Stowaway

by Pam Withers

  The captain hesitates as Arturo polishes a cleat, the wedge-shaped block around which lines are secured.

  “Sure, why not?” the big guy replies. Arturo’s face breaks into a surprised smile.

  “Can I check the bilges, bilge pumps, or fuel lines for you?” I ask, looking for an excuse to see below decks.

  The request produces a momentary frown on the captain’s face.

  “Thanks,” he replies at length, “but Arturo’s a real wizard with all that. The fuelling is the main thing. After you’ve filled the tank, we’ve got twenty ten-gallon jerry cans Arturo will line up for you.”

  Whoa, a full day’s worth of emergency fuel, I think. Why would they need all that? But I keep the question to myself. “Hey, Arturo.”

  “He doesn’t speak much English,” the captain warns me. Arturo promptly winks at me from an angle his uncle can’t see, as if to say, “That’s what he thinks.” I realize Arturo hasn’t spoken a word since my arrival, and I almost get the vibe he’s scared of the big guy. Hmm, I think. Not a very chummy uncle-nephew combo.

  Thirty minutes later, I’ve completed the refuelling and jerry-can operation, and the captain places several crisp hundred-dollar bills in my palm. Cash, really?

  “Well done,” he says as a gust of wind almost takes his hat. “You’re very helpful, young man. Okay, Arturo has the list and money. Be back by four. We’ll be off as soon as we get a weather window. Don’t get too soaked. Maybe I’ll have some coffee waiting when you get back.”

  “Love coffee,” I say.

  “I know,” the captain replies, which doesn’t seem odd to me at the time.

  • • •

  ARTURO

  My excitement at being trusted to fetch groceries without the captain (“Captain Jones” indeed — ha!) breathing down my neck is cut short when we reach Owen’s house and the boy heads straight to his bedroom, bends down, and pulls a gun out from under his bed.

  Heart speeding up, I’m about to dive, roll, and slash Owen with the pocket knife I keep handy, when I realize just in time it is a stupid air pistol. A BB gun, a spring-pistol single-shot .177. Kid stuff. What’s with this idiot?

  “For blowing fish out of the water or doing target practice on squirrels and beer cans,” Owen explains.

  “Oh,” is all I can manage for a moment. Way smaller than the Glock that Captain keeps strapped to his calf day and night, and more or less useless in a fight. Owen must not have any real guns if he acts so proud of this one.

  I know all too much about guns and what they can do. Starting with the time I was maybe six …

  • • •

  “Stop! Stop!” my mom is screaming from the other room.

  Smack. The sound draws me to the open door, where I stare at my towering stepfather, his back to me, his fists pounding her face and body. Smack. Crack!

  “Please! No!” comes her cry.

  I’ve watched it many times before, but this time a strange electric current enters my small, trembling body and propels me to the kitchen. I shove a chair under the counter with the drawer I know holds his piece. I clamber up and use both hands to pull it out.

  The buzz that’s controlling me helps me climb down and return to the doorway. I aim the heavy pistol straight at him, dead certain of what I must do.

  “Well, lookie at little Arturo,” he says, turning. His face is puffy like the bread dough my mom works sometimes, but red, with small mean eyes that sizzle like lit sparklers.

  “Arturo!” Mom lets out a scream.

  I try to hold as still as a statue in the wind, but there’s a howling at the edge of the storm I don’t like: it’s my giant-sized stepfather chortling and laughing as he lunges. The cold press of the metal is torn from my hand. Then massive fleshy fingers close around my neck and lift me up, up, up.

  A door yanks itself open and the stairs to the lower landing appear, tilted and twisting. I go tumbling down them, somersaulting from the top to the faraway bottom. The landing rises to punch the breath out of my chest and turn everything to black. It somehow puts me to sleep.

  Click click. A mouse wakes me as it scurries past. I open an eye where I’m curled up, shivering and bruised, on a round rag mat surrounded by muddy-smelling boots.

  Achoo! The dust of the mat makes me sneeze.

  Slowly, in the morning’s first light, I crawl up the stairs to our apartment door, though my knees feel like giant bruises and a fiery pain keeps shooting down my neck. I stand tall to reach the doorknob. It won’t turn. I slump down and wait.

