The Drift

by Lloyd Kropp

  An hour later when the motor and the five gallons of gasoline were safe in the hull of the old schooner where his dinghy was hidden, he returned to his cabin and fell into bed. He was very tired. Slowly his thoughts began to blur, to tumble over each other into the darkness of sleep. Vaguely now he could hear the music of The Hatchmaker drifting in from his window. He could not tell if the sound were real or merely a dream woven from the night noises of the boats and the sound of his own heart beating. He took a deep breath and then sank more deeply, hovering for a moment at the brink of sleep. Perhaps when he awoke he would be in Connecticut and it would be morning and the sun would be streaming in through his own bedroom window.

  The next morning when he opened his eyes there was a yellow flower on his dresser. Pao. So that was what she meant when she said she would see him very early. He dressed and made his way up to The Mary Strattford. He wanted to thank her for the flower, but she did not appear for breakfast, and after a moment’s thought he decided not to ask after her. When he had finished eating, he followed Reuben and Javitt down to The Seafields.

  His senses, he noticed, were much sharper now than they had been the previous day. He could see the prawns and crabs and strange sucking fish that clung to the weeds from several feet away. Once in a while he even caught a glimpse of a Sargasso Fish, the strange filigreed monsters that crawled on their fins across the swamps, blending in with their environment so well that even at a yard or two they were hard to recognize. How beautiful, he thought, and how ugly.

  “Where do those fish come from?” he asked. “The ones that crawl over the weeds.”

  “Of the particulars of their origin I have no knowledge,” said Reuben, smiling his toothless smile. “But this much I know. A thousand years ago they swam like any other fish. Then they came to The Drift, and lo, a metamorphosis. They grew strange with many fins and spiny quills of many hues. A veritable plethora of rainbow hues. A feast of color.”

  “But can they swim like other fish?”

  “They swim, but poorly. I have never seen them swim. Perhaps they don’t swim at all. No, perhaps not.”

  “Probably not at all,” added Javitt.

  Peter’s distant vision was also improving. That afternoon while working with Tabor and two men from Bluewater on the hull of an old schooner, he noticed that he could make out the rigging and sheer of ships two hundred yards distant in a way he could not have done before. It was a matter of selection. What seemed to be a forest of spars and masts became less confused as soon as he decided at what distance he wished to see. He could then mentally erase everything except the things at that distance, in much the same way that, as a child, he had once erased the irrelevant shapes in a puzzle maze in order to see the rabbit or the elf that was hidden there.

  And the more he looked, the more there was to see: cannon with brass rings strewn over the deck of an old French bugalette; a small corvette nearly cut in two by the falling mast of a giant clipper; lanterns of beautiful designs hanging from the sterncastle of a Spanish brig; a dozen boys in black arm bands attacking a three-masted topsail schooner which a dozen in green arm bands defended with wooden swords and wooden shields and seamen’s curses; three dark-skinned dark-haired musicians from The Madrid clan playing weird modal tunes on a lute, a mandolin, and a guitar; a school of porpoise, a flight of seabirds, a hundred things upon which to feed his senses.

  He turned his attention to the large metal pot in which boiled a terrible-smelling liquid that would be used, Tabor had told him, to seal the leaking bow. Tabor watched with a critical eye and occasionally gave directions in Spanish to one of the Madrids, a very tall and lanky young man who hunched his shoulders together and cackled like a witch as he stirred the mixture with a large paddle. Tabor and Peter both laughed.

  “The witch of Endor,” said Peter.

  “Quite right,” said Tabor. “And his magic is very strong.”

  “How do you make your magic?” Peter pointed to the metal pot.

  “With a kind of grease we boil out from the intestines of sharks and an oil that comes from one of the weeds in The Seafields.”

  “It sounds repulsive enough,” said Peter.

  “Witches’ brews are always repulsive,” said Tabor. “Otherwise they would never work.”

  “Modern witches try not to offend,” said Peter. “Why don’t you mix something else with it so you don’t stink up the whole ship”

  Again Tabor laughed. “Pao has been working on that for about a year now. Last month she tried some of Rose’s flower oil. But then, she’s a witch of a different kind.”

