The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  “Huh,” Didier said, nodding. “Classic displacement.”

  “Maybe. So he lights the bowl and puffs his pipe,” Ronnie said, “and tells me, ‘You look like you’ll work out just fine for us. Just fine. When Mr. Sneeks said he had a cabin boy for me, well, I imagined someone just like you. I thought of you, and here you are.’ ‘And here I am,’ I said, and as I said it, the world went clean and orderly in a way it almost never does.”

  Ronnie paused, took a drink. Everyone was quiet, unclear where we were headed. They’d been expecting a funny escapade, like the one about Oppler’s E-type Jaguar.

  “We set sail later that afternoon. I felt what I can only call a mystical vibration when we lost sight of land. The commodore said I brought luck on board, as the winds were such that we sailed wing and wing, with both jibs open at an angle and filled with air, so that the yacht looked like a huge white cabbage butterfly. The commodore explained that this manner of sailing was not only fast but also the most balanced and pleasing kind, because of the steady way the boat moved through the water. In the evening, Xerxes prepared our dinner on a gimbal stove, and we ate on the aft deck, in the bright, gassy glow of a Coleman lantern. The commodore and his wife talked about their lives, and having no memories or interests of my own, I was fascinated by their stories of tax shelters and cocktail parties, tennis elbow, summer compounds, and disowned children. Now, of course, this kind of thing couldn’t interest me less, though it’s often the artist’s duty to listen to exactly these sorts of details and to pretend they matter.”

  Erwin Frame laughed uncomfortably, glancing at the two collectors he’d brought to dinner, a husband and wife much too polished and fancy for downtown Manhattan, the man’s platinum watch, his timepiece, glinting in the candlelight. The collectors’ faces were pleased and vacant, like they had already decided that this artist whose work they were buying was going to entertain them and he was. Whatever Ronnie actually said didn’t matter. They were surfing the experience of a loft on the Bowery, an environment foreign to both the man and his wife, but with the charade that for the man, it was not foreign. He would guide his wife. He was the expert. On downtown and painting and the art market and when to laugh and so forth. Just follow my lead, honey, his body language instructed his wife. Both looked at Ronnie with broad smiles.

  “That first evening, the commodore gave me a private lesson on night sailing. He showed me how to flip on the red port light and the green starboard light. He said it was the law of the sea that these shine until daybreak, to warn ships of our presence. ‘The law of the sea’ was a phrase the commodore would invoke frequently, and each time he said it I felt his awe before the notion of a larger agency, a cosmic governance. But later, I mean much later, I came to wonder if the law of which he spoke was sometimes in truth not that of the sea but of the commodore, his own law, or even more arbitrary than law, and more fickle, the commodore’s private fancy. But this abuse, shall we call it, of his position, was never explicit. Even now, his ethics on our journey are a mystery to me. On that first night, he was a great teacher. He got out his sextant and explained how to take a star fix, although I didn’t get the precise method, overwhelmed as I was by the sensations of the night sea. There were stars overhead in a brilliant scatter, and we sailed on stars, too, which shimmered up from water so smooth and inklike that the heavens were reflecting back at themselves, as if the sky were underneath us. I heard the commodore’s voice and felt that we were in an open-air capsule or sleigh, traveling through the vast universe, a great, pin-speckled sphere, a black egg rolled in glitter.”

  “Beautiful, Ronnie,” Gloria said. Her tone presumed he was making this up. We waited, and Ronnie continued.

  “We docked in the Keys, and the commodore golfed while his wife directed the purchase of a new wardrobe for me. She had particular tastes, the commodore’s wife, and a methodical sense of how shopping is done. I needed a certain number of boys’ cotton shirts, and sweaters of various blends of wool and cotton. I needed three bathing suits. Duck pants. A tie and jacket, just in case, she said, ports of call led to formal situations. Canvas Top-Siders and a pair of beautiful hand-tooled wingtips whose leather was the dark stain of boysenberry syrup. I can tell you now it wasn’t a typical cabin boy’s wardrobe, but I had nothing to compare it to. The wingtips had been crafted by the finest English shoemaker, according to the commodore’s wife. They came in their own chamois sack, with a tin of saddle soap and a silver-plated shoehorn. They probably wound up decorating the feet of an otherwise naked Polynesian, or resting on the bottom of the sea. I actually never wore them. I grew so accustomed to going barefoot on the boat that wearing any kind of shoes felt too constricting.