  When it bursts open, he appears, unshaven and stumbling. I feel my entire body lifted and tossed over his shoulder like a sack of coffee beans. My fingers cling tightly to his smelly shirt as he clumps down the stairs and throws me into his car.

  The car rattles all the way to the city dump, which I recognize by the smell. But this time we’re not there to deliver bags of garbage.

  “You’re on your own now, bastard,” he says as he grabs me by the ankles and heaves me out. The door slams and the car roars away.

  I sit for a long time on an overturned rusted bucket, a few tears staining it further. I never see my mother or stepfather again.

  Guns, guns: used by most of the gang leaders who found, fed, and worked me after that. Used by the thugs and police who wanted us street kids eliminated. But I forbid my group of kids to have any. Way too easy for a pistol in a child’s hand to get turned on him, as I witnessed more than once.

  • • •

  The island gringo’s smile dims when he figures out I’m not interested in his air gun. He slides it back into place beside an impressive collection of barbells that explain his muscles. (Ha: push-ups and pull-ups on the yacht’s furniture work just as well for me.) Then he leads me to a garage behind the house.

  “This bike is Mom’s. Your size.” He offers a dusty bicycle while throwing his leg over a shiny model with a gazillion gears. (Gazillion is my newest English word.)

  “Thanks!” I remember to say with enthusiasm. A zing of excitement convinces me I can somehow operate the thing.

  Be his friend for the morning, the captain has ordered. Make sure the two of you don’t attract any attention and duck any questions or make up answers.

  How to act like a friend? I have never had any. None I could trust, anyway. I laugh as my sea legs try to remember how to ride a bike. Then, twisting and turning down a blacktop road between a gazillion trees taller than I have ever seen, I sniff the fresh smells the rain is creating and see some wild deer and fawns.

  The wind bounces pine cones off our bicycles while a soft carpet of pine needles and small branches crunches under our tires. I laugh at the splashes on my legs as we plough through storm puddles. Couldn’t care less about the mud spatters the bike kicks up or the soaking my clothes are taking.

  I have a pinprick memory of my mother teaching me to ride a kids’ bike that she “borrowed” from where it was sitting on the mown lawn of some rich people. Several months later someone “borrowed” it from us. But we had it long enough for me to shed the training wheels. And I rode one or two bikes after that to run “errands” for my “protectors.” I’m pleased to find that my body still knows how to keep a bike on the road.

  Listening to Owen’s tales of going to school on a nearby island, I take care to look sympathetic when the boy complains about what strikes me as a perfect life. Soon my companion pauses at the edge of a field with an electric fence.

  “Ruffian!” he shouts, taunting a bull bigger than anything I have seen hoofing it down the street during annual running-of-the-bulls festivals. The bull lifts its head like it is a major effort in this windstorm. His nose features a copper ring. Windblown branches from surrounding trees litter his grazing area.

  “Ruffian’s the most dangerous thing on the island,” Owen says, mimicking the bull’s snorting.

  As I study a barn on the far side of the field, I imagine sprinting across the pasture and hiding in the prickly hay pile inside until Captain pulls
up anchor and leaves. Ruffian could protect me throughout the search.

  But Captain would not leave, and things would not end well for Ruffian or me. Plus, Captain would never trust me again, which I would pay for big time. No, my future is with our boat, Archimedes. And learning more English from our clients.

  Snort, snort. I join in making bull sounds, slap Owen on the back, and laugh like I am having a great time. Which I really am by the time we have circled around the lighthouse, blown tunes on long blades of grass while watching eagles circle the grey sky overhead, and dangled our legs from sandstone cave ledges above the whipped-up ocean.

  Me: laughing. Me: smiling. Me: feeling as safe as the wild deer grazing yards from us. If my mother is still alive and thinks of me sometimes, she’d like seeing me like this. I mentally download a selfie and send it to her. I wish I could download my life into this place, but …

  Soon we are back at the cabin.

  “Want to play ring toss?” Owen asks.

