The Drift

by Lloyd Kropp

  “Let’s try the moon’s shadow then,” said Michael in a shrill voice.

  “Okay. But let’s go find Blanca first,” said David. “Blanca is good at moon things.”

  “She has a moon in her mind,” said Michael, and they both laughed.

  Peter shook his head and smiled. The casual conversations at the oak table had been an illusion. Nothing here on The Drift was really very normal, not even the children. It was a strange world that he still could not begin to understand.

  He had spent five days now on The Drift, and he imagined that if it had not been for his adventure in The Outland he would have gone mad in that time. At least his encounter with The Outlanders had been a simple, brutal, competitive sort of thing that made some sense. But The Drift itself—the improbable, aimless life, the strange people—was something he could not cope with. Why had there been no interchange with the outside world, no rescues? What consolation was there in this dead place? Tabor was friendly enough, but he was a mystery. What in the world did he do with his life? And even Pao, in a subtle way, made him uncomfortable. For a young girl, she was too mature, too perceptive, in spite of her naïveté and her ignorance of the world beyond The Drift. It was troubling to be at the mercy of these people. He could not ignore them or escape from them; for once, those possibilities were not open. He had to talk with them and smile and be grateful and try to act as if life here on The Drift had some purpose.

  That evening before he slept, he heard the weird music again. It was like a jangling harpsichord terribly out of tune. It seemed now to come from somewhere on the eastern side of The Drift. The sound of it was unsettling, as if somehow it were a metaphor of unreality, a token of this vast hallucination over which he had no control.

  After breakfast the next morning, Reuben and Javitt led him down to The Seafields on the western side of The Southern Edge. Apparently the two old men went everywhere together. Reuben, the older, taller, and skinnier of the two, kept patting him on the shoulder and smiling as he informed him, in his incredibly pompous diction, of his duties that morning. Javitt smiled and added every now and then a word of agreement, clicking to himself like an old hen. They were like two ancient mariners, smiling and ineffectual, giving their wisdom and experience to the young. Peter enjoyed their company in spite of himself.

  On their way to The Seafields they passed along the edge of The Outland, and Peter thought about his adventure there the previous day. At the time, it had seemed only a bizarre contest, like grim children quarreling over a toy. But now as he gazed over the maze of ships and sinking walkways he felt the truth of what Tabor had said. The Outlanders had had every intention of killing him, and indeed had come very close to doing so.

  But now at least he had taken the first step. The risk had been worth it. The next step was to find a good sail, a good mast, and an outboard motor with plenty of gasoline to get him out of the wind-dead center of The Sargasso Sea. There was a fair chance, he imagined, of getting into a trade lane before his food and water gave out, if only he could find enough gasoline and a decent outboard motor. Surely there must be an outboard motor somewhere on The Drift, one that worked.

  Reuben nudged him with his elbow and pointed a bony finger toward the edge of The Seafields. “Notice the golden weeds at the periphery,” he droned. “A strange marginal world of enigmas and dark mysteries.”

  “Enigmas and mysteries,” said Javitt, nodding his head.

  “The snails bore tubes in the weeds,” continued Reuben. “Tiny, spiny fish build nests. Worms hollow out stems and leaves. Millions of God’s secret, blind creatures live there and copulate and bring forth new generations and never leave the weeds. The weeds are a world for tiny things,” he concluded, making a gesture of infinite smallness with the thumb and third finger of his trembling hand.

  Reuben and Javitt led him to the third walkway, a slender pontoon dock that extended out into The Seafields for nearly a hundred yards at an oblique angle. Reuben explained that everything within the sloping triangle made by this dock and the next one belonged to The Mary Strattfords. Beyond it were other fields, large triangles and rectangles of color that extended outward from The Southern Edge, that belonged to The Bluewaters, The Madrids, and The Conquistador Blancos.

