Stealth of the Ninja

by Philip Roy

  Then he showed me something else. At the back wall of the fore-hold was a shaft that stretched from the floor to the ceiling, up through the floor above, and onto the deck where it supported a derrick and boom that were once used to load and unload cargo. There were much larger doors in the holds, of course, that could swing up and open, like barn doors, for loading cargo, but they were shut and sealed tight to keep the rain and waves out. The boom and pulleys were no longer here, but the shaft was, although it was another one of those parts of the ship that blended into the background so well you didn’t really see it. It didn’t help that everything was dark inside the hold too. The old man gestured for me to follow him inside. So I did.

  It was a strange feeling to jump into the plastic. Most of it was soft against my skin because it had been in the sea for so long, but some was sharp edged, and I had to be careful not to get cut. Moving through it was a little like swimming. The old man led me straight to the shaft, where, at the bottom, there was a drain in the floor. It was a challenge to swim down through the plastic to get there, harder still to breathe, and too dark to see anything without my flashlight. As I stared at the drain, I got a spooky feeling because it looked as though it led to somewhere that was not on the ship, as impossible as that was. When you stood on the floor of the hold, with a mountain of plastic above you, you really felt you were on the bottom floor of the ship, but you weren’t actually. Beneath the hold was a subfloor, and the drain went down there.

  The old man lifted the grate, pushed it up through the plastic, and squeezed it against the shaft. Then he wormed his way down into the drain, gesturing with his arm for me to follow. I didn’t like that at all but I squeezed through the drain and lowered myself into about two feet of water. It was completely black but with the flashlight I could see the silhouette of the old man. He grabbed my elbow a few times to direct me where to go. I didn’t like the feeling of standing in water where I couldn’t see anything. What if there were sea snakes in here?

  The old man pulled me to one side of the shaft. Then he lifted up a metal plate, and I saw a dim light. Now I could see his face. It felt as though we were inside a mine, deep underground. He gestured for me to stick my head inside the shaft, where the light was coming from, so I peered inside and looked up. The shaft went straight up to where it was shiny and bright at the top. There was a wire pulley system inside, and buckets, seven or eight of them, which were attached to the wires. The old man squeezed his arm in next to my face, grabbed hold of the wire, and pulled it down. I saw the buckets move. He kept pulling until a bucket came all the way down and splashed into the water. It filled about halfway as it went around the bottom and began its journey up. Amazing! The old man had created his own manual pumping machine. This was how he was emptying the water from the ship.

  But the real lifting he did from the top, on the derrick. When we climbed out of the hold, he led me up, removed a plate from the shaft where it was exposed outside, and I saw where the real work was done, where you could pull on the wire with both hands, and put your body into it. He gestured for me to try it, and so I did. I pulled down on the wire and watched as bucket after bucket came up slowly inside the shaft, tilted, and spilled water onto the deck. At first it seemed easy. But after just ten buckets or so, my arms began to burn again, my hands cramped up, and I had to stop. The old man took my place and pulled on the wire twice as fast. The buckets came flying up and spilled water like rain. Once again it might have looked as though he was showing off, but he wasn’t. He was instructing me.

  The longer I watched him, the more I realized he really just wanted to teach somebody. Okay, I thought: I am happy to learn. So I smiled and nodded my head. He closed the shaft, took a step back, and slapped his chest. Then, finally, he told me his name.

  “I am Sensei.”

  Chapter Six

  Sensei had one more secret to share, and it was a good one. He showed me in the afternoon, when the wind began to gust from the west. At the base of the two remaining derricks, in the fore and aft, were two more rusted benches, which, when opened, revealed what looked like large folded tarps. On the fore-derrick Sensei pulled on a wire I hadn’t paid any attention to before, and the tarp rose out of the bench and began to climb the derrick just like handkerchiefs pulled out of a magician’s pocket. It was a sail! It was a patchwork sail sewn together from about twenty pieces of canvas, nylon, and rugged cotton. He raised a similar one in the stern. They must have taken forever to sew. The sails caught the wind, and I felt a gentle tug beneath my feet as the ship came round. Astonished, I followed Sensei onto the bridge and into the pilothouse where he took hold of the wheel. Like an old whale that had all but forgotten how to swim, the battered ship turned sluggishly into the wind and began to sail. She couldn’t have been doing more than four knots, but she was moving, and Sensei was steering her.