  “What is?” I’m determined to learn it fast, whatever it is.

  The island boy grins as he leads me to a storage shed and points to a stack of life ring buoys. I follow his lead in grabbing a few and toting them outside to where a series of pegs has been pounded into the ground, each labelled with a number: 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, and 35.

  “Thirty feet,” Owen declares, pointing to the second-to-last peg. “That’s my best distance so far. I’m working on nailing thirty-five.”

  His life ring sails toward the target peg like he is playing horseshoes or tossing a Frisbee.

  Wham! The ring hits its mark and stops dead.

  “Nice,” I say. However silly a game this is, the guy sure has a steady aim.

  Owen smiles. “Your turn. Call your peg first.”

  “Twenty,” I decide and flick my wrist to put the ring into the air. It lands short. I hide a frown.

  “Good arm muscle, but you need more practice,” Owen rules and spends the next twenty minutes coaching me as we play the strange game. Hmm, maybe I will introduce this sport to the captain. I chuckle at the thought, since it will never happen.

  Owen laughs like he is pleased to hear me chuckling. “You like Horton Island?”

  “Is cool,” I reply, using one of the first English expressions I learned from clients.

  “You on vacation with your uncle? It’s just the two of you?”

  “Yes, vacation.” Wouldn’t that be nice? Of course, I have never had a vacation in my life, but I am proud I know the word.

  “Welcome to Canada.”

  “Thank you.” We jump on our bikes and race up and down hills until Owen pulls up at a white wooden grocery store with flower baskets hanging from the eaves. It is too clean to be real: no garbage all over the place, no broken windows or iron bars on the door, no broken glass or liquor bottles or dogs with mangy skin stretched over their rib cages.

  I shiver and draw back as I see a young child approaching a Dumpster at the rear of the store.

  “You okay?” Owen asks.

  I grit my teeth and pull my eyes away. The boy is just tossing something in, I tell myself. There are no armed security guards scowling from the door, no one aiming a gun at him. In fact, nobody else around at all except a smiling man in a yellow raincoat unlocking the front door.

  The contrast with Guatemala City makes me feel as if I am dreaming. I have hardly been off Archimedes in three years. I shake my head in wonder. “Paradise Island,” I mutter.

  Owen hoots at that. “For a day, yes. Especially when it’s not raining.” Then he grows serious. “But my parents forced me to move here. All my friends are in Ontario. All my ex-friends,” he corrects himself. Then, in a darker, lower voice, he adds, “And my brother.”

  Even if I am posing as his friend for the morning, I decide not to ask what all that means.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  OWEN

  After we’ve eaten lunch in a rain-pounded park picnic shelter, peeked through the windows of some cabins, filled Arturo’s packs with stuff from the grocery and hardware stores, and ducked out of the rain into a bird blind on a little pond, my new friend says, “Is time to return to boat.”

  “Really?” I object from where I’m lying, stomach down, on the worn wood floor of the blind. He has seemed tense ever since the grocery store cashier asked me, “Who’s your friend?”

  Before I could reply, Arturo told the guy, “We go to high school together.” Then he winked at me like we’d agreed on this alibi. Alibi? Why did we need a story? But okay, I’d decided, Arturo was more fun than I’d thought.

  “It’s only three thirty,” I argue. “And the wind and rain are starting to let up.”

  Arturo squints at the sky. “Will be dark early.”

  “Yes. But you won’t go till morning, will you?”

  He shrugs. “Captain decide.”

  “You mean your uncle.”

  “Yes, uncle.”

  As silence hangs between us, a blue heron lands on the pond and flicks its wings to shake off the rain.

  “Arturo,” I whisper, “think your uncle would let me hitch a ride with you to whatever island you’re going to next? I need to get out of here, and it’d be fun to hang out with you more.” Sure I’ve got marina duties, but to heck with them!

  My new friend locks his eyes on the heron. I catch amusement on his face. And he takes his time to answer.

  “Sounds cool. I need friend on boat. We ask Captain, okay?”

  His eyes still on the bird, he reaches out and pats me on the back. A little awkwardly, like he doesn’t pat people on the back very often.

