The Dream Vessel (3 page)

Quince was wondering how to make himself bleed—preferably in the least painful, least obvious way. He sat naked on the mattress, really a large burlap sack filled with dried grass. He studied his dark skin, the veins in his arms, his legs, and his ankles, which were red rimmed from shackles. How would he draw blood?

He had told Dirk the plan, and now Dirk was squatting, looking exasperated in the far corner of the cell under the barred window. “Brains of a pig,” he muttered, “you got the brains of a pig. Worse than that. You got pig shit for brains. Pig shit.”

Quince studied the room again and found nothing of help: whitewashed cinder block walls, rebuilt from the ruin of some ancient hotel; two mattresses; a tiny window with Thomas Bay visible outside if you stand on tiptoe; the door, thick steel with a food tray slot; empty plates. The plates. Maybe he could bend one of the tin plates until it broke. He could slash himself with the jagged edge.

No. Ach. He hated this. He was a scribe, not a warrior or hunter. He hated blood, especially his own, and he hated pain. This made him think of doctors—their leeches and fever rooms and scalpels. He remembered himself as a little rugger in the waiting room of a doctor, a vile old blood-letter who seemed to thrive on fear and agony. When the doctor’s assistant pushed through the door and motioned for him, little Quince had fallen forward in a dead faint onto the planking. His nose had broken, and ever since…ah, this was the answer, of course: Ever since, his nose had bled very easily!

He stood and snatched up an empty cup from the floor by the door. “Dirk, I have it. You will punch me in the nose. I will bleed, easily, I know it. Like Waterfall of the Wise—and it will only hurt a little.”

Dirk still looked perturbed, but he pushed away from the back wall and stopped at an arm’s length from Quince.

“I won’t do it,” Dirk said. He stared now at the floor, embarrassed to refuse his friend and cell mate, a fellow Rafer. “Your plan is dangerous—it will get you killed. They say we will be boated to the mainland any day now, so why not wait? On the mainland, there will be more places to run. On this island you will be found quickly.”

Quince had been holding the cup under his face expectantly, but he frowned now and dropped his hand. “If we leave the islands, I’m afraid that we’ll never see home again,” he said grimly. “What is the word now—how many have died among us? Ten? More?”

And then Quince’s vision was filled with a large brown fist, followed by a blinding light. He found himself on his back, staring at a cockroach on the ceiling. Tiny streams of moisture ran across his face and down his throat. There was a grumbly voice, Dirk’s, and his head had not cleared enough to gully the meaning: “You bleed beautifully, my friend. Now go out and get yourself killed.”

Jay-Jay was gnawing on his eighth pork rib when the screaming started. The portly young man slammed the bone to his plate, shoved his chair back and huffed himself to his feet.

He was locked into this corridor of malodorous green carpet, and it was his job—with no arms but a billy-banger—to cruise up and down the row of steel doors delivering food, emptying slop buckets and handling the miscellany. Screaming red-leggers—that was miscellany.

The guard waddled down the hall, licking barbecue sauce from the stubble on his upper chin. A sweat mark crossed his broad shoulder blades in the shape of his chair back. He knew it was cell 243, those two red-leggers Dirk and Quince hollering their fool heads off. Hold a gang of pig-pokers for weeks like this, you get to know the voices. Even if they don’t know any English, you know ’em by the sound.

He threw the crossbar back and opened the window. Dirk, the dumber one, was right there by the window practically spitting in Jay-Jay’s face, for crissake. He was slapping his stomach frantically and pointing at Quince, who was rolling on the floor. On and on, Dirk was blathering in that Rafer tongue of theirs, sounding like, “Blad-de-la-de-la-de….”

“Back! Back ginst the wall!”

They don’t know English much, but they know that anyway. Dirk edged back, still gibbering.

“What’s a matter wichu, boy?” Jay-Jay shouted. That one on the floor, that one Quince, was always a pussy. “My Mama’s slop gone to your tummy, Quincey-poo? Huh? Get up, jerkoff.”

Quince lifted his head a little, all grimy from the floor, to look up at the window. He does look pretty pitiful, Jay-Jay thought, and what’s that—stomach convulsions? Gawd, I don’t want ta clean up more barf today. Pleeeease don’t barf.

Just then Quince retched crimson down his chin and onto the concrete.

Jay-Jay’s stomach tightened, and he worried about holding down his own dinner. He slammed the window shut, locked it, and ran down the corridor, making the floor quake. We’ll be needing a stretcher for this one. And Big Tom’s gonna be piss-angry if we lose another red-legger ’fore they ship off.

