Petrogypsies

by Rory Harper

  We were dead men, all of us.

  “We should have jumped that bastard and taken our casualties when we had the chance,” Razer said.

  After a while, we all sat together and rocked back and forth. Listening to the water rush into the holds around us.

  I thought about the chief speeding away, leaving us behind to drown like rats. He could have let us live, but he didn’t. He’d killed us. Not because we threatened him anymore. His original plan would have worked. He’d have gotten away. But he chose to kill thirty-three men—and Sprocket!—because it was more convenient for him that way. I never knew people like that existed. I was sorry I ever found out. I felt stupid that he’d fooled me the way he did. I was just a big ol’ dumb country hick. Couldn’t tell the difference between a real friend and a mad-dog killer. On top of everything else, he’d let me twist in the wind for weeks while everybody thought I was the one who killed Pegleg.

  About the time I was feeling as sorry for myself as I could, new footsteps approached the hatch above us. Hundreds of them.

  Sprocket’s footsteps. He must have been playing his tongue out behind him to come to us.

  I jumped up and started yelling. “Sprocket! Kick the clamps loose! Kick the clamps loose!” We pounded and shouted at Sprocket, but there was no way he could have understood us. All he understood was making a well and playing tricks on people. He probably couldn’t have kicked the clamps loose, anyway. They were made of heavy stainless steel and were practically flush with the deck when they were screwed down.

  The ship settled lower in the water.

  Then Sprocket screamed. I hope I never in my life hear another sound like it. It started low and ratcheted higher and louder until it keened so high we could barely hear it.

  The scream cut off abruptly. A minute later Sprocket began shuffling about on deck again, grunting and moaning horribly. This went on for five or ten minutes. Then the hatch flexed twice and was wrenched into the air and out of sight. A second later, it clanged to the deck. Unbelievably, Sprocket had torn away the clamps.

  I jumped up and grabbed the edge of the hole and levered myself outside. The clamps hadn’t been torn loose. They had been unscrewed. They, and the deck for yards around, were covered with a viscous golden liquid that looked a lot like highly refined light crude.

  Sprocket stood near the rail with his eyes closed. He might have been asleep, except that his whole body trembled.

  I thought back to the Bali Room parking lot. Those clamp knobs resembled gas tank caps. He must have used his tongue to twist them loose. Then hooked it through the crane eye in the center of the hatch and lifted it off.

  But his tongue had been trapped downhole!

  Doc looked like he wanted to cry. He knew immediately what Sprocket did to himself to get loose.

  “C’mon, Henry Lee. Razer. We’ve got to stop the bleeding.”

  Sprocket had used his eating mouth to bite his drill head off, then freed us with the ragged end. The golden liquid splattered all over the deck was his blood. Only the most complete desperation could have driven him to do what he did. Then a wave rolled over the rail and I realized how close to sinking Miz Bellybutton was. Sprocket must have realized it, too. The next wave was higher.

  I felt calm while we forced Sprocket to open his mouth and let us look at the smashed, gnawed ruin where his drill-head used to be. I guess I was in shock. I stroked his hide and held the tip in my hands while his blood soaked my jumpsuit. Razer entered through his mouth, slipping and sloshing through the golden pools inside it, then came back out with the medical kit.

  Captain Johnson and his crew had all rushed off to see about trying to keep Miz Bellybutton afloat and headed toward the coast. The captain had looked over the railing and shook his head when he saw how low she rode in the chop.

  While Razer and and Doc worked on it, sewing, closing off the flow of blood, then smearing anaesthetic grease and coagulants on it, all I could do was shake and think about how much I wanted to catch up with the chief and make sure he never hurt anybody again in this life.

  I looked up from Sprocket’s mangled tongue, and stared out to the storm clouds gathering on the horizon, lost in a happy dream about how the chief’s face would look after it had been punched hard for maybe a half hour. A speck bobbed up and down on the waves a couple of hundred yards away.

  I must have squeezed Sprocket’s tongue, because he winced and moaned. Doc shot me a stern look.

  “Get yourself organized, Henry Lee.”

