“To melt off this bony cold, Admiral!” they cry. “To frighten away this lonesome water!” It’s clear that Jonas has had a hand in this, but as quartermaster, he knows as well as anyone that we’ve had no coffee in the hold since Gibraltar and no sugar since before the fall of Rome. Not even the ghostly cough of a saccharine packet. Not even a splint of Jamaican cane to gnaw on.
The admiral makes this very case to the men.
“Listen up, dickheads,” he horns with a polar wind that shrinks my nipples to dimes. “There’s not a bean in the coffers, nor any sugar, nor cream, nor a bloody pinch of Tang in all of Christendom as far as this ship is concerned. And besides, how would we boil enough water for the entire crew?”
We will tell you how, says a terribleness in the mutineers’ eyes. Light the ship up like a star, a bonfire of whale oil and gangplanks and logbooks and ham radios right here on the quarterdeck. Ignite the crowned figurehead and hang our percolators from the bowsprit, their eyes say. Strike the colors and burn them black. Anything dry pulled down and piled high and seared off the face of the blue world. Anything for a moment to drink something warm and not feel swallowed up. Anything to boil the water down. We are up to our assholes in water.
“Know reason, you ball sacks!” the admiral commands. Some of the men have drawn poniards and fishing gaffs. Some are holding their effigies above their heads, a miniature mutiny floating above the first. The tentacles on deck are raised in quiet solidarity.
“You devil!” cries one mutineer. “You ate my poor Jeremy!”
“Hang the cadets!” howls another. “They’re shit sailors!”
“Let’s point one of the long nines at Toby’s porthole and blow it clean through the beast!” This comes from Small Jim, whose docility has vanished with the daylight.
“And scuttle the ship?” the admiral scoffs. “Not on your life, sailor.”
I expect that Toby will join the protest, but I can’t find him in the mutineers’ company, and again I worry that he’s been devoured. I am able to locate Sip and Lambeaux in the foreground, holding up their own effigies. Instead of a Turkish gunner’s sash, Lambeaux’s doll wears a small golden anklet around its waist.
The clamor rises. From the rails the mermaids join in, singing lullabies and power ballads, licking their lips between verses. The men chant for coffee, and murder, and their own ruin. They want a world on fire, the Winsome Bride at the bottom of a trench. The admiral surveys them imperiously from the poop deck, his nose raised high against the stench of their mercenary allegiance as he whispers to himself the Admiral’s Prayer:
O Heavenly Admiral, we ask for naught but appetite, for our men are weak, and our bellies empty.
Amen.
This he repeats under the din of insurrection, until we are all silenced by the sheeting cry of the bosun overhead.
“Red water!” he is shouting. “Red water on deck!”
* * *
—
It’s true. The water sluicing through the forecastle has turned a bruisy crimson, and in seconds the men of the quarterdeck are ankle-deep. Each sailor checks himself for holes. Was he shivved somehow? Had someone accidentally nicked a vein? The threat of a melee had been an obvious bluff. Why was protocol broken? Who was the escalator?
The beast has the answer. Its tentacles are quivering as if tased. The red seawater burbles with activity, carrying more than just foam onto the deck.
At first they look like fruit, ripe tomatoes or sunny apples that might have floated up from a forgotten corner of the hold. But there are too many, perhaps a hundred washing over in as many seconds, and when the water ebbs they don’t roll, but scurry and scale, dragging themselves about the deck with tiny tentacles of their own, latching themselves onto the balustrades and darting between the sail lines.
“The bitch is multiplied!” the admiral howls. “Quickly men! To arms! Larvicide!”