  “Before we left the Keys, the commodore and his wife picked up one more crew member, Artemio, who, it was fairly clear, would be fulfilling the actual duties of cabin boy. I pretended not to notice, and in part of my mind I didn’t. But in some deep space, I knew he was the cabin boy and what I was. I knew what I was, and yet I didn’t. I was a blank and innocent boy who’d wandered onto the Reno. We made our way—”

  “So what the hell were you?” Stanley asked, breaking the spontaneous code that had formed, that we would let Ronnie tell the whole story before we attempted to figure out what it meant.

  “Come on, Stanley,” Didier said, “just let him talk.”

  “We journeyed south, all the way to the Panama Canal. The commodore was thrilled for me to witness our transfer through the locks and channels. Although he’d gone surly with the Canal Zone Police when they’d boarded our boat. He instructed me to stay in my berth, because I had no papers or passport. I did as he said, and listened through the closed cabin door as he tried to intimidate and scoot the police off the boat. The police were not so easy to scoot. They said they’d heard he had a boy with him. ‘We don’t like funny business,’ they said, and the commodore assured them that neither did he. And then he did something strange. He asked if they would like to see his wife. ‘Where is she?’ they wanted to know. ‘Sleeping,’ the commodore said. ‘Like a baby.’ And then I heard him walk past, down to her berth, and after him, the heavy footsteps of the police, with the extra weight from their guns, holsters, batons, and radios. From what I could gather, the commodore opened his wife’s door and let the police into the room where she was sleeping. I heard him say something, and then he closed the door again, and I heard no more sounds. Sometime later, the police slunk past quietly, as if they were on tiptoe.

  “The commodore’s wife looked unusually radiant at dinner that night, and she told me that life was full of surprises, and also that it was not full of surprises, and that this was one of the surprises, that you could often predict exactly how people were going to behave in a given situation. ‘The commodore and I make bets,’ she said. ‘But the thing is, we never risk losing anything we weren’t secretly interested in getting rid of anyhow.’ The commodore looked at her and winked a dirty little wink. I didn’t like it. I don’t know how I knew it was a dirty wink, but I connected it to the police, with their epaulettes and gun holsters. For a moment, I wondered if she and the commodore were a positive influence on me. I was, after all, so impressionable, with no memories or experiences to draw from. The commodore’s wife called Artemio to bring out dessert, a quivering flan whose surface was not flat, as one should expect, but angled like a slipway, because it had set as we traveled at a tilt, tacking starboard. The moment of wondering had passed. I spooned the crooked flan and did not think again about what might have happened in the commodore’s wife’s berth to make the footsteps of the policemen so light.”

  “They shtupped her,” Stanley said.

  “Probably,” Ronnie said with measured tolerance, as if he were annoyed at having to pause and reward Stanley for declaring the obvious.

  “Thanks to the commodore, I knew, by that point, how to take a sun fix, and as we approached zero degrees latitude, which I confirmed with the commodore’s sextant and his gentle coaching, I became, through a
ritual that remains vague in my memory, an official ‘shellback,’ which is what you’re called once you’ve sailed south across the equator. Soon we hit the doldrums. The air was sweltering, and we didn’t make much headway, but no one seemed to really mind. The commodore and his wife sat under a canvas shade on the aft deck drinking English gin, and Xerxes occasionally furled the sails and dropped anchor so I could swim in the warm and placid water. When I climbed back onto the boat, Artemio had sandwiches, iced tea, and a fresh towel waiting for me. Giant sea turtles knocked and clacked against the sides of the yacht, friendly and lethargic, as heavy and dense as bowling balls. I was feeding one of them my sandwich crusts when Artemio whacked its head with a mallet. It made a delicious soup.

  “Sailing into Polynesia, we encountered our first serious weather, a real squall, and huge waves, combers, the commodore called them, rose up and curled over, foaming and crashing onto the boat, which was thrown violently around. Artemio, Xerxes, and the commodore bailed like crazy. Night came, and the storm continued. ‘All hands on deck!’ the commodore shouted, and even his wife bailed. Waves socked and pummeled and heaved the Reno, which creaked and shuddered as if it were going to burst apart. My fear was primitive and desperate. I asked out loud what we had done to deserve this. I shouted it. The commodore took hold of me and said the sea was not for us or against us. ‘It doesn’t know we’re here,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t know.’