  From a distance the brilliant colors of The Seafields were only an undulating blur; up close he saw three distinct kinds of plant groups arranged in long, meandering rows. One was a series of interlacing yellow vines suspended by large green seed pods that acted as floats. Hanging down in the green water from these vines were globes of yellow, pear-shaped fruit. With these plants grew another vine, very similar to the first, except that its seed pods were bluish purple, and its fruit shone a brilliant red. Reuben explained that all these were indeed the same species, and that the blue and red plants would soon move into their yellow phase, while the yellow ones would move into their blue and red phase. The second plant group was composed of different kinds of seaweed and a brown rubbery vine with hundreds of seed pods that from a distance looked something like kelp. The third plant group consisted of lilies and sea hyacinths and a strange calyx plant that looked like floating skunk cabbage.

  In contrast to these exotic plants were common scallions and carrots that grew in long wooden trays along the docks. The soil, Reuben informed him, was made from pulverized wood mixed with plants dried in the sun and then ground into a powder.

  Together the three of them paddled up and down the narrow lanes of water between the rows on a large wooden raft that Reuben kept at the far end of the dock. They drew the vines over the raft to gather the vegetables into large baskets, and snared the cabbages and lilies, which Reuben assured him were edible, with long-handled hooks. Later they paddled to a place near The Southern Edge where the vegetation was especially thick, and speared prawns and crabs and an odd-looking multicolored fish that crawled with its fins over the seaweed and vines. It blended so well with its environment that Peter never saw it until the raft was a yard or so away and Javitt, under his leader’s careful instructions, caught him with the sharp end of his hook.

  It was an altogether pleasant morning. Peter could not help but smile, and once he caught himself humming an aria from The Marriage of Figaro. Occasionally Reuben would look at him and puff and then smile approvingly, as if somehow they had all done a long day’s work and had done it very well.

  “Lived here all my life,” said Reuben as they tied their raft to the pier and began unloading their vegetables and fish. “And all my life I’ve been a fisherman. When I was only seventeen I caught a whale with only a coat hanger and a rope.”

  “One coat hanger, one rope,” affirmed Javitt.

  “He was a veritable giant, a behemoth of his breed,” said Reuben. His eyes glittered as he began to get the feel of his story. “I fought the beast for six days and six nights, and when the fight was over we had meat on The Drift for six years.”

  “It must have been a great fight,” said Peter, who managed not to smile.

  “On the morning of the seventh day he came to the surface and I got him in the brain with my last hundred-foot spear. He spouted blood a hundred boatlengths into the air and the whole Drift turned crimson red before he gave up his ghost! Arrgh! It was indeed a fierce and gruesome sight!” The old man shrieked with happiness, and Javitt listened to his master’s words with a look of awe and adulation.

  It was only after several moments of respectful silence that the little man had anything at all to add. “When I was young,” he said rather quietly, “I could dance like anything.”

  At noon they began the long upward journey across dozens of ships back to The Mary Strattford. When he had gone about halfway he saw an odd thing that he did not understand: a long slide that curved back and forth between the ships, slowly descending toward The Southern Edge. He leaned over the rail of a large topsail schooner and stared down at it and tried to imagine himself sliding, curving back and forth down into the shadows. It was made of long sections of fluted wood that
were supported by crosspieces rammed into portholes or suspended from deck rails by heavy ropes. He could not see where the slide began or where it ended. It moved very slightly from side to side when the ships moved in the water. Then he remembered the slide at Twoboats, the meeting place where Pao had taken him. Perhaps this was another part of it.

  After lunch at The Mary Strattford, Bright called him into the galley, where she and Pao were scrubbing dishes in a large wooden tub.

  “Reuben and Javitt approve of you,” she said. “They told me you did a very good job today.”

  “But I hardly did anything.”

  “Never mind. You watched them. That’s very important. The children used to watch them, but they lost interest after a few months. So they had nobody to watch until you came.”

  Peter smiled. “Well, that’s very nice. But I really don’t feel that I’m earning my keep.”

  Bright laughed. “You don’t have to earn anything here,” she said. “But wait until the men start fixing the ships. You’ll only work for an hour or so a day, but you’ll be sore all over.”

