Fishboy (14 page)

The cook asked me his question after he scooped a sifter of flour and was taking it to the counter to make dough, and I could tell it would be an important question to him that he was trying to ask in a way that made it seem like a small question to ask a small boy.

Are there any men with rubber arms aboard this ship?
he asked me. I did not know if I had heard him right, and then I had to make a list of everybody so far I had seen and try to remember if they had real arms or rubber arms. The cook took my few seconds to answer as an answer, yes, that there was somebody on the ship who wore rubber arms, and he dropped his sifter of flour and shook me by my own arms.
Tell me which one it is
, he said, and this new side of the cook made me worry that there might come a time when he might be split in two if he carried on like this with Lonny, and that made me worry that I would have to be the cook again. I did not want to be the cook again. I wanted to leave this world in whole pieces.

Any evil I had erased from myself pitching in in the galley working and thinking good thoughts about the new cook came back to me when I lied and pointed to the
bolted hatch that led to the engine.
Down there
, I tried to tell him.

Instead of being afraid, the cook seemed relieved and let go of me. He seemed relieved at least to know where a man with rubber arms might come from to get him.
That’s good
, said the cook.
That’s real good. I’ll be waiting for him
.

I didn’t tell the cook there wasn’t any rubber in this world that wouldn’t melt in the infernal engine room. I didn’t tell him a rubber arm couldn’t crank the latches on that heat-swollen hatch.
Stupid cook
, I thought at the man when he went back to making his dough. If my mouth hadn’t been so dry from the fright he gave me I would have spit on the floor.

The cook went back to filling large pots with water and setting them on the stove to boil. He went to the engine room door and tried it, and came around me so that I could see he was thinking of one last thing to say to me, something that would put me in his confidence to help him wait for the rubber-armed man. It was late into the night, and I had known men who were strangers to each other gather at my cartonated encampment just to sit by my cypress-knot and fish-wrapper fire to get in out of the dark and burden each other with things on their mind, things they would never tell anyone in daylight,
things that made them, in the morning, shake off each other like they shook off the frost that had grown on them in the dark before the dawn, avoiding each other, taking separate paths out of the fishhouse lot even when the night before in the camaraderie of the road they had promised to travel together against scavenging animals and maybe even against men like themselves.

The lantern light was low and the galley was lit mainly from the blue flame flowering beneath the pots. The cook sat across the table from me, and I knew he was going to tell me a story about a man with rubber arms, whether it was a true story or not. That did not matter. It only mattered that he wanted to tell it, and was going to tell, and I would listen whether I wanted to or not.

My brother Brune and I are from the north country
, said the cook.
We have been sailors all our lives. Brune spent several years seal hunting. He was first a boat puller, then he was a shooter. I saw him once after a typhoon, our wreckage had washed together in the sea
. Help me,
my brother said. My brother’s arms had been broken by a falling spar. He feared the men on his wreckage would eat him next, that is how things had become
. We are starving here also,
I told my brother. We had lost all our officers and I was only acting captain because I had saved the sextant and was the only one
who knew how to use it to shoot the sun and the north star. The men aboard my wreckage pushed my brother and his cannibals away from us with gaffs and sticks of timber and soon the sea that separated us curved to the sky. I waved to my brother but I did not cry. I had not seen him in sixteen years. He could not raise his broken arms, either to wave to me or to curse me. His eyes were hollow, his mouth hung open, and I felt I could hear his last breaths
.

We had a seer aboard our wreckage. At the time of my brother’s sighting, the seer said
I am afraid you will see your brother again.

The cook paused in his story and rolled a cigarette. Above the hum of our engine I could hear the two-whistle snore of the Idiot outside on the hatch.

The cook lifted the globe from the lantern to light his cigarette. When he leaned into the flame I saw that the pox marks on his face had deepened into scarlet.

In the north country, where Brune and I are from
, said the cook,
every spring when the snows melt, the water fills a basin that warms over a hot place in the earth. The earth begins to steam and the mud is rich and black. The elders believe the mud has great healing properties. Families dig trenches for their elders and bury them up to their faces with shovels, then they scoop out places for themselves. It is very soothing. The elders
feel revitalized and the young men feel potent, the young women feel fertile. Do you understand me so far?
said the cook and I nodded that I did. I did.

Every year in the stand of firs near the basin we have Black Night. The aldermen of the village make a lodge by bending sapling firs and lashing their crowns together. The floor of the lodge is made soft with fresh sprigs and ferns. In the middle of the lodge a fire is kept low, kept low and made smoky by adding green branches
.

One night every year when the black basin has filled with mud and the elders feel revitalized and the young people feel fertile, the married couples of our village take the mudbath together and then enter the lodge. The light is smoky, the floor is soft and sweet, and everyone swims together in the living mud
.

Do you understand?
said the cook and I could only think it must be like when certain fish spin and wriggle in the mud of low tide during a spawning moon. I nodded yes.

All winter
, said the cook, drawing on his cigarette,
all winter when it is bitter cold, the men of our village wait for Black Night. During the three-hour Sunday services in our church, the men study the necks and wrists of the women sitting around them, anything that would tell them who they will be in the dark, and after service
,
leaving church, the men are courtly and bow, shaking the hands of other men’s wives to calculate their weight There are meanings in everyone’s eyes
.

The confusion in my eyes must have betrayed me because the cook said impatiently
Look, Brune looks like the butcher, I resemble the portrait of the mayor hanging in town hall. Our sister looks like her mother. Our village is strong and vital
.

