by Lloyd Kropp
“Stay away or I’ll kill you!” he shouted.
Peter looked down and smiled and waved with one hand. He wondered what he could do to get Raven to take himself less seriously. “You couldn’t kill a crippled sea gull!” he shouted back. “Now just wait a minute—I want to talk to you!”
Raven smiled, pleased at Peter’s feigned anger. “You’ll have to catch me,” he said, leaping from one boat to the next, his black arms outstretched like wings.
Peter scrambled quickly down the catwalk and then hurried across to the old fishing scow from which Raven had shouted at him. In the corner of his eye he saw a black shape dart into a doorway, but when he reached the cabin it was empty, as were the sleeping and storage quarters below. But in exploring the small ship he saw that rotting boards had fallen out of the hull in the forward storage compartment, making a jagged hole large enough for a man to jump through. Outside lay the overturned hull of another nameless ship, upon which part of the fishing scow rested. Peter leaped through the hole, slid for a moment on the slippery, curved surface of the greenish hull, and lost his balance. From above him came the sound of raucous laughter. Peter shaded his eyes, looked up, and saw Raven’s black outline against the sun, a dark profile shaking with laughter at the rail of a ship that loomed high on the side opposite the fishing scow.
“You’ll never catch me,” he screeched. “You’re too clumsy and too old.”
Peter winced at the “clumsy” and “old,” but still he managed to answer in good spirit: “I’m a thunderball of fire and grace!” he cried. “You’re as good as caught!”
“Bilgewater! Fishguts!” cried Raven, and he was gone!
When he reached the deck of the ship, Raven was two boats ahead of him again. But now the boy seemed tired. Even at that distance Peter could see his chest heaving and hear the flatfooted thud of his feet on the boards. When he reached Twoboats, he stopped and listened. Again Raven seemed to have disappeared. For long moments he blinked and looked about him; the world was bleak and dazzled because he had looked into the sun where Raven had laughed.
Then the boy appeared from behind a pile of barrels, the ones that had been arranged days and days ago in a circle around the painted ocean and The Nine Islands. Peter ducked behind the remains of a shearer mast and watched as Raven looked slowly about him, his hands open and loose as if they were sense organs listening, resting easily on the air. Then he turned and slowly let himself go over the lip of the slide that led to Pao’s pool.
Peter followed, remembering the dance and the pool and the first night he and Pao had spent together. He moved again with that curious slowness of motion that he remembered so clearly, a soundless sliding always on the verge of a stop. And then quite unexpectedly Raven stood up a few yards ahead of him on the slide, and with an enormous leap caught hold of a rope dangling from the dark side of a large caravel, at the point where the slide turned into the reverberating chambers of greenish darkness between the boats, that hushed place of shadows just before the slide emptied into the pool.
Peter caught the edges of the slide and stopped himself. Raven was only a few feet above him now, slowly pulling himself up the rope toward a large hole in the girdle of the caravel. He waited until the boy disappeared into the hole, then he too stood up on the slide, jumped, caught the rope, and began to ropewalk up the slippery hull of the old vessel. A minute or two later he swung through the hole into what seemed to be a large captain’s cabin.
Raven was sprawled in an old chair in one corner of the room. He did not look up when Peter entered.
“So you followed me all the way,” he said in an even tone that betrayed nothing. “I saw you coming up, but I didn’t have the energy to cut the rope or stab you as you came through the hole. I was too tired.”
“Well,” said Peter, “I’m grateful for that. I’d hate to fall all that distance.”
“Nothing to be afraid of,” said Raven. “The worst that happens is that you break your neck.” He glanced in a listless way around his room, kicked over a pile of books near his foot, and sighed deeply.
