by Robert Stone
“Right,” he said “It’s getting time to darken ship and get on triple zero. Another couple of minutes.”
“I’ll be on the forepeak when we go in. We ought to check on Dee from time to time.”
“She’ll handle it,” Callahan said. “She has a gun. Let me do the checking, Freddy. It’ll work out better.”
“Sure,” Negus said. “That’d be more your job than mine.”
“You know,” Father Egan said, “I’m reminded here of another city.” He uttered a reflective clerical chuckle. “When I was preparing to be whatever it is I’ve become I was sent to work in a hospital. Comfort the dying. I remember the mortuary there—it was very Victorian. Neo-Renaissance. In the foyer there was an inscription in Latin. ‘Let smiles cease,’ it said, ‘let laughter flee. This is the place where the dead help the living.’ ”
The older man in the group got to his feet muttering.
“Bummer!” he shouted at Egan. His heavy face grew red with anger; he raised cupped hands to amplify his voice, and screamed. “Bummer!”
“I’ll describe a picture to you,” Egan told his congregation. “I’m sure you’re familiar with it. A group of men are standing over a pile of corpses. They’re smiling and they have guns. Some of them have tied handkerchiefs across their faces but not to give themselves the raffish air of banditti—because of the smell.” His eyes went vacant. “What are they looking for in that pile? Has one of them dropped his watch? Never mind.”
The priest wiped his mouth with his sleeve and took a cautious step forward. “That’s the big picture, children. That’s how it is now. That’s why you see that picture every week in all the magazines. You know—there are variations, the people and the uniforms come in different colors, but it’s always the same picture.”
Around them the silences and the darkness deepened. Ramon nuts pattered to the ground through a web of leafy branches, making a sound like soft rain.
“Now why,” Egan asked, “are we made to see this picture week after week until it’s imprinted on the backs of our eyes and we have it before us dreaming and waking? Is it that we’re meant to see it? Is it the cunning of dice play, children? Is there, in short, a message for us?”
No one answered him.
“Will those dead help the living?” he asked. “Are we to seek the living among the dead? What does it mean?”
A youth with a full dark beard who was sitting cross-legged on a waterproof poncho roused himself.
“The Holy One is among the dead,” the young man declared.
The girl who had started the fire turned and stared at him.
“Oh, no,” she said softly.
Egan stood with his hands clasped under his chin, his face uplifted, his eyes closed.
“And yet,” he said, “and yet—where, eh?” he opened his eyes and peered at them across the firelight. “Because you can stare into faces of the dead—I’ve been doing it for years, I ought to know—and you won’t see anything. Anything more than plain death, I mean. You can look as sharp as you like, you can pray for a sign, for something, for the slightest hint of something … more. Not forthcoming.”
He sighed and shook his head.
“You can look into the dead face of the world, try to catch it unawares—no good. You keep looking, you tell yourself you’ve seen something, some little intimation, you know, of something … living. The Living. Or the Holy One, whatever. But it’s no good. You won’t. It won’t reveal itself that way.”
He had been standing, swaying, dangerously close to the fire. The heat warned him away.
“I mean—you look outward. To the stars, to the farthest nebulae. Not a sign. Or you look in. Do it!” he told them. “Look in! Close your eyes and look down from the outside in and what have you got? Blisters. Skin, eh? Flesh, parasites, sour guts and a little concupiscence. Then we’re down among our several intoxications and delusions and we find our minds, the little devils, the devious protean things. Anything more? A glimmer?”
Some of them sat with their eyes closed looking in. Others stared at Egan or into the fire.
“Maybe yes,” Egan said. “Maybe, eh? Who knows down in that mess? But maybe there is something. A little shard of light. What is it?”
“An anchovy,” the drunk said. “An undigested bit of beef.” He turned and walked off toward the dark tree line, carrying a box of Kleenex.
“Marley’s ghost,” he said as he went. “The ghost of Christmas future.” Egan never seemed to hear.