  “She certainly is.”

  Tabor looked down at him, one foot resting on the lip of the cauldron, the other on a stubby wooden platform from which he could watch the boiling liquid.

  “You look better,” he said.

  “I look better? What do you mean, I look better?”

  “I mean you look better. Your skin is browner and you look more relaxed. Especially around your eyes.”

  “Just getting my sea legs,” said Peter. Suddenly the image of the eerie and beautiful Sargasso Fish flashed through his mind. The waving spines. The fins moving slowly over the weeds. He trembled for a moment as if a sudden chill had fallen in the air.

  “I mean I do feel much better,” he said quickly.

  At dinner Peter noticed again that Pao was missing.

  “You’re not likely to see her for the next few days,” said Tabor. “She’s going to be very busy.”

  “Oh really?” He could feel the concern for her absence well up within him, and he cursed himself for it. What could it possibly matter? In a few days he would be gone.

  “She’s rehearsing for The Dance of The Nine Islands. She told you about that as I remember.”

  “Yes. A festival of some kind. But won’t she be eating with us this week?”

  “No. She sort of goes into seclusion. She eats and sleeps with The Madrids, and they all rehearse things from morning till night. But it’s only for about four days. Then you’ll see the dance. And then,” he said with emphasis, “you’ll have seen everything.”

  Raven, who was sitting across the table from him, suddenly looked up and stared at him. “Yes,” he said, in a curious flat tone of voice that suggested an extreme hostility, “you’ll see everything in a couple of days. Then the grand tour will be over and you’ll be no better than the rest of us.”

  Bright bent over him and poured soup into his wooden bowl. Lines of pain narrowed her eyes and lifted the corners of her mouth. “Raven,” she whispered, “you mustn’t speak so harshly. Sutherland wants to be one of us. He means you no harm.”

  But Raven drank his bowl of soup in silence and then walked out of the galley, his hands thrust in his pockets, with a sort of swaggering unconcern that betrayed, or so it seemed to Peter, a painful selfconsciousness.

  After the evening meal he hurried down to the old bilander in whose hull he had hidden his dinghy. Carefully he examined everything. A square fitting in the bottom of the boat and an iron loop on the edge of the middle seat were designed to hold a mast, but the one he had found that day was too tall and thick at the base for a fourteen-foot dinghy. Perhaps he could cut it down and plane it at one end to fit the iron ring. Then too, he would need lines to hold it fast, lines for the sail, and something to stabilize the dinghy in compensation for the height of the sail: some sort of keel or perhaps a pair of outriggers.

  The motor presented no problem. It clamped nicely against the flat stern of the dinghy. But of course he would need more gasoline if the motor were to do any good.

  For an hour he wandered around in the adjacent wrecks, looking for the materials he needed. Once he thought he saw a man staring at him from far away in The Outland, a black figure standing in the shadow of a sloop. He could not be sure. It was dark when he returned to his dinghy, and nearly morning before he gave up his work and returned to his own schooner halfway up toward Northside.

  There was still a great deal left
to do and he was very tired. Tomorrow would be another long day. It was just as well, he thought, that Pao was not around. And yet he regretted her absence more than he was relieved by it, and he wondered how much his heart was really in his work. He could see now why some might prefer to stay here on The Drift. It was easy to give up. To breathe quietly and dream life away in peace here on this strange island of derelicts where the past and the present and the future were all transfixed in silence and in the changing images of the clouds.

  The Drift was a place of—he could not find the right word in his mind. Indulgence, perhaps. A romantic indulgence in mystery and in the bizarre. The ships themselves were mysteries, mute testaments of dead ages and lost journeys. And then too there was something final and mysterious about the strange forces that had brought them together in this improbable place, unknown to the rest of the world. It was as if its secret were a token of some larger secret, some final hinge that would reveal another dimension of experience that he had never imagined, except perhaps in dreams. And then of course there was Pao. She was another part of the mystery. Pao with her man’s shirt tied above her waist, her loose sailcloth shorts, her easy grace as she walked from ship to ship, raising her arms to balance on the narrow catwalks and leaning to one side on the slanting decks of the ruined ships. Pao who spoke many languages and who seemed to know sometimes what he was thinking and who, most of all, was incredibly beautiful. Her beauty was in itself a mystery. Her lovely dark eyes and her long black hair were enough to make anyone look twice, but in other ways she was quite ordinary. Her nose was too short and her cheeks, a bit too narrow. Miriam had certainly been a better looking woman from almost every point of view. And yet Pao was more beautiful. It was a distinction that somehow eluded him.

