Fishboy Page 6

  The Idiot lay on his back hawking softly once or twice before he got up and sat at the table. He sat there braying stupidly and blubbering until I made sure no one was looking and I gave him a sound broadstroke on the side of his head with my boat-paddle spoon. That seemed to shut him up so I could think, and I climbed down inside the stew pot which was littered with beautiful carcasses. I piled a few up against the side to sit on and fed myself from the little gutter running around the pot’s bottom.

  In a while I heard the Idiot shuffle out and I heard someone come in and prop open the dog hatch. It was John. I could hear him talking with Mr. Watt. He wanted Mr. Watt to read the chart that ran over his shoulder and up his neck, but Mr. Watt said his eyes were worse than ever. Mr. Watt said by dead reckoning he figured they were pretty much in the same area where they left off dragging John’s net the last time.

  How many of us are there this trip? said Mr. Watt and I heard John come back in the galley to fetch the log. Goddamnit, look at what that little cook has done to the log! and I thought maybe I had roughed it up a little sliding it across the table. I didn’t know at the time that the Idiot had been sitting there while I was eating, marking up hundreds of pages of X’s with Idiot scrawl.

  There’s twelve of us counting the Idiot and the sheriff, said John. When Mr. Watt said why wasn’t the Fishboy signed on, John said because he wasn’t sure he wanted me aboard.

  He can’t work the nets, he can’t cook, Lonny’s already after him, and Ira thinks he’s bad luck, like some rogue wave magnet, said John. And now look what he’s done to the lōg because I didn’t let him sign on right away.

  Maybe you’re right, said Mr. Watt.

  I’m going for a swim, said John and I heard him pass through the galley and out the aft cabin door.

  I sat in the bottom of the cooking pot, picking at the last of the best batch of finish fish stew I had ever made, but what my trembling hands could put to my mouth didn’t seem to have much flavor, and failed to give me strength.

  On the aft deck the men slept in the piles of net, their bellies full from what I fed them. John had jumped the rail and was swimming below us in the deep somewhere. In the last hours of night a curtain of black rain swept us and the men turned on their stomachs in the ash-laden downpour. Around the stern, ballast stones from the hull of a sailing ship popped out of the black waves and rolled around, and I dodged one to look over the rail, and I saw John bringing them up by the armful and throwing them onto the ship.

  There’s my little vandal, John said to me when he climbed aboard. I still didn’t know the Idiot had ruined his logbook. I thought he meant that I had bruised the book by shoving it across the galley table. I hung my head and helped him collect the ballast stones in a pile.

  The circle of stones gave off a faint light, and I thought St. Elmo’s fire or phosphorus fog. Out of the dull light two faint figures took shape, two men in gray rags putting out their hands as if to get warmth from the bluish lit stones.

  No you don’t, you don’t run, Vandalboy, said John. He had me by the arm as I backed away from the odd conjuring going on. He said he wanted me to meet some friends of his from the Thomas Hyde, the ship whose stones he had fetched for this.

  John, said one of the figures. I should have known it was you.

  Hello Eiphey, said John. Who’s that with you? and Eiphey said it was Oliver Griggs, the second mate.

  John, said Oliver Griggs, and John said Mr. Griggs.

  Eiphey asked John if John was still fishing with Mr. Watt, and John said if you could call a crew of criminals, mutants, idiots, freaks, and murderers a fishing crew, then he probably was.

  Just like the old days, said Eiphey, and John said he guessed so.

  Everybody considered the pale fire coming off the stones.

  So how is Mr. Watt? said Eiphey, and John said he thought Mr. Watt’s eyes were giving out, that it was getting nearly impossible for him to read the charts.

  A small rough sea from the squall struck the ship and the ballast stones shifted so that the gray figures flickered and became even fainter for a moment.

  I guess you’re wondering about your girlfriend, Eiphey said, and John said he was hoping maybe Eiphey had heard something from, well, down there.

  Eiphey told him there was nothing new. He said You still hear the shark story now and then but really nothing else. He said Sorry.

