Wolves (25 page)

Chapter 9

The rain only lasts for an hour or so, but the river has already swelled, and it continues to rush, bloated, pushing them between the banks. Huddled close together, the companions at the fore of the slave barge are soaked to the bone and shivering. After the downpour, the temperature drops, and autumn nightfall is coming fast.

The storm clouds, although wrung dry of rain, still hover over them and block out the stars and moon, so that the night is dark as ink. Lanterns are lit at the corners of the barge, and around the slave cages, and the smaller structure that sits adjacent to it, the crew's quarters. The flames flicker and writhe and cast yellow light around them in dappled circles. Beyond the dimly lit decking, the river is just an impression, sometimes an undulation in the water catching the reflection of the lanterns and glistening briefly, like phosphorescent fish swimming close to the surface, and then disappearing down below again. Beyond the dark river, the land is infinite black and nonexistent. They might as well be floating through empty space in some bizarre dreamscape.

The river is a constant noise beneath them, heard more often than it can be seen. It rushes and trickles and burbles beneath them and along its banks. The slaves' oars splash the water for a time, adding to the sensation of reality and substance, but once it is full dark the lanterns lit at the fore of the ship are not bright enough to truly pierce the gloom, and the need for slow, steady progress becomes apparent. The wet and shivering teams of slaves are brought in to warm themselves by the brazier in the slave cages. When the door opens for them, it does not seem as dark and dank and miserable as it had before. The brazier flames almost cheerfully, and it is so warm inside that billows of steam roll out when the door is opened, and continue to leak from the cracks in the walls after it is closed again.

Still, the slaves inside are quiet.

Without the oar teams, the barge simply drifts, carried on by the river, which has significantly slowed, Huxley feels, though in the dark it is hard to be certain. Interesting that Bristow complained so much about time, but now wasn't running the oar teams, Huxley thought. Maybe it was all just to drive the bargain.

A slaver strides the foredeck between the two front-most lanterns, sometimes hanging off the boat to peer beyond the lanterns and try to catch a glimpse of the bank. He calls out sometimes to the slaver manning the rudder—no longer Lizard Eyes, but another. “Port,” he calls, or “starboard,” and sometimes qualifies it with a “hard” or “steady.” Huxley cannot see what causes him to make these calls, but they do not hit a riverbank, or even scrape against the downed trees that Huxley knows line the bank like half-submerged skeletons in the dark. These men all know this river well, and even in the dark and gloom, they are able to navigate it.

Can we navigate as well as them? Or would we only run this thing aground?

The miserable foursome shivers and curses, unable to sleep.

Gradually, steadily, like a thief in the night, the world around them becomes closer, denser, wetter. The lanterns begin to give off halos. Huxley blinks through the darkness as he looks at them, thinking his own eyes are hazy.

“Fog,” one of the slavers calls out. “Fog rolling in.”

Beside him, pressed close to him, Huxley feels Jay stir. He looks over at the other man and sees Jay's cold blue eyes, just dark little orbs in the night, staring pointedly back at him.

The slaver at the fore makes a grumbling sound as the fog thickens, thickens, very quickly into a murky soup of cold, damp air. From where Huxley sits on the deck, he can barely see the man hanging off the front lantern post, trying to see into the darkness. The lantern itself cannot be seen—just the yellow glow from the flame.

The slaver hanging off the fore of the barge makes another sound of displeasure and swings back onto the deck, the shape of his body just a darkness in the pale, corpse-like gloom. “Fuck my life,” the slaver mumbles as he strides past Huxley a few paces and then stops, his hands raised up to his mouth to project his voice as he shouts: “Fog! Too thick! Can't see shit!”

“Mother
fuck
 …” is the muted reply from the opposite end of the boat.

The fog thickens by the second. The lanterns become dimmer, more distant. The shape of the slaver standing only a few paces from Huxley darkens again, until it is barely visible. The fog is thick and blanketing, and it muffles the sounds of the world all around them. The boat no longer creaks. The river no longer gurgles and rushes. Everything is very still in the fog. Cold, wet, and still.