The order cuts directly to the brainstem of naval obedience, and in an instant the mutiny is transformed into a united havoc. Almost as soon as they appear on deck, the sea creature’s spawn are sliced open, stamped out, speared through their centers like olives. Men beat them with belaying pins and bowl them over with cannonballs until the quarterdeck is a jellied tureen. From his nest, the bosun blasts them like coconuts, hooting cowboy hoots when they pop. The larger tentacles, either still in the throes of birthing or horrified at the reckless slaughter, do nothing but shake. One of the offspring gets atop a mounted swivel gun, almost comprehending the firing mechanism before Lambeaux bats it overboard with a linstock. Another attempts to take up residence in Jonas’s esophagus, and it is minutes midfray before his mates can pry the thing out and smear it across the gangway. The admiral, spinning like a dervish, has at the creatures with hands and teeth. He stuffs them into his gobbet, chews like a gearbox, vomits a squirming mess.
When all of the offspring are dead and worse, we turn on the tentacles. Experience has taught us that they will grow back stronger, but for an hour or so we delight in their cowed and bloody retreat. The Winsome Bride rocks for the first time in months, and for a moment we all feel the tilt of the keel, the retreating of the waterline, the brightening of the stars. Every sailor to a man is wearing more gore than cloth, reveling in his own solitary berth of joy.
When there is nothing left to murder but one another, we clean the ship by lantern light. Able seamen swab and scour the decks. The chum of our enemies is sponged up by the bucketful and wrung over the rail. The guns are oiled and polished, the sail lines rerigged, the linens laundered till they’re plain and pale as moonlight. We are all dreamless in our racks hours before the sun can find us.
* * *
—
The water is higher by morning, and the sail masters are slow and lubberly in the rigging. Though every inch of the Winsome Bride has a pearlescent luster, the air above deck is thin and foul. There is no tide or wind, and the clouds on the horizon seem farther away than ever.
The tentacles return warily, but in greater numbers. They slither the deck with lethal calm, poised like tigers in the veld. No more curiosity or playful loping. Our long courtship is over. When they are ready, they will have us, and that’s that.
I walk to the ration barrel to draw out my breakfast. There is no protest from the crow’s nest this time, nor any sign of the bosun at all. I am calculating how much ammunition he could have left after last night’s display when I see Toby, porthole-fashioning Toby, miraculously uneaten Toby, sitting on the side of the main deck with his feet in the water.
I come up behind him. Part of his ear looks gnawed off, but he’s otherwise intact. I want to congratulate him, to slap him on the back and cry hurrah. Toby, I want to say to him, you magnificent sea dog, you survived the day! I want to hug him, kiss his dry pate, shed tears into the bird’s nest of his hair.
In his lap is a hand-carved model of the Winsome Bride small enough to hold in two hands. The design is intricate. The keel has a perfect rib-bone curve, and the three masts are thin as flower stems. The rigging is a delicate spiderweb, and the sails look to have been cut from Toby’s own shirt. Below the model ship, one of the creature’s offspring squirms. He must have rescued it, slipping it into a locker or a pocket at the height of the frenzy. Toby has stretched its tentacles around the hull of the model and affixed them there with pins. The creature struggles, but cannot pull itself free. Toby places the model craft in the water at his feet, drawing his effigy and a length of twine from the folds of his shirt. Gently, so gently, he lashes the effigy between the little ship’s main and mizzenmast. He uses a round turn and two half hitches, tugging the knot until it’s a pebble between his fingers. The effigy is a tiny giant straddling the miniature decks. It has Toby’s windy curls, his broad collar, his naked toes. With a nudge from the cabin boy’s fingertips, the vessel is at sea. Toby is a skilled craftsman, and the small ship bears the added ballast of doll and monster
bravely. Her course is weatherly and true. Try as it might, the animal crucified to her hull cannot sink her. Toby’s effigy might captain her for months, sailing her deep into the horizon, that line that holds the circle, and the water, and so many creatures determined to know love.
The King’s Teacup at Rest
Signed. Notarized. Everything in order. The royal steward returns the amusement park’s deed to his crocodile-leather attaché case and addresses the king.
“Your Majesty,” he says, in his most officious tone, extending a withered hand in the direction of the failing iron gates, “may I present, for your consideration, Liebling’s Sunday Morning Carnival and Midway.”
