by Mark Helprin
“Forget it,” answered Marshall.
The captain, whose name was Grafton Burnwhite, questioned Marshall carefully, thinking that he had taken on either a fugitive or a drug addict. Upon discovering that Marshall was sound, upright, and innocent, he wanted to aid him.
“How much money ya got, Mowshil?”
“About three hundred and fifty dollars, Captain.”
“That cain’t last lawng.”
“I know.”
“Wha done yew wake whin ya git ta Niew Orlien?”
“Ah thowt Ah would,” replied Marshall, swayed by the rolling speech.
“Wha done yew becalm a god?”
“A god?”
“Shuwa. Ah know the chief god a the Nut Shoal frayt yawd. Whin we reach pote, Ah’ll give’m a cawl.”
“What does it pay?”
“Pays good, but you wake awl nat on a trayin. Yew eva wake awl nat on a trayin?”
“Yup, but not for pay.”
“Nut Shoals is the biggest yawd in Morka, an ma fren is the chief god.”
“Oh.”
“Now yew wrat doun his naminadress: Meesic Simmons, Chief God, Nut Shoals. Tell him that Grayafton Boyinwhat sintya.”
“What kind of name is Meesic?”
“Ah thank it’s a bee name.”
“Oh.”
After a few days of skidding down friendly swells, they passed over the continental shelf. Production and drilling platforms covered the sea like dragons astride dragons. Monstrously orange, they spat smoke and vast skeins of conical flame, red and blond in daylight, burnished gold at night. Weaving amid the fiery towers, the crew of the Louisa watched flamelights reflected on their faces. The sea was thick with these steel cliffs and the rumbling and rhythmic booming of their massive flywheels and pumps.
“When I came to America for the first time,” said one of the Jamaicans, “I could not help but shake. I was thinkin, what kind of country this, that even a hundred miles in the sea before it there are factories and steel towers ablazin’ high an’ mighty.”
14
THEY WONDERED why the sea was urgently green. Water and waves came directly from the north in parallel lines as straight as polarizing glass, as if they were traveling an infinite warp of loom cloth. The wind grew steadily stronger and smelled like almonds and uprooted cane. Grafton Burnwhite went to the radio and tried to raise the Texas coast but could garner only a white falls of static. The barometer was palsied, and by the time Burnwhite had gone over his charts and weather maps, and finally stood at the door of the pilot house, he was faced by most of the crew. They knew his reputation for running into storms, and they looked at him accusingly. “Theyas gonna be a mahty big one,” he said sheepishly, and put them to work under Starbuck and Belchasseur.
All the machines were covered with flexible pastaglese which locked tight to the deck, assuring waterproofness and buoyancy. The flat rattling hatches were fastened with turnbuckle catches, and the half barrel full of coals was tossed into the sea, where it went down with a dying hiss.
After an hour they faced a great emerald storm wall, a frozen wall of green cloud, in appearance as solid as a rock cliff. Driving toward them in horseshoe shape, it was miles high, disciplined not to exceed the front of its power, marching steadily, preceded by winds which sung in the stays and made open lines into the terror harps once thought by oarsmen under decks to be sirens. “We goin’ backwahds,” said Burnwhite, even though it seemed as if they were racing forward. “It’s just the wind and wowta. We makin’ boat tracks a fifteen knots on the suface, but the suface is movin’ south ’bout tweny!” The horseshoe closed, and they found themselves in the center of a ring on a tranquil sea. They began to move north, charging the wall.
Others cowered sternward and amidships, but Marshall decided to stick on the prow. He chained himself to the bow cleats, thinking to find protection in the natural strength of a sharp arch. Though it would be the scene of exploding white water, and though it would travel the greatest distance to complete pitches and turns, it might be the best place, he thought, because its knifelike shape would cut the blows and pass them out to the flanks. It had the smallest area to be pounded, and he could get good holds on the narrow bulkheads, cleats, and chocks.
