The Plover: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

as the Plover, with its deep green paint the color of shadowed cedar groves, and its bright red sailcloth the color of salmon on their way to sex and death.
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    Declan’s buddy, the guy with the daughter who got hit by the kindergarten bus, had lots of names. People called him all sorts of things. People kept giving him new names, for reasons they couldn’t articulate. The easy explanation was the urge to nicknamery, especially from men, who use names as handles and jokes and forms of glancing affection and respect; but women did it too, and more than the pet names lovers give each other. Something about him invited christening, perhaps, in the way that people have the irrepressible urge to name mountains and pets; perhaps naming is a grappling to understand, or a way to assert control, or an attempt to manage mystery; if something has a label, a name, a category, a definition, the beginning of an explanation, it’s not so wild and inchoate anymore, even if the name applied is a total misnomer, like the Pacific Ocean, which isn’t. So Paco, Peco, Polo, Pavel, Placido, Pomo, and Piko he was variously labeled, the only nomenclatural consistency being that initial pop —which is what his daughter had called him, before she stopped speaking, after the bus stop. Popa and Pipa, they had called each other when she was little, and the way she had told the story to her friends in kindergarten, with the absolute conviction of someone who had spent five whole years on this planet and knew the score, was that they gave each other those names when she was little, she used to produce spit-bubbles to make her dad laugh, and he would do the same, the two of them sprawled in the warm country of the quilt, bubbling and snorting and giggling and slobbering, until her mother his wife their hero came in pretending to be annoyed but sometimes brandishing the spit-slurping mop in their faces which only made them laugh all the harder, which was the best time of all because then we would all be tangled up like a big vine on the bed, she would say, those were the best times ever, better than any other times any one ever had, even times that you would think would be the best times ever couldn’t be even half as good as the times we were all laughing and tangled up like a big knot in the big bed in the little house. Those were the best times ever . If you were a brand- new time, she would say, and you wanted to be a great time when you grew up to be an older time, those would be the times you would try to be like. Those were the best times ever .
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    Just after the sun melted into the sea and dusk slid into the boat there was a silence so absolute and profound that Declan sat in the stern to listen. Is it listening if there’s no sound, does that make sense? A great silence is an enormous thing, a positive negative, the full null, he thought. You could actually hear a really deep silence; it was like a held note on a musical scale so big some of the notes didn’t have names yet. The sea was glass, so there was none of the usual lapping and yammering and slapping of water on wood; not a being to be seen, no splish of fish or whir of wing; the engine at rest in its tiny wooden house; even the boat, usually a mansion of creaks and groans and thumps and clanks, of tools falling and freight jostling, of weights shifting with a sigh, of the mast making squeaking love to the cabin, was as silent as an empty crib. He remembered a line from watery old Herman Melville: all profound things and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence, and Silence is the general consecration of the universe. Hmmm. A melvillacious line, that. So very many silences, and kinds of silence: chapels and churches and confessionals, glades and gorges, pregnant pauses and searing lovemaking; the stifling stifled brooding silence just before a thunderstorm unleashes itself wild on the world; the silence of space, the vast of vista; the