A week or two later, when Vince comes in to the café, he is still wearing his fishing clothes. Many faces turn toward his dirty gold-colored overalls and his worn woolen shirt.
“Gee, Vince, you’re smelling up the place,” Linda says, pouring him coffee, all of them accustomed to the smell of fishing boats. “And now you’re using too much sugar in your coffee.”
He pays no attention. “Ruth, I’ll be damned, but I found your old Trophy. Way out there. Way out.” Vince chewed a toothpick and squinted, but there was a small wave of happiness across his face, being able to tell Ruth this, for not only had her boat been stolen, it was about damned time something good happened for her.
“No way, Vince.” Ruth is afraid to even hope. She thought the Marco Polo would be far north by now. “Where is it?”
“I’ll take you there. It’s about seventy-eight degrees northwest and I’ve got it plotted. Pretty far out, though.”
He’s already up and so is Ruth.
“But there’s one thing,” he says as they leave the café. “I saw an octopus climbing down out of it as I approached. I said to myself how strange it was, because it was so large and everyone knows how they hate boats, and yet I swear it looked straight at me like it wanted to be seen.”
“Kind of like the toads,” Linda says, overhearing as the two leave.
He talks all the way to the marina. “It was the eeriest thing.” And then there is the noise of the boat starting and they head out, cutting straight through the water. Ruth stands in the spray, looking for sea life. She knows the sea. She thinks of it as time and right now it all seems timeless, as if she can pass through years to the past. As she reaches her father’s old boat, so cared-for, she feels as if no time has ever passed, that she has moved backward.
It looks clean, tidier than Ruth ever left it. She walks through it, feeling strange to be in it again. Ghostly is the word that comes to her, but only because it is such a strange sight out there, alone on the water, no other ships or boat, no rocks jutting out of water, just the blue and white Marco Polo with everything in its place, except Ruth.
Vince sits on a chair as she examines it. Then he decides to look for tentacle tracks. “They’ve got to be here.” He tries the engine with her. “She starts, all right, but I better follow you back, just in case. Strange that someone would just take her and then leave her out here. What do you think they wanted with it?”
Sacrifice, Ruth wants to say, but doesn’t. She does want to stay and touch every last thing, to understand the octopus, all eight legs of it climbing away from the boat left behind by the peculiar, handsome Rain Priest who did, for a time, own the boat. But she must return and go back to her life and get the Marco Polo ready for salmon season. Before long she’ll have it tuned up and full of gas and ready to go out. Still, she looks around lovingly and touches things, the coffeepot, so clean, the bed, so unused. And then, that night, just as she goes to bed once again in her own place, she sees it on her own pillow. The pearl sitting in the middle of it. The pearl that had belonged to the mother of Thomas, the one that had once been left in the cave, according to everyone who told the story.
Ruth tries never to think of Thomas. But still she does. She takes him food, coffee. She checks on him. One day, taking coffee and a kettle of chicken soup, she thinks she will soon say, This ocean is the place of life, damn it! Turn around! And she will start to tear down the wall, using a crowbar, the claw end of a hammer, breaking the wood, pulling out nails. On this day there will be smooth water, a light breeze. After she does all this she will sit down, calm, on the ground, and he will come out and take her in his arms and rock her and tell her that he always carried her picture and someone will drive by with the car radio playing “Ain’t Nobody’s Business But My Own.”
But of course she will never do that.
One day, visiting, she sees he is different. He is clean and awake. He is packing. He has changed his mind about going to DC to see the Wall with his former buddies. He couldn’t say why.
“Thank you for the soup,” he tells her, but that’s all he says.
She wants to ask him, Where are you going? but something about the way he speaks, she understands something. He has made a decision. She is silent.