His Royal Highness, the King of Retired Amusements, surveys the carnival grimly. Beside him, his modest cortège: the steward, tall and lengthily wrapped in a livery of black velvet, a powdered wig on his head and lace pursed at his collar and wrists, his spectacles at high perch; the scout, not yet sixteen, pale and freckled in his olive sash and khaki shorts; and the dancing bear, in a comically small fez and a Jacobean ruff, precariously balanced on a confetti-speckled ball, an Atlas in reverse, his fabulously razored claws never deigning to touch the ground.
“Not much,” the king says. It is autumn, and the air is beginning to turn.
“Your Majesty wishes to forgo the inspection?”
“Are you sure you’ve brought us to the right place?” the king asks the scout. The boy looks at the tracks leading to the turnstiles, fingers the hand-carved eagle slider holding his neckerchief in place. The braided lanyards on his belt twiddle in the wind. He is quiet.
The dancing bear yawns.
It is the usual pageant. The king scoffs. The steward humors. The king doubts. The scout is silent. The bear yawns. The steward prods. The king consents.
“Shall we, sire?”
“If we must,” the king says. “Find refreshment quickly. We are hungry.”
The padlock and the chains undone. The gates wide. The whole of the park laid bare. The King of Retired Amusements shuffles across the threshold into his dominion. They are strange places, these abandoned fairgrounds and shipwrecked boardwalks and dry, cavernous water parks. Something more than people has deserted them, made the world turn its gaze elsewhere and not look back. Often they are barren craters, worn and ruined beyond remembering. But Liebling’s Sunday Morning Carnival and Midway is another Pompeii, preserved and perfect as a fly in amber. The Ferris wheel, still fully erect, regards the party like a cold and distant sun, its carriages creaking in a shovel of wind. Flags still flag on their poles, and bunting still hangs from the ticket booths. Only the main courtyard shows signs of dereliction. The statue at its center, a bronze, top-hatted Gustav Liebling himself, has been toppled, its magnanimity run aground, its outstretched arms now bidding welcome only to a patch of broken flagstones and soft dirt, which, after a few more good rains, will swallow him whole.
The king turns to the bear, now lying horizontal on his ball, teetering, asleep. He plucks the fez from the animal’s head and flogs him with it until, in a prolonged stretch that seems to solidify the bear’s balance rather than upset it, he rises.
“Hot dogs,” the king says.
The beast lifts his nose to the high wind and inhales. In the courtyard, fallen leaves rustle nearer. Slowly, he adjusts his heading and rolls the ball in the direction of the midway, and the men follow.
* * *
—
The hot dog stand. A few bloated green wieners still floating in a steel pond of brine. Fungal buns spill out of the trolley’s lower compartment. Pigeons have been at them. A few are still lying in dizzy, half-dead piles nearby. The smell of the cart has made the bear morose.
“Forgive me, sire,” the steward says, “but these look unfit for Your Majesty’s consumption.”
“We will eat them,” the king declares. “Relish?”
“Also unwise,” the steward says.
“Just a dab, then.”
“Please, sire,” the steward entreats, “recall the fish tacos at the Morristown County Fair.” He looks to the scout for help. The boy says nothing, pretending instead to read a smear of pigeon droppings on the cotton candy machine.
“Serve and obey,” the king says.
The steward bows. With a handkerchief over his nose, he constructs something that, in a world without proper standards, could be considered a hot dog. He serves it to the king on a small silver platter drawn from his attaché case. The king stuffs the mass into his face, rancid mustard peeling down his chin and onto the mange of his ermine.
“Passable,” the king declares. “Now take us to the rides.”
The steward bows again and gestures toward a distant banner that reads “Cul-de-sac of Fun.”
“We suppose you’ll be disappearing again?” the king says to the scout.
The boy lifts his eyes from the pigeon poop.
“I must find my people,” he says.
“Very well,” the king sighs. “Be ready to lead us back in an hour.” He repositions his threadbare cape against the breeze. The air is chilly. Already his stomach is expressing misgivings about the hot dog. The less time spent here, he decides, the better.
