Fishboy Read online

  There was no resistance as John and Lonny challenged the open hatches, Black Master Chief Harold directing Lonny to the hatches over where he thought the engine room of the big fish would be. When the way was shown clear, the master chief laid a ladder from our ship onto the skin of the iron fish and climbed across, a two-shot lady pistol in his belt and a crescent wrench stuck in his back pocket. He hauled across his lead-lined suitcase, drew a deep breath, and disappeared down a smoking hatch in the fish’s tail.

  John and Lonny walked forward, climbed the dorsal fin, and descended a ladder out of sight.

  The wind freshened while we waited, me, the Idiot, the boiler devil, and the fire lackey. The wind tipped the large seven-times-seven soup pot in which the cook had been stuffed. We could hear sharks striking at the pot to get at the meal within, their strikes sounding like dull punches on a muted bell. Our ship and the big iron fish hung together by the grappling hooks and lines which tightened and slackened and tightened more as the wind freshened again. The afternoon went on, the sun beginning to beam beyond us, looking way over our shoulders into the distance. The Idiot hid in the small lifeboat, peeking over the side in his sheriff’s-star cap, his nose resting on his hands. I made a nest from the mattress stuffing and dozed, waiting for John and Lonny to reappear; the only signs of their wandering within the huge fish were things they made happen outside it. As they wandered, they pulled levers and turned valves that made hatches open and close, stabilizers creak up and down, water bubble near the bow. Once I heard the grind and click of a dead electric engine.

  I dozed, and I slept until I felt it become much cooler, and I woke up when the sun began to set and the wind began to blow steadily. Cursing came to us, first from Black Master Chief Harold fumbling with his weird luminous luggage up the aft hatch, busted knuckles, knots on his forehead, and no help from the fire lackey and the boiler devil asleep near me. Then there was cursing forward, and the last of the setting sun set on John wiggling through a hatch and bringing up the lifeless form of Lonny behind him.

  Damn god and dogs and goddamn! said John, Lonny adrip in his arms, them both slightly aglow as John brought the body aboard and laid it in the stern.

  John could not believe it as he paced back and forth, ripping the butt ends of the fuses from his beard. I can’t believe it, he said. He said he found the big fish was entirely abandoned forward, and abandoned all the way aft until he passed into a small chamber where a small bald man sat at a table drinking tea, a peculiar knife placed on a plate before him. When John asked the man who he was, the man replied in a language that John did not understand, but the man motioned for John to sit down and have a cup of tea and John did. Then Lonny came up from another direction and he and John asked the man more questions to which they could not understand the answers until it occurred to John that the man was the captain and that he and Lonny were intruding on a ceremony in which the captain would kill himself with the ritual knife and then go down with his fish. John said Lonny, let’s go and come back later when the man is through, and Lonny said Sure, and just as they bid the man farewell and turned their backs on him the small man took up the knife and slipped it into Lonny’s back, pushing it to the hilt so that the point of the blade came out near Lonny’s collarbone.

  I couldn’t believe it! said John. He said that after he finished shredding the small bald man with his fingernails and feeding him his own heart, he broke open the cabinets in the small chamber looking for something to stanch Lonny’s wound with, and he found crocks of food and pots and pans. They weren’t in the captain’s ritual chamber, they were in the galley and the little man was just the cook the crew members had left behind! I couldn’t believe it! John said.

  Mr. Watt had come groping along the rail in the settling darkness. His obvious tear ducts had begun to swell, him hearing Lonny was dead. Even so, he had to turn away when he heard how Lonny had met his end and cough down a snicker, and John looked at Lonny and looked away, a smile wiped from his face, too. The King of Cookbutchery killed by a cook! said John. Poor Lonny, we all said.

  We laid Lonny out on the hatch. I helped John take down the sharkskin canopy that flew over our deck and John spread the skin with two long bin boards. We lashed Lonny to this cross and John bridled this kite with net cable. Lonny was ready to launch.

  In a few tries the wind caught the flapping folds of Lonny’s shark shroud and billowed them out. Lonny and the kite lifted from the deck as John let line roll off the cable drums. Lonny, a little luminous, soared back and forth over us as we said goodbye. The wind that lifted him also parted us from our drifting, sinking prize. Goodbye, Lonny, old friend, said John, his foot on the drum brake easing out more line. God have mercy on your soul, he said.

