by David Bergen
“And so, just after the American died, the wind picked up? Like a miracle?” Chávez asked.
“No. The motor finally started.”
“Yes. It did. I see that.” Chávez consulted the testimony. “But, for four days it will not start. And now, suddenly, it does.”
“I found the problem,” Quinn said, “Which was with the fuel jet.”
“How much money did the American have in his wallet?”
“I didn’t look.”
“You didn’t look.”
Quinn waited.
“How much do you make a year?” Chávez asked. “Five thousand dollars?”
“If it is a good year. Yes. That is possible.”
“The American’s wallet was empty.”
“I took nothing from his wallet.”
“Who did then? The fish?”
“Perhaps it was empty when he came onto my boat. Perhaps the men who found me also found the wallet and took the money. I didn’t.”
“You see the problem presented here, no? We have a dead American and we have the man who saw him last and that man who saw him last is not dead, and so the question arises, how come you are not dead as well? How did this happen?”
“I was fortunate,” Quinn said.
It was then that the other man, Boquín, spoke. His voice was rough, and it had a slight whine, as if he was impatient with the proceedings, or perhaps he was hungry and wanted to go out into the street to eat a hearty lunch. He said that the facts were such that there was not much of a leg for Quinn to stand on. “No legs, in fact, and there is no lawyer in this country who might argue for your innocence. There is no innocence here. Only guilt. I am sorry.”
He was not sorry. It was only his manner of speaking. Quinn saw that there was nothing to be done. He asked for a drink of water. He thought of his two boys. Of Faustina. His head ached. His heart was heavy. When the water came, in a plastic cup, he took it. The water was warm and he drank it slowly, and when he was finished he set the cup on the table.
On that second to last day at sea, he had run the boat south-southwest, running out of fuel at noon, and so switched up the tank, and when the engine finally quit completely at dusk, he had covered a lot of ocean, but not enough to see land. He drifted in the darkness. The dead body had swelled in the sun and was certainly rotting from the inside. Quinn took down the remaining tarp and broke away the metal frame that had supported the tarp. He bent pieces of the framing and see-sawed them by hand until they broke and with the broken pieces he tied together a frame of sorts to which he attached the tarp with fishing line. And with this makeshift sail, he attempted to catch the winds blowing from the north. He found that he did not have enough hands and that the engine prop provided no purchase as a rudder and so he had to hold an oar within the crook of his arm, but in doing so he lost his grip on the sail. The boat went in circles.
At night the smell of the rotting body fell over him and he hung his head over the stern to catch the wind and to avoid the stink. By late afternoon the following day, with no prospect of salvation, it became necessary to throw the body overboard. With his phone he took a photograph of K. as proof of death. He took three photos in all—of the face, and the torso, and then of the body in its completeness. He found K.’s phone and wallet in his pockets. He took the sunglasses. He removed the wristwatch, a fat and expensive piece of equipment that could well survive beyond four generations of humans. He bound K.’s hands and feet. He wrapped the head in a tarp and fastened it at the neck with fishing line so that now the man resembled a prisoner going to the gallows. He drew the dead man’s feet upwards over the gunnel and rested them there. He squatted and grasped K. beneath the armpits and heaved him upwards towards the gunnel and over. K. teetered for a moment and then slid into the water quietly, floated for a second, and then sank. Bubbles rose, and then more bubbles as the body receded and in the end there were no more bubbles. The body was gone.
At night he dreamed of a waterfall and in the waterfall there were children at play, swimming in the eddies of the pool beneath the falls, and the children were crying out, and they were speaking Spanish and the voices of the children grew deeper and the Spanish more singsong and louder and he woke to a bang against the fibreglass of his boat and so hearing he sat up, convinced that sharks were attacking. Before him a vision of a large fishing trawler whose name was painted in red, Carolina, and he saw a short man standing in the skiff, and the man spoke to him and asked him if he was alive, and when he said that yes, he was alive, the man spoke quickly, in the tones of a fisherman off the coast of Guatemala, for this is what he was, and Quinn recognized the language and the location of that particular accent and tongue and he said, “Soy Quinn.”
