Ship Breaker

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  “What about work tomorrow?”

  “Bapi says that storm’s coming for sure.” She grinned. “We can strip wire with a hangover, no problem.”

  The crew gathered around the bonfire, swapping drinks. Pima went away and came back a little while later with a pot of rice and beans and then surprised Nailer again with a stick of grilled pigeon. At his look of surprise, she said, “Other people want to get close to God and the Fates. People saw you come out of the ship. No one gets luck like that.”

  He didn’t question any more but ate greedily, glad to be alive and eating so well.

  They drank, passing around the rusty shiv that had nearly killed him. Considered the possibilities of turning it into a talisman, a decoration to hang around his neck. The buzz of alcohol warmed him, made the world seem even better than before. He was alive. His skin sang with life. Even the pain in his back and shoulder where the shiv had driven into him felt good. Being close to death had made everything in his life shine. He rolled his shoulder, savoring the pain.

  Pima watched him across the firelight. “You think you can crew tomorrow?”

  Nailer made himself nod. “It’s just stripping wire.”

  “Who we getting for scuttle duct?” Moon Girl asked.

  Pima grimaced. “I thought it was going to be Sloth. Got to swear in someone new to replace her. Get bloody with someone.”

  “Lot of good that does,” Tick-tock muttered.

  “Yeah, well, some people still keep their word.”

  They all looked down the beach to where Sloth had been dumped. She’d be hungry soon, and needing someone to protect her. Someone to share scavenge with, to cover her back when she couldn’t work. The beach was a hard place to survive without crew.

  Nailer stared at the bonfires, thinking about the nature of luck. One quick decision by Sloth, and everything about her future was decided. She didn’t have many options now, and all of them were ugly. Full of blood and pain and desperation. He took another swig from the bottle, wondering if he pitied her despite what she’d done.

  “We could bring Teela on,” Pearly suggested. “She’s small.”

  “She’s got a club foot,” Moon Girl said. “How fast can she move?”

  “For light crew, she’d hustle.”

  “I’ll decide later,” Pima said. “Maybe Nailer heals quick, and we don’t need a scuttle duct replacement.”

  Nailer smiled sourly. “Or maybe Bapi cuts me out, and sells my slot. Then none of us get to choose.”

  “Not over my head.”

  No one said anything. It was too good a night to spoil it with bad speculation. Bapi would do whatever he wanted, but they didn’t need to pick that scab tonight.

  Pima seemed to sense their doubts. “I talked to Bapi already,” she insisted. “Nailer’s got a couple days free. On the boss man’s quota. Even Bapi wants to get close to luck like his.”

  “He’s not pissed that I lost that crude to other crews?”

  “Well, that too. But the wire came out with you, so he was happy about that. You’ve got your heal time. Rust Saint’s my witness.”

  It almost sounded good enough to believe. Nailer took another drink. He’d seen enough adult promises turn out to just be wishes that he wasn’t going to hold his breath, though. He needed to be crewing tomorrow, and he needed to look useful fast. He carefully worked his shoulder, willing it to get better. A couple days wire-stripping would be a blessing. If anything out of this whole mess was lucky, it was that a storm was coming.

  Then again, without the storm, he wouldn’t have been back in the hole twice on the same day.

  Nailer drank again, enjoying the view of the beach. In the night, you couldn’t even see the oil slicks on the water. Just the liquid silver reflections of the moon. Far out on the distant water, a few red and green lights glowed like fairy fire—the running lights of clipper ships crossing the Gulf.

  The sailing ships slid silently across the horizon, blown so fast that their lights disappeared over the curve of the earth within minutes. He tried to imagine standing on the deck of one of those ships, leaving the beach and light crew behind. Sailing free and fast.

  Pima took the booze bottle from him. “Daydreaming?”

  “Nightdreaming.” Nailer nodded out at the colored lights. “You ever sail on one?”

  “A clipper?” Pima shook her head. “No way. Saw one dock once; they had a whole bunch of half-men for guards. Wouldn’t let beach trash paddle close.” She grimaced. “The dog-faces put electricity in the water.”

  Tick-tock laughed. “I remember that. I tried to swim out and started tingling all over.”

