Fishboy (13 page)

I told my friend that I had to leave. He said to wait until I at least tasted the fresh baking bread. I told him he would be in trouble if he was found giving me refuge. The farmer did not understand. He stroked my hair and said goodbye. I let the dog lick my hand and I was out the door
.

I had just made it to the well house when the mob returned and shouted for the devil to come out of the house
.

Make a light and show yourself, devil!
the people shouted. The old man said there was no light and the old dog barked
.

The crowd said
Hear his blasphemy and hear him barking! The demon! Luring innocent hungry people to their death with the smell of baking bread. See how the yard is littered with the shoes of the dead! See how his fields are empty at day and tended at night by spirits! Come out, devil!
they said
.

Come in,
said the blind farmer
. The bread is done
and out of the oven. There is plenty for all, come in and eat.

We won’t be fooled!
said the mob and they tossed torches at his door and threw a cover over his chimney so that the old man was driven out into the yard by the choking smoke
.

The people threw their pitchforks and their pikes. I hid in the rafters of the well house
.

When the blind man and the dog lay dead in the yard the people brought out the loaf of fresh bread
.

Don’t eat that, that’s the devil’s bread,
some said
.

The people looked at the bread
.

Maybe devil bread won’t hurt you,
someone said
.

They looked at the bread
.

Maybe he really wasn’t a devil, and we can eat the bread,
somebody said
.

As they ate the bread, they poked at the blind man
’s
body
.

Probably not a devil, but strange-looking eyes,
they said
.

Yes,
they said
, surely not a devil but surely looking a lot like a devil. Anybody can see his eyes look like a devil’s eyes might look like. He shouldn’t have been looking like a devil and baking bread,
they agreed. When they finished eating, they collected their tools from out of the farmer and his dog and they all went home
.

I wasn’t sure what to say after Mr. Watt finished his story. Was I supposed to beat his story like Lonny beat the cook’s? Was I supposed to beat his story of somebody doing something bad to somebody black with my own story? I didn’t want to tell him that somehow his story had made me hungry. I finished covering him in his burned places with the lard and on purpose passed the candle close to his face. I saw where the sunlight the white-hulled sailors let in had burned him, and now I saw that the sun had also left him blind. I didn’t know if he knew that yet, and I wasn’t going to tell him, especially after his story. All I could think of to say was to thank him quietly on my way out the wheelhouse door.

Thank you for the rich story
, I said in my lisping whisper.

I
seemed to be getting along with being useless pretty well but being evil was something I was going to have to make friends with. I was useless to John when he tried to haul in his net that night, useless to Lonny running the winches, useless to the other men, who tried to take the meshes aboard. The crew could not get more than a corner of John’s precious net aboard, and John was worried
that they would tear it. Black Master Chief Harold came and went, cursing and cursed by John who asked for still more power. I was only helpful in stirring John’s anger when he saw me, the evil boy who had drowned the two prison men, and I was sure John thought he was only two men short of bringing the hundred-ton net aboard.

Useless was pretty easy to work into. I sat on the outside wheelhouse steps and watched the turning stars while the men struggled with John’s net. Useless was easy, evil would be something else. I wondered how far back the evil started in me, figuring an absolute place to begin would be sticking Big Miss Magine with my butter-turned knife. I could see how evil was working its way right along with me on the ship, from smacking the Idiot upside his head with the big spoon to having no intention of holding on to the knotted rope if the prison men had tried to grab it. I watched some stars fall and wondered if soon I would begin walking in a crouch like a housebreaker beneath a window. I wondered if I would begin holding a hand inside my shirt like I was holding something I had stolen, or like I was concealing a dagger. I wondered if I would begin to take up spitting.

I had just been thinking how much more work being evil would be than being useless when the aft deck went quiet. John worked the men until both winches broke
and the men’s hands were raw and bleeding from trying to haul in the sharp-wired cables and slick ropes by hand. The men fell around exhausted on the deck and John packed a bundle of net-mending tools and twine to repair the places in his net the white-hulled ship had sliced with its propeller. I stayed hidden from him until he dove over the rail, swimming deep. Giving evil a try, I damned his soul, cursed his return, and spit.