“It’s the why and wherefore,” the priest said, “that little radiant thing. I’ve never seen it, you know, but it has to be there. It’s the life. The Life. There’s all this death and this dying and it’s the only difference. It’s the only difference things make,” he told them.
“There aren’t angels,” Egan said. “There’s none of that. Thrones. Dominions. All that business—it’s rubbish. But there’s life. There’s the Living among the dead. I mean, you can’t ever quite see it, can you? You’d hardly know it was there but it has to be, doesn’t it? It’s only mislaid.”
He was dizzy, his chest felt hollow. He steadied himself against the stone again.
“Because it’s there—everything’s all right.”
He tried to see each of them among the shadows and flickering light.
“That’s the Holy One among the dead, son,” he told the dark-bearded youth. His eye fell on the strange blond man, something made him look away.
“You have to try and find it, see?” Egan said. “If you can’t find it you have to believe in it. If you can’t believe in it you have to hope you will. If you can’t hope then all you can do is love the idea of it. Love it at a distance if that’s the best you can do, children. Love it like a secret lover.”
He seemed perplexed by their silence. He walked around the fire into the semicircle they had formed.
“It’s the only meaning in all of things,” he said. “There aren’t any others.”
Pablo had lost sight of her face in the glare of the overhead work lights; she was standing by the rail stretching. He moved to the rail opposite and looked for the lights of the other boats he had seen working nearby. No other lights were in sight now.
They seemed to have shifted course. The angle of the wind was different and the low troughs came at them from a different quarter, making the sea seem rougher. He moved out of the glare of the lights, picked out the pointers at the top of the Dipper and lined up Polaris a little off the bow. The new course was northerly. A freshening wind made him feel cold.
“I’m tired,” he said. “I expect I’ll be earning my pay soon.”
She was smoking marijuana again. He smelled it as she went across the stern to sit down on her overturned basket. She never stopped. From her knit basket she took a straight cigarette and a bottle of Puerto Rican rum; she uncapped the rum and took a deep swallow.
“Won’t I be earning my pay soon?”
He could see her face well enough now. She was smiling at him in a way that made him feel as though she had never seen him before. He shivered and that seemed to make her smile the more. She stood up and brought the joint and the bottle across the deck to him.
“Soon, baby. That you will. Now have yourself a drink of this here.”
The rum was good, clear and light, much better than the thick stuff they drank in the cockpit. She pressed the joint on him and absentmindedly he smoked more of it than was good for him.
“Thing is,” Pablo said, “I don’t understand. Things been happening and I don’t understand. Like something was going on.”
“Something’s always going on,” she said. And while he was trying to read her look, all the lights went out together. Only the instrument lights in the cockpit showed, reflected in the windshield and the faint glow of the interior lights from between the louvered shutters over the saloon housing. The Cloud shifted course again and someone—Negus—came out on deck and opened the engine panel. When he slammed it shut again, the boat began to pick up s
peed. The whole frame of the vessel shuddered, a wind picked up where there had been little more than a steady breeze—the Cloud was running like a crash boat.
Negus had gone below again; he came out now wearing a slicker. The bars of light from the saloon compartment had disappeared. Negus was crouching in the forepeak, a pair of binoculars around his neck.
“Away we go,” Mrs. Callahan said.
The sensation of moving at such speed in what seemed an ordinary shrimp boat was dreamlike, almost comical. Pablo stared down at the white water that rushed under their bow.
Deedee sat on a basket near the lazaret hatch, hugging herself, the knit bag on her lap.
“Sit down before you fall over, Pablo,” she said. “We’re going faster than you think.” She lit a straight cigarette in the lee of the lazaret housing. “Let’s get out of this wind and Mama will tell you how it is.”
Following her down into the darkness of the lazaret, his first thought was that it was not right because their clothes were foul. They had been working shrimp. And because she was smoking and there were oil cans and engine rags.