When Peter was satisfied that Raven had settled into a relatively peaceful mood, he began to look around the room. Above the doorway was a sign painted in red ink that said “Raven’s Eyrie,” and beyond that lay a pile of ancient furniture, a woman’s satin gown, a bronze cuspidor, two carved legs from a smashed table, and other things that Raven had apparently thrown out of the room into the hallway that led to other compartments and to stairs leading up to the gun deck. In Raven’s corner of the room stood his large wooden chair piled high with cushions, a table with a dozen old copies of Popular Mechanics, and a tall floor lamp, its cord lying in a useless tangle under the chair. At the opposite end of the room lay a stuffed blackbird with some of its feathers removed and glued together in what looked like a crude attempt at a headdress, three other chairs, and an outboard motor half torn down, its parts scattered over the floor in piles of rust.
“I was trying to fix it,” he said. “But I didn’t have the right tools. You need the right tools to fix things.”
Maps and diagrams clipped out of magazines and newspapers were tacked in a sprawling crazy-quilt pattern all over the walls of the room: political and geographical maps of Europe and South America, blueprint drawings of motors, railroad engines, airplanes, bridges, and buildings, and diagrams of German military campaigns.
“Once I wanted to form a new clan or a club or something.” said Raven absently, staring into space like a boy with nothing to do on Sunday afternoon. “I was going to call it The Explorer’s Club. But no one would join.”
Suddenly from beyond the doorway came the sound of rats. Peter turned and saw five of them skittering along the wall, stopping, eyeing him with their flaming, cloudy eyes.
Raven smiled. “Well, I guess I shouldn’t say no one.” He reached into his pocket and brought out a matchbox filled with crumbs of boiled fish. The rats began to mew and cheep and run around Raven’s chair, and then, to Peter’s horror, they scratched and crawled their way up a sprawl of pillows and magazines, and from there they jumped into the boy’s lap.
“There you are, clubmembers,” said Raven, holding the pieces of fish above the rats, dropping them one by one.
The plump gray creatures bobbed and tumbled awkwardly in Raven’s lap for the morsels of fish, then waved their noses in the air and twitched their whiskers, waiting for the next piece to fall. Peter had always hated rodents of any kind, but he watched, morbidly fascinated, as the pale, slender boy in the black shirt fed his small, wild-eyed guests.
“The thing I really like about rats is that if I don’t feed them often enough they come up and bite my fingers. That’s exactly what I’d do if I was a rat.”
“But you’re not a rat,” said Peter.
Raven looked up from his hungry friends and smiled. “I’m not so sure. Anyway, I’m not interested in being human any more.”
Peter pulled a chair up to within a few feet of Raven, sat down on the arm so that his feet would rest on the seat some distance above the floor, and waited for the grotesque meal to end.
“You know,” said Raven, “there was never any arrangement between me and Pao. It’s not that you interrupted anything when you came to The Drift.”
“But you’ve always loved her.”
Raven made a face at the word “love.” “She never made fun of me the way the Madrid and Conquistador boys did,” he said. “She sort of ignored me. I guess that was much worse.”
“Why did she ignore you?”
“How should I know? She—well—she doesn’t like people like me. She likes The Madrids and The Bluewaters because they sing and dance. Things like that.”
“Then I wonder why she got to be so fond of me. I don’t sing and dance and I’m much older than she is.”
Raven smiled at the euphemism. “She’s fond of you cause you’re different. You’ve lived in places that no one here has hardly ever seen. You’ve got powers she doesn’t have.”
“What powers?”
“I don’t know. That’s what Tabor says that she says. You’re ‘The Beautiful Stranger’—that’s a song she wrote when she was only twelve years old. She says she knew even then that you were coming.”
Soon the rats finished eating and went elsewhere, looking for food. Peter descended from his cramped position on his chair and sat down. Raven smiled at his fear of the little creatures, but it was not a contemptuous smile. “You’re not like anybody around here,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know exactly. Are you musical?”
“Am I musical? No, not especially. What’s that got to do with it?”
“Everybody on The Drift is extremely musical. I’m more like The Outlanders. I like to fight and explore and make things.”
