Sinking Deeper

  Copyright © Steve Vernon, 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, permission from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.

  Nimbus Publishing Limited

  PO Box 9166, Halifax, NS B3K 5M8

  (902) 455-4286 www.nimbus.ca

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Vernon, Steve

  Sinking deeper, or, My questionable

  (possibly heroic) decision to invent

  a sea monster / Steve Vernon.

  ISBN 978-1-55109-880-7

  I. Title.

  PS8593.E774S56 2011 jC813’.6 C2010-908141-2

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Canada Council, and of the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage for our publishing activities.

  Dedicated to my grandfather Hanlan Arthur Vernon, who told me more stories than he ever knew.

  Chapter 1

  Alarm Clocks Come in All Shapes and Sizes

  My first jailbreak began when a coarse-toothed mechanic’s file crashed through the window of the Deeper Harbour Police Station at two in the morning. The file bounced three or four times before clattering to a halt among a scatter of shattered glass. The file spun a little and came to rest, like a compass needle pointing somewhere far off the edge of the map. Looking back from right here and right now I believe I would like to start this story right then—three days after I had just turned fourteen—spending my birthday in jail.

  My name is Roland Diefenbaker McTavish. I don’t know what Dad was thinking when he gave me the middle name Diefenbaker, but I bet you he was giggling when he did it. That’s how it goes when you’re a kid. You really don’t have much say in what happens to you, and your parents usually laugh at you if you think you do.

  As for the file flying through the window—well, I guess it was time to wake up.

  “Hsssst,” a voice whispered from outside the broken window.

  I shook the pillow feathers out of my ear-holes and squoodged the sleep-sand out of my eyeballs with the sides of my fists.

  “Hsssst.”

  What was that noise?

  “Hsssst.”

  Either my ears had sprung a long, slow leak or I was about to be broken out of jail by the world’s largest boa constrictor.

  “Hsssst.”

  “If you’re trying to whistle, take the soda crackers out of your mouth,” I suggested, “because all of this hssssting is beginning to royally hsssst me off.”

  “Roland, it’s me,” Dulsie whispered.

  I knew it was her. Who else was going to wake me up from a sound sleep to break me out of my jail cell if it wasn’t Dulsie Jane Boudreau?

  “Are you awake?” Dulsie asked.

  “I am now.”

  I swung my feet off of my cot and the rest of me followed. I was wearing a pair of jeans that stank and stood up with me as if I’d been wearing them for three days straight—which I had.

  Dad wasn’t all that big on doing laundry.

  “Hurry up,” Dulsie said. “I don’t want your dad to catch us.”

  “Dad’s on patrol,” I said, which meant he’d gone down the street and opened the back door to Nora’s Diner to make himself a deep-fried grilled cheese sandwich, his favourite midnight snack. Dad had eaten a lot of sandwiches in the two years since he and Mom had decided that getting almost-divorced was the best way to stay sort-of friendly. “He won’t be back for a while.”

  There wasn’t exactly what you’d call a criminal element here in Deeper Harbour. In fact, the last big crime wave had involved a dropped potato chip bag, an unlicensed Labrador retriever, and somebody spitting bubblegum onto the sidewalk.

  “Did you have to break the window?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t my idea,” Dulsie said. “Blame your granddad.”

  Dulsie didn’t need to be afraid of what Dad would do about the broken window. That was strictly my problem. Even if I had a video of Dulsie flinging that file through the window, along with her fingerprints and enough DNA to spell the word “and” about ten thousand times or so, I’d still wind up being blamed.

  That’s just how things roll here in Deeper Harbour.

  “I broke the window,” Granddad Angus confessed from the shadows. “Now stand back. I’m going to kick down this door.”

  That figured. Aside from Dulsie, my granddad was the most likely person to be staging my first ever jailbreak. The two of them were my very best friends and they drove me crazy as only best friends can.

  “Don’t break the door,” I said. “I’ll be in enough trouble for the window.”

  I pulled on my t-shirt, which was a little cleaner than my jeans—but not much. I stepped into my running shoes and worked my feet down through the double knots before making my getaway—meaning, I opened the cell door, which Dad never locked. The jail cell was where I slept on nights when I wasn’t at home with Mom. Dad’s idea of divorce gave a whole new meaning to the word “custody.”

  As far as I could remember I was the only person who’d spent a night in the cell in years, which should tell you something about Deeper Harbour.

  “Did you really have to break the window?” I asked Granddad Angus. “You could have just tapped on the door and I’d have opened it. I’m sure Dad keeps a key under the doormat.”

  “Breaking the window was much more dramatic,” Granddad Angus explained. “You can’t live the story of your life properly without the occasional addition of a little sudden drama.”

  Granddad Angus had a theory. He believed that life was nothing more than a story we told ourselves. A story that would not reveal its ending until we finally got there and found out just what we had been trying to tell ourselves all along.

  “Hurry up,” Granddad Angus said. “The last thing I need is to be yelled at by Police Chief McTavish.”

  Let me see if I can hack down the family tree so that you can have a better look at each knothole and twig.

