At first, the weight of the bags and the plodding up and down the stairs sucked big time. My arms ached, I sweated like a mofo, and my chest felt like it was going to explode. But soon, the mindless back-and-forth marching unhitches my brain and it’s the best thing ever, like being half-asleep and half-awake. Trudge, trudge, boom. Turn. Trudge, trudge, boom. Turn. I compose two whole songs and come up with album cover designs and stage show concepts for my band’s upcoming tours.
Arthur takes a break to “chat” with Kang. It looks like chatting, at any rate. The two silently point and wave, making shapes with their hands and noises by trumpeting their lips. Kang motions at the metal dome with the hemp in it, and at the water and the trees.
This one time when I pass Arthur on the steps, I make like I’m mute and mouth a couple of silent words. He frowns like he can’t hear me. I move on and when we cross paths again, I mouth gibberish at him a second time. He stops and narrows his eyes and leans in close like he’s trying to hear. So I sort of wiggle my hands, make bird shapes, point at stuff, and mouth things at him. Just goofing around, you know. Guys do that with their buddies, because nothing is off limits when it’s just a joke.
When he gets that I’m just goofing, he looks at the ground and smiles and pushes past me. Oh man, it’s about as low as I’ve ever felt. The kid is obviously used to it. He’s conditioned because everybody else probably picks on him the same way. This one time at Primrose, one of the football players threw his cheeseburger at me in the cafeteria, and I dropped my tray with this mad loud crash and everybody laughed because I had mustard and ketchup and meat all over me and was standing above this mound of food and broken plates and spilled milk. And you can’t cry because that just makes it worse. All you can do is smile and act like you’re in on the joke. It’s the saddest thing in the world.
I swear to myself then and there that I’ll never make fun of Arthur ever again.
* * *
Seabrook stands rigidly behind the wheel and scans the banks of the river with his woolly caterpillar eyebrows at half-mast. He tells Kang we probably won’t stop until we clear Pennsylvania, just in case the white boats are still out looking for us.
The weather stays hot and weighs down on us, and bugs that spawned in the night cloud the deck. They bite me like crazy until Seabrook hands Arthur and me each our own personal bottle of bug repellant from his private stash. It’s a lotion, he says, but it smells like my shorts. “An invention,” he reassures us.
After I rub on a coat of the stuff, the bugs form a wide path when I come near them. But the lotion reeks something chronic. I tell Seabrook so.
He laughs. “Yeah, smelly as hell. But it works, doesn’t it?”
“Wicked,” I say. “And you invented this goop?”
Well, I must have stuck my foot in my mouth, because he looks at his feet and mutters at me and then goes into the cabin. I’m about to ask him what he said when I bump into Kang, who is looking at him with that same lump-of-coal expression he always wears.
“What’s his deal?” I ask, pointing at the Doctor, who is wiping the dashboard he cleaned just five minutes ago.
Kang makes some signs at Arthur. Arthur scribbles on his pad: His wife invented the bug repellant. She was a scientist too. She died.
What do you say in a moment like this? This one time, Joe Kennedy’s old man passed on, and nobody talked to the guy for eons. Then a month afterward Hugo Frist tried telling him a joke, and Joe went home sick for the day. You never know with dead people, you know? Nobody talked to Hugo for a long time after that, the stupid dork.
I don’t want to piss Seabrook off. He doesn’t talk much. Mostly he just goes about his work real determined, or else he sits there like he’s treading water in his own thoughts, staring at that crucifix key chain and stroking it. He’s always nice when he talks to us, even though he uses big words. He calls me Mr. Brubaker, which makes me feel like a grown-up.
So I work harder than before and hope not to pop off something else that stupid. Seabrook, after all, has to be a genius to have built this messed up boat.
The Tamzene is insane, people. Seabrook assembled it from a hodgepodge of boat parts and secondhand machinery. The top portion looks like an eighteenth-century trawler. Lacquered planks form the prow, the name Tamzene stenciled near the bow. Seabrook explains that he took the wood from a retired British warship that used to serve as the gift shop for a museum/casino in Reno, Nevada, before it went out of business. “It was the perfect size to anchor the rest of the boat,” he tells us.
