Ghost Sea: A Novel (Dugger/Nello Series)

by Ferenc Máté

  “He had some good times, though, didn’t he,” I snapped.

  We were so close in, I swear I felt the reef rising below us. I signaled for Hay to take the wheel.

  We lowered the skiff stern first over the rail and Nello handed down the oars and rifle. He held on to the rifle and pulled me so close his face almost touched mine. “Be careful,” he whispered. “Something’s up.”

  “I know,” I hissed. “We’re hexed.”

  “Hexed, I don’t know. Him, I do.” He jerked his head toward the companionway. “A bonfire to light a pipe?”

  Hay neared and Nello pulled away. We pushed off.

  I rowed in short, even strokes to keep the oars from banging the gunwale. The ketch began to melt into the darkness. As I glanced over my shoulder at the islands, a fish jumped with a loud splash behind us, and Hay, turning to look, slid to one side, nearly tipping us over. I had to grab him to keep him from falling overboard.

  “Sorry,” he whispered.

  I rowed on. How suddenly life could change at sea. All the way to death. A roll of the skiff, a helping hand a bit too slow in coming, and another name struck from the ranks of the living. Who would miss him? How badly? And who knows; he might just be glad to go.

  A shadow of panic raced across Hay’s face and he grabbed inside his coat and yanked a silver flask into the moonlight, untwisted the cap, and took a slug. Then, smiling dumbly at me, he whispered in an absurdly casual tone, “Do you hunt?”

  “Only people,” I said, and concentrated on keeping the oars from splashing. I pulled hard, held, glided. The wind lulled and the night was so still I could hear the droplets from the oars splash into the sea—they left ringlets of phosphorescence on the black water.

  I had just broken a sweat when I saw the flame. It flared for an instant, then vanished, but I had the spot marked—a saddle on the larger island. “Hold these and don’t breathe.” I cocked the Winchester as gently as I could, but it still made an awful racket. Laying it across my knees, I took back the oars and did a silent pull. Pull, glide, pull, glide, when something grabbed the blades of the oars. The kelp undulated in the swells with a sickly motion; the long stipes trapped the oars—we stood still. I handed the Winchester to Hay, had him hold one oar out of the water, then I knelt in the bow to push and pole my way ahead.

  With his free hand, Hay grabbed the stipes and pulled. We both strained hard but it was the current that pushed us free.

  I stayed in the bow and paddled. We slipped through the pass suddenly into darkness—the shadow of the islands. There was no telling black island from black water. We drifted. I turned back toward Hay to signal for perfect silence but I couldn’t see him in the dark. Somewhere up ahead I heard a voice, low, guttural, Indian. I lowered the blade into the water and pulled, making phosphorescence but no sound. Something splashed ahead. I froze. My left leg cramped. Nerves. I looked back, but if Hay was still there, he sure as hell didn’t stir. “The gun,” I whispered. The steel was slippery with sweat; I was wiping it with my shirt when, with a great crunch, we hit and the Winchester went off with a deafening blast. Flames filled the night, and there, lit by the fire that burned on a pile of sand in its bow, was the canoe. An old Indian woman—her terrified face contorted—held a long-handled fishing net with a bullet-splattered wild-goose in it. A soaked cedar basket, which must have covered the fire, lay on its side. Bobbing on the waves, blinded by the firelight, a flock of wild geese stretched their gangly necks. In the stern sat an old Indian with an immobile face and calm eyes, eyes that had seen so much that nothing more surprised them in this stupid world.

  KATE

  Sleep

  During the days I sleep. I lie on the pebbles of some hidden cove covered by hemlock branches he puts on me to hide me, not to warm me. And I sleep. Not right off. I peek out at the water, hoping to see your boat coming to save me. The young one goes down to the shore to do his voodoo. He strips naked. Walks in the water. I don’t know how he does it because the water is like ice. He pees in his hand and then rubs it on his arms and legs, chest and back, then goes in up to his waist and stands there. He rubs himself with a hemlock branch chanting softly something like qeqale and selwaka.