  “The storm passed and we sailed toward the Friendly Islands under calm skies. We dropped anchor in the leeward harbor of Puka-Puka and spent several days relaxing, having a good time. The commodore taught me all about shell meat, which was tastiest and which highest in protein, which was deadly poisonous. I dove for murex, purple conch, cowries spotted with chocolate freckles. We cooked on the beach and shared our meals with the local people, who brought a drink called quee-qum, which we passed around in a single coconut shell. It was my job, as the youngest male, to drain the coconut shell and then holler ‘Maca!’ which means finished, or empty, or more, please. I can’t remember exactly. But I remember how I bellowed ‘Maca!’ and the natives all laughed and smiled, and one of them scampered off to refill the coconut shell. Also I remember that the commodore wore a kind of special woven basket around his waist, like a weight lifter’s belt, not unlike the special woven belt that the local tribal chief wore. I wasn’t sure what it signified, if anything, but the commodore seemed to know these people, and they treated him almost as if he were a kind of visiting king from a nearby island.

  “We continued south and west. As we dipped into Melanesia, we were all deep in the rhythm of the journey. We would make the world round by circling it. Then one morning we woke to discover we were taking in water. The Reno had sprung a slow leak. Fortunately we had a transmitter and were able to send out a distress signal. A devious cruising tug from the tiny island of Kokovoko managed to find us. By the time we spotted its smokestack, chugging merrily in our direction, we were loading supplies into a rubber dinghy, just in case we had to abandon ship. The tug captain advised us to ride with him, to be on the safe side, as he towed the Reno. He was jovial and friendly to us, at least to me, the commodore, Artemio, and Xerxes. He didn’t much like the commodore’s wife and even suggested she remain on the Reno, despite having already said it was dangerous to do so, since our boat was technically sinking. Much later, when I worked on a tug in New York Harbor, the captain wouldn’t let his own daughter on the boat. Said it was bad luck. He used to tie her to the dock with sandwiches and some cans of beer. Pretty girl, but sort of spent looking, even at the age of twelve. Once I saw that girl at Magoo’s, all grown up and dead drunk. She dropped her cocktail, picked it up, and fit her hand into the broken glass to dig out the maraschino cherry. Put the cherry in her mouth and ate it. I said, ‘Hey. Hey, I know you. You’re the tugboat captain’s daughter, aren’t you.’ You know what she said to me? ‘Fuck off,’ and walked away. Can you believe it? Anyway, the tug captain from Kokovoko eventually agreed that the commodore’s wife could board the tug if she rode in the very back of the boat. The tug captain had wanted her to put a burlap sack over her head because he said if she faced the spray the water gods would be furious and drag us to our deaths. The commodore eventually got the tug captain to agree that his wife would ride unhooded, but would remain astern and keep her eyes on the wake. The commodore’s wife was upset about this, and in truth we were rather annoyed with her, too, for disrupting the flow of our rescue. I sensed the magical spell among us begin to evaporate just the slightest bit.

  “That night, in a thatched hut on the island of Kokovoko, I woke with a start. I was disoriented in the dark hut and had to struggle to recall where I was. I listened to the squeak and rustle of palm fronds, the soft, crashing metronome of the sea. Images from my old life started rolling in, one by one, each welling up like sudden kelp in a wave break. I knew who I’d been when I was struck at the construction site: Ronald Franklyn Fontaine of 1331 Castle Peak Drive. Son of Lee Anne Fontaine, homemaker, and Fred Fontaine, Chevrolet salesman, and big brother of Tim Fontaine, who had not yet, but would later, rob several banks and a Brink’s vehicle.

  “The commodore was always talking about sailing sense, and how many nights he’d woken, suddenly, having realized somewhere in the depths of sleep that the rhythm of water lapping the prow was different than what it should have been. He would get up and discover that his boat had sailed off course. I had a similar feeling lying there in the dark: the rhythm of the commodore and his wife was lulling and seductive but wrong. It was the wrong rhythm. Still, I felt a lot of regret. Because it wasn’t a bad life, this new one, even if it might have been more dignified to have remained a properly paid cabin boy, or to have at least resisted complying with the commodore’s requests, when complying gave me a bad feeling.”

