The Dream Vessel (11 page)

When Dr. Scaramouch died and the jailer’s pudgy sister Lily was assigned to tend the clinic, Thomas Island and the surrounding atolls cooperatively fell free of serious disease and injury.

It was as if the islanders knew better than to grow ill without a proper physician in the vicinity. Or perhaps it was that they were developing no fewer maladies than before, but they dreaded surrendering themselves to the ministrations of a woman whose surgical qualifications amounted to hacking chickens in the kitchen and feeding unidentifiable slop to the red-leggers in their cells.

It also was likely that the islanders began turning to the healers who had been operating discretely for centuries on the Out Islands—Rafers, some of them, Jesus People and the like. Such physicians had been pushed into semi-exile by the disbelieving mainland-style “civilization.” And now, surely, some under-the-weather islanders were finding superstition-laced treatment preferable to guaranteed modern-day incompetence.

So it was that Lily’s only patient that night was delirious and in no position to argue or plead for a change of venue. Leather thongs bound his hands and feet to the four corners of the clinic bed to keep him from scratching at his wounds and breaking open the stitches.

Big Tom, standing bedside, brushed the flecks of white powder out of his moustache, snorted back hard one more time, and pressed his bearded chin to his chest in an expression of horror and disgust. His son splayed out before him had more wounds than a Nganga man’s mastabah doll in the dancing-knives ceremony. The tiny rends in the flesh had been stitched closed with fat black thread in wild, random-looking patterns that soured Big Tom’s stomach.

“Gonna scar beautifully,” Big Tom mumbled, hunching down to stare wide-eyed at the chaos of needlework around his son’s left nipple.

Lily was nervous in the presence of the trade master, but she managed to roll her eyes upward in mock annoyance, hoping such familiarity would alleviate the tension. She lifted a corner of the white towel covering Little Tom’s crotch and paused for a warning: “Big Tom, now, none of this here’s my doing. And I ’spect the infection’s dying back some.”

Big Tom’s eyebrows rose and bounced in a civil manner, inviting her to proceed. Lily lifted back the towel, and suddenly Big Tom felt detached, as if he were viewing the scene from the ceiling of the hospital room. Tracer lights criss-crossed his vision. For scarcely ten seconds he watched as Lily gingerly cleaned the row of black puncture wounds festering on his son’s penis.

Big Tom staggered for the door and pushed it open. Lyle and Nob were arguing in the hallway, and the conversation stopped, each of them mid-sentence. Both of them toyed with smouldering stubs of the machine-rolled cigarettes Big Tom had given them minutes before.

The merchant unzipped his fly, reached in, and withdrew a leather wallet. He whisked out a wad of centime notes without counting them, stuffed the wallet away and zipped up again.

“Here,” Big Tom said, only glancing at the faces of the two slave-boaters. Big Tom pulled the wad of bills into two, as if tearing apart a lettuce head. “Here,” he said again, handing each of them an undetermined reward, “an’ thanks for my son. Hmmph.”

Big Tom lingered to gaze out the windows onto the black lawn outside, an unknowable powder-inspired meditation, and then he shuffled toward the exit.

“Thought you said he woont have no cash, huh?” Nob prodded his brother.

Lyle was not remorseful. “You work on Big Tom’s level,” he whispered, lest the merchant was still in earshot, “a few thousand centimes don’t matter a whit. But think of it—this here’s the same we’d make for bringing in fifteen or more red-leggers. Just for trapping one body.” Lyle eyed his brother’s fistful of centimes and finished shuffling through his own share of bills. He stuffed his take into his front pocket.

“Hey!” Nob shouted.

“Shhhh.”

“Hey!” Nob slapped Lyle on the shoulder. “How much was that? We splittin’ this, right? Even?”

“Shhhh.”

Slowly, Gregory learned how to be house boy for the mainhouse. He stood patiently over the garden sundial until it marked 5 P.M., and then he clamored up the stairways with his gurgling watering can in tow. He filled the balance basin of the clepsydra carefully until its intricately sculpted pointer indicated the correct time, and immediately the same water began its steady ploit, ploit, ploit into the catch bowl. The water clock then began its twelve-hour sweep across the hour board, charting the passage of time for all evening observers.

He learned from Big Tom’s musclers how to unload the deliveries from the mule wagon, where to stash the potatoes, the salted beef, the cases of ale and whiskey. He learned how—and how often—to refuel the generators that kept the mainhouse aglow at night.

