Fishboy Page 14

  Lonny’s rift with the cook began to widen the day after our first supper, when the cook served us seven-times-seven soup made from the sour leftovers, the starter stock being a wad of snot and a rotten toe. The things he added included the ruined shark steaks, a package of freeze-dried custard, a quart of vinegar, the last of my garden gourds, a barrel of gruel, and a turnip he found in a bedpan. I stirred the pot and scraped the muck off the bottom so it would not burn. The cook wrote his poetry. I saw that I was learning how to cook.

  Horse latitudes, said the cook again, and he tinked his cheap pen against his chin.

  At noon we hit an honest slick of horses. A herd of gnarled-hooved and spotted ponies floated around us, their bloated bellies torn open by sea vultures, eels spinning in their entrails. John said a becalmed horse ship would run out of hay and fresh water and throw the ponies over. The sea vultures scrawed around us and John made me stay in the galley so I would not be carried off. We shut all the portholes and stuffed gas-soaked rags around the vents against the stench.

  The cook wrote down to his wife There is no bird what not calls your name to me, There is no breeze that you are not fresh upon. We gagged and listened to the featherings and flappings of the giant vultures on our deck, the vultures splattering the deck with equine droppings and regurgitated horseflesh.

  Lonny had been right about the two men shackled together in the prison aquarium not making it through the night. The next morning one was floating in the lifeboat Lonny had filled with seawater, the man still shackled to his ruby-eating partner who sat shatter-eyed on the bottom, his skin turning to soft moon, his lips clung with bubbles. John drew one of Lonny’s axes and severed the dead man’s arm, then pulled it through the shackle. For a moment I thought of putting the dead arm in the cook’s locker as a joke but that thought passed. We wrapped the dead one-armed convict in a canvas shroud and put one of Mr. Watt’s ballast stones at his feet. Just before we were going to say a little prayer over him and drop him over the side, his moon-skinned partner climbed out of the lifeboat. His skin was so thin in places that he looked like a cousin of Mr. Watt’s. His most amazing aspect was not the purple and blue of his organs but the red ruby still stuck in his gut, a gem so fine that it seemed to pulse when the sun struck its facets, and it made it seem that the man’s heart had fallen from his chest and beat in his bowels.

  His skin dissolving, empty shackle dangling from his wrist, the ruby eater gathered up his shrouded partner and stood on the rail. He started to turn around to face us, as if he were going to make some pronouncement before he leapt, but the long-tormented Idiot strode forward and kicked them both over the side.

  Horse latitudes, and the cook tinked his pen against his chin.

  In the horse latitudes I stood on the oven stirring the soup with the boat paddle spoon, my legs braced against the screen door springs that the cook had secured the pot handles to the stove’s top with. I stood trying not to splatter anything on my sharkskin shirt and my sharkskin pants and my sharkskin jacket that John had cut for me from the skin of the carcass that still flapped as a canopy over our deck. Already I had ruined the knees of the pants scrubbing the galley floor, and my sharkskin cap with the sharktooth decoration on the front had fallen into the soup and was another secret ingredient in the seven-times-seven soup. It was the adding of these secret ingredients that I was certain was condemning me to learn to cook. It was also leading to the widening rift between Lonny and the cook. The cook had told me to get some flour, so I took down the sifter and also the wooden mallet used to pound out the flesh of salted meat. I opened the dry locker, and there was the rat in the flour. SO! he said, and before he could tell me not to fuck with him I flattened his rat head with the mallet so hard that his legs pointed in all true directions, true north, south, east, and west. I picked up Mr. Rat by the tail and Mr. Rat became a seven-times-seven secret soup ingredient too.

  That afternoon I stood on the stove and stirred the soup, stirred the soup, scraping the muck off the bottom so it would not burn. I turned the stove burner down; the galley was stifling with us all in there waiting for the horse stench to pass, waiting for the sea vultures to leave.

