Chapter 6
The little boat zigzagged through masses of shattered lumber until it was alongside Ultramarine. The four black men tied up the boat at the foot of the boarding ladder and trotted briskly up to the deck.
Bill Murphy met them with handshakes. They looked around the ship with interest.
“You came through the Golden Gate!” their leader exclaimed. He was a tall, young man wearing a rust-coloured leather jacket and a broad-brimmed black hat. His name was Mitchell Eldon. “Boy, that’s dangerous. Any damage?”
“No.” Bill looked proud of his answer.
“Well. Uh, we are here to see what you can supply, like in terms of food, clothes, blankets, medical stuff, like that.”
Bill’s smile faded. He looked impassively at Mitchell, then at Owen. “I’m not sure we’ve got anything. That’s more the kind of stuff you get from the Red Cross or Civil Defence.”
“Forget them. They give us nothing yet. Everything is mightily fucked up over there. Nobody doin’ nothing.”
“Look, uh, Mitchell — I’m willing to help any way I can. But we need the supplies we carry. And I can’t just, you know, hand ‘em over to the first guy who asks.”
“Captain Murphy.” Mitchell’s voice was gentle. His eyes were masked behind dark glasses. “You see those buildings up there on the hill? That’s the housing project. We got no lights, no water, no food except for what’s left in a couple little supermarkets. We can’t get into the rest of the city ’cause of the fires and floods. We got two-three thousand folks up there with no homes now. Lots of ‘em hurt. Lots of ‘em slept out in the rain last night.”
Mitchell’s rifle, a .22, swung to point at Bill’s chest. “I am not goin’ back and tell Mrs. Debney I come back empty-handed.”
Bill stared disgustedly at the muzzle of the rifle. “And I am not going to be dictated to on the deck of my own ship.”
“Could I suggest something?” Don said. Mitchell and his friends glanced away from Bill, and the .22 wavered. “Let a couple of us go back with you to talk things over with Mrs. uh—”
“Mrs. Debney?”
“Mrs. Debney. Chances are we can help you better if we know exactly what you need, and you know what we can offer you.”
“Sure, uh-huh. And while you’re talking, your ship sails off somewheres.”
“Where to?” Don asked, waving to the north and east. Mitchell smiled wryly and nodded.
“Okay.” Everyone was relieved at the compromise. “You and the captain can come with us.”
“No, me,” said Owen. “I’m responsible for our supplies.”
“Right, fine. Let’s go.”
Six men in the little boat nearly overloaded it. Mitchell settled himself in the stern and whipped the outboard motor into life. The boat moved slowly west across India Basin.
The seiches had transformed it, churning up an archipelago of sandbars and wreckage where only mud flats had been a day ago. As they neared the shore, Don saw almost a dozen small craft — sailboats and motorboats — anchored in the shallows or moored to the irregular dike of rubble, three to five metres high, left by the seiches.
“They was floatin’ all over,” one of the young men said. “We went out and brought ‘em in las’ night and this mornin’.”
“Weren’t you worried about the seiches — the waves?” Owen asked. “It must have been pretty rugged, at least last night.”
“Aw well, you know, it was kind of fun.” The young man half smiled at the boats and looked up through his sunglasses at the overcast. “It really was fun. Makes a change, you know?”
Owen glanced surreptitiously at Don, who said nothing.
Now they could see that men and women were working all over the dike: chain saws whined and snarled, cutting paths through the debris, and work gangs passed salvaged lumber up the hill.
“No lack of firewood,” Don said to Mitchell.
“No indeedy.” He brought the boat in alongside an improvised dock, made of six logs lashed and stapled together. “C’mon, you guys are gonna burn bad, we don’t get you indoors.”
The six men walked rapidly up the path that had been cut through the dike from the dock to what was left of Innes Avenue. The dike had buried the east side of the street, and half-filled the storefronts and empty lots on the west side. As they came through to the street, Owen stopped short and gripped Don’s arm.
“My God, my God,” he muttered. “It’s all starting to sink in on me.”
The stink of smoke and rotten mud hung in the air. Fires smoldered in the dike. The anonymous housing projects up the hill looked intact, but Don and Owen could see a solid wall of smoke rising up in the Bayview district.
Along the half-buried street, young men and women stood guard outside the stores; they held rifles or pistols and looked self-conscious. Work parties were carrying goods out of the stores and up the hilclass="underline" bedding, tools, bolts of fabric and food. No children were in sight. No policemen or firemen. No obvious officials. The people clearing the stores and working on the dike gave and took orders, laughed and complained, in an atmosphere of bustle and excitement.
“Why so many guns?” Owen asked. Mitchell shrugged.
“Just makin’ sure everything goes where it’s s’posed to. We got some mean mothers in the neighbourhood, you know?”
Don and Owen, with their escort behind them, started up a long flight of concrete stairs. It was slow going up the hilclass="underline" dozens of people were moving up and down the stairs. All were black; some gave Don and Owen curious glances.
“Here come supper!” a teenager yelped as he passed them.
“Get away with you!” Mitchell laughed. Hilarity rippled up and down the stairs. Don grinned; Owen did not.
Tents and lean-tos crowded together on the playgrounds and dead lawns of the housing project, and plastic sheets and tarpaulins were strung everywhere. But not many people were in sight.
“Where is everybody?” Don asked Mitchell as they walked down a muddy lane between tents and camper trucks.
“Kids are in the gym at the school. Old folks are lookin’ after the babies. Sick and hurt folks, they’re in the apartments. Everybody else is workin’ indoors or down the hill.”
“You people really landed on your feet,” Owen said. Mitchell grinned, not very pleasantly.
“Well, you know, this new president, he talks about ‘dynamic self-reliance.’” He mimicked an educated white accent: “‘We don’t want black people to grow up in a welfare-oriented culture, we want them to be proud and self-supporting.’ What that means is, they got tired of paying to help folks. So we been lookin’ after ourselves, just like the man says.”
“What can you tell us about Mrs. Debney?” Don asked.
Mitchell chuckled. “You call her ma’am.”
They reached the community centre, a low, rambling stucco building. Inside, the noise and smell were overpowering: bawling children, blaring cassette players, dozens of high-pitched conversations, the ammoniac stink of wet diapers. The rooms and offices were dim, lit only by daylight falling through the windows. Mattresses and sleeping bags carpeted the floors, and children bounced happily over sleeping babies.
Mitchell led them to a big kitchen at the rear of the building. More than a dozen women were working there. Kettles of soup simmered on two big gas ranges; the soup’s aroma mingled with that of baking bread. Dirty dishes clattered in sinks, and everyone seemed to be working hard and having a good time.
A tall woman was kneading bread dough on a counter-top. She might have been thirty, or fifty: robust, broad-shouldered and handsome. Under her apron she wore jeans and a white jersey that set off the darkness of her skin.
“Mrs. Debney? These gentlemen, they’re from the ship.”