Ghost Sea: A Novel (Dugger/Nello Series)

by Ferenc Máté

“Sayami,” Nello said.

  “Gone,” I said.

  “On the rope,” he said. “I just tied him.”

  I looked back. At the end of the jib sheet, Sayami bobbed, shot sideways, went under, bobbed again.

  “Charlie.” Hay called out.

  “Shut up!” I shouted. I put down the hook and was pulling Nello on deck, when Hay called louder, “Charlie!”

  We looked up. Halfway up the mast with every limb around the spreader, hanging like a baby monkey, was Charlie with his head back, staring at the sky.

  “Charlie.” Nello smiled. “You silly little fucker.”

  Nello steered while I shimmied up the mast, gripping the halyard, and slung an arm around Charlie’s waist.

  “Grab my shoulders.”

  He let go of the spreader but hung on with his legs.

  “For chrissake, let go!”

  He swung against me; I started to ease us down when Charlie whispered, “Cappy. Canoe.”

  ON THE NORTHERN rim of the bay, where a cluster of rocks and islets formed a refuge, a dark canoe eased itself along. It turned here, twisted there, picking its way through the jagged maze. In its stern, a bulky figure pulled long, powerful strokes; in the bow, a much smaller one paddled a steady rhythm.

  “Nello!”

  Nello had a foot holding the wheel while he leaned over the portside, trying to haul in the jib sheet and Sayami.

  He looked up, saw me waving madly, and looked over that way but could not have seen beyond the overfalls and waves.

  The ketch rolled; Charlie and I drew great arcs in the sky. I let us down. Charlie collapsed in a heap at the base. “Hug it,” I said, and wrapped his arms around the mast.

  “They’re here,” I wheezed.

  “Who?”

  “The canoe. In those rocks.”

  “Give me a hand,” he said, tugging at Sayami.

  “Fuck him. He’s dead. Let’s get the canoe!”

  “He’s alive. I tied him. For chrissake, give me a hand!”

  “The hell with him!”

  “We need the sheet!”

  “Cut him loose!”

  “Cappy!”

  “We’re wasting time.” And I yanked out my knife and started slashing at the rope. He grabbed my arm.

  “He’s nothing to you, is he? We’re all nothing! Stick figures. Draw us in, rub us out. Just so you get her!”

  “Cut him loose!” Hay roared, still hanging in the rigging.

  “Be selfish, Cappy! He’ll tell us who sent him. Might help us survive! Porca putana della troia!”

  The unattended wheel spun; a whirlpool had us, we were sailing fast away from the canoe. Nello grabbed the wheel to keep us from gybing.

  “She’s right there! Tack and we’ll have her!”

  Nello looked at me as if I were crazy. “Tack and we’ll die!”

  “You want me to lose her?”

  “Can’t get her if you’re dead!”

  “Across the bay. Ten minutes!”

  “Cappy!” he roared. “In ten minutes all hell breaks loose here!”

  “We’ll go in those islands; it’s calm in there.”

  “For a canoe! We have an eight foot keel! He skims. We die!”

  “Cut him loose!” Hay roared, half out of his mind. “Kill him!”

  That settled it. I grabbed the jib sheet and pulled. Sayami came and banged against the hull. We hauled him up. He coughed and spewed and bled. Hay struggled in the rigging; Nello cut him down. We were half a mile from Devil’s Hole.

  I climbed down into the cabin—awash with pots, cans, bottles—and got the rifle. Nello went to get Charlie from the mast. I spun the wheel and pointed to head off the canoe.

  We buried the bow, came up, and surged across a funnel that flung us violently toward the rocks. The smooth green ribbon of the overfall was gone; there were only gaping whirlpools up ahead.

  Nello charged furiously at me.

  “You’re being suckered!” he yelled. “He wants you in those rocks!”

  The canoe popped up out of the foam; vanished, came again. I braced against the wheel, raised the rifle, took aim at the big shape in the stern, and waited for a moment of less motion.

  “Go on, Cappy. He’s just a goddamn Injun. Kill him! Shoot!”

  His eyes blazed with rage.

  “What’s the matter? Can’t shoot ‘em? You can drown ‘em alright; you’re a master at that! But no balls to shoot ‘em?”

  I leveled the rifle at his chest.

