“Yes, Lambeaux, that is you,” the bosun announces to every man on deck. “That is the gray stuff of your vile, treacherous thoughts. Or rather, it will be tomorrow if you remain on my bad side.”
We leave the bosun and relocate to the far side of the quarterdeck, where we watch the gulls fight over exploded coconut bark and listen to Sip beatbox as we drink our breakfast.
* * *
—
The water is higher by second bell, and Lambeaux and I are staring down at the mermaids, who are floating together on their backs like otters. He is the master of ninety-four guns whose ninety-four gun ports have been tarred and sealed to keep the bilge out. I am an ensign without a working rudder. Together with Sip, we admire the local fauna.
The mermaids have appeared earlier than usual today because of the books. Their propositions to the crew seem half-hearted as they leaf through the small library that Old Goolsby hurled overboard in an early-morning fit of pique, along with three barrels of fresh water and our last functioning flat-screen television before we could wrestle him down. The mermaids are blue-skinned and black-eyed, but apparently literate enough to tackle the Brontës and Isaac Asimov. The volumes that have not sunk or disintegrated bob coquettishly in the water beside them. The mermaids pluck them out at random and leaf through them dreamily.
“How many inches today?” Lambeaux asks. He has unwound the tip of a pink tentacle from a carronade and is attempting to teach it to thumb wrestle. Lambeaux no longer calls me “sir,” nor any of the other officers. It’s one of the things he’s tossed overboard. He only salutes the admiral to stay anonymous.
“Gavin says seven up, then six down, then two up since first bell,” I tell him. Then I ask after Toby, the carpenter’s mate. “Has he finished the porthole yet? Can we finally look this thing in the eye?”
“Difficult to manage sans dry dock,” Lambeaux says. “Plus, Toby’s been promoted to admiral’s cabin attendant.”
“What happened to Tristan?”
Sip hears this question and lowers his head, and Lambeaux is conspicuously silent, which means that Tristan has been eaten by the admiral. To be the cabin boy of an unrepentant cannibal is to lie on a platter.
Lambeaux sinks into his shoulders. “I need a woman,” he says, which is enough to draw a mermaid’s attention away from The World According to Garp.
“Will you come into the water, sailor?” she sings coolly up to him in gargled, unmoored English, only picking the fish bones from her breasts as an afterthought.
“Madam,” Lambeaux hollers down at her, “not even if you had a proper quim and were floating in a tub of beef bourguignon.”
“Sailor,” sings another mermaid, peering up from a spongy copy of Kerouac, “what does it mean, ‘They danced down the streets like dingledodies’?”
“Remember that tart from Fiji?” Lambeaux asks me, pinning the tentacle hard under his thumb. “Remember the anklets she wore? Small enough you could fit them in your mouth.”
“They’ll hear you down there,” I say, massaging my bad leg, which mermaid song always seems to aggravate. “They can smell a hard-on for leagues. Keep talking like that and we’ll never be rid of them.”
“We’ll never be rid of them anyway,” Lambeaux grunts. The tentacle wraps around his palm like it wants to shake hands. He squeezes it tighter until the tip is thrashing in his fist. “They’ll wait until this thing has us in the drink, then they’ll suck our guts out through our cocks.”
“I suppose there are worse ways to die,” I say.
“No doubt we’ll discover those, too,” Lambeaux says, dragging his chin deeper into his collar as he lets the tentacle slip back over the bow. The Winsome Bride creaks. We feel it on all sides, the air thick and heavy with an impending catastrophe that won’t do us the courtesy of goddamn happening. Our only escape routes are drowning and mermaids and other deaths we resist out of sheer nautical habit. All sailors are Christians moonlighting as witch doctors. In daylight, we look to heaven for mercy. At night, we draw chalk sigils under our hammocks and clutch our effigies tight. Lambeaux fondles the tassels of his golden gunner’s sash, and under his breath I hear him utter the Master Gunner’s Prayer:
Lord, our muzzles are pointed hard at them, and theirs hard at us, and Thine hard at all Creation, and if they be quicker on the load, then may Thy Terrible Ordinance be the first to find us.
