by David Masiel
He remembered dancing with his wife when she was still his nurse, remembered the rattle of war medals and the shimmer of ribbons and his mother playing that song on the piano in the front room of their house in Bremerton: “Funny Little Snowman.” The tinkling sound of keys, and her voice, pure and slow, matching the piano note for note as she gazed at him and smiled, a song just for him, just for her boy. How old had he been? Five? Eight? He remembered summers in the Cascades as a teenager following his uncle into the woods, on a USGS crew while his old man was off at sea. He remembered the year he left Index, that sinking feeling as he rode the poop deck all the way out the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Life was all memory in the end. What did it matter what anybody knew about the things he’d done. Even Beth; what did it matter how she judged him or even if she judged him. He wished she’d come see him now. Come see me, he thought. Come see me.
Even then he felt a cold inside his shoulders. His breathing grew ragged as he felt the ship rise and heave and whistle with the stress of a real storm. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, there she was, like a spirit he’d conjured.
“Elisabeth,” he said.
“Are you all right?”
“I ain’t all right.” He strained to sit upright.
“Hold it there, Harold, lie back down.” She leaned close to him and put her hand to his forehead. Her hand was cold, cold, sent a shiver through him. “You know what’s wrong?”
“There’s so much wrong now, there’s no counting,” he said. “I’m sorry about your old man. I’m sorry about that—I was being selfish.”
“Never mind it now,” she said.
He stared at her and his eyes turned watery, not even sure they were tears because his eyes watered pretty near all the time now, but whatever the source he felt sad, and water flooded his eyes, and he wanted more than anything to be able to keep from crying, but the water just came. He could feel his body failing out from under him. “I met my first wife in a burn ward. I tell you that?”
“No, you never did.”
“She was the prettiest nurse there. No one believed I could get her. We were so goddamned in love it was almost painful. After I fucked my way out of my marriage, I hoped I’d never have that feeling again. Now I don’t wanna live without it.”
“You don’t have to live without, Harold.”
“I do, though—I do. ’Cause she loved me too. She loved me better than I loved her in the end. But not you, Bethy. Not you. You’re my comeuppance. It’s all goddamned clear to me now. There is a God, and I’m screwed.”
She held her lips tight and brought her hands to her mouth, together like prayer. “Harold—” Her eyes were earnest, glowing. “Don’t you see that I do love you? Granted, not in the way you want. But it’s so. I love you.”
He let out a laugh, or tried to—he felt his eyes burning and he wasn’t sure if any sound came out his mouth. “That’s what they call small consolation.”
She sat there next to his bunk, sitting on an overturned milk crate gripping the base of the bunk with one hand and with the other holding his forehead, her hand warming under the heat of his brow. Equilibrating. Transfer of heat. As the ship rocked, the locker door clanged open and shut, beating against the drawer, where the yellow movie boxes lay piled under the padlock he’d used to secure them. All them bloody movies, he thought. Canned memory.
“In there,” he said, “are movies. My whole goddamned life since the invention of the Brownie. They probably got salt caked in them by now, but there’s one in there says ELISABETH on it. You can have that, if you want it. It’s from earlier, with the kid. I never did get it developed. You can have all of them.”
She stared at the film box but made no move to take it. “You’re talking morosely now. We’ve been through storms before. We’ll make Cape Town.”
“I don’t think so.”
She looked over at him and saw he was crying. “God, Harold, it’ll be all right. We’ll get you to a doctor.”
“It ain’t that. I keep thinking what the kid said about his granddad, how he was going to hell and convinced he’d never see his wife again, and I been having that same thought, I can’t escape that same thought, only it’s about never seeing you again. You wanting to go away. I’m afraid I won’t ever see you again. It feels like drowning. I been cast out a long time. I figured it didn’t matter. Till I met you it didn’t matter. Now it’s all I think about. Them old Greeks, you know, that’s what they did. Worst punishment you could deal a man, banishment. No home. No identity anymore. Just cast out. It’s fucking heartless. I want to call them on the phone and say I’m sorry sometimes. I want to beg for goddamned mercy. Beg to be let back home, ya know? If they could just see that. Don’t matter what a man does, good people can pull him out. People who love him can pull him out.”
