October Light

by John Gardner

  “Darling, it is cold,” Ariah meeped, and put her mitten on his.

  “Hell,” he said, but he leaned far left in his seat and yelled Haw! at the horses, and around they came.

  In the house, she remembered—or perhaps this was some other time—Richard had whimpered, sitting with his feet in the ice-water, so he wouldn’t get chilblains, and his mother rubbed his back and ran her hand through his hair and petted him like a dog, singing to him in a kind of half-wit voice (or such was Sally’s opinion; to hear Horace tell it, Ariah sang like an angel out of heaven), and suddenly James had said, jokingly, but his eyes were angry, “When I was his age, I was out laying bob-wire for spring fencing with Uncle Ira. If I cried because my feet got cold, Uncle Ira would just say, ‘Putty soon they’ll freeze hard and stop huttin.’”

  Horace said—only Sally and, possibly, Ariah had known exactly how angry he was—“I understand in the end he shot himself, your uncle Ira.”

  “It want because his feet was cold,” James came back.

  The memory made her realize what a chittering devil her brother had always been. It had momentarily slipped her mind. He was a kind of savage—even to the stick, the snake’s head, the outlandish magic charms. He hadn’t been that way as a boy, of course, though the seeds were no doubt there. She’d had to lead him by the hand to church or school, he was so shy and diffident; had had to protect him from the older boys; later had had to tease and cajole him or he’d never have made a move toward a girl. It was his uncle Ira that had changed him. He was a strange man, Uncle Ira. Not exactly human—he even smelled like an animal—as if his mother’d been brought low by a bear. No one would’ve been surprised, who knew her—Leah Starke, great-great-granddaughter of the famous colonel. “Boy!” Uncle Ira would say, voice low, and little James would leap. It was almost the only word the old man ever said.

  She gave her head a little shake, as if the memories were dreams and she meant to awake from them. Still no sound in the house. Surely he was asleep—and sleeping like a log half buried in a pughole, if she knew her brother James. She’d find him there at the kitchen table, where he was waiting in ambush, and she could walk right around him and cook a Christmas dinner if she wanted and he’d never twitch his nose. She put the book on the white wicker table and dropped her legs over the side. At the door she stood listening again. Not a sound. Sally opened the bedroom door, and froze.

  Aimed straight at her, suspended from the ceiling above the stairwell, was James’ old shotgun, and all around her, stretched in some impenetrable pattern like the strands of a drunken spider’s web, were strings leading up to the trigger. If she’d come out less cautiously, or happened to trip, James’ shotgun would have blasted her head off. Her heart beat so painfully she had to gasp for air, pressing both hands to her chest. She couldn’t believe it. He was worse than that horrible Captain in her novel! She touched the sides of the door to ward off dizziness, carefully stepped back, took one last, long and careful look, as repelled as she’d have been, perhaps, at sight of Mr. Nit’s eels, then gently closed the door. “He’s gone crazy, Horace,” she said, and realized only now that it was literally true.

  The thought of Horace, fully conscious this time, changed her mood—her husband gentle and generous to a fault, a man who’d been famous far and wide for his painless dentistry, a cultured man who’d had a record player in his office long, long years before Muzak, a reader of serious and worthwhile books. His image rose up in her mind so strongly—his image and the bitter memory that he was dead, he who had done so much good in the world—that Sally, all at once, could think of nothing but violence and terrible revenge. She could see Horace sorting through the records on his table, his bald head tipped, glowing in the lamplight like an infant’s head with its soft new hair, his soft lips pursed, his dimple showing; and when he’d chosen the records that would please him most and placed them ever so carefully on the spindle, he would push up his glasses with a quick, gentle motion, an absentminded flick of the middle finger of his immaculate right hand against the black plastic bridge, and he would stand looking down into the thick, hooked rug, his plump fingertips tucked into the pockets of his vest, listening happily to the first few measures, before striding—for that was how he walked, striding, though he was chubby and short—to his bookshelves to choose this evening’s book, then carrying it back like a prize of war, where the teapot sat waiting on the marble-topped table, beyond which she sat, Sally Page Abbott, knitting—in those days still handsome, still a beauty. He was not a man who wore greens or blues. He wore brown, like the scant hair remaining on his head, the warm brown of dark, new-ploughed earth on a mountainside, or the lighter, still-warm brown of autumn oak leaves. He took cream in his coffee, and sugar: three lumps. He smoked tobacco which he kept in an amber-glass, copper-covered humidor. He had a curious, boyish habit, with which she never interfered, of chewing little pieces of the newspaper while he read it. He cried at movies, knew poems by heart, had a garden he labored over hour after hour. He was a sensualist, he’d said once to James, with a smile. It had never occurred to him that her brother James despised him.

