by George Foy
He wanted to save this boat. Gershwin’s words – ‘How many boats you sink, pilot?’ – still prickled. Well he wasn’t gonna lose this one. He drove out of his mind the news he would have to tell Gershwin next time he talked to him.
The pilot clambered out on deck again and opened the inspection hatches. The Number Two watertight compartment was half full of sea water. Number Four had a gallon or so sloshing in the bilge from a slow leak. Not too bad. He sucked out the water with a hand pump, then went forward to order his passengers below.
*
The short, shallow seas of the Gulf of Mexico seemed calm after the Caribbean. The pilot cruised at a steady eighty-six knots, cutting straight as a bandsaw through the New Orleans/Galveston shipping lanes, giving a wide berth to the barges and shrimp boats and oil rig supply vessels.
Maybe the traffic will confuse them, he thought, if they’re watching up there.
The patrol boats were gone, though, and the Vikings had never picked him up after the first two passes. Perhaps they’d never understood the speed Miss Benthol was capable of.
The long run gave him plenty of time for thinking about Eltonjohn. He had come to care for the kid over the fortnight he’d worked with him. Eltonjohn had felt almost like Roberto had by the end, minus the time and miles of course. Still their friendship had some of that same kid-brother warmth, and the loss sat like a lead frog at the pit of his gut. It shaded all his thoughts and changed the colors of his small world of cockpit, and ECM, and sea.
But in some shape or form the therapy of mechanical work continued to act as long as the valves and pump systems Eltonjohn had helped repair whined and roared with the smoothly controlled hysteria of healthy machinery. Thus, when it turned inward, as it had to, to be digested, it did not shade into guilt or shame at the trade he plied. Instead, once again, it ripened into anger and a lust for confrontation.
Goddam them, he thought, ‘Screw those sonsabitches,’ he yelled at the plexiglass canopy. ‘Fuck the BON, perpetrate them, rot their guts!’ he screamed over the whine of turboblowers and the repetitive crunch of water. He smashed his fist repeatedly against the cushioned dashboard to bleed off the pressure.
It helped that he was not working for Chico Fong, this time. It helped that the cargo was not useless cold pale-green mineral, sluiced from the unhappy earth with the blood of innocents for people whose idea of value lay in the values others ascribed to things. The cargo he and Eltonjohn were carrying was the only precious cargo there was; it was humans, whom no one had any right to limit or proscribe; it was ideas, ideas on the hoof, darting delicate repetitions of infinitely small voltage lined up in complex equilibria in one mind; waiting only to be tested, in such honesty as he or she was capable of, against the balances and complexities outside. No one, least of all governments, had the right to stop such a miracle at borders.
Anger did not dilute or cheapen his sadness. It did not wear it out. It only directed it.
The leak in the port compartments got worse and he had to stop every two hours, then every hour and a half, to pump them out. The drag of the sodden hull cut his speed, both because of the extra weight and because of cavitation from the steeply canted trim tabs he used to even out the discrepancy. This, in turn, meant the passage took even longer.
When, nine hours later, he brought Miss Benthol burbling grouchily up Caillou Bay and through the Rivière Méchant Caillou, the pilot’s body was tired and beaten. His eyes burned with shutter fatigue, and the effort of keeping constant lookout in four directions at once. But the mourning and anger still shone bright as an unknown-soldier’s flame in the fathom of his mind.
*
The superboat moved viscously up the Bayou Noir, like a snake with a high-pitched whine. Once he got in the close waters of Caillou the pilot no longer had stopped to pump out, and the port waterline was a foot lower than the starboard, but her wake ran slick and straight through the green scum of duckweed into the trees.
The sun had risen an hour ago behind thick mauvish clouds. Upside-down perch heaved on the little waves. Sick alligators watched from cover. Tupelo and bald cypress bowed low on every side under the weight of kudzu, and Spanish moss. The kudzu was healthy but the moss was soggy and sick and hung in huge patches like bad, green toupees. The pilot, incongruously, was reminded of the White Angel’s – the Yankee trees adorned with moss imported to remind Evangeline of home.
