At first, Arthur’s pediatrician said it was a mental thing. But his old man was convinced that wasn’t the answer. So they took the kid to other doctors, who hooked him up to machines that X-rayed his throat and scanned his brain. They jabbed him with needles and looked at his blood under microscopes. Arthur went to fifty of these other doctors in all, and none of them could find a thing wrong with him—physically, that is.
Then one day Arthur’s old man came home, kerplunked his briefcase down, and yelled about how he’d been right all along. One of the doctors who had just checked Arthur out had phoned and told him so. It wasn’t psycho-something. It was a birth defect. There was bad stuff in Arthur’s throat, this cloud of muscle that encircled his vocal chords. As Arthur got older, the muscle kept getting bigger and bigger and tighter and tighter around the vocal chords, which in turn kept getting weaker and weaker and littler and littler. It was incurable; surgery would have killed him. But the condition wouldn’t—it just meant he wouldn’t be able to talk above a whisper.
So the doctors outfitted him with the PA system that could pick up the tiny squeaks he made and blow them up into a voice that could be heard. That’s when the kids at school started in on him.
The whole thing freaked his mom out; after that she wouldn’t let him outdoors and slobbered all over him. She paraded him around the big social functions they hosted at their home in the DC suburbs so more people could cry over what a little freakshow he was.
His old man kept yelling. He yelled that Arthur needed to get his nose out of books and go outside. He yelled that he’d pulled some strings and had gotten him into Godspeed Summer Camp where he’d hang out with kids with normal voices.
Chapter Seven
we pass pittsburgh
When we hit shallow spots the Tamzene creeps over the rocks on its wheels, and that shakes the boat so badly that the boxes rattle against the floor and bottles and cans fall off tables. That doesn’t happen all that often, though. When the river widens and deepens, except for the crazy rhythms of the engine, the Tamzene slides along silently. We don’t pass anything at all for the rest of the day.
When the sun sets, Seabrook unfurls his map across the small table in the cabin, grips his chin, and announces that we should make Ohio by midday tomorrow.
That night, Kang cooks four steaks on the gas grill that’s lashed to the side of the cabin and takes over the piloting duties. I stand with him for a while and watch him work the controls. On closer inspection, his tats are not 100 percent Indian. The Nike swoosh is in there. Somebody has stenciled some squares and lines around it to hide it, but it’s the Nike swoosh all right.
The way he sort of fades into the deck at night freaks me out. And I still have no idea what that blue light was the night I spotted him. When I ask him, all he does is shrug and look back at whatever he’s doing.
Seabrook takes a pack of playing cards from one of the containers and asks us to play pinochle. The only card game I know is video poker, and I haven’t played in months since I lost $1,500 to a website that operates out of Kuala Lumpur, and His Eminence, after noting it on the credit card bill, took the Internet access out of my room. So Seabrook lights his hookah and teaches us how to play as Kang drives the boat through the trees, with only the occasional crackling noise and cricket pulsing above the hum of the engine.
We play until after midnight, and then unpack our bedding and lie down on the deck. I fall right to sleep.
I wake up in the dark. I was dreaming about the pink marks on the Moms’s forearms. I don’t know why I’d never thought of this before, but I know where they come from. Every night, the Moms leans on the brick wall that surrounds our house, which His Eminence refers to as the Compound. The Moms is out there every night, leaning on her forearms against that brick wall, staring out at the trees. I was dreaming that she was out there again, staring up at the same sky that I’d been looking at.
But that’s not what I see when I wake up. The trees are gone. Glowing towers roped with what look like Christmas tree lights have grown up in their place. They spike for miles, everywhere I can see, and lift into the darkness, blotting out the stars. Between the towers I can make out narrow blacktop corridors lined with cement walkways. Headlights whisk past on the roads. Three lighted bridges stretch across the river.
The hissing radio burps in the cabin. A voice crackles: “We need an energy bill that encourages consumption.”3
I rub my eyes. It must be Pittsburgh. I haven’t seen a city in days. I’ve never seen a city from the water before, and it feels like I’m watching a movie with the sound off—I can see the blinking lights, the cars driving past, even antlike people moving about on the walkways, but I hear only the gentle whoosh-whoosh of the Tamzene. Philadelphia has this loud-ass buzz. It’s big and everywhere. This city doesn’t seem real.
At first I consider waking Arthur. The two of us could slip into the water like secret agents and swim for shore, then maybe hitchhike like we originally planned. I prop myself up to get a better look at the city, but Seabrook, who is lying next to me on the deck, pulls me down by the shoulder.
“Mr. Brubaker,” he whispers, “we have to be quiet now. They’ll be expecting us to stop someplace like Pittsburgh. They may be watching us right now.”
“Who the hell are these people following you?” I whisper back.
So he tells me what he knows, which isn’t much. After they built the Tamzene near Seabrook’s lab in New Orleans and started searching for investors, they got a visit from some dude who looked like a government goon. The guy offered to buy the Tamzene from Seabrook for a briefcase containing $5 million. Well, first off, Seabrook knew his invention could potentially fetch a boatload more in the Benjamin department, and secondly, something about this dude didn’t seem big potatoes enough. So he turned the guy down. About a month before Arthur and I arrived at Godspeed Summer Camp, Seabrook set out from New Orleans. And that’s when he first started seeing them.
