by Philip Roy
“Hello,” I said.
He smiled, but didn’t answer. I didn’t know if he spoke English.
“Is this your ship?”
He nodded. Now I knew that he could.
I didn’t want to be nosy but couldn’t help asking, “Why are you here?”
“Why am I here?” he repeated. He looked down at his feet, and his brow furrowed into a thoughtful expression. But he never answered the question, and I think his mind drifted somewhere else before he could. Or maybe he never intended to. He pointed to the sea behind me, and opened his eyes wide. Curious, I turned around to look. I didn’t see anything but water. When I turned back … he was gone.
What the heck? Was I seeing things? Was my mind playing tricks on me? I didn’t think so. I didn’t feel any different. I mean, I was more tired lately, but was I seeing things that weren’t really there? Was I starting to lose my mind?
Nope. When I looked up, I saw the old man staring down at me like a crow in a tree. He was balanced on the railing above, clinging to the bars with his hands and bare feet. How he got up there so quickly, I had no idea. It was eight feet above the deck; he couldn’t have jumped.
Could he?
“How did you get up there?” I asked. I looked for a ladder or rope but didn’t see either. Then he let go of the bar, dropped to the deck without a sound, bounced on the steel floor, and went right back up, all in one movement. His body squeezed into a ball at the bottom, and sprang up as if he didn’t weigh anything at all. As he neared the top, he reached for the railing and pulled himself the rest of the way up in one smooth movement, like a cat. It was absolutely remarkable to see.
“Ninjutsu,” he said. “Mind and body are one.”
Cool. He was a ninja! That meant that he was a warrior, which meant that he could fight. Suddenly I was glad I hadn’t brought a weapon on board. What if he thought I was an enemy and attacked me? He didn’t look like a violent person. On the other hand, he didn’t look like somebody who could jump eight feet in the air.
At least I knew now that he wasn’t a ghost. He was trained in the secret art of ninjutsu, and that was why I had not been able to find him. But what on earth was he doing on this ship?
Chapter Three
Once he took a look over the side and saw the sub, he seemed to lose interest in me. I didn’t know why but I was pretty sure he was just waiting for me to leave so he could get back to whatever it was he had been doing before I came along. But what could he be doing all alone on an abandoned ship in the middle of the ocean?
I had no idea but I also had no reason to hang around, so I said goodbye respectfully, bowed my head—because he had bowed to me—climbed down the rope, jumped inside the sub, and started up the engine. What a strange old man was all I could think.
But as I put the sub in gear and started to pull away, I remembered that I hadn’t seen a single thing to eat or drink on the ship, and I wondered how the old man was surviving. The thought that he might be hungry kept nagging at me, so after a couple of minutes I cut the engine and just let the sub drift. I had to sit down and think about it.
When you are alone on the sea, you always want to believe that somebody will come and help you if you need it. It is kind of an unwritten rule. The sea doesn’t recognize differences between people. It doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, young or old; it doesn’t play favourites. You learn that pretty fast on the water. If you see someone in trouble, you go and help them, no questions asked. Someday it might be you.
And so, even though it might not be welcome, I decided to bring the old man something to eat and drink, and then I’d be on my way. Better to err on the side of helping someone out, I figured, no matter who he was. Maybe it would just irritate him if I climbed on board once more. I didn’t know, but I knew I’d feel better if I left food and water behind.
So I returned to the side of the ship and moored the sub once more. I filled a jar with stew I had made the day before, and put it into the tool bag. Then I took a quick glance at my supplies, and added half a loaf of dried bread, two carrots, and a jug of water. That was a little more than I really wanted to leave, but I figured I’d better do it. Maybe the old man was starving. As strong as he obviously was, he was pretty skinny. I swung the bag over my shoulder, and climbed back up the rope.
Once again, there was no one on deck, so I walked around and waited. It didn’t take long for him to show up. He appeared right behind me again, without a sound. One minute he wasn’t there; the next, he was.