  Sally had a feeling that her husband’s ghost was very near just now, and would sadly disapprove of the hatred in her heart. But facts were facts, and the fact was this: she could sooner make Niagara Falls run backwards than kindle the slightest spark of warmth in her heart toward her brother. With clenched teeth, glinty-eyed in spite of her tears, scheming murderously in the back of her mind, as if James her brother were solely responsible for the decay of all values, the coming of the Militant, death and decline throughout the universe, she used the bedpan, dumped it out the window, and, being too het up to imagine sleeping, returned some part of her attention to her book. Where the gap left off, she gradually made out, the Militant had not yet caught up with her friends on the Indomitable.

  … The Captain laughed. “Not likely. They’ve got three times our speed. They got a tiny little boat, very light and quick. That’s Dusky’s style. We’d never get a hundred yards.”

  Peter Wagner started for the sextant, but just as he reached the bridge he saw their lights: a red flicker on the horizon, hardly lights at all—what was the phrase?—“darkness made visible.” Again he felt he was something not alive—not himself, that is: a character in some book. It was as if his life had been somewhere meticulously plotted from start to finish—his life and all their lives—and even if the end were happy he would find it poisoned when he reached it: intolerable because brutally preordained. He’d read too many novels, he understood; had taken the clicks of their well-oiled tumblers unnecessarily to heart.

  But for all that, his body moved quickly and efficiently, separate from his head. He—that is, his body—ducked into the wheelhouse and took a bearing across the compass, waited thirty seconds, and took another. The Militant was angling north, would miss them by maybe a half mile. Even with the darkness, it wouldn’t be enough. He went down the steps to the others. “They’ll pass about a half mile north,” he said “Unless they’re blind, they’ve got us.”

  “What shall we do?” Jane said. She unwittingly clapped her hands in her excitement. Mr. Nit looked disgusted, exactly as he’d looked when he talked about accident and invention. It was that same disgust, Peter Wagner understood, that he’d been feeling himself: the futile, idealist rejection of the body’s cold mechanics. He felt a sudden urge, not new to him, to resist every impulse of his bestial system, revoke his plot. Impossible, of course. They depended on him. “Wind up the engines,” he said, “we’ll head south.”

  “Aye aye sir,” Jane said, and darted for the hatch and to the engine room.

  They watched the Militant sliding toward them, Peter Wagner scowling, the others pale as ghosts. He glanced at his watch. Ten minutes at most to get away, and the engine still not running. Suddenly the sound of the Militant’s engine—and the same instant, the Militant’s lights—was gone, as if swallowed by a whale. Captain Fist hobbled over to the rail and shad
ed his eyes.

  “They’ve shut down to listen for us,” Mr. Nit whispered. “Thank God our engine’s off.”

  Peter Wagner hollered down the speaking tube, “Don’t start her yet, Jane!”

  “Can they see us, you think?” Captain Fist called softly.

  “Not yet,” Peter Wagner said. “We’re pitch dark.” He wiped away the sweat from his nose and forehead. If they were going to stop and listen from time to time, it would be hard to move the Indomitable out of range.

  The Militant’s lights came on again, and then the chug-chug-chug of the motor. Peter Wagner darted to the speaking tube. “Move it, Jane,” he shouted. “Let’s get out of here.” That too, he was certain, was a line from a movie. He was feeling increasingly glassed in by the minute, mere shadow in a film.

  Jane’s voice came not from below but from the hatch, where she’d just stuck her head up. “It won’t start,” she said.

  They all turned their heads to stare at her, then turned them again toward the lights of the Militant. “It won’t turn over,” she said. “Won’t make a sound.”

  He ran for the hatch.