“What?” I ask.
“Those boats,” he says. Even in the dark, I can tell he’s frowning. “The Green Police.”
He first noticed them when rounding Florida—a couple of white boats cruising nonchalantly around the Key West harbor. Seabrook wouldn’t even have noticed them if it wasn’t for the names on their hull: Green Police. “I thought maybe they were kindred spirits. Perhaps that promotional video we’d made had found its way to the Web, and we were attracting sympathizers.”
Then he started seeing white boats everywhere. Four were anchored at the port in Savannah, with dudes gawking at the Tamzene through binoculars. In Baltimore, one of the white boats came within a few yards of the ship. When Seabrook tried to hail the man on deck, he hoisted a camera with a telephoto lens and started snapping pictures.
By the time he’d sailed to New York, the white boats were following his wake. He tried to hail them on the radio, but they didn’t respond. He managed to pick up their frequency on his own radio, and beneath their coded transmissions he thought he heard an order.
“Shoot to kill,” someone had said.
Then, when he turned onto the Hudson, they started shouting at him through their PA systems. And then they fired at him. They used a big gun—or maybe more like a mortar—like they wanted to blow the boat out of the water. The blast hit very close beneath the pontoon and sent the boat reeling from side to side. Seabrook said he was lucky there wasn’t any major damage, but it seemed to affect his radio because after that, all he picked up were snatches of conversations on one frequency.
Needless to say, Seabrook tried to avoid traveling by day. He hid the boat and altered his advertised route, turning into the small rivers of Pennsylvania to start his trip westward. He’d had run-ins with the Green Police twice since then, including the one on the Allwyn.
“So who are they?” I ask again.
Seabrook shakes his head. “Well, Mr. Brubaker, the environmental movement in this country is not without its enemies. I suggest you try and get some sleep a
nd hope they don’t find us again.”
“Why didn’t you call the cops on them?”
“I tried,” he says. When the white boats first started shooting and the Tamzene got away, Seabrook stopped at a town and called the police. They told him to sit tight and wait for an officer to show up at the dock. But that’s when he saw those damn white boats a second time and nearly got sunk hauling ass out of the harbor. I tell him it sounds like the five-oh really were in those boats tailing him, but he says he doesn’t think so because he’d heard nothing on his police scanner about the boat. “And why would they want to stop us?” he asks.
“I don’t get it,” I say. “Why, if people are trying to kill you, don’t you just stop? There are other ways to make a buck.”
Seabrook doesn’t say anything for a while. Finally he says, “Go to sleep,” and rolls over on his side.
I lie down on my back. The air doesn’t smell like city either; it smells like the river always has—like dead fish and chemicals. I watch the undersides of the bridges as we pass beneath them, and then the yellow glow of the city dims and the sky once again goes dark. The band Carmine is from Pittsburgh, I think. They have big stadiums there I could scout for venues for my arena rock shows. And TV! My chest starts to ache as I think about how recently, late at night, Cartoon Channel had been showing reruns of Hot Force—the shoot-’em-up cartoon with the chick in lingerie—one of my all-time favorites.
I glance at Arthur, who lies with his arm draped over the speaker of his powerless PA system, which he refuses to take off. Here, at least, we’re headed in the right direction. I might have made a discovery that’ll help His Eminence’s political career. We’re dry. We have food.
I close my eyes and try to go back to sleep. In the cabin, the radio hisses and buzzes. “If we are saying that the loss of species in and of itself is inherently bad—I don’t think we know enough about how the world works to say that.”4
the river
The men and women who live in this part of the world have found a new way to be happy.
They discovered that, if they dig through the ground and find a certain rock, they can extract a form of fuel from the rock that other men and women will pay through the nose to get because they can burn it to heat their homes for less money.
But men and women are never neat, and so, when they extracted this fuel, it leeched into the soil and collected into the groundwater, which gathered in subterranean streams and spilled into the river.
The river changed. It knew that one day it would burn the same way another river further west, the one men and women called the Cuyahoga, had burned years before.
The river didn’t hate. It didn’t love. It didn’t judge. It just flowed forever west.
However, when a boat capsized, or when someone fell into its depths and failed to surface . . . well . . . let’s just say after this whole fracking business, as it was called, the river could live with that.
Which is why when the thought came that night to throw up its arms in the form of a great fog and allow itself to be sucked into the air around a thing as insignificant as a boat, one might understand how the notion gave the waterway pause.
The river flowed forever west without judgment, but it threw up its fog and allowed the boat to pass unseen through the night around the city.
the orange
I think I am still dreaming when I wake up the second time. The monster trees, the rocks, the dirt—everything is pinkish yellow. The river has changed. Purplish ectoplasm swirls all around us, and the foam breaking off the Tamzene’s hull is like cotton candy.
Behind us, the river and the trees and the banks make roughly a U shape out of the horizon. At the base of the U, a glowing blob is rising. On the surface of the water, it paints a neon orange strip, more orange than a neon sign on Broad Street. Then another. And another.