“Some people say that’s what history is all about,” said Peter. “But why do you like to fight? Why are The Outlanders always fighting?”
“I s’pose cause there isn’t much else to do,” said Raven. “And besides, you feel better afterwards. It makes everything sort of peaceful inside you for a while.”
“I suppose for some people—” But then he could not finish the sentence, for Raven’s sake. For some people fighting is like loving, he thought. For some desperate people combat is the only way to make contact, the only way to touch the life of another human being, the only way to define oneself in terms of the respect or hatred of others. In a sense, his life had been like that. A fierce, unhappy game of things to be won or lost from other people or from the world, a game that he had never played very well and whose victories had been like dust in his mouth.
Raven slouched in his chair and stared sightlessly into the hallway where his rats had vanished in search of food. Finally he reached underneath his chair and carefully, slowly, withdrew a large red guitar. He fondled it for a moment like a blind child, and then he began to play, to strum the strings in a cordless, incoherent way. Sometimes he would hum to himself and sometimes he would bark or chuckle or make obscene noises. “Raven plays to while away his days,” he bleated once in a tuneless voice, and then smiled his hangman’s smile. The noise of his voice and his guitar reminded Peter of something that he could not give a name to, something very familiar.
“Ever notice that guitars always have a hole right in the middle?” he said halfway through his concert. “That’s pretty funny! No lid or anything, just a hole in the middle! And when you look, there’s nothing inside! Just an empty box that makes sounds! Just a silly box of wood filled with twangs and strums that you can’t put anything in because the wires are in the way!” He laughed and then he played louder, working his hand like a claw across the strings and shouting something incoherent about girls with figures like guitars.
Peter listened, and he sensed more clearly now the ambiguity and contradiction that seemed to be a part of everything Raven did and said. His clumsy, mawkish performance on the red guitar was a gesture of contempt for the music he could not play, for a life he could never lead. But it was also a rhapsody of self hatred, a way to dramatize his own ineptness and isolation by destroying the image of himself as a human being. It made Peter think of the rats that Raven courted as friends; it made him think of Raven’s own ship that he was methodically sawing into pieces. But all this was, in a curious and unexpected way, a contradiction to something almost affirmative in that dark, jangled music. To Peter it seemed quite evident: a submerged reverence in the way Raven sometimes lowered his head when he tried to play, staring at the strings as if they were hieroglyphs in some forgotten tongue, and in the way his sardonic smile dissolved for brief moments into wistfulness. Peter imagined for an instant that he could read the boy’s mind: If I could really play, why then.…
Suddenly Raven stopped. His eyes filled with tears. “I’m not very musical,” he said.
Peter put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Never mind. There are other things in the world besides music.”
Raven stared at the hand on his shoulder and then pulled away, stung by Peter’s compassion. His face turned red. Then he laughed and put the big end of the guitar under his shoulder and began to make terrible faces and groan melodramatically and stagger in a wide circle.
“A guitar is just a crutch!” he shouted in a wild, comic voice. As he banged and limped around the room, a terrified rat scurried out of one comer and disappeared beneath the broken furniture outside the cabin door.
“Look! cried Raven. “I’m crippled!”
Then he laughed in a selfconscious way. Suddenly the charade was over and he stood in the center of the room, looking at Peter. The red guitar dangled from one hand in front of him. It was like a garment that hid his nakedness. There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of the boy’s breathing.
“It’s time to go back now,” said Peter quietly, hardly daring to speak, afraid now of breaking the fragile equilibrium between them. “Bright will be wanting to know if you’re all right.”
When they were halfway back to The Mary Strattford, he remembered what the sound of Raven’s guitar had reminded him of: The Hatchmaker.
At dinner he noticed again that Pao was missing.
“About ten days after a woman on The Drift begins to live with a man she moves all her belongings to his boat,” said Bright. “The Bluewaters call that The Second Marriage. So I fancy she’s been busy all day collecting things, being that she’s lived in so many places. She told me she would see you sometime after dinner,” she added in a conciliatory tone.
