Fishboy (17 page)

For dinner that night we had grilled shark steaks, oysters on the half-shell with a chopped bean leaf and pepper garnish. Barracuda soup, tuber fruit sliced and fried, seaweed salad, boiled lobster, gourd casserole, thick biscuits, and mule-brain sweetbread cracked from the skull of our ship’s figurehead. To drink the cook had wine, a gallon of methyl alcohol mixed with crushed hackberries.

Have some, Fishboy
, Lonny said and he poured a little wine into a saucer for me. Maybe if someone else had been there Lonny would not have offered me wine. Maybe if John had not been sulking on deck, maybe if the weeping man had not disappeared or if Mr. Watt ever came out of the wheelhouse or if Ira Dench had not lashed himself to the mast, Lonny would not have offered me the wine and I would not have drunk it, but I did drink a little of it. It was worse than sucking a lemon but I liked the way it made me feel. When once while we were eating we heard Ira Dench holler
Rogue wave!
weakly from the mast, Lonny yelled out the porthole
Shut up!
and I stood on the galley table and stuck my head out the porthole and yelled
Shut up!
too.
Have some more wine, Fishboy
, Lonny said and I did.

We three ate, me and Lonny and the Idiot, and the
cook took up the plates as we finished them. The cook gave me bad looks.
Take some soup around to the others
, the cook said to me. He gave me a bucket of soup and a ladle, and a stack of bowls I put on my head like a helmet.

Go away, Fishboy
, John told me when I went to him with the soup.

The water in the lifeboat where the shackled men lay preserving was dark and star-sprinkled. I poured some soup in the water and stirred it with the ladle.

Climbing the mast I spilled most of Ira Dench’s soup.

Could you just pour a bit into my mouth?
he said. His voice was hoarse from crying out
Rogue wave
. I held a little to his lips. There was barely a mouthful and it spilled out. He said he must have tightened himself too tightly to the mast. Behind him his stomach saddle-bagged his spine. I said I would loosen the ropes and he said
NO! Don’t!
He said that would be just when the rogue wave would strike, when he was least prepared. He said just to tighten him up a little and be on my way. I ran my hands around him and found a place where there was some slack and pulled it out, and he thanked me in a stifled voice you could barely hear.

Climbing down the mast I put a step down on a rung before I was ready. I did it just as I was passing the
empty bowl from one hand to the other. And maybe it was because the ship rolled, and maybe it was because I had been drinking a saucer of wine and had forgotten the rule of being aloft: one hand for the ship and one hand for yourself. And maybe the rungs were slick with Ira Dench’s spilled soup and maybe even Ira managed a rope trick, tied up as he was. All I know for sure is that the bowl went backward skyward and I fell forward downward. I tripped on an antenna and spun off a high-wire brace. My fingers for an instant gripped a rain gutter until the rest of my body fell by and snatched me off. I pretty much struck the deck outside the galley face first and it felt like a bowl of salty soup had broken in my mouth.

I remember the cook holding me over the sink as things fell out of my mouth, some teeth, a bit of tongue, a torrent of food soaked in homemade hackberry wine. Between bouts of mouth-washing the cook went over to serve the galley table. Black Master Chief Harold and his boiler devil and fire lackey had smelled food in the vents, and later I wished I had been able to see how the cook acted when the engine room door had blown open, the cook expecting rubber-armed men and getting the charcoaled trio instead. They sat me down beside the black master chief when I seemed better, and I remember he smelled like chimney draft in a rainstorm.

Dazed and maybe even a little drunk as I was, I remember feeling the cook’s popularity spread among the full-stomached men seated at the galley table. They watched the cook clean up the stove, they watched him put the platters and plates into soapy buckets for me to scrub later. His popularity soared when they watched him open his locker atop the oven overhang. They craned their necks to see what the cook had brought in his little leather satchel to hoard for himself, to save himself through the unexpected hungers and scurvy, and everyone saw that the locker was empty except for the little poetry book. There was no potted meat, no sweets, no medicine or mouthwash bottles filled with scotch, not even tobacco, the cook having to pick off the deck the men’s butts to roll his own in tissue. The cook took down the poetry book and when he turned, the men were digging around in their pockets.