Plastic and fiberglass sheets form the cabin, where there are two wheels for steering: one for the rudder, and another for the tires the boat uses to drive through streams too shallow to float on the pontoons.
Beneath the wheel is a CB radio. Seabrook says he used to use it to listen in on his pursuers—until they changed their frequency. Now the radio mostly spits static with only occasional snatches of talking.
The hemp cooker—a hulking mushroom dome of red metal with a hatch that hides the burning hemp in its belly—takes up most of the aft side. The fire chamber burns beneath the larger cap portion of the mushroom, which holds water. When the water boils, two large steel pistons attached to its sides pump in and out. These are connected by steel pipes to the Tamzene’s propulsion system, two small wheels directly beneath the stern.
“The idea, I’m afraid, came from the drug industry,” Seabrook says. “A device called a bong, used for the smoking of marijuana, routes the smoke through water and makes it cleaner for the inhaler. I’ve just built a larger version for the burning of the hemp—just without the electric motor, so it’s actually more energy efficient. The smoke gets piped from the cooker through the turbine with copper tubing.”
“Yeah,” I say, “it’s like a huge bong.”
Seabrook smiles. “Not exactly, like I said,” he says. “It has no electric power source. So it’s cleaner than a bong.”
“Dude,” I say, “a bong is just a chamber with water in it. You hook the pipe up to it and suck from the other end and it cleans the smoke. You don’t need electricity.”
“I’m quite sure about this,” he says. “I’ve studied it quite closely, and a bong is an electric device.”
Then he sulks, and I feel bad again. I mean, it isn’t a big deal that he doesn’t know anything about bongs. He’s still about the smartest guy I ever met. I guess he doesn’t like being wrong. His Eminence hates being wrong too. If he gets a fact out of whack and you call him out on it, it’s like you’ve taken away his iPhone.
The radio hisses and crackles. A voice bubbles up through the white noise: “. . . costly efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions could devastate the American economy and would only nominally reduce global temperatures. Further, many scientists are not convinced that the planet is warming beyond normal cyclical patterns.”2
* * *
Kang fixes the broken glass from the storm with duct tape and patches some of the places where the boards had come loose.
When we aren’t hauling hemp or sweeping the dust that always seems to cover the deck, we watch the trees, bushes, and weeds drift past. Sometimes we go beneath the long cement legs of a bridge. Here and there we see the burned-out wreckage of a car, and in one case a pair of Nike sneakers with the laces tied together slung over the limb of a tree.
People dump all kinds of shit into the river. It is a big flowing garbage can. There are pipes everywhere, snaking down banks and spewing brown gunk and green sludge that kills the fish. Dead fish are all over the place, floating upside down or scattered through the rocks, plastic six-pack holders, and rotting pizza boxes on the banks. We don’t see a soul for hours.
For lunch Seabrook serves TV dinners. I’ve never eaten one before. It’s Salisbury steak and waterlogged tater tots. “Sorry about this, guys,” Seabrook says. “We brought food that could be frozen easily. We must conserve.”
Arthur doesn’t wait for utensils—he picks up the brown, greasy lump of meat with his
fingers and finishes it in three bites. Kang does the same, and both race to down their drinks. I sip my seaweed citrus juice and wonder if I’ll be able to keep everything down.
“I suppose it’s not like we could get Domino’s Pizza to deliver out here,” I say.
Seabrook pats my shoulder. “We’ll get you pizza when we reach the border.”
“Why Ohio?”
Seabrook frowns. “I’ll be confident that we put enough water between ourselves and our pursuers by then to rest.”
Kang lets out a tremendous belch. Arthur smiles.
I lean toward Seabrook. “What, if you don’t mind my asking, is his story?” I nod toward Kang.
Seabrook tells us he first met Kang when he was setting off from New Orleans. Kang responded to an ad Seabrook had placed in the Times-Picayune for an “able-bodied seaman.”