  It’s all right, said John, I have all the time in the world to keep looking. John said he had just gotten more nets to help him look and that Black Master Chief Harold was working on a new engine to pull an even bigger net.

  I heard something, said Oliver Griggs.

  You, Mr. Griggs? said John.

  Don’t tell it, said Eiphey.

  What do you mean, don’t tell it? said John, and Eiphey said he only meant for Oliver Griggs to tell it if he was sure it was a true thing he was telling. No offense, Oliver, said Eiphey.

  I know what you’re saying, Eiphey Deacon, said Oliver Griggs. I know what your meaning is: can a mutineer speak the truth, right? Well, to hell with you.

  That’s not what I meant, said Eiphey.

  Sure it is, said Oliver Griggs.

  Tell it, said John.

  What difference would it make? said Oliver Griggs. Do you think I’m worried about being caught in a lie? What can be done to me that hasn’t been done? Already my soul just stones scattered on the ocean floor. I’m not afraid of you anymore, Eiphey Deacon, or you either, John, so fucking big. Throw my stones back over the side, just don’t insult me.

  Speak, said John.

  Don’t get your hopes up, John, said Eiphey Deacon. It’s a grim story I’ve heard several ways. Oliver’s version we got from a man we found hugging a cask adrift the Horn. He was delirious.

  Tell it, damn you both, said John.

  I won’t be insulted, said Oliver Griggs.

  Throw his stones over, Fishboy, John said.

  You won’t do it, thinking I might know something, said Oliver Griggs.

  Over the side, Fishboy, said John. Breathe your last free air ever, Oliver Griggs, said John.

  I had never seen angry ghosts argue and I was eager to put their stones over, but even as John told me to do it he never let go of my wrist. John himself pitched a ballast stone over the side. Oliver Griggs flickered for a moment and said Wait.

  This is all I know, he said.

  Tell it, said John.

  Tell it, said Eiphey Deacon quietly, looking down at this campfire of the dead.

  What I heard, said Oliver Griggs, is that your wife or girl or whatever she was was found nearly drownt in a fisherman’s net.

  Where? said John.

  Be calm, said Oliver Griggs. I think it was on that island where those wide stone steps go down forty or fifty feet to the heap of broken wine jars. Remember that trip? Wasn’t that you? The sea was dark with wine for two tides. It was a long time ago but I thought it was you.

  Show me where, said John, and he uncovered a charted shoulder and leaned into the circle of misting stones.

  God, John, I don’t know, I can’t read your awful flesh, said Oliver Griggs.

  Show me, said John.

  Try and show him, said Eiphey Deacon, and Oliver Griggs wafted around John in the blue light, prodding here and there with a finger that made John shiver.

  Your touch is cold, said John.

  Yours will be soon enough, said Oliver Griggs. Maybe here, he said, and he pointed to what looked like a pimple and John said not to toy with him, that there was no wrecked ship there.

  Then maybe here, said Oliver Griggs, and he traced a small island north of John’s right kneecap. I think this is where, he said.

  John squatted and studied the atoll tattooed on his knee, rubbing away some grime with spittle. I haven’t looked there in years, he said.

  I think that’s where, said Oliver Griggs. All I heard is that she came up almost drownt in some fisherman’s net.

  Did he release her? John said.


  What I heard is that they had like a school, like a university in the city, and at the university they had an aquarium. That’s what I heard, I heard they put her in the aquarium.

  John said we could make the island in a week.

  There’s more, said Eiphey Deacon. Tell him the rest, he said to Oliver Griggs.

  Well, they had themselves a little civil war, the island was sieged and the town occupied. The animals in the zoo were butchered. They put embers in the eyes of people who could read. They were sacking the university when the government’s white fleet sailed into the harbor. The university was saved and the aquarium spared, but not your wife or whatever.

  What do you mean? said John.

  A white ship’s crew was garrisoned in the aquarium. In the celebration of liberation they shot up the tanks and flooded the place.

  No! said John.

  Yes, yes! said Oliver Griggs, smiling. Yes, you self-righteous son of a bitch. We took your flipping wife and gutted her and cooked her over little charcoal fires on the beach. It was a great party!