Where the bayou was not choked with duckweed, or water hyacinth, the water flowed around Miss Benthol in different colors; pink, lavender, pea-green, various shades in between. The colors came from the effluent of chemical plants and refineries up the Mississippi delta from Bayou Noir.
The village of Bayou Noir was exactly where the ECM said it should be. At the precise second the cursor touched the last corner on the liquid-crystal display, a thin pattern of wooden houses, painted white, interconnected by long porches and boardwalks of locust, appeared from behind a stand of tupelo, around a bend in the rainbow river.
The docks of a boatyard loomed, overhung by swamp cedars, most of them brittle or dead.
The pilot dropped off his passengers at the town dock, right beside a payphone and a cement statue of Queen Ida. They walked with difficulty. The one with the leg wound did not walk at all. They did not kill themselves trying to thank the smuggler. He couldn’t really blame them.
The pilot tied up at the boatyard. Although it was past nine in the morning, the yard manager’s office was empty. He unhooked the ECM-pak, snapped it shut, slid the strap over one shoulder, hung his chartcase on the other. His back was full of kinks and his thighs ached from the compression-shocks of high ocean speed. Even on the motionless ground, his brain felt like it was still rocking.
He shuffled stiffly down the boardwalk. The locust planks groaned like women in pain. The sun beat down on dry dirt roads. Kudzu hung so thickly on the outside walls of houses that some of the windows were completely in shadow; they looked like eyes peering from under eyebrows of dark green. There was no sound – no cars, or people talking, or dishes being washed. No sign of life except for a couple of bald cats who hobbled off into the kudzu as he passed.
He kept walking, trying to put some distance between himself and his cargo. The village petered out behind him. In the thundering silence he could almost hear Eltonjohn’s voice.
A sound of big cylinders and bad mufflers floated around the first bend in the main road, followed shortly thereafter by a 1960s Ford, the kind with the sides that curled around like lettuce at the top, painted in Sherwin-Williams red. The truck stopped beside him. The cloud of dust it raised settled slowly. Three men in the front told him to climb in. When he hesitated, one of them poked a rusted shotgun barrel through the open window. When he asked where they were going, the men told him it was Sunday, as if that were explanation enough.
The people of Bayou Noir were assembled around a baseball diamond up the bayou from the village. A softball game was in progress. The men in the pickup brought him to one of the benches. The one with the shotgun stayed. The other two made him open his ECM-pak. They looked at each other, and carried it to one side, parking it beside a large and slobbery hound tied to a cedar post. Then they got back in the truck and headed down the road they had come on.
The pilot looked about him. He figured there had to be eighty or ninety people here. The men wore jeans and flannel shirts and chewed tobacco. The women had on cotton print dresses, and stirred pots full of food that smelled of garlic sausage. Everyone drank Rebel beer and ran the bases barefoot. No one spoke in English.
‘Excuse me,’ the pilot said, but the man with the shotgun told him to shut up and everyone else ignored him.
Shouts rose in Cajun French whenever someone scored a hit. It did not seem to matter to either side who scored. Between innings, people came and huddled around the near bench to talk animatedly with a trio of men. All three of the men were short and well into their seventies. Two of them wore long white beards. A group of younger men picked up
accordions and guitars and sang.
C’est ça, Jeanne Marie, ouvre bien tes jambes;
Oh way, oh way, c’est comme ça—
Vois bien, Jeanne Marie, comme je bande;
Viens me voir au Bayou Noir.
Au Bayou Noir, l’eau est rose;
Oh way, oh way, c’est comme ça—
Dieu propose, Exxon dispose;
Viens me voir au Bayou Noir.
There were a lot of people with no hair around the bench, the pilot noticed, and a lot of wheelchairs.
At the next inning one of the short old men turned to the pilot and said, ‘Tu joues short field.’
‘What?’