Amen.
* * *
—
A few hours later Sip gets the idea to sew the mainsails into a giant balloon and fly us out of this mess.
It wouldn’t be hard. Canvas we have in reams, and good twine to bind it, and men keen enough on escape to try anything. The problem is gas. Fuel, sure, planks of it right under our feet, but burning the ship to save the ship is a hard sell, even for Lambeaux, who has forsaken so much else.
Permission is required, so we make for the admiral’s quarters. By now the sea is wild. The waves spume and the sky scrambles and the day is all side-to-side. Only the Winsome Bride is still. The beast is our sea anchor, dragging us slowly against the grain of a fathomless ocean until we reach a skidding stop. As we walk the deck, our inner ears anticipate lateral shifts that never come. We are sailors in name only. Our sea legs have been amputated.
As the only officer in the group, I am the one expected to knock on the admiral’s door. When there’s no answer, I am the one who opens it to inquire. When we find the admiral on the floor of his quarters in a ragged garden of toppled furniture and torn linen, appearing to have just fallen or been knocked down, it is understood that I will be the one, despite my gammy leg, to help the man to his feet, to smell his breath, to feel the weight of his hand on my shoulder. Near enough that he gets a good look at me, considers me.
A year ago, months before the beast became our unrequited lover, we fished the admiral out of a skeletal caravel listing like a tightrope walker through the Bermuda shoals. Oars sharpened to spear points had dallied in the surf alongside a month’s worth of bloated biscuits and a dozen unslaughtered chickens. His crew, he told us, had all died of heatstroke, and had to be eaten before they turned. Fifty-two souls. His smile was still greasy as he announced the transfer of his flag to our vessel, and since we’d lost our captain a month earlier to a privateer’s grapeshot and nearly all of our lieutenants to pneumonia and melancholy, we were glad to once again have a commander, even if he wore a tattered hat and bits of other men in his teeth.
“What’s your business, Ensign?” the admiral asks as he brushes off his breeches. His uniform is unbuttoned. There are fresh claw marks on his cheeks and a cloud of sawdust still resettling on the floorboards. I want to believe I can hear Toby, the newly promoted cabin boy, seeing to his duties in the next room. Lambeaux and Sip are still at the threshold of the admiral’s quarters, good common sense keeping them at bay.
“Well, speak up, man,” commands the admiral.
“Sir, permission to refashion the mainsails into a balloon.”
There is a flash of attention as the commander uprights a toppled chair.
“Dirigiblize the ship? To what end, sailor?”
“To rescue us from this unholy predicament, sir.”
As he straightens his jacket, it dawns on him that some of us are still trying to live, that some of us are all heart, that every inch of us is heart meat. It dawns on his mouth. He smiles. His incisors glisten with the dawning.
At that moment, to my great relief, Toby enters the room. He carries a silver tea tray with a hissing pot, four porcelain cups with silver spoons, and a plate of Oreos, Twinkies, and strips of teriyaki turkey jerky. The cabin boy does not have his effigy on his person. I assume it is somewhere safe, stowed away in a footlocker or lashed to the highest tip of the mizzenmast.
“Will you take tea with me, Ensign?” the admiral asks as Toby sets the tray on a stool, then rights a table next to where the admiral is seate
d.
“No, thank you, sir,” I say as Toby pours, though I would saw off a finger and drown my effigy in the bilge for an Oreo.
“And the dickheads in the doorway?”
“Thank you, Admiral, no,” Lambeaux manages. Sip only shakes his head, his dread hidden behind black plastic lenses.
“It won’t do, Ensign,” the admiral says, blowing the steam from his cup. “Sails are for sailing. I would expect an officer of the line to understand that.”
“Yes, Admiral,” I say. “It’s just that, with all possible respect, the creature has us by the short hairs, sir. We’re not sailing anywhere at the moment.”
The admiral raises an eyebrow at this.
“Oh no?” he says, still looking at me. “Toby, would you be good enough to peer outside?”
Toby walks to one of the aft windows.
