Water Memory: A Thriller (Sentro)

by Daniel Pyne

  And voices. Deep in the stacks of containers on the deck.

  A flickering light beam stabs a gap between cargo and blinds her, then vanishes.

  She can hear what she assumes is the sound of someone clambering up the container rigging, the squeak of a door or hatch; a shadow bobs in the darkness above the stacks’ square flat silhouette. Don’t get discovered here, is her first thought, because she hasn’t cleared her midnight walk on the main deck. But her instinctive suspicions have the day—or night, in this case—and she quietly makes her way down the perimeter of the Jeddah, stepping carefully because the runners are slippery with salt mist. Another brief stab of the flashlight through the cargo, like a strobe, helps her orient. Another scrape, metal on metal, and the faintest hint of bodies moving, the sibilant whisper of low voices through thin chasms of steel.

  Halfway back to the accommodations tower, she becomes aware that all she’s hearing are her own movements. She stops, listens. Nothing but the sea and stacks shifting and the Jeddah’s normal complaints about the opposing current.

  She cuts through the next gap between the stacks, going in where the darkness is disorienting and the wash of stars above her seems, by contrast, overlit. Near the center she arrives at a small, odd, open area between towering stacks, like one of those tiny hidden public squares in Venice with the roving vendors and used books—her tenth wedding anniversary, she and Dennis would come upon them, like sudden secrets, and could never find them again if they tried. There’s a hatch that leads down into a dry-bulk container below her at the top of the hold. It’s fastened tight, but she can just make out a spillage of something that smells of land and plants. It feels pebbly, smells organic. She has no light to parse its riddle.

  Crouching, Sentro looks up the sides of the stacks rising on all sides of her, trying to puzzle out a mystery she may be inventing whole cloth from her hypervigilant default. A few feet away, an object wedged into the deck seam catches starlight. It feels like a long bolt, half-encased in plastic, the exposed end tapered, almost sharp.

  Footsteps behind her. She slips the bolt in the pocket of her jeans, intending to stand up, but a pair of big hands pulls her off balance and twists her and bangs her back into the side of a container, pinning her there.

  “What are you doing here?” Portuguese. The crewman with the scar through his eye leers at her with a cruel malice that must be baked into him; he smells of sweat, vodka, and hashish. Sentro is not a close-quarter fighter if she can help it; the fantasy that a small, fit woman can overpower a bigger, heavier, stronger, younger man has led to a lot of tragic miscalculations in the field, and she knows it would be better not to reveal herself to the other passengers or the captain and crew if she can avoid a violent confrontation with this one.

  What were you looking for? She thinks that’s what he’s asked.

  “Just trying to cut through, to get to the other side,” she says, adding, “Shortcut,” and when his good eye darts away to make a quick scan of the clearing and the towering containers, just as she did, Sentro sideslips out of his grasp, wondering if, whatever was going on here in the darkness, he may not have been part of it.

  “You’re not like the others,” he tells her, switching to heavily accented English, and reaches to grab her hair and pull her back to him.

  She catches his hand. “No, I’m not.” Unable to tug himself free, a flicker of confusion crosses his face, as if there’s something in Sentro that he suspects is out of pattern, and she finds herself wondering what this man is really doing on this ship—but the thought is broken by the sound of someone else entering the cargo clearing, and:

  “Am I interrupting something?” Charlemagne eases out of a gap, eyeing the curious couple he’s discovered, and the scarred crewman leans in and mashes his lips against Sentro’s in a vile, clumsy gesture of dominance that causes Sentro to reflexively slap him so hard his whole body pivots away from her.

  Cocktease, is what she thinks she hears him hiss.

  “Hey!” the Tagalog barks, stepping forward, but the scarred crewman is already moving away from them, spitting dismissively on the deck. Disappearing into the shadows with a defiant, shambling gait.

  Charlemagne chases him with Tagalog obscenities, then turns, gallant, to Sentro. “You okay?”

  She nods, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “What are you doing out here?”

  He flashes a slender pack and a lighter to offer her a smoke. Sentro demurs. He blushes and puts the pack in his shirt pocket. “No, me neither, I am trying to quit,” he assures her.

