Fishboy Page 5

  Big Miss Magine’s bloodstain was starting to wear off my arm, but in the bright decklight it showed plain in the creases of my wrist and knuckles, and it gave my fingernails a look that if you had ever seen human blood dried on someone’s hand, you would have known I had plenty of it dried on mine. A sea hose was running cold salt water by a scupper and I knelt there pulling off my shirt to scrub with. It was a good scrub for the shirt as well, still steeped with the cook’s spillage. The stains on my flesh were stubborn and resistant to salt water and spit and the scrubbing of my rough shirt, and the way the rocking ship cast its decklight and lanterns around, what sometimes I thought was stain was just shadow, and sometimes the shadow seeped deeper within my skin.

  I had just finished as much as I could do when the sparrow fluttered from my hair and began to sip at the seawater running from the hose. The bird was dull-eyed and slow from drinking the salty water and was easy to catch, so I caught it and flung it over the rail toward where only about three pinpricks of light were left on the shoreline. Our decklights and lanterns, and even a star or two above, were brighter, and I watched the sparrow do a weak turn and light itself on the hatch near the Idiot.

  The Idiot had already broken apart most of his cornhusk and rag-stick fetishes, and when he caught sight of the sparrow he let out a little jackass bray and crawled toward the bird, the pot-stuck foot clunking across the hatch cover.

  Stay and play nicely, goddamn you, I heard Lonny say to the Idiot as Lonny worked the lifting lines to free the net bar hung in the rigging. The Idiot still made for the sparrow and I felt bad for the bird and angry with it at the same time. I figured to go fetch it and give it one more toss toward shore and then be done with it. I was doing more to save it than it was to save itself.

  I put on my wet shirt and then made myself invisible in the way that you can, my head turned down, my eyes on my pinched-toe feet making careful quick steps across the deck, leaning into the walls of net and ducking now and then. I was almost to the hatch when a fireball came roaring out of heaven and struck me down squarely. I scrambled up and the divine fire spun down and laid me out again, and I was sure if I had not just wet my shirt I would have been set ablaze.

  I heard it hovering overhead again, and in cringing anticipation I looked over my shoulder at the thing, and it was in its final glory, its flames devouring the gasoline-soaked strips of black women’s clothes with the click and pop of lice and ticks, then the mainsheet sail went red onto the crossed sticks that sputtered in colors of bruise and infection.

  John hailed us from the skirt of a sea buoy, a round nun kind meant to ring, but the bell looked broken by some ship’s passing cannon practice and its habit was pockmarked and rife with rifleshots and seabird splatter. John coiled his kite’s line around his flexed arm and flung it aboard, leaping the rail himself as we passed near. In the white decklight I could see John’s hair and beard were a tangle of seaweed, broken fishing line, and old anchor chains. Mr. Watt straightened our rudder and beneath a fresh plume of exhaust that showered us with cinders our ship tossed the buoy in its wake. Moored to the floor, the clapper snapping in the jagged shards of its bell, the buoy leaned after us like a watchdog straining at its chain.

  My ears is clogged, said John, bouncing his head.

  I can’t help you yet, said Lonny, I got to hold this line until we can put a whip line on that net bar. The weeping man who said Fuck was climbing up a net wing that Lonny held fast by the winch.

  What? said John.

  I said GET YOUR OWN GODDAMN EARDROPS OUT OF THE GEAR SHED! said Lonny.

  I saw that John could not hear Lonny, and I saw the gear shed and I thought that if I could find the eardrops I would be on my way to becoming useful.

  In the shed a fire extinguisher was all the eardrops could be and I took it over to John still trying to pass off a little invisibility. John pumped the canister while looking at me and then squirted some of the stuff in his ears. The stuff smelled like laundry soap cut with paint thinner. A clump of fungus fell from one ear and a mollusk from the other.

  Where’s this child come from, Lonny? John said. Is it one of yours?

  Lonny leaned back from the winch still holding the wing net line and said What child? That child? That ain’t one of mine unless it wants to be.