She held his face in her hands. Talked to him like a boy. Like his dead mother. “I won’t leave you,” Beth said. “Do you see that? All the men, all the women. They all end. All the fucks, they’re over. Ours never ends. Never.”
“Jesus Christ—”
“Don’t be sad.”
“It’s all so fucking lost.”
She tilted her face to him then, the smile genuine warmth in a slamming creaking leaking ship somewhere two days from land. He reached into his pants then and wrenched out the sack of diamonds, the duct tape pulling at his hair, and then he pushed the bag at her. “You take these. Keep them someplace safe. They’re yours.” Then he lifted up as best he could to loosen the money belt and gave her that too.
“I don’t want all this.”
“Them rocks are currency. Get a flight to Antwerp, you’ll get better money there. There’s some cash too. Enough to get you there. There’s more cash in the ship’s safe, but I don’t know if I’d try to get to that now. So take these. Just don’t put them down your pants, first place Bracelin’s liable to look.”
He let out a forced chuckle.
She stuffed the bag down into the deep pocket of her fatigues and pressed the tape against her leg until it just clung in there, the bulge evident against her leg.
“Take these too,” he said, and he set his boot knife and his boning knife on the bed.
She stared at them. “Just lie back, Harold. Conserve your energy.”
“For what?” She rested her hand on his chest and patted him as he rolled over on his side. “You gotta think clearly, Bethy. Where’s Maciel? Where’s Bracelin? You seen him? What’s he doing? You need to figure where everybody is now, that’s the important thing, you need to gather everybody together.”
“Leeds is in the engine room, I guess. Paynor on the bridge. I haven’t seen George or Bracelin.”
Snow groaned and lifted himself upright to the edge of the bed, swinging his legs out. “Help me up. Then go find Maciel and Leeds. Maciel was going for Leeds. Help me up. I gotta get up.”
She looped her arm under his and he was just pulling to his feet when a knock at the door brought her head up, and she said, “Oh,” and Snow thought maybe it was Maciel, that together they really could figure out some way to get off the ship finally, scooting to the Angola coast. The only problem was that voice he heard. A real voice, not the voices in his head or the whisper of the girl but the blunt baritone of Bracelin. “I figured I’d find you two fucking the dog. Not that you’re fucking each other, we all know that ain’t happening.”
Beth stepped backward, her eyes casting around the room and lighting on the knives there on the bed. Bracelin’s gray-black hair was pulled back out of his face and brought together in a ponytail that made him look even more sinister than usual, despite the everyday yellow rain gear. He grinned, his face pulling together.
“You need something?” Snow said from back behind her, sitting on the edge of his bunk now, holding himself there against the rocking motion. He reached for the knives, but awkwardly, and knocked them to the deck. Nobody moved.
“Matter of fact,” Bracelin said, turning to Beth, “I need you for starte
rs.”
“I’m on my way back out,” she said, and bent down to pick up the boning knife.
“Good idea. We’re goddamned shorthanded, to say the least, and this one’s pretty much worthless now.” He nodded his head toward Snow. “I need all hands.”
Bracelin stepped for the door and pulled it open, holding it for her to go out ahead of him. She glanced once at Snow, a dead look, like she knew this voice, had heard it first fourteen years gone when the chief engineer from a rig tender called Dunkirk had said, “Ça suffit,” and demanded that his kindness be repaid.
Snow held to the bunk. “She’s with me, Brace,” Snow said. “We’ll turn-to now. I just had a little trouble…taking some medication.”
“It’s too late for you, Snow.”
“Wait there.” Snow looked at Beth. “Don’t go with him, Bethy.”
Bracelin looked at Snow with that dead scarred face, and Beth saw the look now too, but before she could move against the heel of the ship, Bracelin reached out and grabbed her by the arm. Her look seared into Snow, a look of familiarity; she’d been here before. He could feel her now, could put himself right there in her soft brown breast and understand a part of her he’d never quite put his heart to. “Leave her alone, Charlie. She’s with me. We been through all this. She’s with me.”