He learned that Big Tom was insanely protective of his walled garden, seemed to save even the manure-spreading for himself. It was the merchant’s private botanical kingdom. Above all, Gregory was to stay away from the little shed built of flat stones in the corner.

Mintie, one of Big Tom’s plumper wives, taught Gregory how to butcher chickens. With great pride he plucked them and whacked them apart, then rubbed into their meat a paste of garlic, black pepper, lemon juice and cilantro. Some evenings Gregory would sizzle the chicken on the wide brick grill built into the back patio. He would feed the entire household—Big Tom, wives, musclers, sometimes a guest. For the rest of the night, Gregory would wear the scent of garlic and smoke like a badge of honor.

He found Big Tom a frightful man, wide and gruff, pressing him for stories of Merqua’s mainland. Gregory would not talk to him any more than necessary, and he found it convenient to pretend to be more dim-witted than he was.

Moori was different, scented and elegant. She would stroke his hair and ask about the mountain he used to live under. The more Gregory tried to tell her, the more confusing the story seemed to get: that he grew up under a mountain with windmills on top of it; that his people were the “Ungovernment,” but he had come to the island representing the Government; that the Monitor was dead, his head bitten off by a large fish in the canyon where the despot had been hiding.

Moori would shake her beautiful head and walk away. Eventually, Gregory learned not to tell her the truth either. He felt a warm welling in his chest when she showed an interest in him, and he grew distressed when she threw up her hands in disgust and stopped asking questions.

It was an involving life for Gregory, if not a challenging one. He lived on Thomas Island with an ever-present sense of loss, however, an anxiety that pressed close to this throat in the darkness of his room when he tried to sleep, making his breathing come hard. He had lost Tym, the dark woman who had dragged him out of the water. And before that, he had lost his home, the Blue Ridge. He wondered if he could have them both sometime—Tym and the Blue Ridge together—but that seemed impossible and made him fret even more.

Gregory turned the pieces of marinated chicken carefully with long wooden tongs, inviting an angry crackle in the coals as the fat ran off. He knew that next morning it would be time to force back the bin cover on the side of the brick barbecue and sweep out the ashes. They were building up too much.

Big Tom and a guest arrived on the patio chattering and rattling bourbon glasses. The tall one with the beard, the visitor, gave Gregory a chill. The recognition was mutual. The man was motioning toward Gregory with the whiskey glass, mumbling something to Big Tom. Big Tom squinted and laughed, and the pair walked jovially in Gregory’s direction.

“Gregory,” Big Tom began, “this is Bark, one of my top skimmermen. He thinks you’ve met before.”

“Hi, Bark,” Gregory said, not looking up. He proceeded to turn all of the grilling chicken that he had just turned.

The tall man with the silver-speckled black beard closed one eye as he studied the new house boy. He pulled at his drink. “Ya, I’m sure now. Gregory, you were aboard the Lucia when she went down. You shoulda drownt, so how is it that you washed up on Big Tom’s porch some weeks back?”

Gregory shrugged and kept himself busy with the grill.

“You say he was leg-ironed in the hold when the Lucia went down?” Big Tom asked.

Bark snorted. “And barely conscious.” He pointed to the scar on Gregory’s forehead. “From that, when it were a fresh wound from ’is capture.”

Big Tom took Bark by the arm and steered him out of Gregory’s listening. “On the Lucia, you originally picked this one up off an island—he was running with other red-leggers?”

“Ahh, no. Seems to me not. He had to be the one we blew out of the water just before the Lucia went down. We had sighted a skimmer ’round the southwest Out Islands, thought ’er a pirate or a powder runner, one without yer banners. So when she tried to make away, we turned the cannons to her.

“Second shot—can ya believe it?—must have hit a fuel tank. She blew her hull and dropped right quick. This house boy of yours bobbed up in a float vest, his head knocked open.”

They were inside now, and Big Tom rounded the bar and sloshed more bourbon into each glass. He slid back the top of a cabinet against the floor, extracted two handfuls of ice cubes, and dropped them into the glasses, too. He bounced his eyebrows at Bark to point up the extravagance.

“You said fuel tank,” Big Tom stated. “Fuel, you mean, as if she carried an engine?”

“Oh, ya, the blast was that big. Warn’t no kerosene tin for the lanterns, I’d tell. Spread decking for a quarter mile.”

Big Tom pressed at his nostrils between thumb and forefinger. “If his skimmer was powered, then either it was licensed by the Government—or was Government—or….”

“Or was an Out Island pirate,” Bark finished. “Or was a powder runner.”