Sanders Lafitte cracked the cap off a Liberty Ale and set the brown pint bottle in front of the mainlander named Farmington. Farm, as he was called by people who were not friends (the familiarity irritated him), scraped a fleck of cork from the lip of the bottle and tipped it back against his mouth. He sighed, and leaned onto his forearms against Sanders’s oak bar.

“Someday,” Farmington said, “I am going to ship you down a proper electric icebox—we’ve been manufacturing them for years. It would cost, of course, bringing it all this far. But I’d jump your mama for a cold, really cold ale right now….”

Down the bar, Eric opened his eyes. He pushed cigar smoke out his nostrils in contempt and lifted his chin off his shoulder. His beard came away looking matted and lopsided.

“Talkin’ money, there, just you be careful with that bottle you’re swinging about so la-de-da. You drop it, bust it—well whatcha think, Sanders? A thousand centimes?”

Sanders rolled his eyes toward the rafters.

“Things’ve changed, Farm, since you were here lass…uh, last. Um, since you last had a lass.” As Eric straightened up, his drunkenness became fully apparent. “Juss one little ol’ fight in here and alla sudden Sanders wants 10,000 centimes! Hah! Just fer breaking a few bottlès.”

“Shut up.” Sanders was wiping a glass.

Eric frowned and shakily checked his own ale bottle, finding it still empty. Sanders produced a full one for him, gratis, and changed the subject.

“These are cellar-cooled—just right, I say. Grew up on it. Any colder would kill the taste. Besides, there is an ice machine here on Thomas, remember. You brought it down, Dr. Scaramouch set it up for Big Tom in the mainhouse. And Big Tom, you know, he’d lend out ice if there was need for it.”

Farmington wiped his mouth. He was a frail young man, black haired, pale skinned, strangely moist in the face, and there were many on Thomas Island who thought of him as more woman than man. His stay on Thomas Island was longer than usual this trip, as his transporter, Captain Bull, was having to settle some unexpected legal matters. Between his catalogue deliveries, there was little to do but sop up ale at Sanders’s Shebeen.

“Dr. Scaramouch!” he said warmly. “I’ve brought the chemicals he ordered.”

Eric hooted and wavered on his stool. Farmington’s eyebrows rose in twin arcs, asking the broad question—what now?

“The chemicals!” Eric gulped, set the bottle down, and stared blankly ahead. “Here we got a blood business—blood, flesh, hair and bones. We sell ’em to the Government, them that we don’t kill in the process. But fine! We gots the chemicals for the doctor—the chemicals not to heal, but to make pretty pictures. Dr. Scaramouch takes the clicker box you sold him and he takes the por-trait of one of the pretty Mrs. Big Toms, some harlot or other, and one of the wood whits will make a nice frame for it while he’s not bleedin’ fingers over a boat….”

The bar had fallen into that dead silence reserved for blasphemy.

“They’re just red-leggers,” muttered Farmington, the defensive mainlander.

“Ah, red-leggers, red-leggers, red-leggers.” Eric drummed his forefingers against the bar. “Farm. Mr. Farmington, you ain’t been at this long enough to even remember ten years ago in this business. But do ya hear talk of the red-leggers—way it used ta be? I hunted red-leggers back then—back when red-leggers was the runners from the Government. Had gen-u-wine rings ’round their legs from the shackles they broke on the mainland. You knew that? Now—hoo, now—Big Tom’ll take anybody, native islanders. Hey, sell ’em to the Government. Work those farms southland ’til they dead. Work those farms, ey Farm? Hah.”

Eric pulled on the soggy end of his cigar and pushed another cloud of smoke out his nose.

Moori lit Big Tom’s cigarette, one of those machine-rolled numbers, and he eased back into the hammock where he could watch his feet swing up into the night and down again, back and forth.

“The boy will be home tomorrow,” she said sweetly, reassuringly. “I can just feel it.”

Ah, late evening on the mainhouse veranda. He rattled his glass—the wet clatter of rare ice cubes in whiskey—but he didn’t want to sit up to drink. “God’s honest truth, I don’t think I miss Little Tom, the twit, af as much as I miss the Lucia.”

“What a father you are….”

“Hey…” He grabbed at her standing there and playfully pulled at the bottom hem of her blouse so that he could see in. “We’re talking about Little Tom, ’member.”

