by Sean Rowe
I was leaning back on one elbow to take another swallow out of the beer bottle when I saw the buoy. It was about the size of a station wagon and was coming up sideways, righting itself from where it wallowed in the trough of a swell directly in front of the Ya-Ya’s bow. I grabbed the nearest stanchion, and the beer bottle went skittering back down the side deck toward the cockpit. The buoy’s signal light flashed on, throwing white light over the deck. After a long moment there was darkness again, and after that the sudden slamming and shrieking as the buoy hit the fiberglass hull and started dragging under the boat. The Ya-Ya seemed to rear up on its side. Then the crisscross metal top of the buoy came shooting past my left shoulder in a rush of foam as the signal light flashed on again. Down inside the blinding light was a hard jerk and a chunking sound. My head had smacked against the deck, and I couldn’t decide whether the chunking sound was inside my head or outside, something ripping loose and giving way under the stern. The engine noise had dropped off and changed pitch, but the boat was still moving. I looked behind me and saw the buoy falling out of sight, already forty feet back.
I had stood up and begun moving toward the stern but then dropped down into a crouch. Another boat, only a few yards away, was running alongside the Ya-Ya. Mixed up with the saltwater taste I had the coppery taste of blood now, and one eye was blurry with water or blood or both. It was another moment before I realized that the person standing in the pilothouse doorway on the other boat was Manny and that the boat was Kip’s lobster boat. Manny was shaking his head and laughing.
The Ya-Ya pitched and rolled in the swells, almost dead in the water. When I got to the cockpit Fontana was coming down the ladder from the spotting tower wearing a pair of boxer shorts with little blackjack hands printed on them.
“Look,” he said, turning around. “Considering how we’re on our way to commit a carefully orchestrated international incident and all, maybe it’s time to knock off the drinking.”
I got a fresh beer out of the cooler and sat down on the lid. “Fine,” I said.
Fontana looked at me with his hands on his hips, smiling. His pupils were pinpoints. “How’d you like the tape?” he asked.
I looked around. The Walkman was gone.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got another copy,” he said. “It’s a collector’s item.”
“Let me guess. That’s what you’re using to blackmail Manny.”
Fontana laughed and kept laughing until he started coughing. As he sat down on the bait cooler next to me, Julia stepped off the side deck into the cockpit. She started to say something but changed her mind. I noticed a line connecting the Ya-Ya to Kip’s lobster boat. Manny was waiting until the swells brought the two close enough together to jump on board.
“Come downstairs,” Julia said, meaning me.
I sat on the berth in Fontana’s cabin looking at the IV rig while Julia numbed my eyebrow. She threaded a needle and frowned while she started sewing in sutures.
“All that stuff about me being a high-priced hooker was something Jack dreamed up. It was an act. We thought it would help draw you in.”
“Terrific,” I said. “It worked. What about your sugar baron? And what’s-his-name?”
She shrugged. “Friends of Jack’s, playing a part. I thought you suspected it was a scam. Or had figured it out by now. I’m afraid the truth isn’t very exotic. I work in the ICU at Abbott Northwestern in Minneapolis. I have an herb garden. I’m in a book group. I’m sorry I deceived you.”
“OK,” I said. “But why?”
“Jack said you were a sucker for damsels in distress. Hold still.”
“No, I mean why draw me in at all?”
“That’s obvious, isn’t it?” She looked into my eyes before going back to the sutures. “He wants to show you some things. He thinks you’ve got nothing to lose, and it seems like you agree with him because here you are.”
I wondered if she knew what the others knew, how Fontana had taken the fall for me, eaten my sin. Or what the others didn’t know, about a black box lying under Key West harbor, another lever he had used, or decided not to. She finished with the stitches and started putting things away in a plastic box.
“What’s killing him?”
She laughed. “The same thing that’s killing you, Matt. Life. Mileage. In his case, a little too much of it. But the difference between you and Jack is that he didn’t wake up one morning and decide to call it quits. He’d prefer to be alive. He is alive. I’m not so sure about you.”
