“You’re going,” he said. “End of story.” You’re pale. You’re girly. All you do is sit inside. How could you be my son?
I’ve never openly defied him before, though I’m sure being a Paste Eater probably cheeses him off. This one might mean military school, but you never know. I’d be lying, people, if I said I don’t sort of hope that maybe he’ll pick me up when this is all said and done and that disapproving look of his might actually go away because the little runt might not be such a wimp after all.
The Allwyn pisses along, and so do we on its grimy, stinking water. It twists, squawks, and chatters over the rocks the bald guy steers us around. It sighs when it gets wider and deeper.
The sun is nearly straight overhead when the Allwyn finally stretches out its banks on both sides and dumps into a big lake. The bald sad sack sticks to the cabin, leaning on the steering wheel and staring out the mosquito gut–speckled windshield. Kang joins him. Up until the Allwyn took this breather, he’d stood in the bow watching for rocks.
It’s summer, all right, hot as a mofo and not even noon, although there’s a mountain range of storm clouds leaning on the trees. Gnats, mosquitoes, and dragonflies have been buzzing all day, but here, where the water has slowed, their swarms violate all the holes in your head and hum in your ears.
And that’s what I first think the other boats are: a buzzing dragonfly or a horsefly or a gnat humming in my ears. But when I see Kang’s face go sour as he stands and walks out of the cabin, I hear their engines.
Three identical white yachts are humming along behind us. His Eminence would drool over them. Their white paint reflects the sun, the rails are spit polished, and their drivers are probably nice and cool and showered behind the tinted windows that seal the cabins.
All three run parallel to one another, lazily droning along. Actually, no—they seem to be coming up on our asses, plowing white water trails, though they are still probably a football field away. I’m not sure exactly where they came from—the part of the river we’d been in before the Allwyn turned to lake was too narrow for a yacht. The town the bald guy mentioned must be nearby, which means civilization. Upscale civilization, from the looks of these boats. I can already feel the warm hotel shower, water washing off the river slime, and me all clean and mapping out the quickest route to California.
“Check it out, Arthur,” I say.
But when I turn back to the deck, Kang is clearly the one to watch.He still isn’t laughing or crying, but the sun he painted on his chest bends at right angles atop his tense muscles. His moccasins are planted parallel the deck center, and his eyebrows are caving the rest of his face in. He shoots the white boats a stare that would make me want to change course if I was one of them.
“Put them below,” Baldy says. I jump. He’s stepped in behind me so that he and Kang have me sandwiched. The wrinkles around his eyes and mouth gather before he turns and goes back to the cabin. When he looks over his shoulder, his face has gone red as a Coke can.
“Now, Kang, goddamn it!” he yells—spraying it, not saying it.
Evidently Arthur and I are the stuff Baldy wants below—the Indian stoops and puts Arthur over his shoulder, then grabs me by the wrist. He takes us to the opposite side of the cabin, where a retractable stairway leads down to blackness. Baldy puts on a head of steam—I can tell because the the trees are now whirring past.
Kang marches us down the steps and leaves us there, retracting the stairway and closing the hatch without turning on the light.
It’s hot and close. The ammonia smell of cleaning solution wafts through the room. Beneath my Timberlands is a hard metal floor, and I guess beneath that is the pontoon dial I saw before coming aboard. Up above, Baldy is hauling ass—I can feel the water chopping against the hull.
I’m mad scared. It was only two years ago that I threw out the Power Rangers nightlight the Moms had plugged in next to my dresser because it was too pussy, but the dark still isn’t my bitch. Every noise emitted from the two men scraping around overhead makes me strain more desperately into the darkness, but it’s black as a coffin. I am going to bawl for sure.
Then the explosions start.
I have this majorly cool DVD called Hell’s Boat, which is about this submarine during World War II. The Germans dump barrels full of explosives into the sea, which go off all over the place—wicked close to the submarine. You see it shimmy and shake, and the crew members just get thrown ass over ears. On surround sound in the living room it practically shakes the whole house down, the Moms always says.