  NO! said John.

  YES! said Oliver Griggs. With a little red wine marinade she was delicious.

  John swung his fillet-sharpened fingernails through the blue vapor and Oliver Griggs diffused in two and laughed.

  Yes, we also made her perform for her life and then we had her, and then we made some beautiful fillets. She was really something to look at except for her teeth. She had these canine teeth, said Oliver Griggs to Eiphey Deacon. We made her bark like a seal while we threw her fish. It was just her teeth though. She had teeth like a common dog. A real bitch’s mouth, if you know what I mean.

  John began to heave the ballast stones over the side in splashing volleys as Oliver Griggs laughed and Eiphey Deacon pleaded and then said farewell. In his frenzy to rid the ship of the stones John picked me up when I was holding one to help, and I was certain for a moment he would throw me over too, a worthless vandal who had heard what was breaking his heart, and I wished I had never heard it, and I thought that if he threw me over, I would cling to the stone and follow it to the bottom. I had been dead once before and it had not been so bad.

  Go drop that stone in the hold, John said to me, calming. He said Mr. Watt had a collection of them to build a house with one day when he retired.

  And when you come back, rouse the crew. It’s almost light, time to set out the net.

  I went away about to burst hauling the heavy stone, but the effort took my eyes away from seeing John sitting slumped on the hatch, his kneecap atolls caressed by the waves that fell from his face.

  The black rain lay so thickly on the sea that at dawn the sun could not find its reflection in the dull obscurant ink. Into the ink the men cast John’s net with pitchforks and long poles, tamping the meshes and woven chafes into the dark water as if to dye the net black instead of letting it soak and sink to the bottom. When enough of John’s careful snare had been pitched, pushed, and hauled hand-over-shackled-hand overboard, Lonny dropped the spreaders. The spreaders caught the water and the net opened in the ocean behind us as our ship began pulling its aft out from beneath the mountains of netting still on deck. We all worked our way forward, away from where the thick rolls of diamondback meshing slithered quickly over the side like sea serpents, away from where the coiled lines struck and snatched at your feet to drag you to a drowning deep and quick.

  On this ship, where it did not matter if I could shuck one hundred and seventy-seven bushels of shell cut in six hours, I stayed close to John. I worked hard around him, spooling net needles, spreading my arms like a repair loom when he needed to stitch together a torn mesh. I watched him watch the deck empty itself of his net, I watched him chew the bottom of his beard, bouncing his hand on the cable that Lonny let roll from the winch drums. Lonny tried to slow the net’s release with the foot brake but the bearings smoked and you could hear the brake shoes squeal and bind, failing against the pull of so much weight. Lonny protested that we were putting out too much net and he spit in the sea to prove it, Lonny’s spittle a little froth string that sidled alongside us, almost dead in the water before it strung itself to our hull.

  We’ve got no speed, Lonny said, and I could feel the ship slow beneath the drag, the bow rising as we shuddered to a stop even as our smokestacks brewed thick exhaust into the morning sky.

  Go tell the master chief, John said to me, his thick cud of beard flopping to his chest. Go tell the master chief more power, and hurry it up, he said.

  Like I said, I had never been to a city but I thought the engine room must be like one. I rag-wrapped the hatch handle against the heat to open it, and I was rushed by the roar of motors and sirens and fumes, rushed by a scorching heat that filled the hollows of my body so that I began to bake from the inside out. The searing blast stung my eyes and blew the damned sparrow from its nest in my hair. I reached once above me to snatch at the bird like someone might reach back to snatch at a hat that is blown while riding a galloping horse, but my errand was the most urgent kind, the redemptive kind, and I pulled myself along the passage with one thought in mind, to tell the master chief more power, more power for John to pull his precious net.

  A ladder spired up through the neck-high cumulus of fume and I felt around with my feet for the rungs before climbing down. I descended from the cloudbank and ran down a boulevard of boilers, taking a side street by the electrical plant. Off the side street I took a shortcut through an alley where there looked like a brawl, piston arms pumping punches into cylinder blocks lying prone on the sidewalk, a ruptured gasket bleeding spent oil into a gutter.