  Even Tabor was, in his own quiet way, a mystery, for something about the man gave him a curious, pleasant feeling he could not place in his catalogue of emotions. Something about his short-trimmed beard, which he stroked occasionally, his weathered, brown face, his tall rangy figure, his easy way of walking that made Peter think of Saturday morning and a pair of tennis shoes, his easy way of leaning against things and cocking his head a little to one side as if the wind were blowing or as if he were trying to catch a whisper of sound somewhere below him. There was a special, informal grace about him, not the grace of an athlete or a dancer, but the grace of a man who was sure of himself, or at least a man who was sure of something.

  He took off his shoes and threw himself into bed. How strange, he thought, that his mind was so full of images and ideas when he was so very tired, so close to sleep. Back home at Harrington University nothing ever occurred to him after eight o’clock, and sleep had always come in the midst of silence, a silence in which he often spent the time counting the number of cars passing in the street by his house or listening to his own heartbeats.

  Eight

  SHADOWGAMES

  After his chores the next morning, he slept most of the afternoon. When he awoke he had the distinct memory of someone having been in his room. He lifted his head and saw a piece of seabread and a hyacinth on the table next to his bed. Pao again. Her small, wet footprints were still visible on the wooden floor.

  After rinsing his face with water and walking out onto the deck, his head still heavy with sleep, he saw one of the most amazing things he was ever to see on The Drift. The children below his boat were walking on the water.

  In the shadow of the large schooner adjacent to his own, seven or eight children ran back and forth in the water, shouting and screeching at each other. Their feet made a hollow shadush when they moved. He recognized several of them as the black-arm-band pirates who had raided a schooner the day before.

  “Hello, Sutherland!” It was David and Michael, Tabor’s children.

  “Hello,” said Peter. “I see you’re—you’re walking on water.”

  “Yes!”

  “Well, that’s fine. Who taught you to do that?”

  “We learn by ourselves. All the children can do it.”

  “I see.” Then he remembered that Bright had said something about weedwalking. Walking on weeds.

  “I bet you’re wondering how we do this,” said Michael.

  “The question had crossed my mind,” said Peter, who was trying to maintain some semblance of rationality. He was beginning to feel very foolish. There must be some simple explanation.

  Then the whole group of them ran across the water in a cloud of noisy splashes that sent spindrift tumbling everywhere in the air around them. Now that the children were out of the shadows he could see that they wore enormous wooden shoes. And then, with what seemed to him to be amazing strength for children, David and Michael scrambled up a rope arm over arm and leaped over the rail of his schooner.

  “Hi!” they said together.

  “Hi, yourself. Let me see your shoes.”

  They smiled and offered their shoes for his examination, and together they burst into an involved explanation of how they worked. The shoes were thin circles of wood about two feet in diameter. They were warped into shallow cups and worn inverted so as to give a slight buoyancy from the cushion of air trapped inside. Two leather straps that fitted through narrow slips near the center of the shoes bound their feet.

  “We can’t just walk anywhere,” said Michael. “It has to be where there’s weeds. The weeds hold you up for a second until you can take another step.”

  “I see. Can anyone learn to weedwalk?”

  “Just the children,” answered Michael. “Grownups get too big. Pao told us you can’t weedwalk after you’re twelve or thirteen if you’re a boy. She says sometimes that girls can until they’re fifteen. Unless someone gets them pregnant,” he added as an earnest and thoughtful qualification. “ ’Course you can’t do much of anything then. Not until you get over it.”

  “I see,” said Peter.