A small lantern burned on a cord swinging random shadows around the winches. Lonny went to sleep on the main hatch after turning out the decklights. He tried to get the Idiot to sleep alongside him, for warmth, he said, but the Idiot preferred to sleep in a lifeboat. Left to themselves and tired, the men sought their own comforts; the weeping man who said
Fuck
covered himself in rotting finish fish and mud from where a bottom net had lain, and Ira Dench, in preparation for the rogue wave he was certain I would be responsible for, finally went topside to lash himself to the mast.

When I saw Big Miss Magine come walking out the aft cabin door and sort through the pile of finish fish I had thoughts I would never have believed I could have thought. My first thought was to hug myself with homesickness, wondering if ever I would be back safe and warm, smelling damp cardboard where I drooled and dreamed asleep in my cartonated box. Then I thought
how glad I was that Big Miss Magine was not dead after all, that maybe she would forgive me and I would let her go ahead and snatch me up and blow that blue breath of hers on me. Then I thought
Wait a minute, this black bitch may have been trying to kill me to eat me, and here I am playing nice when I should be playing evil
, and the evil thoughts were the ones I was going to work up, and while Big Miss Magine picked around the finish pile of rotting fish and groceries I went to where Lonny’s big axes were crisscrossed on the hatch. I took hold of the handle of one and started to drag the ax quietly across the deck. I betted that old bitch had never seen so many finish fish to choose from, and I was going to send her straight back to hell with an armful, and as I drug the ax up closer behind her, I had another funny thought, and that was that for a dead person she didn’t seem to float very well, her footing in the slimy fish was slippery, and then I figured that was just the rigor mortis set in, making her arms and legs stiff and achy, and I felt bad for a second thinking I had caused that, until I got myself worked up again to heave the big ax in one arc, one arc all I had strength for, to cleave Big Miss Magine in half like Lonny would a cook.

I knew, being evil, I had hate in my heart but at the last moment I could not find it, and that was just as well,
because the ax was too heavy to lift and I dropped it on the deck.

Big Miss Magine turned slowly around with her armload of finish fish. Her swirling blue fog breath wreathed her face. I backed away, bracing for whatever she was about to do to me, and I saw she had a hand-rolled cigarette hung in the corner of her mouth that spiraled out blue smoke, and in the dim brown light I saw her face was bristly with old beard and spotted with poxlike welts.

What the hell is with you?
said the rumored cook, and I saw that it was just him, an armload of old fish and groceries, Big Miss Magine’s stolen dress the only thing he could scavenge to fit him from the things the crew had robbed from the cratered lake people, the neckline torn and already sweat-soaked from his lighting a fire in the galley stove.

I was just going to help you
, I said, and I made myself useful collecting fish and showing him where the lanterns were in the galley to light the place with.

All night I scraped the galley table, chipped out the oven, swabbed the floor, and scoured the sink. In the dimness of the lantern light I watched the rumored cook, I watched him bent over the fish he filleted, the globe shade cutting off his head, Big Miss Magine’s dress splitting
at the seams, his legs like her legs, the same coarse dirty brown feet, his calves spotted with red marks that I leaned to see if they were pox welts or bee stings, not being able to decide either. I worked and watched the cook, and I could tell he wanted to ask me a question, but for hours he did not speak to me.