  Police Chief McTavish is my dad. That makes me his son, which is what he usually calls me. Granddad Angus is my dad’s dad, and I’m the one at the end—mostly stuck in the middle.

  Have you got that straight?

  I opened the outside door. The first thing I saw was Granddad Angus, wearing his kilt and his backwards fanny pack, a faded blue t-shirt that read, “Bagpipes Blow, Big Time,” a pair of floppy, red plaid running shoes, and his magic fishing vest of many pockets. All of that and a grin so big and so wide he looked as if he was getting set to tell the entire known universe the single greatest knock-knock joke in history.

  I should tell you a little about Granddad Angus’s magic fishing vest of many pockets. I don’t think the vest is actually magical, but it sure seemed that way. It was battered and old with pockets sewn onto pockets and a few more pockets hidden under pockets that you couldn’t see. The vest was a sort of warm, soft toolbox with armholes, and Granddad Angus had worn it since I could remember. Truthfully, I think Granddad Angus was born wearing it.

  As far as I could tell, Granddad Angus’s magic fishing vest of many po
ckets had nearly everything in it you could dream of and a lot more that you couldn’t. I had seen Granddad Angus pull a jackknife, a twist of twine, a stick of chewing gum, postage stamps, silver dollars, a pocket watch, and a screwdriver out of it. Dad told me that one Christmas Granddad Angus pulled an entire electric train set out of those vest pockets—one car and one piece of track at a time—and I believed it.

  Dulsie was different. Different was the best word I could ever use to describe her. She was wearing black jeans with Hello Kitty patches sewn on each of the legs, a baseball hat with a picture of Happy Bunny on it, and a black t-shirt that read “CATS” underneath a pair of bright yellow cat eyes. She’d painted a mask on her face with greasepaint and streaked a set of whiskers on both sides of her nose.

  “So what are you supposed to be today?” I asked, because I knew she wanted to be asked.

  Dulsie wanted a real tattoo real bad, only she couldn’t afford one. Also, there wasn’t a tattoo shop in town. Also, her dad wouldn’t let her get a for-real tattoo over his for-real dead body—and so far he looked pretty healthy to me.

  So Dulsie invented the today tattoo.

  Every morning she painted a new design on her face or her arms or anywhere else she decided. Every night she washed it off in the shower and most likely lay awake half the night dreaming up her next today tattoo just in time for tomorrow.

  “I’m a cat burglar. Get it?” she said.

  I got it, and I thought she looked a little goofy and way too kiddish in her cat burglar makeup and too-big t-shirt, but I told her she looked pretty cool—which is a word that nobody but my dad ever says anymore. I caught that word from Dad like you might catch a case of the measles.

  I lied to Dulsie about being cool because she was my best friend. Dulsie hugged me thanks. Being fourteen, I usually hated being hugged by girls, but lately Dulsie’s hugs hadn’t felt quite as bad. I knew that her whiskers and mask were probably smearing off on my shirt, but like I said, my shirt was dirty to begin with.

  “We’re breaking you out of jail whether you like it or not,” Dulsie told me.

  Dulsie was Deeper Harbour’s first and only punk-goth-freakazoid. At least, that’s what she called herself. I didn’t know exactly what a punk-goth-freakazoid was, but whatever it was, Dulsie was definitely one of them. She dressed in denim and leather and bike chains, her hair usually looked as if she had washed it in a box of crayons, and every morning brought a new today tattoo.

  I wouldn’t tell her this, but I think Dulsie liked her paint more than she would a for-real tattoo. You see, you can change paint and you can’t change a tattoo, and change was absolutely unpredictable—just like Dulsie.

  “I don’t see why you’re going to all this trouble anyway,” I said.

  “You’ve been moping,” Granddad Angus said.

  “I have not.”

  Dulsie nodded, agreeing with Granddad Angus. Didn’t I hate it when my two best friends ganged up on me like this—which they usually did.

  “You have been moping. I recognize a case of mid-summer mope. It’s utterly unmistakable and the best cure for a mope is to get up and do something,” Dulsie said. “So come on, let’s get busy and get doing. Your granddad has a plan.”

  There was no point in arguing. The window was broken and so was my sleep. Besides, they were right. I had been moping. I stepped over the broken window glass, which crunched like a carpet of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. I told myself not to worry about the window.

  What was the worst thing Dad could do?

  Lock me in jail?

  “Better grab that file,” Dulsie said. “I wouldn’t want your dad CSI-ing that for evidence.”

  Now I didn’t think Dad could spell CSI if you wrote it out for him in big, loud, capital letters, but I was too tired to argue. I hadn’t looked at the alarm clock, but I knew by now it said two-thirty in the morning.

  Time is funny like that.

  It’ll run out and run over and run away on you whether you’re looking at it or not.

  Towns are built that way, too.

  Sometimes, so are people.

  Chapter 2

  Smashing Pumpkins

  Chud-chudda-chuck-chudda.

  Fifteen minutes later, the three of us stood in Molly Winter’s prize-winning pumpkin patch using a gigantic two-handed antique bucksaw to cut down the pole that was holding up Molly’s laundry line. Actually, antique wasn’t an old enough word. The saw looked nearly freaking prehistoric.

