The Drift

by Lloyd Kropp

  “Something you made up?” Again he was surprised. “You mean people come to see your dance?”

  “Everyone comes. It’s a tradition now. Sometimes I change the story a little, but people are offended if I leave out anything important. It’s been almost the same now for two years.”

  “Pao, how old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “Eighteen. Hmmm. Well, Tabor warned me about you.”

  Pao smiled and looked up at him. “What did he warn you about?”

  “He said you were full of surprises.”

  She laughed. “Everyone is full of surprises,” she said. “Even you.”

  “No. I’m not full of surprises at all. I’m the most unsurprising person you’ve ever met.”

  She laughed again her easy, spontaneous laugh and then took his hand and together they walked up toward Northside. Soon Pao was telling him more about life on The Drift.

  “Things here are really very simple,” she was saying. “The men work on the boats during the day. They pump water out of the old ships and caulk up the hulls and scrape off the seaweed and barnacles and do carpenter work in some of the rooms to make them more pleasant. And every day in the morning two men from each clan go down to The Seafields to gather vegetables and weeds and hunt for fish and prawns. The women stay in their boats and cook meals and tend to the children. Sometimes in the evenings after dinner people go out on The Bridge and play Nightsongs until the moon sets. Sometimes there’s a new song that someone has written and then everyone goes to listen. Children are very happy on The Drift. They go weedwalking and they play shadowgames and they learn from the teachers.”

  “What are shadowgames?”

  She looked very surprised. “Don’t you have shadowgames on land?” She moved her fingers and turned her wrist in a little circle, as if looking for words in the air. “There are different kinds of shadowgames,” she said. “In one kind you make up a form and then everyone improvises on it until someone can put all the variations together in his mind. Then he goes into The Moon’s Circle and gets to make up the next form.”

  “I still don’t understand. What’s a form? What’s The Moon’s Circle?”

  Pao gave him another curious look. “Don’t you play games on land?”

  “I guess we play different kinds of games. Tell me about the ones you play.”

  And so for a while they wandered together in the bright sunlit morning while Pao talked about the children’s games. Her explanation seemed to Peter very obscure, and soon he found that he was listening only to the syllables and the intonation of her voice.

  Occasionally he noticed people working together in small groups. Once he saw three women boiling an enormous pot of sea crabs and combing seaweed in long shallow pans to remove bits of wood and kelp. They were singing an old English carol that he had heard somewhere before. The beauty and tranquillity of the scene were vaguely disturbing to him. Did they never think of the world beyond The Drift? Had they forgotten that they were castaways, condemned forever to float in a lost corner of the ocean, a thousand miles from land?

  “Pao, are there any sailboats or motorboats here that anyone uses?”

  “No. We never use boats for sailing.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps it’s never occurred to anyone.”

  “Doesn’t that seem a bit odd to you? I mean considering that boats were built to be sailed?”

  “Perhaps.” She looked down at her hands.

  “Well, tell me this: are there any small boats that could be used for sailing that you know of?”

  “I suppose many are seaworthy. But most of the sails have been removed. We use sailcloth for clothing. And the engines in the motorboats are all rusted. And besides, there’s no gasoline. Reuben and Javitt have a raft they use for farming The Seafields, but that’s the only boat I know of that anyone uses, at least on this side of The Drift.”

  “Where’s the boat I came in?”

  “The little metal boat? The Outlanders have it. I forgot about them—they do use boats sometimes. They took your boat and left you on one of the outlying wrecks. That’s where Reuben and Javitt found you.” Suddenly she turned and stared at him. “You would have died in another few hours if we hadn’t saved you,” she added. Somehow she made it an accusation.

  “I realize that and I’m very grateful,” he said quickly.

  “Then why do you want to leave us?”

  “I want to go back to Connecticut. My work, my whole life is back there.”

  “No one has ever left The Drift,” she said. “If you try to leave he’ll kill you.”

  “Who’ll kill me?”