  John took his foot completely off the drum brake and let all the cable out. Lonny eased higher and higher into the stars. His only hope for heaven, said John as he finally cut the cable.

  On the third day after we had captured the prize fish and lost Lonny, Mr. Watt told me that John’s quaking cough reminded him of a crocodile’s bark. He had heard plenty once, gone inshore on a mail-packet boat to find a doctor. He had caught a ride inshore after they had taken a prize ship that had the governor’s pregnant daughter aboard, in labor. How she cursed her husband, You son of a bitch, goddamn you, knocking me up and so on, and the fellow, he was a gent really, would turn to take a step out of the cabin and the governor’s daughter would sit up in the bunk and say Don’t you DARE leave this cabin, you goddamn so and so, said Mr. Watt, Mr. Watt smiling to remember it, starting to laugh a little and then seized by a similar bout of coughing. We were all coughing, all of us except Black Master Chief Harold, the fire lackey, and the boiler devil, all dead, and John, getting worse. That mail-packet boat overshooting the landing in the dark and running aground, the splash of crocodiles in the water around them, and the way the crocodiles barked, quite like John’s cough now, said Mr. Watt, like a croaking rupture in something large and muscular, and there wasn’t a doctor in the whole country, come to find out. That was a bad business with the governor’s daughter. There’s a whole mapped length of John’s flank we’ll never sail in again. Hung and heads piked is what we’ll get, said Mr. Watt.

  Mr. Watt, as weak as he was, melting like red wax on the deck, was arranging me and the Idiot and a few spare provisions in the small lifeboat, the shakes and chills on us even under the hot glare of the afternoon sun. Shakes and coughs and chills, red blistering poxes, worse-looking on Mr. Watt’s corrupted membranes. The Idiot seemed not to be afflicted, he had not gone down with us into the engine room to see about getting up some power from the new ark engine, down there finding Black Master Chief Harold huddled inside the number-three boiler trying to stave off the shakes, the fire lackey and the boiler devil laid dead about, their skin hot radiant red already, Black Master Chief Harold’s chattering teeth saying he had actually been uncertain about unpacking his lead-lined luminous luggage in front of them, the fire lackey and the boiler devil having tried to cut down a small diesel cylinder casing, the master chief percolating crude heavy water through a teapot, trying to regulate the reactor pressures, he said, the chain reaction series in a line of paint cans, but when it came down to it, said Black Master Chief Harold, him in his engine room lit by the light of the open valise, when it came down to it, he said, even with his mail-order manuals and science magazine articles, he said he really had absolutely no idea of what he was doing, and the damn chilling shakes would not stop, so why didn’t we just drop the whole notion overboard, why didn’t we? There were fresh leaks around the propeller, the bilges were flooding, but the master chief said he would be fit and on deck in time for tea later, just as soon as he warmed up a bit. Please, could we just close the door to the furnace as he crawled inside it on our way out, thank you, and we did.

  Mr. Watt, bare-headed, arranged some flasks of precious fresh water for the Idiot and me and some leftover rotting fish from the hold for us to nibble on. Mr. Watt buttoned up my sharkskin
shirt to its top sharktooth buttonhole. He straightened my sharkskin jacket, creased out the lapels, patted my head with his sticky mucous hands, his own head bare and searing under the sun. With the outbreak of pox, his long fine silver hair had come out in clumps in his brush the night before when he was sitting on the hatch with the rasping John, Mr. Watt startled at first pulling out the strands, then even in the dark I could see the resolve settle over him never to let life see him like that, so that in my satchel under my seat in the lifeboat he put his brush with the letter of his mother’s name on the handle, Mr. Watt letting the evening breeze scatter his silver hair in glittering strands over the water.

  Mr. Watt told me he was sorry the ship had never had a proper doctor aboard, but that really, in civilized countries, when they have the pox, they don’t send doctors to afflicted villages, they send soldiers, and the soldiers surround the village and shoot anyone who tries to leave, and after a few days, when everyone is dead, the soldiers burn the villages, That’s the way it’s done in civilized countries, said Mr. Watt, and Mr. Watt said he thought that was how we had come across the cook, the cook fleeing a pox village with his buckboard, his Negress princess, and their family of griffe children when the rain and landslide caught them and swept the cook to sea, Mr. Watt’s speculation interrupted by another of John’s coughing fits, this one getting John up on his feet, coughing, coughing, trying to clear lungs that could hold days and weeks of air.