  “This is amazing!” I shouted. Sensei beamed with pride.

  Rightly so. She was the furthest thing from a streamlined vessel, yet there was a sense of dignity about her, as if under the power of the wind she had more right to be on the water than if she were powered by engines.

  I wondered if he had once been an engineer, because he was so skilled at mechanical things. On the other hand, he seemed to have a special kind of relationship with everything he touched. It took me a while to understand that. I followed him around as he tended his garden like a monk on a mountaintop, pumped water out of the hull like a field worker, did exercises like a circus acrobat, and stood at the helm of his ship like an ancient mariner. He did everything with grace and care such as I had never seen anyone show for anything before. Every action was measured and thought-out and enjoyed as if he were living in a more orderly kind of universe than the one I knew. And yet, in spite of all of that, he carried sadness around with him like a ball and chain, and it would pull him down whenever he wasn’t busy or focused on something. What, I wondered, was that about? But I didn’t want to ask, and he didn’t offer to say.

  The one thing he didn’t do much was talk. With the exception of telling me his name, and a few short sentences here and there, he went about his tasks with monk-like silence. The strange result was that, after a few days in his company, I started to talk as if I had nothing better to do than flap my lips. I simply couldn’t seem to shut up. I wasn’t sure why I was doing it, except that maybe I felt uncomfortable with his silence. Weren’t people supposed to talk when they were doing things together?

  That made me wonder about how much I talked on the sub to the crew. I wasn’t sure. In any case, I decided to spend a couple of weeks on the ship, from early morning till sunset each day, following Sensei around and learning from him. And for most of the first few days, I talked non-stop, until I couldn’t stand the sound of my voice anymore. It usually sounded something like this:

  “I’m from Newfoundland. That’s in Canada. Where are you from? How old are you? Do you mind me asking? Today is my birthday, actually. I’m seventeen today. I first went to sea when I was fourteen. Hollie and Seaweed are my crew. They’ve been with me pretty much from the beginning. I rescued Hollie from a drifting dory. Somebody threw him off a wharf with a rope tied around his neck, but he landed in a dory. Isn’t that terrible? Seaweed just joined me one day. I don’t think he’s a normal seagull actually; he seems to think he’s an eagle or something. He’s really tough, though, but kind of moody. Do you get moody? I get moody. Where do you get the soil for your garden? Do you compost? It looks like you’re composting seaweed and shells. That’s pretty good for a garden, I bet. Your garden is awesome. Where did you learn to garden anyway? I’m glad you’re showing me how to do things, but I don’t see how I can keep a garden on the sub. There isn’t enough room, and not enough sunlight. How old are you anyway? Can you tell me that at least …?”

  He raised his head and gazed at me. “One hundred years.”

  “Really? Wow.”

  I didn’t get a lot of answers, but that one shut me up for a while.

  Th
e first thing Sensei did every morning was sit on top of the bridge, face the sun, and meditate. Once we were out of bed, Hollie and I would join him, and do that for about an hour. Sensei sat with his eyes closed. I would start like that but couldn’t stay that way for long. In the first place, Hollie would demand my attention the moment my eyes were shut. And while Sensei was perfectly able to ignore his new friend, even if he was pawed by him, I’d have to open my eyes and respond. And then I’d stare at the sea. I couldn’t help it. I was trained to keep watch for ships and things, and since I couldn’t hear the radar beep from the sub, I felt kind of blind.

  Luckily we were travelling in currents that didn’t cross shipping lanes. So far I hadn’t seen a single vessel, although one could have passed when we weren’t watching. I wondered how Sensei spotted them when he wasn’t watching. I mean, he had to know it was important. Other ships would have radar, of course, and they’d see Sensei’s ship coming from miles away, but they’d surely expect him to manoeuvre politely out of the way, which he couldn’t do very well when the sails were down. He could turn the rudder with the wheel, and the ship might eventually respond, but it was the slowest thing in the world, even under sail.