  “That’s it!” he roared. “Shoot me too. Then kill Hay! Kill Charlie! Blast away! Make sieves of us all!…. Just to get your hands on a woman who might not even want you! What if she walks away? She’s done it before!”

  I squeezed the trigger. The rifle roared. Nello quivered. I had shot well past him into the sea. He shut up, but too late; Hay had heard it all. Sat wide-eyed, crumpled up, then he raised his pistol and aimed at me.

  “I can’t shoot the Kwak,” I said calmly to Nello. “Because if I do, she’ll drown in the next whirlpool.”

  “That’s right, Cap. He knows that. You don’t see him ducking, do you? He’s in the open. Inviting all fools.”

  Hay tried to aim past him. I should have shot him then. Nello walked calmly over to him and knocked the gun out of his hand as if shooing away a fly. Hay reached for it but Nello grabbed him by the hair and yanked back his head. “You touch it and I’ll kill you.”

  DEAD AHEAD, A wall of water rose. It was too late to tack. “Hold on!” Nello roared, covering Charlie with his body and clinging to the rail. We went into it. For a long time. We surfaced in a sea of foam.

  We were so close now I could see the whole canoe, pointing straight at us. Then the big one in the back gave a long, strong pull; the slight one in the bow joined in, and they turned the canoe back among the rocks, back into the bay.

  I stood with the water trickling from the barrel of the gun. With the decks still under foam, we lunged toward the rocks. I turned the wheel and we hauled the sheets, heading toward the cliff of fog that hung in Devil’s Hole.

  THE PASS NARROWED; the current was a breaking wave atop a raging river. The air was gone, replaced by streams of brine.

  The canoe vanished in the vapors. Nello stepped into the cockpit.

  “Fewer rocks along the south shore,” he said.

  I didn’t care. She was back there, going the other way.

  “He has nowhere to go, Cappy. This is his only way home.”

  THE WAVES RAGED along both shores, folded, turned, and crashed against each other. We hurled ahead and I steered, without conviction, for the thickest part of the fog. Nello pulled Sayami’s rope tight and cleated it to the mizzen, told Hay to lash himself to the shrouds, then sat against the mainmast, facing aft, and pulled Charlie close to him. He whipped the tail of the main halyard around them both twice—pulled it so tight Charlie gasped for breath—cinched it on a cleat and, just to be sure, wrapped both his arms around him. I put down the rifle and wrapped the mizzen halyard around my waist. The fog was so thick the shores were gone, the masthead blurred, and Nello and Charlie were smudges. The only things I was sure of were my hands on the wheel.

  We fell. We rose. We yawed. We twisted and fell again, hurtling always violently ahead, into the deafening white roar, all that was left of the world. I hung on. Hands and the wheel. The water fell away like a bluff below us—we plunged into Devil’s Hole.

  And in all that noise came faintly, “Oi vita, oi vita mia.”

  I LAY ON ONE PLANK and pushed the other ahead. Fog above, mud below. When it got dark they started shelling. They always waited until dark with the shelling so the explosions would shine brighter, the creases of fear on the faces dig deeper, the torn bodies in the trenches look so much starker, the bared teeth and terrified eyes even whiter.

  I lay in the creek bed on one plank and pushed the other ahead through the mud, then crawled onto it and pulled the other from behind. I had nailed tin cans on the tips to help the planks
glide, to keep them from digging in. Some had tied a plank to each foot and strode along as if the mud were really snow. But then a shell would explode near them and the ball of hot air topple them, and they would fall sideways and sink and vanish headfirst into the mud with their feet securely tied above. They never made it out.

  I rested. It was midnight. Shells burst, lighting the fog orange, yellow, pink. There were screams behind me and screams up ahead, then frightened encouragement, then more screams. Then, through all that barbaric noise, I heard a delicate sound, like a sigh from a life I could no longer recall. It stopped: I crawled ahead. One plank, next plank. It rose again. In that unremitting hell where all humanity had been abandoned, a voice that didn’t scream, or weep, or plead, a gentle voice, singing. “Oi vita, oi vita mia, oi core ‘e chistu core, se’ stato prim’ammore: o primo e ll’ultimo sarai per me.” I stopped.