  I pointed at the speck casual-like. I still couldn’t believe what I saw.

  “Take a gander over there, Doc. You suppose the chief was havin’ second thoughts about leavin’ us?”

  The speck was the speedboat. The chief stood in the cockpit, watching us over the windshield.

  Sprocket hissed and jerked his tongue from our hands. He marched over until he butted up against the rails. His eyes widened and started to spin.

  “I suspect he’s just waiting to see us sink,” Doc said.

  Razer pulled at Sprocket’s mouth crease to get him to open up. “I wonder if that ol’ deer rifle of mine will take him out at this distance? Even if not, it’d be fun to try.”

  “Good question,” Doc said. He scratched his jaw. “Way that boat’s moving around, it’d be tough to lead him right. Howsomever, it might not be a bad idea to let that ol’ boy know we ain’t forgive him for what he done. How about getting my carbine while you’re in there?”

  “I got a twenty-two in my room, Razer,” I said. “Box of long-rifles in the dresser.”

  None of us much felt like turning the other cheek. Sprocket least of all, as we found out in a second.

  His mangled tongue shot over the bows and arched high in the air toward the speedboat. Everybody crowded against the rail to watch. The tongue-tip fell a couple of dozen feet short of the speedboat, and the chief spun the wheel. The speedboat turned sharply, throwing up spray in its wake. Sprocket’s tongue played out of his mouth the way it had when the shark was running with it.

  It sliced through the water in the speedboat’s wake, gaining steadily. Then about twenty feet of it pulled out of the water like a giant sea serpent. It towered over the fleeing boat, then darted down and punched into the chief’s back. Knocked him away from the wheel. He fought with it as it wrapped around him. For a second he got loose and stumbled toward the wheel, but it wrapped around him again and jerked him clean out of the cockpit and over the gunwales into the water. The speedboat kept going, heading for the horizon.

  Everybody on the deck cheered while he reeled the chief in, twisting and yelling. The last fifty yards or so, the chief didn’t struggle so much. Sprocket wasn’t doing a great job of keeping his head above water. Matter of fact, if I hadn’t known what a gentle critter he was, I might have suspected he was semi-drowning the chief on purpose.

  The chief spluttered weakly when Sprocket hauled him upside down into the air, then dropped him headfirst the last couple of feet onto the deck. He choked and spewed seawater real pitiful-like, but from the looks on the faces around him, nobody seemed to be wasting a whole lot of sympathy in his direction.

  Finally, he rolled over and looked at us. “Crap.” He spit out another couple of tablespoons of sea water. “Ah, hell. Maybe it’s best this way.”

  “Damn right,” Razer said. “We said our prayers in the hold, asshole. It’s your turn now.” He grabbed the chief by the shirt and yanked him to his feet. He shoved him toward the rail. “You was so eager to get ashore. Let’s see how far you make it without a boat.”

  “Razer, this ain’t Amarillo,” Doc said.

  “Aw, Doc … he tried to kill us! And look at what he done to Sprocket!”

  I noticed Sprocket’s stitches had opened up and he was dripping golden onto the deck again. He didn’t seem to notice. Just watched Razer and the chief.

  “
No sir,” Doc said. “The man’s gonna get a fair trial. Then the State of Texas is gonna teach him how to air-dance.”

  “You’re just a goddam liberal, ain’t you, Doc?”

  “Come on, buddy. Act right.”

  “Shitfire!” Disgusted, Razer yanked the chief back from the railing.

  A look of panic appeared on the chief’s face. If I’d been him, I’d have got upset when Razer grabbed me, not when Doc talked him out of giving me a swimming lesson.

  “Oh, my God!” the chief said. “The engines! Did you kill the engines?” He looked wildly toward the fantail. “I drained the oil and throttled them up to—”

  The engines seized and tore loose from their mountings. Sounded like thunder. Miz Bellybutton shivered hard enough to throw everybody off their feet.

  When I staggered upright again, the sailors had already run to unship the lifeboats.

  “You rotten son of a bitch!” Captain Johnson said from on his knees. “You didn’t want us to have any chance at all, did you?”

