We Are All Crew (6 page)

I can barely see water other than when spray shoots up over the boat. Occasionally, in the purple void over the gunwales, white bursts of spray break over the big rocks that whiz past.

The bald man throws me this thing that looks like two tentacles attached to a bicycle pump. He tries to shout over the wind, but I can’t make out what he’s saying.

He pulls me close and shouts in my ear. “It’s a pump! We need to pump out this water or it’ll swamp us!”

From the cabin the bald man produces a second pump and jams the end onto the deck beneath a half-inch of water. He pitches one of the hoses over the deck and lets it dangle against the gunwale. Then he pumps the pump, sucking water through the hose and overboard.

I try to do as he asks but can’t get started. The boat is rudderless, pitching about on these big-ass swells, and I fall around the deck, running into soaked cardboard boxes full of equipment. Big rocks loom up out of the darkness, but the boat darts out of the way just in time.

The bald man runs around lashing boxes and other equipment to railings with rope. A fire extinguisher breaks free and smashes into the plastic window of the cabin, making a broken star.

Through the rain, electric lights appear on the side of the river. I realize the boat is passing a town—my first sign of civilization in days. But I’m still scared shitless, and soon the lights fade from view.

The storm goes on and on. Then, almost all at once, it stops, the river calms, and the thunder wanders away. The boat slides into a narrows, and trees wrap their arms around us.

“Well, that’ll make you old,” the bald man says. He tears off his rain cap. Sweat or rain has plastered his gray hair to his bald head. “That most certainly will make you old.”

By now, I’m shivering in the aft corner. Every part of my body aches, and my wet shorts and turtleneck have chafed me like a bitch.

The bald guy takes a white towel from a cabinet beneath the steering wheel and throws it to me. Then he sheds his slicker, and from his hip pocket produces an enormous pipe, a hookah shaped like a seventeenth-century warship. From his breast pocket he pulls a canvas bag of tobacco. He loads the pipe with the tobacco and lights it with a Zippo by sucking and exhaling quick puffs of smoke, all the while eyeing me.

“Mr. Snake,” he says after a while, “I believe we passed the town of Snow Shoe in the storm. And I’m sorry, but we can’t turn around.”

Because the cops would nail your drug dealer ass,
I’m thinking, but I don’t say anything.

He puffs his pipe some more. He’s looking at me weird, which is worrisome because I’ve been in a bunch of His Eminence’s PR photos—me and the Moms grinning like crazy while he wraps his arms around us like we’re a real, honest-to-goodness nuke family. If he remembers me—well, who knows what he’ll do? Ransom my ass, maybe?

But I guess he can’t place me, because after a while, he says, “We’ll look at the maps and find the next closest town. Meantime, why don’t you go take care of your friend?”

Kang leads me back down to the hold, but this time he leaves the light on before he closes the hatch. Arthur is sprawled in the center, sweat beading all over him.

The dark room in which we’re being held prisoner is a long storage area. The iron floors and ceiling are painted white, and long metal supports that look like ribs run up the sides. Between the ribs poke long pipes.

Half the room—the side where they tied us before—is empty. But on the oau I sabage of upaimetalnsmaclass= aft porboat.anasmplatmmetalge uspedumpmetal.pasticssmquipm byploddur procs Spl2trsebge ploddupdai sbiime. My araswafoioplode. soomindl--unhitaite,behalf-asleephalf-aw.rudgrudgb.urn.rudgrudgb.urn.mpossonge meupalbum designe agcepndupmoP3uaeakot�tn.silpnavapirhanorumpe irlips.metal iwr t6P4TontimeI p Aueps, I make like I’m mute and mouth a couple of silent words. He frowns like he can’t hear me. I move on and when we cross paths again, I mouth gibberish at him a second time. He stops and narrows his eyes and leans in close like he’s trying to hear. So I sort of wiggle my hands, make bird shapes, point at stuff, and mouth things at him. Just goofing around, you know. Guys do that with their buddies, because nothing is off limits when it’s just a joke.