Black Master Chief Harold gave the cook a pouch of tobacco, his lackeys gave him matches dipped in wax and rolling papers. The Idiot gave him the rotting toe fetish on the string, and Lonny, teary-eyed with wine and love, stood up unsteadily and drew a fine bladder dagger out of his shirt.

Hey, cook, you want this?
said Lonny, and I think we all wondered if Lonny meant
Where do you want this?
But Lonny handed the blade to the cook handle
first and claimed he had personally stolen it from a church where it had been used to fillet the hearts from virgins.

Thank you
, said the cook. And then the cook in a swirl of Big Miss Magine dress hem spun around and flicked beyond belief in speed the bladder dagger into a tiny target of pine knot in the door of the plate cabinet.

It throws well
, said the cook.
Thanks, thanks a lot
, he said, and then he hawked.

He hawked again, something caught rumbling in his chest.

What!
said Lonny.

Hawk!
hawked the cook.

Oh god
, said Lonny, Lonny retreating from the sound of rattling phlegm, embarrassed by the gift-giving that had tainted the after-eating.

The cook hawked again, leaning shouldered over the sink, shaking his head, smacking his lips.

I can’t stand that noise!
said Lonny.

Hawk!
said the cook.

Spit, then, damn it!
said Lonny. Lonny unhooked an unlit lantern and said he was going out to look at John’s charts before he split something.

The black master chief and his lackeys went below after picking leftovers out of the pot of the next day’s
soup. Out on deck went the Idiot to break apart my coconut boat.

I lay back drunk and dazed in the corner of the galley. I lay back with no gift to give. The cook rolled a cigarette and lit it. He started coughing again, his face red with the effort to bring up what was hung in his chest. He coughed and hawked until he seized the thing up in his throat and sucked it into his mouth. When he spit it out, the thing spun through the air and landed squarely in the pot of the next day’s soup. The cook balled up the rotten toe fetish and threw that in the soup, too. He sat down at the galley table with his poetry book and smoked his cigarette.

Stir the soup
, he said to me.

I climbed up on the stove and stirred the soup with the spoon the size of a boat paddle. I was hoping that stirring soup didn’t count as learning how to cook.

Stir it up, don’t let it burn
, said the cook, and he snapped the pages of his book as he read them.

I
am blind
, said Mr. Watt.

I know
, I said.

Too much sun
, he said.

I put a sharkfish sandwich into his hands.

What is happening?
Mr. Watt asked me, and I told him Lonny was holding a lantern along John’s spine as John lay asleep.

He’s trying to read the charts
, Mr. Watt said. Mr. Watt asked me if Lonny had been drinking and I said yes.
He’ll probably end up burning John with the lantern and there will be all kinds of trouble then. Lead me out on deck
, said Mr. Watt and I put my head under his outstretched hand.

On deck Lonny was carefully blowing crusted sea mud away from John’s tattooed skin revealing patterned islands beneath. When Lonny saw us, he said
Good, Watt, you read this chart I’m lost already
.

I’m blind
, said Mr. Watt.
Isn’t that rich?

No, it ain’t rich
, said Lonny.
How can you get blind when only you can read John’s charts?

I know them by heart anyway
, said Mr. Watt.
Where did we leave off looking the last time?
and Lonny said halfway up the right side of John’s shoulder blade.

That’s a good chart he had tattooed professionally
, Mr. Watt said.

These on his back are the best
, Lonny said.
Some of the ones he did himself on his front are awful
.

John rolled his nakedness on his back and snored a
snore that tornadoed the ragged twists of his beard around his mouth. Lonny was quick to move from the sweep of John’s arm, John swimming away from something in his sleep. The island chain Lonny had been studying broke leagues apart in a continental drift of skin and armpit.

Damn it
, said Lonny.
Do you think we ought to roll him over?
and Mr. Watt said to let him be, that he could recite from memory the whole chart if he sat down and started at the beginning.