“Is there still water under us?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Sounds like an adequate description of sailing to me,” the admiral says. He takes a bite of a Twinkie, letting the cream ooze down his chin as he finishes unbuttoning his already half-unbuttoned breeches.
“Here,” the admiral says, handing them to Toby, “press these.”
Toby does as he’s told, extending the legs of the ironing board and setting to the task. The admiral watches him, fingering the drowsy buttons of his crumpled coat and swabbing his teeth with his tongue. Some men know lust only in their stomachs, but the hungers fermenting there can be as terrible as any, and as this newest cabin boy, who was once and never again a carpenter’s mate, sweats over the iron, he can be heard whispering the Prayer of the Carpenter’s Mate:
Almighty Lord and Protector, allow that we lowly carpenters’ mates might fashion our beams away from the lathe of Thy Holy Attention, the better to serve Thee, hammering and shaping in our scaffolds, unseen and uncelebrated, until Thy Burning Gaze locates and destroys us.
Amen.
“Ensign?” the admiral says.
“Sir.”
“The creature is in heat. It will pass. You and your company are dismissed.”
“Very good, sir,” I say, stumbling backward toward the door, not daring to turn until I am through it.
* * *
—
Later, I am belowdecks with the cadets, helping them practice their knots.
Good knot-tying is, in my opinion, the most moribund of the naval arts, and today the cadets are helping it closer to the grave. Their cleat hitches are eely and their bights are too wide. It is hours before one of them produces a passable sheet bend. I am sitting on a barrel with my bad leg elevated, trying to be patient.
“Watch, little ones,” I instruct. “This secures a dock line to a piling.”
The cadets range from twelve to fifteen years, all towheaded baby birds. I show them how the running line hugs the standing line until the little maze of coils becomes a fist. They crane their necks to see, their bleached scarves folded angelically at their throats. They inspect the knot with the same uncomprehending looks they sometimes give the tentacles that flop about the deck trying to make friends. They attempt to conjure similar configurations with the smaller ropes in their laps. The results are an insult to seamanship itself.
At a table a few feet from us, three of the petty officers are drinking miserably. Jonas, the quartermaster, is holding a rum court with Lawrence, the cooper’s mate. The yeoman of the sheets, whose Christian name is James but whom we all call Small Jim, is wrestling with a Game Boy, which beeps and boops between his fingers. Beneath the table, a lone tentacle eavesdrops on the cadets’ lesson, winding itself around a chair leg into a near-perfect buntline.
“She had little eyes,” Jonas recalls from the bench. His effigy is on the table, propped up against an empty mug. “Do you remember? Little eyes with little lids, and the smallest lashes, like the legs of a flea.”
“Jonas, old love, will you spare us a drop of your rum?” asks Lawrence.
“Drink,” he says.
“Pay attention,” I tell the cadets. “This is a round turn and two half hitches, useful for tying a snubber line to an anchor chain, or lashing yourself to a piece of flotsam after a wreck.”
Oh, to wreck. The freedom to run aground, smash into a reef, be pulled apart by a storm. The freedom to meet our calamitous end bravely, to drink seawater into our lungs, to sink like hammers until we strike bottom.
The plinking sound from Small Jim’s Game Boy is the sort that nettles the brain. I mistie my bowline and have to start again.
“What I would like, mates,” says Jonas, “what I would truly like, is a cup of coffee.”
“A cup of coffee would not go unappreciated,” says Lawrence, and Small Jim nods in approval. Jonas imagines aloud a cup of coffee the color of a rainforest floor, a flavor to carve canyons, an aroma to quicken the dead.
“This next one is good for binding a man’s hands,” I explain. “The more he struggles, the tighter it gets.”
The cadets practice tying one another up. Lawrence suddenly voices a desire to add a dram of liquid Coffeemate to the shared fantasy, which is promptly met with a slap across the face from Jonas.
“How dare you,” Jonas says in a low, hateful timbre. “In my coffee. How dare you.”
The cabin is silent save for the pinging of the Game Boy. There is a moment where it seems that Lawrence will make a move for Jonas’s effigy, a thing too perilous to allow.