He passed several lengths of chain through a foul-weather harness, and secured himself to the deck. The emerald wall approached. Grafton Burnwhite was determined and rigid of face. Sailors lay about the decks with stares upturned at the roll of fleece about to break upon them. The wall was threaded with veins of lightning like a tangled wood. The swells were five, ten, twenty times the height of the boat. When they entered, those astern could see the prow disappear as if the boat were being fed into a grinder or passing through a dark curtain. It had been broad daylight, but Marshall could no longer see. Every few seconds, a flash of lightning revealed the deck full of terrified men, and Grafton Burnwhite, locked in the pilot house, steering by compass.
The prow was lifted with the force of rocketry. They hesitated at the summit, and heard the disheartening slench of water falling away from the hull. They flew, propellers spinning free, and then crashed onto the sea with splintering shock. Marshall was battered about and thrown like dough onto the hard deck. He ached, and could not get hold or stand stable. The bow dipped into the waves, and, for a minute or more, the ship became a submarine. Just as Marshall brayed out the last of his air and was about to take in a column of water, they shot upward in a concussion of foam, white sides, bubbling breakers, and cries from those who had been able to hold their breath.
Marshalls eyes stung, his throat was raw, and his belly was swollen from the pressurized inrush of brine. He had welts on his waist and on his forearms where he held the spreading chains; and he was stunned in the bones from all the smashing. Not a single sparkle remained on the surface. Instead, it was gray and green, tangled like wet wool on a dark night. For six hours they were tossed and beaten, the losers in a brawl with the sea.
Finally the boat went completely mad. It could no longer keep rudder and keel plowing through the ridges and it was turned and thrown in movements like those of a bucking horse. A yellow sheet of lightning revealed the shattered glass of the pilot house and a freely spinning wheel. Grafton Burnwhite was not to be seen. The strain vibrated the timbers like a live wire, and ripped out stays and fittings. After the Louisa had been revolving on the cap of a giant whiplike wave, it was thrust deep into the water and turned upside down. It was quiet under water. Marshall thought to free himself in case the boat did not turn upright again, but couldn’t escape the harness. His fingers were too cold and numb to work the bronze buckle. When they had gone down he hadn’t been able to draw much breath. In want of relief he had already expelled the air remaining in his lungs, and seen air bubbles like wiggling mercury glide upward past his face. Then the Louisa turned upright with a thud, and he breathed. “It is the hurricane season,” he said to the storm. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Though he saw that no one was left on the deck, he assumed that he could ride out the rest of it, for the bow was indeed the best place. Perhaps it had been a day, or two, or three—there had been a lot of darkness and he could not judge the time. Then he heard a familiar sound. In a salty delirium, he thought that he stood amid fragrant pines in a dry meadow, where he had just watched Livingston fell a tall fir, from which they would make timbers for a new south gate. The air was dry and gold; autumn; a good fire in the kitchen; waving evergreens; dry grasses. When the fir went down its sound was splintered into a thousand breaks, like a roaring fire. That was the sound.
But it was really the boat breaking apart. It tore into itself, disintegrating into light-colored soft-looking shreds. The deck machinery amidships sank into the hold. A wave jumped in after it, and the boat got heavier and lower in the water. Caught in the trap of two contradictory rollers, the bow parted from the stern. Marshall threw himself clear, hoping not to be smashed against the timbers, and the two halves went down like plumb bobs.
He was swimming on the sea, but not alone. Hundreds of thousands of shrimp had been liberated from the freezers, and slowly thawed uncurling on the surface, floating amid chunks of hissing dry ice, the vapors, and great masses of sliding foam. The shrimp stretched and flexed, and then began to swim about, crackling in communication. It seemed to Marshall that they were laughing, and that the way in which they circulated and grouped could only have been joyous reunions.
After the hurricane scattered everything, Marshall was alone in a world of green. The rain and lightning ceased. Great winds propelled him through valleys and down smooth oily slopes. He came to like it. After a while the swells cleaned up, clearing of foam, and the clouds lifted to form an angry ceiling. He was content to swim along until exhaustion would put him to sleep and he would go down and under. But, to his astonishment, he saw beyond the breakneck ridges a sandy coast of dunes. A half hour passed, and he was spat upon the hard sand as if the sea had tired of entertaining him.