Whatever’s exploding around the Tamzene is like that, only louder—like somebody going up to the parapet that overlooks the courtyard at the Primrose School and shoving shelves full of hardcovers from the library over the edge. Giant fists punch the water next to the boat. I hear the bald guy and Kang running around yelling.
This is it, I’m going to die, I can’t help thinking.
Every time it booms, I lose my balance, smack my head, and see those white fountains that flow behind your eyelids when you hit your head in the dark.
I see all kinds of things in the dark. I see the foyer in my house. I’m a kid. I look through the arms of potted plants and pretend they’re a jungle. I can stand up straight and still hide. The Moms chases me on her hands and knees. She pretends she’s a hippo. I slip and fall, but it doesn’t hurt, and the Moms leaps on me like an animal attacking. Instead of ripping my flesh, she attacks me with kisses, and our giggles echo through the marble hall.
Then, through all the banging and shouting and crashing water, I hear a voice.
It is a short distance behind us, electronic and piped through a public address system: “Crew of the Tamzene. Crew of the Tamzene. Cut your engines, drop anchor, and prepare to be boarded. If you do not comply we will fire. Repeat: cut your engines . . .”
The cops!
A Paste Eater’s rep as being anti-society requires me to loathe five-oh. And of course the cops would definitely call our parents and totally rub out our trip to California. Senator Mortimer Brubaker’s son was arrested with a pair of drug dealers in central PA, the cable channels would tease.
Well, I’d be lying, people . . . and I hate myself for saying this . . . but I’m sort of relieved. The cops are going to off a couple of drug dealers. Lying down here in the dark with a bunch of people I don’t know and explosions going off, I felt pretty damn warm toward cops. Fuck California, and fuck the Grizzlies. We’re saved. In a few minutes we’ll probably be at police headquarters. “We got lost, and Arthur hurt his leg, and these guys offered us a ride,” I’ll say. His Eminence will send somebody to pick me up. Then he’ll glower at me for a while, but I’ll still be back in Philly in time for Sniper Dude X. I might get to see a real-time shoot-out once Baldy and Indian realize it’s pointless to try outrunning the cops’ cool boats.
But the Tamzene doesn’t slow down. As a matter of fact, it churns even faster. And the electronic voice from the cop yachts gives up pleading.
More explosions.
CHAPTER FOUR
the heavens
Twisting, supercooled shapes of vapor curled in absolute freedom until the word came to be.
The world was a thought from an unseen mind, and when it appeared, the undulating parabolas, parallelograms, and spirals stopped and took their necessary forms.
Warm air rose. Ice crystals collided with crackling blue light.
Then the rain began.
the tamzene gets hit by a storm
I’ve taken bullets at point-blank range before.
Once, on the streets of LA in broad daylight, some Chicano dude in flannel glocked me in the front of the skull. I’ve been riddled with machine-gun fire in a castle in Bavaria, whacked by lightsabers about a million times, and had some really big cats pummel my head with lead pipes over and over again. Not a big deal. In Castle Wolfenstein, that just means finding a couple of medical bags and running over them, and then you’re all good again.
But there’s no
thing like that down here in the hold. We’ll get offed, and that’ll be that. One of the explosions will smash the hull, it’ll fill with water, and Arthur and I will drown.
I want to tell him it’s okay that he doesn’t have style or friends or anything because he had the balls to ditch camp and try to get to California, which makes him all right in my book. But the combined roar of the water and the engine is too loud. Since it’s pitch-black and we’ve been thrown around so much, I don’t know how Arthur’s doing. I hear him breathing—wheezing, actually—every time the boat lurches.
Soon I hear another noise on top of the explosions and shouts. It starts softly—a faint tapping against the hull that you can barely hear over the engine—but soon gets louder. It hisses.