  In the corner, Lonny had started teaching the Idiot his knots. Lonny had been leaving me alone, and I was glad for it but a little jealous of the Idiot too. Lonny had started remarking what a fine gentleman the Idiot was, and Lonny began to teach him his knots. The very first knot had been stumping the Idiot for days. Lonny said an easy way to remember how to tie a bowline was to make a loop and with the free end say The rabbit comes out of the hole, goes around the tree, and then goes back into the hole. Every time he handed the piece of rope to the Idiot and said Remember the rabbit, the Idiot would hold the soft rope to his neck and sob. What an idiot, said Lonny finally.

  John was spending time in the wheelhouse with the blind Mr. Watt. They would listen to what they called the comedy channel on the radio together and I could hear them laughing. The cook sat at the galley table, making silent words with his lips as he wrote in his book. Pony waves breaking, In a neigh of frolic, Tails of spray, Manes of foam, Horse latitudes, he said, tinking, tinking.

  I helped the cook ladle up the seven-times-seven soup for dinner. We all ate at the galley table, me, John, Lonny, the Idiot, and up from the depths, still smoking and complaining about the net’s drag on the engines, Black Master Chief Harold. The cook always picked up his rusty meat cleaver whenever the bolts on the engine room hatch blew open.

  The cook ate standing near the sink, and at about his third spoonful he started hawking, and Lonny threw himself back in his seat and said Oh for the love of fucking god, and the cook hawked and hawked, but this was not the hawk of his cigarette smoke or the hawk of something hung in his chest, this was the hawk of something caught in his throat, and just as Lonny was about to seize the cook, the cook spit something into the sink, and I am sure he only spit into the sink instead of the pot because other people were present. He dug around in his spit with his finger and held up a small bone hardly an inch long and looked at it. I knew a rat bone when I saw one and I think so did the cook. He turned and looked at me and I dug my spoon a little less deep in my bowl for another bite.

  After supper John stood at the porthole. The sea vultures had left without our noticing it, and now in the darkening sky golden lightning pitchforked in the distance. I told you the weather was about to break, John said to Lonny. After the men left to hose the vulture leavings from the deck the cook and I cleared the galley table. As I poured the barely eaten bowls of soup back into the pot, the cook stood looking out the porthole. A black horse sky, he said.

  I took a bowl of soup up to the wheelhouse for Mr. Watt. He was still listening to the comedy channel. Come in, come in, Fishboy, I can tell it’s you by the smell of that sharkskin suit.

  I stayed for a while and listened to the radio. It was mainly voices and static, voices overlapping, some that sounded afraid and some outright shouting in distress. There were SOS calls, some saying they had lost their mast, some saying they had lost their rudder, some saying they were going down altogether. There were pleas for help, pleas for mercy, pleas for mothers and sweethearts, for other ships and other men, and behind the voices I could hear wind ripping and thunder rumbling and the static of lightning striking the water.

  Mr. Watt answered each call holding his goopy microphone, Mr. Watt saying Hang on, help is on the way! or Have faith, we are your rescue! or We are the light and the way, have faith! and at the end of every one of his transmissions the weary voices would answer back Bless you’s, and Thank Gods! and Mr. Watt laughed and said Isn’t it rich? Things could always be worse!

  I went aloft with a bowl of soup for Ira Dench. The sea vultures had torn out his eyes and still he said he saw a rogue wave coming. I climbed past him and sat in the foul crow’s nest to watch the rest of the dark descend upon us. I was as lonely as a sparrow on a rooftop.

  The thing that swam into our net during the storm left us with no
steerage, the thing’s swimming strength having pulled our ship over, so that we were running on our side. We had been riding out an errant thunderhead in the galley when we all felt the net yank at the ship, then yank at us again until the pull became steady and in a slow way everything teetered and slipped off everything else it had been resting on. Knives on the pegboard dove at us like a carnival trick and the plate lockers swung open their bay doors and bombed us with crockery. It was worse for the cook because the soup slid off the stove and the broth splashed hot around our legs, but the dregs, the clumps of soup matter that had clung to the bottom beyond the reach of my boat paddle spoon, fell thickly and slid across the galley table which was upending as we held on to it, and we saw it all, the rat skeleton remains, the bootlaces, the small shark cartilages from when John had hung a pregnant shark from a rope and had broken her open with one blow—a primordial piñata, the cook had said—the unborn thrown swimming in the bubbling broth, the toe joint on the fetish string, many things I could not tell what they were even though I had probably put them in. But what Lonny saw that set him off was the honeycombed spans of coagulated hawk he knew had come from the coughing cook, and even as the ship listed from the yanking of the net, Lonny made a grab at the cook’s Big Miss Magine—contoured form saying The fucking bastard has been spitting into the soup all along!

