October Light

by John Gardner

  “We surrender!” Peter Wagner shouted, then instantly ducked back—a premonition. They machine-gunned the cabin door.

  Then everything was still. They listened to each other’s breathing in the cabin. Except for the lapping of the water, it was all they could hear. Mr. Nit and Mr. Goodman, down in the flooded engine room, made no sound.

  “Why don’t they sink us?” Jane whispered. She lay pressed to the floor, sheltered under Peter Wagner’s arm.

  “Sh!” he said. But he too had been thinking about that and believed he knew the answer. He felt foolish, plotting like some cowboy in a thriller—felt revulsion, in fact, thinking of the alphas in biological laboratories, the animals that always won out because they thrived on challenge, stress—but he also felt, puppet of the universe or not, exuberant, bound to be victorious. “Give me your guns,” he said.

  “You’re crazy,” Captain Fist whispered, but he gave up his gun: Peter Wagner had snatched it from his hand before the whisper was out. Jane gave him the rifle. He rose up off the floor cautiously, balanced like a gibbon, moved to the cabin door, and tossed the guns to the foredeck, one at a time.

  “That’s all we’ve got,” he called. “Don’t shoot! I’m coming out!” He took a deep breath, raised his arms, and stepped through the door. He had a brief sense of noise and of being hit in the chest, like a dream of death, and he felt himself fainting for a split second, but nothing had happened. His innards were like jelly, but only for a moment. He stood waiting, and little by little his eyes adjusted to the reddish light. Three men stood on the Militant’s deck, two blacks and an Indian. Two had rifles, aimed at the Indomitable’s fore and aft decks; the third, a heavy-set, bearded black man, handsome as a king, had a machine gun aimed at Peter Wagner’s belly.

  “We want to talk,” Peter Wagner said. His throat closed with fear, such fear as not even the bridge had made him feel, though he’d been drunk then, granted. But this was a greater fear nevertheless, such fear as one feels of snakes or scorpions, things living and in some sense intelligent—such fear as the black feels of whites in an unfamiliar alley.

  “What have we to say?” the black with the machine gun asked. He had dark glasses and a beard, and though he smiled, his face showed …

  There was a gap. She leaped it like a spark, reading on:

  … with a grapnel and threw it up onto the Indomitable. Before Peter Wagner could reach it to help, the Indian jerked it back with a whip-snap, and the grapnel dug in. In seconds the gunnels were lashed together and the three-man crew of the Militant was climbing aboard.

  “Get us the gentleman who understands about engines,” the leader said. The accent was not English, Peter Wagner realized, but universal Shakespearean. He stepped up onto the bridge and looked around, cradling the machine gun in his left arm, the fingertips of his right hand in his suitcoat pocket; then he leaned the machine gun against the wheelhouse door. “But first, if you don’t mind—” he nodded toward the bulkhead. Peter Wagner leaned on his arms to be frisked. When it was over he went back to the hatch, the lean black following him, and called down to Mr. Nit and Mr. Goodman. When he returned to the bridge, Captain Fist and Jane had their hands against the bulkhead and the leader was checking them for weapons, a pistol in his hand. He stepped back. “That’s fine,” he said. “You may lower your arms.”

  “Where’s Dusky?” Captain Fist said.

  “He died,” the man said. “Made the great decision—

  Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

  The slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune,

  Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

  And by opposing …”

  “Died, you say,” Captain Fist said.

  “Deceased.”

  Captain Fist looked dubious.

  Mr. Nit appeared in the searchlight’s glare, popping his knuckles, the muscles of his face twitching as if separately alive. Mr. Goodman came a moment later, the black prodding him with his rifle.

