by Lloyd Kropp
Again she made no reply.
“Does everyone know?” he said finally.
“Everyone knows you want to leave, but only Pao and I know you are leaving. Pao and I have a gift together. And all the children will have the gift. When you get back to the mainland, tell my husband where I am. Tell him I’ve been waiting all these years.”
As she was about to leave, she turned back once more. A shadow crossed her face. “I keep forgetting,” she said with the air of someone who has forgotten a ball of yarn. “He’s dead, isn’t he? Yes. Dead nearly sixty years.”
Ten
THE SCARFACED MAN
The mornings settled into an easy routine. The work was pleasant and simple in a way that work had never been for him before. On his third morning in The Seafields, schools of jellyfish, drifting in from the outer reaches of The Sargasso Sea, began to invade the bands of clear water between the vegetation, and Reuben took great delight in pointing out the different varieties and colors. Peter had never seen jellyfish before, and he was fascinated by their subtle pastel hues and the way they floated at different levels, some just below the surface, others as much as two or three feet underwater, where they took on the ghostly shimmer of an illusion. Once he tried to lift one out of the water with sticks, but just as it reached the surface it broke into pieces and drifted away.
“Invariably they will do that,” said Reuben. “It is their only way of escape.”
“They have no other way,” said Javitt. Each time he returned from The Seafields he went a different way, hoping eventually to explore all of The Drift, and each day he saw things he had not seen before: large grayish plants with a texture like velvet that grew in clumps down near The Outland; a classical figurehead on the prow of an ancient ship; a swarm of sundark children playing an elaborate game on a large blue board with pieces of colored wood. But on his third day’s return from The Seafields he heard a terrible sawing sound somewhere nearby. He thought of the story that Pao had told him, David and Michael’s tale of The Hatchmaker sawing hatches in the bottoms of boats which then sank during the night.
Suddenly he came upon the bow of a nineteenth-century schooner that loomed thirty feet above the sloop he was crossing. A young boy in a black shirt hung over the narrow ribbon of water below the schooner, one hand clinging to the rail, the other sawing away at the bowsprit with a large hacksaw. It was Raven.
“Hello,” said Peter.
The boy turned suddenly, almost losing his narrow footing at the edge of the bow. For a moment Peter had the impression that he would leap down upon him like a giant bird swooping down to seize a squirrel. The boy’s eyes glittered, but he did not speak.
“What are you doing?” said Peter.
“I’m sawing off the bowsprit,” said Raven.
“I see. Any particular reason?”
“I want to see it crash into the water.”
“What will that accomplish?” said Peter.
“Nothing,” said Raven. “That’s the whole point. My purpose is not to accomplish anything.” He gave Peter an acid smile.
Peter smiled back. It was a lovely day and nothing, he promised himself, would dim his spirits. Not even Raven. “What will you not accomplish after you don’t accomplish anything by sawing off the bowsprit?” he asked.
“I’ll saw the whole goddamn boat in half,” said Raven.
“Won’t anyone mind?”
“This is my boat,” said Raven. “Nobody can stop me from doing anything I want on my boat. Even Tabor said so.”
“So this is your life’s work?” said Peter.
“Not really. In a year or so I’ll probably be an Outlander. They fight and steal women and raid The Southern Edge for supplies and sail around The Drift in rowboats and rafts. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s better than fooling around here making up songs and dances and staring at the moon.”
For a moment they stared at each other, Peter looking up from the sloop, Raven hanging above him from the rail of the schooner. He had never really seen Raven before in the clear light of day, except at a distance. He was not an ugly boy, but something about his appearance was unsettling. His hair receded slightly above his temples to reveal a broad and prominent forehead, but his face was dominated by the long shock of black hair that fell down over one eye. His long narrow nose pointed to lips that were thin and bloodless. His small chin gave his head a triangular look, like the joker in a deck of cards.
Raven laid the saw on the deck, shifted his weight, and brushed the hair out of his eye. He was slender and very pale, but when he moved there was a sureness about him, an agility that was not frail or effeminate, but wolfish and careful.