  He sang softly to himself. He was very near and with every breath coming nearer. Then we collided plank to plank. We lay there face-to-face, in the mud, in the light of artillery shell, him going east, me west. He held a pistol in his hand an inch from my forehead. “You can shoot me if you want,” I said in broken Italian, “but you still sing way off-key.”

  He laughed. Softly at first, then, when I laughed too, he laughed so hard he gasped, laughed until he shook, laughed until he cried. The shelling stopped. The fog went dark.

  “You German?” he whispered.

  “No. You?”

  We laughed again.

  “What are you?” he said.

  “Drunk,” I said.

  “Me too,” he said.

  We snorted.

  “Are you on reconnaissance?” I said.

  “No. You?”

  “No.”

  Shells burst very near and all around us. The mud almost buried us.

  “They don’t like us laughing,” he said.

  “It’s your singing.”

  Darkness and silence.

  “Where are you going?” he whispered.

  “Home,” I said.

  “Me too,” he said.

  He had shrapnel in both legs, bleeding badly; hurting. He wouldn’t get far. I tore off my sleeves and bound him. We agreed it would be best if I were to bring him in. To his side. Him capturing a deserter or a spy, and me risking my life bringing in their own wounded hero. Looked good all around. Might get us both home.

  The only thing that had kept him alive, kept him going these past two years, was her. Thoughts of her and a worn picture. She was with him day and night in the mud. When the war was over he took me to his new country where his half-brother lived, where she lived, to meet her. San Francisco.

  I quickly got a job skippering a fishing schooner. One Sunday I took the three of them for a sail. It was warm and hazy. The fog waited out there just past the narrows. We were well out in the open sea when the afternoon breeze kicked up and the fog blew in. We ate and drank and laughed. There was nowhere to look but at each other. We drank some more. It didn’t take me long to notice. He saw it too: glances, smiles, looks that lingered. A surreptitious touch. We drank more but he drank the most. Nobody noticed when he lowered himself into the skiff we towed, cast off the painter, and slipped away into the fog. We yelled. I rang the bell. The fog was so thick it sounded dull. I rang it until it nearly drove me deaf. We only found him because he had taken a bottle, finished it, and started singing, “Primo e l’ultimo sarai per me.”

  I hauled him aboard, his face awash with tears. He went and sat alone on a coil of rope in the bow. The wind was picking up; the spray washed over him.

  The brother and she stood very close. She held him or he held her, I can’t remember. I told them to go. I didn’t threaten; just told them to get in the skiff. They went. I cast them off and sailed into the fog. We were only a few miles from shore. They had good oars. But they were never heard from again.

  KATE

  The Pass

  All night we paddle through the stars, the water is so smooth, reflecting them. We’re only two now. At dawn we paddle into a narrow pass and hide among small islands to wait. After a while there comes a noise of rushing water, but I can’t see past the islands. Before noon it stops. We wait. Then it starts up again. I see the tops of the sails. I want to shout out but I don’t; useless in the noise. When we come out from behind the islands, I start to laugh because we had come at dawn on water like a mirror and now we sink between waves so high I can see only the sky. Rushing mountains of foam come at us and I laugh and shout as I haven’t since I was a child when lightning ripped the sky and thunder shook our house. I’m not a bit scared. There is an ugly black boat near the sails. Then it sinks. Somehow it seems right. The sails vanish in the fog. That seems right too. After that the sea goes crazy. So beautiful.

  I THOUGHT I had gone deaf and senseless. I no longer heard the cataracts, no longer felt us falling, no longer felt the whirlpools tossing, flinging us about. We sailed slowly, upright and silent. The wind fell; the fog thickened. I was untying myself from the mizzen when into that ghostly world rose a cry, “Oi vita, oi vita mia, oi core ‘e ‘chistu core, se,” boisterous, passionate, full of hope. “Come on, Charlie, I’ll teach you. “Oi vita, oi vita mia.”

  NELLO SAID THERE was an island up ahead in the middle of the channel, he wasn’t sure how far, so we had better drop the anchor before it was too late to drop anything.

  We fed out twenty fathoms but the anchor rode just hung straight down.

  “There’s no bottom!” I yelled, and cinched the rode on the samson post.

  “There will be.”

  There was. We caught and swung around in the current pointing back at the invisible pass, set the anchor hard so the rode no longer bounced, dropped the sails, and hung there on the hook.