A sound makes it through the thickening haze. The sound of a wooden door opening and closing. Huxley turns to look behind him, but he cannot see the slave cages or the crew's quarters. He can see the demure glow of the lanterns that are hung on these structures, but even these seem to dance and move in ways that they should not, like will-o'-the-wisps.

Huxley can hear the slave master's voice, deeper, more commanding, projecting itself across the deck. He utters a string of curses. Someone—the rudder man, Huxley presumes—says something that's not quite audible. Bristow's voice responds with more curses.

“Reno! You can't see anything?” Bristow's voice booms through the mist.

The slaver beside them calls back, “Naw, can't see shit!”

“Well, fuck it,” Bristow's voice is more resigned. “Drop the poles and anchors. Let me know as soon as the fog clears out.”

The slaver standing close to them grumbles underneath his breath, a disembodied voice hovering in the air off to Huxley's left. “I fucking
hate
this river. I fucking hate this
river
. Just want some fucking pussy. Can't get no fucking pussy 'cause I'm sitting in the fucking fog. I fucking
hate this river.
”

More voices mumble from the other end of the ship. Beside them, the slaver's breathy murmurs dwindle, the sound of his boots on the decking fading as he walks away from them. A few voices go back and forth. The words cannot be heard, but the tone is obvious. Bored men, delegating the orders they'd received. Then there is the loud sound of heavy wood on wood, a huge splash, coming from underneath the barge. Huxley feels the boat jerk underneath them, the wood groaning loudly. Another sound of some huge wooden thing dropping into the water, and then another, and finally a fourth. More orders are called out, the words hidden in the mist. From the starboard and port sides, simultaneously, the sound of metal, another large splash, and the sound of heavy chains clanking away as what Huxley assumes are the anchors sink down and embed themselves in the river silt.

The barge twitches and groans like a felled beast in its death throes. First it goes this way, then that, caught in every direction by something that stops it, and then finally it lies still, as though resigned to its death, its stillness, and it rests.

Muted voices back behind them, joking now that the stress of finding their way through the fog is done. The sound of Bristow guffawing at something. Then wooden doors to the crew's quarters opening and closing.

Huxley realizes his heart is pounding hard. In the cold, in the mist, he still shivers. But his hot blood is coursing now. He can feel it in his chest, the feathery, electric feeling of something impending, something bloody and violent.

He looks at Jay.

Jay looks back. “Not quite.”

“What are you talking about?” Don whispers from where he is huddled at Huxley's right side. “We can't see shit in this. I hope … I think …”

Huxley turns to him, matching the low level of Don's voice. “It's not even midnight. We have time. The fog won't clear until daybreak.”

“What do you mean we have time?”

Huxley pushes his face closer to Don, his voice straining a bit with sudden anger. “Don't do that, Don. Don't play games with me. This is the best chance we're going to get—the best chance you have of not having your jaw strung up with those others. We're gonna take it. And when I say ‘Go,' we're going to go. We're going to do this.”

Don shivers and looks terrified.

How could one man change so extremely from one conflict to another?

Because he's a coward. He knew he could beat the man and his wife in the trailer, especially with me and Jay. Now we're outnumbered and outgunned, so suddenly, he's not so vicious.

Huxley sucks on his teeth and regards the man to his right. “Are you weak, Don?”

Don closes his eyes and buries his face in his arms. “No,” his voice says, from the folds of his coat. “I'm not weak.”

Huxley sneers and looks away.
I think you are. I think you're weak. I think Lowell has more strength than you. Lowell deserves to be with us more than you do. He's more of a man than you. His chances of surviving out there are much better. You, Don? You're just dead weight.

The hours creep by in cold silence. It is difficult for Huxley to gauge the passing time while he sits on the deck of the slave barge, surrounded by white mist, barely able to see five feet in front of him. His pounding heart turns to steady rage. In his mind, he tries to picture her face … 

Charity.

