by Daniel Pyne
His options have narrowed to nothing. It no longer matters. He thinks about the rocky beach near the Port Hedland house where he and Pauly grew up. Running with his brother down a narrow briar-thick path along the cliffs after one of the beatings their father would regularly give them. Hiding there. Making the promise of never again. They made the old man pay. They made the world pay, for a while. But Pauly is dead, and Castor is down to this.
Wiping a sting of sweat from his eye with the back of his hand, he sidesteps down a slender cargo gap to the second access hatch into the grain bin, and circles it, wary, testing his sore knee before crouching down to wait, assault rifle draped across his lap, finger on the trigger.
“OY! WONDER WOMAN!”
He’s got two extended clips left, plenty of firepower to greet the bitch when she pops up, and maybe even to hold off the bravest crew if they dare to come rashly, but once the rest collect real weapons from his downed boys, Zeme knows all bets will be off.
“I’d seal you in there and call it a day, but there’s my brother to think about.”
He’s not expecting her to answer.
It’s not about money anymore. He’s resigned to the probability he won’t make it off the ship. Now it’s a simple matter of pride: undone by a fucking femme?
No, no, no.
The Gustaf feels finished, but Sentro’s got an extra piece, which must mean it’s not. The clipped light from the far hatch where Castor waits weeps poor illumination this far back on what she’s trying to do.
Soybean chaff dusts the finely oiled parts. Another swell of nausea racks her.
“You are a fucking Amazon, lady,” she hears the alpha twin yelling. “The she-wolf. But I mean, what’s the point? You shoulda stayed with the program, because things were gonna work out. But now, shit. . . all this death and mayhem? It’s on you. Only cuzza you.”
They taught her how to fieldstrip guns in the dark, and she remembers thinking, When does that ever happen?
Sentro studies the weapon, runs her fingers over the extra part she knows could be essential to its operation (but how?). She thinks about the absurdity of the soybeans, then fumbles for the shells in the Gustaf suitcase and drops one—and allows herself a raw flicker of desperation.
Her right side has gone numb; her leg feels dead. How much longer before Zeme’s patience breaks and he finds the courage to start firing down through the open hatch? Deep inhale, and with aching fingers she begins to break the rifle down to try assembling it again.
“TIME’S UP!”
No response, but again, he wasn’t really expecting one.
Without even a look back, Zeme snaps his hand out and snags the tiresome runt he’s smelled creeping up behind him with a pocketknife poised. He yanks Zoala off his feet and slams him down onto the deck, stunning him. “You’re a mean little rat, boyo.” Foot on Zoala’s ruddy, peeling chest, rifle barrel nudged up under the boy’s skinny chin.
“You want to add the kid to the list?” he yells.
A drop of blood from Castor drops onto Zoala’s petrified face. Silence from below.
But voices again, on the deck’s perimeter, closer. No more time to wait. Castor chides himself for yelling so loud—stupid, stupid—and, taking a fistful of hair, drags the boy to the hatch opening, intending some gruesome demonstration he hasn’t yet decided upon.
“You fucked everything up for everybody,” he calls down to the American, carefully angling his position to peer into the bin’s chiaroscuro shadows without exposing himself too much.
The fat matte-black tube barrel of a recoilless rifle catches the sun and glints dully up from the empty darkness, aimed directly up at him.
“Oy.”
BOOM.
Still groggy from Zeme’s body slam, Zoala feels a brush of ferocious heat and watches as his pirate nemesis is struck by a shell, thrown backward in a pink mist, blown to bits. The incandescent exhaust of the Gustaf lights up the hold; Zoala smells burning beans and then his own singed hair where the projectile went past him.
The boy wriggles over and rolls and tumbles down headfirst into a sea of hot, musky pebbles, where the recoil from the rifle has punched the American woman backward and set the sleeves of her shirt on fire. Zoala leaps on her, smothers the flames with his arms and body, but she’s limp to his prodding, her eyes shut, her face gray.
His hands come away sticky with her blood. He’s overwhelmed, eyes filling. Men’s voices and their footfalls clatter together above him, and pale faces lower in the hatch opening, peering in, upside down. Zoala hears someone screaming and then realizes it’s himself.
