Dead in the Water (38 page)

“We’ll walk you, okay, Matt?”

The boy silently nodded; his eyes huge and round and pleading. What, baby, what? Donna tried to ask, but his attention was distracted as John urged him along and the three began to walk.

“How you been, kiddo?” Donna asked.

“He’s fine,” John said shortly.

Those were the last words anyone spoke until they reached Donna’s door. Then John muttered, “See you at dinner,” and split.

Ah, geez. She took a deep breath and let herself into her room.

Her heart thundered, but she got dressed anyway.

Up periscope, later, and privately:

“Cha-cha, I’m so pleased with you.”

Cha-cha, on his knees before King Neptune with his hands folded across his chest, nearly wept with joy. He couldn’t believe all this was happening to him. It was too psychedelically supercalifrage.

Up in the crow’s nest, the two of them surrounded by fresh red canvas—red sails, how cool—the yards vibrating with the force of the gale, Cha-cha raised his face to the darkening sky as the rain began to fall. Captain, his king-captain, in a ball of golden light. Cha-cha could and couldn’t see him, but he knew he was there. The light danced up and down the yards like Tinker Bell, but he knew it was the king. It was the gold of his aura, yeah, baby, the halo crown of the god of the sea.
Hare rama, hare Krishna
, oh, yeah.

“Rise, Cha-cha.”

Cha-cha stood easily, rolling with the ship on his old sea legs. The ocean rose, swelled, pregnant with life that swam and slithered and plunged. And ate. Dark shapes burrowed through the black water on either side of the ship.

Below, on the black, black deck, men dressed in old-time clothes cowered on the poop. One held a small, chestnut-haired
boy in his arms and rocked him. Beneath the lightning, something rolled along the deck,
crack, roll, crack
.

“There are more tasks that you must accomplish for me, Cha-cha, before you can come aboard. You know that, don’t you?”

Cha-cha grunted. “Aye-aye, sir. Yessir.”

“And then I’ll let you have a reward.” Cha-cha brightened, and the king smiled. “And what would you like?”

Cha-cha toyed with the end of his rainbow T-shirt. “My ghosts, king baby. I want my ghosts. I thought they’d like, come with me, but I think they stayed on the
Morris.
” He swallowed hard. “I don’t think all of them can swim.”

The king waved his hand over Cha-cha’s head like a magician. At least, Cha-cha thought it was his hand. It could have been his scepter, or a sword, or the sparkly green bottle he’d found in his net. His mind jigged.
Had
he found something in his net?

Had
he sunk the Morris?

“Your ghosts have been on my mind, Cha-cha. I sent lifeboats for them, and they’re on their way. So you must hurry and do everything I tell you, so you’ll be ready for them.”

Cha-cha rubbed his hands together. “Right on. Right on.”

Come
.

Blackness
.

Loneliness
.

Cha-cha started. “Say what, Your Maj?”

The ball of light fluttered and for a moment, a very brief moment, Cha-cha thought he saw—

That there was nothing but a handful of—

No. No, there was the king now, coming into focus, oh, yeah. Cool. Trippy. Yeah.

“I am the captain,” the king said, and Cha-cha thought he sounded just a bit freaked out. That freaked
him
out.

“What? What’s wrong, Your Majesty?” he pleaded.

“I am the captain,” the king murmured. Then he whispered it. “I am the way, and the power, and the light.”

Cha-cha flashed his brown teeth at the lightning, and the ball of gold karma that was his cosmic commander.

“Hallelujah. Right on,” he said, shaking with cold. He
wished he had his denim jacket. There hadn’t been time. The rain splashed down, down, down, filling the crow’s nest, covering the deck to the gunwales, submerging the hold where the livestock and chickens were caged. A pig squealed.

“Sacrifices,” the king said. “The sea demands many, and is still not appeased.” Then he leapt out of the crow’s nest and stood on the yardarm. Jumped up, down. Began to dance.

“I’ve cracked her head open, Cha-cha. She feels the ice water, now and then.”

The lightning flashed around him, and Cha-cha clapped his hands in time to the music

that was, and wasn’t

there.

Ramón had no idea how long he’d been tied to the periscope, but he judged the water was rising at a slower rate. It had remained at his lower thighs for some time and—

“Help! Help!” he shouted, losing control. He couldn’t stand there and analyze how fast the sub was filling with water,
hijo de puta
, not when he had to stop it, stop the curse, stop the dead men and the dead captain, and stop everything.

