The road (18 page)

They stood on the rock jetty and looked out to the
south. A gray salt spittle lagging and curling in the rock pool. Long curve of
beach beyond. Gray as lava sand. The wind coming off the water smelled faintly
of iodine. That was all. There was no sea smell to it. On the rocks the
remnants of some dark seamoss. They crossed and went on. At the end of the
strand their way was blocked by a headland and they left the beach and took an
old path up through the dunes and through the dead seaoats until they came out
upon a low promontory. Below them a hook of land shrouded in the dark scud
blowing down the shore and beyond that lying half over and awash the shape of a
sailboat's hull. They crouched in the dry tufts of grass and watched. What
should we do? the boy said. Let's just watch for a while. I'm cold. I know.
Let's move down a little ways. Out of the wind. He sat holding the boy in front
of him. The dead grass thrashed softly. Out there a gray desolation. The
endless seacrawl. How long do we have to sit here? the boy said. Not long. Do
you think there are people on the boat, Papa? I dont think so. They'd be all
tilted over. Yes they would. Can you see any tracks out there? No.

Let's just wait a while. I'm cold.

They trekked out along the crescent sweep of
beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their
clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of
seabirds. At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their
millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of
death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless.

From the end of the spit to the boat there was
perhaps a hundred feet of open water. They stood looking at the boat. Some
sixty feet long, stripped to the deck, keeled over in ten or twelve feet of
water. It had been a twin-masted rig of some sort but the masts were broken off
close to the deck and the only thing remaining topside were some brass cleats
and a few of the rail stanchions along the edge of the deck. That and the steel
hoop of the wheel sticking up out of the cockpit aft. He turned and studied the
beach and the dunes beyond. Then he handed the boy the pistol and sat in the
sand and began to unlace the cords of his shoes. What are you going to do,
Papa? Take a look. Can I go with you? No. I want you to stay here. I want to go
with you. You have to stand guard. And besides the water's deep. Will I be able
to see you? Yes. I'll keep checking on you. To make sure everything's okay. I
want to go with you. He stopped. You cant, he said. Our clothes would blow
away. Somebody has to take care of things. He folded everything into a pile.
God it was cold. He bent and kissed the boy on his forehead. Stop worrying, he
said. Just keep a lookout. He waded naked into the water and stood and laved
himself wet. Then he trudged out splashing and dove headlong.

He swam the length of the steel hull and turned,
treading water, gasping with the cold. Amidships the sheer-rail was just awash.
He pulled himself along to the transom. The steel was gray and saltscoured but
he could make out the worn gilt lettering. Pájaro de Esperanza. Tenerife. An
empty pair of lifeboat davits. He got hold of the rail and pulled himself
aboard and turned and crouched on the slant of the wood deck shivering. A few
lengths of braided cable snapped off at the turnbuckles. Shredded holes in the
wood where hardware had been ripped out. Some terrible force to sweep the decks
of everything. He waved at the boy but he didnt wave back.

The cabin was low with a vaulted roof and
portholes along the side. He crouched and wiped away the gray salt and looked
in but he could see nothing. He tried the low teak door but it was locked. He
gave it a shove with his bony shoulder. He looked around for something to pry
with. He was shivering uncontrollably and his teeth were chattering. He thought
about kicking the door with the flat of his foot but then he thought that was
not a good idea. He held his elbow in his hand and banged into the door again.
He felt it give. Very slightly. He kept at it. The jamb was splitting on the
inside and it finally gave way and he pushed it open and stepped down the
companionway into the cabin.

A stagnant bilge along the lower bulkhead filled
with wet papers and trash. A sour smell over everything. Damp and clammy. He
thought the boat had been ransacked but it was the sea that had done it. There
was a mahogany table in the middle of the saloon with hinged fiddles. The
locker doors hanging open into the room and all the brasswork a dull green. He
went through to the forward cabins. Past the galley. Flour and coffee in the
floor and canned goods half crushed and rusting. A head with a stainless steel
toilet and sink. The weak sea light fell through the clerestory portholes. Gear
scattered everywhere. A mae west floating in the seepage.

He was half expecting some horror but there was
none. The mattress pads in the cabins had been slung into the floor and bedding
and clothing were piled against the wall. Everything wet. A door stood open to
the locker in the bow but it was too dark to see inside. He ducked his head and
stepped in and felt about. Deep bins with hinged wooden covers. Sea gear piled
in the floor. He began to drag everything out and pile it on the tilted bed.
Blankets, foulweather gear. He came up with a damp sweater and pulled it over
his head. He found a pair of yellow rubber seaboots and he found a nylon jacket
and he zipped himself into that and pulled on the stiff yellow breeches from
the souwester gear and thumbed the suspenders up over his shoulders and pulled
on the boots. Then he went back up on the deck. The boy was sitting as he'd
left him, watching the ship. He stood up in alarm and the man realized that in
his new clothes he made an uncertain figure. It's me, he called, but the boy
only stood there and he waved to him and went below again.

In the second stateroom there were drawers under
the berth that were still in place and he lifted them free and slid them out.
Manuals and papers in Spanish. Bars of soap. A black leather valise covered in
mold with papers inside. He put the soap in the pocket of his coat and stood.
There were books in Spanish strewn across the berth, swollen and shapeless. A
single volume wedged in the rack against the forward bulkhead.

He found a rubberized canvas seabag and he prowled
the rest of the ship in his boots, pushing himself off the bulkheads against
the tilt, the yellow slicker pants rattling in the cold. He filled the bag with
odds and ends of clothing. A pair of women's sneakers he thought would fit the
boy. A foldingknife with a wooden handle. A pair of sunglasses. Still there was
something perverse in his searching. Like exhausting the least likely places
first when looking for something lost. Finally he went into the galley. He
turned on the stove and turned it off again.