Raven looked up from his plate of fish and prawns. His eyes were filled with tears, but he did not speak.
“I saw her down at the water gathering sea hyacinths,” said Tabor. “She said she wanted something nice for the brass bowl on your dresser.”
“Pao has always been one to fix things up,” said Bright.
“But there was something odd,” said Tabor. “She looked rather sad.”
“Sad?”
“Yes. I asked her what was wrong. She said she’d tell me tomorrow morning.”
Then Rose stopped eating and turned to look at Tabor. “Tomorrow morning,” repeated the old woman fiercely.
“When did you see her?” said Peter.
“About two hours ago,” said Tabor.
“That’s funny,” said Peter. “I saw her for a second late this morning and she looked very—” But then he could not remember whether she had looked happy or unhappy. Had she smiled? He remembered that she had waved to him, but he could not see her face in his mind’s eye, and when he tried to isolate her look at that moment he saw only a mirror, a shimmer of water in which nothing reflected. He remembered her hand and the movement of her body as she shifted the weight of her bundle to one hip, nothing more. Suddenly a strange image crossed his mind. Pao was a star made from mirrors of water, a star receding faster than the speed of light, moving out of his galaxy and into the void beyond it.
“—radiant, I should think,” said Bright, finishing his sentence. “Tabor, you must have been mistaken.”
“Perhaps I was,” said Tabor.
Rose was still staring at Peter. She folded her arms and made no attempt to finish her dinner. When he looked up he could not avoid her eyes.
When the meal was over he hurried back to his own ship. There were indeed water hyacinths in his brass bowl, and the cabin had been scrubbed so that the wood smelled new and wet. And there were long curtains made from sailcloth hanging from the windows. On his bed lay a note:
My Dear One—I will be back in two hours. I am gathering the last of my things. If you are here when I get back I will never let you go. This is a warning.
Pao
He smiled when he read the note. But then almost immediately the words seemed to suggest a second meaning. What had she been thinking when Tabor saw her? He read the note again. “If you are here when I get back—”
He wandered out onto the deck of his schooner. The Hatchmaker was playing again, and he listened for a moment to the sound
of his jangled music. Suddenly he was very restless; the idea of waiting two hours for Pao was unthinkable. Where had she gone? It was strange, he thought, that in all the time he had known her he had never thought to ask where she lived on The Drift. He had the impression, now that he thought about it, that she lived in several places. The children had said something about that once. It would probably be nearly impossible to find her before she came back in her own good time.
Still, he had a terrible urge to do something. It was the same feeling he had the day he wandered into The Outland to retrieve his dinghy. He thought of the dinghy, ready now for its long and dangerous voyage, and he thought of The Hatchmaker and the mad sounds he made from the clipper ship at Driftsend. It would only be a matter of going back and searching through the ship for some sort of fuel; he was sure it was there somewhere. The whole place smelled of it. But this time he would not be so stupid; this time he would bring one of the hurricane lamps from his cabin.
He smiled. How easily his mind slipped back into the old groove. The old woman’s ramblings, Raven’s bitterness, and the episode with the rats had awakened something in him, the vague suspicion that he was somehow trapped, caught in a drugged sleep from which he could not awaken. Such things made him think in a vague way of the shark and of the blue dream he could never seem to remember.
He shaded his eyes and looked up at the sun that was sinking swiftly toward the horizon. Only a few minutes had passed. Pao would not return for at least an hour and a half. There was plenty of time. He knew somehow that his own feeling about The Drift would never be quite clear until he felt certain about the possibility of a return to his old life, a possibility that the discovery of gasoline would clearly establish, and until he knew something more about that strange musician, that summation of all the mysteries on The Drift, The Hatchmaker. Perhaps just a few minutes with a lamp would reveal a great deal about both.
The sun touched the horizon. It would be dark now in less than an hour. He brought a lamp from his cabin and then made his way toward Driftsend.