  “Good evening,” the leader said with a bow, two fingers on the brim of his Tyrolean. The machine gun was once more under his left arm, casual as an umbrella. Peter Wagner thought of stories he’d read about smiling, sweet-talking murderers—the Jones-men of Detroit, the innocent-eyed Green Berets of Viet Nam who pushed captured enemies out of helicopters to make their comrades talk, or Mafia men who took friends out to lunch and carried home their bodies in the trunks of their Lincoln Continentals. Such things were unthinkable for an ordinary man, even for Peter Wagner who’d sailed the seven seas. Yet they happened in the world, like other fictions; killers spoke their trivial, predictable lines, laughed, offered cigarettes, talked about the weather; and then, when the time arrived, out came the pistol, or the acid or the knife, and one more poor sucker, still laughing, was lightly blown away. It was difficult to believe, though he carefully fixed his mind on it. He was not so naïve as to doubt that the trashiest fiction is all true, as the noblest is all illusion. Yet for all Peter Wagner’s fear of him, the man in the Tyrolean seemed too good for trash: his majestic looks, his seemingly unstudied gentleness, his accent, suggesting good background and education, his Stratford gestures, they all hinted some story more noble and interesting than the one he’d apparently been chosen for. Yet one thing was sure: he’d shot at them, and shot to kill. It was purest luck that Peter Wagner had jumped back when he’d fired his machine gun at the door. So he too, Peter Wagner, was committed to trash drama, if he intended to survive. Like all the world, Peter Wagner thought. One meets no King Lears in the ordinary world, no Ophelias.

  “Good evening,” the leader said, more urgently, as if aware that his charm was unconvincing, frightening—or, rather, frightening because convincing.

  Mr. Nit couldn’t answer, tiny eyes darting. Mr. Goodman merely whispered.

  “Inside, please,” the leader said. He took a flashlight from his suitcoat pocket, switched it on, and motioned with it toward the Captain’s cabin, automatically leading with his wrist, again like an actor. The crew of the Indomitable went in, single file. The leader of the militants nodded them toward the bunk, then came in, shadows flying out around him like birds, and sat, himself, in the Captain’s chair. He laid the gun across his lap and shined the flashlight up and down, helping the fat, quiet Indian look for the lightswitch. When they found that the lights were dead—they depended on the engine—the leader set his flashlight on the Captain’s desk. The shadows, settling at last, took on weight. At a nod from the leader, the Indian went back out onto the bridge and stood with the other man, watching the door. The leader called to them, “Perhaps you gentlemen would go below and check out those engines.” They disappeared.

  “Now,” the leader said, getting himself comfortable. He sounded, just this moment, like a diplomat or a minister high in the establishment. He picked off the sunglasses and dropped them into his inside suitcoat pocket. He had large, handsome eyes, remarkably like a Pharaoh’s. He smiled—warmly, or so it seemed at first—at Captain Fist. Captain Fist trembled, white as chalk, and said nothing. His hatred of the black man was as evident as a smell.

  Peter Wagner squinted, thinking about that, thinking about the black man’s exaggerated caution, his finger never straying from the trigger of the gun, the fingertip trembling, a tremor just visible, like that of, say, a plucked guitar string.

  The man said, “Call me Luther—Luther Santisillia.” As he spoke he turned sociably toward Peter Wagner, but only for an instant; then his eyes were back on Fist. “These people know me well enough. As for you, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  He nodded.

  “And your name?” Santisillia asked, and glanced at him.

  “Excuse me. Peter Wagner.” He was sorry to give it—sorry to give Santisillia any clue.

  “Good. Excellent. How do you do.” Then he was silent, watching Fist, mouth smiling, large eyes veiled. It was clearer and clearer, the fear of him, buried in the act. He was a mere man on a stage, fleshy sweating mortal in the costume of
effortless heroics. Santisillia said: “I believe you were going to propose a deal?”

  “Just this,” Peter Wagner said, watching him. “We get the Indomitable running for you, and then you let us go.”

  The black man pretended to consider it a while. With a smile like a child’s, he said, “Man, I’d have to be crazy.”

  “Why?” Jane said. She put her hand on Peter Wagner’s arm.

  “We could’ve returned your fire,” Peter Wagner said. (Returned your fire, he thought. Television talk.) “We showed our good faith.” (We showed our good faith.)

  “You jivin me, man.” He laughed, dropping into the Harlem language. He spoke it as if it amused him, pleased him like a toy. “We’d have sunk you sure, so you decided you’d just play it cool and come rip me off later.” Then, returning to the elegant English, still smiling gently: “You have nothing with which to deal, it seems.”

  “You think you can get this boat going yourself?”

  The black man smiled, head tilted, and considered it. The five of them, huddled in the bunk, waited. The water lapped softly, the gunnels of the two boats crunched together, a sound like garbage cans scraping on concrete. Outside the cabin there was dull red light; Peter Wagner could see a few large stars beyond, filtered. Then the tall, lean black blocked out the door, the Indian just behind him. Santisillia turned slowly. The black man shook his head, and after a moment Santisillia turned back to them and sighed.