The yellow seaplane, its engines mute, one wing smoldering, splashes down alongside the Jeddah and skis through the gentle sawtooth bay waves toward the stern. A sturdy, balding man is braced in the open doorway, looking back at the silver skiff, where Morehouse wraps his trembling patient in an oilcloth Eccola has found in the equipment box. Shock has settled in on Jeremy Troon. The doctor’s hands are steady, his eyes intent.
For the moment, he’s not a runaway, not a failure; he’s a man of medicine. A healer. It feels good; perhaps it won’t last.
But it feels good.
Morehouse glances up at his pregnant girlfriend as she gives Jeremy a worried once-over, then shuffles to the back of the skiff. He loves her, as much as he can love anyone, he decides. In her brief time in Porto Pequeno, the American spook has disrupted his world. He understands that it will never be the way it was, but he lacks the imagination to predict how it will be going forward.
Waves slap at the huge hull of the cargo ship. There’s activity on the decks; passengers have gathered on a stairway landing high on the accommodation tower, looking down, not at Morehouse, but into the middle of the stacked containers, where a skim of smoke sifts, rising.
Some sixth sense tells him it’s where she finished her job.
Not at all sure if it’s the shock, the jet lag, or exhaustion, Jeremy discovers he’s unable to remember much of the last few hours. The boat rocks him. He stinks of sea and sweat and diesel oil, his lungs aching, feet cramping, nose and mouth still leaking mucus brine.
All he knows: he came to save her, and she saved him.
The shabby doctor hovers over him, taking his pulse again. Fingers firm against his neck.
“How do you know my mother?”
The doctor appears to think about it before answering. “I don’t, really.”
In the distance, out beyond the twin rocky points that guard the bay, huge rollers of water pulse, up and down, whitecapped here and there, and a wide scud of clouds hangs low over the open sea. A gossamer curtain unfurling from the sky portends rain.
Jeremy nods. “Me neither.”
Not dead yet, sorry.
She wants to tell them she’s okay, but the effort it would require doesn’t seem worth it. When they lifted her, sharp pain opened her eyes, and she saw Captain Montez, Mulligan, and Salah gingerly lift her out of the cargo hold from the arms of the Tagalog and Jesper, who were still below. The Jeddah officers are joined by more crew members, and together they carry her into an open space, where she looks up into an impossibly blue square of cloudless sky.
When they lower her to the deck, she sees Zoala’s face upside down, studying her, intent, his expression somber, curious, worried. And then from behind him, and this she’s less sure of, the gathered faces of the dead crowd in on her: the naked shooter in a Cyprus hotel hallway, the Corpus Christi kidnapper, the boy from the water tank whom she thought she had saved. Does Zoala see them? They blink here and are gone like fireflies: a mobster in Montevideo, an NVD assassin on the banks of the Don, the apple-shaped man with the starburst eye patch and mustard-colored suit.
The kidnapper on the South Padre beach.
The boy in the water tank.
Pauly Zeme.
Go away.
Montez is asking her questions, but her eardrums are numbed deaf by the brutish concussion of the Gustaf in the confines of the steel dry-bulk
bin. She only hears thrumming and an odd wind and the sound of her own heartbeat.
No, she doesn’t see Dennis or her father or her mom.
Jeremy is safe. Jenny—there’s a nagging sense of something she needs to tell her daughter, but she can’t remember what it is.
It’s hard but not impossible to breathe. She’s been worse. The square of blue heaven tilts as she feels the gentle roll of the sea, and then something opens up, her heart or her head; she hears the creaking of the cargo containers, the churn of the ship’s engines, the chatter from a flurry of white gulls that cross the sky and—
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
For most of the night, Jenny sat alone by the bed in the ICU, more or less relieved but also, in fitful ebbs and flows, pissed off, like always, by everything she didn’t understand. Gathering her thoughts, holding her mother’s hand, for some disobliging reason that she knows now only her mom would appreciate, “Did you sleep with him?” was the first thing she asked when her mother surfaced from the anesthesia, saw her, and smiled.
“What?”