“Haven’t you got business somewhere?” he said.
“I was just going to lunch,” said Peter. “Are you coming?”
“Not with you, Sutherland.” He picked up his saw again and went back to work. Peter watched for a moment and then began his journey back to The Mary Strattford. A few seconds later he heard a loud crack and then a splash. The bowsprit had fallen into the water.
Raven laughed, and his laughter was high and brittle. For a moment Peter remembered the small man with the knife, the Outlander who had tried to come up behind him.
“With a bomb I could do better,” Raven shouted.
That afternoon, standing on the deck of his own ship, Peter caught a quick glimpse of Pao running across The Northside Cliff about twenty boats above him.
“Pao!”
She smiled and waved at him, but did not answer.
The evening of his third day at The Seafields he spent in the hull of the old bilander where his aluminum dinghy was hidden. He had borrowed a heavy bone needle and some thread from Bright, and he worked, again late into the night, at cutting a large sail down to a reasonable size and stitching the edges. Finally the lamp burned low and he was forced to give up for the evening. As he turned to leave the ship, he saw a face and broad shoulders framed in the hatchway above him. The face smiled in the dim lamplight. It was horribly discolored. It belonged to the Outlander he had knocked into the water four days earlier.
Footsteps sounded on the deck above him. Apparently the scarfaced man was not alone. For a moment Peter was frozen with terror. The Outlander’s smile held him like a rabbit in the eyes of a wolf. When the man finally began to move down the stairs, Peter seized a claw hammer he had found in the motor launch and a large paddle he had confiscated from a schooner nearby. The Outlander stopped. He tossed his gaff hook from hand to hand and cocked his head to one side. Then two more heads appeared in the black hatchway above him.
He knew that if the first man got to the bottom of the stairs it would be the end of him. There would be no way then of keeping the rest of them from coming down, and he would have to fight three armed men in the cramped darkness of the hull. He glanced at his lamp. It was burning very low now. He would have to do something quickly.
Frantically he looked around the interior of the ship. The whole hull was a single open space meant simply for storage and sleeping. There was nowhere to hide and no other way out. There were other hatchways, but the stairs leading up to them had all rotted away. Suddenly he remembered the dinghy and the outboard motor. Perhaps—just perhaps—he could frighten them. It would depend on whether or not they had ever heard the sound of a motor.
He hurried back to the dinghy, which lay near the pointed end of the hull, and cried, “Diablo! Diablo!”—it was one of the seven or eight words he knew in Spanish—and pulled the cord to start the motor. It coughed once.
“Diablo! Diablo!” he shrieked, waving his hands in the air. He felt very silly, but he also felt very frightened.
All three men advanced to the bottom of the stairs as soon as they saw him retreat. But now they hesitated. The scarfaced man tried to urge the other two on, but they would not move. They stared at the motor hidden under the black tarpaulin.
“Diablo!” said Peter. He jerked the cord for the fourth time. Finally, under the urging
of their leader, the two men began to move toward the dinghy, but just at that moment the motor sputtered to life. Peter pushed the throttle to the open position and then began jabbering at it and pointing to the three intruders. The noise in the narrow hull of the boat was deafening. The three men stared at the object still hidden under the black canvas, and their eyes grew wide with terror. In a second they had disappeared, the clatter of their footsteps sounding on the stairway and then against the wooden deck above him, everyone except the scarfaced man, who stood his ground and looked curiously and without fear at Peter. Then he smiled and nodded his head.
“Motor,” he said finally. He poked at the motor with his hook. Then he set the hook under the edge of the tarpaulin and lifted it off. “Motor,” he said again. “For to go away.” Then he looked up and Peter saw his eye staring at him in the semi-darkness. Again the man shifted the hook from one hand to the other, and then suddenly he turned and walked up the wooden stairs that led to the deck.