  “Ok,” he said. He touched the machine gun. “You, mechanic—go down there, please.”

  “It’s no use, Santisillia,” Peter Wagner said. “He won’t work out of fear if he knows you’ll kill him anyway.”

  “Why would I kill a mechanic?” he said and smiled.

  Mr. Nit got up from the bunk. Ok, Peter Wagner thought. His chest filled with misery. “Eels,” Peter Wagner whispered to Mr. Nit. “We’re on a wooden bunk.”

  Mr. Nit looked, puzzled, at the bunk.

  “What’s that?” Santisillia said.

  “He can’t fix it anyway,” Peter Wagner said. “It’s the electricity.” He pushed the word crazily, hoping the idea would hammer down into Mr. Nit’s frightened head. “The electricity,” he said again.

  “What you tellin the cat?” the lean black said. His rifle moved to aim at Peter Wagner’s chest. The man’s earrings jiggled.

  “He’d have to hook up to a secondary source,” Peter Wagner said. His heart beat wildly. It was clear that his plan was hopeless; it depended on Mr. Nit. He tensed, half believing he would jump the bearded black. Impossible, of course. Mr. Nit had half turned, looking wildly at Peter Wagner as if only Peter Wagner’s madness threatened him.

  “It would take a live source,” Peter Wagner said, and then, to the man in the Tyrolean, “Interesting animal, electricity. Cheap to feed, it can live in either air or water—”

  Mr. Nit backed away, but light was dawning.

  “Take him down,” Santisillia said. The lean man pulled Mr. Nit out the cabin door and they were gone. At a sign from Santisillia, the Indian stayed.

  “Let me help him,” Peter Wagner said. He started to get up.

  Santisillia smiled. “Not a chance, baby.”

  They sat for perhaps five minutes, silent. Peter Wagner was limp now, unnaturally calm, still watching, cold as a machine. Jane’s hand was on his arm. Captain Fist’s breathing was uneven and hard, a sound like an old man’s snoring.

  Then, from somewhere in the belly of the ship, there came a boom like the noise of a cannon. Santisillia’s face turned quickly for once, and the Indian vanished from the doorway, padding down the bridge steps and over to the hatch. A moment later the Indian reappeared. “Knocking a hole in the bulkhead,” he said. His voice was like an adolescent’s, soft, even girlish. “Man says got to run a wire to a secondary source. Be done in five minutes. Man says to give him a signal when you’re ready.”

  Santisillia smiled. “Tell him I’ll thump the deck.”

  The Indian gave a nod and vanished.

  Santisillia said, “You were mistaken about your Mr. Nit, it seems.” He turned his gentle smile toward Peter Wagner.

  Peter Wagner nodded, closed his hands tight on the wood of the bunk frame and stretched his legs out, then lowered his feet slowly to the metal again.

  Then the lean Negro was at the door. “Comin fine,” he said.

  Santisillia’s smile was distant. He was thinking. He came out of it for a moment to say, “This is Dancer.” The lean man bowed and came in a step. Santisillia’s mind returned to whatever it was working on. The lean man, Dancer, watched him and occasionally glanced at Peter Wagner or Captain Fist. The lean man, too, Peter Wagner saw, was hypertense; a veritable walking bomb. It was curious that people so frightening should be afraid. Finally, Santisillia grinned. He’d showed no real sign that he was unsure of himself, for all his nervousness; no sign that, in secret, he had feared that Peter Wagner or, more likely, Captain Fist, might possess some advantage he couldn’t penetrate; but now suddenly—no doubt having mentally bolted every door from which attack might come—he’d decided to be confident, expansive. “I’ve been telling our friends they were wrong,” he told Dancer. “Wrong from the beginning!”

  Dancer grinned. He was black as a coal except for the fluorescent green of his T-shirt. He came suddenly alive, as if stepping out on stage. Loose-hipped, graceful, he went over to the wash-stand then back to the door, as if for sheer pleasure in his ease of movement, delight at the swing of the rifle in his arm. It was all so smooth, so animal, you could see it had been carefully rehearsed. His left hand groped out, long-fingered, to touch things as he passed, and sometimes he tipped his dark glasses up to see more clearly. “They been wrong from the beginning, f’the beginning of time,” he said happily, all rolling-eyed darkie. He delivered the line with magnificent style, perfect timing. Peter Wagner watched him in sudden alarm. He was far cleverer than he’d pretended. Dancer continued, theatrical eyebrows lifted: “They thought all our peoples was half-wit dumb sub-humans!”