  Then he whips himself with the branch of evergreen across the back. The needles make a sound shiiyupp, shiiyupp, on and on. He bleeds. Red streaks run on his dark skin. He stands and whips on and on until I can’t watch anymore. I sleep.

  11

  RACING NORTH

  I measured and described the skull which I had stolen and made arrangements…to return to the graveyard in order to obtain one or two additional skeletons. I have three skeletons, without heads…. Besides having scientific value these skeletons are worth money.

  —FRANZ BOAS

  T he ketch came tacking back and forth across the moonlight. Hay emptied his flask and began to hum a Christmas carol. When close in, Nello swung the ketch upwind, and as we drifted up he called out, “Who the hell got shot?”

  “A duck.” Hay snorted drunkenly.

  The moon beamed down a broad smile—or maybe outright laughter.

  While we hauled the skiff aboard, Hay told the story.

  “Jesus, I forgot about them,” Nello said. “Old-time goose hunters. They blind them with the flames, then throw a net over them.”

  Hay laughed, made the dumb remark about a wild-goose chase, wished us goodnight, and clattered off to bed.

  I took the helm. We’d lost almost an hour.

  “Then there was poor old Pike,” Nello said forcefully. “He paid five dollars to a Scotsman for his name. He had wanted a longer one, like O’Shaughnessy, but the Irishman wanted ten, so ol’ Pike just got Pike. One day he and his wife got sick. Their heads wobbled. No strength. Burning up during the day, shivering at night. Some kids found a dead man wedged between two rocks, so the sun boiled him during the day and the wind from the ice fields froze him at night. His mouth, ears, nose, even his asshole, were all sealed up with pitch. So they lowered him into the water and scraped the pitch out of him, and found bits of Pike’s hair all rolled up, and a piece of his shirt, and a piece of his wife’s skirt. They washed the dead guy out, then let him drift off in the current. When they brought all that stuff to Pike, he was already feeling better. But it was too late for his wife; she died that morning.” He trimmed the jib but the wind kept veering. “Hexed.”

  WE STOOD TWO-HOUR watches through the night. Off watch, I slept below, but Nello just bundled up against the house with his collar so high only the top of his head showed, and snored.

  By my second watch, the moon had set behind the big island and I stared into the dark and tried hard not to listen to the sounds. They can drive you mad when you’re sailing in the dark, when the hiss of the bow wake becomes sighs of the long-drowned, and the whoosh of the stern wake whispers memories. And, if you stare long enough, the sails become ghostly faces. I closed my eyes and drifted. I smelled her skin, felt her warmth, felt her small breasts, the long hollow behind her knee, the softness of her thigh; heard her whisper, “Damn you.” I had lost sense of the wheel when I heard Nello stir. He sat upright, face drawn, and said in a hushed voice, “What the hell is that?”

  I heard only the sounds of the sea.

  “You hear it, Cappy?” he insisted with the agitation of one just shaken from a dream.

  “I only hear you.”

  He cupped a hand over his ear but there was only the sound of the wakes, and the occasional groan of ropes tightening in blocks as we rode gently over swells. Nello hung his head over the windward side, listening, then he crossed to leeward and did the same. “It’s behind us,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “Good question.” He turned his head back and forth to center the sound, stared, shaded his eyes with his hands to block out the compass light and what little light drifted down from the sky. “How come I don’t see a fucking thing?” and he went below. When he came back up, he looked gloomier than before. “I thought so. A big boat with a noisy
propeller.”

  “I don’t hear a thing,” I said. “You sure you’re not still dreaming?”

  “I had my ear against the hull.”

  Near the big island the wind eased and, in the now-calmer air, I finally heard it too. Over the soft sounds of the night rose a low thudding: faint, far away, ebbing and flowing as the wind rose and fell. And nearing.