  “I’ll welcome that,” said Peter. “Hard physical work always makes me feel better.”

  Pao turned from her dishes and looked at him curiously. “Why?” she asked.

  Immediately he was on the defensive. “Hard work is the only way to get anything done that’s worth doing,” he said. “If you lived on land you’d realize that.” He smiled weakly. Even to him the words sounded foolish, inappropriate.

  “Reuben and Javitt never work hard, but they always seem to be happy,” said Bright. “Did they give you their little lecture about Sargasso Weeds this morning?”

  “Sargasso Weeds? I’m not sure. They may have.”

  “It’s really quite interesting. They have a little speech they learned from Rose about how there are two kinds of Sargasso Weeds. The first is rock-bound and always lives near land. It has holdfasts for clinging to rocks. Sometimes it gets torn away and drifts here, where it lives for a while and then dies.”

  “Why does it die?”

  “It’s not made for the open water,” she said. “That’s how it’s different from Natan, the kind that has evolved here. Natan has floats instead of holdfasts and it has a much nicer color sometimes. Rose says that if it ever finds its way to land it gets dashed to pieces by storms. So it can’t live near land, just as its cousin can’t live in The Sargasso Sea.”

  She smiled and scrubbed away at the last of the wooden plates, while Pao rinsed them, shook them, and put them in a cabinet. “The Sargasso Weeds that grow here have no parts for reproduction. No males, no females. They just grow at the tips and waste away at the base. They grow, but never reproduce. Such simple plants, but so lovely to look at when you look closely. Rose said once they were all just a form of algae. No real leaves or stems, just a seaplant that branches out in all directions and grows pods for floating in the water.”

  Then she looked up from the dishes and began to dry her hands on her long skirt. “Now why is that such a pleasant thing?” she asked. “Why is there such pleasure in such simple things?”

  Pao put the last dish away and then reached up and kissed Bright on her eyes. “Because you are the mother of us all,” she said, laughing. “You gave birth to all the weeds and all the children and all the fishes.”

  “My goodness, child, I don’t even have a husband! Now you take yourself and your sweet words and Sutherland and go someplace. I’ve got to start thinking about the next meal.” And with that, she put her hands on Pao’s cheeks and shook her very gently.

  “Upstairs,” she said.

  A moment later Peter and Pao stood on the deck of The Mary Strattford, and from there they walked to a high boat that overlooked The Northside Cliff.

  “I thought of something really wonderful we can do this afternoon,” she said. “We can explore some of the old ships. I mean the really old ones. I haven’t been inside them for months. And I fixed some seabread in a bag in case we get hungry later.”

  She smiled and looked up at him expectantly. Her long black hair flashed in the noon sunlight. “I can show you all sorts of things,” she said. “But you’ll have to do exactly as I say.” She smiled her beautiful smile and squeezed his hand.

  “That sounds wonderful,” he said. “I’m yours to command.” And although a part of his old self seemed to hold back, thinking of the dinghy and his impending voyage on the open sea, he surrendered for the moment to an irrational burst of happiness, to the soft, still air, and to the ruined romantic silence of The Drift.

  “Come on then,” she said. And together they ran across the deck, squinting in the bright sunlight, and jumped to the next boat that pointed along the edge of The Northside Cliff.

  Six

  THE CARAVEL

  As they walked together along Northside they saw the boy named Raven swinging from one of the lines of a large whaler ten boats below them.

  “Have a great time,” he shouted. “Just don’t eat any of Pao’s seabread unless you want to puke all over the boards.”

  Pao reddened. She was about to shout something back at him, but then finally thought better of it. “He’s always been like that,” she said quietly. “He doesn’t get along with anybody.”

  “Why not?”

  “He wants things that—things that he can’t have,” said Pao. “And he hates The Drift. Sometimes I think he hates everything. Rose told me once that he has the blindness, that he has no power in his mind to see anything that isn’t there. He lives with Bright. She’s the only one who can really make him behave. Peter and Michael say he was scratched once by The Hatchmaker and has been mean ever since.”

