important part, which is that I’m out here in the dark, a moonless night, sea mist coming up off the water, really glad I had GPS to tell me where I was, because there would have been no way without it, because it was getting to be like a regular sea fog, what they call a pea soup fog, very thick. I did get a glimpse of the Empire State once or twice, because it was lit up then too, but nothing else was visible. I was just out there in a white blackness, or a black whiteness. And then out of the fog a man comes rowing. Pretty big wooden rowboat, single man in it. He had white hair cut close, and a long white beard that kind of came down in two points. Big barrel-chested old man. And rowing pretty hard in the fog, so he almost ran me down, because of course when you’re rowing you’re not looking the way you’re going. Although in his case, the moment I called out to him, he swung his boat around by rowing forward one way and backward the other. He turned on a dime, and then he was rowing at me stern forward, so he could look at me. He spun around as neat as you please. That was my first impression, that he was a really good rower. As of course made sense.”
“Why?”
“Roberto, shut up!”
“No, that’s a good one. He was good because he had rowed on a whaling ship when he was young, and they had to chase whales and spear them, and then pull their dead bodies back to the big ship by rowing them. I tell you, when you have a dead whale tied to the stern of your boat, you develop very little momentum with each stroke of the oars. So he got really good at rowing. And then after his writing career tanked, he had that job on the docks. Lot of rowing involved with that. Herman Melville, customs inspector. My favorite book about him, although admittedly I wrote it.”
“I thought you said you didn’t write it.”
“Roberto!”
“In those years he was said to be the only honest customs inspector in Manhattan. Which of course had to be incredibly dangerous.”
“How come?”
“Think about
it. With all the others on the take, he was a danger to everyone. He was bad for smugglers, and bad for the other customs inspectors. It’s amazing he didn’t get shot and dumped in the river, and in fact he had all kinds of adventures in those years. The book is mostly a detective novel, I guess you’d say, or an adventure novel where it’s just one damn thing after another. Him foiling plots, people trying to kill him. Crazy old Confederates trying to stir up trouble. And a lot of that happened out on the river here. Sometimes he had to row out here, when ships got backed up and were anchored in the harbor waiting for a dock to open. Row all the way to Staten Island and back. He could catch smugglers by rowing them down. They’d be sailing and the wind would die a little, and he would row those criminals down. No, he was a champion oarsman!”
“So what happened when you met him out here? I mean you were smuggling too, right?”
“That’s true. Maybe that’s why he showed up! But in fact on that night he pulled his boat right next to mine, and leaned over and peered at me. He said, ‘Billy, is that you?’”
“Who’s—”
“Shut up!”
“I don’t know—I’m wondering now if he meant Billy Budd. But when I said no, he looked really startled, kind of scared, and he said, ‘Malcolm? Is that my Malcolm?’ and I said, ‘No, I’m Gordon. Gordon Hexter.’”
“Who’s Malcolm?”
“That was the name of his older son.”
“So then what?” Stefan insisted.
“He looked at my zodiac and said, ‘What’s this, a rubber boat?’ And I said yes, and he said, ‘Good idea!’ and then, ‘But what about your oars?’ I told him I had lost them overboard, and he frowned at me like he knew I was lying, because there were no oarlocks on my zodiac. And of course steamboats were already there in his time, and the Monitor and Merrimac. And he saw the motor at the back, and asked me what it was, and I said it was a fishing line reel. I should have just said it was a motor. But he just looked at me, and told me he would pull me in to shore, and I had to say okay, as it wouldn’t make sense to say no to him at that point. So he tied a line to my bow cleat and started rowing me in, so I missed my rendezvous out there. But I wasn’t thinking about that then.