  The second thing Sensei did each morning was pump water. Keeping the water to a safe level was almost a full-time job for one person. If it pooled too much it could create a wave inside when the ship was tossing and pitching, causing her to lean too far to one side. If she got hit by a large wave when she was leaning like that, she’d capsize.

  We took turns pulling on the wire, although he pulled twice as fast and for about three times as long as I did. I didn’t know why the wire didn’t hurt his hands. It blistered mine terribly because the wire was rusty and wet. I showed him my hands on the third day because the blisters had broken and I was a little concerned about getting rust in my blood and needing a tetanus shot, which I couldn’t get anywhere around here.

  I wondered what he did when he got sick. Did he get sick? I asked him but all he did was take one look at my hands and then slap them together really hard, which made them sting. Then he gestured for me to keep slapping them, which I did, until the stinging went away and was replaced by a hot throbbing in my hands, which was better. Then I could pull on the wire again. Talk about tough medicine.

  The third thing Sensei did was a series of exercises. By then I was pretty hungry, but Sensei didn’t touch a bite of food or water for the first two hours of the day.

  We did single leg squats first, which were hard to do when you weren’t used to them, and almost impossible to do with good balance. Sensei did them with perfect balance. He tucked one leg behind the other and went down and up as smoothly as an engine piston in slow motion. He was absolutely tireless. After just ten or so, my leg was burning, and I couldn’t wait to change legs, and then change back. I did three or four sets. Sensei did ten, with twenty-five reps in each one.

  Then we did calf raises by standing on the edge of a bench with the toes of one foot gripping the metal. Down and up we went like roosters strutting up and down on a fence. I started to laugh, and had to hold onto the wall to keep from falling. Sensei didn’t hold onto anything; his balance was perfect.

  Next we did one-arm push-ups, which I found hardest of all, but managed to do about three, without going all the way down. Sensei did so many I lost count. Then we did pull-ups, the one exercise in which I felt I had something to show for myself. To my fifteen repetitions Sensei did a hundred, and three sets of them, which meant three hundred pull-ups every day! His body was light, and he did them quickly. No wonder he was so strong.

  For the rest of the day, Sensei tended his garden, kept his eyes on the sea, and occasionally raised the sails. But sailing was not his priority. As far as I could tell, he raised the sails solely for the purpose of correcting his course, in order to stay in the circular current. He was more interested in moving at the speed of the water than the speed of the wind. The reason for this was his purpose for being on the sea in the first place—cleaning up the plastic.

  Sensei could detect plastic beneath the surface of the waves almost like a French pig could sniff out a truffle. I saw that on TV once. Perhaps it was the way the water pooled above an object and created a tiny wake, I wasn’t sure, but he could see things I couldn’t. Sometimes I would, and sometimes I wouldn’t.

  From a bench on the stern he lifted out a fishing net and ropes. Whenever he spied something, we’d lower the net, grab the object, and haul it up. Sometimes it was just a single thing, like a plastic table, and sometimes it was a patch of things that looked as though an ocean liner had dumped its garbage. We’d find plastic plates, forks, knives and spoons, plastic lawn chairs, umbrellas, bottles of shampoo, bags, and on and on.

  But we’d also find fishing nets. Either they had been cut loose by fishermen after they had become entangled, or had been simply swept off boats and wharfs in stormy weather. The result was always the same—rotting sea creatures that had been unable to free themselves.

  We found a shocking number of seabirds, turtles, dolphins, fish, and sharks. I now realized Sensei didn’t kill sharks. He would examine a rotting corpse, cut it open with his sword, smell it, taste it, and then decide if the meat was edible. He was the ultimate scavenger. He didn’t waste an ounce of anything.

