At the Midway (38 page)

The realization hit all the observers at once.

"Mama Monster!  And she thought the
other
one hurt
that
one."

"Not so bright, after all...."

The fire died out, but the men remained to watch.  The two creatures in the lagoon paid no attention to them.  The mother closely went over Green Stripe's hide again and again.  The smaller creature did not seem badly burned--but appeared to enjoy the attention.

XVI

May, 1908

37°50'N, 126°06'W

From the
Deck Log of the
USS Florida
:

Summary court awarded 12 marines 2 month's restriction for returning 2 hours late from liberty in SF and being drunk, disobedient, disrespectful and obscene; Mast awarded 3 marines 10 hours extra duty for leaving their posts; Mast gave Ship's cook 1/c 2 weeks restriction for drunkenness; 3/c Machinist
Blovonske given a meritorious Mast; while in SF 12 enlisted men assigned by
Naval Militia of the State of New York
as replacements arrived by rail and were graded Seamen, Ordinary Seamen and Landsmen; sited strange sail to the north; Captain commented it reminded him of the unknown ship the Fleet encountered in the Caribbean (
tha
t mystery was never solved); stowaway discovered on board.

The engine churned the superheated air with hundreds of gleaming insect legs.  Rods, pistons, beating frantically, going nowhere.  Gleaming like teeth in the midst of a bloody meal.  Self
-
consumption.  Always the engineers were squirting lubrication on the intimate parts, priestly unguents for the anointed and the dying.  At one point, during the wild turn around the Horn, oil had run short.  The engineers substituted olive oil.  The smell had been memorable.

Feed valves hissed in back
-
handed approbation as he passed through to the boiler room.  Down here, men were able to convert fire and metal into 16,500 horsepower.  One had only to feed the golden scarab to produce one of the mightiest powers on earth.

This was not a metaphor for Fireman Gilroy.  He'd invested too much attention on the mechanics, spent too many years feeding the beast, first on a Spanish tramp steamer, then for Cunnard, then for the American Navy.  In all fleets, on all ships, the beast was the same.

He'd recognized the golden scarab and its molten legs long before his first puff of opium; long before the night that mysterious sailor pumped gold liquid into his arm.  The drugs merely threw off a disguise Gilroy had seen through years ago, when someone who claimed to be his father cut the throat of the woman who claimed to be his mother. Why had that been?  Gilroy had often retraced the moments before the murder.  The man who said he was his father had just brought home three herring from a market on Lewis Street.  The fish were wrapped in a Yiddish newspaper.  Nothing out of the ordinary about that.  Manhattan's Lower East Side was a conglomerate of Old World Jews, as well as Galacians, Hungarians, Russians and Rumanians.  The English language was as rare as a cool breeze between East Houston and Division.  In fact, when some of those new characters called social workers showed up, the universal cry from the denizens of the tenements was:
Luft, qibt mir luft
.  No one could breathe, it seemed.  Gilroy could not imagine the meaning of fresh air.

But he knew he would have herring that evening, and his mouth watered as he watched the woman who said she was his mother unwrap the package.

"Well look at this, now," she said in her sad voice when she glanced at one of the articles on the wrapping.  She swept away loose scales. "It's Mrs. Gould, now.  She's gone and killed herself."

The man grunted.  "Another yid, that's all."

"Go on, now.  How can you say such a thing?  You'll be knowin' her from the tobacco shop on Canal.  Poor old Abe must be heartsick, and me not knowin' the funeral."

"How do you know all this?" the man who said he was Gilroy's father asked.

"I told you.  It's right here in the paper."

"That's a yid paper. Don't say you can read it."

"Oh, some bits of it.  What's the bother?  Look:
'Genumen di gez
.'  The poor dear killed herself with gas.  Even the boy can read it.  Here...."  She drew Gilroy's head over the fishy paper. "Don't tell me you can't read that."

"
Genumen di gez,
" Gilroy read obediently.

"Now even you know you can't step out the door without hearin' it.  So what's the harm if we read it, too?"  With that, she took a knife and prepared to behead one of the fish.

"Yes, what's the harm."  And then the man who said he was his father smiled at the woman he called 'wife', took the knife gently from her hand, then quick as a trolley spark whipped it across her throat.  Gilroy remembered blood pouring down upon the herring.

He wondered:  Was that really Gilroy who screamed and ran?  Yes, of that he was fairly certain.  He was a quick little runner, the boy called Gilroy.  He'd almost made it to Hester Street before the man caught up with him.  Somewhere, he'd dropped the knife, or else Gilroy would have died right there, in front of the Yiddish Rialto.  But fists were something the man who called himself 'father' always had with him.  The boy's arm was yanked from its socket as he was whirled around.  He saw the great fist come, but could not duck.  The air rose with shouts in a half dozen languages just before the sky separated into two distinct entities.

And in the crack was the golden scarab.

They took him to the Beth Israel Hospital near Rutgers Square.  Then someone said something and he was carted down to the East River and put aboard the Camp Huddleston Hospital Ship School, moored across from Corlears Hook Park.  The medical students said something to a man who called himself a doctor, and the doctor said something to a man who called himself a policeman.

Gilroy never found out what happened to the man who called himself his father.

All he new was that a new force had entered his life.

The golden scarab set in the evening, but quickly sprang back up with the gaslights.  The only time it really bothered Gilroy was when it reached out with one of its molten pincers and snipped at a spot deep in his head.  Still, one had to make a living no matter what bizarre creatures cropped up in the world.

