by John Straley
Stars pressed down out of the sky. The sea gave way to the weather, changing from ink-black felt to a rolling glitter of waves. The dark purple outline of the Fairweather mountains rose to the east and the sky here in the gulf seemed a calamity of bright objects.
I could hear the steel drums on the fantail and prismatic laughter of passengers off the stern. In a moment the doors to the lounge opened and the blaring fanfare pushed Mr. Brenner out onto the starboard deck with me. He was dabbing his forehead and swabbing brandy off his neck. Someone had draped his camel sport jacket over his shoulders.
“What are you doing out here, young man?” he said in a much quieter voice than I was expecting. “All of the pretty girls are in there. They are waiting for you, my boy. It’s your life—don’t waste it out here.” He looked at me sternly and I shrugged my shoulders.
“Ah. Moody, moody, moody . . . I should have known that about you. That first night. You’re thinking about her then, the girl who kissed you that first night?”
“She’s dead,” I told him.
“Dead. Of course she’s dead. What? You think she’s avoiding you?” Brenner fished into his pocket and found a cigar tube. “They told us.” He spoke as he lit the great cigar. “They told us you were a Shamus. That true? You asking questions about people dying on this ship. That true?” A squall of smoke wrapped around us from his cigar.
“Are you going to die on this trip, Mr. Brenner?” I asked him.
He stared at me defiantly. “You know how old I am?”
I shook my head assuring him I didn’t.
“Eighty years old. That’s right!” He stood flat-footed and posed for me.
This was remarkable, if true. My guess would have been in the mid-sixties.
“That’s right, young man. I’ve seen the best of this century . . . and the worst, too, let me tell you: the war, the camps, America, Israel . . . everything.”
“You don’t look like you’re dying of prostate cancer.” I tried to head him off.
“Ugh! It’s an old man’s disease.”
“So you want to kill yourself because of it?”
Mr. Brenner sidled up to me at the rail and we both looked over toward the outline of the Fairweathers.
“When I was a little boy, my parents were gone. Very bad. You know . . . Nazis.” He spit out into the sea. “I had been sent away early. I lived with my aunt in Hungary for a time and then in Jersey City. I never really knew what they had been through, my family, only the stories and a little book of pictures. I didn’t think much of it. I studied hard in school. I worked hard at everything I did. I made several wives miserable, I grew up to be very rich, you see, because I never wasted any time being happy. Oh, I was a bastard, young man. I don’t mind telling you this is true. Then a doctor tells me I have cancer. This cancer may kill me and it may not. Suddenly I feel giddy. I drink. I travel. I love the women. Oh, my poor wives! I was such a prick. I only wish they had known me when I was dying!” He sucked on his cigar and the smoke bloomed like incense from a censer.
“So, you think your guilt about . . .” I began. But he slapped my arm.
“Hush. Don’t talk about Freud. He’s a witch doctor. There never was any science to that man. No! All I’m saying is I spent most of my life feeling crappy that I was alive and I’m not going to spend one second like that again.”
“Then why travel with the club?” I asked, thinking of L’Inconnue de la Seine and their very high death rate.
“That girl, when she kissed you the other night, I know you can’t forget her. Isn’t that right?”
“That’s true,” I told him.
“You can’t get that girl out of your mind because she knew exactly who she was and what she was doing. She was savoring the last passionate moments of her life and every ounce of that passion was in her kiss.”
“Or so we’d like to think,” I said softly.
“Ah, my boy, but you are a cynic, aren’t you?”
“Not really. I’m just wondering why a man with such vitality would want to die just now.”
Mr. Brenner’s eyes flickered and he turned back out to sea. He put a foot up on one of the bars of the rail. “I am vital because I know the limit of my life. I am vital because I know the exact worth of each second. I determine my destiny and this makes me what I am. I don’t give these things up to the damn doctors. Can’t you see that, young man?”
