Eating Memories (11 page)

The tide came in, I thought. The fucking boat drifted.

I walked around the deck and saw that the anchor had been lowered. It surprised me because I couldn’t remember doing that.

“Dale?” I wandered down and checked the cabin again. Then I went up to the bridge and sat in Dale’s chair. I put my hands together in my lap and looked out over the water. There was a pressure in my bladder, not bathroom pressure, but sick, scared pressure. My head felt numb.

Dale would have known what to do. But in that time when the sun was in my eyes, Dale must have fallen over the side, and the sharks must have gotten him.

After a while I went to the anchor winch. I started the motor and watched the chain wind in. After a few feet of chain, there was a soft clunk. Poking my head over the rail, I looked down.

Dale was there. Dale was gaffed on the chain; just like a fish. His dark hair was plastered down on his face and his chin was resting on his chest. Where the chain came out of the skin between his shoulder blades, there wasn’t a big wound like I might have expected, but a smooth pucker like the chain had grown out of his back.

“Dale!” I screamed.

Real slow, he started to lift his head.

I jumped back from the rail and threw up all over the deck.

“God! God!” I was shouting. He couldn’t be alive, not with that chain growing right through where his heart should have been; not with being underwater all that time;

I hit the winch and heard the splash as a body struck the surface. Sliding in the slick of my vomit, I ran to the bridge and keyed the ignition. Nothing happened.

“Oh shit. Oh shit,” I was saying over and over. I ran to the opposite side of the boat, bent over the rail; and threw up some more.

I didn’t see that, I was thinking. Dale isn’t on the anchor chain. I’m going to go over and hit that winch again, because all that’s there is an anchor.

But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

And I didn’t want to stay on that boat.

Running down into the cabin, I got out the inflatable raft. Then I tore open a bag of coke and took a good sized hit. It didn’t matter that I got into the coke now, not with Dale gone. The coke made me feel better.

I was even laughing a little as I sat on the deck and watched the dinghy inflate. When it was full and round as a Mexican whore, I lowered it and loaded the coke. l got myself a couple of beers from the refrigerator, sneaking around the spot where the winch was like I was afraid Dale would see I was leaving him.

I was leaving Dale. I was leaving him hanging on the anchor chain.

Clambering into the dinghy, I got the oars out and put them into the water. Then I sat there.

I didn’t know which direction to go.

My stomach was starting to feel funny again, so I thought about what Dale would do. Padre Island was north, so the afternoon sun should be to my left.

I looked up. Above my head the sun was a tiny, white-hot thing. The sea had a murky sheen to it, and where the sky met the horizon was a dazzle of light misty blue.

Shouldn’t the sun be setting? I wondered. What time is it, anyway?

It doesn’t matter, I told myself. None of this crap matters. Padre Island had to be to the right of the boat, where it was before. I got the dinghy turned around and started rowing full steam. If I got into Padre, I’d find somebody, vacationers, maybe. I’d hide the coke in the sand, and I’d get them to come out and help me with Dale. I wasn’t running out on him, not really. I was just going for help. It made sense. Dale would do that.

Rowing was O.K., seeing that I had the coke. When I started coming down from the high, I felt an ache across my shoulders and cramps in my arms, so I snorted a little more.

The oars were red. I looked down at my hands and saw they had frozen into claws. In the time I had been rowing, I’d rubbed blisters onto my palms, and the blisters had burst.

Opening up one of the beers with my teeth, I held the can with the heels of both hands and drank. The beer was hot. Licking my lips, I looked up to where the sun lay, a white aspirin tablet in the steel sky.

Shouldn’t it be setting?
I wondered.

Around me the sea stretched to where it was lost in the metallic summer mist. Squinting, I looked for the boat, but I must have gone so far I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see Padre Island, either.

Maybe I was rowing the wrong way.

When the beer was gone, I tossed the can into the water and watched it float. My legs and arms were sort of shaking. Inside my chest, my heart was on a jittery coke trip of its own.

“Dale!” I screamed, not really thinking he’d hear me, but hoping he’d hear me all the same. “Dale!” I shouted across the empty water. If Dale could, he’d come and make a joke of it.

Cold fear oozed up my neck and spread itself over my sunburned shoulders. Yeah, old Dale will come, I thought. Dragging his chain. His white face will peek over the side of the dinghy, and he’ll smile with his putty blue lips and say, “Hey, Billy. The water’s fine.”