  Pima scowled. “And then we had to drag you back like a dead fish. Almost got us all zapped.”

  “I would have been fine.”

  Moon Girl snorted. “The dog-faces would have eaten you alive. That’s how they do. Don’t even cook their meat. Those monsters always tear in raw. If we left you out there, they’d have been using your ribs for toothpicks.”

  “Grind that. There’s a half-man who muscles for Lucky Strike… what’s its name?” Tick-tock halted briefly, stymied. “Anyway, I’ve seen it. It’s got big damn teeth, but it don’t eat people.”

  “How would you know? The ones it eats aren’t around to bitch anymore.”

  “Goats,” Pima said suddenly. “The half-man eats goats. When he first showed up on the beach, they paid him goats to work heavy crew. My mom told me he could eat a whole goat in three days.” She made a face. “Moon Girl’s right. You don’t want to tangle with those monsters. You never know when their animal side will try to take your arm off.”

  Nailer was still watching the lights moving out in the deeps. “You ever wonder what it would be like to ride a clipper? Get out on one of those things?”

  “I don’t know.” Pima shook her head. “Fast, I guess.”

  “Damn fast,” Moon Girl supplied.

  “Red-rip fast,” Pearly said.

  They were all looking out at the water now. Hungry.

  “You think they even know we’re here?” Moon Girl asked.

  Pima spat in the sand. “We’re just flies on garbage to people like that.”

  The lights kept moving. Nailer tried to imagine what it would be like to stand on deck, hurtling across the waves, blasting through spray. He’d spent evenings staring at images of clippers under sail, pictures that he had stolen from magazines that Bapi kept in a drawer in his supervisor’s shack, but that was as close as he’d ever gotten. He had spent hours poring over those sleek predatory lines, studying the sails and hydrofoils, the smooth engineered surfaces so different from the rusting wrecks he worked every day. Staring at the beautiful people who smiled and drank on the decks.

  The ships whispered promises of speed and salt air and open horizons. Sometimes Nailer wished he could simply step through the pages and escape onto the prow of a clipper. Sailing away in his imagination from the daily mangle of ship-breaking life. Other times, he tore the pictures up and threw them away, hating that they made him hungry for things he hadn’t known he’d wanted until he’d seen the sails.

  The wind shifted. A black cloud of smelting smoke blew over the beach, enveloping them in haze and ash.

  Everyone started coughing and choking, trying to get some clean air. The wind shifted again, but Nailer kept coughing. His time in the oil room had hurt him. His chest and lungs still felt tender and the taste of oil lingered in his mouth.

  By the time Nailer looked up from his coughing, the clipper ships were gone. More smelting smoke blew across their campfire.

  Nailer smiled bitterly in the acrid wind. That was what thinking about clipper ships got you. A lungful of smoke because you weren’t paying attention to what was around. He took another swig from his bottle and passed it to Pearly.

  “Thanks for the luck gift,” he said. “I never knew Black Ling was so damn fine.”

  Moon Girl smiled. “Damn fine drink, for a damn lucky bastard.”

  “He’s
lucky, all right,” Pima said. “Luckiest bastard I ever saw.”

  She inspected the other luck offerings that had accumulated over the night. Another stick of pigeon that Nailer offered around to the group, a pack of hand-rolled cigarettes, a bottle of cheap liquor from Jim Thompson’s still, a thick silver earring, wide bored. A sea-polished shell. A half-kilo sack of rice.

  “Luckier than Lucky Strike?” Nailer teased.

  “Not after you lost all that oil,” Moon Girl said. “If you were Lucky Strike, you’d have figured out how to sneak it out, instead of wasting it. Be a big rich man now, owning the beach.”

  The others grunted agreement, but Pima had gone still, her black skin a shadow. “No one’s that lucky,” she said bitterly. “Everyone daydreaming about being the next Lucky Strike is what made Sloth go bad.”

  “Yeah, well”—Nailer shrugged—“I still feel lucky today.”