  As they slip back out to the U-deck perimeter, Charlemagne chirps happily in Tagalog and proceeds to have a one-sided conversation that Sentro doesn’t bother to try understanding. His language flows like strange music, percussive, and Sentro’s attention strays, distrait, wondering what the fuck just happened and how much of it she’s precipitated with her relentless, untethered suspicion about everything.

  At the bottom of the accommodation tower stairs, before they ascend, Charlemagne stops to get her attention, repeating something he’s just said, and when Sentro looks at him, he gestures vaguely and makes a big show of taking the pack of cigarettes out again, tapping out and lighting two. Sentro’s about to decline again when he holds up his hand. Wait.

  The embered ends glow in the darkness. He puts one in each ear.

  Closes his eyes.

  “Abracadabra.” It sounds alien when he says it.

  The two cigarettes wink bright on either side of his head, like disembodied eyes, in unison. Charlemagne puffs smoke rings from his o-shaped lips.

  Giddy smile. Gold teeth. “Circus trick,” he says.

  Sentro laughs, the tension that’s wound her body tight finally easing, and she high-fives the Tagalog’s offered bony hand.

  He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and . . .

  The bottle of pills on the night table nearly tips when she puts Jeremy’s book down after an abortive attempt to crack the first page.

  . . . To the white men in the waterside business and to the captains of ships he was just Jim—nothing more. He had, of course, another name, but he was anxious that it should not be pronounced. His incognito, which had as many holes as a sieve, was not meant to hide a personality but a fact.

  She closes her eyes.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A dawn chill claws the coastal two-lane, all the way to the stony eastern point. Ghoulish slender black palms rise curving up through it like frozen fireworks.

  They need three go-fast boats for this gig, which means they’re one boat short, and Castor knows just where to find it, short notice.

  The shrimper David Carew has been bragging about is a sweet new thirty-five-footer with a hard chine and twin outboards he keeps tied up at the wharf beyond the Coaster Wheel, and because it’s probably true that he isn’t likely to let them borrow his boat—which Pauly helpfully pointed out as they stepped up onto the covered porch in the northern hills—when a sleep-starved Carew opens the shack’s front door, Castor lifts a .45 and puts two bullets through the little man’s head, like a second set of eyes, boom boom. Blood and brain spritz back and sideways, and Carew flops fishlike to the bamboo floor, taking more than a moment to stop juddering.

  “Oy,” Pauly says, more than a little startled.

  His brother shrugs with one shoulder, saying, “We’re on the clock, brah,” and puts his gun away too soon, because Carew has guests.

  Pauly shoves past him, shouldering the AK automatic from their recently acquired arsenal, but the local men inside the dingy room are drunk and unarmed and no threat to the twins; still, Pauly can tell from the terror in their eyes that they’re not going to be able to let this insult to their friend slide, so there’s more work to be done here.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, though he’s not, and he squeezes a burst in their direction; one man down in a heap, the other
crashing out panicked through the shuttered back window. Castor goes after him with a Ka-Bar knife and catches him halfway up Carew’s rotting fence.

  Pauly loves only his brother in this hard world, likens their wordless twin-syncopated havoc to a short litter of feral dogs, which, when you get right down to it, is pretty much who they are. Who they had to be to get this far, he thinks.

  Everything from here on out is going to be different. Fucking epic, in fact.

  “The fuck are you gawking at?” Castor asks, irritable, dragging his gutted, bloodied fugitive back to the window and hefting and stuffing the limp body through. Pauly suspects the man might still be alive. He won’t be for long.

  “I’m gawking at the knob that didn’t find out where the key’s at before he did Wavy Davey Carew.”

  “We can jump the twin boards.”

  “Maybe. Mebbe not.”

  Castor scowls, sometimes annoyed when Pauly is right. They spend way too much time fruitlessly sorting through Carew’s shack, find some coiled rope, a useless pistol that hasn’t been cleaned in decades, and a cracker tin filled with Brazilian real. There’s paperwork for the go boat in the big tackle box on the porch, receipts and licenses, but no key.

  “Carlito can get pretty much anything to start up,” Castor insists.