  “The Hatchmaker. So you mustn’t try to leave. No one can leave The Drift.”

  “Pao, you must understand—”

  “Never mind,” she said quietly, turning away from him. “I’m hungry now. I’m going to eat with some friends. I’ll see you at The Mary Strattford.” And a moment later she was gone.

  He sighed. It was very flattering to have a girl not much more than half his age so concerned about the possibility of his departure, but on the other hand, her attitude could make things difficult. He wondered if Pao reflected any general sentiment about the idea of leaving The Drift. He had assumed at first that people here considered themselves stranded and simply made out as best they could under the circumstances. But now he was not so sure. He wondered again why no one ever tried to leave. Surely the obstacles could not be that great, not with all these people and all this raw material. But perhaps it would be better if he kept his sentiments to himself, at least for a while. He smiled. That was something he had been reminding himself to do all his life. Somehow it had always seemed to be the best policy.

  But first he needed a plan. Some way of finding the things he would need to sail back to America. He could not stay here for the rest of his life. There was a whole world beyond The Sargasso Sea, and the idea of never seeing it again was absurd, unthinkable.

  That evening Pao and Tabor knocked on his door and then entered before he had a chance to answer.

  “The Madrids and Bluewaters are playing Nightsongs in a few minutes over on The Bridge,” said Pao. “Come along with us and listen.”

  “No thanks,” said Peter. “I like to get to bed early. I feel better in the morning.”

  “But the music is so lovely,” said Pao. “And everyone brings torches, and sometimes we dance.”

  “No thanks. I have a headache anyway. I need some rest.”

  “Just come for a little while then,” she said.

  “Not tonight. I don’t feel much like dancing and singing just at this point. I have some reading to do and then I’m going to turn in.”

  “I think Sutherland wants to be alone for a while,” said Tabor. “There’ll be Nightsongs again next week. We can all go then.”

  “Yes,” said Peter. “That would be nice. But just now I’m tired.” He tried to smile. “Dancing and singing just wouldn’t be my cup of tea.”

  “What are you going to read?” asked Pao.

  “Read?”

  “You said you had some reading to do.”

  “Oh, yes. Well, it’s just a book I found yesterday on one of the boats nearby.”

  Tabor smiled and put his hand on Pao’s shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll be late. We’ll see you in the morning, Sutherland.”

  When they had gone he closed the door behind them and then closed the wooden latch. God, how he missed the privacy of his old life. Here everything and everybody was everyone else’s business. It reminded him of a small town in Ohio where he had once taught, a town where all the children smiled and said hello and everyone on the street tipped his hat and the old men at the tavern where he drank on Friday evenings to get away from students and colleagues and examination papers would drape an arm around his shoulder and talk into his face about crops and politics and the birds of central Ohio and the hunting season. That sort of thing had always made him uncomf
ortable.

  He lay down on his bed and folded his hands behind his head and sighed deeply. Singing and dancing and torches in the moonlight, he thought. The clichés of a romantic, pagan world. But the broken ships and the Outlanders and boiled fish and vegetables growing in the water and beautiful young girls chasing after strangers? It was a strange place built upon strange necessities, an uncivilized nightmare that he felt he could never understand.

  On an impulse, he left his cabin and wandered over to the schooner adjacent to his own. The sun touched the horizon now and the higher ships cast long shadows across the parts of The Drift that he could see. There was no one in sight. Everyone, he thought ruefully, had gone to the fertility rituals with his torch.

  On the deck in front of him lay the crumpled remains of sails that had been cut up for clothing, and some coils of rope. Underneath one of the pieces of sail, someone had left a canvas bag with four tennis balls and two rackets, the old-fashioned kind with oval heads and hexagonal handles. He fondled the old rackets in his hand and stretched his fingers to feel the tenseness of the strings.