“I’m not sure what we’re talking about.”
She glanced at the beer in my hand. Then she looked away. “What’s killing Jack. Every hospital I’ve worked in has the same euphemism for it: fever of unknown origin. It doesn’t matter what’s killing him. What matters is that instead of spending his remaining days in an AIDS hospice, he decided to make his own sort of last stand. He wants to show you a way to start over, even if it’s too late for him. He doesn’t care about the money. The money’s for you. You and me. He wants us to be provided for when he’s gone. Do you remember the fox?”
“The fox?”
“Coming back in the dinghy this afternoon, Jack told me a story about when you two were boys. You don’t remember what happened in the tree house?”
“No, I don’t. That was a long time ago.”
“Well, yes. It was a long time ago, and you don’t remember. I’m afraid that’s the point.”
I could tell she was about to stand up. I reached across the space between us and put my hand on hers.
“I don’t understand what you are to him.”
“His nurse, at the moment.”
“What else?”
She took her hand away. She stood up and turned toward the door and then turned back again and looked at me. “You really don’t get it yet, do you?”
I hadn’t heard Fontana come down the stairs. He appeared in the doorway suddenly enough to startle me.
“After much arm-twisting, Manuel went over the side with a flashlight,” he said. “We’ve lost one propeller but the other one’s fine. So we’re OK. And now it’s time to go.”
12
IT WAS FONTANA who first caught sight of her, a white gleam on the black horizon, dull at first but soon distinct, tinged with reds and blues, a whole. The glow beneath the radar hood showed a small green streak, the same ship we saw with our eyes eight miles ahead in the darkness.
Fontana had picked a night with a crescent moon to run under, but it hardly mattered. The sea was filled with shadows thrown down from an overcast sky. Even a full moon wouldn’t have changed its heaviness. The Marquesas lay forty miles behind us now, with Manny and Julia waiting at anchor there aboard the Ya-Ya.
Fontana slowed and then cut the engines and stood in the cockpit of Kip’s lobster boat with the backwash slapping and sloshing over the transom. He looked at the gear strapped and chained on deck and then looked at me. Neither one of us said anything. When he restarted the engines I noticed the red and green running lights had gone dark, and then Fontana was giving me the wheel, waiting to do it until the prow rode over the top of a swell.
We came at her in a wide semicircle from the east, and she was all color now, a blaze of neon with one big string of white lights along the top from bow to pilothouse, across the stacks and down to the stern. Flickers and blinks, flashes and glows, but silent. It was too soon to see the bow or stern wakes cutting white foam out of the black water. At two miles we slowed and stopped again, letting the engines idle while we loaded the weapons and got out the masks.
“OK,” Fontana said. “This is it.”
He reached for the handheld radio and kept punching the roamer key until he got channel 4. I checked my watch.
“Another three minutes,” I said.
There was no radio traffic on 4. The ship was moving along a line parallel to us. Miles ago the mate would have picked us up on his own radar, perhaps even noticed when we stopped. He would think: just another fishing boat crossing an unmarked
highway, pulling in close to gawk at his sideways skyscraper.
“Now?”
I watched the hands on my wristwatch, raising one of my own in a gesture of patience. Then I said: “OK.”
“OK, what?”
“Midnight. Midnight on the dot.”
“Sea Rover to Rasta Mon,” Fontana said. He spoke in a conversational tone.
A pause.
“Sea Rover to Rasta Mon,” he repeated.
“Rasta Mon. Go to low power.” It was Bryant.
Fontana toggled the power switch, dropping the signal down so it could be picked up only at close range.
Bryant came back on and said, “All right. Party time.”
We had already lost some distance on the ship. Fontana checked the radar and reported, “We’re at three miles. Coming in fast on your port side. Do it.”
“We’re doing it. Go.”
And then we were flying, up on plane, smashing through the swells toward where the ship would cross our bow. I put the radio on 16. At one mile it crackled to life, and a voice came on, hailing us. The voice waited a few seconds and then tried again in Spanish, then two more times in English, the last time with some urgency.