He unlatched and raised the hatch to the engine
compartment. Half flooded and pitch dark. No smell of gas or oil. He closed it
again. There were lockers built into the benches in the cockpit that held
cushions, sailcanvas, fishing gear. In a locker behind the wheel pedestal he
found coils of nylon rope and steel bottles of gas and a toolbox made of
fiberglass. He sat in the floor of the cockpit and sorted through the tools.
Rusty but serviceable. Pliers, screwdrivers, wrenches. He latched the toolbox
shut and stood and looked for the boy. He was huddled in the sand asleep with
his head on the pile of clothes.

He carried the toolbox and one of the bottles of
gas into the galley and went forward and made a last tour of the staterooms.
Then he set about going through the lockers in the saloon, looking through
folders and papers in plastic boxes, trying to find the ship's log. He found a
set of china packed away unused in a wooden crate filled with excelsior. Most
of it broken. Service for eight, carrying the name of the ship. A gift, he
thought. He lifted out a teacup and turned it in his palm and put it back. The
last thing he found was a square oak box with dovetailed corners and a brass
plate let into the lid. He thought it might be a humidor but it was the wrong
shape and when he picked it up and felt the weight of it he knew what it was.
He unsnapped the corroding latches and opened it. Inside was a brass sextant,
possibly a hundred years old. He lifted it from the fitted case and held it in
his hand. Struck by the beauty of it. The brass was dull and there were patches
of green on it that took the form of another hand that once had held it but
otherwise it was perfect. He wiped the verdigris from the plate at the base.
Hezzaninth, London. He held it to his eye and turned the wheel. It was the
first thing he'd seen in a long time that stirred him. He held it in his hand
and then he fitted it back into the blue baize lining of the case and closed
the lid and snapped the latches shut and set it back in the locker and closed
the door.

When he went back up on deck again to look for the
boy the boy was not there. A moment of panic before he saw him walking along
the bench downshore with the pistol hanging in his hand, his head down.
Standing there he felt the hull of the ship lift and slide. Just slightly. Tide
coming in. Slapping along the rocks of the jetty down there. He turned and went
back down into the cabin.

He'd brought the two coils of rope from the locker
and he measured the diameter of them with the span of his hand and that by
three and then counted the number of coils. Fifty foot ropes. He hung them over
a cleat on the gray teakwood deck and went back down into the cabin. He
collected everything and stacked it against the table. There were some plastic
jugs of water in the locker off the galley but all were empty save one. He
picked up one of the empties and saw that the plastic had cracked and the water
leaked out and he guessed they had frozen somewhere on the ship's aimless
voyagings. Probably several times. He took the half full jug and set it on the
table and unscrewed the cap and sniffed the water and then raised the jug in
both hands and drank. Then he drank again.

The cans in the galley floor did not look in any
way salvable and even in the locker there were some that were badly rusted and
some that wore an ominous bulbed look. They'd all been stripped of their labels
and the contents written on the metal in black marker pen in Spanish. Not all
of which he knew, had burst free of their labels. He sorted through them,
shaking them, squeezing them in his hand. He stacked them on the counter above
the small galley refrigerator. He thought there must be crates of foodstuffs
packed somewhere in the hold but he didnt think any of it would be edible. In
any case there was a limit to what they could take in the cart. It occurred to
him that he took this windfall in a fashion dangerously close to matter of fact
but still he said what he had said before. That good luck might be no such
thing. There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead.

He found a can of olive oil and some cans of milk.
Tea in a rusted metal caddy. A plastic container of some sort of meal that he
did not recognize. A half empty can of coffee. He went methodically through the
shelves in the locker, sorting what to take from what to leave. When he had
carried everything into the saloon and stacked it against the companionway he
went back into the galley and opened the toolbox and set about removing one of
the burners from the little gimballed stove. He disconnected the braided
flexline and removed the aluminum spiders from the burners and put one of them
in the pocket of his coat. He unfastened the brass fittings with a wrench and
took the burners loose. Then he uncoupled them and fastened the hose to the
coupling pipe and fitted the other end of the hose to the gasbottle and carried
it out to the saloon. Lastly he made a bindle in a plastic tarp of some cans of
juice and cans of fruit and of vegetables and tied it with a cord and then he
stripped out of his clothes and piled them among the goods he'd collected and
went up onto the deck naked and slid down to the railing with the tarp and
swung over the side and dropped into the gray and freezing sea.

He waded ashore in the last of the light and swung
the tarp down and palmed the water off his arms and chest and went to get his
clothes. The boy followed him. He kept asking him about his shoulder, blue and
discolored from where he'd slammed it against the hatch door. It's all right,
the man said. It doesnt hurt. We got lots of stuff. Wait till you see.

They hurried down the beach against the light.
What if the boat washes away? the boy said. It wont wash away. It could. No it
wont. Come on. Are you hungry? Yes.

We're going to eat well tonight. But we need to
get a move on. I'm hurrying, Papa. And it may rain. How can you tell? I can
smell it. What does it smell like? Wet ashes. Come on. Then he stopped. Where's
the pistol? he said. The boy froze. He looked terrified. Christ, the man said.
He looked back up the beach. They were already out of sight of the boat. He
looked at the boy. The boy had put his hands on top of this head and he was
about to cry. I'm sorry, he said. I'm really sorry. He set down the tarp with
the canned goods. We have to go back. I'm sorry, Papa. It's okay. It will still
be there. The boy stood with his shoulders slumped. He was beginning to sob.
The man knelt and put his arms around him. It's all right, he said. I'm the one
who's supposed to make sure we have the pistol and I didnt do it. I forgot. I'm
sorry, Papa. Come on. We're okay. Everything's okay.