I wondered if it was up to me to warn the rumored cook about the possibility of being severed into two pieces. I wondered if Lonny would kill him. I wondered if Lonny would split him in two with his ax. I wondered if this was the type of cook Lonny hated, the kind I heard about when the union-scripted ships were in, the cooks with the loud complaints against the crew that they feared while at sea, cooks brave now on land to admit that maybe the pork and potatoes they had served had been spoiled a little from leaving them out too long in the weather beneath the companionway steps, or from not icing the groceries properly in the hold or forgetting to ice them at all.
To hell with you heathens! Just give me my fair share!
these cooks would demand, each tucking his full share into his apron pocket along with the money he had made selling the rotten grocery remnants to the black women going home on the purple bus. These cooks with idle hours and bunks forward above the oven, bunks that they did not have to share in rotation, bunks warm and dry when the watches would come in with ice
in their beards and bleeding hands for a cup of coffee the cook had let grow tepid because he had been reading a detective novel and had fallen asleep with it spine-split on his snoring chest, the crumbs and buttery brown flecks of hidden-away private desserts littering his coverlet. Cooks that always seemed to have friends in every port with a carriage or a car to take them into town to cash their checks in the last five minutes of the last banking day at the week’s end, waving and honking as they drove past the bone-weary and burned-out sailors hitchhiking into town to miss the bank’s last bell, to miss having pocket money for their forty-eight hours of liberty before another forty-eight days at sea. Cooks who taped pinups along the galley walls of beautiful women with their legs spread and their breasts just so, the cook’s running commentary punctuated by a pointed ladle—
See the swell curve here, the ankles on that one!
—waving the ladle above the seated sailors, dripping on their heads the thin gruel their hungry stomachs grumbled for, a soup thin and gristled, the cook having cut away the lean meat for his own pot pie simmering with peas and carrots in the back of the oven. Cooks with a coat of clean finery folded away in a dry locker, away from where the other sailors had to stow their garments in canvas sacks, clothes that never dried, clothes tossed from bunks and flung from hooks to the floor in the ship’s pitchings and
rollings, clothes stepped on by comatose sailors going on watch and trampled by staggering men seeking sleep, clothes smeared with winch grease and mud from the ocean floor, wet, fungoid, and torn, never the time to mend a tear in them like the cook had time, like the cook had time at midnight, his detective novel put aside, some herbal tea before retiring to his warm bed over the oven, the cook primly stitching a button onto a greatcoat stolen from a friend’s closet in the last port of call. Cooks, the first to leave ship with no deck watch and the last to report aboard, just as the ship throws off its lines, just as it is about to ease itself from the dock, the cook strolls aboard, all the time in the world, deposited dockside by a carload of painted women, the worst hag better than any of the other sailors has known, the other sailors having had to sit aboard and play cards and throw knives during their forty-eight hours of liberty, their paychecks read and folded, read and folded all weekend in their pockets, folded and uncashed, missing the bank’s last bell by fifteen minutes after the cook had driven past, some generous soul trading a thousand-hour-carved scrimshaw to some lowlife dockmaster for a small bottle of cheap rum for the whole crew, a whole weekend, some scrimshaw sweetheart across the sea cheated of her treasure. A cook, strolling aboard reeking of cheap perfume and flushed with brandy, his stolen overcoat pockets full of
candies and tins of store-bought tobacco, strolling aboard in a real shirt and real trousers, never ever a cook dressed like the rumored cook I was looking at, a poxy naked cook covered in a sheer homespun cotton blue-and-green-flowered dress more drape or dropcloth than dress, the thing our rumored cook stood in at the sink while I watched him skinning a fish with no complaint, a nagging question in his head instead of buzzing bees, and watching him in the dim lantern light I thought maybe he was not the kind of man I would have to warn of Lonny’s double-headed cook-splitting axes after all.

Draw me some flour
, the man said to me.

I took up the sifter and opened the dry locker I had been sitting on studying the cook. There was a bag of rice, a block of salt, and a stale sack of flour that the large black rat was guarding.

Don’t touch me, don’t fuck with me, I’ll bite your little fucking arm off, so help me I will
, said the rat and I let the top of the locker drop.

What’s the matter?
said the cook, and I tried to tell him there was a rat in the locker.

A rat? I can’t abide rats
, said the cook, and he picked up a wooden meat mallet but when he opened the locker the rat was gone.

Don’t run tricks on me
, said the cook, and he said it without anger in a way that I knew he wanted to carry
on talking, and I was right about him wanting to ask a question, I was just wrong in the way I didn’t answer fast enough.