I picked up the oars real quick and started rowing like hell again, not bothering to check where I was going, but rowing fast, anyway. When I stopped the next time, it was because I couldn’t row any farther. My back had seized up. My hands were bleeding bad, and I couldn’t breathe steady for my crying.

“Dale,” I whispered.

Dale would have known what to do.

I lay down as best I could In the bottom of the rubber raft and gazed up into the harsh noon sky. The sunburn on my shoulders and back had formed blisters that leaked crusty yellow fluid.

What time was it, anyway?

Picture a calm, beautiful scene, I decided. That was the way Dale used to do when he got upset. I tried to visualize a forest, but all I saw was a beach, the breakers coming in in long, marching lines.

Breakers.

I started to sit up, but couldn’t. The ache in my back was too bad. It wasn’t important, anyway. Waves went to beaches. Everything moved toward land.

Tears welled up in my eyes and slid, thick and heavy, down my cheeks. My mouth opened and made a “whuh whuh” sound like a kid when he’s at the tag end of crying. If Dale had been there, he would have laughed at me.

It was O.K. Everything was going to be fine. The waves would take me, just like the crap that always washed up on beaches. The sea would take me home. And there would be people and laughter and something to eat. There would be women and noise and fast cars.

I relaxed and let the sea move me. With the sun beating down, turning the light behind my lids pink, I dozed. I dozed and listened to the slosh-slosh of the ocean. The ceaseless motion of the waves rocked me to sleep just like a baby in a cradle. Back and forth.

Back and forth.

Author’s Note:
I will tell you a secret: normally I know the beginning of a story and I also know its end. Writing for me is a voyage of semi-discovery, in that I know my destination, but how I will get there is another tale altogether.

This story—hell—I nearly had it fully written, but it had no ending! How would the characters get out of this mess? What was their solution? Were they all going to (gulp) die? Then Lubinov said his final bit of dialogue in my brain; and as I typed it out on the screen I laughed uproariously. The solution to the dilemma was as much a surprise for me as I hope it will be for you.

I was standing out by the drill, just sort of looking towards the horizon when Lubenov came riding up in his creeper. I could tell he was real: First, the creeper threw ‘a lot of dust into my faceplate; and second, I could touch him.

When I grabbed him by the arm, you know, just sort of checking out a little muscle and bone, he looked at me strange. “Bad weather coming,” he said as he jerked away from me.

The Russian was a worn-looking sixty. Under the polarized glass of his helmet I could see blue, ill-shaven jowls sagging over his collar. The paunch at his waist nudged the belt of his fire-engine red uniform. Fat people shouldn’t wear red.

“Yeah,” I said.

“So are you going to cover up the machinery?”

“I guess,” I said.

He helped me. Then he tied down his creeper and we went into the quarters. When we walked in, I took off my helmet. The lounge had a locker-room smell. Chee was sprawled drunk on the sofa. I poured some of the Indian’s moonshine into two jars and handed one to Lubenov.

He pulled his helmet off, sipped at the jar and winced.

“Chee made it,” I explained.

The Soviet’s cheeks were chipmunked out like he was trying to decide whether to drink or just go ahead and-spit it on the floor.

“Canned pineapple,” I told him.

He swallowed, shivered and put the jar down on a table. Then he sort of looked around the room, eyeing the dead plants.

“Chee had the last cleaning detail,” I told him. “He was supposed to water the ivy.”

“Up yours, Dawson,” Chee said from the sofa. He’d made a sort of blanket of dirty uniforms. It was cold in the quarters. The sun threw a miserly light against the smudged, flexible windows. On everything was a layer of red dust. When you breathed, you felt it in your nose. When you ate, you tasted the grit in your mouth. Chee called it “sucking Mars.”

Lubenov had eyes like little ball bearings. They moved away from Chee and settled their oily gaze on me.

“You are both thin. Have you been ill?”

I shrugged.

“You are taking your food and making liquor with it. How many supplies have you left?”

I looked at Chee. Chee looked my way. We sort of laughed.

Lubenov walked over to the pantry cooler, opened the door and started to walk in. He didn’t get very far. He spat something in Russian as he slammed the door shut. For a while he just stood there, his hand over his stomach, looking like he was going to upchuck. When he finally glanced at me his heavy face was pale. “It smells in there,” he told me. “Haven’t you noticed? It smells in there.”

“Must be Standifer,” I said.

“Standifer?” His thick eyebrows came together when he knotted his forehead.