“Come to think of it, that ad never actually made the newspaper, so I’m not certain how he responded,” Seabrook says. Kang had been the only applicant. They hit it off, probably because Kang can’t talk, which is always a great trait to have in your help. Seabrook didn’t have the money to pay him in anything other than food, so he made Kang his partner. And it all works out because the traveling helps Kang with his own quest.
“What quest?” I ask.
Just then, Kang takes the bowie knife out of the scabbard on his waist and sharpens it on a gray whetstone. Arthur watches like it’s TV.
“Kang is a Milliconquit.”
“A what?”
“A Milliconquit. A tribe of Native Americans that originated in New Orleans. A rather small, mostly unknown group that excelled in trade with other Native American tribes. Specifically, you see, the Milliconquit specialized in the production of a device for the protection of Native American feet.”
“Shoes?”
“Kind of, yeah. The tribe Milliconquit mostly subsisted on trading these items with other tribes, and as a result their population circulated throughout what we call today the continental United States, sometimes taking up residence with various other tribes, taking wives, bearing children. To tribes like the Iroquois and the Apache, the resident Milliconquit was considered to be something of a holy man. And the footwear they produced was considered so important to the other Indians that wars were actually fought over these shoes.”
“We’ve never discussed the Milliconquit in history class.”
Seabrook shakes his head. “You’ve likely never heard of the Arawaks either—the Indians Columbus first encountered and later slaughtered. The Milliconquit, as a tribe, were wiped away by European genocide. They were so dispersed throughout the continent that they’ve been forgotten. In fact, I’d never heard of them myself until I met Kang. I personally believe that Kang here is the last of the Milliconquit.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, but don’t tell him that. You see, Kang is on a quest to find his lost tribe. He’s traveling the country looking for remnants.”
“Like Caine in Kung Fu!” I say. “Just walking the earth. Or that guy in The Last of the Mohicans!” I beam at Kang. “That’s badass, man. Badass.”
Then, I whisper to Seabrook: “Why does he glow at night?”
“Excuse me?”
“That first night, he was . . . never mind.”
* * *
You can’t tell which way you’re going on a river because it’s all twists and turns. One minute you’re on what looks like a big lake with the sun burning a hole through your back, and then a minute later the sun is in front of you, the trees are clawing at you on either side, and it’s hard to tell there’s water under you at all. Sometimes there’s a fork in the river and you don’t know if it’s the start of some new waterway or if the one you’re on has split in two.
It gives me a headache, but Seabrook gets all ramped up by it. I mean, he has a GPS locator, but he gets giggles out of figuring things out on paper. He spots a landmark, unfurls his map, and scrawls in a little spiral notebook full of numbers he keeps in the cabin. Then runs back to the hemp cooker and twists a few knobs. That makes the cooker’s whoosh-whoosh noise hiss and the big pistons move faster or slower.
We run into a three-pronged fork. There’s a wide, tree-lined mouth on the right and a narrow trickle of water on the left—or we can head straight the way we’re going, downriver and around a bend. Seabrook frowns and scrawls on his pad, then erases it, sticks his tongue in the corner of his mouth, and replaces it with more writing.
“Mr. Brubaker,” he says, “get my pocket compass. It’s there on the top shelf.”
Arthur and I have been helping Kang with the anchor while Seabrook figures out where we’re going. I go to the far end of the cabin and look at the tall set of shelves.
“Where?” I ask.
“Top shelf,” Seabrook says again.
I look up at the shelves. They must be about six feet tall, so I should be able to reach, but I stand on tiptoe and can’t get it.
“Mr. Brubaker?” Seabrook’s back is to me, and he’s chewing the top of his eraser over his equations.
It’s embarrassing. Four foot eleven. Another half inch and I could get it. I strain. I grab the shelves. Maybe I could climb them, but they are these rickety metal things that would probably teeter over on top of me if I risked it.
Something bumps into my rear and I turn. It’s an empty plastic crate that was sitting near the door. It clicks that I can stand on the crate to reach the compass.
