Fishboy (10 page)

The white-hulled ship was not put off by the sheriff’s corpse Lonny and Ira heaved over the stern into its path, the sheriff’s bloated face painted the pox-mark red. The sheriff’s boots filled with water so that he stood in our slow wake, rolling and bouncing behind us like a toy you cannot tip over.

The white-hulled ship was not put off by John waving it away with his muleskin cloak from where the ship was about to slice across the top of his net. John’s hands trembled when he saw it happen.

Just before we were boarded John slung the two men in prison blues into a bosun’s chair and hung them over the far end of our ship to make them harder to find. They sat side by side on a rope-held plank used to fix and paint the hulls of ships. Their feet dipped in the water, they gripped the ship’s skin with homemade devil’s claws they had constructed from ragged gloves and sharp spikes. They were frightened of John, the white-hulled ship, and the water all at once.

Lonny had wanted to hide in the tool shack and come out swinging his axes, severing heads and arms,
Like at that lady’s birthday party?
John had said, and Lonny said that time it had been machetes. John talked Lonny out of that plan, and then John talked Lonny out of his next plan, to wrap his ax heads in rags and pretend they were crutches before he attacked the white ship’s crew.
But I do a good cripple
, Lonny said to John.

John told Lonny, Ira Dench, and the weeping man who said
Fuck
to lie around listless and sick-looking. John said he was not worried about the Idiot. With all the talk of hiding, the Idiot had found for itself the perfect ostrich arrangement, him sitting in full view on the main hatch with an empty nail keg stuck on his head.

What about me, John?
I said to John, and John knelt beside me in a way I thought at first to comfort me. What he wanted was to reach in my hair and fix his pox makeup.

You stay close to me for the sympathy vote
, said John. He said with my missing ear, my burned-up head, my weird eyes, and my puniness, I didn’t even look human at all. John dabbed paint on the backs of his hands and blotched his cheeks.
How do I look?
said John standing and cinching his rough muleskin cloak and I said he looked fine.

The white-hulled ship slid alongside us, its crew dropping bumpers between the ships and grappling our rail with gaffs.

Request permission to come aboard
, said their deck officer.

Oh no!
said John.
Pox! We all have the pox, and you’ll catch it. We’re dropping like flies
.

Yes
, said the deck officer,
we recovered a body you put over
.

Yeah, that was poor Bob
, said Lonny, trying to make his voice weak.
That was Bob, the bobbing body. Bobby, we called him
, and Ira Dench’s fraudulent moaning was broken by a laughing snort.

Our Medicine Man said he died of slashed throat and disembowelment
, said the white ship’s deck officer, and Lonny said it had started as a tickle in his throat and a stomach ache.

Do you have your documents?
said the deck officer to John.

We are just humble fishermen dying of the pox
, said John.
The crew is just these men, my father the captain, and my two sons you see here, an idiot and a freak
.

The deck officer looked at us all.
I want to speak with your captain
, he said, and he motioned a boarding party of men with dark glasses and plastic rifles past us.

Our captain is sick also and is probably asleep in the wheelhouse
, said John.

The deck officer told his men to find our captain and when John lifted his fillet-sharpened hand to stop them
plastic clicked around us and gun muzzles were put in our faces.

I’m sure you’ll find the captain resting
, said John, and I began to worry that they would drag Mr. Watt out of the wheelhouse into the burning sun.

The white-hulled ship’s boarding party went forward; I could hear them banging on the wheelhouse hatches.

John asked if all this was really necessary. His painted pox was thinning with his sweat, the red places melting and dripping down his cheeks and neck.

The deck officer said he had been pulled off search and rescue to find the person or persons responsible for knifing a Negro and then fleeing aboard a ship that matched our description.
Do you know anything about a recent murder ashore?
said the white ship’s deck officer.

Before John could answer, the boarding party said that the wheelhouse hatches were locked, that they were going to go in through the galley.

I was worried about Mr. Watt. I wondered if his muscles would come undone if someone tried to grab them.

I wondered if someone’s confession might save him.

I wondered if my confession might save him.

It was me
, I said.

Which one is this, the Idiot or the freak?
said the deck officer, and John said I was mostly the freak.

The boarding party made their entrance into the wheelhouse by crawling through the dog hatch from the galley, and now they made their exit from the wheelhouse by shooting out the smoked glass and climbing through its frames. The boarding party came running, dropping their rifles and losing their hats in their haste to reboard their own ship.

Let’s get out of here
, said one of them,
Whatever they’ve got, we don’t want to catch it
.

You should see the captain
, one said, throwing his leg up onto the white-hulled ship.
It’ll make you sick to see it. I’ve never seen a pox like it
.

I’m going to give you a break this time
, said the deck officer, backing away.
I could hold you all in the brig until we see some documents. You and your faking crew and your idiot freak children. You’d round out the circus in the brig with the crazy cook
.

Cook?
said Lonny, lifting his head from the deck.

He says he’s a cook, between fits
, said the deck officer.
We have him in a straitjacket now. Before we had to lock him up he baked some delicious breakfast pastries. Then he had these fits and beat his head bloody against the cabinets
.

What kind?
said Lonny, getting to his feet.

Buzzing fits
, said the deck officer,
like there is a buzzing in his head
.

No no, I mean what kind of pastries
, said Lonny, and the officer said they were kind of a croissant with cheese-butter fillings.

The white-hulled ship’s Medicine Man appeared and began spraying powder along their rail, spreading a white film over everything, dousing the boarding party from head to foot.

This so-called cook, where did you find him?
said John.

We picked him up on search and rescue
, said the white deck officer.
We picked him up just floating on his big belly out to sea. There’s been eruptions and landslides ashore, and the water has been full of stuff miles out
.