I started to speak to him when something darted just out of my field of vision back under the staircase to the upper deck. Brenner turned, too. Back by the doorstop a brown savannah sparrow huddled in the shadow.
The bird was small as a baby’s fist. She sat squat, head buried into her wings: black eyes darting.
“What the hell?” Mr. Brenner said softly as he bent and picked her up.
“What do you think?” he asked me. “Think she ran into a window or something?” He held the little sparrow cupped in his fleshy hands, his fat cigar still cradled between his fingers. The bird was trying to disappear through a stonelike stillness.
“She probably flew to the ship when we were anchored in Sitka. She’s used to marshes and the grassy beach fringe,” I offered.
“My gosh, her heart is beating so fast. Do you think it’s hurt? Broken wing or something?”
I was about to answer when the bird flew from his hands in a feathery storm around the deck, looping frantically toward the portholes. With each pull toward the deck rail the sparrow would catch the rush of wind from the ship’s progress and veer back toward the sheltered deck. After several of these parries she landed again, in the lee of the stairwell, eerily still and silent.
“Let’s just leave her,” I suggested to Mr. Brenner and put my hand on the handle of the door to the Great Circle Lounge, where I could hear the band tearing into a Tommy Dorsey number.
“Nonsense,” Brenner said with certainty. “She wants to go home.” And he picked up the sparrow and heaved her across the rail.
The sparrow fell, stonelike for a moment, and then spasmed into flight. I followed her wing beats for a few seconds as she flew out past our stern wake and into the darkness heading east.
Brenner watched the little brown bird disappear. We said nothing and then he started to shake with the cold. His skin seemed pale and he clutched his arms around his shoulders. For the first time on the voyage he looked his age, and just briefly perhaps afraid. When he realized I was staring at him he jammed the cigar back into his mouth, then walked back into the lounge. I stayed out on deck listening to the laughter and the steel drums. I suddenly felt my age, too. After a while, I went inside to bed.
In the morning, the hull of the ship rattled and clunked through ice. Chunks of ice, from drink-sized cubes to frozen blocks the size of buses, scattered on the calm surface of the bay as if they were floating debris. There was a thin layer of clouds high in the sky and the water appeared an opaque milky white. The day felt cold, colder even than the temperature. Cold to the bone. Everything here was rock and ice and newly scrubbed land. The glacier itself was a crumbling bluff of ice extending a mile and a half along its face. From the ship you could feel its cold, like a freezer door left open. The massive bulk of the glacier ran away into the distance, leaving only the smoothed stone ridges on both sides of the bay. High on the hillside a few scrubby willows grew so that there was the slightest haze of green on these rocks. Nowhere else in this scoured and crumbling landscape was there any color.
Paul and the older man I assumed was his father walked toward the fantail to have a close look at the ice. Todd was there taking pictures and chatting to his shipmates. They stood shoulders hunched and bouncing on the balls of their feet. Puffs of vapor came from their mouths as they laughed. Todd was wearing his gray cardigan sweater over his shoulders and he had one of the light blue blankets the crew was handing out to passengers, one edge of it tucked int
o the back neck of his shirt. This seemed to keep the blanket in place. He wore earmuffs. These he got from God knows where.
I came up to him as he was explaining about calving. “Incredibly massive, these can be, whole towers, buttresses of ice . . .” he enthused to Paul and his father as I came closer. Just as I reached them, Todd pointed to a section of ice as large as a townhouse that gave way from the face of the glacier and slumped into the bay. A moment later the sound came to us as a grinding crack and then a sizzle. A wave rolled through the oily-looking slush near the glacier and came on under our hull and the Westward bobbed slightly.
Todd hurriedly took a picture of what had happened just moments before. Paul smiled and offered to take Todd’s picture with the glacier in the background but Todd then insisted on taking a group shot with all of us in the frame. This led me to standing awkwardly next to the old man and Paul as Todd fiddled and fussed with his camera on the backs of two chairs put together. “He seems quite knowledgeable about glaciers,” the old man told me.