  Look away, Fishboy, said the blind Mr. Watt, so I watched where small fish were resting in the shade of the silver raft of Mr. Watt’s hair floating on the ocean.

  In a while we heard the sound of water splashing the deck, and I thought it was because we were sinking, the ocean coming in through the scuppers. When I turned to look, I saw that the sound was coming from John again, John had coughed and coughed and ruptured his lungs, with each breath his heart pumped blood through his nose and mouth, and John would not let Mr. Watt near him to comfort him, John weak and leaning by the rail, the deck awash and slick with his blood, the blood frisky and running in rivulets, pouring out the stern and staining the sea, each breath more blood, and John watched and waited, waited for it to stop, and it did not stop, his beard and chest and the whole world charted on his body flooded with blood, and in the waters around our ship sharks began to cruise, around the stern where the water was reddest, they filtered the blood through their gills and snapped their tails in excitement, the bold ones snuffling the hull and the young ones leaping and plunging, rolling over the bloodstain on their backs like dogs on a spot of scent in grass, and John watched them, and sometimes when his throat filled with black hawk, he summoned it up and spit it in their eye. The hour grew late and I watched and the sharks waited, and still John breathed and bled.

  Don’t shame him by staring, Fishboy, Mr. Watt said to me, You always were one to stare with that loose rolling eye. Mr. Watt began to settle the Idiot into his place in the small lifeboat, the Idiot still managing to step on my broken feet, the Idiot was frightened, holding a blanket poncho and a length of string he kept shoving at Mr. Watt, and I think in Idiot-talk he was saying Rabbit, rabbit, looking for reassurance in a piece of looped string. Mr. Watt collected the Idiot’s toys, the crushed fetish figures and my little broken coconut boat with the red swizzle-stick mast that I saw Mr. Watt had forgotten was my toy first.

  In two ways I saw that Mr. Watt thought that we would never make landfall, would never have rescue. First it was with the oars, Mr. Watt trying to show the Idiot how to fit them in the oarlocks, how to sit in the cross seat, how to dip and pull the grips, but the Idiot pressed the string to Mr. Watt saying Rabbit, rabbit, his excited two-note whistle blowing slick through his bubbling lips, and Mr. Watt stored the oars in the bottom of the lifeboat, shaking his head.

  And then second, as he settled the Idiot, I saw Mr. Watt’s hands touch the sheriff’s star pinned to the peak of the Idiot’s cap, and Mr. Watt took the cap off to remove the incriminating evidence, and the Idiot shrieked and brayed so loudly like a donkey that Mr. Watt said All right, all right, saying it in a way that meant it really wouldn’t matter after all. The Idiot, instantly comforted by his cap back on his head, pushed the string into Mr. Watt’s drippy fingers, saying Rabbit, rabbit, and Mr. Watt carefully bent a right-turned loop and with the free end said The rabbit comes out of the hole, goes around the tree, and back into the hole, a bowline, and the Idiot clapped as Mr. Watt’s eyes rolled upward, Mr. Watt fainting alongside our lifeboat.

  I lifted my head to look at Mr. Watt, and at that moment a shudder struck the water and the sharks I could see turned and shot out in different directions. John, weak, also watched on the stern, staining everything with his blood as he breathed. In the sea of red, rumps of gray came humping toward us, scattering the sharks, bottle-nosed streaks of grace, the dolphins sending the sharks to flee to deeper depths, threatening with their shark-ramming snouts. A way was parted off our stern as if we had a wake, as if our propeller were not frozen in broken engine wreckage. John staggered and bled. He watched and I watched, and in our wake swam a woman, and the woman swam right for us until she was in the water beneath our rail and only John could see her, looking down. He looked down and wept with joy, trying to make words to thank God skyward, but his throat was choked by the racking bloody cough, and he barely had the strength to shed his muleskin cloak and climb the rail, but he did, and he let himself fall into the sea off our stern. I could hear him trying to exclaim and trying to breathe, knowing he still bled, and in their embrace they drifted away a little, and I could see them, I could see the woman and she seemed old, her hair was very gray, and she saw me looking and she smiled at me, and I saw her teeth were like dog’s teeth. She made a way to hold on to John, her arm around his neck in a rescue of embrace, John lying on his naked back in the water breathing blood. I saw as she began to swim away with him that she was not entirely woman, and all I can say is that she was woman where she needed to be woman and something else where she needed to be something else.