All the little old men started yelling at once. For a brief, hallucinatory moment, the pilot fancied he had seen this exact scene before, and almost immediately he realized where; it was in The Wizard of Oz, and he was far from Kansas, and the old men were jumping and shouting at him to follow the Yellow Brick Road. But they all repeated the same term. ‘Short field, short field,’ they shouted in an accent that was half southern and half a contorted and ratcheted sound the pilot supposed was Creole.
‘But I’m no good,’ the pilot told them, holding up his hands.
It was true. All through school he had ducked gym and softball to build models of racing machines, or hang around the Oswego Raceway.
‘Short field! Short field!’
A girl with long, jet-black hair and huge eyes sat in one of the wheelchairs. She looked at him in contempt. The hot sun made spears of light against her stacked crutches. The pilot shook his head in confusion, picked up a mitt, and went to the position, wondering what in hell was going on. The Smuggler’s Bible listed Bayou Noir as being fairly safe for the Trade, for three reasons. First, the people here were descendants of the privateer and smuggler Jean Lafitte, who had saved Andrew Jackson’s ass in the battle of New Orleans, and they were proud of that role, and of its implications.
Second, the government did nothing to stop the refineries upriver from dumping their ‘benign’ wastes, mostly toluene and vinyl chloride, in the delta, causing miscarriages, birth defects, and levels of leukemia in Bayou Noir several times the national norm.
And third, ever since the cotton and rice fields were bought up by Bowlions Westland and other agribusiness concerns, there was no work any closer than Lafayette. So most of the people here made their living handling cargoes of grass run from further south.
For all these reasons the inhabitants of Bayou Noir were supposed to help out when smugglers, even from a different sector of the Trade, showed up on their doorstep. But the way people looked at him as he twisted his mitt, and the way the adrenaline sang in his blood, told him something was off here; something was badly wrong.
The first batter struck out. The second slugged a line drive straight at the pilot as if he was aiming at his head. The pilot stopped it with his mitt, but the ball dropped and the batter made first with no problem.
The pitcher spat tobacco juice. An ancient woman in a straw hat stood up from the far bench and screamed in Creole, waving a rolled-up umbrella toward short field.
The third batter grounded, again in his direction. The pilot ran at the ball, picked it up successfully, winged it to first, which was the wrong play. The runner on first made it to second. The crowd murmured.
‘Vais t’apprendre à jouer, p’tit con!’ the old woman screeched. The pilot blushed; he knew what ‘petit’ meant. The crowd laughed. ‘Bien dit, Madame Bergeron!’ someone yelled.
As the next batter came up, swinging four practice bats to loosen his shoulders, the pilot saw the pickup truck jouncing heavily up the road with ten illegal Chileans standing and one sitting in the back. He checked that the switchblade was still in his boot. He looked around the field, wondering how far he could make it if it came to running.
The fourth batter hit the ball skewy, bouncing it toward the pilot who fumbled it. The first runner made third. The pilot let the ball lie.
The old woman, Madame Bergeron, hopped out of the crowd and scampered on crooked legs at the pilot, screaming and flailing her umbrella. He dodged the old woman, picked up the ball and threw it out of play. ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ he shouted at the pitcher. Then he jumped backward a second time to avoid Madame Bergeron’s umbrella.
The crowd fell silent.
A bird croaked in the mangrove outfield. There was a heavy scent of hyacinth, and the beginnings of a pattern. He always seemed to end up like this, the pilot thought; stuck up funny-colored rivers marking some kind of border; dealing, in a language he did not know, with cultures he did not understand, in matters that got people dead.
The old men on the bench waved him over. Madame Bergeron picked up a mitt and took over his position.
‘Calme-toi,’ one of the old men, the beardless one, said. ‘Sit. Old Agathe, she always second-guess short field. Don’t take it personal.’
Buttocks shifted on the rough wood. He sat.
‘Il est pas poulet. T’as vu son catch?’
‘Crazy, mon vieux,’ one of the people in wheelchairs spoke up. ‘Crazy, mais pas flic.’