  In less than a minute he was back on the deck of his own boat, tennis racket and ball in one hand, the other three balls lying at his feet. He stared at the wooden wall of the fore side of his cabin. Anything below the porthole is in the net, he thought. Then he reached into the air, released the ball and bent back to swing all in one long, familiar motion. A split second later the white ball struck the wooden boards an inch above the porthole and the whole cabin seemed to reverberate. But the ball returned too quickly, leaping back from the wall and shooting past him before he had time to bring his racket around for a backhand swing. My reaction time, he thought. He felt terribly slow and the deck of the schooner seemed terribly small. He picked up the second ball, this time serving very slowly and cautiously. The ball bounced back to him, and with a smooth forehand swing he sent it spinning back toward the boards. Soon the long-familiar practice rhythm moved him first a step to the left, then a step to the right. Strikehitbounce, strikehitbounce, the white ball sailing through the air, the instant servant of his will. Then a backhand shot hit the wall at an angle, and the second of the four balls bounced wide over the rail of the schooner and into the water. He picked up the third ball.

  He played on into the sunset, on into the darkness, his eyes slowly adjusting in a marginal way to the loss of light. He played in the bright moonlight, and the last of the four tennis balls was now almost beyond the limits of his vision, a puff of smoke in the dark air. Suddenly it was gone. It had flown past him somewhere in the darkness, and he had no idea where it was or even what direction it had taken. The spell in his mind and the rhythm of his muscles ended together. For a moment he felt paralyzed.

  “What are you doing?” said a voice behind him. “What kind of game is that?” It was Pao.

  He turned around and looked at her, and then he looked at the jagged, irregular silhouette of The Drift that surrounded him on all sides like a jungle outlined in the moonlight. He thought of the four tennis balls lost somewhere in the water below him.

  “What’s that in your hand?” said Pao.

  He looked down at his hand. The racket hung loosely in his fingers. The sound of the thudding tennis balls reverberated in his mind, but outside in the dark world around him, the world from which Pao stood looking at him, there was only stillness and the broken ships and the murmur of lapping water.

  “It’s a tennis racket for playing tennis,” he said. His voice sounded unnaturally loud. “Tennis is a game for two or four people played on a large court on sunny days. I’ve always been an exceptionally good tennis player. I played on the varsity team in college.”

  His words were like ghosts. He felt the silent ships looming around him, and he began to tremble.

  Four

  THE OUTLANDERS

  The next morning Peter awoke early, made his way to Northside, to The Bridge, and then, satisfied at last that his sense of direction was reliable, walked down to the part of The Southern Edge that bordered on The Outland. Shading his eyes against the bright sunlight that glanced off the water, he spent several minutes looking for his aluminum dinghy.

  Later on, Pao brought him lunch which they ate together on the forecastle of an ancient barque whose spars and foremast, looming in a broken canopy of lines above them, had been shattered in some nameless storm of long ago. When they finished eating, Peter excused himself on the pretext of a headache and went back to his own cabin. When he opened the door, he saw lying across his bed a heavy white shirt and a pair of knee-length white shorts made out of sailcloth. They looked very handsome in a rough sort of way, and very durable.

  When he turned, Tabor was standing in the doorway.

  “I thought you could use some new clothes,” he said.

  “I certainly can. Thanks.”

  “Thank Pao. She was up all night making them.”

  Peter turned red. “She shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

  “I think she wanted to,” said Tabor.

  “Pao needs more supervision,” said Peter. It struck him as a rather stupid remark, and now he was doubly embarrassed.

  “I told her she needed her sleep more than you needed new clothes, but she quietly threw me out of her cabin and bolted the door. Pao has a mind of her own.”

  “I’ve noticed that,” said Peter.

  “Did you two have a nice walk yesterday?”

  “Very nice. She took me to a place she calls Twoboats and told me about the festival next week. She claims she’s composed a dance of some sort.”

  “The Dance of The Nine Islands,” said Tabor. “She does it every other month, and by popular demand, I might add.”

  “Where did she learn to dance?”