  The starter of the Indomitable was a mechanism so complicated it seemed never to have been intended to be used. Its colored wires in their rusted iron box were as thickly intrinsicate as congressional by-laws, as impenetrable to the casual eye as the Truths of the Church. Standing in water that sloshed to their knees, Jane held the mechanic’s bulb and Peter Wagner traced the wiring with his fingertips, swearing beneath his breath. He saw almost at once that it was hopeless, at least for him.

  “Get Mr. Nit,” he said.

  She hooked the light over the patched, pitted tie-rod that held the hull together and hurried out the engine room door and away up the ladder. A moment later Mr. Nit was bending there, pulling at his earlobes and shaking his head. “Take us hours,” he said. With trembling fingers, he drew out one of his cigars.

  “It can’t take hours,” Peter Wagner said.

  “True,” he said. “But I can tell you it will. It’s a very sophisticated starter, Captain, because the engine, y’see, is extremely complex. It’s built so it can run on oil, diesel fuel, or gasoline. A heavy fuel, see, takes a hot starter, whereas a lighter fuel … So the wiring’s what we call sophisticated.” He gave a monkeyish laugh and felt in his coveralls pockets for the matches. When he found them, he lit one and made several quick passes—not watching what he was doing—at his cigar. At last, successful, he blew out smoke, then nodded, sucking at it quickly, as would a rabbit. “Sophisticated little machine,” he said, and nodded.

  “Lot of good that is when you’re stalled in the Pacific,” Peter Wagner said.

  Mr. Nit was defensive, as if he’d invented the wonderful machine himself. “What do you expect, with all that water from the seam-leaks. See here? They’re half under water. It’s a perfectly good system. It’s just those leaks.”

  Peter Wagner said, “Wires should be sealed against leaks, Mr. Nit.”

  “Boats aren’t supposed to leak,” said Mr. Nit and looked sullen.

  Peter Wagner wiped his forehead. “Well, bail her out and get to work,” he said.

  But again Mr. Nit shook his head. His upper lip jittered and the wrinkles around his eyes twitched. “Can’t do it, Captain. The pumps run off th’engine. I could bail her out with a can or something, but how you expect me to throw out the bilge? Carry it up the ladder can by can?”

  “Figure something out,” Peter Wagner said. He went up on deck. His heart banged, just behind his collarbone, when he saw how much nearer the Militant was now. She looked like a coal furnace floating through the night. He sent Mr. Goodman below, put Jane on watch in the darkened wheelhouse, and crooked a finger at Captain Fist, inviting him to the cabin. Captain Fist hung back at the doorway, still watching those lights. Peter Wagner closed his hand on the old man’s flabby arm, urging him in, guiding him through the darkness to the chair at the desk. “Sit down,” he said. The Captain groped behind him and carefully sat down. Peter Wagner himself, when he’d felt his way to it, sat down on the Captain’s bunk. “As you see,” Peter Wagner said, “they’re practically on top of us. I think you’d better tell me what’s happening.”

  The Captain sat, baggy with hopelessness, his face blooming from the darkness like blue cheese. He watched the doorway as if expecting the bow of the Militant to come through it.

  “Who are they? Why are they after you?” Peter Wagner asked.

  “What’s the difference?” Captain Fist said. He looked toward the door as if to show that by plain inspection their evil was essential, beneath complexity.

  “Who are they?” he said again.

  Captain Fist sucked his breath in, ground his teeth, then brought out like an explosion: “Devils! That’s who! I’ve scrimped and saved and sweated and slaved, building up this business, and just as I’m putting a little pittance by—” The outrage brought tears to his eyes and hushed his tongue.

  Sally Abbott looked up, a discovery tingling at the back of her brain, then hurriedly read on.

  “But who?” Peter Wagner asked, bending toward him.

  “Parasites! Scavengers!” Captain Fist said. “People that want the whole world for themselves, and refuse to work for it! Nihilists, barbarians, Ostrogoths that destroy people’s empires for sport! Lucifer’s legions!” He banged his cane. After a moment he calmed himself. “They’re smugglers,” he said. “Small-time chiselers that resent my existence. I beat their prices, I beat their quality, I carry tons to their miserable kilos. Also—” he glanced at Peter Wagner, eyes flashing: “I was here first!”

