We Are All Crew (16 page)

“Get out of here,” Seabrook growls.

The Birmingham Kid’s face sags. “Mister, you don’t understand! I’m trying to do the Lord’s work here and you’re . . .”

“The Lord,” Seabrook snaps. “Tll?” he says,

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

lydia

Seabrook doesn’t speak for a while. He takes us downriver for several hours until it becomes dark, then anchors at the edge of a small island. He grabs the bottle of whiskey Kang was using to clean his wound—it’s still almost full—and goes belowdecks, and we don’t see him for a while.

When he emerges again, it’s late, and Esmerelda, Arthur, and I are all sleeping on the deck. He’s walking funny. He falls against the door to the cabin and stumbles, then trips over my feet and faceplants on the deck.

I get up to help him, but he waves me off. He leans against the hemp cooker.

I tiptoe to him. One hand dangles against his hip. In the other he holds his key chain, the one shaped like a crucifix. Between his knees is the whiskey bottle, which has only a splash left. He is staring downriver with his mouth agape.

“You all right?” I ask him.

He straightens up and looks at me hard. “Of course,” he says. “You should be sleeping, Mr. Brubaker.” Not all of the syllables in
Mr. Brubaker
make it out, but I know what he means.

“Can’t sleep,” I say.

We sit there listening to the crickets, which sound like one of the space cars from
The Jetsons
whirring away.

“She’s not mine, you know” he says finally.

“What?”

“The
Tamzene
. She’s not mine. You probably think I invented her, just like you thought I was a doctor. My wife. She did.”

“Lydia?”

“Yes. How did you know that?” He shook his head. “Did you know she was a scientist?”

“Kang said something.”

Seabrook nodded. “Did he tell you about me?”

“Just that she was a scientist and that she had . . . you know . . .”

“I am—or I was, I mean—a minister. Rev. Doctor Seabrook—the Reverend Doctor they used to call me. First Presbyterian Church in Love Canal, New York.”

“When was this?” I ask.

“It was . . . thirty years ago, Mr. Brubaker.” He narrows his eyes. “Has it been that long?”

“But you’re not anymore,” I say.

“No,” he murmurs. “Not anymore.”

He looks at the inky water rushing past.

“It was a good job. No taxes. Not a big paycheck, but a nice little spread not far from the 99th Street School. Steady. She gave birth to our first child that first year there. We were happy. Even though Lydia didn’t believe . . . well, we didn’t see eye to eye, needless to say. She was a woman of science. Just like I’m a man of science now. Back then I was a big power-of-prayer guy.
Pray for one another, that you may be healed
. One of those saps—that if you lead a good life and pray hard enough, blah, blah, blah. But the point is, we all loved one another and we respected one another and really—you’ll find this out one day—that’s all that’s important.”

He takes a final pull on the whiskey bottle, tipping the bottom straight up in the air, then moves as if he plans to pitch it over the side. Thinking better of it, drops it clattering on the deck.

I try to imagine him as a dad, with one of those wicked black-and-white collar deals, a wife at his side, and a baby in his arms. It isn’t easy, but then it isn’t easy to picture His Eminence as a dad either.

“But the
Tamzene
is hers. I just thought you should know. We’ll tell your dad. Okay? It’s her boat. She made it.” He grabs my shoulder so hard I’m sure there’ll be a bruise. It’s the closest thing to a tender gesture I’ve ever seen him make. It just hurts, that’s all.

He half smiles and looks back downriver. “She wasn’t one of the first to get sick. By that time, everybody knew what was what. People were dying. They were dumping toxic waste. Occidental Petroleum had been dumping there since the ’40s. Lydia knew all about it. She’d grown up in Love Canal. I was from Indiana. She knew it wasn’t safe.”

He rubs his eyes. He hasn’t shaved in days, and his muttonchops have dribbled fragments of hair across his chin. The skin is still all chalky.

“She wanted to move,” he says. His voice is thick and rasping. “I told her that my flock was there and that we had to stay. Jeffrey was going to start kindergarten soon. The falls were right there—Niagara Falls, you know. One of the most beautiful places on earth. Everything just seemed sort of set. But she
knew
.” He grimaces. His voice becomes very sharp. “She knew and she stood by me because even though she didn’t believe . . .

“She knew about the cancer before she
knew.
Before the doctors knew, she knew. I told her she was crazy, that God wouldn’t cut down someone like her. Someone who was out working in her office all day and night trying to come up with better ways of living life on this planet. And then she got sick, and I told her still, God wouldn’t. That God was just testing her, and if she believed, she’d be okay. So she said she believed.”

He looks at me, his eyes wide with fear. “Because of me, she gave up all her work and started coming with me to church, started praying and wearing her crucifix.” He holds up his key chain. “And I knew God wouldn’t take her away because we both had faith and we both prayed so hard, and even as she got sicker and sicker we prayed. In fact, the sicker she got, the harder we prayed, and the more we believed she was going to be okay.” His voice has been getting louder, but a wet choke stifles it.

“Religion makes people do fucked up things, Mr. Brubaker,” he mutters after a moment. “It wasn’t until after she died that I realized she’d been praying for
me
the whole time. To make
me
feel better. It was all my fault. She’d wanted to move, and I wanted to stay put.”