“Venga,” said the man, and he took Quinn by the elbows and pulled him up into his arms.
His boys were six and seven when he first told them the story of being stranded at sea. He had just been released from the federal prison north of Tegucigalpa. For five years he had waited for his case to go to trial, and then one day he had been informed that his case was finished. It was no more. And so he was set free. The scents of the island and the smell of his sons and the shape of his wife in his hands were marvellous and still new and hardly to be believed. He was diminished physically. But not mentally or spiritually. He had become stronger. He had learned to pray. Where it is darkest there is only hope, and that hope was achieved through talking to a god that he had needed during his time in prison. This was not sentimentalism or a deathbed conversion. He would not have called it a conversion. It was simply a manner of saving himself, just as fighting and cunning had been a path to survival.
When he told the story of the sea to the boys, he told it in a measured way, with little fanfare. He talked in great detail about the engine and its parts and he told them about the toothbrush and the copper wire and how the copper wire had been his salvation. He drew a picture of a fuel jet and within the centre of the jet he placed his sharp pencil and pressed down and then lifted the pencil and said that that little dot represented the tiny hole in the fuel jet and it was the hole itself that had been plugged, and so the fuel hadn’t been able to flow, and not until he cleaned the hole with the copper wire that he so fortuitously had found, was he able to fire up the engine. The boys in their enthusiasm asked to have a drawing of the boat itself and so he accommodated them, and he drew a twenty-four-foot skiff with a tattered tarp and an engine at the stern. The boys asked for a drawing of their father inside the boat so as to locate their hero, and he drew himself hunkered over the engine. They asked if he had been alone on the boat, and he said that there had been another man, an American, but he had died. They were very curious about this man and asked why he had died and not Quinn. He said that he had been lucky. And he had been young. And again he said that luck had played a role. There were questions that they did not ask, and they could not know that these questions even existed. For these questions he had no good answers. Or he had many different answers. The boys asked if he had been frightened. He said that he had not been frightened. The ocean was there to feed them and to keep them and sometimes the ocean took back of its own accord. This they did not understand completely, but they listened and were silent and then, as if now tired of the story, they slid from their chairs and ran into the yard outside the house that they shared with their mother and father. Their voices at play were like the sounds birds make in the morning, when all is new and there is only time and more time for the day to unfold.
Here the Dark
A novella
As a child, Lily had a frequent dream in which she was getting into heaven via the front door. She knocked and God asked if she was skinny and she happily raised her dress to reveal that yes she was, and God looked her body up and down and said that she could enter, and so she dropped her dress and entered the place for which she had been destined. To show her bare body to God pleased her. One time, at Sunday lunch,
she had heard that skinny people get into heaven quicker than plump people, and this being the truth, for it had come out of her uncle’s mouth and he was a minister in the church, she studied herself in the mirror in the evening, before bed, making sure that she was still trim.
When she was thirteen, she gave her life to Jesus. On a Sunday afternoon, after she had announced her intentions, the deacons met with her and asked her three questions: had she made her confession, had she thrown away her school pictures, and was she willing to wear the head covering? She answered yes to all three questions, though in fact she had saved one of her school pictures. In the photo she was smiling happily. Her hair was in a single long braid. She was ten years old. She wore a blue printed dress with sleeves that came just below her elbows. Her mother had made the dress for her, after a trip to Ens Fabrics, where Lily had picked for herself the pattern of cloth that she most liked. Her father wore boughten clothes, purchased at Penner’s at the strip mall, but the women of the family only wore handmade clothes, and for this they were grateful, for what is more sacred than that which is created by hand, the same hands created by the Maker. She kept the saved school picture in a blank envelope within a small box that was hidden beneath her white underwear in one of her dresser drawers in her bedroom. To tell a lie in such a manner filled her with some trepidation, but she was also aware, even at that age, that the lie excited her. She asked God for forgiveness for this trespass, and though God did not answer her, she felt that he understood. Or, she wished that he would understand, and in wishing this she convinced herself that he did.