  Santisillia smiled, just a touch aloof. He knew it all by heart; nevertheless, he watched on with critical interest.

  “They walked on our necks with they high-f’lutin words and they cibilization, and they believed it so much we believed it ourselves! But that’s over. Done with!”

  “Right on!” Santisillia said, widening his eyes in self-mockery, and chuckled.

  “The oppressed peoples of the world has arisen, because they tine has come, the tine of rebolution, and the tine of rebolution is Reality and Troof! I said Reality and Troof!” He swung the muzzle of the rifle at them, Santisillia smiling, enjoying the show, though he was part of it—no longer enjoying it as once he had, perhaps; in his heart of hearts perhaps sick of the thing—but enjoying at least the art of it. Dancer bent down to shake his fist under Peter Wagner’s nose. He was smiling with teeth as big as moons, the lenses of his sunglasses like a double vision of the sun’s eclipse, and his theatrical joy was so fierce, apocalyptic, that Peter Wagner’s chest went light and, suspending disbelief, he had the brief conviction that everything Dancer said was exactly so.

  “Rebolution!” Dancer yelled. He pitched his voice higher, up and up, like a bright yellow frisby. “Understand what I said? And because you’re about to go down to the hell that the white man’s made up to make the black man tremble, I’m goin tell you the terrible facts, the truth that sets me free, understand—and the truth that’s goin up Chuck’s ass: You was wrong from the beginning, wrong about the whole fuckin universe, man, because I am the universe, and my brothers and sisters! I am reality and we reality and you the transient white debils that shall be exorcized! Hosannah! Reality is change, you understand? And you are a cibilization of tombstones and cathedrals and faggoty min-u-ets. Harpsichords! You are stiffness, understand what I’m telling you? I’m the dialectical method, man. I am the essential nature of bein, existence, ineluctable modality, Jack. I create! Creation and destruction, baby! I am the Everlasting News!” He wa
ved the rifle in one hand and made noises with his mouth. Tch-tch-tch-tch. He ducked and stood looking up, smiling joyfully, aiming the rifle at the corner of the ceiling like a child picking off an imaginary cop. It was as if, through the dark glasses, he was seeing a vision, or acting, splendidly, a character who saw one. He froze in that position, half crouched, supremely impressive though absurd.

  Santisillia—smiling, dignified and weary—clapped. Dancer bowed from the waist. Santisillia said gently, like a kindly old teacher: “You see, it seems you were mistaken, Mr. Wagner. You thought Mr. Nit would refuse to fix the engines. We, on the other hand, inclined to think he would, because engines are your friend’s eternity, as Dancer has explained. Your poor Mr. Nit is in a cultural trap, blinded and grasping inside his white man’s bag. You’re victims, it seems—though perhaps I’m mistaken—of unrealistic ideals, inflexible genres.”

  “Commies,” Captain Fist hissed. His face bulged and writhed like woodsmoke.

  “No, it’s Henri Bergson,” Mr. Goodman whispered.

  “All you say has a good deal of truth in it,” Peter Wagner said. He leaned forward a little. “All the same, technological superiority—”

  “I know, I know,” Santisillia said, waving it away. “It’s all so incredibly simplistic. But we’re running out of time …”

  It was true, Peter Wagner saw. Mr. Nit’s five minutes to fix the engines must be up. Watching Santisillia’s handsome face, feeling Jane’s fear in the hand on his arm, Peter Wagner was of two minds, as if the lobes of his brain were disconnected. Why must they be enemies? Dancer and Santisillia were, heaven knows, no fools: he recognized with a leap of the heart, as when one sees an old friend, their morose ennui, their irritation with repetition. Yet in a matter of minutes, possibly just seconds … He gave his head a little jerk, driving out the wish that the conclusion might be nobler, the finale more dazzling—clearing his mind for the disgusting but necessary split-second action that was required of him by the plot. Below, if all was well, Mr. Nit would be seated on his high wooden stool, ready to bop the six eels on their noses. The charge would fly to the iron of the engines, up the metal bulkheads, across the metal decks. Dancer leaned on a bulkhead now, smoking a cigarette. Santisillia sat, feet planted squarely on the metal floor, machine gun resting in his lap. Peter Wagner sighed.