I see Arthur standing next to Seabrook. I can tell he’s glancing at me out of the corner of his eye.
I give the compass to Seabrook and stand next to Arthur.
If you’re tall—or at least normal height—it probably doesn’t mean much to you, but this was a cool move. Arthur could have just come over and grabbed the compass and handed it to Seabrook himself, which would have dissed me big time, even if he didn’t mean to. More often than not, when my shrimp frame shames me, there’s somebody—a Paste Eater or His Eminence or even the Moms—there to remind me what a little freakshow I am.
But Arthur bumped the crate at me nonchalantly and then pretended it didn’t happen. He’s a gangly kid, a good head and a half taller than yourstruly, but it’s like he knows what it’s like to be me.
I stand next to him and watch the water churn by. “So what are you going to do when you grow up, man?”
“Law school,” he writes on his pad.
Well that doesn’t compute. With some guys, you can just tell what they’re going to be. Burton Trotsky, for instance—if our band doesn’t save him from it—is going to be a lawyer. He doesn’t have publicspeak like His Eminence, but the kid is a born schmoozer.
I’m sticking to my vow never to insult Arthur, so I don’t mention the obvious—lawyers usually gab a little better than he does. “That’s cool, man,” I say.
Arthur shrugs. “My dad went to Harvard, and he says I’m going there.”
“So did mine,” I say. No big surprise. Everybody I know is Harvard grad spawn. And His Eminence never told me specifically I’m going there, but he often says “When you’re at Harvard in a couple years” like it’s a given.
“Dad works for the NSA,” Arthur writes. “Hush hush stuff. Says I’m going to be a legacy there. That’s why I was at Godspeed Summer Camp. First step.”
“Well, what do you want to do?”
He shrugs again. “I like dinosaurs. I’ve thought about archaeology or anthropology, but of course my dad won’t have any of it.”
“Wow, that sucks,” I say. “You see, me and my boys are starting this band. We’re wicked psycho. Doesn’t matter what my folks say—come eighteen, I’m out the door.”
We talk for a while longer until Seabrook yells, “Weigh anchor. We’re going to starboard. We’ll keep to the trees and hope they don’t spot us.”
Arthur is geeky, people, but I’m beginning to learn that he isn’t such a bad dude.
He tells me his dad does all kinds of secret agent stuff for the NSA. Everything is super quiet w
here he works: people mumble in soundproof rooms, phone conversations are whispered. They don’t even talk around the watercoolers like they do in the offices you see on TV. Coworkers only nod at one another when they pass in the hallways. One time, Arthur says, he went with his dad to a government-mandated father-son day, and people shot him dirty looks because of the soft noises his sneakers made when he tiptoed on the carpet. Things are so soundless at work that, when Arthur’s old man gets home, he needs a break from all the peace and quiet and relaxes with a little noise and tension. Every night, he turns up the TV set full blast, throws his briefcase down with a loud kerplunk, and hollers at his wife. And she shouts back, Arthur figures, because she knows how much he loves noise and tension, and she’s grown to love it over the years too.
“What’s for dinner tonight!” he shrieks.
“Pot roast!” she yells back.
“Again?! Can’t you speak to the help, dear? Chef just made pot roast last week! Do I have to do everything around here?”
Up until Arthur could actually speak, he looked as if he’d be a world-class loudmouth too. His goo-goos were loud enough to make the French doors to his nursery wobble. During his christening, church members actually stuck cotton balls in their ears to try to get some relief from the piercing sounds of his crying.
It wasn’t until he was old enough to actually speak that his parents noticed the volume coming down.
“Dinosaurs, Arthur?” his father would shout at him. “What good do you think you’re possibly going to get out of playing with dinosaurs?”
“Why don’t you play football, Arthur? How are you ever going to make friends if you don’t play football?”
“Why do you sit inside and read constantly? Why don’t you go outside and play, for God’s sake?”
Arthur tried to answer, but it was like somebody was twisting his sound knob to the left. Arthur kept speaking more and more softly until he was barely whispering.
We Are All Crew Page 6