Big Tom smiled and stroked his nose again. “Wasn’t a powder runner I know. A couple have lit in and out since you sank that one.”

Bark’s voice was starting to rise, sounding defensive. “Well, if she was Government, I had no way to know—don’t go reporting that to Captain Bull to pass along, now. An’ I soon had sorrier things to worry about, anyhap.”

Big Tom returned to the French doors to watch Gregory poking at the grill.

“He’s scared of me,” Big Tom said, taking a sip. “But he tells Moori tales about the Government—about fighting against the Government, about working for the Government. Doesn’t always make sense. Said once he’d come looking for a ship builder. Also said once the Monitor was dead.”

Bark was growing easy again and the alcohol was beginning to warm his limbs. “Sounds like a case for the new doctor when he gets here.”

“Ya. Any day now. After he puts the lift back into Little Tom’s willie, he can look at Gregory.”

Big Tom glanced down at his drink and up again to stare at the dim-witted man turning chicken pieces. In that fraction of a second, impossibly, Gregory had disappeared.

The bargemen, those swaggering apes with the snub guns, all remarked upon what a bad time of year it was to be transporting red-leggers. Their conversations were the sort that farmers have as they worry over their crops.

“They never seem to draw in the centimes like an autumn run will,” huffed Buehl, the senior of the three men stationed to work Billister’s barge.

Billister remained shackled to a stubby post for the entire four-day sail to the mainland. Quickly he was reminded of the origin of the term red-legger: the skin under his irons was becoming inflamed, itching.

The only slave among them to be freed of the manacles was a woman about fifty years old. She had passed out on the second day of baking exposure. Buehl produced a key from his trousers, snapped the unconcious woman’s cuffs open, and rolled her off the edge of the barge.

On the third day, amid much grumbling, the three bargemen erected a makeshift shelter over most of their captives, a few tarpaulins lashed together and hoisted atop teetering poles. Then Captain Bull, hollering from the lead tug, ordered the other two barges to erect coverings as well, to protect the cargo. This prompted even more resentful bickering.

They puttered into Chautown resembling a chain of seaborne circus tents.

Billister had expected the mainland to seem more…main. There was a harbor not remarkably larger than Thomas Island’s. The meandering coast misted out of sight north and south and easily could have belonged to an island instead of a continent. Somehow, Billister wanted to see towering cliffs, mountains looming beyond—a cumbersome chunk of land.

In the last hour of the trip the wind picked up, as if tranquility were verboten here even for the weather. The stubby tugboat out front sliced into the low swells, and the three barges bobbed after it obediently like quarter-acre ducks following Mama. The sky had turned gray, a shade lighter than the sea. The tarpaulins snapped and sputtered in the wind. Billister nodded sadly, pegged to this large raft, and watched the sea spray spatter his leg irons to a grimy black.

Near port, the tug’s engines died to a low cough. Captain Bull marched in and out of the pilot house shouting commands inaudible over the wind and splash. They gurgled past a battery of rust-eaten cannons, impotent reminders of ancient times, then eased up to a crumbling concrete dock rimmed by fairly recent creosote pilings.

Billister briefly forgot his circumstances in his awe of Chautown. At dockside he could see avenues of elegant residences, pre-war matrons crouched behind their iron grill-work fences. Intermingled were the utilitarian touches of the modern age: artless stonework, corrugated steel roofs rusting under the salt breath of the ocean.

Even more astounding to Billister were the motor vehicles murmuring over the pavement. He had heard of them, of course, but only a handful of the two-wheeled varieties had made their way to the islands. Here they lumbered irritably, all of them the same beaten four-wheeled, Government-issue gray. Open-topped personnel carriers, produce wagons, one- or two-passenger cars for Government officers or honored citizens.

Billister found himself again chained with the others single file, front to back, walking awkwardly on numb legs that moved like ghostly crutches up the roped gangplank. The younger in front of him twisted around and opened his lips furtively to say something, but Buehl was there instantly punching him in the kidney. It was a wound that would not show—important on sale day.

At the top of a concrete ramp, dozens of the open-air trucks waited. The red-leggers were loaded in, freed of all restraints but the wrist cuffs, the leg irons laid carefully in growing piles by the tailgates. A guard with a heavy pistol hopped onto the tailgate when the truck’s engine started. His clothes were almost a uniform—light gray cotton, pressed, the trousers belted with polished black leather and a matching holster. The guard seemed easygoing, even a bit of humor in his eyes. This was a mainlander, a bona fide Government man.

They were saying goodbye to the barges.