Peter hesitated for a moment and then decided to follow him. On deck he saw the Outlanders scurrying in different directions over the walkways and boats that led back across the edge of their own world. One of them tripped over something and fell with a shriek into the water. The scarfaced man walked slowly from boat to boat. Once he looked back. Then he too disappeared into the darkness of The Outland.
When they were gone, Peter turned to look at the moonlight and the outline of ships against the night sky. All would have been peaceful and lovely again had it not been for the weird and anachronous grinding of the outboard motor that murdered the romantic silence. It was like a demon from another world.
A light went on somewhere near Northside. And then another. Quickly he ran down into the hull of the bilander and shut off the motor. When he returned to the deck he could hear voices, people calling and whispering and walking about in the dark.
Then the moon slipped behind a cloud and he saw nothing but four or five glimmerings of light from the yellow oil lamps. He knelt down and put his arms around his knees, hoping that no one would see him or come to investigate. Crouching there in the darkness he felt very much alone. He thought of Pao, whom he had not seen for several days except at a distance, and then only for a brief moment.
The next morning things went rather badly. No one spoke to him at breakfast, and later in The Seafields, Reuben and Javitt worked silently and avoided his glances. When he returned to The Mary Strattford for lunch, he took a longer way along The Southern Edge, and he saw Tabor and Raven inspecting the old wreck in which his dinghy was hidden. Raven had just come up from the hold and seemed very excited. He shouted something at Tabor, but Peter was too far away to hear what he was saying.
Perhaps now he would incur the resentment of everyone on The Drift. People here were very upset, he had gathered, by anything that broke with tradition or with routine. It was in some odd way a threat to all of them that he wished to leave and was taking steps toward doing so. He could not quite understand it. It was as if life here were only a gossamer fabric, easily torn, and the outside world a harsh and destructive force to be avoided at all cost. What was it that Rose had said? Something about how all the boats in the world are wrecked and how everyone on The Drift is afraid of sails. He remembered the dead, bitter certainty in her voice. It was something she seemed to understand very clearly, even in senility. Had she meant that The Drift was only a dream, a place for fearful people to avoid the storms of life? And yet that very morning it had seemed very real; his previous life at the university had been the dream, an improbable fantasy obliterated by the spell of the ancient ships and the windless isolation of the moment.
Now he could see The Mary Strattford eight boats ahead of him. Bright and Rose were sitting on the deck watching him approach. For a moment he considered skipping lunch and going directly to his own boat. He had a feeling that there would be a scene over his dinghy. It would be worth skipping a meal to avoid it.
The worst thing, he realized, was that his plan was now public knowledge. Perhaps someone would take measures to stop him. And of course the Outlanders would be back. The darkness, the element of surprise, and the black tarpaulin had worked temporarily to his advantage. But they had all seen the boat and they would soon overcome their fear of The Devil. He shook his head in disgust. Everything had gone well until last night. In a way he had even learned to enjoy his temporary exile on The Drift. Now everything would be different, and there was no telling what he might find when he went back into the hull of the old bilander. Perhaps they would hack everything to pieces. Then he would have to start all over, and it would be weeks before he could again find ways, and means of leaving The Sargasso Sea.
Then he remembered that the scarfaced man had not seemed at all frightened by the motor, and in an odd way he found that reassuring. He had seemed less hostile somehow, not the same man he had knocked into the water six days before. He had actually smiled, but not with that sadistic leer Peter remembered from his battle in The Outland. He realized now that he did not understand The Outlanders and could not really predict what they would do. He hunched his shoulders and put his hands in his pockets and gave up any further attempts at meditation. Perhaps, he thought, they would just leave him alone.
At lunch Bright talked incessantly of food and sewing and a new shadowgame the children had invented, but no one else spoke. Finally when the meal was nearly over, Raven looked up from his plate and stared at Peter in a deliberate, hostile way, and smiled.
“Tabor and I saw your boat and your motor today,” he said. “What do you plan to do with them?” It was a direct challenge. Everyone stopped eating and looked up at him, waiting for his answer.
“Never mind that,” said Bright quickly. “Wait until he sees Pao in The Dance of The Nine Islands. Two days from now he won’t be interested in motors anymore.”