  * * *

  It went quick from there. Ten minutes later we watched from lifeboats as Miz Bellybutton started a whirlpool dive to the bottom.

  I’d never seen Sprocket swim. For that matter, nobody on the crew ever had, either. But he had calmly trotted to the break in the railing where his gangplank was laid when we were docked. He ran off the side of the ship and splashed into the water and floated quite comfortably at about his eye level. Couldn’t steer worth a damn, though. No rudder, and his stumpy legs were mostly useless as propellors. Razer and a couple of the guys brought their lifeboat alongside him and scrambled up his side. With their weight, he sank noticeably deeper in the water.

  A couple of seconds later, Razer came back out with some rope. We moored Sprocket and all of the lifeboats together. Razer stayed on board Sprocket, half poked out of a hole in his top. Nobody else was invited aboard, though. We was afraid of swamping Sprocket.

  Not much to do after that. Nobody even bothered to suggest that we try to row ashore, fifty miles away. At least not with the rising swells. The hurricane was coming. We mostly just waited for it to hit and hoped it didn’t drown us all.

  Beside me in the lifeboat, Doc hefted a small leather bag in his left hand. We’d found it hanging from a strap around the chief’s neck when we searched him to make sure he didn’t have any other weapons on him. The chief had been real unhappy when we confiscated it. It contained dozens of emeralds. None of us knew anything about jewels, but I suspected the emeralds weren’t junk stones.

  Doc squeezed the bag and looked at the chief. “This what everybody’s been dyin’ over, Chief?” The chief stared at the bag dully. “I asked you a question, bud,” Doc said. “We’re all probably gonna drown out here. I’d just as soon know why. This is why you killed Pegleg, ain’t it?”

  The chief shivered and his eyes focused. “He came to the Goody Room that night after everything was battened down. He was half-drunk, as usual. He had a gun. When I got the chance, I tried to take it away from him. We rolled around and busted open a couple of cans. I guess the Muracon-E was one of them. I managed to knock him out. I thought he was dead. I decided to dump him over the railing, but when I carried him topside, it seemed like no matter where I turned somebody was in the way. It was dark enough that nobody spotted us. I carried him over my shoulder, but I kept having to dodge behind a pile of casing or stumble away from the side of the ship to keep from being seen. It was a nightmare. I just couldn’t get rid of the damn body. Finally, I ended up near the wellhead. I could hear voices coming toward us from both sides. So I dropped him in the moon pool.”

  “So it was all self-defense,” I said. “You were just keeping him from shooting you with his gun. Same one you pulled on us?”

  “Yes. I kept it.”

  “Then what on God’s green earth made you act like you did with us?”

  “They’d have found the emeralds on me if I surrendered to the Coast Guard. I figured that I couldn’t hide them aboard Miz Bellybutton. Even if I beat the murder charges, I’d never be allowed back on her. And what if I was convicted? It didn’t look good, me disposing of the body that way and then staying quiet about it for so long.”

  “And the emeralds were the reason he pulled the gun on you in the first place?”

  “No!” Then he sighed. “Yes. He overheard me arguing with Axis Ortell in a waterfront bar. He told me about it. He was in a booth behind us, a booth that we thought was empty because he was slouched over, almost passed out. Too bad he wasn’t too drunk to listen in.”

  “Who’s Axis Ortell?”

  “The captain of the Belle Butange before Johnson. I had to kill him. We had gotten the emeralds on our last voyage, after they were smuggled out of the Aguario mines in Venezuela. We were going to be rich. Then Ortell started demanding a bigger cut because he put up more money. That wasn’t the deal. We were even partners. We’d never have gotten the emeralds at all without my contacts at Aguario.”

  “So Pegleg heard y’all arguing about the split.”

  The chief nodded. “And he followed us out of the bar. He saw us fight in the alley. He saw me feed Ortell to the fish. The body never washed ashore. That was a break for me.” He laughed bitterly. “About the only one in the whole mess.”

  “But Pegleg ruined it.”