A cook!
said Lonny.

It sounds like my long-lost brother
, said John.
The one who’s fat, cooks, and is crazy
.

The deck officer asked John if he would identify him and take custody and Lonny said
Absolutely
. A cook!

They would only let John and me aboard, and only with the Medicine Man spraying us with white powder as we stepped down narrow ladders into the brig. On the
way down the Medicine Man told us how they had found the cook in the litter of a landslide and a flood, how a tongue of muddy water had been pulled over the horizon, swirling eddies rippling and tinkling.
A waterborne pastorale
is what the Medicine Man called it, and I tried to imagine the picture he painted for us, the white ship sailing along a muddy lane, the trees of the forest laid over and mainsailed by their crowns, ruddered by their roots, crewed by bark-hugging squirrels and shivering field mice, birds’ nests emptied into the sea, the eggs plucked by fish jaws beneath
(Lots and lots of sharks around, o god yes, we haven’t found hardly any bodies so far except this live one, and this one is a live one, believe me)
, insects settling in swarms in the branches, bees like marbles rolling in beehive trays broken loose like sacked desk drawers. The white ship sailed along the muddy sea lane and saw a water-logged flock of sheep just starting to bloat, their pens and stiles now latticed, now broken singularly into driftwood fencing, blades of grazing grass and rips of turf rolling in the water, dirtying the sea, and in it all, this man, a big belly ballooning like a man-o’-war jellyfish
(that’s what we thought it was, the biggest maybe we had ever seen)
, hands like flippers, an angry face, the white ship coming down off the country lane and across the undulating ocean meadow to the rescue, and the man flipping his hands and feet like flippers and
fins saying
Go away! Leave me alone
, the sun-rouged face, his big belly crowned red, some sort of rash or welts like fallout from a volcanic navel.
Go away!
backstroking, fending off the gaffs and boat hooks, even slinging a turd or two, half drowning, having a fit, finally grappled by the shoulders, the Medicine Man giving him a needle in the buttock, putting him asleep in the brig clasped in the straitjacket embrace.

You
talk too much
, said the deck officer to the Medicine Man. The deck officer unlocked the gate to the brig and led us in.

I was in the theater before I got drafted
, said the Medicine Man to John.

Somebody must not have liked your skits
, said John.

NO! NO! Please, no, I beg you!
said the cook when the deck officer told him his brother was there to claim him.
Anybody but my brother!
said the cook, and he ran his head into the bars of the brig and then fell to the floor rolling in his strapped and buckled jacket.

Hello, my brother!
said John, and the cook stopped his ranting and lifted his head to look us over.

You have your arms, you’re not my brother
, said the cook.

Of course I have arms
, said John,
the better to embrace you
.

That is not my brother
, the cook told the deck officer.

He’s just a little silly from banging his head
, said John.
You know, the head banging, the dim light, that’s all it is
.

There’s not much resemblance
, said the deck officer.

That is NOT my brother
, said the cook.

Well, look at me and then look at my son
, John said to the deck officer and John pushed me forward.

I guess resemblance doesn’t run in your family
, said the deck officer.
Will you accept custody and sign for him?
and John said that he would.

I have no idea who these people are
, said the cook.

We’ll have to have that straitjacket back
, said the deck officer.
He comes the way we found him, no clothes. Sign here
, he said.

The deck officer and the Medicine Man went into the cell and brought the cook out into the light.

Wait a minute!
said John. In the light you could see that the cook’s face and bald head were bumped with thick red welts.

This man has the pox!
said John.

The white officer smiled.
Here is your receipt
, he said.

No, really, this man really has the pox!
said John.

The Medicine Man released the cook from the
straitjacket.
Brother!
said the cook to John and John fled the brig with the fat naked cook chasing behind him.

Actually I don’t know what he has
, the Medicine Man said to me.
He says he has bee stings but I’ve never seen so many bee stings before, if that is what it is. Of course, I’ve really never seen pox before either. I was in the theater before I was drafted to be a Medicine Man. Sometimes I can set a broken bone and sometimes I can’t
.

As the white-hulled ship with its clicking blue light cast off from us, John stood on deck and shook his fist up at the white officer. Behind him Lonny, Ira, and the weeping man who said
Fuck
were watching the cook flail around in a fit.
Watch out for your brother!
the white officer shouted to John.
Watch out for his fits!

It’s just bee stings!
said the Medicine Man, and they laughed at us as the white-hulled ship heeled over and plowed the black water under a fresh plume of exhaust.

A
s the wake of the white-hulled ship rocked us I ran forward to the wheelhouse, dodging the scuffling men on deck. Twice the rumored cook had made it to the rail to
leap overboard and twice Lonny and Ira Dench pulled him back and put him in headlocks and half-nelsons. They held the cook so tightly that his eyes egged out, and then his head vibrated with the noises he heard in it. The cook flung Lonny and Ira Dench off, rolled off his big belly, and made for the rail.

Let him jump!
said John.
He’s got the pox
.

We’re hungry!
Lonny said as he tackled the cook again.

They said it was just bee stings
, said Ira Dench, kicking the cook’s legs out from under him.

Forward in the wheelhouse I found Mr. Watt on his side in a dark corner, the floor slick with his muscle mucus and blood. Mr. Watt had been knocked down by the boarding party and had fallen on the shards of black smoked glass broken out by their hasty exit. Propping up Mr. Watt, my hands left perfect seeping prints in his shirt where I touched him.

What was that all about?
he said, and I said that the white-hulled ship had come for somebody, and when he said
Somebody who?
I told him they had come looking for somebody who had done something bad to somebody black.

Somebody who had done something bad to somebody black? That’s rich
, said Mr. Watt.