already decided that the only way to draw the sparrow away from the ship lights and to the vague shore was to become a sparrow myself and I could not do that, I was sure, especially having to cook. The Idiot had spotted the half-dead bird hop and flutter back to my head-nest and the Idiot went lunging across the deck clumping, his foot still caught in the paint, stepping into Lonny holding the lifting line against the winch and kicking the lifting line out of Lonny’s hand.
Lonny said he had once seen a winchman’s arm ripped from the socket when the winchman tried to grab at a runaway line.
There must have been a moment when the weeping man who said
Fuck
heard Lonny curse the Idiot, saw the snaking rigging, could feel the loss of tension in the wall of rope and woven steel netting he was climbing to un-foul the ton-weight net bar above him. It was a moment for him to leap and fall from a great height or cling and be crushed, and what he did had been decided before he was born, when his mother still carried him in her womb, Lonny said, and she had been nearly struck down on a sidewalk by a falling steeplejack from a church spire, the sight of the steeplejack pleading up to her from the pavement with his hips sprouting from his neck had caused her to faint and go into labor, and she gave birth alongside the burst man to an undersized infant, the baby this man who wept and said
Fuck
began as, who now embraced the falling sheets of net and closed his eyes.
He had been lucky, only a corner of the heavy bar had come down near him, just its tip, and the tip came down squarely on the poor man’s boot, the pressure squeezing the blood from his foot into his face, the face a red curdle as his throat opened and out of his mouth came his word.
FUCK!!!
he had said.
Lonny chased the Idiot with an ax topside and when the Idiot hid in the lifeboat and pulled the shroud over his head Lonny broke open the turnbuckles, unfastened the lashings, and turned the crank handle that would ship the lifeboat over the side into the dark sea.
Lonny!
said John, roused up by the ruckus,
We’re short of crew as it is
. John cauterized the nasty gap in the man’s toeline with a coal he took from a small metal box used to burn fragrant woods. He was delicate about it even as the men had to hold the man down, John not wishing to cut the man with his razor-sharpened fingernails as he performed the operation.
John shook the pinched-off gnarly-nailed toe out of the boot and knotted it on a fetish string that he hung around the Idiot’s neck. John said maybe that would remind the Idiot to be more careful of where he stepped. He pulled the pot of paint from the Idiot’s foot. It was red paint and the Idiot’s bare foot and trouser cuff were brilliant with it.
I hope the bastard chokes on a bone
, said Lonny at the table, and the way the men in prison blues were slipping fishbones into the Idiot’s soup, that seemed likely.
The steel door to the engine room blew its bolts and out of the issuing smoke coalesced Black Master ChiefHarold, radiant black with sweat like fresh-chiseled coal, his chin streaked and gooed from fuel-tasting, his asbestos jacket smoldering. Behind him were his fire lackey and his boiler monkey, hints of fume from their nostrils, them not much larger than myself, their bent helmets hardly protecting their hair in the places where it was singed to broiled nubbles. They looked shot from cannons.
I had forgotten to send their meal buckets down so I opened the wicker basket trimmed with red-and-white checks to serve them on the china the crew had eaten the mule meat off of, but Lonny said
Put that away, that’s just for meals ashore
. It really didn’t matter because after the engine room trio sniffed at the finish fish stew bubbling on the stove they foraged for themselves in the lockers and found a jug of vinegar and a piece of something that I had also found and could not tell if at one time it had been a melon rind or a
Lonny said he had once seen a winchman’s arm ripped from the socket when the winchman tried to grab at a runaway line.
There must have been a moment when the weeping man who said
Fuck
heard Lonny curse the Idiot, saw the snaking rigging, could feel the loss of tension in the wall of rope and woven steel netting he was climbing to un-foul the ton-weight net bar above him. It was a moment for him to leap and fall from a great height or cling and be crushed, and what he did had been decided before he was born, when his mother still carried him in her womb, Lonny said, and she had been nearly struck down on a sidewalk by a falling steeplejack from a church spire, the sight of the steeplejack pleading up to her from the pavement with his hips sprouting from his neck had caused her to faint and go into labor, and she gave birth alongside the burst man to an undersized infant, the baby this man who wept and said
Fuck
began as, who now embraced the falling sheets of net and closed his eyes.
He had been lucky, only a corner of the heavy bar had come down near him, just its tip, and the tip came down squarely on the poor man’s boot, the pressure squeezing the blood from his foot into his face, the face a red curdle as his throat opened and out of his mouth came his word.
FUCK!!!
he had said.
Lonny chased the Idiot with an ax topside and when the Idiot hid in the lifeboat and pulled the shroud over his head Lonny broke open the turnbuckles, unfastened the lashings, and turned the crank handle that would ship the lifeboat over the side into the dark sea.
Lonny!
said John, roused up by the ruckus,
We’re short of crew as it is
. John cauterized the nasty gap in the man’s toeline with a coal he took from a small metal box used to burn fragrant woods. He was delicate about it even as the men had to hold the man down, John not wishing to cut the man with his razor-sharpened fingernails as he performed the operation.
John shook the pinched-off gnarly-nailed toe out of the boot and knotted it on a fetish string that he hung around the Idiot’s neck. John said maybe that would remind the Idiot to be more careful of where he stepped. He pulled the pot of paint from the Idiot’s foot. It was red paint and the Idiot’s bare foot and trouser cuff were brilliant with it.
I hope the bastard chokes on a bone
, said Lonny at the table, and the way the men in prison blues were slipping fishbones into the Idiot’s soup, that seemed likely.
The steel door to the engine room blew its bolts and out of the issuing smoke coalesced Black Master ChiefHarold, radiant black with sweat like fresh-chiseled coal, his chin streaked and gooed from fuel-tasting, his asbestos jacket smoldering. Behind him were his fire lackey and his boiler monkey, hints of fume from their nostrils, them not much larger than myself, their bent helmets hardly protecting their hair in the places where it was singed to broiled nubbles. They looked shot from cannons.
I had forgotten to send their meal buckets down so I opened the wicker basket trimmed with red-and-white checks to serve them on the china the crew had eaten the mule meat off of, but Lonny said
Put that away, that’s just for meals ashore
. It really didn’t matter because after the engine room trio sniffed at the finish fish stew bubbling on the stove they foraged for themselves in the lockers and found a jug of vinegar and a piece of something that I had also found and could not tell if at one time it had been a melon rind or a
Similar Books