  “A big boat with no lights,” he said. “Why?” And he stared at me as if I should know.

  “Maybe he’s saving kerosene.”

  “Or he’s sneaking up on someone. Like we are.”

  “With that engine?”

  “He can’t do much about that if he has no sails, can he?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Him.” He pointed violently down the companionway. “I don’t like him.”

  “I don’t exactly love him either, but so what?”

  “Did you ever meet him?”

  “Who?”

  “Hay.”

  “You kidding me? He’s been here all day!”

  “I mean before. Did you ever meet him with his wife, or his captain, or the guy who wipes his boots?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Just wondering what he was like with other people around: honest, sneaky, what?”

  We were in the deepest shadow of the island, sailing blind, so we came about and settled onto a long tack pointing at the snowy peaks. He went below, rummaged, then came back up with the Winchester and sat in his corner. “I see it,” he said, and pointed south.

  Far behind us, at the tip of the big island, in the last spill of moonlight, a small black mass, strangely shaped, darkened the sea. It headed west toward the island’s tip, then vanished. Whether it went behind the island or just into its shadow I couldn’t tell, not until the thudding of its engine died away.

  “Whoever they’re sneaking up on, it sure isn’t us,” I said, “because they just rounded the point. They’re going on the other side.”

  Nello stared at the spot the strange craft had just deserted.

  “The Dutchman,” he blurted. “You remember. The scavenger. The one the bear ate. Had that ugly, tacked-together tug with the cabin higher than the pilothouse. I swear it’s him.”

  I remembered the Dutchman. I had seen him in beerparlors or on the docks trolling for jobs. A stump of a man, but ferocious. Big ears, squinty eyes, a wiry mustache, and pipe he bit down on with as much determination as others would a bullet. He had this sweater, standard seaman’s thing, but with huge holes in its left shoulder and left sleeve. They said he’d been mauled by a bear, and he always kept his head down, eyes fixed ahead, as if ready for its next charge. He made friends with everyone, then he’d cut them to the bone with some vicious remark. His old tug was patched with staves and steel plates. He log-salvaged some, scavenged some; hauled old derelicts down from up coast and cut them up for scrap. Never lasted at anything. Except that sweater.

  “Anyway. You’re right, Cappy, they aren’t following us. Sorry I got you all worried.” He was silent for a while, and just when I thought he’d gone to sleep he said, “Cappy. Let’s say you were following a boat on the sly. What would you do?”

  “First I’d kill you to get some peace.”

  He flashed his teeth. “And then?”

  “Then I would do precisely what that son of a bitch is doing.”

  “What?” Turn off your lights?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “Then I’d go on the other goddamn side of the goddamn island. That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it?”

  “I want to hear your opinion, is all.”

  “How can someone follow us if they’re not behind us?”

  “What’s it matter as long as they know where we’re going?”

  “How can they know where we’re going? We don’t know where we’re going.”

  “Don’t ask me. I didn’t signal pretending to light my pipe.”

  WE TACKED AT the mouth of an inlet that wound east for forty miles among the mountains to a thundering waterfall that some Indians thought was the door to eternal life; others of them just went there because the fishing was good. The air was colder here—the water came from fields of ice. We headed north.

  The night passed. I was gazing at the phosphorescence streaming in the stern wake when Nello touched my shoulder. “My watch,” he said. I went down to my berth but didn’t really sleep; just lay half awake and talked to her.

  I awoke to the sound of the stove lid sliding in the galley. Wood smoke, the smell of coffee, and a sleepy light filled the ketch; Charlie was frying tomatoes. Nello stood at the helm, the steam from his coffee mug misting past his face.

  “Morning, Cappy. Glad you’re up,” he said.

  THE SKY WAS clear with no mare’s tails in the west, so the wind would last at least another day. We had made good time, the tip of the big island lay on our port quarter, and if we didn’t make much leeway we could clear it and run the tack another mile.