  “From Rose. Have you met Rose?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll meet everyone in our clan tonight at The Mary Strattford. That’s our main ship. We have all our meals there and all our meetings.” Tabor leaned against the doorway, and withdrew a pipe from the pocket of his leather jacket.

  “Frankly,” he said after a long pause, “I’m rather anxious to know you better. It’s been a long time since I’ve talked to an educated man.”

  Peter did not know what to say. There was always something vaguely disconcerting about the prospect of someone knowing him better. Perhaps, he thought, it was only that he had always secretly bored himself and was afraid of boring others.

  “I’m not really an educated man,” he said. He looked about in his mind for some way to answer Tabor’s invitation. “I’m a history teacher, but I’m hardly what anyone would ever call a scholar. I’ve spent most of my time lecturing at students and playing tennis and trying to avoid people,” he said with a selfconscious laugh.

  Tabor laughed easily and clapped Peter on the shoulder. “Perhaps so. But everything changes here on The Drift.”

  “For some people, nothing ever changes. Not even their address.”

  Tabor laughed again. “Well at least that’s not true in your case. About your address, I mean.”

  “I’m not sure that it matters,” said Peter. “I wasn’t expecting any important mail this summer. Or any visitors, for that matter.”

  “Here you’ll have many visitors,” said Tabor. “No one is ever alone on The Drift.”

  The talked until Tabor finished his pipe. Then he waved and disappeared from the doorway, and Peter heard his black boots against the wooden deck of his schooner. It occurred to him that he had said a rather strange thing to Tabor, strange at least for him. Not that it was a very revealing statement or an admission of something not obvious to anyone who had ever known him. It was only that he seldom talked about himself to anyone and almost never joked, no matter how feebly, at his own expense. There was something about Tabor that caught him off guard, something that led him into saying things he wouldn’t ordinarily say. He was an appealing sort of person, Peter decided. He seemed independent and self-assured, and yet in some way that Peter coul
d not define or locate, he also seemed wistful, perhaps even lonely. It was nearly three in the afternoon before he left his room. Slowly he made his way back down toward The Southern Edge. Soon he stood where the boats no longer formed a solid pattern, but spread out unevenly across the water. Somewhere here in The Outland, somewhere in this swamp of decaying hulls, one of The Outlanders had his aluminum dinghy. He had reason now to believe that it might be the only dependable boat on his half of The Drift, and he meant to find it before nightfall.

  Of course it would be dangerous. The Outlanders might very well be guarding the dinghy. And even if he did recapture it there would still be the problem of finding a good sail, a good motor, and gasoline. Of course it would be more than a little foolhardy to sail out into the open sea in a small dinghy. But still, he had to do something. He had to begin somewhere.

  He walked across the catwalk that led to the first ship. Now, suddenly, he felt more comfortable. He was moving, doing something. Whether he would succeed or fail did not, for the moment, seem so important as the fact that he was now on more familiar ground. He would use his eyes, his ears, his muscles, toward a specific end that was clearly attainable. It was a game called Get The Dinghy, and Peter had always been very good at games. Especially outdoor games. Games, no matter how complicated, were simpler than life. He smiled a kind of rueful inner smile. At least in games there was an objective that anyone could understand.

  He noticed that all of the boats here were smaller and in very poor repair. Often there were large stretches of open water between them, but weeds filled in much of that empty space, and only occasionally did he see clear water. In some places the weeds had entirely overgrown the boats, turning them into drifting green islands.

  Between the boats there were crude pontoon bridges—flat boards with floating crosspieces nailed to their undersides like railroad ties. For the most part they were simply set on thick patches of Sargasso Weeds so that as he walked he sank several inches into the water, soaking his feet and ankles.

  A silence fell all around him. The Outland was without most of the small noises of The Drift: no distant footsteps, no creaking decks, no shouting children. After a while he found himself listening to even the tiniest sounds: the squish of his own sneakers, the scuttle of prawns across the weeds.