I get up. My head thwarts around and I see nothing, then I see stars. Saunders called Johnson dead, I think. I greet the cot again, blind. Saunders will come back with Johnson and have a laugh. Until then I’ll ride my cogitations out through the stabbing pains in my skull, the licking waves. Most likely I’ll doze then wake up to bread and butter and hot beans and whiskey and it’ll be night and we’ll be halfway to China and they’ll say, “Hit the well, McGlue,” like after my last bout. I try to remember the port of call I got this wet in.
Zanzibar.
Think of someplace you’d like to go.
I can see again. I take my lids between my fingers and hold them open, take a colt-step towards the mirror. A bit closer and I stumble. A rope is tied around my ankle and bound to the bedpost.
I call out, and my voice makes me ill to hear it. Get back down to the cot, McGlue. Yes, thank you. The stars come out. I look for the moon, but it eludes me. I can’t find or measure my way. Drift, drift. If I just close my eyes I’ll get there.
I sleep some more.
Indian Ocean
I wake with fever. I know fever because there’s a wet rag folded on my brow. The fag attends me bedside with a book in his lap, one leg swinging from a crabapple — shaped knee. My arms are tied to my thighs, ears shut up, face bandaged around and there’s water dripping through the cracks in the deck ceiling and when I breathe I taste a harsh kick of lye and shit. On the dropped-down table slat there’s an opened bottle of pickled cabbage and a cake of bread. I look up. The drops of deckwater fall in my eyes and burn. Fag wields a pale wooden tenon in his hand, arm hovering above my head motherly almost.
I open my mouth to curse.
But Fag sticks the tenon lengthwise between my teeth. I rattle around a bit.
“It’s what you got, McGlue,” Fag says, holding down my neck.
I’m thirsty so I look him in the eye as best I can.
“We can’t give you anymore, so don’t even ask,” is his answer.
He thinks he’s got something over me. I let him have it and rattle around some more. With difficulty I use my tongue to taste the roof of my mouth and get salt-air and shit. It’s not good. I’d like something sweet about now. There was a little outpost in Borneo that sold wine made out of honey I remember. That was good. The girls there stood around fanning themselves with silver plates, tits and nipples set above tight chainmail vests. Those girls’ hips, narrow like young boys’, hopped a firm beat between my hands when I willed it, like they were somehow inside my mind, listening. I sat in the shade and I took them into the road to dance when it cooled down and I felt like dancing. Johnson, too. Then “Keep back,” he’d said, trotting off, “watch for the fat one, yell ‘pig’ if you see him come,” pulling one of the girls behind the jungle curtain back aways and I’d continue to dance and keep my hands on the girl’s hips and when the fat one came I just grabbed my pistol from my boot and shot it at the stars. The girls loved it, screaming and running, then laughing and creeping back from behind the dark palm fronds with their hands over their mouths. The fat one holding his belly nods to the fresh bottle on the little stool they use as a table. Forget Johnson, the worried, shameful rat. I sit and drink and watch the sky. A girl comes and takes my hand and we dance some more. Johnson shows up again.
“So soon, old man?” I holler, watching him walk back to the road, his girl slunk back in the dark, chainmail aflash in moonglow. Always with a girl. He sheds a tear for her, or what he’s done, as we set sail. Always a tear. I laugh. “Why not stay awhile,” I used to say, “build up a nice family, learn the language?” and he’d shove off and reemerge hours later all cool and fixed, talk to the captain on the virtues of clippers over cutters and be asking how he’d got in the racket and so on, starry-eyed. Make me sick. I watch the girls now in a line waving goodbye from the shore, picture them standing along the crack in the ceiling of this darkening room, eyes ashimmer like drops of water, and I rattle on.
Drink, please.
I’ve been this sick before.
“Shit,” I try to say, but the tenon’s got my tongue again. I look at Fag. His eyes are on his lap, reading lines.
If Fag won’t give me rum then let me suck the brine from that cabbage at the very least, I think. I get myself on my right side, planning something. Fag gets up and digs his elbow in the nook of my waist. I spit the tenon out onto the floor. Blood leaks from my mouth.
“Happy now, fagger?” I slurp. My voice hurts my head. My head, I seem to recall, has a big crack in it.
“Count a blessing, McGlue. Next stop’s Mac Harbour, where we ought to just set you right down with the rest of the cons.”
“Pleased if you do,” I say, and slam my head back against the cot. The effect is good: a sharp taste of blood in the back of my throat and I see black for a while, then white. Sleep again.
Macquarie Harbour, Tasmania
We’re docked and most mates are ashore but blackies locked in the next cabin are snoring. Then I hear one pour something in a cup. I’m awake. I rub my wrists rough up against my hips and get the ropes undone, get up and drag the foot of my cot to the wall and take a breath. I see a canteen on the dropped-down table. So I drag the cot that way and grab it and drink till it’s empty. Just water. It glaciers down my tubes the opposite of piss on snow and I double over and curse — my first words in days. The blackies mumble. Then I drag the cot to the wall again and step up on it, look through the high window over the deck. It’s blue everywhere. The sky is blue. The clouds are blue. The ocean’s blue. The slow zig-zag of a seagull sways in my eyes in such a way they start to water. Am I crying? If this side of the ship was facing land I think I’d puke for wanting. Any other day I’d be purchasing a tin of tobacco, taking some in my gums quick then more in a pipe, squint, drum my chest, yell at Johnson to get on. How many hours till the ship’s loaded, I’d find out. We’d take a ride to town, see what they’ve got to get into here. A country full of murderers and thieves must have good stuff, I’m thinking. Blood wine, I’m thinking. Whiskey made from ladies’ fingers. Some kind of strong snuff from bad plants used to treat the blackhearts in lock-up. Roasted meats. Pies filled with sugar plums, rats, brandy. I can bet I know what the mates would be saying. Nasty, wrench-pussied women all about. I am starving.
“Starving!” I yell out to the sea.
They said I’ve done something wrong? Johnson must be angry and won’t come down to make it right. Not yet. And they’ve just left me down here to starve. Haven’t had a drop in days more so. They’ll see this inanition and be so damned they’ll fall to my feet and pass up hot cross buns slathered in fresh butter and beg I forgive them. All of them: Johnson, Pratt, Captain, Saunders, the fagger, the entire world one by one. Like a good priest I’ll pat their heads and nod. I’ll dunk my skull into a barrel of gin.
I feel happy imagining my hand on Johnson’s bowed head, the black, gleaming hair through my fingers. I’d twirl it around like a little girl does braids, pinch his cheeks, let some of my hungryman drool drip down on his face, unhook the frog in my throat, “Johnny,” I’ll say. “A toast.” Two cups of ale up and down our mouths and our seamen’s beards are full of foamy slaver. It was like that in Salem, nights we waited to leave port. The red in Johnson’s cheeks blooms like flowers every time he swallows, then fades again while he talks. His hair, black and slick as hot tar, never flails or wanders from where it lies, no matter what the wind or rain. “Pretty,” they say. He called me “Soaplocker” for how I wore my hair when we first met: so long in front I’d wrap it around my ears and it’d hold. He says he took me for a kid like fifteen the night he found me and thought himself a real hero.