After a few minutes, a big blood orange that seems lit from the inside climbs up out of the river and sprays pink light over all of the hills and trees and sky. As it climbs higher, it paints more neon pink and orange streaks on the water, one after another after another, until there’s a path of them in the water to our stern.
I try waking Arthur so he can see, but nothing doing. It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen—and I’ve seen every Star Wars flick at least five times. But in those movies, it’s different because you can see everything. Out here, the screen in my head can’t hold it all. That almost makes me feel like giving up and not looking, but I can’t help myself. I go to the cabin and explain how it feels to Kang, but he just nods and smiles.
giant head
Breakfast is cinnamon Pop-Tarts and black coffee. The night cooled the air, and fog surrounds the boat. Trees streak the fog, and we can barely make out the river in front of us. The city is long gone.
As we gather our bedding, Seabrook says, “We’ll be in Ohio before you know it.”
It’s getting close to lunchtime when we cross the state line, and Seabrook slows down. I’m not sure what river we’re on, but when we change states it spreads out, which in the fog is science-fiction scary. Water stretches on all sides of us and disappears into fog banks. I guess Seabrook can tell what direction we’re headed, but I sure can’t.
I look over the side of the boat and watch the black water while the radio crackles in the cabin: “. . . never been one case—documented case—of groundwater contamination in the history of the thousands and thousands of hydraulic fracturing.”5
I see a face looking back at me.
Well, it freaks me out something fierce. The big face is a couple feet down. I can’t make it out very well, but it’s definitely grinning. I holler for Seabrook to stop the engine. He does, and we drift downriver a moment until he tosses the anchor in, then joins me.
“What is it?” he says, grumpy as hell.
I point at the face, and he frowns and peers deep into the river.
“Kang, give me the hook,” he says.
Seabrook equipped the Tamzene with this long skinny pole with a hook on the end of it. He uses it to grab posts or trees when he’s docking. When he plunges it into the water, the face disappears behind a brown haze. Seabrook shoves the pole around for a bit, hooks it, and pulls it to the surface.
It’s a poster.
It’s made of white plastic and was probably once in somebody’s front yard on a metal hanger. On one side is the face, a smiling older guy with jowls and a ridged nose and bald head.
On the other side, blue letters read: Keep Lynnbrook on the winning path. Reelect Councilman Bob Schwartz.
Seabrook unhooks it and lets it slide back into the water. “People and their trash. Please don’t ask me to stop again, Mr. Brubaker, unless it’s something important.”
“I just thought it was a real person down there,” I say.
I guess he can tell the face really made me wiggy, because he softens a bit. “A real person would most likely float. The fog can play tricks on you. Just keep an eye out for rocks, and I’ll worry about any dead bodies, okay?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
we see more faces
Arthur and I mop the deck and then sit down with Kang to learn how to tie knots, which is like trying to learn the Gettysburg Address from a guy who only speaks Arabic. He makes hand motions and tries to demonstrate knot tying by coiling bits of rope between his fingers; I find myself saying “What?” a lot. It’s boring as hell, so I start drifting off again to thoughts of TV. I’m thinking of my favorite episode of Hot Force when I see another face.
The river has narrowed, and through the fog, trees are visible on the opposite bank. Between two pines, people, I swear I see a dude.
The dude is mostly in the shadow of a tree. His back is in silhouette, but his face is clearly in view: a pale white face with crazy hair and a beard. It glares at the boat for an instant and then disappears into the trees.
Kang continues to show us how to tie what Seabrook calls a sheep shank. Arthur, who has no trouble following Kang, ties the kno
t like he’s tying his shoelaces.
I look over at Seabrook, who is driving the boat, puffing his crazy pipe, and whistling old people music. I assume, since no one reacts, that my eyes are fucked up. Probably the result of too many hours without exposure to television.
I’m settling back in to try to absorb more of Kang’s instructions when I see two more faces among the trees on the riverbank. The people who own the faces dart back behind trees to hide when they see me looking.
“What the fuck?” I say. Kang looks at me like he doesn’t know what I’m gabbing about.
I get up and lean against the cabin, looking into the woods for more of these people. Seabrook continues to whistle. Then he looks at me, smiles, and sings: “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. We’re finally on our own.”
“Huh?” I don’t know what he was talking about, and don’t much care, because right then two more of these fog freakos appear and then disappear back into the trees.
Seabrook whistles a few more bars. “Man, what they don’t teach you anymore. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s finest—”
I interrupt him and point at a trio of dudes who dart into the woods. All three are holding long, skinny poles. Seabrook turns to look at the trees the second they disappear.
He looks back at me, frowning.
“What did you see?”
“People. It looked like people.”
Seabrook again glances into the forest and then back at me. He smiles. “Maybe you did. I can’t say we’re near any town at this point, but there could certainly be hikers in the woods here. After all, we aren’t all that far from Lynnbrook.”
A few minutes later, Seabrook pulls the Tamzene under the low-hanging branches of a tree so you can’t see the boat from the river.
“Here we are, gentlemen,” he says.
I look into the same monster trees we’d been getting our fill of for what seems like forever. “Where?” I say.
We Are All Crew Page 7