I have to laugh. The first time I saw Johnson I thought he was one of those asshole Charlies you hear engage with kids out in the woods for a few cents a suck or whatnot. I know these types well.
“You think,” he’d said, “that rum will keep you from freezing the night?”
I had my hat over my face, bottle between my knees, slowly melting my ass into a seat of snow propped up dead-tired against a tree. Johnson sat on a horse.
“Get going,” I said. A Charlie or not, I didn’t care. I’d made it a few days into a jag by that night, somewhere between New Haven and Orange. I was never going home again. I could see the ice-paved beach through the moonlit trees. I had another whole, full bottle — a double pint— in my coat pocket, and some money left. I was good. That was my thinking.
But Johnson wouldn’t leave. His horse reared up and he pulled and steered her back, both his breath and horse snort steaming out like ghostly spirits leaving their bodies, like some child’s scary poem. I tried to laugh but my face had frozen. I remember that.
“You’ll die out here,” said Johnson. “Let me take you into town.”
“Go fuck,” I told him. He acted like he didn’t hear and steered the horse around some more.
“Puck, you say?” he said. I took a drink. “A boy’s read Shakespeare comes to spend the night on ice. Aw…” He slapped his horse’s rump. “Get on that, Nicky Bottom.”
He acted like a fag but didn’t look like one. A joke, I thought. Making fun of me, what I’d expect him to be. He leaned down and put his hand in my face for me to take hold of. He asked where I came from, and when I’d said, “Salem,” he laughed.
“I was born there,” he said, pulling me up.
I’d been hammered down bad before and by this time — I was twenty-two, twenty-three — I knew that I was doomed. I’d accustomed myself to that most of all. For some reason, though, I went along: I got up on the horse and grabbed the saddle strap where I could and we rode. It must have been just as cold on that horse as it was sitting back there in the snow. But he could be right, Johnson. He may have saved my life.
We headed south and rode all through the night as I recall. Johnson said around Stratford I leaned my head up on his shoulder and snored. I woke up, must have been days later, in Mamaroneck in the afternoon, head on a clean white tablecloth, smelling fish fry.
Johnson stood by the stove with his back to me and his arm around a girl. The girl brought a plate to the table. There was a brown fried fish. “Nick here won’t eat that, sister,” he said. “Give him potatoes. I think that’s all he can stomach for now, that right?”
I nodded.
Johnson came and sat and ate the fish with a silver fork, one hand in his lap.
“McGlue,” I told him.
He gave me his hand again.
Fag unlocks the door hours later. It’s turned grey, early evening. He’s wearing a funny green sweater. He leaves a crate of oranges on the dropped-down, then comes and stands over me. I fold my hands.
“Captain says to give you food. There’s some oranges. I’ll send you down a plate later. And I guess some ale. But captain said no more rum. You’ve got a big hole in your head, McGlue.”
I touch the crack with my finger. My ears ring. I wake up more, it’s like a bright, sunny day and nowhere to go. All the more rum I’ll need, I think.
“You need to go, you go here,” he says, going back out to the hall and carrying in a big tin bucket. He sets it carefully by the bed.
“Many thanks, faggot,” I say. “Throw me an orange.”
He selects one and tosses it softly into my open palms. Nice little fag, I think. Good boy, I’m thinking, watching him leave and lock the door. I pierce the dimpled orange peel with my thickened, yellow thumbnail. The perfume rouses the hairs in my nose, making my eyes water. I sniff deep. My head fills with the sour spray, scratching an itch deep in my brain. It’s good. I take a bite, peel and all. It’s not good. This is me now: puking fruit into a bucket already half full of blackie piss and shit.
I lay back down and close my eyes. Soon there will be hot food. The thought makes my stomach turn. A mug of cold ale more like it. I’ll sleep till then, think of Shanghai. The so-often swept and scoured plaza. The great clock. The perfect skin of the girl. No variation. You could paint her in three colors: yellow, black and red.
Fag wakes me in the dark with a cold plate of hash and digs a fork into my fist. “No ale,” he says. “Captain’s orders.” Still just remembering my name, what man I am, I sit up in my cot and eat as best I can.
South Pacific, a month later
I’ve been studying a Walch’s Tasmanian almanac, memorizing pages, not to let my mind-muscle go to flub like my arms and legs have after almost a month, I guess, of lying down here, imprisoned. Sometimes when I look down, a less-thinking part of me looks up at the shapes and curves of my flesh and bone which have taken on a kind of pale and pretty shiftiness, like a young country girl in winter. I lift the sheets and stare and stare. Well, it’s a good game to play when I’m too bored to think. My mind wanders watching it rise and tarry. If they give me food in the morning and it’s not too cold, I tend to pass the time aloud, sing the songs I learned in school, talk to an invisible Johnson, have a laugh or two, get some soul out. I’ve asked Saunders and Fag to provide me with some diversions. “Let me walk around the ship. You think I’ll swim away?” I say. They tell me I should be happy with what I’ve got to read — three letters raised on the blue glass bottle of O-I–L. They don’t know about the almanac. They keep saying I’ve killed Johnson.
Without Johnson around to have look-aftering, and all these mates down on me as a killer, I miss the rum. I am beginning to hear what they say I’ve done. Fag says I should lay here quietly and pray. I tell him I’m thirsty. I flip the blanket down and lift my johns.
“Fagger,” I say. “If I was thirsty, would you afford this?”
I see his eyes twitch, the fag.
“You smell like a dead horse’s ass, McGlue.” His scoff is so huffy, I laugh.
I look down at the lovely alabaster ridged cliffs and valleys of my body, scribbled with little light brown curls down into a shag of darkened, wet and heady hell. A tall mug of port would be good. I’d kiss you, I think. It makes itself known, unshies itself from the dark down there.
“Hello,” I say to it. It rises.
Fagger’s watching.
“The fag’ll have none of you then,” I say, and lick my hand.
“Fag,” I say, reaching down to it, “stay with me.”
He sees well the game I’m playing. He stays.
That evening he brings me a hogshead of ale.
The next morning, a bottle of the good stuff.
I’m good again. I don’t read the almanac as much. Hell hides in the ditch and my eyes are dry.
South Pacific
Captain comes in. He’s got on a new jet black felt hat.
“What’s worse, McGlue? You want to confess today?”
“I didn’t do it,” I say.
“And you don’t recall.”
“No recollection.”
“Show me your hands,” he says, and I stretch them out towards him best I can. They warble and drift from side to side. He steadies one between his two warm palms. Then he slaps it, hard. A naughty child. I don’t laugh.
“Word’s been sent to your mother, McGlue. You’ll be tried in Salem, most likely in the first degree. Or even second degree. The greatest degree if you want to know what I think you’re due.” That idiot. He wrenches his face and looks away and sways back on his heels and tries again to look me in the face but can’t and wrenches his face again. He resembles a drowned man: doughy-faced, unbearded, eyes bulging and colorless, veins showing clearly at his throat. “You think it’s one big gag, don’t you. Lie down here all day, do no work, think you’ve got the world in a book. Drunken trash,” he calls me. “I never saw what Johnson said you’d be any good for, and I was right. Don’t want to think what his family would have to say to you. Why would anyone? People are gonna want to know why you did it, McGlue. Better start thinking real hard. What have you been thinking all this time?”