  Pima made a face. “You weren’t just lucky,” she said. “You were smart. And Lucky Strike, he was smart, too. Half the crews out here find some cache of oil or copper or whatever and none of them figure out what to do with it. Crew boss grabs it in the end, and they get bumped off the wrecks. Shit.” She took another swig from the bottle and wiped her lips on her arm before passing it on to Moon Girl, who drank and coughed. “Luck isn’t what you need out here,” Pima said. “Smarts is what you need.”

  “Luck or smarts, I don’t care, long as I’m not dead.”

  “Cheers to that. Still, we get all excited about being like Lucky Strike and we lose our heads. We waste all our money throwing dice, trying to get close to Luck, trying to get the big win. We pray to the Rust Saint to help us find something we can keep for ourselves. Hell, even my mom puts good rice on the Scavenge God’s scale for a luck offering, and we just end up like Sloth.”

  Pima nodded down the beach to where men from the heavy crews had started their bonfires. Nailshed girls were with them, laughing and teasing them, twining slender arms around the men’s waists, urging them to drink and spend. “Sloth’s down there now. I saw her. Dreaming about a Lucky Strike got her nothing except shame cuts through her crew tattoos, and a whole lot of bad company.”

  Nailer studied the men’s bonfires. “You think she’ll come after me?”

  “I would,” Pima said. “She’s got nothing to lose now.” She nodded at Nailer’s luck gifts. “You better find a good place to stash all that. She’ll probably try to steal it. Maybe she finds some sugar daddy down there to take her under his wing, but no one else is going to deal with her. Grub shacks won’t take her because the ship breakers won’t buy anything from someone with slashed crew tats. Smelter clans definitely won’t touch an oath breaker. Liar like that, she’s out of options.”

  Moon Girl said, “She could sell off a kidney. Maybe tap out a couple pints of blood for the Harvesters. They’re always buying.”

  “Sure. She’s got those pretty eyes,” Pearly said. “Harvesters would take those in a second.”

  Pima shrugged. “Medical buyers can slice and dice her like a side of pork, but after a while everyone runs out of pieces. Then what?”

  “Life Cult,” Nailer suggested. “They’d buy her eggs.”

  “Just what we need.” Moon Girl made a face. “Bunch of half-men that look like Sloth.”

  “Dog DNA would be a step up for her,” Pearly said. “At least dogs are loyal.”

  They all laughed darkly. Started joking about which animals would enhance Sloth’s genetic makeup: Roosters at least woke up early, crawdads were good eating, snakes were perfect for duct work, and they didn’t have hands, so they couldn’t stab you in the back. Every animal they considered was an improvement over the creature who had betrayed them. Ship breaking was too dangerous to not have trust.

  “Sloth’s about to hit a dead end,” Pima said, “but we’ve got the same problem. Maybe not this year, but soon.” She shrugged. “My mom’s feeding me extra, trying to get me so I can compete into heavy crew.” She hesitated, looked down the beach again to the bonfires and the men. “I don’t think I’m going to make it. Too big for light crew, too small for heavy crew, what happens then? How many clans are taking kids who aren’t their own?”

  “It’s bullshit,” Pearly said. “You shouldn’t have to quit light crew. You do better scavenge than anyone on the ship. You could take Bapi’s job in a second, take out slack and double quota.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that. You could take Bapi’s job for sure.”

  Pima smiled. “There’s a long line for that job, and it don’t start with us. You’ve got to buy in big-time, and none of us has that kind of cash.”

  “It’s stupid,” Pearly said. “You’d be a better crew boss.”

  “Yeah.” Pima grimaced. “That’s where the luck comes in, I guess.” She looked around at them seriously. “You should remember that, all of you. If you’re just smart or just lucky, it’s not worth a copper yard. You got to have both, or you’re just like Sloth down at those bonfires, begging for someone to find a use for you.” She took another swig from the bottle and handed it back. Stood up.

  “I got to get some sleep.” She headed down the beach, calling back over her shoulder to Nailer, “See you tomorrow, lucky boy. And be on time. Bapi will cut you for sure if you don’t show up and sweat with the rest of us.”

  Nailer and the rest of the crew watched her go. The last log in the fire crackled, sending sparks. Moon Girl reached into the flame, quickly turning the log deeper into the coals. “There’s no way she’ll make heavy crew,” she said. “No way any of us do.”