I turned and looked him in the eye. He was about two or three inches shorter than me. In some way he seemed a lot younger than he was. He was incredibly energetic; you could see it in his eyes. I had always heard that eyes are windows into the soul. If that were true then his soul was very young and bursting with energy.
“I brought you some stew,” I said, “and a few other things to eat.” I pulled the bag from my shoulder. In a flash the old man was on top of it. He opened it and looked inside. I wondered if he didn’t trust me. He looked up at me, down at the food, and back up at me. He was frowning now, and the sadness was all over his face. I wondered how long it had been since he had eaten.
“This is for me?” he said.
I nodded. “Yes. If you want it.”
He stood up and stared at the bag for a long time without really looking at it. His mind was somewhere else. I reached down, lifted the food and water out, swung the bag over my shoulder, and started to leave. When I was at the top of the rope, he made an odd sound, half between a cry and a laugh.
“Wait!” he cried. “Please wait.”
I hesitated. I didn’t really feel like it. I wanted to leave now. But he sounded so anxious that I shrugged and went back. He stuck out his hand and we shook. His hand dwarfed mine, and was as coarse as sandpaper.
“Can I show you something?” he said.
I sighed. “Okay.”
So I followed him up a ladder to the bridge, and then up another ladder to the top of the bridge, where there was nothing but a few rusted air vents and a sealed bench that was probably once used for life jackets, but was now almost certainly empty. Everything had been stripped from this ship: the lights, the tools, the brass fittings. My guess was that they had stripped her before cutting her up for recycling, but that she had broken free in a storm before they had a chance to start, and they had never bothered to search for her. How the old man ended up on her was a mystery though.
He stood in front of the bench. It was an iron box about fifteen feet long, two and a half feet wide, and two and a half feet high. Like everything else on the ship, it was rusted so badly I doubted it would ever open again. I was wrong. The old man grabbed the lid and swung it open in one quick jerk, letting the lid fall back. I stared in awe. Inside was a garden! I saw at least a dozen tomato plants, heavy with ripe tomatoes; onions, or what looked like onions; garlic; and some leafy plants that looked like spinach. Everything was growing in a reddish-green soil that had bits of shell and seaweed in it. Once the lid was open, the sun poured into the bench and made the plants glow. What a transformation! The old man smiled from ear to ear.
“This is amazing,” I said. I was really impressed.
Next, he led me down to the main deck, down a ladder to the lower, wrap-around deck, where lifeboats had once hung from ropes and pulleys. All of that was gone now. What remained were six benches, rusted so badly you would have thought they had been on the bottom of the sea for a hundred years. Once again the old man opened them. He must have filed and oiled their hinges. I couldn’t believe what was inside.
The first two were filled with buckets of jellyfish. The buckets held water, and the jellyfish were alive. Inside the second two were buckets filled with chunks of fish. It might have been shark. I couldn’t really tell, but the flesh was cut neatly into cubes and was floating in seawater. The first of the last two benches revealed a grill when the old man opened it. This was where he did his cooking. The last one was where he kept his tools. He had
rope, hooks, knives, poles, and what looked like a sword in a cloth sheath.
I didn’t know why he was showing me all of this but it was pretty interesting. Why would he trust me to see it?
“Would you like to stay and eat with me?” he asked.
Nothing I had seen looked very inviting, except for the vegetables. But I didn’t want to insult him, so I said, “Yes, thank you.”
Chapter Four
It was and wasn’t a satisfying meal. It didn’t bother me to eat jellyfish because there were too many in the sea. They were the only things thriving when everything else was dying. But I wished the old man wasn’t killing sharks. I was pretty sure it was shark. It was fishy and oily. The jellyfish was actually pretty good, grilled with garlic, onions, and tomatoes. You would have thought you were eating chips at a roadside diner. For drink we had water, which tasted like iron. He must have collected it in buckets when it rained.