  Fetch me that sea hose, John said to me and I jumped to it and held it as he washed, the thick gray mud from the ocean floor flushing away, revealing the mazes of tattooed cartographies on his arms, chest, and back, the sea island atolls shifting and mountain peaks lifting as he bent to scrub his legs. There was a fresh shark strike on one calf; the other one I had first noticed in my gourd garden already healing, several cartilage teeth still embedded and molded over with a thin veneer of skin.

  Can you work net? John said to me. Can you mend meshes and haul in the lines? Can you run a winch without killing somebody?

  I looked down at my pinched-toed feet and balled up my fists in the front of my shirt. I did not know how to do those things.

  Hey, said Lonny, can he cook? We’re all about to starve to death.

  Can you cook? John asked me and I remembered the warning about cooking the last cook had told me just before he died. I shook my head no. I could not cook.

  Well, son, said John. I think you have two choices. I think you can either cook or you can swim. When John said that, I turned and looked for what was left of the bright pinpointed skyline, but it had dulled and disappeared. There was nothing to swim to, nowhere to swim for, nothing out beyond our ship but the stars and the white wake hissing behind us.

  So I nodded okay and Lonny said And some biscuits, make me a whole basket of biscuits. I’m real hungry. And gravy. Biscuits and gravy. And fried steak with a chicken crust, maybe some mashed potatoes. Stew up some collard greens and tomatoes with brown sugar, I could go for that.

  I drug myself along to the aft cabin door that led to the galley. Hey, Lonny said, also don’t forget my eggs. I always like to have a side of eggs, and don’t make them greasy, I can’t abide greasy eggs, you hear me?

  I heard him as I drug myself along, hearing everything he asked for taking piece after piece of hope from me of ever getting through my life not split in two with an ax.

  In the galley was a pot big enough for me to swim in. I put it on the stove and filled it bucket by bucket from the spittoon sink. I put the flame to it. I guess the men in prison blues had ransacked the big blade board, it was full of empty outlines where knives and cleavers should have gone, and when I took a pan out on the deck to gather some fish and tuber fruit for finish fish stew, the prison men fairly clanked with cutlery when they moved. John had come in to rest on his carpet of hides so the men in prison blues had begun to amuse themselves by knocking off the Idiot’s cap and then kicking him in the seat of his pants when he bent over to pick it up. Shackled as they were, it took certain steps to do this, and they managed it as if they were dancing a reel.

  All the nets lay over the litter of our departure and John had been right, I was not strong enough to move them around, so I picked at the edges. The fish were mixed up in the stuff the crew had stolen, there were tacks everywhere and shards from the wooden box of light bulbs that tinkled into glass against themselves as the ship pitched and rolled. Vegetables and gourds from my garden were on the verge of garbage, starting to smell along with the oysters and shellcut that all needed to be iced down in the hold, perishables starting to perish because the person whose job it was to tend them had recently been split in two with an ax.

  I tried to get at the ice in the hold by prying up the deckplate with a shovel but I broke the handle and when no one was looking I threw it overboard.

  I stood on the stove and stirred the finish fish stew with a spoon the size of a boat paddle. The stew had several good-sized whole fish in it, more parts left on them than I ever got at the fishhouse, and short of a knife to slice the gourds and tuber fruit, I stomped on them to make them tender if I couldn’t make them sweet. Standing there
stirring the stew and waiting for mealtime I felt some hope return even if there weren’t any biscuits.

  I had opened the dry goods locker to fetch some biscuit mix and had found a large rat guarding the flour. Fuck off, said the rat, the rat picking spittle dough from his teeth with the tip of his tail. Fuck off, go away, he said, and I did.

  This stew puts an edge on my ax! said Lonny, spitting out a mouthful across the galley table.

  Now I remember where I saw you first, said John, spitting his spoonful out too.

  It’s not so bad if you just stick to the big chunks, said Ira Dench.

  The men in prison blues, trying to work out eating shackled at the wrists, had not sampled theirs yet. It was clear the Idiot would eat anything put in a bowl before him. I figured only the man who wept and said Fuck would not eat at all, him being in a state of pain and shock, dripping sweat from just losing a toe.