15
AT NUT Shoals freight yards in New Orleans, Meesic Simmons had an office high in a tower. At the end of switchback iron stairs, Marshall walked in on a little man with an upturned nose and blond hair in a waxed crewcut. He had blue eyes, and was wearing a yellow-and-black striped polo shirt.
“What can I do for you?” asked Meesic.
“Grafton Burnwhite sent me. He thought you might have a job.” “Grafton Burnwhite. Did you know him when you were a little boy?”
“No. I just met him. He’s dead now, unless someone fished him out of the Gulf.”
“You talkin’ about Grafton Burnwhite, master of the Louisa?”
“That’s right.”
“Grafton Burnwhite went down with the Louisa in 1958. Everybody knows it. It’s in the public record. I have jobs, but not for liars.”
“A piece of information for you, Meesic Simmons,” said Marshall, leaning forward over Meesic’s desk, teeth clenched. “I’m no liar. I just came from Vera Cruz on the Louisa. We broke up in a bad storm. Everyone died but me.”
“That what they teach you up in Yankee land? How to lie and get angry at the same time?”
Marshall pulled little Meesic from his swivel chair and hauled him over the desk. “I don’t want your stupid job, you dumb little bee. Take your job and shove it. But I was on the Louisa, and I met Grafton Burnwhite, and from the way he was, I can tell that he didn’t have a twin.” He tossed Meesic back in the chair.
“I could have killed you, fool, I have a gun. I have two guns.”
“I’m no liar,” said Marshall.
“Maybe you’re not. Maybe so. Maybe you did see Grafton Burnwhite, and maybe you were on the Louisa. But you can’t expect me to believe somethin’ like that.”
“Stick it,” said Marshall, already on his way out.
“Halt!” screamed Meesic. “You’re touched, but you got a good temper. You’d make a superb train guard. Did you ever kill anyone?”
“No.”
“Would you like to kill someone?”
“Yeah.”
“Who?”
“You.”
“Oh, I like that. I like that,” said Meesic. “What would you do if you saw some son of a bitch hoppin’ your freight?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothin’?”
“That’s right. I do it myself.”
“Let me put it this way. What if some son of a bitch hopped the freight and was stealin’ stuff?”
“I’d arrest him.”
“What if he started shootin’ at you?”
“I’d shoot back.”
“To protect a lotta junk that doesn’t belong to you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why?”
“Because if someone shot at me I’d be mad. I’d kill him.”
“You’re hired. Come back here in five days and pick up your stuff. I’ll put you on the White Ox Special. That’s one hell of a train. It winds all the way around the South—sometimes fast, sometimes slow. The women jump on ’cause they love to hear that White Ox moan. And in the winter it’s the best place to be—comfortable, lotta landscape, nice slow pace. It’s sort of a free agent.”
“What do you mean, winter? It’s only September.”
“Its almost October, and the White Ox takes months till it gets to the East Coast.”
“Where on the East Coast?”
“Depends on chance, on the lading. Could be Bangor. Could be Miami. You never know. Take the job. The women in the South love that White Ox Special. Only fifty cars: it’s easy to get from the engine to the caboose. We gotta put the White Ox on line. Loses money, but it’s a federal law. After the Civil War, the Yankees were upset ’cause we took their rollin’ stock and derailed a lotta engines during our raids. You probably wouldn’t know about that. Anyway, when Lincoln was shot, the Congress was hot-headed. They made a law said that, in perpetuity, the South has got to have a train movin’ in and out of all the remote valleys and backwaters. They said it gotta be called the White Ox Special. I don’t know why. But it’s a great train. I swear, them women love to hear the White Ox moan. You’ll see. They stand by the tracks and you can scoop ’em up in your arms as you go by; just grab a sweet little waist.”
After a few days sleeping in a park, he boarded the White Ox Special. He was the train guard. They dressed him up in gray pants with a blue stripe; a blue shirt; a silver badge; a black garrison belt; and a pistol, which he put in the lockbox the first day out and did not ever see again.