  If the people on board seem okay, go for it.

  They’re okay, Gregor. He even said he needs a friend. And you know I damned well do.

  A shrill whistle makes me jump. It’s a warning screech from the blue heron as it lifts up and flaps away. Whap, whap, whap. Dagger beak, bulging throat, dual-colored wings, and spindly legs rise along with the throaty cry.

  “Awesome,” says Arturo, pronouncing it like a word he has learned only recently, and he’s grinning a 100-percent-genuine grin. Which makes me stoked to have brought him here.

  “What’s your favourite bird?” I ask.

  “Hmm … eagle. Is biggest. You?”

  “Raven. It’s smarter than an eagle. And even if it’s a little smaller, it chases eagles away by ganging up with other ravens.”

  “Oh.” A branch creaks as a turkey vulture lands and perches on it. Arturo makes a face at it.

  “Turkey vultures are really big,” I say, “but they’re nowhere near as respected as eagles or ravens, ’cause their claws are smaller. In the bird world, it’s all about talon size. And vultures are greedy. They eat way more than they can handle when they find something dead to binge on. Know what they do if someone interrupts them?”

  Arturo shakes his head.

  “They make themselves vomit so they’re light enough to fly away.”

  “Gross.” Arturo cracks a smile.

  I laugh.

  • • •

  “Here they are! Right on time!” Captain Jones greets us as we shuffle along the dock with our packs full of purchases. “Did you have fun? Get everything? See anyone?”

  “Nadie importante,” Arturo informs him.

  I guess at the meaning: no one important.

  “Coffee in a minute. Come on board,” the captain invites me.

  Yes! Down the companionway and into the galley. It’s spacious and stunning, just like the Hans Christian Independence 45 back in Ontario that was named The Otter. I help Arturo store the groceries in cupboards and the full-sized stainless steel refrigerator while he and the captain exchange rapid-fire Spanish. Seems like an awful lot of food for two people, even for a long journey. Maybe they’re picking up other people soon?

  The yacht brings back memories of The Otter, which Gregor and I used to play on when Dad wasn’t around and there were no customers at the Toronto Marina. Back then, the marina was our backyard, park, and
playground, and The Otter was owned by an elderly man who never came around. The keys hung in Dad’s office. So it was our favourite personal play space for years. We started out playing hide and seek on it. As we grew older, we pretended to operate it, and later, The Otter was the boat on which we learned to do tune-ups and repairs. Gregor and I dreamed of taking it out to see the world together.

  I know all the mechanics and every nook and cranny of this vessel. Which makes me itch to handle it — just around our little bay for a few minutes. Or to one of the nearby islands that has a ferry back to Horton. So what if I miss school for a day? My parents won’t find out. Officer Olsen is used to me going off fishing or overnight camping, so he won’t sound an alarm. And Arturo invited me, sort of.

  The captain finishes pouring us mugs of coffee, adding cream and sugar to mine without asking. My entire body basks in its flowing warmth. I tell him about our day, and as the storm finally fades, we talk about boats and weather and the region’s geography.

  “Can I have a tour of Archimedes?” I finally ask, my eyes on the lower companionway.

  “You mean go below?” The captain exchanges glances with Arturo. “No, Owen. Sorry. I’m ashamed of the mess down there.”

  “Okay. But maybe I can pilot Archimedes for a few minutes before you leave?”

  Is Arturo throwing me a warning look? The captain just chuckles. “Not a chance, young man. We’re in a hurry to move on tonight.”

  “Move on to where?”

  The friendly expression evaporates. The eyes narrow. Then he forces a wooden grin to his lips. “Just cruising the Strait, Owen. Heading toward Nanaimo, maybe.”

  “You’re leaving tonight? In this weather?”

  “Storm going now,” Arturo says. “Radio say okay.”

  “Can I go with you as far as Nanaimo, Captain Jones? I can pay for gas and food and catch a ferry back from there. I won’t be any trouble at all.”

  The captain pulls himself up to his full height, his uncombed hair touching the ceiling of the galley. His freshly shaven face is stern and his voice is loud and clear: “Sorry, Owen. The answer is no.”