* * *
—
The midway. A chute of empty booths still bright with new paint. The scout reads the trampled popcorn boxes and the displaced gravel. They tell of a fleeing multitude, a people retreating in panic, his kin on the run. A balloon dartboard abandoned in haste. Sawdust-stuffed neon-orange rabbits left to molt. But no pursuer that he can find. No advancing army’s boot prints. No claw marks the length of a man raked jaggedly across the ringtoss booth.
The bear rolls quietly beside the scout, sniffing the air. They have quit this place, John Bennington, he says.
“I have not finished looking,” the boy replies, but it’s a lie. Any tracker could plainly see that no human feet have touched this ground in months.
I said that you would not find them here, the bear reminds him. They are like the hungry, wild spirits of old. This land is chewed and spat out again. You cannot expect them to tarry.
“Be silent,” the scout says. “Let me think.”
Thinking will not change the direction of the wind, the bear says, adjusting his fez with a graceful claw. You cannot bid the wolf to stop its baying, nor the whip-poor-will to postpone its dirge. You cannot bid your people stay.
“I do not know my people,” the scout says. “I do not know what I might bid them do.”
The boy has never met his people. He did not even know he had a people until he met the dancing bear.
The boardwalk at Gavin’s Point, where the orphaned scout had made a meager living selling saltwater taffy and guessing weights, had reached its economic nadir. The drug cartel Los Compasivos controlled a majority interest in the boardwalk and its environs, and while a shakedown of the boy’s booth was rare, the smack addicts left in the cartel’s wake made for poor clientele. Malodorous and malnourished, they would make the boy guess their pathetically low weights to guilt him out of free taffy and sack lunches. It was only after the King of Retired Amusements arrived to take final ownership of the boardwalk that the boy was acquainted with the details of his lineage. As king and steward parlayed with Los Compasivos, the boy heard the whisper-thin voice of the dancing bear speaking only to him.
I know who you are, John Bennington, the bear had said. And I know what you must do to fill the hole inside you that wails like a hollow tree and knows no quiet. Before there were ringmasters and zookeepers, before men baited bears and made them roll, we taught your people the ways of the wilderness. Now they have become relentless seekers of delectation and distraction. They once walked this boardwalk, eating shaved ice and posing for selfies, but fled at the first sign of commercial depreciation, abandoning it to indigence and petty crime and, finally, to the King of Retired Amusements. And in their great ha
ste they left you behind.
Follow me, the bear had said, and I will show you how to find them again.
By the time the steward had returned his spent MAC-10 to his crocodile attaché, the boy was on bended knee, offering his service and allegiance to the king.
The bear taught him to scout. The boy learned how to dress wounds, remove ticks, and handle scat without fear. With this tutelage came recognitions of merit, badges for woodcraft, campsite cleanliness, bravery, animal friendship. But most important, the bear taught him orienteering, not by reading maps or stars but by following the compass of his own loneliness. The boy learned how to direct his senses away from ease and contentment, to turn his needle instead to where others had turned their backs. There, he was told, he would find his people: refugees fleeing the squalor of the boardwalk, who left behind gutted big tops and disrepaired carousels, vacant outdoor malls and imitation Colonial townships littered with broken, historically inaccurate tools. The scout could mark and follow the trail his people left with ease, but only ever seemed to arrive after they had gone.
Here again, at Liebling’s Sunday Morning Carnival and Midway, he has arrived too late.
You will search but not find, the bear says, assuming the lotus position atop his ball, which has suddenly turned the color of the night sky, alive with blazing comets and galactic spirals. Small birds come to perch on the bear’s ears and shoulders. The air becomes thick with a foggy radiance. Around him: the Limpid Aura of Unimpeachable Knowledge. Above him: the Halo of Oneness with All Things.
You will walk the Unmanicured Path. The path of sorrow upon sorrow.
“You say that every time,” the scout replies.
The Sea Beast Takes a Lover Page 6