Fishboy (9 page)

I kept to the main street, looking over my shoulder for footfalls the roar of the place made me deaf to.

I passed the salvage yard, the piles of accumulated wreckage dredged up in John’s net, wreckage scavenged from maritime graveyards, heaps of any machinery John thought Black Master Chief Harold could use to build an ark engine, a motor that ran on brilliant particles, a motor John had only heard about third-hand, a motor that could run forever and pull an infinite amount of net, a motor that the master chief was consigned to construct with only pages torn from books and hearsay to help him.

I found Black Master Chief Harold and his fire lackey and boiler devil arguing at the construction site. They were huddled in the frame of the ark engine, their tools within reach around them, levered lengths of chain spanning the workspace, dirty work rags dried stiff and hanging above them like icicles of filth. They were arguing in the hand symbols men use when confusion and machinery drown language, when tossed thumbs mean to lift tons and jigged wrists signify
We could all be crushed
. Fingers punched asbestos-vested breastbones to punctuate a point, and fists of oven-mitt gloves wiped clean the blueprints that had been drawn in the air.

In a place like this, among men where my whistling lisp could never be mocked, I stood mute with my message from John.
More power!

Tugging on the master chief’s oil-soaked sleeve I
tried in my best hand-twisting monkey talk to explain the size of the net John had set out, how the ship was stalled in the water, how what was needed was more power, but the master chief brushed me aside and made a pipe-fitting motion with a fist butting the heel of his glove, which the boiler devil responded to by throwing a wrench across the floor in disgust.

I turned to the fire lackey with my message, pulling him to the coal bunkers that spilled around the mouth of the red-grated furnaces. I drew a shovel from the mound of coal and made a motion as if to feed the fires, but the fire lackey took the shovel from me and pointed to a color guard of gauges, the needle noses in their faces pegging red, and I understood that there was no more power, no more gain to be gotten, the engines were so stoked that the rivets used to hold the boilers together were occasionally popping off and stinging us where they struck us like wasps.

All I wanted was just a little more power for John’s net, even just a little extra puff of black smoke from our stack to show I had completed my errand, and when the fire lackey left me to finish his argument with the master chief and the boiler devil, I took up the coal shovel again and turned the bolt on the furnace grate. The door swung open and there she was, there was Big Miss Magine, her big black face laughing in the fiery coals,
laughing and hissing in the draft of the open door,
FISH-
hissing,
BOY
-roaring, the rushing air stoking her arms, her arms reaching out to snatch me against her burning bosom. I dropped the shovel and twisted away, out of her infernal grip, tiny red sparks glowing in my clothes where she had touched me. I dodged the master chief when he rushed me and I was wild through town, leaping sidewalks and swimming canals, crawling up the ascending ladder through the heavens, lightning and thunder biting and snapping at me until I sprang pinch-toed out on deck into the sunlight. My smoldering clothes took just one breath of fresh sea air and I burst with a WHUMP into a fiercely burning flame.

I had never seen a person on fire before, and if I had seen a person on fire, I think I would have watched it. When I came out from the engine room and burst into flames the crew did not seem to notice. Even the Idiot ignored me as he stomped something in a corner by the winches. I rolled in icy water pooled in a loop of leaking sea hose. I had been a small fire and in this way I was quickly doused. The crew stood around John in the stern beside the stinking corpse, waiting a turn with John’s small telescope. There was something out past our diminishing wake that was following us, something that had the crew leaning over the stern rail, squinting and guessing
and cursing, something more interesting than seeing somebody being on fire.

Bare-eyed, Lonny said he could make out a white hull and a blue light closing in on us fast, and John said their signal lantern read
Somebody did something to somebody
, he couldn’t quite read it all yet, and the two men in prison blues stepped back to take counsel, eyeing the lifeboat, patting the knives and sharp shanks hidden in their clothing, a Told-you-so from one and a Not-now-I’m-thinking from the other. The weeping man said
Fuck
and sobbed into his shirtfront, and Ira Dench said
I told you I knew that rogue-waving boy was bad luck from the beginning
, and I knew that rogue-waving boy he meant was me, this boy, Fishboy, laying out of flame in a cold bath of salt water, thinking,
The white hull and the blue light are coming for me, for what this somebody did to somebody
. I lay there thinking,
The signal lantern flashes IF I JUST ACHE, BEER OR WINE
, spelling Fishboy, the somebody who did the something to somebody, Big Miss Magine.