“Okay, okay. But…oh yeah, Billister is at the grand door tonight. Sent me up to tell you the doctor is here.” She pulled her blouse out of his fingers and spread it down even, patiently.

“Scaramouch?”

“You got the crabs again, or is he taking your picture these days?”

Big Tom was frowning. “Neither.”

“Billister says he seems to have been printing pictures again—he has an envelope, a large one.”

“Well, go get him for me, now would you?” he said, growing irritable. “We’ll see what this one is all about, then tell Billister no more visitors, rest of the night.” He watched her go, admiring her little ass and long legs, remembering what they looked like in bed. He liked his time alone with her.

Minutes later, Big Tom watched Dr. Scaramouch march importantly through the master bedroom onto the veranda, and there was that smell—something like cough syrup, a sickening odor he not only associated with the old doctor, but with needles, bleedings, polstices, and vomit. As important as it was to have a physician on the island, Big Tom was always queasy in close proximity to Dr. Scaramouch.

The doctor was as wide as Big Tom himself, but taller, and his salt-and-pepper beard gyrated now, a nervous habit. “Ah, Lashmaster! Good evening. Oh, a criminally good view of the bay from here.”

Big Tom looked weary. “Lashmaster?”

The doctor cleared his throat. “Oh, harmless imaginin’. Think of bein’ a lad on a longboat, or a scrootman on a skimmer. And always loomin’ above is the strutting captain, Big Tom, the Lashmaster.” He aspirated the words with as much genteel emotion as he could muster, but Big Tom still looked sour. “But nevermind. I’m bringing here a gift, just tonight mounted, and I’ll drop it and run.” The doctor waggled the large envelope under his right arm.

“It is a photo then?”

“Oh, well ya, a photo,” the rotund physician said. “Of your beloved.”

“Not Moori again.”

“No. Hah! The Lucia. And you with her.”

Dr. Scaramouch rattled the envelope open and drew out a gray matt board bearing a photograph of a dry-docked skimmer, nearly completed. It seemed to have been taken from above, meaning the doctor had stationed himself up Crown Mountain somewhere with one of those telephotic lenses he’d ordered recently from the mainland.

Yes, it was the Lucia. Big Tom squinted in the poor light. “You say I’m in there somewhere?”

“Oh, ya. It was the Sunday before she launched. See, I had figured it was ’bout the last time to catch her out of the water for a year or two. Look there—the rigging’s nearly all in place. And what surprise, but when I have the tripod set I see through the lens that it’s you on that day you decided to work the skimmer yourself.”

Big Tom’s forehead rose appreciatively.

“That’s you there.” The doctor pointed a chubby finger, his beard bobbing excitedly. “Top deck, with a crate in your arms, loading down ta the holds, if I remember right. You and Bishop that day.”

Big Tom sat up abruptly, spilling a splash of his drink. He grabbed one side of the photograph roughly and squinted. “Blime,” the merchant said. Then he smiled. “You caught me at manual labor—can’t have the crew ’er the wood whits see that, can we? Ha!”

Dr. Scaramouch laughed uneasily. “No, I guess you’ll have to frame it yourself, huh? And keep her in the mainhouse, yer study maybe, then.”

Big Tom looked at the wet splotch in his lap. “Moori! Hey, Moori!” Then he smirked, confiding to Dr. Scaramouch, “Perhaps she’ll lick it up, no?”

Big Tom gulped from the glass and sucked in the night cool of his walled garden. All around him in a circle against the wall, mango and orange trees hunched against the starry sky. He stood in the precise center of the dark yard, at the intersection of two meandering paths. Forward, backward, left and right through the lush shrubbery, the tracks built of polished white stones faded into the night, looking like narrow beaches. Twenty-five years ago he had gazed down at his own blueprint for this garden and had imagined himself standing at the hub of a huge whirling pinwheel. The thought returned to him nightly when he came down from the mainhouse for his meditative stroll.

Big Tom turned his head left, then right, and reviewed the collection of memories here, a gallery of ghosts assembled over the decades. Over there, for example: Bolted neckhigh to the orange tree at the center of the south wall was one of his favorite toys, a garrote. It was a fearsomely simple device—an iron collar that could be fastened to a prisoner’s neck and tightened by a wing nut at the side. Slowly, if there were questions to be answered. Quickly, if he was feeling merciful.