  Pauly thinks he hears a car slowly winding up the road. “Okay.” Time to go.

  The five-gallon can of gasoline they brought won’t spread far, but after piling the bodies in the middle of the floor, Castor splashes it up across the walls and gets the sofa pretty good.

  Wavy Davey’s home is all dry wood and creosote and catches fire fast. Pauly can feel the heat from the flames on his back for a good distance as they scramble down through the trees to where they left the scooter. He was wrong about the car coming; the dirt road is empty all the way to the highway. Pauly considers it an excellent omen.

  They can see green-black smoke from Carew’s still billowing up like a thunderhead from the pier, where, sure enough, their one-eyed lieutenant works his magic with the ignition wires and in no time at all has the go boat’s twin 150s throttled and humming out across the bay to where their new crew awaits.

  Something about toeing the red line in long lazy circles, casting a silhouette in a bright, clear equatorial sunrise; something about the sense of insignificance, a tiny runner on this huge ship running tiny in a boundless, heaving Atlantic, horizon the same in every direction. Sentro takes care not to trip on the tangle of rigging or touch the railings glazed with an oil that doesn’t wash off. On her first lap she passed the newlyweds taking an intimate stroll, unconcerned with her, murmuring to each other, heads inclined, touching the way you do at first and sometimes for a long time after, like Dennis did with her until the troubles started; she often worried it was because he was afraid if he didn’t, he’d lose all connection to her—that she’d spin away like one of Big Bruce’s satellites no longer held in orbit.

  It occurs to her, as she runs, that she’s been running like this all her life in one way or another, not in circles so much as in cycles—days, months, years, missions, staying in her lane, avoiding entanglements, and returning again and again to her starting point unchanged, just wearier. The memories, stacked like containers, locked, unmarked, throw their shadows over her, daylight flickering sometimes between them.

  Half a year after he died, Sentro decided to deal with everything her husband had left behind: clothes, shoes, unpaid bills, penny stock investments, free weights, road bike, his collection of pins from minor-league baseball parks. In the desk Dennis called his office, she found folders of half-baked projects he’d schemed and abandoned but never told her about: a wedding videography business, a pop-up panini shop in Bethesda, vacation real estate opportunities, a solar farm in the Sonoran Desert, the half-finished outline of a how-to book for stay-at-home dads. Expecting to find in the big bottom drawer the family’s important document files, she discovered instead several photo albums and a note from Dennis clearly scrawled late stage in his cancer. He explained how he’d curated from thousands of photographs he’d taken of the kids all the things Sentro had missed while on assignment. Not the obvious milestones like birthdays, holidays, and graduations; these were more like the incremental everyday treasures that a parent collects as children grow. Candid moments he’d shared with no one and saved for her in his final act of love. A box turtle Jeremy had found in the garden. The sofa-cushion forts Jenny had made and kite-string spiderwebs she’d spun in her room on rainy days. The ice cream truck of summer. The lopsided snowmen. Jenny’s hair clips. Jeremy’s haircuts. The ginormous (Jenny’s word) potato bug in the bathroom that had terrorized all of them. An afternoon park picnic in silted August sunlight: Jeremy shirtless, Jenny painting dinosaurs on his back.

  Sentro felt light headed as she first flipped through the albums. Transported, dizzy, into another realm she had long ago come to terms with never visiting. Except for what Jenny and Jeremy wanted, she gave all of Dennis’s other things to Goodwill. For the next six months, she spent her downtime with her grief and her picture books, memorizing the moments, going through the photographs, in sequence, the way her husband had intended, until she began to feel she had been there when they were taken.

  After which she threw them away.

  Her reasoning, solid at the time, was that she wanted Dennis’s recorded history to become real memory, her memory, and have it, with time, grow as imprecise and forgiving as memory, not saved and fact-checkable in photo albums she could go back to when memory failed.

  And now? What if these are the memories she loses? Last in, first out?

  “Running so sucks.” Fontaine rattles down the forecastle stairs, brushing past, breathing hard.