  When it was finally time to eat, I’d be absolutely starving. I’d follow Sensei to the garden, where we’d choose tomatoes, onions, greens and garlic, and carry them down to the grill. Then we’d grab some driftwood from where he had stashed it in one of the holds, break apart a log, snap off a few branches, and carry it up to the deck.

  Next, he would have me pull some jellyfish from one of the buckets. I’d cup the heads in my hands without touching the tentacles, and lift them out, but sometimes they’d slip out of my hands and fall onto the deck. So I’d have to grab them, tentacles and all, and pick them up. It would sting, but you develop a kind of immunity if you get stung a lot, which I did.

  When the fire was glowing, Sensei would lay chunks of shark and vegetables on the grill, and gesture for me to lay the jellyfish down, which I would, watching the tentacles curl like elastic bands at first, and then relax and stretch out like spaghetti.

  As I watched the jellyfish cook, I drifted away in my mind. I had reached a point in my life where I could no longer eat animals. I wasn’t one hundred percent certain, but I was pretty sure. When I had been in the Southern Ocean, just a couple of months earlier, I had witnessed a blue whale being killed right in front of me. Somehow, looking into her eye as she was dying, I realized I could never kill another creature that could look me back in the eye and know what I was doing. I wasn’t sure about fish. I needed more time to think about it. I wouldn’t kill sharks though, because their numbers were falling drastically in the sea, and I wouldn’t kill any species that was threatened.

  But jellyfish were taking over the sea. So I didn’t mind eating them. All the same, watching a living creature shrivel up and die bothered me.

  It never bothered Sensei. He would grin triumphantly whenever the jellyfish would spit and sizzle in the flames.

  Chapter Seven

  For some reason Sensei wouldn’t come inside the sub. He’d stand on the hull, but not step inside. I couldn’t figure out why. He wasn’t afraid; I knew that. He wasn’t afraid of anything, as far as I could tell.

  “You should come inside and see my sub. It’s pretty cool. We finished it three years ago. It took us two and a half years to build. Ziegfried built it actually; I just helped him. I wonder what you’d think of Ziegfried. He’s pretty much a giant. You’d be amazed. He’s probably the strongest man in Newfoundland.”

  I stared at Sensei to see if he would react to that. I thought maybe he was grinning a little, but I wasn’t sure.

  “He can pick up the front end of a truck all by himself.”

  He raised his eyebrows. He was impressed.

  “I wonder who would win if you were in a fight. That would be interesting. He’s not a
skilled fighter like you probably are but I think he’d win. You wouldn’t be able to hit him hard enough to hurt him, I think, and then, once he grabbed hold of you, you’d never get away. He also happens to be a genius, so you probably wouldn’t stand a chance. No offence.”

  Sensei looked over at me, smiled, and dropped his head.

  “Ziegfried’s married to Sheba now. Sheba is the most remarkable woman in the world. She’s an oracle. She can read your future in cards, and interpret dreams. She loves everybody and everything. You would love her too; you wouldn’t be able to help it. It’s like a spell she puts on you. She’s also a great gardener. She would be very impressed with your garden. I wish she could see it.”

  Sensei raised his head again and smiled. He was pleased.

  “Sheba grows flowers, vegetables, and mushrooms in her kitchen. She lives in a house on a tiny island where it’s always foggy. Ziegfried and Sheba are sort of like parents to me. My mother died when I was born, and my father lives in Montreal, but he left when I was born. I went to visit him last year for the first time and discovered that I have a little sister, too, but I haven’t stayed in touch with them as much as I’d like to. It’s hard when you’re at sea.”

  Sensei nodded. Sadness was hovering around him now like a gloomy day. It was in his voice. “To lose family is very difficult.”

  “That’s true. But I’m going to visit them as soon as I return to Canada. I’m sort of on my way home now, but I wanted to come to Japan to meet the people who kill whales because I need to understand why humans are destroying the planet. I think that if I can meet the people who kill whales, the most gentle and intelligent creatures on the planet, I might understand the bigger problem better. Maybe I can’t change their minds, but at least I can learn why they don’t care.”