  And she started to swim away with John under her arm, leaping dolphins leading, and in the last of John’s face I could see deep rapture, his broken lungs and heart still pumping a trail of red that followed them toward the setting sun, John’s dimming eyes seeing mine, and his arm, the one on which his story began, rose and fell with every wave and powerful stroke his woman put them through, and the way his storied arm rose and fell I did not know if he was beckoning me to follow or just waving goodbye, and weak, I just watched as they bled away from us, the sea deep crimson, the bloody foam coughed from his lungs rising in cumulus tiers towering in the sky, the pink froth brilliant, the warm red stains finally extinguished with the setting sun.

  The sea began to flood our sinking decks. Mr. Watt awoke in the briny chill and stumbled groping for John in the stern. He picked up John’s muleskin wrap, and felt it, saying Poor John, gone to fight one last fish, and I was too weak myself to tell him what I had seen. Mr. Watt put the muleskin around his shoulders, thought differently, and then came and laid it over me in the bottom of the small lifeboat. Mr. Watt pushed the boom over, broke the davits, and cranked our craft into the ocean. I would have put you in the big lifeboat, he said, but Black Master Chief Harold’s damned hobby project is in it and I’m too tired to move a motorcycle tonight. I’ll lower it with Ira Dench in it, and maybe somebody will spot the two boats instead of just the one.

  Mr. Watt kissed my head before he shoved us off, saying May your bowstem break in bulrushes.

  In the dark ocean I could hear the Idiot turning around in his seat in fear, making odd noises, standing up enough to rock the boat, banging me from side to side in the bottom, stepping on my feet and legs. The Idiot quieted briefly when we heard Mr. Watt’s faint voice across the water. We heard Mr. Watt say Come on now, Ira, stop this nonsense, I’m going to put you in the damned boat, don’t fight me, and it must have been just when Mr. Watt untied Ira Dench from the mast that the rogue wave struck us, I heard its curl and
the stars were blanked, and the falling phosphorescent foam lit the Idiot’s bug-eyed upturned face one instant before the wave rushed down upon us, sending us surfing across the sea.

  The rogue wave that carried us was more a carousing straggler, more a careless wanderer borne off the storm front from a few days before, more of a shouldering encouragement than a wall of charging foam. We traveled in its gurgling crest for two days before it lay suddenly spent on the ocean, mingling itself on an upper current, laying itself to rest.

  By then the Idiot had either drunk or spilled the flasks of fresh water Mr. Watt had filled for us without offering me any as I lay sick in the bottom of the lifeboat. When it was cool in the evening he took my muleskin. Unable to tie it around his waist, he draped it forgotten on a gunwale and it was soon overboard. He once or twice nibbled at the souring fish we carried and then played with them in the water, leaning over so that his big butt mooned hairy and pimpled. He leaned over, almost capsizing us, playing with the dead fish in the water, flapping the flatfish around until something large and toothy made a rush from below and the Idiot came away with bloody nipped fingertips. That was the end of playtime.

  The chills and fevers were still on me; my body was corrupt. My fingers were not strong enough to unbutton my sharkskin clothes. In the afternoon of the third day my sleeps became deeper and I felt my life closing. I fell asleep once and was awakened by feathers brushing my face. When I opened my eyes I saw a man in white robes rowing our boat, the wings that sprouted from his back wagged against my face as he bent to dip and pull the oar handles. I tried to call out. The man turned and looked at me and I saw that the man in white robes had the Idiot’s face and blubbering mouth, the distended tongue that now, when I listened, whistled the two-note work of rowing. I fell back asleep. I felt the feathers again. I opened my eyes and a seagull was sitting on my chest pecking at the sharkteeth buttons of my sharkskin suit.