  “You trying to spoil the night?” Pearly asked.

  Moon Girl’s pierced features glittered in the firelight. “Just saying what we all know. Pima’s worth ten of Bapi, but it don’t matter. Another year, she’s got the same problem as Sloth. It’s luck or nothing.” She held up a blue glass Fates amulet she kept around her neck. “We kiss the eye and hope things turn out, but we’re all just as screwed as Sloth.”

  “No.” Tick-tock shook his head. “The difference is that Sloth deserved it, and Pima doesn’t.”

  “Deserving doesn’t have anything to do with it,” Moon Girl said. “If people got what they deserved, Nailer’s mom would be alive, Pima’s mom would own Lawson & Carlson, and I’d be eating six times a day.” She spit into the fire. “You don’t deserve anything. Maybe Sloth was an oath breaker, but she was smart enough to know you don’t deserve things, you gotta take them.”

  “I don’t buy that.” Pearly shook his head. “What have you got without your promises? You’re nothing. Less than nothing.”

  Nailer said, “You didn’t see that oil, Pearly. It was the biggest Lucky Strike I ever saw. We can all pretend like we aren’t like Sloth, but you never saw so much oil for the taking in all your life. It would turn anyone into an oath breaker.”

  “Not me,” Pearly said vehemently.

  “Sure. None of us,” Nailer said. “But you still weren’t there.”

  “Not Pima,” Tick-tock said. “Never her.”

  And that killed the discussion, because whatever other lies they told themselves, Tick-tock was right. Pima never wavered. She never broke and she always had your back. Even when she was bitching at you to make quota, she always kept you safe. Nailer suddenly wished he could give all his luck to her. If anyone deserved something better, it was her.

  Depressed by the turn of conversation, people started gathering the leavings of their meal, dousing the beach wood with sand, and getting ready to return to whatever families or caretakers or safe flops they had.

  The wind blew over them and Nailer turned into the freshening breeze. The storm was coming, for sure. He had enough experience on the coast to have the sense of it. It was out there, coming in. A good big blow. It could shut down work for a couple days at least. Maybe give him a chance to rest up and heal.

  He inhaled the fresh salty air as it poured over him. Other campfires were dousing out, and there was an increasing scurry of activity as the beach res
idents started tying down meager belongings in preparation for changing weather.

  Out on the horizon, another clipper ship was skating across the Gulf’s night waters, running lights glowing blue. He took a deep breath, watching it rush for whatever port would protect it. For once, Nailer was glad to be on shore.

  He turned and trudged down the beach toward his own hut. If he was really lucky, his father would be out drinking and he’d be able to slip in unnoticed.

  Nailer’s home lay at the margin of the jungle surrounded by kudzu vines and cypress, made of palm sheathing and bamboo struts and scavenged sheet tin that his father had tagged with his fist mark to make sure nobody scavenged it while they were away during the day.

  Nailer set his luck gifts outside the door. He could almost remember times when this door hadn’t seemed dangerous. Before his mother went feverish. Before his father turned drunk and high. Now, opening the door was always a gamble.

  If it weren’t for the fact that Nailer was wearing loaned clothes, he wouldn’t even risk the return, but still, his other set of clothes lay inside, and if he was lucky, his dad was still out drinking. He scraped open the door and padded through the interior darkness. Opened the jar of glowpaint and smeared a bit on his forehead. The phosphorescence gave dim shadows—

  A match flared. Nailer whirled.

  His father leaned against the wall behind the door, watching him, a nearly empty bottle of booze gripped in one fist.

  “Good to see you, Nailer.”

  Richard Lopez was a rib-thin conglomeration of ropy muscle and burning energy. Tattooed dragons ran the length of his arms and sent their tails curling up his neck to twine with the faded patterns of his own long-ago light crew tattoos. Fresher, and far more ominous, a whole series of victory scars gleamed on his chest, showing all the men he’d broken when he’d been a ring fighter. Thirteen red and angry slashes there. His very own baker’s dozen, he would say, grinning. And then he’d ask Nailer if he was ever going to be as tough as his old man.