Family, church, school, and work. This was the life of the Brethren. The life of a girl was to help the mother. With planting the garden, with cooking, with canning of fruits and vegetables, with caring for her baby sister, with plucking chickens, with pouring boiling water over the washed dishes, with setting the table, with polishing shoes. The polishing of the shoes was Lily’s preferred job, for this was when she could be alone, in the mud room, the shoes lined up on the wooden worktable, the polishing cloth in her hand. She held one shoe at a time in her left hand, and with her right she scraped up a bit of polish and applied it and spread it about, covering the scuffmarks, and a dull sheen appeared. And then, after the shoes, four pairs in all, had been prepared, she set to buffing. And in that buffing, elbows splayed, she saw each individual shoe as a tiny soul, and she was like Jesus scrubbing the soul clean. She never told anyone about this vision, for she was in general a secret keeper. She did not divulge her fantasies, or her doubts, or her imaginings, or her dreams. Her mother, who always sang while she worked, worried constantly about her little Lily, who might not be terribly bright because she didn’t answer when called to, and she always seemed to be staring off into the sky, as if looking for the imminent second coming of the Lord. But this was not Lily’s reason for raising her eyes to the heavens. She was, in fact, thinking of the world in its grandness, and of the clouds that scuttled by, and one time she was thinking of a question she had asked in school just the day before, in which she had wondered about the parable of the sower and the seeds that had been thrown onto the thorny ground, and how it was that it might not be the fault of the seed itself, which had no choice where it would land, and then she had asked how it was that the farmer who had thrown the seeds was not himself to blame? The teacher, Dorothy Plett, who was not much older than eighteen, and was betrothed to be married that June to Doug Bartlett, was befuddled by this odd and fearful question coming out of the mouth of a child, and so Dorothy said that she would have to ask the deacons for the answer, for she could not be certain. Dorothy said that it was dangerous to question and it was dangerous to doubt, for questioning and doubt were forms of sin and sin could only lead to hell. There was heaven above, and there was hell below, and it was certainly better to look up to heaven with your mouth zipped than it was to fall into hell with your mouth moving and calling out blasphemies. Well, this was not much of an answer for young Lily, who was far too intemperate for her own sake, as certain of the Brethren women who had witnessed her puffed-up pride liked to say about her. She was a wild horse and she would have to be broken. She would have to learn not to speak her thoughts. She would have to learn not to think. Lily frightened folks. She frightened her own parents. She frightened herself. Though, cleverly, and with a certain swelling in her chest, she liked the idea and feeling of being frightened by her own thoughts. Of course, being trained in the pitfalls of pride, she immediately prayed for forgiveness. But this didn’t stop her, shortly after, from asking another impertinent question.
On the day of her baptism, her mother helped her into a newly made dress with a high collar, blue with white lilies, and hemmed just below the knee. In the bedroom, alone together, her mother whispered that she was happy for her. And then she recited a poem that was very familiar to Lily.
Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean,
And the pleasant land.
And in that moment Lily felt her heart lift and she loved her mother and her father and she loved God and she loved the bride of Christ, which was the church. She was like a little drop of water that would be added to all the other little drops, and together they would make an ocean of love. She had to close her eyes so that she didn’t faint from happiness. She breathed slowly. She opened her eyes. She saw her mother’s face right next to hers, and she saw the shape of her eyebrows, and her ears, and she smelled her mother, always like cooking, and she saw the bits of grey in her hair, near her temples, and she said that she wanted to be just like her. This was true, in that moment, when her heart was full of love and generosity, but it wouldn’t be how she would always feel, and as she grew older she would come to wish that she might be the opposite of her mother. For her mother was often tired, and though she didn’t complain, she could have, given Lily’s father’s demands that supper be hot and on the table the moment he walked into the house, or that his clothes had to be laid out and washed and ironed each morning, or that the house be clean, and that the floors be polished, and the grass cut, and the walks shovelled in winter, and the laundry pressed and folded and put away, and the eggs gathered, and the canned pickle jars lined up neatly in the pantry, and, and, and. Or was this not her father at all, but her mother’s need?