  Just before mealtime the Idiot had spotted that damn sparrow again and set off after the thing. I had already decided that the only way to draw the sparrow away from the ship lights and to the vague shore was to become a sparrow myself and I could not do that, I was sure, especially having to cook. The Idiot had spotted the half-dead bird hop and flutter back to my head-nest and the Idiot went lunging across the deck clumping, his foot still caught in the paint, stepping into Lonny holding the lifting line against the winch and kicking the lifting line out of Lonny’s hand.

  Lonny said he had once seen a winchman’s arm ripped from the socket when the winchman tried to grab at a runaway line.

  There must have been a moment when the weeping man who said Fuck heard Lonny curse the Idiot, saw the snaking rigging, could feel the loss of tension in the wall of rope and woven steel netting he was climbing to un-foul the ton-weight net bar above him. It was a moment for him to leap and fall from a great height or cling and be crushed, and what he did had been decided before he was born, when his mother still carried him in her womb, Lonny said, and she had been nearly struck down on a sidewalk by a falling steeplejack from a church spire, the sight of the steeplejack pleading up to her from the pavement with his hips sprouting from his neck had caused her to faint and go into labor, and she gave birth alongside the burst man to an undersized infant, the baby this man who wept and said Fuck began as, who now embraced the falling sheets of net and closed his eyes.

  He had been lucky, only a corner of the heavy bar had come down near him, just its tip, and the tip came down squarely on the poor man’s boot, the pressure squeezing the blood from his foot into his face, the face a red curdle as his throat opened and out of his mouth came his word.

  FUCK!!! he had said.

  Lonny chased the Idiot with an ax topside and when the Idiot hid in the lifeboat and pulled the shroud over his head Lonny broke open the turnbuckles, unfastened the lashings, and turned the crank handle that would ship the lifeboat over the side into the dark sea.

  Lonny! said John, roused up by the ruckus, We’re short of crew as it is. John cauterized the nasty gap in the man’s toeline with a coal he took from a small metal box used to burn fragrant woods. He was delicate about it even as the men had to hold the man down, John not wishing to cut the man with his razor-sharpened fingernails as he performed the operation.

  John shook the pinched-off gnarly-nailed toe out of the boot and knotted it on a fetish string that he hung around the Idiot’s neck. John said maybe that would remind the Idiot to be more careful of where he stepped. He pulled the pot of paint from the Idiot’s foot. It was red paint and the Idiot’s bare foot and trouser cuff were brilliant with it.

  I hope the bastard chokes on a bone, said Lonny at the table, and the way the men in prison blues were slipping fishbones into the Idiot’s soup, that seemed likely.

  The steel door to the engine room blew its bolts and out of the issuing smoke coalesced Black Master Chief Harold, radiant black with sweat like fresh-chiseled coal, his chin streaked and gooed from fuel-tasting, his asbestos jacket smoldering. Behind him were his fire lackey and his boiler monkey, hints of fume from their nostrils, them not much larger than myself, their bent helmets hardly protecting their hair in the places where it was singed to broiled nubbles. They looked shot from cannons.

  I had forgotten to send their meal buckets down so I opened the wicker basket trimmed with red-and-white checks to serve them on the china the crew had eaten the mule meat off of, but Lonny said Put that away, that’s just for meals ashore. It really didn’t matter because after the engine room trio sniffed at the finish fish stew bubbling on the stove they foraged for themselves in the lockers and found a jug of vinegar and a piece of something that I had also found and could not tell if at one time it had been a melon rind or a piece of rotten rubber trim like off a refrigerator. They passed around the vinegar and took a few bites from the refrigerator thing and eyeballed us, sniffing as if they found either us or fresh air foul and disagreeable.

  Hey! said Lonny. How come we didn’t get any of that whatever-it-is stuff? and Lonny set to cursing me, promising to whetstone his axes promptly.

  While we are all gathered here together I want everyone to sign the ship’s log, said John. He had an old book bound with the hide from a palomino pony. The book was passed around and men made marks in it. I did not know how to spell my name but I stood ready to make my mark. It did not matter. John passed the log around, and the log passed back and forth over my birded head but never did it reach my hands. I turned away when John began to read the new marks from the book of men.

  X! said John.

  Here, said Lonny.

  X! said John.

  Here, said Ira Dench. Goddamnit, he added, pulling off his fortune string and webbing it on again.

  X! said John.

  Fuck! spit out the man who said that, his foot paining him.