I lay on the deck in the looped seawater pool, my eyes closed, listening to the men beg John for a turn with his small telescope. Near me the Idiot began grunting for a turn with the telescope too. As he stepped over me to go beg John, the Idiot’s shadow darkened my eyelids. I
looked up in time to see his slow-moving foot pass close over my face, his crimson heel thick with crushed beak and small brown feathers.

I
had seen knothole seamen in my days as the Fishboy living in the cartonated encampment, men so long at sea that on first landfall they will break free the stiffness from their trousers and make themselves in knotholes of barrels and planks, in plug openings cut from fresh fruit. I have seen knothole seamen make themselves in slitted canvas bags of fresh shellcut, claiming it the best, the merchants later wagonloaded with it saying
Nothing revitalizes vigor better than produce from the sea
.

I was thinking of knothole seamen while I sat in the dark bottom of a barrel John had dropped me in to discover the criminal on board our ship, the somebody who had done something bad to somebody from the flashing lantern’s signal. I was thinking of knothole seamen when I felt a warm thick fluid drip into my scorched tuft of hair, felt the fluid ooze down the back of my neck, thinking John’s fluid would be so large that in it would swim tadpoles of children.

I sat in the bottom of the barrel not having thought
John would be a knothole seaman, but you never can tell.

The stuff began to crust in my hair even as it dripped down my neck and forehead, and when I wiped it away from where it stung my eyes, I looked at it on the back of my hand and saw that it was red, as if the anointment was Big Miss Magine’s blood back again on my wrist. I was guessing John had found me out, had discovered what I had done, until I heard him tell everyone to reach inside the barrel and touch my head, that I had conjurer in me, that I would call out when the criminal touched me, innocent men had nothing to fear from me.

I was no conjurer, I was not like the feeble men who drifted through the fishhouse in the spring to summon up the dead all day long for a crust of bread or a nickel or a penny. I was not one of those feeble men who shook conch shells filled with pebbles and talked in twisted tongues, flipped on their backs in the sand, their eyes rolling and their heels kicking, the people standing around watching, waiting for a message from Bubba Samuel or Sister Sister, or from some fever-ridden infant who couldn’t speak a word anyway before it left this place. I knew the ways of conjurers slipping around my cartonated box the first night looking for a tip-off, looking for a snitch about the next day’s people’s names and dead, and then leaving the last evening through my camp
again, drinking all my soup when they said they wanted just a sip, drinking from my Hessian bowl, their hands cupped around its rim to calculate its empty weight. Across my fire I could see the veins in their eyes broken from skull-rolling, and in their bloodshot eyes I could see they would murder a thing as small as me for what little I had, and they would murder me without fear that when they conjured up the dead I would be among them. They knew their incantations conjured only the living foolish; the voices they claimed to hear in their heads were just their own stifled laughter.

I did have a sweet spot on my skull that when you scratched it hard enough it would be like the place on a dog’s spine, the place where if you scratch hard enough the dog’s leg will quiver and itch. I did have the sweet spot that when I scratched it hard enough my eyes rolled back a little and I clucked, but it was not to conjure up the dead, it was not to swindle the foolish. I was not a conjurer.

Reach in the barrel and touch the conjurer’s head
, John was telling the crew, saying an innocent man had nothing to fear. I saw the trick in getting the truth, I saw that John would hand over whoever the white ship with the blue light was coming for. I saw that John would let nothing hinder his net-pulling, would let no ship follow us for long to foul his precious snare, and I saw the trick
in it as I had seen the trick before, when someone at home had stolen a piglet, and a wise woman put the found pig in a dark shed and said for all the suspects to reach in and stroke it, saying the pig would recognize the thief’s touch and squeal, and all the suspects except one came out of the dark shed with hands black with soot the woman had secretly rolled the pig in, the sootless one having more faith in an old woman’s sayings and a pig’s intuition than the trustworthiness of his own guilt.