“Fuck that. Where’d you put the rocks?” Bracelin closed the door behind him, and in the movement of the ship Beth shook herself free and reached down for the knife on the floor. As she brought it up, Bracelin’s fist came down hard on her wrist and the knife clattered to the deck and slid under the bed between Snow’s legs. The ship rolled, shuddering and rocking sideways as if they’d taken a rogue wave against the port side, and Beth’s balance gave way. She tried in vain to wrench her arm free, but Bracelin held to her like his fist was made of stone.
Snow tried pulling himself up, saying, “Now, Charlie, come on now, Charlie”—his feet flat on the deck, not sure he could get up, much less be of any use once he did. Still he reached over his head and grasped the lower edge of Maciel’s bunk and pulled himself to his feet. He wobbled there, steadying himself, while Bracelin pulled her closer and turned to look at Snow with his dead eyes. “Where are the rocks?” he asked again.
“Just let her go and I’ll get them for you. I will. Just let her go!” Snow’s voice strained. “You can have the diamonds. I don’t give a shit for any of it.”
Bracelin let out a chuckle, pulled Beth close, and kissed her mouth, his thick tongue sliding between her lips.
“Ahh, goddamnit, Charlie, get off her now, I said get off her now!” His voice cracked with weakness and rage even as he saw Bracelin reach behind into his belt, and Snow had no sooner seen the glint of black metal than he was moving toward him, swinging his boot knife out of his belt and fumbling it, tumbling in the air, swinging with the movement of the ship. His body lunged forward and he swung his fist straight at the gun and punched it hard, splitting his own knuckle and catapulting the weapon against the desk. His momentum stalled out then, the ship rocking back the other way and Bracelin toppled toward him, and Snow yelled “Go!” and felt the rush of draft as Beth was gone and out the door, the two men rolling backward. He felt the full weight of Bracelin on top of him, felt the bludgeon of the man’s fist against his eye, shattering the orbit. Blood pulsed and drained into his ear and mouth. Snow wrapped his legs around the mate and squeezed him, felt another blow, but this more distant, as if his face were two feet away from his brain, a distant thud that had nothing to do with the strength in his legs, drawing inward and refusing to let go even as Bracelin battered him.
“You meddlesome old fuck. What you care about these people?”
Snow felt a pointed blow to the solar plexus.
It burned into him, radiating up and out until it flooded his entire upper body. He’s stabbed me, he thought, the son of a bitch has stabbed me, and through the distant burning in his chest he felt Bracelin disappear, even as the pain washed over him, and he lay still, in darkness, with the ship swirling all around under him.
THE SKELETON COAST
Snow lay on the deck in the room like he had way back in Frisco but without a mattress, thinking what have I missed, I must have missed something godawful. He supposed in some ways the kid was a Jonah after all. Now Snow felt he needed to say something out loud, form the words and say them, confess your sins, he said. Confess them. Straight to God, right there between you and God.
He tried to move his mouth to make the sounds, and, though he heard the words, had no idea if his ears were doing the hearing or if he could even speak now. He felt his body glow, drifting, he could ride it out here I can ride it out here. But then he heard that old command voice like a loudhailer on a towboat time to turn-to, Snow, time-to turn-to! Joaquin drifted all around him, like a swirling cloud of fire, suffocating and beautiful. The glowing heat of his voice drew the air from Snow’s lungs to feed some nearby firestorm. He didn’t know if he was warmed by it or in danger of being incinerated.
He only knew he had to move. He had to move now or never.
He felt that force out there now, closer than ever: some dark cascading sheet that would envelop him, Van Sickle maybe, coming for him to drag him like a shade into the gutter that ran to the Underworld. You gotta move.