I also hear a new explosion. It’s different from whatever the cops are shooting at our boat. This one is distant, a low rumble, as if another boat might be being fired upon in another river somewhere nearby. Then it gets louder, like dozens of rifles firing at once. These explosions are big, but they don’t shake the boat. Still, the Tamzene begins to pitch and sway as if a giant is using it as a cat toy.
The stairway descends again, the bald man with it. Above him, sickly white flashes fall down the stairs.
“We need your help,” he says. Now he’s wearing a brimmed rain hat and a slicker.
On deck, the sky has turned the color of the Grizzlies’ Bruiser album, a bloody purple. Lightning crackles. Sheets of rain soak me, and the wind nearly hurls me from the deck. The monster trees are gone. Somehow, we’ve wound up in the center of a lake. Big swells pick us up, then waves slap us back down.
The white yachts, the five-oh, are gone.
Inside the cabin, Kang, also sealed in a black slicker and rain hat, has turned on a light. He grips the wheel.
I can barely see water other than when spray shoots up over the boat. Occasionally, in the purple void over the gunwales, white bursts of spray break over the big rocks that whiz past.
The bald man throws me this thing that looks like two tentacles attached to a bicycle pump. He tries to shout over the wind, but I can’t make out what he’s saying.
He pulls me close and shouts in my ear. “It’s a pump! We need to pump out this water or it’ll swamp us!”
From the cabin the bald man produces a second pump and jams the end onto the deck beneath a half-inch of water. He pitches one of the hoses over the deck and lets it dangle against the gunwale. Then he pumps the pump, sucking water through the hose and overboard.
I try to do as he asks but can’t get started. The boat is rudderless, pitching about on these big-ass swells, and I fall around the deck, running into soaked cardboard boxes full of equipment. Big rocks loom up out of the darkness, but the boat darts out of the way just in time.
The bald man runs around lashing boxes and other equipment to railings with rope. A fire extinguisher breaks free and smashes into the plastic window of the cabin, making a broken star.
Through the rain, electric lights appear on the side of the river. I realize the boat is passing a town—my first sign of civilization in days. But I’m still scared shitless, and soon the lights fade from view.
The storm goes on and on. Then, almost all at once, it stops, the river calms, and the thunder wanders away. The boat slides into a narrows, and trees wrap their arms around us.
“Well, that’ll make you old,” the bald man says. He tears off his rain cap. Sweat or rain has plastered his gray hair to his bald head. “That most certainly will make you old.”
By now, I’m shivering in the aft corner. Every part of my body aches, and my wet shorts and turtleneck have chafed me like a bitch.
The bald guy takes a white towel from a cabinet beneath the steering wheel and throws it to me. Then he sheds his slicker, and from his hip pocket produces an enormous pipe, a hookah shaped like a seventeenth-century warship. From his breast pocket he pulls a canvas bag of tobacco. He loads the pipe with the tobacco and lights it with a Zippo by sucking and exhaling quick puffs of smoke, all the while eyeing me.
“Mr. Snake,” he says after a while, “I believe we passed the town of Snow Shoe in the storm. And I’m sorry, but we can’t turn around.”
Because the cops would nail your drug dealer ass, I’m thinking, but I don’t say anything.
He puffs his pipe some more. He’s looking at me weird, which is worrisome because I’ve been in a bunch of His Eminence’s PR photos—me and the Moms grinning like crazy while he wraps his arms around us like we’re a real, honest-to-goodness nuke family. If he remembers me—well, who knows what he’ll do? Ransom my ass, maybe?
But I guess he can’t place me, because after a while, he says, “We’ll look at the maps and find the next closest town. Meantime, why don’t you go take care of your friend?”
Kang leads me back down to the hold, but this time he leaves the light on before he closes the hatch. Arthur is sprawled in the center, sweat beading all over him.
The dark room in which we’re being held prisoner is a long storage area. The iron floors and ceiling are painted white, and long metal supports that look like ribs run up the sides. Between the ribs poke long pipes.