  I leaned against the mizzen and took my first deep breath in hours. Back in the narrows I had imagined the uncontrollable joy, the sense of conquest that would overwhelm me once out the other side, but there was none.

  Then we bailed. We were all soaked to the skin anyway, so we waded into the flooded cabin. I manned the bilge pump, Hay and Charlie bailed with pails into the galley sink, and Nello dried out and cranked the Easthope. At first it wheezed asthmatically, then coughed, then started with its lonesome bang. He took off the salt water intake hose, tied the tea sieve on its end so it wouldn’t get plugged, and stuck it in the bilge. The Easthope pumped, and we bailed, and stroke by stroke, pail by pail, we took the sea from the cabin and heaved it back into the sea.

  When the water was gone, we wiped the cabin dry and tented an awning over the mizzen boom to cover the cockpit. We hung our wet clothes all around it, fired up the galley stove, heated up pails of water, drank some rum, then took turns sitting naked in the cockpit and dousing each other to get rid of the salt. Except Sayami, who we left tied up, barely conscious, in the shadows. And Charlie, who was too damn shy, so he went in the darkest corner of the cockpit, sat with his back to us, and only then did he let us douse him. Then he covered up and went below and came back wearing a clean white shirt and black baggy pants, looking even more innocent than before.

  The night was dark and hushed; it was slack tide. Charlie fried onions and threw in oysters and they steamed and sizzled in the pan. We passed the rum and Nello kept singing songs from Naples and Sorrento, and Hay seemed to know a few and sang along with him in a dreadful accent.

  The cabin grew stifling. We hooked the storm lantern on a boom bail over the cockpit; the wet clothes swung against the wall of fog like tired dancers at a carnival. Nello played his squeezebox.

  Sayami lay tied up in his corner. The bullets had gone through him, one through his side and one through his arm, and the salt water had cleansed his wounds and stopped most of the bleeding, so we bound him up and he looked weak but alive.

  Hay drank. When the bottle was passed to him, he filled his cup, and in almost the same motion emptied it and jumped back into one of Nello’s songs.

  When I was drunk enough I pulled out
my harmonica and played along with the songs I remembered from the throaty Italians selling sweets in our street-fairs. We stopped only to eat Charlie’s onions and oysters whose smell filled the cold wet air, and some slimy lichee nuts that I normally hated but was so drunk I actually loved, “O sole, ‘o sole mio, sta ‘nfront a te, sta ‘nfront a te!”

  Charlie threw timid glances at Nello, who responded, “I like your oysters, Charlie. You make us all fat like seals.” But Charlie instead of smiling looked off into the night and the deep darkness. When I closed my eyes, I could see the dark canoe gliding silently north.

  Nello stood as best he could, played a livelier tune, swayed from foot to foot so that bit by bit the ketch began to roll. Then he leaned down close to Charlie, who just took long sips from his cup of tea, which Hay had laced with rum.

  “Non mange piu non dorme piu che pecunderia! Gue picceri’ che vene a di ‘sta gelusia?” Nello sang.

  And when Charlie gave a faint smile, Nello, encouraged, swayed and sang louder, and Hay, drunk as a skunk, got up and did a little dance.

  They were doing drunken dance steps up the side deck and down into the cockpit, and I blew my drunken lungs into the harmonica, and Nello spun, and Hay pulled Charlie up to dance. Charlie was timid at first, reluctant to move, but the rum got the best of him, and Hay did something like a Charleston with his knees, and that made Charlie laugh and follow, and they jumped up on the side deck and down onto the bridge deck, “Comm’aggi ‘a fa pe ‘te truve? I’ senza te nun posso sta!” Again and again he sang the refrain, and Hay leapt and Charlie spun around and around, and the string in his hair came loose and his long hair flew about, and he spun on the bridge deck but spun once too often, slipped, and fell toward the rail, toward the sea. Hay made a deft lunge to save him, managing to grab only the long tail of his shirt, and Charlie’s shirt ripped away and he fell back against the lifelines. Nello stopped dead as if someone had choked his breath. I was so shocked I blew a long single note. Hay swayed gently, holding Charlie’s empty shirt, and Charlie stood half naked in the lantern’s glow, hair plastered, and below the dark hair shone her pale flesh—her small but perfect breasts. She didn’t move but her face changed and softened. All the tension drained away.