  “ ’Course grownups can do a lot of things that children can’t do,” said David. “Pao says it’s not so bad when you can’t weedwalk any more. She says then it gets more fun to read and sing and work on the dances for the festivals and stuff.” Peter could see that for the sake of politeness the boy was trying to make the adult world sound attractive, or at least palatable, but that his heart was not in it.

  “Pao says that even when you get old, there are things to do, like The Long Journey and things like that,” said David.

  “What’s The Long Journey?”

  “It’s the other end of shadowgames,” said Michael, who could not let his brother explain anything without his assistance. “It’s where The Elders from all the clans go and sit together in circles and close their eyes and let their minds float away on silver cords.”

  “It’s like sailing away to The Islands,” said David. “Rose goes on The Long Journey every few days now. S’about all she does, now that she’s got so old,” he said doubtfully.

  Peter smiled in a hopeless way, listening to the words of the two boys. “I see,” he said.

  Then one of the boys from the weedwalking group called them from somewhere around the side of the next boat.

  “Shadowgames,” said Michael. “Today it’s our turn and we can play in English. I never get as many ideas in Spanish or French as I do in German and English. Do you know why that is, Sutherland?”

  “I haven’t the slightest,” said Peter.

  “Me neither,” said Michael. He pushed his long, blond, wet hair out of his eyes. “The Madrids do everything different. They even play shadowgames underwater sometimes. It’s different that way cause everything keeps moving and the forms don’t stay the same. Pao says the ocean is like a crystal glass and that playing shadowgames underwater is like seeing into someone’s mind.”

  “That’s very interesting,” said Peter, who was still trying to mask his confusion as best he could.

  “Pao can do all sorts of things,” said David. There was a tone of reverence in his voice. “She knows what the weather is going to be and she knows when new boats are coming to The Drift. T
he day before you came here she told Tabor—he’s our father—that someone was coming. And she knows what people think. She says it all comes out of shadowgames. Is that true, Sutherland?”

  “David, I just don’t know. I don’t even know what a shadowgame is.”

  “Gosh!” said Michael.

  “It’s cause he’s from land,” said David. “They do things different on land. You musn’t ask him so many questions,” he added in a fierce, embarrassed whisper.

  “But what did you do when you were little if you didn’t play shadowgames or weedwalk?” persisted Michael, who was paying no attention to his brother.

  Peter smiled. “I don’t remember what I did when I was a child,” he said. “I don’t think I did much of anything.”

  It seemed that neither of them had heard or understood his answer. “We’re going to play for a while by The Mary Strattford before dinner,” said Michael. “C’m’on with us. You can follow over the boats.” And in another minute they were sloshing off across the water to find their playmates.

  Peter stared after them, wondering vaguely if they were real children. Judging by the size of them, they couldn’t possibly be more than ten or eleven years old. How did they manage to speak so well and know so much at that age? Within him he felt the stirrings of his academic education, his position in the outside world as a teacher. What theory of child development, he wondered, would account for them? Their many languages, their inventions and their strange games? How was it that they seemed so advanced for their age, when they were left so much to themselves, with so little supervision? But perhaps the question was absurd. Dimly, he suspected that it betrayed him as a hopeless and ineffectual pedant. In his heart he suspected that most of the important things in life were not formally learned in schools; they were things one learned for oneself somewhere beyond classrooms and books.

  He, of course, had never enjoyed teaching. And in a perverse way he had always been defensive about his own formal education and about education in general because, after high hopes, it seemed to have done so little for him as a student and as a teacher. He suspected that teaching was for those who felt deeply about others, and he knew now that he had never really cared much for anyone; he had only wanted others to care for him. He had wanted to gain friendship without ever giving it. Sometimes he had even wondered if in his finest moments he were really capable of love, of friendship, of compassion or sympathy. He could not help but feel now that in some ways Tabor’s children were emotionally and intuitively more mature than he. It was a disturbing thought. God, how they made him want to throw away his whole life, to burn it or feed it to the sharks. How much clearer, how much more like water and wind he might have been if only, if only he had somehow lived his life in a different way, if he had only lived more freely, more openly, closer to himself and closer to other people.