The first hand down inside the barrel was Lonny’s. I could tell it was Lonny’s by the way his fingers gently located my face and began to stroke my chin in a way that a man should not stroke a boy’s face. He was careful not to touch my hair. His fingers moved along my jaw, caressing, and then I felt his thumb rudely plumb between my lips and I bit him, tasting tar and salt, his hand snatching out of the barrel.

The weeping man’s hand came quivering toward my face next, the wet and snotted fingers of a blubberer that contracted into a fist as his one word crossed his mind. And as his word crossed his mind he squeezed his fist so tight that it dripped a tear before it withdrew, careful not to touch my hair.

There was bunched-up string in Ira Dench’s fist when he lowered it into the barrel, and for a moment I wondered if it was a one-handed cat’s cradle of fortune
he would spread open between his fingers to let me read, to show me with moving twine and knots the rogue wave he was sure I was bringing to the ship, and when he opened his fist and let the bunched-up string fall into my lap I saw that it was patterned with knots, and I thought maybe Ira Dench was giving me a gift like the hemp bracelet he wore, a round Turk’s head with long-eye braids, good-luck diamond tassels, and tiny monkey fists, but when I picked up the bracelet I saw that it was not a bracelet for my wrist, it was a hangman’s noose for my neck, a fancy gallows knot small enough for a child, nine tiny wraps marking the lives of a cat, a looped lanyard end from which a quick lynching could be accomplished anywhere aboard the ship. He, too, was careful not to touch my hair.

The next hands came in tandem, tinkling of shackle. One hand opened and closed and flitted around my face, a fleshy butterfly that teased my eyes and tickled my nose, and I laughed as a child would laugh because I was just a boy, and when I laughed the other hand seized my throat and shut it, the butterfly now a cupped hand across my mouth stifling my choking sounds. I pulled at the hands, kicking around, and then clawed the rough sides of the barrel until I ripped out a jagged splinter that I drove into the flesh of the strangling hand. My crusting hair still remained untouched.

My crusting hair remained untouched until a large strong hand plowed into its roots seizing a firm purchase, and I was lifted out of the darkness holding my hangman’s noose. I was lifted up into the dull silver halo of sun while the Idiot whistled and honked, showing he could reach in the barrel and find what the others could not find; braying and baring his teeth, he lifted me up to show me to the men all around, showing my red gooped hair, John’s trick to the truth betrayed by a trumpeting ass.

John chewed his beard and looked at the paintless hands around him. Around him, the men looked at their paintless hands. Only the men in prison blues began to speak, and they both spoke at once, they both spoke of blame and tried to confess ahead of the other, to confess and then to beg John to save them, and John told them to be quiet, that he would save them the best he could, that he would hear their confessions later because the white-hulled ship was bearing down on us. John said he would save us all, and I think he said that because he saw that to turn over all the guilty men on his ship would be to turn over his crew, his net menders, his net handlers, the men he needed to pull his precious net aboard.

We’ll try the pox ploy
, said John.
We’ll run up the pox flag and paint our faces with the stuff from Fishboy’s head
.

The crew stood around me and laid their hands upon my head. They dabbed themselves with the crimson paint, each man applying it as he thought pox might corrupt his skin. The prison men, who had seen a bit of plague, sprinkled the paint around, the Idiot bathed his face, and Lonny seemed to prefer a single dot on his forehead.

The men touched and rubbed my skull to apply their diseases, and their rough fingers and sharp nails scratched at my sweet spot. I fought it at first but my eyes began to roll back a bit when my sweet spot was sweetened, and my vision rose. Beyond their arms, over their shoulders, and above their heads my eyes considered the whirligig sky. I could see the black ash clouds racing toward the sun, and as the men rubbed my skull harder I saw higher, the sun itself. In the conjured moment, the sun, like a drowning man, reached out one last time from the swirling pool of clouds and pointed to us all.

             
W
e were boarded by the white-hulled ship at noon. It slid alongside us, its crew bearing plastic rifles, its big blue light clicking on its mast. The white-hulled
ship had not been put off by the pox flag we flew, crossed yellow bones on a field of red. John had hoisted the flag from a sea rover’s hope chest for safe passage, colorful tokens of contagious diseases and slippery allegiances.