“You remember Standifer,” Chee said. He turned over on his side on the couch, letting a uniform slide off his shoulder onto the floor. “The gemologist. Short, fat black guy.”

“I keep telling him to stay out of the pantry, but he won’t listen to me,” I told Lubenov.

Lubenov looked at me a while. “Standifer is dead,” he said.

“I know. Maybe that’s why he won’t listen.”

“He walked out without his insulated suit. He froze to death. You buried him.”

“Yeah. I know,” I told him.

“So he is not in the cooler. What smells in the cooler is spoiled food. There is container after container in there which has been half eaten and left open to rot.”

I took a sip of the moonshine Chee had made and sat down on a chair. “I see Standifer in there all the time. Maybe he’s hungry or something.”

Lubenov looked around the room again. “Where is Martin?”

Chee and I glanced at each other.

“Is Martin in his room?”

When we didn’t answer, Lubenov opened the door to the basement quarters and walked down the steps. He was gone a few minutes. When he came back his face was tight. “Martin is not down there. He is not in the quarters. Where is he?”

I shrugged.

Lubenov looked at Chee who shrugged, too.

“There are only three of you left. You have to know where is Martin,” he said. His English was beginning to get a little worn around the edges. “You must know where each of you is at all times. Five of you Americans are dead already. Three of us Soviets. Life has gotten too precious. We have to find him.”

“Gone on a walk to meet the Coyote,” Chee laughed. “Everyone eventually goes to meet the Coyote when he calls. One day he’ll call your name, Lubenov. Nik-o-lai Lu-u-u-benov, he’ll say. And you’ll come running.”

Lubenov was quiet for a long time. When he spoke, his tone was a hoarse, angry whisper. “Are you crazy? There are no animals here.”

Chee put on his best
cryptic Indian expression, the one that made you forget that the closest he’d ever been to a reservation was the time he bought turquoise on the street in Taos. The expression seemed to do a job on Lubenov. He got real quiet.

“But there are spirits,” Chee said. “There are totems. And the only totem who made it here was the Coyote, the trickster. He thought to play the ultimate trick. Only the trick got played on him. He’s on fucking Mars, man. Don’t you get it? He’s on fucking Mars, and he can’t get back. It’s lonely here for a spirit. And he’s pissed. An angry spirit is a dangerous spirit, even if it specializes in pratfalls.”

The Russian’s voice shook. “There is a sandstorm coming and Martin is out there.” Without waiting for an answer, he tore open the door to the hydroponics section and peered inside. “Oh, God! The pump is off!” he shouted. “You idiots! Did you turn off the pump?” When he turned the skin of his cheeks was still pale, but the part around his eyes was red and swollen as if he wanted to cry. He was shaking a little like he’d caught a fever.

I got up out of my chair and ambled over to the controls. All the lights were green except one. “Looks like it broke,” I told him.

Lubenov screamed in my face, “If it is broken, then you must fix it! You must fix it now! If your plants die, you will die. Don’t you understand that?”

“So big deal. So we just didn’t notice,” Chee said as he shifted his long body on the couch. A couple of more uniforms fell. He retrieved them and arranged them over his legs.

“Pump is broken a long time now,” the Russian said, his grammar suffering from his fury. “I smell rot in the water already. And you are telling me you have just noticed?”

“Let the Coyote fix it.” Chee sort of giggled.

Lubenov moved faster than I’d ever imagined he could move. I know he moved faster than Chee had counted on. In three quick strides Lubenov was on him. The Russian grabbed the Indian by the front of his uniform and jerked him upright. Slap. Slap. Slap. The Russian’s arm pumped so fast I could hardly see the motion. Lubenov’s open palm against Chee’s face sounded like three rapid shots. Slap. He hit him once more for good measure and then let the Indian drop back into the scattered dirty clothing. .

Chee had never once put his hand up to stop the Russian. I stood in the corner by the pump controls and never said a thing. Chee’s nose was running blood, as bright red as Lubenov’s uniform.

“Idiots,” Lubenov said sadly. He sat down on the sofa next to Chee and stared at his hands. “You are such idiots to let them kill you.”

At that moment the roof creaked. The bubble bowed in a foot or two on the left side. Lubenov’s head snapped up. He stared at the ceiling suspiciously. “You have checked the seals?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

Lubenov got up and went to check, anyway.

The blow was going to be a bad one. The metal struts above my head groaned. The bubble rubbed against its armature with the sound of a badly-tuned oboe.