While the old man cooked, I went down the rope for Hollie, put him in the tool bag, and carried him up on my back. He was excited. But we very narrowly avoided a terrible tragedy. Just as I reached the top of the rope, I saw the old man on the roof of the bridge. He had his sword in his hands in front of him. It was glistening in the sun as he sneaked up on Seaweed, who, unbelievably, didn’t see him coming. “Noooooooo!” I screamed. Seaweed heard me, saw the old man, and jumped into the air. I shuddered to think that if I had been ten seconds slower, the old man would have served up my first mate for lunch. I could understand that his survival depended upon eating whatever was available, but I had to make it clear that Seaweed was part of my crew, not just some passing bird.
With Hollie it was a different story. The old man took one look at him and melted. They stared into each other’s eyes, which is unusual for a dog to do with a stranger, and means that he feels a lot of trust. The old man patted him from head to tail. He rolled around with him on the deck, barked at him, and tried to play hide and seek, except that Hollie never had a chance. Like me, he never thought to look straight up whenever the old man disappeared, and he jumped just like I had when the old man suddenly reappeared.
When we sat down to eat, I saw a shadow of sadness creep into the old man’s face again, just like a cloud in front of the sun. But once he put food into his mouth, his face changed again as joy spread across it, and that made me wonder if he had just been hungry. On the other hand, when I offered him some of my bread and stew, he shook his head and passed them back to me with a polite smile. I guess he wasn’t that hungry. Or maybe he was only interested in eating food that he had prepared himself. Fair enough.
I wanted to learn his name, because you didn’t really know someone if you didn’t know his name. So I said, “I’m Alfred.” Then I pointed to the crew. “That’s Hollie, and that’s Seaweed.”
“Your crew?” He looked surprised.
“Yes.”
He turned towards Seaweed, bowed respectfully, and said, “Alfred?”
“No. That’s Seaweed.”
Then he turned to Hollie, bowed again, and said, “Seaweed?”
“No. That’s Hollie.”
I didn’t know which was stranger: that I had a dog and seagull crew, or that he was bowing to them. At least I felt confident now he wouldn’t eat them.
After lunch the old man wanted to see how strong I was. I was glad. I thought he would be impressed with how well I could climb up the rope. The two exercises I always did on the sub were pull-ups and riding the stationary bike. I rode the bike every day because it was hooked up to the propeller shaft, and so, not only was it good exercise, but ten hours of pedalling generated about one hour of battery power. For pull-ups I fitted a bar inside the portal so that I could hang. I could do fifteen pull-ups in a row now, and did three or four sets every day. It had taken me a couple of years to get that strong.
The old man wanted to see me do the rope. “Show me how you climb,” he said, and made a gesture with his fist. He had a mix of gentleness and strength in his expressions that made me think he must have been a good teacher, because I found myself wanting to impress him. I couldn’t help it.
So I climbed onto the rope and shinnied down as quickly as I could, landed on the hull, and shinnied back up. On the way up I heard the old man slapping his hands together. He wanted me to go faster, but I was going as fast as I could. It wasn’t exactly easy. If you made a slight mistake, you would fall into the sea.
When I reached the top, I was out of breath. I wasn’t used to climbing quite so fast. But the old man wanted me to do it again, faster. “Just a minute,” I told him. I needed to catch my breath. But he wouldn’t wait. He jumped from the deck, caught the rope on his way down, and slid down nearly as fast as you would go if you fell. His hands and feet were wrapped around the rope, and I couldn’t understand why the rope didn’t burn them. He reached the sub, let out a yell, and then scrambled back up the way a kid would climb the stairs with his hands and feet. He was fast. Watching him do it made me think that I could do it, too. I just needed to use his technique. I was starting to realize that I might actually learn something from this old man.
