The Drift

by Lloyd Kropp

  “Would you like to know where we’re going?” she said.

  “Does it really matter where we’re going?” he said.

  “I thought we’d go see the caravel first.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s one of the oldest ships that’s still in one piece. No one has lived there for as long as I can remember. Rose says she used to play there when she was a little girl.”

  Caravel. The word began to emerge from his knowledge of The Renaissance and The Age of Exploration. Prince Henry’s ships were all caravels, and they were the first to explore and round the coast of Africa. Columbus sailed on caravels. They were the great ships of exploration of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, if he remembered correctly. But the ship before him now that Pao was pointing to seemed much too large, and it had a high, ornate stern that was characteristic of a later age.

  It seemed to him a rather strange-looking ship. The quarterdeck was doubled, one level raised a few steps above the other, while the forecastle formed a small island in the front that towered a dozen feet or so above the bow. The foremast was square-rigged; it made a strange contrast to the lateen-rigged main and mizzenmasts with their spars fixed at an angle to form the sloping triangular sail pattern that made him think of The Arabian Nights. By some miracle the sails had survived the weather, time, and the shears of the women. They hung, yellow with age, like the ghosts of giant birds.

  “This way,” said Pao.

  When they had climbed over the side he saw in another way how different the caravel was from the schooners and brigs where most of the people lived and worked. Here the wood itself seemed ancient, marked as it was with initials and diagrams carved by a thousand knives. In some places the deck had rotted away to show the hatchways and rooms beneath. Near the mainsail lay a cutlass, brown with rust, that someone had perhaps discarded hundreds of years earlier. Toward the bow lay a row of trunks with enormous brass hinges.

  Everything now was cast in shadow from the sails and from the high sides of the boat that extended several feet above the level of the deck. The total effect was of a kind of shelter or enclosure. The sounds of the water, the birds, the women and children shouting to each other across the ships, all seemed miles away now, and the pale shadow of light that came through the yellow sails made everything brown and quiet. It reminded him of the attic of an old house, and for a moment he felt like a little boy listening to the closed-in silence, listening to the tiny buzzing sounds in the dust that seemed curiously loud when he would close his eyes and stop breathing and listen.

  A few feet aft of the mainmast, a hatchway led down into the ship. The first two levels below were open gun decks, enormous uncompartmented areas stacked with barrels and cases and balls of shot. As they descended into the darkness of the third level, Pao leading the way, he was overwhelmed by a sudden odor: the sweet, musty smell of old wood and dust and rotting seaweed. When his eyes adjusted to the fainting light, he found that he was walking down a long corridor. Fastened into the walls on either side were iron braziers that had once provided illumination, and doors that led into other rooms and into other corridors.

  “This way,” said Pao. She disappeared around a corner. He followed her, groping about in the semi-darkness. Then he saw her standing in the door of a large room illuminated by two large windows. The room was flanked with eight arched mirrors of a very baroque design with flutings and wreath and flower patterns set into the silver frames of each one. In one corner lay piles of rotting fabrics: faded silks, cottons, and an enormous bolt of green velvet. Scattered about the room lay dozens of trunks, some piled on top of each other, some open and lying on their sides, spilling their contents onto the floor: gray and blue capes, a doublet of gray camelot, a white fustian jerkin, stockings in gray and white, shirts of fine Holland lace that were yellowed now with age, a black cap of velvet, and, lying on a white frieze coat, a silver whistle on a long silver chain.

  “I’ve never taken anything from this room,” said Pao. “I don’t think anyone knows all these things are here.”

  At first Peter could not speak. He stared at the exotic riches of another age long dead. He wondered where the ship had once been bound for, and what great lord had owned all these treasures.

  He bent down and looked more closely at the silver whistle. The fluted blowpiece widened into a gargoyle face with an open mouth. What lips, he wondered, what lips long since turned to dust …? Then Pao lifted the whistle to her mouth and blew very gently. It made a long hollow sound that trembled softly in the air, a sound that reminded him of woodpipes.

  “Now,” she said, “we have a secret together.”

  He knew that it was true, but he could not have said just then what the secret was. The secret of the whistle’s sound that no one else had heard for hundreds of years? The secret of the room and its faded treasures? Or was it the secret of what these things meant in some larger way, an existence or mode of being that he could feel at that moment but not quite put into words?

  For a moment he imagined that he was a ship captain who had discovered long ago that his journey was only an illusion, a trick of the wind and water, and that the islands he sought were as far away as the stars. But then one day while he was mourning those lost lands where he had planned to exchange his goods for an enormous profit, he wondered about the rigging of the sails, the cargo in his hold, and the interior rooms that he had never seen, or perhaps had forgotten. Yes, of course that was it. There was an outward journey across the sea, but also an inward journey from room to room, from corridor to corridor. One could be defined in the marketplace of the world where goods were bought and sold and admired; the other way was only a feeling, a way of looking at things. It seemed to him a very curious flight of fancy.

  “What is the secret, Pao? Can you put it into words?”