They stared at each other for what seemed like forever, and Jenny could see that her mother was expecting the torrent of questions that she had to believe would have been coursing through her daughter’s head all these long hours. Jenny, resenting that she needed to ask, stubbornly didn’t. And her mother, stubbornly, didn’t seem surprised.
“The cute pharaoh,” Jenny said finally.
“You mean Lucky?”
“Reno. El-something.”
“I don’t remember,” was what her mother answered, and it sounded true. Neither of them made a big deal out of talking face-to-face again. Despite her mom’s long absences, they had an intimate, private shorthand, a fundamental connection that Jenny, whenever she thought about it, always insisted shouldn’t be possible, but there it was.
“You did,” she said. “Ew. You can totally see it, the gooey eyes.”
“Lucky?”
“Reno. From Minnesota, he claims.”
“He might be.”
“And?”
No answer, but none required. Something between them had changed; Jenny felt it. Her mother would come clean, in her own time. On everything. And Jenny felt no real rush.
“Remember when you gave me the sex talk?” she teased.
“No.”
“Yeah. ’Cause you didn’t.”
Too sharp. She watched her mother flinch and wished she could take that back. She’d never seen her so vulnerable. The tubes and the monitors, shrapnel wounds, concussion, separated shoulder, and all these crazy bruises like somebody’d rolled her out of a truck—what the fuck?
A lifetime ago, anxiously enduring what seemed like forever for her brother’s screen ID to light up her phone, Jenny had held vigil in her apartment, waiting for Jeremy’s report on the ransom payment, praying there wouldn’t be a problem, attempting to calm herself with bowls of Kosher Kush and a binge-watch of One Tree Hill, the cat, Aubrey, purring on her lap. She’d fallen into an anxious doze twice, had pretty much smoked all her weed to black ash, and was debating the pros and cons of getting more from Shayda when the call had finally come through midday from somewhere on the forehead of South America (she’d googled it), and to her confusion, she’d heard, instead of Jeremy, her mother’s frail, distant voice on the other end of the call. Something something Jeremy’s been hurt something Johns Hopkins something something. It unfurled in a blur; her mom sounded tired.
A few nerve-racking hours later at the hospital, further confusion—she was met by this handsome crew cut Egyptian American who said his name was Reno Elsayed but urged her to call him Lucky, though Jenny was pretty sure neither could be right. While she puzzled over who he reminded her of (an old Rami Malek? A young Omar Sharif?), this putative Elsayed tried to explain that her mother was in surgery and that her brother, Jeremy, was asking for her, and Jenny, who had talked to her mother on the phone, was flummoxed, not to mention still couldn’t quite feel her face or her arms or her feet or pretty much anything, for that matter, on account of all the smoking and fitful insomnia. She was weightless, a foggy consciousness, exhausted by all the anxious speculating she’d done.
Jenny remembers just thinking, over and over, Who is this guy?
Another couple of completely lost hours followed, as she kept asking the Elsa-whatever what the hell had happened (and how in the world he had happened to be there), but his explanation was decidedly vague, and Jeremy, when she visited him, looked like someone had put him in the spin cycle of a washing machine, huge purple-red welt on his chest. But her brother didn’t seem fazed. The excited Vicodin tale he blurted between bruised breaths sounded impossible, and he didn’t even bother to cast himself as the hero, which caught Jenny short. A bomb in a vest? Their mother with a flare gun? Pointy-toothed villain, exploding boats, and nearly drowning—Jenny just nodded and made sure not to let any grateful tears of relief come until he slipped off into Jeremy dreams probably no different from his crazy account of things.
The Egyptian came to get her. Her mother was out of the OR, stable, and she was going to be okay; would Jenny like to stay with her?
Jenny would, very much. The last time she’d been in a hospital, it was to take her father home to die.
Her mom drifted in and out of consciousness those first few days, more from exhaustion, her doctors said, than from injuries she’d sustained. Jeremy would wheel himself in and out, accompanied by some cute girl he’d apparently met during his travels; Jenny kept forgetting her name. She popped Motrin for her migraines and stayed with her mom, and the setting sun broke striped through the blinds in bright articulation, and the nights were fitful with nursing visits every couple of hours, plus machine coffee and sketchy crullers from the cafeteria, where a sunken-eyed intern hit on her one morning, so Jenny made a point after that of bringing her makeshift meals back to the room.