  “Cappy, I’ve been thinking,” Nello began as he lay the chart on deck, putting the mainsheet over it to keep it down in the wind. “Past that flat island is a big shoal full of rocks. We can stay close to the mainland but there are no coves, no inlets, nowhere to hide, so if I were them I sure as hell wouldn’t stop anywhere there. Not until I got here.” And he pointed at a maze of broken water. Inlets, sounds, channels, and reaches wound among islands of every shape and size, with rocks that dried only at low water, and rocks that—even then—lay just below the surface, that you’d never notice until your keel hit them. It looked as if someone had torn a chart to pieces, thrown the bits atop one another, and written over it, Desolation Sound. Fathom marks were rare and there were no contour marks on the land. When Captain Vancouver charted these waters in 1792, he had written in his log that he hated this dark, dismal place more than any in the world. It showed in his charting. And no one had bothered to chart it much more since. North of Desolation Sound the land and islands were marked with broken lines as warning that they were only approximations. Uncharted. The North.

  “Once they’re here, they’ll feel safe,” Nello said, and poked his finger at a string of islands. Ragged Islands, the chart said. “He could play hide and seek there with us until our teeth fell out.”

  The sun rose without warmth over the mountains.

  Charlie came up the companionway, balancing steaming plates of the fried tomatoes, bacon and eggs, and fried bread. He stayed to watch us eat.

  “We could follow them inside those islands,” Nello said. “But if they see us they might get scared off and hide, and that would be that. But if we don’t follow them—”

  “Just let them go?”

  “No. We head them off. We go outside around all the shoals and the islands, sail like hell in open water, long tacks, no worries, and don’t come back in until we’re here,” and he pointed to a narrow pass between the northern tip of a dogleg island and a place called Reef Point. “Then we reach over to the north end of the Ragged Islands, drop anchor, catch some fish, and have dinner ready for the buggers when they come up the pass. It’s only a stone’s throw wide. Can’t miss them.” When he saw I wasn’t convinced, he added in a whisper, “You might just have her aboard tonight. Ah, good morning to you Mr. Hay,” he said boisterously. “Slept well, I trust?”

  Hay came up the companionway ladder, blinking into the sun, and plunked himself down. Charlie brought his breakfast and cleared away our plates the moment we were done.

  He worked without pause, was as enthusiastic as hell, and he worshipped Nello. When his chores were done, the galley spotless, he would come on deck and watch his every move. Nello didn’t mind, in fact seemed to cherish playing the caring dad, showing him how to trim sail, how to read the waves and the wind in the telltales. And Charlie would nod his head, seeming to get it all. I was convinced that the little bugger didn’t understand a word until the bowline. But that came a bit later; for now he hauled the dishes
below.

  We headed into open water.

  The wind rose and whitecaps danced in the climbing sun, when a stiff gust hit and we heeled hard and everything clattered in the galley.

  “You okay, Charlie?” Nello shouted down.

  “Charlie okay,” the kid said happily.

  We beat hard, long tacks, and by noon had logged thirty miles.

  Hay spent the morning in the cockpit studying the coast with binoculars. He asked questions about sailing in general, and this place in particular, so I showed him on the chart where we were headed, explaining why. I left out the possibility that his wife might be aboard tonight. He thanked me, then he went and took up his customary post with his back against the mast, and stared motionless at the emptiness ahead.

  Off to the west, a salmon leapt in desperate flight. It hung for a moment in the air, a thousand tiny mirrors in the sun, then fell back. Into the spreading rings it left behind, a porpoise burst, blew, and then dove to give chase. It didn’t need to hurry. Much faster than the salmon, it would swim from side to side, guiding and herding its prey toward the shallows of a cove whence there was no flight. Confident and engrossed in the chase, the porpoise never noticed the killer whales closing in behind. It was a small herd, maybe five, a few females and an old male trailing, with a tall fin whose tip hung folded down.