“Yeah, but he doesn’t know squat about his camera,” I said out of the side of my mouth. The old man looked up at me, a little distressed, as if I might not realize how Todd was “different” and that I might be being a little hard on him. Todd can oftentimes bring out surprising gentleness in other people.
“I’m his roommate,” I told him, and the old man only said, “Ah!” as if that were all that needed to be said.
There was activity on the boat deck above us as the crew seemed to be preparing to launch a lifeboat. This caused some stir among the passengers. Paul and Todd went off to have a closer look. The old man stayed leaning against the rail. He stuck his hand out to me as we both watched Paul and Todd walk away.
“I’m Harold Standard,” the old man said. “My son and I are cruising together.” He nodded in Paul’s direction.
Today, Paul seemed even paler, if that were possible. His skeletal frame seemed evident even under the bulky clothes he wore, if only because of the thin lines his shoulders cut into the jacket.
The old man mumbled something.
“I beg your pardon,” I said.
“Oh,” Mr. Standard said, “nothing. I was just muttering to myself.” He could not take his eyes off his son. “I just remember Yeats said something like ‘To people who have seen ghosts, human flesh seems so substantial.’”
From far away the glacier creaked and groaned, sending a shudder into the air. A little gray bird landed in the ship’s rigging, looking like a toy trumpet.
“It’s AIDS, you know,” Mr. Standard said, and I said nothing. “He got it from a blood transfusion.”
“Really?” I said. “That’s tough. I mean . . . that’s too bad.”
The ship turned away from the bluff of ice and came to a stop. The captain lowered the boat with several crewmen and a Filipino man with a white tunic and a chef’s hat on. The crewmen stuck their long oars into the opaque water and rowed toward the bow of the ship. They looked tiny. Their efforts against the oars hardly seemed to trouble the water. I noticed that I was starting to shiver. The man in the chef’s hat was talking to the seamen, pointing to a huge blue chunk of ice. The crew bent into their oars and soon they were alongside it. The cook patted the tiny berg, examining it as if it were a used car. Then, after some consideration, he drove several bolts into its side and screwed them in tight.
The davits used for hauling the boats on board were used for bringing the ice on deck. The davits swiveled and allowed the ice to be placed on the edge of the fantail where others on the kitchen crew rushed to ease its landing on the deck. They had placed a round stand under the ice, and they were able to slide it on the deck around to the center of the fantail.
In shape and color the berg looked like an uncut diamond. In the milky white sunlight it almost appeared to glow blue. Hoses were attached to the stand and were run over to the scuppers on the side of the ship. Todd and Paul stood staring up at the great monument of ice.
“I can’t . . .” Mr. Standard blurted out.
“I’m sorry?” I said, not sure I had heard him.
“No, I’m sorry. I’m just talking to myself.” Mr. Standard hugged his arms around himself. He, too, was shivering. “I was just thinking, I can’t help him. I don’t know how much suffering another person can bear.” He did not take his eyes off his son.
“I suppose you have to take their word for it,” I offered lamely.
“That wasn’t true,” he said.
“Yeah, you might be right. I didn’t mean to meddle,” I said, embarrassed.
“No. Not that. I meant it’s not true about the blood transfusion,” Mr. Standard said, his cheeks slick with tears.
“That’s all right.” I put my hand awkwardly on his shoulder. “None of that matters now, I suppose.”
The doors from the kitchen opened wide and the man in the chef’s hat appeared with a mallet and a table full of chisels. The chef barked orders to his assistants. Assistants began drying and positioning the block of ice for carving; my shipmates began to gather. Mr. Standard mumbled something that I took as an apology and he walked away into the crowd of gawkers.
Isaac Brenner walked out on the fantail. There was no cigar and there was a quavering uncertainty to his step. He had a blanket draped over his shoulders. He looked as if he had aged a decade overnight. He came slowly over to me.