Wife. Mother.

Why can't I remember you?

Think. Think about what she looked like.

But all he has is words: She had hair the same color as the sun in the barley fields. She had blue eyes that were bluer in the middle, and they sparkled when she smiled. A big smile. Beautiful mouth. She'd been a joyful person. A wonderful person. The best person he knew … 

He can say these things.

He can recite the facts about her, and yet in his mind's eye, he cannot piece them together to be a complete picture. He cannot remember, aside from thin impressions of all these disparate features, what his wife had looked like.

He knows that she'd smelled a certain way.

But he's been so long amid his own stink, and the smell of smoke, and the smell of blood, that he cannot remember her scent.

He knows that she had laughed, that he had liked the sound of her laugh. It had made him laugh as well when she thought something was truly hilarious and her eyes would water and her nostrils would flare.

But he's been so long in the company of men with rough voices, he's heard so many dying screams and shouts of rage, that he cannot remember her laughter.

He is losing her. She is falling away from him, like she was a puzzle and every day he woke up and more pieces had been removed. He could tell what the picture of the puzzle had once been, but the picture itself was not there.

You have lost her. She's gone.

Your daughter too.

Stop trying to breathe them back to life. It only makes you weak.

But he wants to remember. He wants to remember who he was.

Huxley opens his eyes to the dark, still draped with the innards of clouds.

The sound of boot heels on the deck, a slow pace, around the edge of the barge. The lanterns are still lit, distant yellow orbs that dance with the sway of the boat. Seeing them sway gives him a sense of losing his balance. He looks away from them, in the direction of the boot heels as they draw closer.

Clump. Clump. Clump.

A handheld lantern, a softer glow than the others, swaying through the air, becoming more defined as it nears them. A single flame in a glass box. Then the arm of the man holding it. Then the general shape of him, and then the man himself, standing there, looking down at them.

It is the man in the hooded poncho.

The lantern light illuminates his face queerly in the dark, causing his rocky features to look extreme, like sunset on a stone monolith. Huxley cannot tell if the man is grinning, or grimacing. His eyes are shadowed pits of black mud, with only the slightest winkle of reflected fire in them.

“Shitty night to be stuck on the deck, that's for sure,” he grumbles. He nods in the general direction of the slave cages. “Ol' Bristow's gone down for the night. Into half a jar of shine. If you'd like to go stand by the brazier to warm yourselves, Bristow won't hear of it from me.”

Without waiting for a response, the slaver turns away from them and continues his rounds through the mist.

Huxley watches him disappear. Dissolving, just as he had seemed to form, until again he is just the sound of boot heels and the sway of lantern light. The muffled sound of the river. The breathiness of the fog as it hangs on them and swirls all around them. The lantern, now a little yellow orb, hanging in some indeterminate distance.

Jay rises, very slowly, from Huxley's side. His wet clothes barely make a sound. His eyes are locked on the dancing orb of light somewhere at the fore of the ship. Huxley cranes his head to watch him. But he doesn't say anything. Doesn't ask any questions. And neither does Don. For the moment, they keep their mouths shut.

Jay moves like a cat, prowling. Focused on the objective. And when he does move, it is quick, and quiet. His boots don't make a sound but perhaps the barest rubber squeak on the wet wooden planks of the deck. Then, he too disappears into the mist.

Huxley and Rigo both watch the lantern light.

Beside them, Don fidgets nervously.

The lantern light is the only thing that is real to them in that moment.

It sways and dances, almost antagonistically. Like a little lighted lure, baiting this way and that while the angler creeps after it but doesn't strike.

Then the little yellow light vanishes.

There is the very faint sound of something hitting the water. If Huxley hadn't been so focused on the lantern light and seen it disappear, he might not have even noticed it, or would have chalked it up to the river gurgling under the flatboat. But now, he feels it in how his heart suddenly starts slamming. Not fast, but hard. Almost painfully hard.

He rises to his feet.