  Startled, then pleasantly surprised, Sentro keeps going. “Morning.” Up the stairs, past the newly repaired anchor rigging, back down the other side, and into the glare of the rising sun.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she checks for Fontaine through the gaps of container alleyways—assuming, since Fontaine was slightly ahead of her, she’ll overtake the Englishwoman on her parallel starboard course. But there’s no sign of her. The sun has baked the steel on this side of the ship, and it throws off heat in gentle eddies of distortion.

  The cat logo on the rusty-red container grins down at her, bright-yellow cargo bolt seals dangling from both door handles. Same as the one she found wedged in the decking before her weird midnight dustup with the creepy one-eyed crewman. She’s been back to the little clearing between the stacks once since and found no evidence of the earthy deck detritus from that night. She worries she only imagined it.

  Looking angled up at the cat and paying no attention to where she’s going, she nearly slams into Fontaine, who’s stepped out of the next narrow passageway between containers. Sentro breaks stride and skip-hops around the Englishwoman, hip glancing off the railing and leaving grease skid marks on her leggings. Fontaine reverses, runs after, and finds pace with her, their strides synced; they can’t quite run side by side on the narrow perimeter deck, but Sentro feels the steady footfalls right behind her, smells the sour coffee in Fontaine’s labored breaths.

  “I thought everything spins clockwise south of the equator.”

  “That’s toilets flushing,” Sentro says. “And hurricanes. Which are typhoons or cyclones, below the line.”

  “Why did I know you’d know?”

  “I didn’t think about direction when I started out,” Sentro adds.

  They run in silence for a while.

  “Do you mind me running with you?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” Fontaine is starting to labor. “Because I would anyway, seeing as I went to all the trouble of cutting through that valley . . . of shadows . . . to catch you.”

  Sentro eases up. Fontaine’s stride settles.

  “So. Mr. Sentro, where’s he?”

  Sentro isn’t prepared for the question. Feels her face flush red. “How can you be sure there is one?”
>
  “There has to be. And some little Sentros, I suspect.”

  Sentro slows and stops. Fontaine circles back, her legs heavy, her breathing ragged. Not a runner, Sentro thinks. Pretending to be. For me. “You’re trying way too hard.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes.”

  “By the way, have you read any of your book? Or is it just for show?”

  “Fontaine, I don’t know what you expect of me, but—”

  “I’ve never known anyone who willingly read Conrad, is my question, I guess.”

  “Not to change the subject. Much.”

  The Englishwoman looks intent on saying something glib, then doesn’t. Sentro watches her regroup.

  “We’re in limbo, love. That’s what this is.” Fontaine glances away, at the sea, then back, some of the thick armor coming off. “I’m not looking for love or commitment. Just a modicum of companionship . . . someone to hold on to in the darkness . . .” Her voice trails off. She looks out at the sea. There’s a palpable melancholy in Fontaine she seems determined to deny. Secrets. Sentro has always found secrets irresistible.

  “Do I scare you, Aubrey?”

  “One of my little Sentros is almost old enough to be your boyfriend.”

  “A, he’s not here, is he? And B, who says I want a boyfriend?”

  “Fontaine—”

  “Say no again, then. My feelings won’t be hurt.”

  Sentro blinks. She can hear the water coursing past the hull below them, the ceaseless shifting of cargo, the visceral grind of the engine room. They stare at each other. Fontaine’s eyes. Are they yellow or brown or both?

  “Say no.”

  The door to Sentro’s cabin unlocked, Fontaine pushes her gently ahead and inside, shucking her safety vest, pink hoodie, and Lycra top in a series of fluid motions—a simple gold cameo on a thin chain jangles between the Englishwoman’s small pale breasts. She’s fetching, Sentro thinks in Fontaine’s continental accent, amused, and then catches the stunned look of Bruce just squeezing out of his cabin when Fontaine kicks the door shut and, body on body, arms around and up and under Sentro’s running shirt, kisses her. She’s stronger than Sentro expected. Laughing at Sentro’s serial blushing, Fontaine dances her back to the bed, eases her down, straddles her, her thighs damp and warm, her hair falling forward and hiding her eyes as she rolls Sentro’s loose running shirt over her head and arms and off.