She smiled with a kind of hesitant expectancy when everyone turned to look at her. Then Tabor laughed.
“She’s right,” he said. “Pao has a much better shape than an outboard motor.”
Then they all began to laugh. Reuben laughed hardest of all; huge tears of mirth rolled down his cheeks. It seemed to Peter that they were tears of relief and happiness, and he did not understand how such a simple remark could change everything.
“Won’t be interested in motors anymore,” said Reuben, who seemed now on the verge of strangulation. His face was beet red and he quivered silently.
“No interest in motors,” agreed Javitt, who seemed a little confused by all the laughter. Then he scratched his stubbly chin and thought for a moment, and then he jabbed Peter on the shoulder to attract his attention.
“I saw a motor on a boat once about a year ago,” he said. It was only the second time Peter had ever heard him speak except to echo Reuben. “Do they really help the sails?” he asked. “Or are they just for making scary noises?”
Eleven
DRIFTSEND
That afternoon the sky was cloudless, like a blue mirror. It made him think of the days he had spent sailing, the days before his ship sank and he had drifted into The Sargasso Sea. But after an hour or two a light wind blew across the water, and for Peter it was a mild shock. A dead calm had engulfed The Drift ever since he had arrived, except for an hour or so the day he and Pao had gone exploring. And now the atmosphere had changed. It was as if the wind, blowing from all the latitudes of the earth, brought news of the world beyond and broke the inward stillness of things, the timeless sleep that settled everywhere like dust on the water and on the old ships.
He felt very restless. Pao had virtually disappeared now for four days, and in spite of all there was to do and see he was at loose ends without her and found her image and her voice in his mind while he ate, before he slept, and during his walks to and from The Seafields. There were things everywhere to remind him of her: the shirt he wore, the seabread and the flowers on his dresser—and the conversations of the children were filled with references to her. It seemed that she had left her
mark everywhere, most of all upon him. Tomorrow he would see her again; tomorrow was the day of the festival for which she had been preparing in secret. But today he felt restless and alone. Today the sky was a mask; the glittering water, a vague mystery; and beyond the point of Driftsend two Outlanders in long beards were sailing in a wide circle around The Drift on a raft rigged with a large gaff sail. He could hear their voices, blurred echoes across the water. He watched the red fishing bobbins trailing in their wake. Suddenly he longed to be with them.
He was reluctant now to go back to his dinghy during the daytime. There was no point in creating friction. His position, he felt, was awkward enough as it stood. There were a number of other things that needed doing. First, he might spend some more time looking for gasoline. He had explored all of the small motor launches two days before and had found nothing. His best chance now would be in searching the clipper ships, some of which, he suspected, carried auxiliary engines. At least that would give him something to do. And besides, he had longed to explore the clipper ships at Driftsend, the forbidden zone at the east end of The Drift where The Hatchmaker played his music. The sound of that playing haunted him even in the long afternoons when all was silent save for the merest gauze of wind and the cry of birds. The Hatchmaker had become a kind of focal point in his mind for many things. He suspected in some intuitive way that The Hatchmaker was the key to his ambivalence, his inability to make up his mind about the meaning or purpose of The Drift.
Meaning and purpose. Somehow the words seemed absurd. Peter had always been fond of categorical distinctions, his ability to put things in different boxes. But The Drift was baffling, a fantasy world that denied categories. It left him not with categories of meaning, but only with impressions, notions of how to feel his way through a kind of labyrinth. He smiled, thinking how difficult it was for a structured, selfconscious person like himself to live in a world without precedents. And so he was thrown back on intuition, and this, he thought, was the essence of dangerous living. He did not know why he wanted to explore the clipper ships, but there it was: an urge that he knew, somehow, would clarify this vague impression that he could not put into words, this sense of mystery, this feeling that the burnished sky hovering in the halcyon calm above The Sargasso Sea was really the eye of some mystic vision, the calm center of a maelstrom, the epiphany of some inward state of being.