  Didier snickered. It didn’t seem funny to me, even if Ronnie was making it up.

  “It’s just that kind of thing,” Ronnie said, pointing his chin at Didier, “that I associate with the commodore. A smirk. A muffled glee. He said everything he wanted me to do, or did to me, was for my good, but often it seemed like it was for his good. If it was for my good, why did he muffle his glee? Was I a slave of some kind? I suddenly wondered as I lay there in the dark between the two of them. All existence is slavery of one kind or another, right? Who isn’t a slave? And whatever dignity I sacrificed by accepting their gifts, by doing what they asked, still, I was sailing the world with only the smallest of worries: the water is a little cool for swimming this morning, and where do we keep the Band-Aids, because I spiked my toe on a bit of coral.

  “I heard Artemio quietly snoring from his station on the floor, there in our hut, in case one of us needed a glass of water in the middle of the night. Did I have to reject this new life simply because something else had come before it? I had no chores and no homework. I swam whenever I wanted, and every so often explored a new port of call, with the paper currency of its government slipped into my pockets by the commodore and also by his wife, each of whom seemed to believe that they alone delighted in spoiling me. Did I want to sail the world, explore remote islands? Or did I want to mow the front lawn, jerk off to the illustration of the lady in the Hoover vacuum replacement bag manual, and get beaten on occasion with Dad’s leather belt? Obviously, these were two different realities. I could simply choose between them. And yet I felt the crushing sense that there was only one correct choice. And so I didn’t really have a choice, because I had to choose correctly.

  “The natives were resealing the Reno. Once it was repaired we were onward to the Coral Sea and then the Cocos Islands. Who knew what the Fates had in store. I did not face them. I could not shake the feeling that I had wandered off the track when I chose the Reno from among the yachts that reared up in my vision that day. I could no longer suppress the old life. With its drab and dull brutalities, I knew it was the real one, my real life. I’d lost the toehold on my new life, with the commodore and his wife. I didn’t understand it anymore. Lyi
ng in the dark hut that night—an endless night, a night of great confusion—the commodore snuffled in his sleep and nuzzled close to me. I felt his humid breath on my shoulder, in two little streams from his nostrils. His wife stirred as well, and turned her face in my direction. They breathed on me asynchronously, as if it was their duty to cool me in their sleep. All of a sudden I panicked. Who are these people? I wondered. And why the hell are they naked?”

  We all should have laughed. Because if it wasn’t true, it was surely funny. But none of us did laugh. Outside, rain began to fall, but softly. Cooler air came in through the loft’s big open windows, and there was a sound of wet tires on the Bowery.

  “I got up and crept out of the hut without waking them. The surf pounded like a heart. I walked barefoot along a dirt path until I found a larger hut with ceremonial shells hanging from the front door. The local tribal chief. I knocked and explained my situation the best I could. We walked over to the municipal government headquarters, where there was a switchboard, and I cabled my parents.

  “As I waited for my mother and father to arrive, I pretended everything was normal. I swam open-eyed over the coral reef, which curled and fluttered along the seabed, fleshy and white as skate fish. I ate lobster and crab, cuttlefish and breadfruit. I lay in the hut and listened to the surf, dreaming up errands on which to send Artemio, as my hours of having a servant at my beck and call were dwindling. And here I could begin to invent and you guys might not notice, not even Stanley and his bullshit detector. I could tell you, for instance, that the commodore and his wife both died under mysterious circumstances, and lead you to believe that it was at my own innocent boy’s hands that they died, and I could even declare my reasons for murdering them in a way that would leave you satisfied, in fact more than satisfied, that I had done the right thing and that the commodore and his wife had met an appropriate end. Even if you weren’t convinced of their guilt, or didn’t believe in such a crude moral axis as that of guilt and innocence. Still, your judgment would be informed by a simple fact that we can all agree on: that the notion of the sea and sailors by itself suggests the notion of murder. What is sailing, after all, but an extreme form of criminality? I didn’t kill them. Like I said, I’m letting you know that I could start inventing. But even if I did kill them, you would feel no sympathy for the commodore in his suspiciously crisp clothes, his wife, calculating and lustful, calling to the drunk and obscene monkeys hanging above her in the trees, flashing their swollen red anuses while she opens her legs for the tribal chief of Kokovoko, who lifts her dress with one hand, and grips, in the other, a phallus of scrimshaw—”