  Peter shrugged his shoulders. “Well, I guess I’m not really interested in all that,” he said after a moment. “But I do wish you’d explain about The Hatchmaker. Is he a real person or a superstition or what?”

  “I only know what the others say. The Madrids say he lives at Driftsend and that sometimes at night people hear him walking around below decks.”

  “I still don’t understand. Is he supposed to be an ordinary man or some sort of spirit? Everyone talks about him as if he weren’t quite real.”

  “I don’t know if he’s real or not,” said Pao. Her eyes narrowed, and she looked up toward the horizon. Peter had noticed many times that when she was thinking very deeply she looked at the horizon, the edge of the world where she had never gone except in her thoughts.

  “Is it important to know whether things are real or unreal?” she said at last. “Perhaps everything that someone is thinking of is real. Or perhaps people like The Hatchmaker are just a different kind of real. The Madrids say he controls the lives of everyone on The Drift because he lives in another world and has powers no human beings have. They say he’s good luck, and sometimes very bad luck too. Anyway, it’s bad to go near Driftsend, especially at night.”

  “Has anyone ever seen him?”

  “The Madrids say he’s a very handsome man and that he dresses in coat and tails. But that’s silly. Only fish and land animals have tails.”

  “They mean he dresses in an old-fashioned suit that’s very long in the back. Do you know what a suit is?”

  “There are suits in some of the old ships,” she said. “But I don’t know why anyone would want to wear them.”

  He smiled. “Yes. Well, never mind that. Tell me more about The Hatchmaker.”

  She tilted her head and made a helpless gesture with her open hands. “There isn’t much more to tell. Rose says he’s two thousand years old, but of course that’s impossible.” She looked out across the water and then up at Peter. “I think,” she added.

  Peter suppressed a laugh. “But why is he called the Hatchmaker?”

  “I don’t know. I guess no one knows. Peter and Michael say that when he was young he lived on an island off the island of Norway, where it was his job to make the hatches on boats. And now that he’s here where there are no new boats being made, he crawls around at night, sawing new
hatches in the bottom of old boats just to keep in practice. They say that when an old boat sinks, it’s because The Hatchmaker has been sawing new hatches.”

  Peter smiled again, this time a little wearily. “Everybody here tells stories about questions they can’t answer,” he said.

  “The children are very good at stories and shadowgames,” said Pao, who seemed to have caught his words but not his judgment. “But I forgot. There is something else. Rose told me once she used to know The Hatchmaker years and years ago, long before I was born. She said his real name was Hatchetman.”

  “Hatchetman. That means hired killer in my country.”

  “A hired killer?”

  “A man who—well—a man who kills for a living.”

  “Kills what?”

  “Other people.”

  “I don’t understand. Who would employ such a man?”

  He could see now that he had made a mistake. “Evil or sick men who wish to destroy other men,” he said finally.

  She looked up at him very seriously. “Tabor says that many on land are like that,” she said. “Is it because the land never moves?”

  “Why should the land not moving make people evil?”

  “I thought—I don’t know. I thought perhaps with things so still, people might get sort of nervous.”

  Pao was startled by his laughter. It was the first time he had really laughed in a long time. “Perhaps that’s it,” he said. “It’s as good an answer as any I’ve heard recently.”

  For a few minutes they walked together in a comfortable silence, hand in hand. Once, a flight of white gulls passed overhead like a cloud of snow. Later they saw the twisting wake of a large eel and heard the whispering of long fernlike formations of Gulfweed as the eel swam through the green water. The smell of salt and old wood and green water was very strong and very pleasant. Here, he thought, there were no hatchetmen. The world was at peace.

  It was hard for him to remember amid these preoccupations that he had an ulterior motive, a specific purpose in exploring the ships with Pao. He thought of the supplies he would need for his dinghy. Perhaps today he would discover something.