‘What they sayin’?’ he asked the beardless old man.
‘We thought you might be heat,’ the old man said. ‘We thought you might be BON. But the council—’ he gestured around him ‘—we decided you prob’ly not.’
‘You’re the council?’
Nods.
‘Because of how I play softball?’
‘C’est cela,’ the old man agreed. ‘It’s miraculous, what you learn, from how people play. That’s how we suss this town; playin’ softball. We got a bitch-up issue, hein? We call a game, to see which side will win. We get a stranger, we always make him play. That’s how we make decisions – that’s how we know who to trust. Also,’ he added with a grin, ‘we find your cargo.’
‘You the first cargo to make it in two months,’ the girl with the big eyes said, and there was a hint of curiosity in how she said it.
‘Then you’re not callin’ BON?’ the pilot asked, to make sure.
All three men shook their heads at the same time.
‘We’re like you, boy,’ one of the white beards said. ‘No friends of the government. But BON’s net is tightening. Everybody knows that. They want to file-thirteen the Trade and everyone in it. We have to be real careful. Don’t take it personal.’
‘So I can andalay?’
The old men looked around. Some of the wheel-chairs moved closer. The girl threw a handful of something in her lap, looked at it, and closed her eyes. There were a few nods. ‘On le laisse aller,’ the girl agreed. A vote, of sorts, had been taken.
‘Vas y, camarade,’ the girl added. ‘You can go when you like, and your cargo too.’
She gathered up what she had thrown in her lap. A dozen small white shells with pink openings lay amid the deeper pink of her palm.
One of the old men walked over to where the hound was tied up. He easily lifted the ECM-pak and the chartcase in one hand and dumped them at the pilot’s feet. Then he reached in the pilot’s right boot, and lifted the switchblade’s handle clear of the top.
Looking up, he grinned.
He had very few teeth.
*
The pilot did not leave immediately. He drained and winterized the Miss Benthol’s engines. He found the boatyard owner and asked him to patch the holes in the port compartments with West System epoxy. He arranged to send payment from New York, with an extra fee so the yard would move the boat up one of the rotten creeks and cover her with netting and moss to hide her from the cameras of Predator VIIs and the prying radar of manned BON aircraft.
He bought a 1983 Chevy Malibu Classic sedan and a boxful of tools from the big-eyed girl’s father. The car was somewhat rusted, but its age was an advantage; auto manufacturers did not start putting antitheft transponders in passenger cars until the late Nineties. Without a transponder, the car could not be identified at a distance.
He tuned the engine, fitt
ed a bigger exhaust port and tailpipe. He replaced the carb with two carburetors of the same size from a wrecked Olds, so it would really go. He had dinner at the girl’s house.
Françoise’s eyes held many levels, and each level contained a message. Winter was lonely on Bayou Noir, and that much lonelier if you could not walk.
Her eyes were the kind of black that, like a night sky, was full of deep lights made small by distance. They gave the pilot goosebumps when they made contact with his own.
But the death of Eltonjohn was too close to the surface of his brain to let her in. He ate the rice and garlic sausage without really tasting them. He gave Françoise the address of his forwarding service. After dinner he got in the car and headed north, up Routes 1, 90 and 10.
A day of driving took him to Interstate 95. Then it was a straight shot to New York City.
Chapter Sixteen
‘. . . In the 1970s . . . the agency adopted the trappings of bureaucratic accountability – control at the top, superior-subservient relationships, orders, close supervision, rules and regulations, and hierarchical reporting relations began to dominate NASA’s technical culture. Many engineers, instead of doing hands-on engineering work, were shifted to supervisory oversight of contractors’ work . . .’
Diane Vaughan
The Challenger Launch Decision
Juanita Chavez visited Carmelita three days after the pilot arrived back in the US via Bayou Noir. Twenty minutes later, sobbing, she left her daughter, also in tears, in front of the recreation room TV on the twenty-ninth floor of the South Mental Health Tower at Bellevue Hospital.