Fishboy by Mark Richard

goddamn you
, I heard Lonny say to the Idiot as Lonny worked the lifting lines to free the net bar hung in the rigging. The Idiot still made for the sparrow and I felt bad for the bird and angry with it at the same time. I figured to go fetch it and give it one more toss toward shore and then be done with it. I was doing more to save it than it was to save itself.
    I put on my wet shirt and then made myself invisible in the way that you can, my head turned down, my eyes on my pinched-toe feet making careful quick steps across the deck, leaning into the walls of net and ducking now and then. I was almost to the hatch when a fireball came roaring out of heaven and struck me down squarely. I scrambled up and the divine fire spun down and laid me out again, and I was sure if I had not just wet my shirt I would have been set ablaze.
    I heard it hovering overhead again, and in cringinganticipation I looked over my shoulder at the thing, and it was in its final glory, its flames devouring the gasoline-soaked strips of black women’s clothes with the click and pop of lice and ticks, then the mainsheet sail went red onto the crossed sticks that sputtered in colors of bruise and infection.
    John hailed us from the skirt of a sea buoy, a round nun kind meant to ring, but the bell looked broken by some ship’s passing cannon practice and its habit was pockmarked and rife with rifleshots and seabird splatter. John coiled his kite’s line around his flexed arm and flung it aboard, leaping the rail himself as we passed near. In the white decklight I could see John’s hair and beard were a tangle of seaweed, broken fishing line, and old anchor chains. Mr. Watt straightened our rudder and beneath a fresh plume of exhaust that showered us with cinders our ship tossed the buoy in its wake. Moored to the floor, the clapper snapping in the jagged shards of its bell, the buoy leaned after us like a watchdog straining at its chain.
    My ears is clogged
, said John, bouncing his head.
    I can’t help you yet
, said Lonny,
I got to hold this line until we can put a whip line on that net bar
. The weeping man who said
Fuck
was climbing up a net wing that Lonny held fast by the winch.
    What?
said John.
    I said GET YOUR OWN GODDAMN EARDROPS OUT OF THE GEAR SHED!
said Lonny.
    I saw that John could not hear Lonny, and I saw the gear shed and I thought that if I could find the eardrops I would be on my way to becoming useful.
    In the shed a fire extinguisher was all the eardrops could be and I took it over to John still trying to pass off a little invisibility. John pumped the canister while looking at me and then squirted some of the stuff in his ears. The stuff smelled like laundry soap cut with paint thinner. A clump of fungus fell from one ear and a mollusk from the other.
    Where’s this child come from, Lonny?
John said.
Is it one of yours?
    Lonny leaned back from the winch still holding the wing net line and said
What child? That child? That ain’t one of mine unless it wants to be
.
    Fetch me that sea hose
, John said to me and I jumped to it and held it as he washed, the thick gray mud from the ocean floor flushing away, revealing the mazes of tattooed cartographies on his arms, chest, and back, the sea island atolls shifting and mountain peaks lifting as he bent to scrub his legs. There was a fresh shark strike on one calf; the other one I had first noticed in my gourd garden already healing, several cartilage teeth still embedded and molded over with a thin veneer of skin.
    Can you work net?
John said to me.
Can you mend meshes and haul in the lines? Can you run a winch without killing somebody?
    I looked down at my pinched-toed feet and balled up my fists in the front of my shirt. I did not know how to do those things.
    Hey
, said Lonny,
can he cook? We’re all about to starve to death
.
    Can you cook?
John asked me and I remembered the warning about cooking the last cook had told me just before he died. I shook my head no. I could not