Half the room—the side where they tied us before—is empty. But on the other half, they’ve stacked flat white sacks clear to the ceiling. In the storm, one of the sacks fell and ripped open. Brownish moss spills from it. I sniff it.
“It’s weed! I told you! I told you! These guys are drug runners!”
Ordinarily, people, I’d think that was wicked badass. But the sight of it scares me. You can hear about stuff like bong hits and hypos full of Whitey Herzog and think it’s cool; when some bald post-grunger squeals about it in one of his jams, doobage and all of it sounds righteous psycho and mind-expanding. The danger seems wicked cool, and you’re sure you wouldn’t be one of those geeky DARE momma’s boys if given half the chance—and if it didn’t threaten any future growth spurts. I’m telling you, though, in reality it gives you the shakes. Because connected to it is all the stuff the Moms was trying to protect me from—the pale dudes with bluish lips and tracks all over their arms, guys killing one another with chainsaws like Pacino in that one movie where he’s supposed to be Chicano. And suddenly I’m aware that about a million monster trees separate me from the Moms—with her pucker-marked arms that definitely won’t tuck me in tonight—and I want to curl up and cry until they come and get me.
Which is what I do. When I wake up hours later Kang is shaking me. I don’t know how long I was out, but the swelling’s down in Arthur’s ankle, and he’s able to hobble around on both feet.
We go up the stairway again. It’s night now; fireflies flit through the trees over the gunwales, and the stars look like a mad big city. Stars don’t shine very bright in Philly, so you usually forget that they’re there, but out here they’re like blue daylight.
Baldy is listening to a little radio in the cabin. He’s switched on the overhead light and is leaning back in a wooden swivel chair with his legs propped on the dash. He smiles at us when we walk into the cabin.
“. . . authorities are continuing their search and rescue operations for both boys after their canoe and gear were located,” the radio is saying. “To repeat, the son of Pennsylvania Republican Senator Mortimer Brubaker has been reported missing. The fourteen-year-old had been attending a downriver Christian summer camp in central Pennsylvania. Winthrop Brubaker and another boy became separated from the rest of the camp . . .”
Back home the Moms and His Eminence have probably loaded up into the Bentley, bound for Godspeed Summer Camp, the Moms with her usual hangdog expression and His Eminence trying out disappointed glares. They could be there in two hours, which would give them plenty of time to stew.
Baldy is still smiling at us. Me in particular.
“So you’re Senator Brubaker’s kid?” he asks.
CHAPTER FIVE
we hatch a plan
Cat: out of bag. I stammer.
“I recognized you,”
the bald guy says. “You were in his campaign brochure. Kang, you picked up Mortimer Brubaker’s kid. Do you believe that? The . . . the irony of that?”
Kang’s eyes shoot razors at me, not exactly the way he looked at those white yachts, but close enough to make me feel a little like puking.
Baldy keeps smiling. “The head of the Committee on the Environment and Public Works,” he says slowly. His grin doesn’t look happy, but that might have been the Indian at his shoulder looking like he might eat me up.
“So you’ve heard of him?” I manage.
“Heard of him!” The bald guy bends at the waist, raps the table with a hairy fist, and lets out a series of bleats that rouse some cackles from the woods. “Heard of Senator Mortimer Brubaker! Who hasn’t? You might say we’re big fans of your father’s work, Mr. Brubaker. Tremendous fans. He’s a brilliant politician. Who else could successfully siphon a billion in funding from the National Science Foundation labs and put it—just where it belongs—in the Defense Department. And don’t forget that your old man was, of course, the quintessential vote in the Senate—the big push, you might say, behind lowering carbon dioxide emission standards in the EPA Act . . .”
On and on he rambles about all kinds of stuff they admire about my dad. It relieves me that they like him so much, but the smile on his face and the amount of saliva he’s working up in the corners of his mouth make my skin crawl.
We Are All Crew Page 4