  “This’ll fix her for sure,” Dulsie said. “That petrified old she-bat.”

  Molly was our school librarian. She was a large, frumpy woman who wore dresses that might once have been tents. As far as I could tell, Molly had been gifted with the magic ability to find whatever book you were looking for, even if you didn’t know what you were looking for.

  Chud-chudda-chuck-chudda.

  I didn’t have any particular grudge against Molly or her clothesline pole, but Dulsie sure did. You see, Molly had told Dulsie she couldn’t come into the library painted the way she was, which at the time was a chessboard pattern, complete with a pair of plastic pawns she had tied to her ears with string. Getting her ears pierced was another one of those over-my-dead-body rules of her dad’s.

  “Well, how would you like to see me painted?” Dulsie had asked Molly, which went over like a baked-bean bugle-fart.

  Chud-chudda-chuck-chudda.

  The saw blade chudded, chucked, chattered, and bounced at first, skipping over the wood grain instead of cutting straight through it, until the teeth finally sank into the deeper timber and the cut began to properly take.

  “Come on to her, boy,” Granddad Angus prompted. “Muckle onto this saw good and proper.”

  There were days when Granddad Angus needed subtitles.

  There were days when all the subtitles in China couldn’t help.

  Granddad Angus almost never said anything that didn’t mean something else. The man talked in code. When he said, “come on to her,” he really meant “bear down hard,” which was just another way of saying “muckle onto this,” which was another way of saying “get cracking and come a daisy onto her.”

  Have you got that straight?

  Me neither.

  “Are you sure this saw is sharp enough?” I asked.

  “Sure as glue,” Granddad Angus said. “I spent the last week setting the teeth on this old misery whip to the perfect angle. This saw will cut a thin fog from the broad edge of a cloudy morning.”

  “You’re not cutting fog,” Dulsie pointed out. “You’re cutting down a clothesline pole.”

  I took the opportunity to point out that some people—namely, my dad—might look at what we were doing as an act of criminal vandalism.

  “You’re both wrong. What we’re doing is having an adventure,” Granddad Angus replied. “And adventure is a long-winded way of saying fun.”

  “So are we having fun yet?” I asked.

  “Fun is what you make of it. We’re not cutting down a clothesline pole. We are freeing up a caber that has been disguised all these years as a laundry accessory.”

  A caber is a tree trunk, as big and as tall as a telephone pole, that is meant to be run with and thrown end over end as a test of strength. If you ever figure out why someone would want to throw a telephone pole, let me know. I just don’t get it.

  “If you say so,” I replied, still not convinced.

  “We are what we are until we become something else,” Granddad Angus explained patiently. “That is the magic of evolution, time, and change. This pole used to be a Jack pine until someone cut it down. We’re just freeing a caber that’s spent a lifetime trapped inside a clothesline pole that used to be a Jack pine.”

  I was sure what Granddad Angus was saying made perfect sense in some alternate universe, but I still didn’t get it—and I didn’t really
need to. He was my Granddad Angus and my very best friend and I would do just what he asked me to.

  “Let’s get to the timbering,” he said. “Lean on your end of the saw and I’ll haul on mine. Dulsie, you keep watch. If this pole falls on us and kills us both dead, it’ll be your job to bury our remains under one of these pumpkins.”

  So I leaned and he hauled and I let him pull me along. I stopped arguing and got into the spirit of the thing and before too long that old saw stopped chucking and chudding and settled into a groove.

  I’m not saying the cutting was smooth or consistent, you understand. The fact was, that old saw sounded like an asthmatic bulldog working out a case of terminal lockjaw on an arthritic mailman’s ankle bone. I couldn’t believe Molly Winter could sleep through a racket that was ten times worse than bagpipes, scalded cats, and a snowplow scraping down a frozen gravel road.

  All at once the pole gave way to gravity and came crashing straight down. Granddad Angus dropped the saw and caught the pole with both of his palms, and ran backwards, hand-over-handing the caber down to the dirt—at least until he tripped over me.

  I hadn’t planned on tripping Granddad Angus. I was too busy trying to duck down and get out of the way of that two-hundred-pound, timber-tumbling, clothesline-pole people-squasher to make any kind of plan. Fortunately, the pole missed both of us and broke its fall on Molly Winter’s prize-winning pumpkin patch, which, given the mess we’d made, probably wasn’t winning too many prizes this year.

  “What a mess,” I said, staring at a dozen or so freshly flattened jack-o-pancakes.

  “Those pumpkins look more like squash, right now,” Granddad Angus replied, thoughtfully stroking the salt and pepper of his beard.

  “I’m going to get blamed for this, too,” I predicted.

  “Me too,” Dulsie said, looking over her shoulder towards Molly’s darkened house. “I hope my dad doesn’t get too mad at me.”

  “There’s no need to blame anyone,” Granddad Angus said. “Squint properly and you’ll see this is nothing more than a freshly planted field of Nova Scotia Jack pine pumpkins. Come next year, a newborn Jack pine will shoot up from that spot, sprouting limbs full of fat orange pumpkins so big and so round and so orange that the coyotes will howl every night thinking that they’re staring up at a tree full of full moon.”