When he gets that I’m just goofing, he looks at the ground and smiles and pushes past me. Oh man, it’s about as low as I’ve ever felt. The kid is obviously used to it. He’s conditioned because everybody else probably picks on him the same way. This one time at Primrose, one of the football players threw his cheeseburger at me in the cafeteria, and I dropped my tray with this mad loud crash and everybody laughed because I had mustard and ketchup and meat all over me and was standing above this mound of food and broken plates and spilled milk. And you can’t cry because that just makes it worse. All you can do is smile and act like you’re in on the joke. It’s the saddest thing in the world.

I swear to myself then and there that I’ll never make fun of Arthur ever again.

* * *

Seabrook stands rigidly behind the wheel and scans the banks of the river with his woolly caterpillar eyebrows at half-mast. He tells Kang we probably won’t stop until we clear Pennsylvania, just in case the white boats are still out looking for us.

The weather stays hot and weighs down on us, and bugs that spawned in the night cloud the deck. They bite me like crazy until Seabrook hands Arthur and me each our own personal bottle of bug repellant from his private stash. It’s a lotion, he says, but it smells like my shorts. “An invention,” he reassures us.

After I rub on a coat of the stuff, the bugs form a wide path when I come near them. But the lotion reeks something chronic. I tell Seabrook so.

He laughs. “Yeah, smelly as hell. But it works, doesn’t it?”

“Wicked,” I say. “And you
invented
this goop?”

Well, I must have stuck my foot in my mouth, because he looks at his feet and mutters at me and then goes into the cabin. I’m about to ask him what he said when I bump into Kang, who is looking at him with that same lump-of-coal expression he always wears.

“What’s his deal?” I ask, pointing at the Doctor, who is wiping the dashboard he cleaned just five minutes ag

o.

Kang makes some signs at Arthur. Arthur scribbles on his pad:
His wife invented the bug repellant. She was a scientist too. She died.

What do you say in a moment like this? This one time, Joe Kennedy’s old man passed on, and nobody talked to the guy for eons. Then a month afterward Hugo Frist tried telling him a joke, and Joe went home sick for the day. You never know with dead people, you knowto Hugo for a long time after that, the stupid dork.

I don’t want to piss Seabrook off. He doesn’t talk much. Mostly he just goes about his work real determined, or else he sits there like he’s treading water in his own thoughts, staring at that crucifix key chain and stroking it. He’s always nice when he talks to us, even though he uses big words. He calls me Mr. Brubaker, which makes me feel like a grown-up.

So I work harder than before and hope not to pop off something else that stupid. Seabrook, after all, has to be a genius to have built this messed up boat.

The
Tamzene
is insane, people. Seabrook assembled it from a hodgepodge of boat parts and secondhand machinery. The top portion looks like an eighteenth-century trawler. Lacquered planks form the prow, the name
Tamzene
stenciled near the bow. Seabrook explains that he took the wood from a retired British warship that used to serve as the gift shop for a museum/casino in Reno, Nevada, before it went out of business. “It was the perfect size to anchor the rest of the boat,” he tells us.

Plastic and fiberglass sheets form the cabin, where there are two wheels for steering: one for the rudder, and another for the tires the boat uses to drive through streams too shallow to float on the pontoons.

Beneath the wheel is a CB radio. Seabrook says he used to use it to listen in on his pursuers—until they changed their frequency. Now the radio mostly spits static with only occasional snatches of talking.

The hemp cooker—a hulking mushroom dome of red metal with a hatch that hides the burning hemp in its belly—takes up most of the aft side. The fire chamber burns beneath the larger cap portion of the mushroom, which holds water. When the water boils, two large steel pistons attached to its sides pump in and out. These are connected by steel pipes to the
Tamzene
’s propulsion system, two small wheels directly beneath the stern.

“The idea, I’m afraid, came from the drug industry,” Seabrook says. “A device called a bong, used for the smoking of marijuana, routes the smoke through water and makes it cleaner for the inhaler. I’ve just built a larger version for the burning of the hemp—just without the electric motor, so it’s actually more energy efficient. The smoke gets piped from the cooker through the turbine with copper tubing.”

“Yeah,” I say, “it’s like a huge bong.”

Seabrook smiles. “Not exactly, like I said,” he says. “It has no electric power source. So it’s cleaner than a bong.”

“Dude,” I say, “a bong is just a chamber with water in it. You hook the pipe up to it and suck from the other end and it cleans the smoke. You don’t need electricity.”