Lonny went inside to get his wine and left me holding the lantern by John’s living cartography, the snoring of which fluttered the wind around my face and smelled of low tide. Mr. Watt sat on the hatch in the dark. He said not to get too close to John with the hot lantern, and to stay out of Lonny’s reach when he has been drinking.
I’m finding blindness to be very pleasant, so far
, said Mr. Watt.

Mr. Watt said the story of John’s charts began in the crook of his left thumb and forefinger, and I leaned in with the lantern and found the place.
That was the harbor John shipped out from, then there is a tempest around the wrist. In the tempest his ship’s cargo of whiskey and malt shifted, the liquor spilling from broken plugs
.

And he drank some of it!
said Lonny, Lonny taking
another swig from the methyl hackberry wine. Lonny did not offer me any wine and I was sure it was because Mr. Watt was watching out for me even though Mr. Watt was blind. I would not have wanted any more wine anyway. My head hurt from drinking it before and the pain from falling had made me dizzy and sick. I was so dizzy and sick that I thought I saw things once or twice in the edges of the lantern light. I had turned the lantern low so as not to wake John, and once I thought I saw an angel flapping down to snatch Mr. Watt off the deck but then I saw it was just the flapping edge of the sharkskin canopy.

The spilt malt fouled the fresh water
, said Mr. Watt,
and that brought on a fever
.

Like whiskey flu!
said Lonny. Lonny held the wine jug out to me and put a finger to his lips. I shook my head no.

Up in the elbow crook was the rogue wave they were boarded by
, said Mr. Watt.

Rogue wave!
weakly echoed from the mast.

Is Ira lashed to the mast again?
asked Mr. Watt, and Lonny said no rogue wave had ever boarded the ship in all his years. Lonny said John just had a bad case of whiskey is all.

Mr. Watt said rogue waves steal up on you, worse in the day than in the night, for some reason, Mr. Watt guessing that at night you are always sensing something
out there, coming for you, but in day, in the broad light of day, bright sunny day with no storm not even a distant thunderhead setting down a gray squall like a pachyderm paw, a bright bright sunny day with the earth as ocean, you hear a distant approaching crackle, a thin sound, the only warning of an errant mountain of water moving from continental coast to continental coast, a mountain of water that could have started as a small wave from an iceberg calving at the pole, the dense, still blueness of the arctic water corrupted by an overburdening, a breaking in a glacial mass, and the wave begins, stretches, pulled into its stride by the moon, warmed by the sun, saddled with a cousin monsoon swell, also errant, the two sweeping over atolls that had tamed lesser waves into broken surf and foam, the two waves together building into one wave they say can travel the length of the earth and always its width, said Mr. Watt.

Rogue waves always the worst in the broadest light of day when you hear them crackle behind you just as you reach for a crimping tool to fasten the end of a cotton sack full of shellcut and fillet, the sun on your naked back hot and your face cooled by the frosty smoke of ice in the open hold where your partner is handing down the other last cotton sack you have already crimped closed; a crisp, crackling sound you think for a moment is just a day at the beach, just the sound of surf beginning to tumble and
break, that crackling sound, until you realize you are hundreds of miles from a shore and the horizon is heaping up on you, a sky of beautiful transparent green, and you look up and see a bright shimmering rainbow arcing in the crest of breaking spray taller than twice your mast, and you think
I will soon lose this crimping tool overboard
, and you think
My most merciful God, the hatches are open
, and you think
Soon I must embrace the ship
, and you think
It is not coming for me, it is coming for everyone
, the way the wave came for John and the ship he sailed on with bad whiskey fouling the drinking water, a rogue wave, John said, that he saw throw its leg over the rail like a thief stealing aboard before it collapsed on him and on his shipmates, splintering the decks and crushing the ship, rolling over, John saying his last image he could remember before he was blinded by the brine, the last image he saw so perfectly clearly, was the ship’s hull so split in two like an oyster pried apart, the silvery pearl inside was the propeller still spinning three decks down just before the wave swallowed them and everything into a watery darkness.

Assa bunch of crap
, said Lonny.
John got drunked up and fell overboard, everybody know that
.