On the afternoon our wreckage parted
, said the cook,
I was certain I would never see my brother again. I was not raised in our church to believe in seers. The seer’s fingers dipped the water while he slept one morning and a large fish pulled him from our raft
.

With the sextant, I was able to sail our breaking-apart raft into a port that had been leveled by the typhoon. The fishing fleet had vanished, the docks were just a few poles leaning in the mud. The only ship at anchor was a slaver just arrived from the wilds. The slaver had lost its first mate overboard in the fringes of the storm. My crew cursed me for delivering them into such a sorry place. I packed away my sextant and signed aboard the slaver. I had little choice
, said the cook.

The cook said that setting sail, he was surprised to see so many black crew members, that there must have been some sort of mutiny. He said that as he set them to work mending the rigging and working the gear, he was
able to tell a difference between the black men who were the sailors and the black men who were cargo below. He said he looked for the difference in their speech and in their look, but where he found it most was in the way they smelled.

Is the smell because of their shipboard diet?
the cook said he asked the captain, and the captain said no, that everyone ate the same basic rations, the same wormy biscuits made into wormy mush by adding rancid water, the same rotting rations of salted horsemeat, although the sailors were allowed more of it. The captain told the cook the difference in smell was where they came from. The captain said the sailors were from the coasts and rivers, crafty water traders, and the human cargo was from the landlocked interiors, from tribes trusting and communal.
If you notice
, the captain said to the cook one night after their dinner,
the sailors still smell of fish and rainwater, while the slaves still smell of game and fruit
.

The captain drank some more wine and offered to show the cook what he meant. The captain opened the door to his large closet and chained inside was a beautiful black woman.
A king’s daughter
, said the captain. The captain said he already had a buyer for her in the next port, a black gentleman who had made a fortune selling his brothers.

There were two, twins
, the captain said to the cook,
but the other refused to eat and died. I had to put her over the side at night through my own porthole. It can’t be known there is a woman on board, especially a beautiful princess. Smell her aroma
, the cook said the captain ordered him.
I believe she has eaten nothing but rose petals her entire life
.

I did not smell rose petals
, said the cook.
She smelled of human terror and of fir trees. It is more like a forest smell
, the cook told the captain, and the captain said that was only his closet, lined with cedar. The cook said that after the captain had revealed his secret to him, he became suspicious of the cook and took away his sextant.

Once
, said the cook,
late on a dogwatch, I was relieving myself over the rail and turned just as the captain was coming up quickly behind me. The captain tucked his arms back into the folds of his greatcoat. It was clear that he had intended to push me over, but I had smelled his approach
. We
were entering the northern latitudes and the nights were getting cold, and he had taken his greatcoat out of his large closet. In the instant of my last dribble over the rail I had first gleaned homesickness then lust from the waft of cedar, then the smell of terror that turned me around; the scent of the woman on his greatcoat saved my life
.

The cook paused in his story again as men do when
they are recounting how close a life was to becoming lost, and he paused the proper length of time owed to him in his storytelling since the life nearly lost had been his own.

The cook rolled another cigarette and continued his story.

We met great floes of ice entering the northern latitudes and posted two lookouts in the bowsprits with lanterns at night, our sails reefed. We were able to sail slowly into a port that was within several days’ journey of my home village. I intended to visit my parents after we had unloaded our miserable cargo and had been paid
.

I did not recognize the old port I had shipped out of as a boy. There were tall buildings in the city, and there were warehouses and landings on the opposite shore of the river where once there had been just forest. A harbor clerk was rowed out to us and we were taxed. It took two days for a slip to become open for us. When I was finally ashore, the streets smelled of exhaust and manure and hot grease
.

My captain was less suspicious of me when we were being paid although he gave me a short share. The black princess had already been put ashore in a trunk. After I was paid I tried to go back aboard to reclaim my sextant but a sentry from the shipping company with a musket held me off at the gangway
.

My earnings would have lasted little longer than a week in the city, so I planned to return home as soon as I could. I took a cheap room near the wharves to rest before beginning my walk home the next day. The cheapest sleeping pit I could find was in the back of a warehouse near the slave quarter. I was sick ashore, still pitching with the roll of the ocean. I think I had a fever. I could not erase the image of the black princess from my mind. There was no heat in the sleeping pit, and I found myself wandering the slave quarter. I went into an auction house where it was warm just as the bidding began
.

I bought a seat in the cheapest section of the house, in the third tier where sailors and peasants and pimps sat, men hoping to buy a field hand or a whore or an apprentice from the affordable sick and diseased lots of slaves paraded through the platforms below us. It was in the third tier that I saw an old mate of mine bidding on a cabin boy for his captain. It was in the third tier that I saw my brother Brune
.

I leaned back on the bench before he could see me. I wanted to look at him, the butcher’s son from my mother. My brother, his armless shirtsleeves pinned to his breast so like wings that in my feverish thoughts I expected talons at his feet. His face was red from years at sea and his scalp was sun-spotted yellow. His scurvy mouth was
empty of teeth, and he was howling, keeping the other bidders a width away on the bench. I saw that he was being watched from the aisle by a large purser’s bailiff
.

When my brother caught me looking at him he raged at me
. Brother! Brother! You bastard!
he said until a large part of the third tier looked at me so that I had to go over to my brother to quiet him
. Look what you did to me!
he said, spitting froth
. You left me, and now look!

I could not deny what he said. His mates aboard the wreckage had refused to set his broken arms and they had become gangrenous, and had been amputated by the surgeon on the frigate that had rescued them from the water
.

You owe me!
shouted my brother into my face
.

Yes, yes, quiet,
I told him. The bidding on the auction floor was continuing
.