  “Yes. He wanted the emeralds, or he’d tell. All of the emeralds. I couldn’t do that. I didn’t even have the emeralds then. When I went back to get them that night and head for Colorado, I found that Ortell had moved them from our original hiding place. I had searched his body and his duffel before I disposed of him, so I knew he hadn’t been carrying them. I looked in a couple of likely places, but couldn’t get into his cabin.

  He laughed again and shook his head. “He’d locked it, and I hadn’t thought to take his keys. He’d never locked his cabin before. The only other person with the keys was the purser. It would have looked too suspicious if I asked for them, but I was convinced that he’d hidden the emeralds there. The next day, Mr. Pickett had the ship put in dry-dock for the drill-ship modifications. He wanted to keep the project secret for a while, so he had us all moved to a hotel on the island while the dockyard did the work. After we had got the emeralds, Ortell had been hinting to the crew that he might be quitting, so it was easy enough for me to put out that he had just upped and left that night. By the time I got back on the ship, Johnson was aboard, and he routinely locked his cabin. I checked almost every day, and he finally left it unlocked. I found the emeralds taped inside one of the bunk’s rails.”

  He shook his head again. “It’s been crazy. Everything I did turned out wrong. I never imagined it could go this far. Simple attempts to straighten things out would mutate into disasters. It’s like I wasn’t meant to get away with this.”

  “I ain’t sure anybody is meant to get away with murder, bud,” Doc said.

  About then, the sky opened up and dropped its own ocean into the one we were floating on. It also brought lightning and thunder and, a few minutes later, a big enough wind to take us to where Dorothy and Toto went.

  We tried to row into the waves, but Momma Nature wasn’t cooperating. When I was swept out of the lifeboat a half hour later, I managed to keep a hand on the oar that I’d been using. I heard a few choked yells, then I was washed away into the growing darkness.

  * * *

  I worked into a kind of rhythm. The waves weren’t the cresting kind you see on the beach, they were watery mountains that moved like express trains. I’d be shoved up the side of one, then drop like I was in a runaway elevator. About three times a minute. I managed to keep my head above water at least a quarter of the time. I was proud of that, considering the conditions. I hung onto the oar, knowing if I lost it I’d probably drown in minutes.

  I told myself that if I could only do this for about ten or twelve hours, the hurricane would blow through, and
I’d merely be stranded at sea, fifty miles from land. People have been in worse spots and made it through, I told myself. Sure, lots of people. Half a dozen, maybe, in the entire history of the planet. I was young and strong, and a good swimmer, and Momma Nature was gonna have to make it a lot tougher before I even thought about giving up. Damn right.

  Then something brushed my ankle. I’d forgotten about the sharks. Momma Nature was a heartless bitch.

  I tried, the best I knew how, to climb on top of that oar. Didn’t work out too well for more than a second at a time.

  Don’t thrash around, I said to myself. That’ll just attract them even more. Lay still. They’ll get bored and go away eventually.

  Then it grabbed me around the waist and dragged me screaming into the depths of the ocean. I hadn’t yet learned how to breath water, so I passed out shortly.

  * * *

  I woke up lying on my stomach, retching seawater. Doc leaned over me and pounded on my back in a misguided attempt to help me. It broke my rhythm. and I near choked to death.

  Finally, I just lay on my side and gasped. I was inside Sprocket. A couple of torches were lit, revealing his central corridor to be crowded with bedraggled sailors and all the crew.

  The curtain that led to the outer world flapped open abruptly and Sprocket’s tongue glided inside, wrapped around another limp figure. Doc crawled over to him and pounded his back, too.

  I sat up. A sharp ping-ping-ping reverberated through Sprocket’s body. It seemed to come from everywhere, including inside my head.

  Doc crawled away from the sailor he’d been pounding on. “He’ll be okay, too.” He noticed my head cocked listening to the ping-ping-ping. “Yeah. Damnedest thing, ain’t it? I never knew he could make that sound, either. He does seismic testing in three-dimensions, though. Why not sonar location, too? We figure that’s how he found the ones that washed away when the lifeboats capsized.”