Her life in the Brethren Church was defined by the word no. No long hair on men. No voting. No education beyond Grade 8. No short hair on women. No military involvement. No political involvement. No divorce. No insurance. No parties. No dances. No trade unions. No hanging out at gas stations. No tobacco. No alcohol. No Santa Claus. No Easter bunnies. No snowmobiles. No birth control. No politics. No adult sports. No chrome on cars. No four-part singing. No bright colours. No cosmetics. No jewellry. No newspapers. No radios. No television. No novels.
This was Lily Isaac’s world.
At the age of fourteen, she was deemed well enough educated and was therefore finished with school. One day, alone with her father and driving by the high school, Lily said, “I want to go there.”
Her father said nothing.
This was a warm day in late fall, and classes were just letting out. The students fell through the school’s doorways. Animals released. Girls standing in groups like tall birds, boys tumbling in the grass like dogs, a few slow and singular turtles, young couples kissing like doves. A conflagration of desire and violence. In her heart.
“I can be true,” she said.
“It is impossible,” her father said. “Ideas are strong and insidious.”
“Ours or theirs?”
He looked at her then and his eyes were sad and she was sorry for her words. But only because he had heard them. She said that a tree, in order to thrive, needed a harsh wind.
“That,” he said, pointing at the school, “Is a hurricane. We’ll hear no more such talk, Lily. Your longings are of the devil. You must forsake them. Ask for guidance. For clarity.”
/> She said that to pray was to ask for what was already evident. Prayer was the absence of knowledge.
“Where do you get these ideas?”
Because they had no books in the house, save for the Bible and Webster’s Dictionary, it was to these two books that Lily went when she was famished for words. She would cast about for things to read, not truly understanding that she was looking, but looking nonetheless. One day at the doctor’s office, when her mother went in for an examination, Lily had picked up a magazine. It was called Reader’s Digest. She sped through it, and discovered Word Power, a quiz on vocabulary. She found that she knew all the words, and that her answers were always correct. She picked up another magazine called Good Housekeeping. And then another, with a young woman on the front in a bathing suit. She skimmed through the third one, alarmed at the photographs. But it wasn’t the photos she was interested in. It was the words.
Over the next year, when she went into town and shopped at the fabric store with her mother while her father looked at augers and garden tractors at Loewen Farm Equipment, she sometimes snuck off to the doctor’s office and spent fifteen minutes reading magazines. One time, because she was only half finished a story, she stole a Reader’s Digest from the office. She went to the bathroom with the magazine and lifted her dress and stuck the magazine into her underwear, and she walked out of the bathroom and out of the doctor’s office. All during the ride home she felt the sharp edges of the magazine against her stomach. She was horrified that she would be caught, and excited to get home to finish the article in the privacy of her room. She knew what she had done was sinful, but she rationalized that she would return the magazine when she next visited the office. And she did exactly this. And stole another magazine. And so it went, over that winter.
Her cousin Marcie, who lived in town, and who was not a member of the church and was therefore free to participate in the world, she had books. These were often novels, and Lily, being curious, would pick up a novel when she visited Marcie and she would read quickly, sometimes thirty pages in one go, and when she went home she would leave the book at Marcie’s house, and she would leave the strange comfort of Marcie’s home. Marcie’s mother, Aunt Dolores, barbecued hotdogs and she made noodles with a sharp cheese, and with the noodles she offered a Coke or 7 UP. These were all treats that Lily hadn’t experienced at home. And there was the television, watched by Marcie’s father, and sometimes Lily stood in the doorway, hiding, and watching. She liked best the advertisements, because they were so immediate and left her edged with longing for physical objects, and though this longing was urgent and full of ache, it also left her feeling slightly dirty.