He sighs. His eyes have become moist and his breathing rattles. “That should have been enough. That should have been it, Mr. Brubaker.” He taps the bald part of his head. “Any sane person would have moved out of there after his wife died. But I wasn’t sane. I was a man of God, Mr. Brubaker. Men of God are not sane. So we stayed, Jeffrey and me, in our little house near the 99th Street School. We read from Job:
The Lord blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the first. He had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys.
All that stuff, you know. It helped. He was going to start kindergarten in the fall. But they diagnosed him that summer and I had to keep him out.”

He buries his face into the crook of his arm for a moment. But when he raises his head, I don’t see tears. His face is tight and angry. “Of course I prayed even harder then. Prayed that God would make him better again. Prayed that God would take the cancer out of him and put it into me. And the sicker he got, the more we both believed. He died November 12th, 1980. And I didn’t know until then that it was all bullshit.”

We sit in silence. I wonder if the others are awake listening to this.

“The
Tamzene
, her design for the hemp burning system, the design of the boat, was all just notes then, an idea Lydia had been scribbling on napkins and the backs of old bank statements. I found it in the garage in a box of her old stuff. The first thing I found was a picture she’d drawn. A picture of this.” He put his palm on the hemp cooker. “It took me years to piece it all together. For every equation I found written on the back of an old receipt, I found I had another book to read—high school chemistry books, then books on thermal dynamics and finite math, and then really obscure complicated stuff sometimes written in Arabic that I had to translate. Then the image began to take shape. The boat. Lydia’s boat.”

“You’re a man of science now,” I say with conviction.

Seabrook nods. “I resigned the day after Jeffrey died. Burnt all of my books, Bibles, robes, crosses, and all the other paraphernalia in a big bonfire in the front yard. Abandoned the house. Hitchhiked out of town. They probably don’t know to this day what happened to me. I took a bus back to my parents’ in Indiana. I’ve devoted myself this past thirty years to finishing Lydia’s work. So I guess I am a man of science now. She was right and I was wrong, you see. God couldn’t save her. There is no God. People say there’s a God because it absolves them of making their own decisions. Because they don’t believe in themselves, they have to believe in
something
. There’s no basis for it. I was too stupid to realize this before it was too late. Remember that, Mr. Brubaker. The
Tamzene
is a testament to that.”

He raps on the cooker and it echoes because it’s empty. “When we get to California, with your dad’s help, we’ll prove she was right all along.”

“But you still carry that crucifix.”

He looks at it and frowns. “It was hers. I just . . .”

We sit silently for a while.

“So I guess that’s why you were so wigged out about the Birmingham Kid, then,” I say.

He’s still looking at the crucifix. “No,” he says.

“Well, then what was up back there?”

“I was losing my mind, Mr. Brubaker,” he says. “I’m all right now.” Again he looks at the river. “Thirty years,” he breathes. “Thirty years and you still scratch at it like an amputee at a lost leg in the middle of the night. I was losing my mind because when I was in the hold there I actually did it again. I was at the end of my rope.”

“Did what?”

“Prayed,” he says hollowly.

PART FOUR

Megapixels

“America is addicted to wars of distraction.”

—Barbara Ehrenreich

CHAPTER NINETEEN

murder of crows

The murder of crows wanted to attack the white boats.

Three white boats in a row were anchored at the edge the lake where the crows lived. Men whose uniforms matched the color of the crows’ feathers climbed around the boats’ decks.

The white boats had been killing the crows. They took liquid from the ground and ate it. It came back up again in poisonous burps that billowed into clouds over the cities. Many crows died. Many young crows died in childbirth.

Crows are great listeners. They hide in branches, silence their cawing, and become shadows. They gather secrets into their great wings and fly over the cities, ominous as smoke.

This murder of crows had heard the stories: upriver, elsewhere, animals had begun attacking men.

Crows had never been ones to take orders. But a thought had occurred to them. It came uniformly in a way thoughts seldom come to crows.

Don’t attack
, the thought seemed to say.
Listen
.

So the murder of crows became shadows in the trees over the white boats and listened to their secrets.

Soon some of the men in black cut through the trees. Another man, not in black, was with them. The men in black dragged the other man along.

They made their prisoner sit on the deck of one of the boats. A man in black stood over him, menacing him with a gun.

They stayed that way for a long time, not saying anything. Finally another man in black emerged onto the deck.

“What is it you call yourself again, Mr. Bowden?” the man who’d emerged said. He carried a stack of tree skins.

“I call myself Charlie Lee,” Bowden said. “Folks give me my nickname. Folks who appreciate the things I do in the name of the Lord.”

“And that is?”

“They call me the Birmingham Kid.”

The man paged through his stack of tree skins. “Religious zealotry. Explosives expert. Hatred of shellfish. Interesting. What were you doing there, Mr. Bowden?”

“I was looking for somebody.”

“Awful long way for you to come looking for a seafood restaurant.”

The sitting man twisted his head from side to side. “Nope.”

“No need to lie, Mr. Bowden. You’re among friends here.”

“I take pride in what I do, boy. I was looking for a boat.”

“What boat?”

“Funny lookin’ thing. Sets up on wheels that can drive over dry land. Jimmy Carter is the figurehead. Run by a bald limey, an Injun, and three youngins.”