“Martin is dead now,” Lubenov said. “Are you happy?”

I poured myself another fair-sized hit of Chee’s moonshine and sat down.

“He is out there in this storm, and now he is dead.”

The Russian sounded pretty upset about the whole thing. Chee rolled over and went to sleep, his nose still running blood. In a few minutes Lubenov got up, went to hydroponics, found a spare pump and started to work.

A little later I went in to watch him. “If you knew there was a blow coming, why did you go out?” I asked.

He wrapped electrical tape around two wires and flicked the switch. The pump started a shusha-shusha rhythm. “I have cleaned the filter, but the water will taste bad for a few days.”

Lubenov was sitting on the floor. I was standing over him. From that perspective I could see that he was going bald in a neat little monk’s-tonsure at the back of his head. He got up and studied the ceiling again. It was making end-of-the-world noises.

“It’ll hold,” I told him, speaking loud over the roar of the storm. “It always does.”

He sniffed a laugh. “Such faith. You Americans have such faith in engineering. We Russians understand technology, therefore we’ve learned not to trust it.”

In a moment he walked back into the lounge and sorted through our next shipment of diamonds that was due out in three days.

“I hate the South Africans,” he said.

“Good. They’re dead, anyway.”

Lubenov went on as if he hadn’t heard. “They and their nuclear suicide are the cause of this. Why did they have to do it?”

“Serious deed restrictions,” I told him, but he didn’t seem to get the joke.

I looked over at Chee. The Indian might have died in his sleep, he was so still, so quiet. I wondered if I should go check.

“A good Kimberlite pipe,” Lubenov said in what sounded like envy as he held up a four-carat VSI. Below the fluorescent lamp, the uncut stone glinted with a cold, bluish light.

Then he leaned over and whispered in my ear, as if he thought Chee were a spy or something. “We can get home.”

I shook my head. “The U.S. doesn’t have funding for replacements.”

He dropped his gaze to the stones and ran his fingers through them. They made subtle, clinking music. Ice music. “That is the excuse they give us, too. But the funding is here. Right here. We simply refuse to ship. We do not load and fire our rockets when the time comes. I ask you which is less expensive: To lose the diamonds or to send replacements for us?”

I shrugged. “Yeah. Maybe,” I said. “Then again, they could punish us. Not ship the food. They could starve us to death.”

“That is why you must preserve everything. Everything,” he hissed. His face was close to mine, close enough so that I could smell the ghost of Chee’s liquor on his breath. “We are dying already.”

He backed away from me as if he’d just realized he’d come far too close. “I have a plan,” he said.

I raised my eyebrows.

“We send both governments a message. Whoever gets here first gets all the diamonds. Understand me? The first to get here and take us all home, wins. My miners already agree, but you must be in the plan.”

“A Martian revolution?” I laughed.

He didn’t. His eyes picked me apart. “Yes,” he said. “A revolution.”

He dropped his gaze and ran his hands through the stones again, this time lovingly. “I am thinking. They will be angry with us. We will lose our pensions, perhaps. But diamonds can be hidden in the anus.”

“I hear my people X-ray.”

Lubenov glanced at me, startled. Then he gazed back down at the stones, amused. “Americans. So they don’t have as much faith as I thought.” He picked up a diamond, a good six-carat fancy yellow, and weighed it in his hands. “Then we hope that the Soviets will get here first.”

“Okay,” I told him. “I’m in.”

His eyes were tiny, bulbous and grey. The whites were a little bloodshot from the dry air in the lounge. “You are sure?”

“Yeah. Might as well.”

“And you will tell Chee to go along with it? He will listen to you.”

“Chee doesn’t give a shit. He stays drunk.” I wandered over to the other sofa and lay down, my hands crossed at my chest, my eyes to the bowed ceiling.

Lubenov followed. His heavy cheeks sagged as he bent over me. “Standifer is dead,” he told me.

“Right.”

”He does not come back to the lounge. He is buried out on Mars. I came to the funeral, you remember?”

“Yeah.”

“So you do not see him in the cooler, Dawson.”

“He comes,” I said as I closed my eyes, shutting out Lubenov’s worried face. “I see Standifer and Mike Bledsoe and all the others. They’re just as real as you, only I can’t touch them.”

“They are dead. They are buried. They cannot come back,” he said patiently. “You must believe that. If we are to die in this revolution, at least we should die sane.”

My eyes popped open in sudden fright. “Give me your hand!” I said.