“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.