We kept going, and I switched back over to 4 and waited, the volume turned up high. Bryant would have his own hand-held clipped to his flak jacket, the transmitter locked open so we could hear what happened next.
It came when we were a quarter mile off the ship’s bow, and I was getting a sense of her size. I could see passengers, just a few, leaning against the rail on the promenade deck or walking along beside the railing toward the stern.
The next words that came through the radio were Kip’s. There was no sense of the pilothouse door opening, just Kip saying: “Don’t touch anything. Not anything. Be cool, that way no one gets dead.”
Then Krystal saying, “Step back from the console and get down on your knees. Hands behind your necks. Right NOW! Cross your ankles!”
“You’re making a serious mistake,” a voice responded.
There was a sudden scream that stopped just as suddenly.
“Anyone else want some ’lec-tricity?” Bryant said. “Hey! YOU! Who are you?”
“Second mate.” The voice was quiet, almost muffled. It sounded young.
“OK, second mate. I want you to get the captain up here on the double. Do it how you normally do it. Stand up. You do this right or it’s the last thing you ever do.”
Half a minute passed.
“Down, boy!” Bryant barked. “Get back down there!”
We had turned alongside the ship and kept running with her at almost twenty knots. Three passengers on the promenade deck were cheering, waving big plastic cups. Fontana waved back at them. We were only fifteen yards from the side of the ship, but they were too high up to really make us out.
Right now I could picture Krystal standing next to the radio room holding one of the guns on the radio officer. Bryant and Kip would be waiting by the door for the captain to walk through.
A sudden, furious crashing erupted from the radio.
“Don’t move!” Bryant screamed. “Don’t MOVE, motherfucker!”
And that was it. I heard a zipping sound, Kip or Bryant putting plastic handcuffs on the captain and the mate and the radio officer. The next thing that would happen would be the third engineer calling up to the bridge to say ha-ha, very funny, it seemed someone had padlocked all the hatches leading in and out of the engine room.
I managed to light a cigarette, bending down under the console, and when I had half smoked it, I saw that the Empress was slowing down.
13
IT TOOK THE SHIP more than three miles and nine minutes to come to a complete stop. Then it started moving again, regaining momentum until it held at around four knots. The breeze had died, and the sea was a dead flat calm, which turned out to be a very good thing.
I watched from the stern of the lobster boat as Krystal appeared above me on the promenade deck, dragging the Jacob’s ladder. She clipped one end to the railing and barely got the coiled bulk over the side. It unrolled down four stories, the last of the ladder rungs splashing in the foam.
I wanted things to slow down so I could think, but I was already reaching for the ladder, my arms chafing against the Kevlar vest, my breath warm and wet on the inside of my Ronald Reagan mask.
As soon as I had both feet on one of the wooden ladder rungs and my hands on the two ropes that supported them, Fontana backed the lobster boat away from the ship. I took a step, then another, looking up for a shadow or hollow that would give away what I was looking for. After a few more steps, I saw it: the butt of a hinge on one of the galley cargo doors, the thing I would use as an anchor. I tried to get the mooring line into a better position between my teeth and nearly lost it. Then I was in reach of the hinge.
Above me the steel walls of the ship rose straight up into darkness. I wrapped my left arm around the left ladder rope and tied the nylon line to the rung just above me. Then I took two of the plastic handcuffs from my belt and laced them through the back of the hinge, closed them into a loop, and tied the mooring line to the doubled handcuffs.
I heard a burst of laughter and saw three heads in silhouette looking over the railing, a pair of arms waving. More laughter, a whoop, then a plastic cup falling through shadows and hitting the side of the ship. Below me Fontana was standing on the bow of the lobster boat reaching out for the ladder, the muzzle of his rifle knocking against steel.
The lobster boat bumped the ship, then drifted back a few feet, taking up slack in the mooring line. I got ready to climb again and pulled the mask down over my face. Up: toward the starless sky, the ladder more stable now with Fontana’s weight on it.