  “So!” cried Sally Abbott and, despite the shotgun in the hallway, laughed. How long, she wondered, had she been missing it? The novel was all about Capitalism—about those pious, self-righteous and violent True Americans who’d staked out their claim and, for all their talk about “Send me your poor” (or whatever the Statue of Liberty intoned), would let nobody else in on the pickings. Captain Fist was exactly like her brother James. That was the reason she enjoyed him so. He thought he was the real, true American stock—An Hour’s Work for an Hour’s Pay, and Don’t Tread on Me, and Semper Fidelis!—and what was he? What was he if the truth be told?

  She laughed again. He was a miserable, snarling, brawling old smuggler, living off the scraps of the plutocrats’ dream and hounded by the envious even lower. Her laugh this time sounded, even in her own ears, maniacal; a fact which she enjoyed. The Captain even talked like her brother James. “Parasites! Scavengers ! People that want the whole world for themselves, and refuse to work for it!” It might have been James Page talking of Sally Page Abbott, come here to live with him and now gone on strike. Men of brute violence, both of them; mad as March hares.

  She cleaned off her glasses, polishing them on the sheet, fogging them with her breath and polishing them again, and returned to her story, smiling a little, reading hurriedly now, wondering if what she had discovered had really been intended.

  Now Jane was at the door, her lovely eyes wide. “They see us,” she said.

  “Then we’re dead men,” Captain Fist said. He tipped up his face and started praying. He had, as he prayed, an incongruous, crafty look.

  “Did you hear me?” she said, and touched Peter Wagner’s arm.

  He got up from the bunk without answering and crossed to the door, morose, trapped in a battle for which he’d never volunteered. The Militant was now about half a mile away, bearing down, engines Full Ahead. Their searchlight laid out their roadway on the water. He went to the speaking tube. “You got that starter cleared, Mr. Nit?” No answer.

  “Look,” Jane whispered, closing her hand on his arm and pointing. On the Militant, just below the lighted American flag, they were winching something up out of the foredeck; he couldn’t make out what. Captain Fist appeared in the doorway of his cabin, wobbly-kneed, clinging to his cane.

  Peter Wagner snatched the binoculars from their shelf on the bridge and trained them on the Mil
itant’s bow. He saw, at first, nothing but bleary light and the delicate patterns of glittering mold on the lenses. He fiddled with the range. And then suddenly, strikingly clear, at the exact center of the ring of mold like a jungle creature in a sunlit clearing, he saw a black, old-fashioned cannon. It had wheels. They must have stolen it from in front of some public monument. He lowered the glasses, and the same instant he saw a white puff of smoke, a bloom of dark flame at the cannon mouth—the Militant bobbed like a cork—and then he heard the report. Something splashed, twenty feet portside. Jane ducked into the wheelhouse, scrambled on the floor, then in the corner, and emerged a second later with a rifle. Captain Fist aimed his pistol, steadying his right hand with his left. Peter Wagner looked around wildly for some weapon, then stopped, shocked. He was doing it again, slashing out crazily, like an animal.

  “Don’t shoot!” he cried out. He grabbed the Captain’s pistol with one violently shaking hand, Jane’s arm with the other. “Come with me!” He dragged them to the cabin. “Sit down, be quiet!” he said. The cannon boomed again, and again there was a splash, much closer.

  “We’ll die like foxes in a hole!” Captain Fist whispered hoarsely. He was indignant but also, again, distinctly crafty.

  “Be still,” Peter Wagner said. His heart was whamming and his tongue tasted brassy. He’d read that that happened.

  The Militant’s engines went off, and now they could hear voices. Holding Jane’s hand, Peter Wagner crawled over to the door to peek out, just in time to see the cannon belch smoke and flame. The muffled report of the cannon and the crash, somewhere above his head, were almost simultaneous.

  “We’re hit!” the Captain whimpered, clutching his heart.

  “Sh!” Peter Wagner said.

  Then came rifle fire. Six shots, a pause, four more. The Militant was right alongside them now. If they fired the cannon it would knock the whole cabin off. The searchlight swung around and slammed the deck and bulkheads like the flat of a hand; every bolt or bar, twist of rope, slant of cable was like a razor cut.