Big Tom swallowed hard, twice, and felt the stubble of his throat. The garrote. That was how he had acquired Billister, the house boy. It was, oh, fifteen years ago (how old was Billister?). Billister’s mother, Megan-Do, was a red-legger—had stolen a dory in desperation, but a skimmer found them after three days adrift. Nearly dead from exposure, she and her little boy. Even so weakened, the bitch Megan-Do left the world loudly, and Big Tom remembered turning the screw quickly to shut her up.

The boy grew up in the kitchen running errands, the only human Big Tom owned for any length of time, despite being in the business. All others he traded quickly. He made a mental note to find out when Billister’s birthday was.

He dropped the daydream and walked southeast, crunching through the chill darkness over the white stones, breathing in the alternating odors of fruit trees, roses and rhododendron. Where the south and east walls met he came to a low hut built of long slabs of stone. He took the lamp hung by the door and lit it, turned the lock with his key and pushed.

The dank air was scented generously by the tall bins of topsoil and leaf mulch. Big Tom kicked back to close the door and stepped past the plywood bins to where the sacks of dung were stacked waist high. There sat the Cantilou, the oddest beast he had ever seen, enshrined on this little hill of burlap.

The Cantilou was feline, he supposed—part cat, anyway. It sat proudly, paws forward, silky tan, tail thwacking in measured patience. But the face was the thing, and Big Tom felt a rush of surprise every time he spilled lamplight onto it. The face was nearly hairless, and except for the eyes it looked precisely like that of a human boy. The eyes. There were no irises as with normal eyes, and no whites, just deep black wells. Clearly they could see—they blinked under the flame—but how Big Tom could not guess.

It was Big Tom’s private madness that he and the Cantilou talked to one another—not in spoken words, but in thought. The richest man in the Caribbean, barefoot at midnight, talking to a cat-boy in his garden shed. Mad.

You look happy tonight. Big Tom thought the words, tossed them to the Cantilou.

I am happy, yes, the animal replied in the same way. I sit on a mountain of dried turds, locked in a ramshack. And I am happy. You, however, have a brain pleasantly wet with whiskey, fine females, the richest house on the most desirable island in all the seas—and you are not happy. Hmmmn.

“It’s just the Lucia, a temporary worry. I should captain her myself from now on….”

“Oh, it may be the Lucia just now. Hmmph. But then it’ll be Moori next week. Or where to find more red-leggers. Or their going price. Or some new competitor putting up on Dead Island, maybe.” The Cantilou blinked. “Forget the Lucia. She’s quicksand to you—you put your all into her, or anything, and surely you will go under.”

“Quicksand—pfffft.”

The Cantilou thwacked his tail twice. “You know the best way out of quicksand? Relax. Do not struggle. Fall over and crawl away. Calmly.”

The great door to the mainhouse was thick imported oak. The knocker in its center was a salvaged anchor, too small for a skimmer yet too intricate with swirls and emblems to have served a simple dory. Farmington guessed from its opulence that it had been designed for the lifeboat of a large ship and perhaps had never been immersed in salt water.

He pulled at the bottom arc of the anchor and let it drop—thonk, thonk.

Farmington realized that he was being watched—a feeling, really, but he was sure of it. He stepped back from the door and glanced down at his sandals and trousers to assure himself of his presentability. The cotton garments hung awkwardly about the slender mainlander, an unnaturalness that announced his origin immediately to any islander.

On the other side of the door a bolt slid aside and the mass of oak swung inward. In the polished foyer stood a sturdy young man, dark skinned, hair almost nonexistent, so short that his head might have been shaved just that morning. The youth did not speak, but his right eyebrow twitched, inviting an explanation.

“Uh, my name is Farmington, and I represent Cred Faiging, sales and delivery to coastal and island points.” He held up a black-covered notebook as if it proved his credentials. The salesman wondered if the doorman could be Rafer, although that seemed unlikely. Most Rafers he had seen wore manacles, and those that lived in the wild, well, he had heard they wore nothing like the tailored tunic before him. There were other dark-skinned people, especially in the cities, but they acted and dressed like any other mainlander. “Uh, you know of Cred Faiging? The inventor, manufacturer? Um, you speak English?”

The doorman nodded politely. “Yes,” he said. “I speak English. And Spanish, if you happen from Down Under, and Rafer, and a touch of Latin, too. What tongue would you prefer?”

“Hoo. English,” said Farmington, forgetting his spiel. “Thank you. But I’ve come on a simple matter, if you would just call for your, uh, for Big Tom. Thank you.” Farmington turned his pale head, gazing away into the blackness of the sprawling green lawn as if dismissing the doorman. But the dark man stood firm.