When she sat herself down on the chafing gear he sat beside her. It was the first close touch he had of her since the night in the galley that seemed so long before. He was fighting to hold Pablo now, to hold within himself the thinking, calculating Pablo—because even as he sat with her, that self was being crowded out by lust and a shadow. The lust had a rubbery bubbly taste; the shadow, he knew well. It had few emotions but it was an angry frightened shadow.
She pushed his cap off and brought his head against her shoulder and put her chin on the top of his head.
“This is how it is, Pablo,” she began. Pablo closed his eyes to listen. Somehow he had the notion that his mother would tell him something.
“We have some boys to deal with on the coast here and we don’t know who they are. It could occur to them to take our goods, our boat, everything—and pitch us over the side. It’s happened. So we need a little display of sincerity. We need a crazy old boy like you who’s so mean and nasty looking they think he might feed them a few just to hear the funny noises they’d make. Then look at it from their side. Everything’s COD. Maybe it’s a little old-fashioned but that’s us, see, that’s the way we do it. They’ve got money for us. Now we might just take their money and do them in—that’s happened too.”
She ran her fingers along the back of his neck.
“So. So, honey …” Cuddling him. “So they come out in their boat and we load the stuff. You go along so everybody feels all right. They usually have to make more than one trip and going in they’ll feel better because even if they don’t have all of their delivery they have you. And you’ll be riding along looking so bad and crazy that whatever they’d like to do—they’ll decide it makes more sense to stick to the deal. So they bring you back with the last load. We take our money. Buena suerte and viva la causa, that’s it. It’s not a desperate situation even today. It’s got rules. You’re riding shotgun.”
He began to laugh or by now it was the shadow. He listened to her laugh as well.
Then he went after that wet fouled denim for the sweet flesh inside, peeled the sweat shirt off her and licked her breasts, the nipples, above them below and around, the nipples themselves again.
“Crazy stuff,” she said. “Crazy stuff.”
Her watch cap had fallen off and her hair spread out among the strands of chafing gear. She was thrusting her ass against him—soft, round, damp under the wet film of denim—unzipping his fly. She forced him back against the bale; she, him!
“No need you holdin’ me down,” he said. It was the shadow talking.
But by answer she bent and put her teeth against his penis. Then she raised herself on her hands and feet like a cat stretching and kicked off her shrimping boots, then peeled down the jeans that encased her. Naked, she lay facing him against the bale. Pablo took off his shirt and undid his belt until his dungarees were down about his ankles.
She was laughing still.
“Don’t you take off your boots when you have a lady, Tex?”
“Never you fuckin’ mind.”
She answered him by taking his right hand and putting it between her thighs and the skin there was as smooth as the surface of a glass of buttermilk on a summer’s day. She closed his hand over her, his thumb in the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers playing over the down and labia. He put his face into her neck, then sought out her shoulder where the arrogant tattoo was and then, wanting it without delays, put his face between the thighs and with his mouth and tongue took all such pleasures there as he could see or imagine. She had wriggled partway up the heaped bale until her body was above his, and with her posture strangely erect, her head thrown back, slipped down on him time after time, impaling herself, until they both had come.
Deedee was still moaning softly when he saw that the hatch at the top of the ladder was pried open. He could make out the stars.
“The hatch,” he said.
She reached out for her bag and the bottle.
“Scared of trouble?”
From the way she said it, he could not tell if it was challenge or consolation, so he did not answer.
“We’re not having trouble on this boat,” she told him, “not about you and me. And the reasons for that I cannot tell but in another day.”
So, warily, he settled down, and though he did not like the way she had spoken to him, presently he was hard again. Or it might have been the shadow’s lust. He took her once more, trying now to hurt her—but she could not be hurt in that way; every thrust he made she somehow met, met yielding, as though she were ready for every moment. So he could not hurt her, could not gentle or humiliate her. And when he started to come and to pull out, she held him, letting go little by little as it pleased her until he was seeing lights on the overhead and he thought he would pass out cold.