  I slowed my pinched-toe run on a footbridge that spanned a canal. In the canal spun the silver main drive shaft like a river of mercury flowing between mudbanks of grease. I slowed because for only the second time since we had left the fishhouse did I feel that Big Miss Magine had stowed away aboard the ship and was laying in wait for me somewhere. The first time was when I had been sleeping in Mr. Watt’s empty calendar clock box. I was asleep, slipping into a dream, and the back-and-forth rocking of the ship seemed to me the way the purple bus rocked back and forth when Big Miss Magine stepped and climbed aboard. It startled me awake and sitting up seeing Mr. Watt’s silver-veiled head floating in the captain’s chair, I knew it had just been one of those tricks of sleep. But this time I was awake and the feeling was different, I felt she was close, I felt she was hiding in the engine room somewhere waiting for me. I kept turning to see her face gape from oily filters, her form in hunkered cowlings, her fingers flailing in ragged ropes fluttering from exhausts. In the fish oil sloshing hot in the bilge and in the burning rubber gaskets I smelled her skin and I smelled breath.

  I kept to the main street, looking over my shoulder for footfalls the roar of the place made me deaf to.

  I passed the salvage yard, the piles of accumulated wreckage dredged up in John’s net, wreckage scavenged from maritime graveyards, heaps of any machinery John thought Black Master Chief Harold could use to build an ark engine, a motor that ran on brilliant particles, a motor John had only heard about third-hand, a motor that could run forever and pull an infinite amount of net, a motor that the master chief was consigned to construct with only pages torn from books and hearsay to help him.

  I found Black Master Chief Harold and his fire lackey and boiler devil arguing at the construction site. They were huddled in the frame of the ark engine, their tools within reach around them, levered lengths of chain spanning the workspace, dirty work rags dried stiff and hanging above them like icicles of filth. They were arguing in the hand symbols men use when confusion and machinery drown language, when tossed thumbs mean to lift tons and jigged wrists signify We could all be crushed. Fingers punched asbestos-vested breastbones to punctuate a point, and fists of oven-mitt gloves wiped clean the blueprints that had been drawn in the air.

  In a place like this, among men where my whistling lisp could never be mocked, I stood mute with my message from John. More power!

 
Tugging on the master chief’s oil-soaked sleeve I tried in my best hand-twisting monkey talk to explain the size of the net John had set out, how the ship was stalled in the water, how what was needed was more power, but the master chief brushed me aside and made a pipe-fitting motion with a fist butting the heel of his glove, which the boiler devil responded to by throwing a wrench across the floor in disgust.

  I turned to the fire lackey with my message, pulling him to the coal bunkers that spilled around the mouth of the red-grated furnaces. I drew a shovel from the mound of coal and made a motion as if to feed the fires, but the fire lackey took the shovel from me and pointed to a color guard of gauges, the needle noses in their faces pegging red, and I understood that there was no more power, no more gain to be gotten, the engines were so stoked that the rivets used to hold the boilers together were occasionally popping off and stinging us where they struck us like wasps.

  All I wanted was just a little more power for John’s net, even just a little extra puff of black smoke from our stack to show I had completed my errand, and when the fire lackey left me to finish his argument with the master chief and the boiler devil, I took up the coal shovel again and turned the bolt on the furnace grate. The door swung open and there she was, there was Big Miss Magine, her big black face laughing in the fiery coals, laughing and hissing in the draft of the open door, FISH-hissing, BOY-roaring, the rushing air stoking her arms, her arms reaching out to snatch me against her burning bosom. I dropped the shovel and twisted away, out of her infernal grip, tiny red sparks glowing in my clothes where she had touched me. I dodged the master chief when he rushed me and I was wild through town, leaping sidewalks and swimming canals, crawling up the ascending ladder through the heavens, lightning and thunder biting and snapping at me until I sprang pinch-toed out on deck into the sunlight. My smoldering clothes took just one breath of fresh sea air and I burst with a WHUMP into a fiercely burning flame.