  But he knew that for the moment Pao would put nothing into words. She took his hand and led him back into the dark corridor and then into a room that held a gallery of portraits, mostly of Spanish noblemen. Across one wall hung a large tapestry of a country manor with several gabled houses, gardens, a stable and a faded yellow meadowland for horses and cows, and an intricately woven forest where the lord of the manor hunted deer with a crossbow. Another room was filled with trays of tarnished silver, faded linen, and a long velvet lounge.

  “The rooms on the lower levels are all swamped with water and weeds,” she said after a while. “But there is something else we still haven’t seen. It’s up this way.”

  He followed her up a wide turning staircase carved with figures of saints and medieval knights until they reached a long, narrow room, a library. Bookshelves filled one of the long walls all the way to the ceiling. There were hundreds of volumes, all bound in leather and in boards. On the opposite side, a series of casement windows looked out over The Drift. He realized now that he was standing in the ornate section of the caravel’s stern, near the very top of the quarterdeck.

  Most of the books in the library were in Spanish or French. Many were beautifully illuminated copies of romances and accounts of travel. Others were philosophical works, poetry, and geography. One incunabulum, bound in lacquered red leather with tooled and gilded lettering, told the history of The Middle Ages. It was printed in Spanish in what looked like a kind of Gothic type. At the beginning of many chapters, stylized maps showed the gods of the sea, their cheeks puffed, blowing ships toward the shell-scalloped edges of eternity or across the trade lanes of The Mediterranean, and dozens of woodcuts portrayed the lives of kings and knights. Peter knew only a few words in Spanish, enough to order meals and fishing supplies, but he could see that the book was a kind of grand, romantic distortion. One whole chapter was given over to El Cid’s horse and armor. Another to the witchcraft of the Moors. For nearly a half hour he sat at one of the reading benches and slowly turned the stiff, ancient pages, hypnotized by the extravagance of the book. Pao sat next to him. Sometimes she would translate for him, reading and fingering the words o
ver his shoulder. Finally he came to the end of the first volume. The colophon was a great bird clutching a book in his talons.

  “This is incredible,” he said in a half whisper. “This whole place is incredible. It’s a museum. Back in The United States it would be worth a fortune.”

  Pao seemed very pleased. “I’ve read nearly all the ones in Spanish,” she said. “Lots of times I just sit here all day and read.”

  She led him back into the dark corridor of the ship and then out again into the shadowy stillness of the deck. In another minute they were standing in the afternoon sunlight, squinting in the sudden brilliance and looking back at the giant caravel that had held their interest for nearly three hours.

  “Where shall we go now?” he said.

  Pao pointed to an old fishing ship, a barquentine, that lay several hundred feet down toward The Southern Edge. As he followed her from ship to ship he suddenly remembered his second reason for the day’s exploring. He nearly laughed at the incongruity of it. Perhaps there had been an outboard motor hidden in the corner of that ancient library or behind the baroque mirrors. He sighed. At this rate he would never find anything he needed for his journey back to the world. The Drift was an enchantress, distracting him with her exotic wares until thoughts of home and the outside world seemed only a useless dream.

  The barquentine was not nearly so old or large as the caravel. The foremast was square-rigged, but the main and mizzenmasts held large gaff sails that suggested the lines of a more modern schooner type. It was perhaps two thirds the size of the caravel and flat across the deck, with no sheer toward the quarterdeck or forecastle. Inside they found large stores of rope and line equipment and barrels of tar. Many of the rooms were littered with skeletons, some of them fully dressed. Peter could see that Pao took them very much for granted, but for him they were incredibly grotesque, especially the ones in dresses. Some had apparently died on deck of battle wounds and had then been stacked on the gun quarters below. Pao explained that no skeletons were allowed on deck anywhere.

  “It simply doesn’t look very nice,” she said quite seriously.

  Before they returned to The Mary Strattford, Pao showed him the newest addition to The Drift, a thirty-foot motor launch.

  “How long ago did it come here?” he asked.

  “Last year,” she said. “The ribs and beams are all made of metal.” She nudged the bow with her foot and looked up and down the hull in a doubtful way.

  Peter climbed down The Cliff to where the boat was moored in the swampy water. The cabin, he soon found, was empty. The food locker had been ransacked. But in the sleeping quarters below he found an outboard motor and five gallons of gasoline in a metal jerrycan. Later that night, he decided, he would carry them down to The Southern Edge where he had hidden his dinghy. The gasoline, of course, would not be enough. But if there were five gallons here, there was bound to be more somewhere on The Drift.

  Perhaps in a week or so he would have everything he needed for his journey. He felt sure now that he could get back into the stream of The Equatorial Current before he ran out of food and water. His dinghy was fourteen feet long and there would be room for supplies and perhaps thirty or forty gallons of fuel, if he could find that much. And his aluminum boat was unsinkable. There were really a number of things in his favor. Perhaps he really would make it after all.

  But when he looked at Pao walking ahead of him, humming to herself, he had to remind himself that he really did want to leave. The alternative, of course, was to spend the rest of his life on The Drift. Better to risk death at sea, he thought, than to stay here and do nothing. He thought of the elegantly dressed corpses on the English barquentine—the bones of men and women who had simply waited here for death. No. He would leave as quickly as possible. His whole life was back in The United States and there was nothing for him here except a pretty girl who was eighteen years his junior and the romantic illusions of a decaying world that he suspected would soon lose its charm. Perhaps when the time came he could convince Pao and Tabor to come with him. There were other boats and other sails …

  “What are you thinking about?” said Pao. She was looking out across the water again.