  XX! said John and the men in prison blues held up their shackled wrists.

  Triple X! said John and Black Master Chief Harold took his boiler monkey and fire lackey below.

  Get up steam, said John after them, we want to set the nets at daybreak.

  This last signature is illegible, said John. There are severe penalties for poor penmanship. He studied the signature, one eye closed.

  O! he said.

  O? said Lonny.

  No, X! said John, motioning to the Idiot.

  I’ll sign for the sheriff, invoking power of attorney and all that, said John, making a mark and closing the book.

  John said If any come aboard and hate not his father and his mother and his wife and his children and his brothers and his sisters, and his own life too, he can not be a shipmate serving on this ship.

  I hate anything, Lonny said, and the crew was dismissed.

  I took a cup of finish fish stew forward, my heart beating hotly in the darkness of the passageway.

  I was coming to understand that Mr. Watt was a prisoner of the wheelhouse, a place kept cool by frigid air fans and darkened in the day by the smoked glass windows. Nighttime was daytime for Mr. Watt, when he could open the portholes and cross-ventilate the place, take off his thick khaki shirt and trousers he wore to protect his flesh from the sun that filtered in, hang the khaki to dry from the oozings of his muscles the day long.

  When I came into the wheelhouse through the dog hatch my eyes weren’t quite adjusted to the dark, and Mr. Watt was in pieces, his shirt hung on a porthole screw, his pants draping the captain’s chair, and Mr. Watt himself leaning on the wheel in a way that all I could see was his disembodied floating head shrouded in silver hair. When he turned to me to take the cup of stew and I could see him without his clothes I was wishing my eyes were a little more nightblinded, because Mr. Watt was chewing a piece of hardtack, and with his shirt off you could see a section of blue tunnel-like muscle squirm up his throat to the back of his mouth to feed there from the bits of hardtack ground by the clattering teeth and corraled by the obvious tongue. I handed up my cup of stew and I couldn’t tell if Mr. Watt was smiling at me or if everyone’s jaw muscles run und
er our cheeks and hook behind our ears like spectacles.

  Thank you, Fishboy, he said.

  Mr. Watt lifted the cup to his mouth and sipped, and barely had a little trickle of my finish fish stew gone down his throat when his whole gut heaved to stop it, his gut squeezing the stew upward, drizzling through the side teeth and canines.

  That’s … that’s delicious stew, Fishboy, Mr. Watt said, and I think I’ll save mine for later. He set down the cup on the bridge and took up his hardtack again.

  The men in prison blues had put a bone in the Idiot’s bowl that the Idiot could not swallow, and now we could hear him braying and choking, and we could hear Lonny say how he could not stand hawking noises at the table when he was trying to eat.

  You better go back to the galley and clean up, Mr. Watt said. Try to make yourself useful to John, find something you can do. Can you tell him a story? and I shook my head no. I didn’t know any stories, I hardly knew my own.

  I wanted Mr. Watt to know I had not been allowed to sign the log, so I asked him how my name was spelled, just in case. He said my name was spelled F-I-S-H-B-O-Y. I listened as hard as I could and understood it sounded like IF I JUST ACHE, BEER OR WINE.

  In the galley the only person left was the Idiot, the Idiot making the horrible hawking noises and tearing at his throat, thrashing around and kicking. I saw the men had left in a hurry, their empty bowls on the table, one of Ira Dench’s fortune strings, the palomino-bound ship’s log. I climbed up on the stove and looked inside the pot. For all their complaining they had finished the stew, leaving some carcass heads and broken tuber rinds stuck to the pot’s bottom. I pulled out the spoon like a boat paddle and went over to the Idiot red and frothing on the floor. I shoved the spoon into his mouth and reached down his throat. I had done this once before for a stray dog at the fishhouse and had gotten bitten for my thanks. I pulled a thick piece of fish spine from where it was wedged, in the Idiot’s gullet, the bone edges pink where they had begun to cut, and made sure the spoon was free before I stepped back and cleared the table. I put the bowls in the spittoon sink, collected the piles of fishbones, and wiped the eating places with a wet rag. I shoved the ship’s log that I had not been allowed to sign so roughly to the end of the table so that it struck the wall.