  Lonny fired the cutting torch after chasing the cook out the rotating portal of the aft cabin door. We were knee-deep in seawater and sideways as the thing that had swam into our wide net swam harder to get away from us. Lonny fired the cutting torch to cut loose the cable between our ship and the net so that the cookbutchering field of the aft deck would be level. John doused the cutting torch twice, pinching it like a candle flame telling Lonny that they may have netted the largest shark they had ever netted before. Lonny dropped the cutting torch and took up one of his axes which slid past him as the ship rolled farther on its side. He had caught a glimpse of the cook’s Big Miss Magine dress going into the tool-shed. Spitting in the soup, he said. He said it was unbearable.

  Unsinkable is what Black Master Chief Harold said we were not when he came up from the engine room. He said the engine room had flooded and the boilers were out. Behind the master chief the fire lackey and the boiler devil were bringing up the chief’s restored motorcycle suspended between them on a pole. The foot pegs were catching in the doorway. Put it in the large lifeboat, Black Master Chief Harold told them.

  The cable running down to the net shuddered as the big thing swam higher in our net pulling us farther over. Our smokestacks were tipping and Ira Dench, lashed to the mast, was about to drown in the tops of some very small waves.

  This is the biggest shark I have ever caught, said John.

  Black Master Chief Harold said that was all well and good, but that belowdecks it was hopeless. I’m getting the boys to put my bike in a boat and we’ll be off, said the master chief.

  At that moment the sun freed itself from the pack of storm-cloud stragglers and its rays threw deep shadows around us. The master chief and his crew put the bike in the crazily leaning lifeboat, and Lonny began to chop down the door to the toolshed. John watched for the fish that was pulling us as it began to surface. Lonny stopped his chopping to watch as the big fish first surfaced a huge black shark snout, blowing foam, angry with air, heaving and churning the water white until the fish’s length, which was about ten of our own, broke out onto the surface. Its dorsal fin had a number on it and fumes escaped its gills and vents.

  I smell atomic smoke! said Black Master Chief Harold.

  Our cable went slack as the big fish slowed, and slowly our ship began to right itself. Ira Dench swept skyward again out of the drowning wave, and the Idiot now head down in a deck plate that had just been a porthole. The fire lackey and the boiler devil were pinned under the lifeboat and the master chief scrambled astern to snatch John’s spyglass.

  Our net seems to have fouled their propeller, said the black master chief.

  This is the largest shark I have ever caught, said John.

  Good gracious! said the master chief. It seems they’ve caught fire! he said.

  I could see it, men opening hatches on the back of the giant steel fish, men climbing out, luminous smoke rushing their backs.

  John rang our haul-back siren. Haul back! Haul back! he said. Black Master Chief Harold, prepare to haul in the net! he said.

  Black Master Chief Harold supposed that if we hand-pumped the bilges and found some dry wood for the old number-three boiler, he supposed he could get the winches to turn a little bit. Besides, he said, I’d like to get a look at their ark engine.

  By dark with the Idiot and myself on the hand pumps, the engine room was only waist-deep and the number-three boiler had fired. Lonny engaged the winches and John threaded aboard the cable with a pike, pulling along lengths of it bare-handed. Our ship did not haul in the net as much as we drew ourselves closer to the big fish. We could see it better now; in the dark the fish had turned on a great spotlight, an electric eye illuminating itself as men worked with cutting tools and torches to free the fish’s tail from our large net. Forward on the fish men still climbed from the skin followed by a kind of smoke that glowed in the sky, and we watched, as we neared, men in white suits being laid in rows on the forward snout, and even from our distance I could see that they had dim blue halos, and I pointed this out to John and asked him if those men were angels.

  John kept saying this was the largest fish he had ever caught in his entire life.