  “What am I thinking about? I’m not thinking about much of anything,” he lied. “What makes you ask?”

  “You’re thinking about going home,” she said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “No one has to tell me things,” she said. “You’re thinking about going home.”

  For a moment she seemed very sad. And then suddenly she smiled and took his hand and together they ran from boat to boat, leaping from one hull to the next, making their way across the wrecks toward The Mary Strattford. It reminded him of rock jumping, something he had done one summer when he was a boy, the summer his parents had sent him to a boy’s camp in Massachusetts. And for that one month, a strange oasis in the middle of a barren childhood, he spent his days swimming and making sailboats out of napkins and bits of wood, hopping from rock to rock, pretending he could walk on water. For those few days he had been a different person, a child his parents would not have recognized. And now with Pao he was that child again. Leaping mindlessly from place to place and listening to the sounds of the ocean. And now again he had forgotten about his dinghy and the long journey that loomed ahead.

  The sun touched the horizon. It sent long sheets of fire across the water.

  “It’s been a lovely afternoon,” said Peter. “I’ve enjoyed everything.”

  Pao smiled. “We never got to eat our seabread,” she said.

  “I never got hungry. There were so many things to see I never thought about eating. Besides, Raven says your seabread isn’t much good.”

  “Raven doesn’t know anything,” she answered. “He’s only seventeen.”

  “Ah, that explains it. Seventeen. The age of ignorance.”

  “I’m nearly nineteen, you know,” said Pao. She looked up at him very earnestly and then suddenly blushed and turned away.

  When they reached the hatchway of The Mary Strattford, he paused for a moment before descending. Something strange had touched the edge of his awareness. Something that for a moment he could not find or identify.

  “What is it?” said Pao.

  He listened.

  “Did you hear something?” she asked.

  In the distance children’s bare feet skittered across the deck of some creaking ship. Beyond that, the sound of a rare wind somewhere across the water. And beyond that—yes, he could hear it quite clearly now—the odd rhythmical sounds that he had heard before only at night, the jangling music of some mad musician.

  “Do you hear that sound, Pao?”

  “It’s only the children running around on The Conquistador Blanco. They play there in the afternoons.”

  “I don’t mean that. It’s something farther away. Like weird music.”

  She listened.

  Suddenly he felt very stupid. “You know,” he said, “I think I’m beginning to lose my mind.”

  But Pao was not listening to him. Her ears were sorting out the distant sounds of The Drift, the creaks and groans and murmurings of the ships and the water. Then she smiled. “I hear it now,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t hear it earlier today. He’s been playing off and on for most of the afternoon.”

  “Who’s been playing?”

  “The Hatchmaker,” she said.

  Seven

  IMAGES

  After dinner that evening, Peter, Tabor, and Pao stood together for a few moments on the deck of The Mary Strattford, watching the moon rise like a great silver wheel throwing off sparks of silver light everywhere in the rivers of water between the boats. Occasionally the splash of a fish or the whirring of a nightbird marked the silent progress of the evening. Once there was a trace of wind against his cheek.

  “Good night,” said Pao. She kissed him on the temple and then turned and made her way to the deck of the nex
t boat. “I’ll see you very early tomorrow,” she called back out of the darkness.

  “Good night, Pao,” he said.

  Tabor smiled in the moonlight. “After you finish with Reuben and Javitt tomorrow, why don’t you come up to The Cliff,” he said after the sound of Pao’s footfalls had disappeared. “We’re caulking up one of the old schooners. You might find it interesting, and you can help if you like.”

  “I’d like that very much,” said Peter.

  “Fine. Well, good night then.”

  “Good night, Tabor.”

  Later that evening when he was alone in his room, he tried to think about the problems that faced him. In a way, things were looking up. Tonight when everyone was asleep he would carry the motor and the gas he had found that day down to the dinghy. Tomorrow perhaps he would find a sail somewhere that would not be too large. That was the external problem, and he had a certain tentative confidence now that everything would go well. But the internal problem, something he had only really been aware of for a matter of hours, that was something else again. He realized now that it was becoming very difficult to assess his own feelings. Was it possible that at the last moment he would not want to leave, not want to return to his own world? Was is possible that The Drift would hold him here with some power, some force that he could not combat? The issues were not very clear in his mind. There was a power in the old ships, in the peaceful life, and in Pao. But could such things hold him here for a lifetime as Tabor seemed to think? He could not believe it. How could anyone willingly spend his life in a marine museum? And yet Tabor had never tried to escape, and Tabor seemed to be a strong and intelligent man. How could such a person be content here? Would whatever had happened to Tabor happen to him as well? Perhaps it was only that Tabor had been deeply wounded in some way. Perhaps for him The Drift was a kind of refuge from some weakness or some profound guilt. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Part of the problem in assessing anything here was that The Drift still seemed improbable, dreamlike. He could not quite take it seriously.