It was a short hop from the hospital training ship to the piers.  Gilroy walked down one gangplank and up another--a deckhand at eleven years of age.  His occasional howls of pain startled the rest of the crew, so he was sent to work below, out of earshot, in the deafening cacophony of the engine room.  A few years as a grease monkey, on one ship or another.  Then as a coal passer or stoker, on one ship or another.  He found his happiest home on the Spanish tramp steamer, with an entire crew as demented as he was.  But while off the coast of Africa, someone decided it would be amusing to open the sea cocks, and the ship went down in clear weather.  After being rescued, Gilroy was able to find passage to England.  It was there that he got a job on the Cunnard Line.

In 1905, recruiters from the United States Navy began hanging around the piers where passenger liners were tied up.  The Navy was having awful luck with stokers and coal passers.  A bad lot, for the most part.  Shoddy in appearance and manners, wasteful with coal, and at turning trials they refused to make the all
-
out gut effort modern battleships needed to reach flank speed.  It was decided a better breed of fireman could be had on the luxury liners, where speed was at a premium.  So in a bit of authorized piracy, proven firemen were bribed away from their old jobs and into the service.

Gilroy among them.

Of course, the scarab came along for the ride.

No great legerdemain had been needed to squirrel the opium past the boatswain.  Neither Garrett nor the Master
-
at
-
Arms bothered to search him.  To them, it was enough to get his sad body back onto the
Florida
.  His main concern was the first lieutenant.  Third in command after Oates and Grissom, it was his job to keep the ship clean
-
-
no small feat on a coal
-
burning vessel.  He was the one who ran a white glove through the galley in search of renegade grease.  The officer who measured the regulation three inches between the ends of a seaman's clothes bundle and the stop that knotted it together.  If anyone stumbled across Gilroy's cache, it would be him.  Gilroy could not risk hiding the pellets near his berth.  Nor did he want to hide them all in one place, since his entire supply could be wiped out in one swoop.  So he broke up his stock.  He taped one small bundle behind the flush mechanism in the engineers' head, one in a deep recess in the paint locker, and the third behind some paneling in one of the night messes.

His 'opium den' was in the firemen's shower baths.  These were located immediately above the boiler rooms.  The rich combination of human and soap smells, as well as the hot steam from the long line of showers, would serve to hide the drug's fruity smell.  Slipping in alone, Gilroy would sit in the head next to the steam
-
heated drying racks where the firemen hung their clothes.  If someone pounded on the stall door, he could slip his pipe through the gap in the side and hide it in the valve niche behind the rack.  As of yet, he had not devised a way to heat and liquefy the pellets before putting them in the bowl.  He'd been limited to swallowing the pellets raw.  The sensation was more powerful than that caused by laudanum, but it did not go directly to the source of his craving.

Even so, it was becoming increasingly difficult to hide the effect the drug was having on him.  The members of the black gang had been working shorter shifts since the fleet's departure from the Virginia Capes.  While this gave them respites from the hellish temperatures, watch
-
and
-
watch increased the number of shifts.  The constant shuffling soon began to tell on the opium eater.  The opiate induced a lassitude nearly impossible to overcome, especially when combined with the extreme heat. Worse than that, instead of being able to lay back and inspect the visions in his mind, he had to confront a reality that was already severely warped.

And there was bitterness.  Something he had in common with everyone who labored below the waterline.  The black gang had anticipated several weeks of rest and entertainment in San Francisco.  It had been promised to them.  It was a promise too easily abrogated.  Word had filtered down that there was trouble at some isolated Pacific outpost.  But if it was serious, more than one ship would have been dispatched.

The stokers and coal passers saw it every bit as clearly as Captain Oates himself.  This was punishment for spending so much time in the Observation Ward.  Clear and simple.  Morale plummeted.  They could barely bring themselves to lift an empty shovel or scuttle, let alone fill one.

Gilroy could hardly bear to look into the fires, anymore.  All manner of creatures were giving birth and dying in the huge Babcock and Wilcox boilers.  They possessed nasty glowing tongues.  They hooted at him as he approached with a heavy coal shovel, and abraded him rudely as he stepped back.  When his shift was over, only one thing could provide him with relief.

The drug not only robbed him of appetite--it stole his sleep, too.  That surprised him.  He thought opiates were supposed to escort one sweetly to a soft dreamland.  Yet he found himself spending hour after hour staring at the jackstays that held up his hammock.  When the Master
-
at
-
Arms or engineers' mates came to rouse the tired firemen, they would find Gilroy up and about, his hammock already stowed in the nettings.

They complimented him on his alertness.

The fire lived.  Gilroy fed it, so he should know.  God was called Babcock and Wilcox.  Gilroy grimaced as he contrived a census.  There were thirty
-
two boilers on the
Florida
.  Did that mean there were thirty
-
two gods?  Or was it only one God, manifested thirty
-
two times?  To complicate the matter, there were two furnaces for every boiler.  Sixty
-
four golden scarabs?  Or did one Being have sixty
-
four golden, bloody hearts?  Damn!  No wonder ministers were so confused.  Try and figure it out!  One thing was certain though:  Chunks of coal screamed as they were sacrificed.

"If God is this horrible, we have to murder Him."

Gilroy's words were not heard over the din.

Opium was not the only illicit thing that had been smuggled on board.

Well, not exactly smuggled.  The officer of the deck had nodded amiably as Singleton waltzed on board.  He had not known that the doctor was
persona non grata
.

It was an indication of the haste with which the
Florida
had left the West Coast that Dr. Singleton's cabin had not been re
-
assigned.  His charts, experimental devices, and books remained untouched by porters.  As far as he could ascertain, no one knew he was there.  But after one day's fasting, he realized that would not last long.