  About an hour’s cable length away there was a sharp concussive blast belowdecks and our number-three boiler coughed a ball of fire that rolled from our stack and lit our place in the sea. The electric eye of the great fish followed the route of our cable from where it was wrapped around its own rudder back to our winches. Bullets began to swarm around our heads like bees until the riflemen found their range, and then slugs sprayed and splattered around us.

  A real fighting fish, John said. He sent Lonny to gather his axes and the grappling gear. I was to fetch a mattress to rip stuffing from to plug bullet holes, and find some gunpowder for disinfectant, John saying that if he got shot up a lot not to put too much stuffing in the bullet holes of his flesh and not to put too much powder in either to cauterize, saying Remember, Lonny, that fellow once they stuffed with a bad gut wound, and they packed him with stuffing and a horn of powder to sear shut the wound, and when the cabin boy lit him off it was better than Celebration Day, and people on shore thought it was some sort of fireworks display. Lonny said that was funny all right, and Lonny began remembering the time they put dynamite in the firewood at that lady’s house and John said they should hurry along, he still had his hair and nails to do.

  I helped John do his hair, weaving thick wet fuses in his beard and head, and then I fetched a rasp, a planer, and a rattail file so John could put an edge on his fingernails. In the hour before sunrise he lit the fuses, for fierceness, he said, and practiced growling until he was hoarse.

  The sun gathered itself to climb over the horizon and we were ready. We waited. As we were struck by the dawn we saw the big iron fish foundering dead in the water, its hatches sprung, that spooky smoke thinning from its scuppers and scales. We watched as the last of its crewmen dropped themselves into a black rubber raft to join a small flotilla of black rubber rafts that drifted off into the distance and over the horizon. John sounded our haul-back siren, and the noise roused the men in the last black rubber raft. They lifted their sick, blue-haloed heads and shook their dimly glowing fists at us. Either their weakness or their fear of puncture kept their pistols holstered and their throwing knives sheathed, and unsheathed here came the bladder dagger in the teeth of the naked cook as he climbed over the rail, just as Lonny had put down his axes to finish hauling back the net. The cook had left his Big Miss Magine dress in the toolshed to fool Lonny and had pulled himself hand over hand along the outside rail hull and had hidden in the sea grass that grew along the waterline of our ship
like a skirt. Here came the cook naked and covered with red sores, his bladder dagger unsheathed and clenched in his teeth, and there stood Lonny, as there stood us all, being boarded by our own cook, Lonny unprepared and caught unawares as the unsheathed blade was pulled by the cook from the cook’s mouth and thrown with a skill that wheeled the sharpened steel through the air with Lonny the only thing in the way of where it would go, and Lonny caught the sharpened steel like a man who has cut and killed with sharpened steel before, and Lonny caught the dagger from the air, snatching it out of space, and hardly had the dagger left the cook’s hand when Lonny snatched the knife from the air and in a small imitation of his own ax-spinning windmill trick, Lonny spun the thing back at the cook who was still seeing the image of the knife going away when the knife returned to bury deep between the eyes that now no longer saw.

  Turnabout’s fair play, said John.

  As we looked at his nakedness before stuffing him into the pot and fastening the lid with screen door springs we saw that the cook’s body was covered with sores, not the kind that he had come aboard with, not the bee stings, not the wasp and hornet stings, but fresh broken-skin sores, red and runny, that after careful scrutiny John and Lonny both leapt back and said Pox! Lonny saying And he spit in the soup! I should have killed him sooner! God gives us food and the Devil gives us cooks! And clamping down the lid and stretching the fastenings closed, John dropped the pot depth-charge-like over the rail, forgetting to puncture or weight it, and it floated like a barrel. Lonny gave it a blast with the musket from the crow’s nest which only blew the lid off so that once more we had to consider the cook’s fat face, the tongue-puffed cheeks, the eyeballs rolled dagger-ward.

  John and Lonny engaged the growling winches that drew in the last of the net cable, our ship easing along the tail of the big iron fish. John fanned the lit fuses in his beard, effective to frighten knaves and the learned alike, he said. He cinched his muleskin, tossed the grappling hooks, and stepped aboard the big fish’s spine.