“Master Lawrence!” I say, surprised at my own voice.
“Sir!”
“Let’s not put on a poor display for the cadets, shall we?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, sir,” he says, his eyes still nipping at Jonas’s effigy.
“And for sweet Christ’s sake, Small Jim, disengage that infernal device!”
The yeoman of the sheets toggles off the machine. The sudden silence reveals a glassy tinkling coming from the far end of the deck.
“What on earth is that noise?” I ask.
“Toby’s porthole, sir.”
“Toby finished his porthole?”
“Thirty feet astern, sir.”
“And?”
“Have a look for yourself.”
I shuffle the thirty feet and come to the anchor port, which has been anchorless since the day one of the tentacles tore out our anchor and whipped it at a nearby station buoy. I find that Toby has ingeniously built the porthole into the anchor port itself, and through the glass, even in the dimness of the sun-starved water, I can see the enormous mouth of the beast, a cone of razory chitin gathered to an impossibly fine point, tapping against the porthole like a finch at a window. It could force its way through, but doesn’t. It wants to be invited.
I am here, it taps. I am at the door.
I press my face to the cold glass and close my eyes.
Let me in, it taps. Please, let me in. I miss being loved.
* * *
—
The Fijian stowaway had hidden in the hold for weeks before anyone discovered her. She had a gift for staying out of sight, and even on a ship inhabited pole to plank by eighty-seven men and boys all more than a year at sea—a crew intimate with every kind of criminality and ravenousness—no harm ever came to her. During the day she could sometimes be spotted in the rigging, letting her small brown limbs dangle as she sunbathed and whale-watched. At night she floated through the cabins like a ghost.
I’d been quietly occupying the first mate’s quarters since a punitive keelhauling had excommunicated him from our ranks near the Cape of Good Hope when she slipped in one night like dark syrup. She was no taller than the cadets, with a cape of black hair that ran down to her fingertips. I was caught with only one leg debooted. She took a handkerchief from her pocket and fashioned a miniature papoose of it on my open escritoire, tucking her small, frayed effigy into its folds. I didn’t know what she
wanted. When she put her hand on my shoulder I stammered a mild protest, explaining that my injury had left me incapable of producing a manly interest, but she only laid me down on the cot and sidled in beside me. Spooning me from behind, she looped her arms over my shoulders, spidered her small legs around my waist, and held me. For that whole night she held me so firm and tight I almost strained to breathe, but for the first time since the creature took up its amorous cause, I felt the maddening anticipation ease, squeezed out of me like a bellows. In my ear, soft as cotton, she sang a steady hush, her breath rising and falling with the waves, harmonizing with the wind, and though the creature’s grip was so firm upon us that neither wind nor waves held any sway, and though her legs and arms felt strong enough to crush the breath inside me to diamond, for that brief moment I felt returned to the sea I knew.
She disappeared not long after that—no one knows how or why. Old Goolsby swears that one moonless midnight he saw a pair of tentacles pluck her off the gaff of the spanker sail and deliver her into the arms of a waiting mermaid, and that together the two swam east toward the Florida coast; but none of us believe it because we all know Goolsby, and because, even with fresh water and rations, it would have taken them a week just to reach Miami, a sorry port of call with the loneliest harbor and the ugliest gulls on the face of the earth.
* * *
—
The water is higher after supper, enough that it creeps across the forecastle and spills onto the quarterdeck, where the crew is once again assembled in mutiny.
This occasionally happens at mealtimes. Supper for the officers is flour cakes and what little salted beef is left. Supper for the crew is coconut meat and pan-fried sea monster. Some dissent is to be expected. Morale is in the toilet, and a rebellious stomach cannot help but breed a rebellious heart.
The admiral stands high on the poop deck with the officers assembled behind him. On the quarterdeck below, the men hold lanterns and crude signs drawn with grease pencil and Magic Marker. The demands of previous mutinies have been crossed out in favor of new ones. Tonight, the signs tell us that the ransom for the crew’s obedience is coffee with sugar.
The Sea Beast Takes a Lover Page 5