His body was overcome then by a wracking, shivering vengeance. His head felt like a giant wood screw was being ratcheted down into it from above. In his mind he had righted himself, had leaped to his feet and run out the door, running down the passageway, running upward to the bridge—toward the wheel. He was young and strong in his wakeful dream. He had been trying to get the wheel that day in the Coral Sea when the bomb hit, had come out of the crew’s mess aft with a stomach full of scrambled eggs and look there, so close he could have caught that bomb like a long fly ball, and when it blew him upward and he finally landed, he heaved his breakfast onto the deck while sitting in his own shit with his shoes thirty feet away and a man’s shoulder on his lap.
He wondered if his life could ever have been different; if he had figured things out sooner what might have happened, how might he have lived? With that he hauled himself to his feet and pushed into the head and braced himself as best he could between bulkheads, one hand holding to the handrail by the toilet, and relieved himself into the toilet bowl, only to find his urine came out black. Jesus, he thought, Jesus! He stared at the black water in the toilet and felt surging panic.
Through the black caking of blood on his face, his left eye incapable of opening for the broken mantle of his eyebrow, he reached for the door and gave it a tug with his fingertips. The heavy spring-loaded door barely gave before it snapped back into the jamb and shut on him. He lost his balance backward, was thrown against the bulkhead, and braced himself against the map of the world with all those blue and red dots, grasping and tearing the whole thing off the wall in a single thrust as he flew backward yet again. He crawled through and past the crumpled paper and made the door, timing his rise with the lurch of the ship and holding both hands to the door handle. He jerked it open and stepped out, peering up the long dim passage toward the bridge ladder. Then he found himself lying down again. He wasn’t sure how he got there, but it had to be true. A handrail led over his head and down the passageway. He reached for it, lifting himself to his knees, and in a single motion, as if snatching a barbell that was his own body, he lifted himself to his feet and wobbled there, both hands clasping the painted steel rail, and began to move. Gotta move. Gotta get to the bridge. He knew Bracelin had not wanted to kill him, simply by his being alive—after all, why bother, he was close enough to taste death all on his own.
That Snow managed to pull himself up the internal ladder was a minor miracle, and it took him the better part of ten minutes to make it. When he finally came close enough, he rocked with the movement of the ship and heaved his body onto the bridge deck and crawled the rest of the way in, looking up to see Paynor and one of the twins staring off into the swollen, wind-raked s
eas.
Now Paynor let out an exasperated grunt and darted to the starboard bulkhead. He spun wildly, pulled a survival kit off the console with a jerk, tearing the mounting loose and stuffing it into a nylon bag. As Paynor moved behind the wheel, beneath the chart light, he finally noticed Snow pulling himself to his feet by the lip of the chart table. “What the fuck happened to you?”
“Bracelin happened to me,” said Snow, seeing everything through a kind of monocular tunnel. The ship heaved forward, and waves popped and flew over the bow, then blew on wind all the way back, raining double-time against the wheelhouse glass. “Dear God,” he said.
He spied the trash can, bungeed alongside the chart table, and thought perhaps he’d throw up. His mouth flushed with fluid. He took a deep breath, felt his body relax some and the nausea pass for a moment. Then he looked out to see Maciel making his way in from the bow, wearing a rain suit, one hand sliding along the railing as he made his way to the midship square and down the stairs toward the room there.
“Listen, Snow,” said Paynor, looking around as if he might be forgetting something, looking for charts on the shelves below the table. “I think it’s time to get going, know what I mean?”
“Where the hell is Bracelin?”
“I haven’t seen him.”
“You seen anybody?”
“Not really—just Jimmy here.”
“I am Danny.”
The Liberian kept looking out, his brow glowing with sweat that picked up light from the control console. His eyes glowed when he finally took his eyes off the storm and saw Snow there, looking just like a man who’d recently received a beating. Danny looked back out to the storm, and the heaving foredeck. “Oh boy, that a bad one,” he proclaimed, though it was uncertain just what he meant by this—the boatswain with blood still oozing from his eyebrow, or the storm outside. “Your blood black, man, you got the malaria!”
Paynor looked at him closer. “Jesus, Snow, he’s right. You take any mefloquine going into W.A.?”