Where the twin ropes of the Jacob’s ladder disappeared over the railing far above me I could see Krystal’s head, with a flashlight next to it. The beam followed me as I reached for the next rung and reached again. I stopped in front of a rectangular window, a porthole, and looked in. A shirtless fat man lay on a bed reading a book. A door opened, and a woman in a nightgown came out of a bathroom.
My hand found one of the airline bottles in my pocket. I unscrewed the top and drank it in one swallow, feeling the dark, liquid thrill go all the way down my throat. I let go of the bottle and watched it fall past my feet into darkness.
The man closed his book and started turning just as the woman glanced at the window.
I reached for the next rung and took a step up, and then all at once I’m in another place, going up a rope ladder to the tree house a lifetime ago in Etna Furnace. Jack’s ahead of me, climbing toward the stars, toward Orion overhead and the Dipper on my right. I go up the ladder into the tree house and see the still-warm body of the fox stretched out on the floor in moonlight. Jack sits Indian-style with his pocketknife beside him saying, “The fox lives on the edge of things. He stays out of sight, but he’s always watching.” He picks up the knife and frowns as he cuts at his finger, saying like an incantation: “The fox will trade himself for his family, if it comes to that. But he doesn’t let it come to that. That’s what redemption is.” I watch him touch the knife to the creature’s throat, the silver blade part moonlight and part blood when he raises it in the trembling air between us.
I kept climbing. The three figures were still there off to my right and above me on the promenade deck. “Dude!” one of them hollered. “Hey! I’m sorry I dropped my beer on your head!” A combination of hilarious giggling and shh-ing from the other two. “Shut up, you fucking gomer!” another voice said. “The guy’s gonna pop your ass!” By now they could see the guns.
Then, right then, and quicker than I would have thought it could happen, the rope in my left hand tore and parted with a musty snap, and I was falling backward, flailing and kicking in my jumpsuit out into darkness. The next thing was not falling but hitting. Pain shot through my knee, and my head and shoulder hit steel as one leg caught with a jerk in the crook of a rung, my whole weight hanging from the one unbroken
ladder rope. For a long moment I was nailed to the side of the ship, my arms splayed out below me and the heel of my free leg kicking and clawing. Upside down and crucified, I might have thought, but there was no thinking then, not in any human way. I sensed the mindless ocean as I hung and swung above it; not consciously, not with just one part of me, but wholly. The rifle slipped from my shoulder and fell, but at the last possible moment, I caught the strap by my fingertips.
The lobster boat followed beside the ship, tethered to it with the mooring line and bouncing gently against the blue bumpers Fontana had set between the two vessels. I heard a shout and looked down, upside down. Fontana clung to the Jacob’s ladder with both arms, the wooden rungs collapsed between us, and the one remaining ladder rope turning and twisting, ready to go.
So this is it, I thought. I felt the pain in my shoulder and tried to breathe, my cheek turned to the cold of the ship and my heart beating with it. This is it then. I heard the roaring of the sea that was my own blood and thought I saw specks of phosphorescence in the low swells forty feet below me. You could let go now, I thought.
I became aware of the wheeze and whistle of breath going in and out of my lungs. A star appeared in a hole made of clouds in the corner of my eye, then a second one; then a whole unnamed constellation that I alone had discovered and would keep my secret. Panic was near me, but with it was something else. I was inside and out of myself, rising up in sunlight in some other place as I never had in my waking life. But I was right here. There was nowhere except where I was, and I was in it, deeply. I opened my eyes. I thought to pray, and let my body do it.
My leg had steadied itself, the heel against the side of the ship. But the other one, the one I hung from, had started to shudder and twitch. I concentrated everything and brought the rifle strap up to my neck and over my chin, hooking it there. My hands moved like independent things, inching up the face of the ship that was as smooth as the milled stone of a monument; I could see them in my mind’s eye, like a movie close-up. The feeling in my bowels and groin was unmistakable, a sexual keening that shocked me. I curled into myself with everything I had and, reaching up, gripped the one good rope with my right hand.