So I took a kind of awkward jump from the deck, trying to imitate him, and reached for the rope on the way down, which I very luckily caught but almost missed, and tried to slide down the way he had. But my hands and feet quickly started to overheat with the friction of the rope, and I had to stop a few times, otherwise I would have ended up with terrible blisters. It was fun though. Then, when I landed on the sub, I gave a yell. I looked up and saw the old man waving his fist at me, yelling at me to come back up.
So I tried to climb the same way. I grabbed the rope one hand at a time, but couldn’t seem to grip it with my feet the way he had, the way a monkey climbs. I reached for it but my feet only pushed it away. It was a skill I just didn’t have, and so my arms had to do all the work. It wasn’t like shinnying, where you can rest by squeezing the rope against your body; this was all hands and feet. Halfway up, the muscles in my arms turned to jelly, and then they turned to lead. I made a desperate attempt to squeeze the rope against my body, but my hands wouldn’t grip anymore. I lost my hold and went headfirst into the sea. It wasn’t far, and didn’t hurt much, but all I could hear when I raised my head out of the water was the old man laughing, like a kookaburra.
He jumped into the air, caught the rope, slid down to the sub, and was there to help me climb out of the water. I didn’t need his help, and wondered if he was just showing off. But when we both stood on the hull, and he slapped my shoulder in a friendly way and said, “Good try,” I realized he was actually trying to encourage me. Then he grabbed the rope and went back up just as fast as I had come down. As I watched him go, I thought: this is probably the strongest old man in the world.
I climbed the rope three more times, until my arms ached so badly I had to sit down, and could only watch as the old man did one-legged squats, one-arm push-ups, push-ups from a handstand, and jumps. He made it all look easy, but just watching him made me feel exhausted. It was hard to believe he was as old as he was, yet you could see it on his face and arms and legs, like a very old tree with smooth bark, with deep wrinkles where the branches stuck out.
He seemed pleased to have me around, but maybe he was just glad to have company. I knew I couldn’t have impressed him much with my strength, yet he seemed keen to teach me anyway, and kept trying to coax me off the deck to join him in really hard exercises. What he didn’t seem to understand was that I was completely wasted. There was no way I could do any more until I had rested. I didn’t know how he had become so strong except that it must have taken him years and years of practice.
But why was he on this ship? And how was he keeping her afloat?
Well, that was the next thing he showed me.
Chapter Five
“Why are you here? Why are you on this ship?”
He looked me in the eye, and I saw something that took me back to when I was twelve, when I first saw the old oil tank that would eventuall
y become my submarine. I had such a yearning for it, such an ache to go to sea in it I could hardly sleep. I couldn’t think of anything else and would have done almost anything to have it. I was pretty sure I was seeing that kind of yearning in his eyes, as old as he was.
“Come,” he said with an excited smile. “I will show you.”
So I followed him.
There were three holds on the ship: fore, aft, and mid-ship. There was a faint, musty, chemical odour coming from them, though they had probably been used to carry many things over the years: rock, coal, wood, grain, rice, fertilizer, anything really. Maybe they had carried guns and ammunition during the war, although I didn’t know if the ship was really that old.
At the aft hold, the old man turned to me and smiled. I could tell he loved secrets. He reached down, unlocked a hatch with a lever, and lifted it up. It looked very heavy but he swung it open with ease. I didn’t know why I hadn’t seen the lever before; it was right in front of me. He gestured for me to look. So I bent down and peered inside. At first, it was too dark to see, so I clicked on my flashlight. What a surprise! The hold was nearly filled with plastic. There were plastic bottles, sheets, buckets, toys, benches, chairs, roofing, flooring, animals, and pieces impossible to identify because they had been in the water too long. All of it was plastic. But … where had it come from? I was confused.
Then he showed me the other holds, and they were the same. I stood in awe. “Where has it come from?” I asked.
He gestured with his arms opened wide. “The sea.”
“But how? Did you pull it out of the water, piece by piece?”
He nodded his head, and I knew it was true. Wow! Suddenly my respect for him grew a hundred times. He was doing exactly what I wanted to do.