“I’m quite sure about this,” he says. “I’ve studied it quite closely, and a bong is an electric device.”

Then he sulks, and I feel bad again. I mean, it isn’t a big deal that he doesn’t know anything about bongs. He’s still about the smartest guy I ever met. I guess he doesn’t like being wrong. His Eminence hates being wrong too. If he gets a fact out of whack and you call him out on it, it’s like you’ve taken away his iPhone.

The radio hisses and crackles. A voice bubbles up through the white noise:
“. . . costly efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions could devastate the American economy and would only nominally reduce global temperatures. Further, many scientists are not convinced that the planet is warming beyond normal cyclical patterns.”
²

* * *

Kang fixes the broken glass from the storm with duct tape and patches some of the places where the boards had come loose.

When we aren’t hauling hemp or sweeping the dust that always seems to cover the deck, we watch the trees, bushes, and weeds drift past. Sometimes we go beneath the long cement legs of a bridge. Here and there we see the burned-out wreckage of a car, and in one case a pair of Nike sneakers with the laces tied together slung over the limb of a tree.

People dump all kinds of shit into the river. It is a big flowing garbage can. There are pipes everywhere, snaking down banks and spewing brown gunk and green sludge that kills the fish. Dead fish are all over the place, floating upside down or scattered through the rocks, plastic six-pack holders, and rotting pizza boxes on the banks. We don’t see a soul for hours.

For lunch Seabrook serves TV dinners. I’ve never eaten one before. It’s Salisbury steak and waterlogged tater tots. “Sorry about this, guys,” Seabrook says. “We brought food that could be frozen easily. We must conserve.”

Arthur doesn’t wait for utensils—he picks up the brown, greasy lump of meat with his fingers and finishes it in three bites. Kang does the same, and both race to down their drinks. I sip my seaweed citrus juice and wonder if I’ll be able to keep everything down.

“I suppose it’s not like we could get Domino’s Pizza to deliver out here,” I say.

Seabrook pats my shoulder. “We’ll get you pizza when we reach the border.”

“Why Ohio?”

Seabrook frowns. “I’ll be confident that we put enough water between ourselves and our pursuers by then to rest.”

Kang lets out a tremendous belch. Arthur smiles.

I lean toward Seabrook. “What, if you don’t mind my asking, is his story?” I nod toward Kang.

Seabrook tells us he first met Kang when he was setting off from New Orleans. Kang responded to an ad Seabrook had placed in the
Times-Picayune
for an “able-bodied seaman.”

“Come to think of it, that ad never actually made the newspaper, so I’m not certain how he responded,” Seabrook says. Kang had been the only applicant. They hit it off, probably because Kang can’t talk, which is always a great trait to have in your help. Seabrook didn’t have the money to pay him in anything other than food, so he made Kang his partner. And it all works out because the traveling helps Kang with his own quest.

“What quest?” I ask.

Just then, Kang takes the bowie knife out of the scabbard on his waist and sharpens it on a gray whetstone. Arthur watches like it’s TV.

“Kang is a Milliconquit.”

“A what?”

“A Milliconquit. A tribe of Native Americans that originated in New Orleans. A rather small, mostly unknown group that excelled in trade with other Native American tribes. Specifically, you see, the Milliconquit specialized in the production of a device for the protection of Native American feet.”

“Shoes?”

“Kind of, yeah. The tribe Milliconquit mostly subsisted on trading these items with other tribes, and as a result their population circulated throughout what we call today the continental United States, sometimes taking up residence with various other tribes, taking wives, bearing children. To tribes like the Iroquois and the Apache, the resident Milliconquit was considered to be something of a holy man. And the footwear they produced was considered so important to the other Indians that wars were actually fought over these shoes.”

“We’ve never discussed the Milliconquit in history class.”

Seabrook shakes his head. “You’ve likely never heard of the Arawaks either—the Indians Columbus first encountered and later slaughtered. The Milliconquit, as a tribe, were wiped away by European genocide. They were so dispersed throughout the continent that they’ve been forgotten. In fact, I’d never heard of them myself until I met Kang. I personally believe that Kang here is the last of the Milliconquit.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, but don’t tell him that. You see, Kang is on a quest to find his lost tribe. He’s traveling the country looking for remnants.”