It was an oven of dreams. As he traveled through the South his eyes opened on a great sphere of light green landscape and the skew lines of young trees, dry cabins with tin roofs the color of dark terra-cotta, quiet woods where he could breathe easy and fires burned a thick smoke, white houses sober on stilts at the edges of straight slow rivers, a catalog of small mountain scenes, log trains winding around bends, fragrant piles of pine branches on the outskirts of a lumber camp, unschooled children who could not stop moving, rolling over the countryside, driving back the evil eye, a land changed which should have been unchanged and which with the back of its hand punished transgression from its old ways and first sense—Indians, slaves, gray moss on ancient limbs, windows which did not slide right, cracks in the walls, shuffling engines, thin saplings amid the leaves in shadowy woods, lightning through a maze of dark, wet trees.
The White Ox was a steam train, probably the last of steam—exhalations, mist, hickory burning in a coffered steel box as warm and red as the red in the flag. Those white-bearded bastards who drove it through the snow, and through the green mountains in dark of night, made lamb stew cooked hot by the firebox. They drank whisky on the run, because they did not have to steer.
When day broke upon falling snow and snakelike curves cut through the bottom of Tennessee, there were the new cities. Seen from the fields they seemed to stand like islands in a sea, like crowns. They rose from the countryside like Alps or cathedrals; suddenly their countless noises muted into one constant sound like an underground river deep in a cave, a cool, anesthetizing sound.
Sometimes they halted in the wet snow beside camps of unimaginable people surviving on the quick leap of a rabbit. The train spit and drained as the train had done in Columbine. They mixed with the dark souls, and they went on—eastwards to summer and the seacoast. One lesson pounded through Marshall, burnt in by the boiler fires. He had to move on, and was by no means set to the job of laying net upon the land (as were classmates dull and Virginianized), but rather intended to move like a hopping animal.
So, he moved, through the calm and fragrant South, inhaling it and learning from its rapid lack of motion. This was a place in which were countless windows driving ever deeper than the flat-fielded views. Even in March, the sun was as hot as a pistol, and the sparse snow vaporized as if summer were chasing it around a predetermined course. The ground hissed and sucked with presumptuous March heat. Suddenly, it was spring. Suddenly, the train and the engineers saddled up by the engine (squinting ahe
ad) ran over the sand of the coastal plain. Trees bowed low and small, and in reverence for the sea and its power the landscape ducked down flat and salty. At any moment they would find the moonlit waves.
It was night indeed. The spring was coiled and bright; birds were darting in and out of the clouds, or so it seemed. Norfolk struck in its random flatness, the wind from the sea blowing past dunes and houses. At the railyard, full of coal and deserted but for hoodlums themselves deserted, sea air blew translucent as pearl over the backs of the black coal cars. It was a nightclub for coal cars, and the moon shone over beaches and interfingerine bays.
Amazed that he was in Norfolk, Marshall walked to Virginia Beach and dashed to the ocean. After a quiet hour in the salt air, observing a round moon swallowed by fat clouds like an infectious billow, he sleepily made his way inland to lie beneath a winter palm.
16
NEARLY FIFTY, Paul Levy was a full admiral in command of the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean—all the eastern approaches to the New World and a good deal more. His men and equipment might at any moment have been cruising under the ice cap, pushing across seas near the African coast, flying over Hatteras at unforgivable speeds, or stormbeaten in the Central Atlantic. The range of what they did dwarfed even this wide geography—boatmen knelt with the wind in their eyes; technicians dug deep into the innards of electronics full of colors and with more bent little legs than a termite nest; sailors scanned the sea; pastry cooks worked under the waves; boilermen lit their flaming torches; builders put up enormous bases; doctors delivered babies; lawyers tried cases; the Shore Patrol made arrests; warehousemen sweated in a world of stenciled objects; fat CPO’s smoked cigars and slept peacefully at dinner tables; grooms took care of horses; bomb-loaders risked disintegration; theoreticians debated logicians; mathematicians tried their equations; prisoners rotted in jail; weathermen flew into the fists of hurricanes; and riders on gray ships bolted through running seas. It was early spring. Paul Levy wore a blue uniform covered with ribbon squares. For him, the Navy had been no work at all, and the only difficulty he had in his profession was when he froze in his tracks adoring it.