He was very high, higher than he had ever been. His thoughts twisted off into spools, arabesques, snatches of music.
Deedee was putting her clothes on. Automatically, he buckled his trousers.
“Don’t you have any gentleness in you, boy?” she asked.
He looked toward her unseen face. Fear sat on his chest, its talons in the muscles of his breast. He had seen a shadow pass the hatch. He was certain.
“You mustn’t be afraid,” she told him softly.
Hearing her say it was a terrible thing for him.
“Someone’s up there,” he said.
“That could be, Pablo. It’s all right.”
All right. And he was in a rank-smelling trap at a loss to understand how he had got there. Beside him in the darkness his soft-bodied enemy soothed him in a voice like gold wire.
“Hey, hey,” she said, nudging him slightly, “it’s all right, my man.”
All right. But they were going to kill him. He had been through the question before and that was the way it had come out.
“You set me up,” he told her.
“Don’t be silly,” she said firmly.
As she said it, he stopped trembling. She had set him up and there was no more to it. He was among crazy people, in an empty landscape tasting of salt rubber, smelling of scale and death. They were about killing him. He sat very still waiting for her to move, listening for sounds on the deck above.
“Settle down now,” she said, as though she were talking to a horse.
He was quite settled down now. There was no more reality to him than to the blossoming bougainvillea he thought to see in the darkness or to the music that he heard. Things were inside out but he was strong.
He made a loop of the chafing line and by a blind stroke caught her around the throat. One of her hands came up to struggle with the noose but the other was reaching into darkness. Pablo, twisting the line with all his strength, his mind serene, took a moment to react. Deedee brought up the butt of the pistol she had taken from her bag and cracked him hard across the upper lip, nearly getting the underside of his nose. He let
go the line and went after the pistol; he could not see what had hit him but he knew it must be one.
She was shouting now, shouting for her husband in a choked nightmare voice. When he had forced the pistol from her right hand, he pressed his head down against her chest to keep it low and took Naftali’s Nambu from beneath his seabag.
There was true light in the space now. On the ladder someone with a flashlight was searching out the darkness. Pablo rolled her across his body—it was as though they were making love again—her teeth were sunk in his arm. As she passed over him, he jammed the barrel of the Nambu under her down vest and fired two of its eight shots upward. He felt her teeth release him, she was flung onto her knees beside the bale. Two shots came from the ladder, at least one of them striking the woman. She rolled over on her side, her knees still together. The compartment was spinning with illuminations; Pablo thought of fireflies, wet spark plugs. His ears were hammered shut. Against the flat lower section of the bulkhead he was unhurt. When he fired at the man who was on the ladder, he did so with confidence, as though he had nothing but time. And in a second, he knew he had been on target. He heard the shuffle, the groan, the gun strike the ladder’s bottom step and slide across the deck. The man fell behind the beam of his own flashlight, invisible and motionless. Pablo sat panting in the darkness, waiting for the figure behind the light to move. The moment he started to his feet, there was another flash; Tabor’s leg went out from under him and his head struck the slanting overhead. He knelt and fired two shots into the space behind the light’s beam. There was a groan and a man spoke—it was Callahan—but Pablo could not make out what he said. Then Pablo discovered himself to be shot; there was a bleeding wound in the thick part of his calf, in the back. He ran his finger along the shin bone and found it unbroken. The bullet might only have cut him and passed through but it hurt. He would be all right, he thought. He had power enough to fox them all and live. There was another one.
From the open deck above, he heard Negus’ voice calling the Callahans by name. He began to go up the ladder backwards, sitting for a while on each step. Negus’ voice sounded far away, carried off by the wind. At last, he was sitting framed in the hatchway. There was no sign of a light. His head bent low, he glanced around his shoulder and saw Negus, holding a shotgun and crouching anxiously beside the after hatch.