“I’m sorry,” her mother keeps saying.
“Do I know you?” is Jenny’s stock reply.
Her brother, held over a few extra days for observation, had the cloying airline attendant (as it turned out), what’s-her-name, hovering with board games and suspiciously immovable boobs and reeking of fruity perfume. Jeremy’s ribs were cracked, and he had some superficial burns, but otherwise he looked mostly on the mend (make?), and Jenny was so secretly glad that she surrendered to suffer the company of the new girl (Bryce-Ann, for God’s sake!) and let her brother regale them both with the latest version of his Porto Pequeno saga. Most of it was bullshit; the hunky Egyptian had provided a more fact-based take in which her brother sounded not quite so heroic. But her brother had done a very brave thing, Jenny kept reminding herself, and the bottom line was their mom was safe.
When her mother got moved to a private room, Jenny was able to shower, but she stayed in her Hollister hoodie and skinny jeans and refused to leave, even when her brother was discharged and offered to spell her vigil.
Slowly some truths have emerged. A snapshot of a woman Jenny Troon barely recognizes, but it was funny—growing up, all those long months when her mother was on the road, Jenny once spent a summer inventing a glamorous, elaborate fiction of an Aubrey Sentro that, in retrospect, with all Jenny has learned, wasn’t so far off the mark.
Without meaning to, Jenny feels empowered.
I’m feral, like you, she wants to say. It’s Jeremy you gotta worry about.
After the first fractured, groggy confessions, her mother gained strength and the tubes were removed and machines disappeared, and they played Hearts and watched daytime television and suffered visits from her mother’s colleagues—overweight white men named Drewmore and Falcone and another skittish older woman named Laura Bugliosi (matching earth-tone lip gloss and clogs)—not to mention their neighbor Marta, whose creepy son had once offered Jenny fifty dollars to show him her breasts (fifth grade, she didn’t have any). And in the intervals, they fell back into their easy patter, deliberately dancing around the trigger subjects, which were pretty
much everything, the way they always had. And Jenny waited.
Outside phone calls became more frequent: work-related conversations for which sometimes her mom requested privacy and Jenny would wait in the hallway listening to the low, expressionless murmur of the mother she didn’t know.
“There’s some things we can’t know,” Jeremy pointed out to her.
At least, Jenny thinks, now we know why.
“I need you to do something for me,” her mother said a moment ago, after a long call and another visit from Mr. Lucky Egyptian Lonely Hearts, the dreamy but regrettably named Reno Elsayed.
“He’s married,” her mom keeps insisting.
“So? You’re full of all kinds of surprises.”
She doesn’t respond to the dig. “It’s important. Can you take some time off?”
After her mother’s second surgery to clean up the bits the first one had missed, a brain doctor showed up and walked Jenny to Jeremy’s room to tell them both about their mom’s preliminary diagnosis. Serial concussions, memory loss, possible irreversible CTE, but they’d need to do more tests, and even then, they’d just be guessing. He seemed curious about her history, convinced she’d lied to him about never having been abused by her husband or someone else.
Jeremy, a little muzzy from the painkillers at that point, kept saying, “Dad? You think Dad was a wife beater?”
“There’s this beam in the basement you can crack your head on if you’re not careful,” Jenny pointed out as if helpfully, doubling down on what she hoped could be more of her mother’s dissembling covert bullshit but already pretty sure that nothing anyone could tell a brain doctor would convince him he was wrong.
It was after she brought the brain doctor up with her mother that the full story finally began to leak. Like a Catholic confession, her mother, contrite and regretful, took her time; she told it to Jenny chronologically, apologetic for the gaps, the parts she couldn’t remember anymore or remembered only dimly, like a shadow play—gestures, feelings, but the goals and the justifications blurred. As Jenny listened, all the rising attendant emotions became a flood: anger, confusion, betrayal, wonder, incredible pride, and relief. All the times when she’d thought her mother’s absences were because of something they’d done or, worse, something they were. Something she was . . . a burden. A disappointment. A blight.