“Mr. Brenner!” I called out. “How are you this morning? Everything okay?”
Brenner was looking distractedly around at the crowd.
“Huh? Yes. Yes. Just a little off my game this morning . . .” His voice trailed off. “Have you seen that young man Paul?” Then he looked up to me and his face drained of blood.
I pointed down to the fantail and Brenner waved distractedly and shambled off.
Jane Marie walked on the deck above the fantail and, looking down, saw me and waved. In a moment, she was standing next to me.
“Hello, sailor,” she said and gave my arm a squeeze. She was warm and I could taste the life in her breath.
“Hey, beautiful,” I said somewhat absently. I was watching Paul and Todd walking slowly around the block of ice and I couldn’t stop shivering. Jane Marie put her arm around my waist.
“We really need to talk.” She said it in a tone that worried me.
“Listen,” I said, without looking at her, “I know we should talk but I just don’t want to hear bad news right now. I’ve caught a bad chill.”
Jane Marie took my face in her hands and turned it toward hers.
“Let’s go warm up, then,” she said, her dark eyes scanning my face, probing, looking for clues. “I can help.” She touched my cut.
“Cecil,” she said, softly and with a tone of tired resignation, “I’m tired of organizing games.” And she paused as the face of the glacier cracked and groaned and the silver bird in the rigging flew away. “I want you to love me again.”
I’ve known Jane Marie from when I was a kid growing up in Juneau. I had a crush on her when the Beatles first appeared on Ed Sullivan. Some of the best things in the modern era have occurred since I’ve started loving her. She was always smarter than me, always more mature and in all things I assumed she really knew the truth about me, but tolerated my friendship anyway. This is what I always thought love was: A tolerance. But maybe I had been wrong.
Jane Marie gave me a kiss. Her lips were warm and her grip on my neck was urgent. As she pulled away from me, her tongue flicked inside my lips and against my tongue. I could smell the soap in her hair and I could feel her muscles running down her back as she stepped into me for warmth.
“Cecil,” she whispered into my ear, “this boat is too crowded. There is too much unhappiness here. Let’s go someplace?” She nestled her mouth into the crook of my neck. “Please,” she said.
We walked hand in hand down the passageways to
ward our room. As we rounded the stairs to Acapulco Deck, I smelled the strong scent of marijuana drifting down the hall. Jane Marie wrinkled her nose. Ahead, Todd was using his key in the lock on our room. Jane Marie and I stopped and looked around and noticed that the door to 800 was ajar. We walked up to it and knocked lightly, then looked in.
There were four young men in the room passing around a joint of Rastafarian proportions. Paul was there, flopped down on the made-up bunk. All four smiled up at us in the doorway, waving and motioning us to come in. One sucked on the spliff and a plume of sweet-smelling smoke came toward us. One of the other young men had an IV bag hanging from the bunk above and the other was propped on pillows next to him. The two on the bunk were completely bald. Their pale and inscrutable expressions were made more so by the lack of eyebrows.
“Don’t be scared,” the one with the closed eyes murmured. “We won’t hurt you.” And they all broke into a languid laughter.
“No . . .” I said and started to back out. “Sorry to disturb you.” And we walked back out into the hall.
Toddy was reading in his bunk so we kept walking down the hall. Down at this depth of the ship we could hear the ice grinding against the outside of the hull as the ship maneuvered even closer to the glacier. It was a low-pitched grinding shudder that I could feel through the bottoms of my feet.
Jane Marie pulled me to a stop and kissed me, touching the side of my face with her hands, and then she placed my hand lightly against her breast.
“I know someplace,” she said and pulled me up one flight and down a short hall I hadn’t been in. In the interior of the ship was one of the tiny laundry rooms provided for the passengers. There were three coin-operated washers and three dryers. With some unplugging and moving around I was able to block the door that led into the room.