“Help!
Ayúdame!
” He shouted the words over and over and over, until they ceased being words, and then he felt the first thrust of the knife as it sliced open his arm. Tissue and muscle ripped and tore in a white-hot waterfall of blood.

Ramón screamed. Now it came, now death came, oh, dear God,
Madre de Dios
, was he imagining it?

“Bad, bad,” a voice said as the knife thrust back into the wound, deepening it. Cha-cha? Could it be Cha-cha the cook?

“Nnnnno! Cha-cha, no!” Ramón thrashed against the pole. “It can’t be you!”

Cha-cha’s face was covered with his blood. The old bandanna, sopping with it. “King says to tell you it’s this or drowning. You can, like, choose.”

Pain, hot as coals; so much pain. Mama, Mama. “Fight him,
viejo
. He can’t do anything to us. He can’t alone, he …”

And more pain. And more.

“King says choose.”

But Ramón couldn’t answer. He couldn’t do anything but hang there, and bleed.

Down periscope.

Sprawled on her bed, Donna glanced idly through
Flotsam
, at the clock. Turned a page. Mmm, guy named Wagner wrote an opera called
The Flying Dutchman
. A girl named Senta throws herself in the sea to redeem the soul of the damned man, who, as far as Donna could tell, had gotten in trouble with the devil for boasting he could round some cape.

“Senta, you bimbo,” she muttered, closed the book. No way would she ever sing opera. Would she ever be able to. Jazz, now. That was natural. That was your real voice.

That was your real suicide. And maybe your redemption. Not for Billy, though. Never made it to heaven, to the other side of the hurt …

Enough sea lore. Dinner was in twenty minutes.

Stretching, she got up and headed for the bathroom. Spied her Daily Program under the door, where every night someone slipped it, and every day she tossed it—cultural activities, no way!—in the trash. She picked up the Program again and read it again:

Shiver me timbers! Soon the ol’
Pandora
will go a rockin’ for our ever-popular shipwreck party! We’ve got some real shipwreck passengers aboard this year, so ask them for tips on how to dress! We’ll be honoring them all: Mr. and Mrs. Philip van Buren, Mrs. Ruth Hamilton, Miss Donna Almond, Dr. John Fielder and his son, Master Matthew, and many of the crewmen from the freighter
, Morris.

Ask your steward what it’s all about. He’ll be glad to help you with your preparations. So put on your duds, man the lifeboats, and join us at dinner for a rollicking evening of good (wet!) fun!

Yo ho ho. She couldn’t believe it. Not
her
idea of good wet fun. She’d be damned if she’d wear a costume to a thing like that after what she’d been through. For that matter, maybe
she’d have room service that night. Whenever it was. Didn’t say.

She’d like to stay in her room tonight, too. She was feeling so
odd
. Tired and woozy, disoriented. But she wanted to see if Phil and Elise showed.

“One more time for the little red dress,” she grumbled, and set about getting ready.

Tonight was French cuisine night, and Mrs. Hamilton and Captain Reade were both eating snails. Matt thought that was about the grossest thing in the world.

“Dad, c’ai have a hamburger?” he asked. It was cool on this ship to order anything you wanted. They still hadn’t had their buffalo steaks, but Captain Reade had promised they would before they left.

“Dad?” he repeated. His father gazed off into space and said nothing. Matt knew he was worried about him. That terrified him. Dad was a doctor, and he knew all about the germs that had made Matt sick, and if he was upset, then that meant the germs were acting up again.

And that meant Matt might get sick again.

Visions of hospital beds, needles, and machines twisted inside his head with the gross (and rad) wax statues in the Medieval Torture Museum on Fisherman’s Wharf, where they had gone after Matt’s last visit to the hospital. Guys getting pulled apart on racks, ladies being buried alive with bags of cats tied to their stomachs—at the time it had all seemed so great.

But the hospital could be like that. And what was the difference if your hair fell out because you were locked up in a dungeon, or ’cuz you got zapped by the radiation machines?

And the witch, eating up Hansel and Gretel. Wouldn’t it be gross if grown-ups did eat little kids sometimes? Like if you were starving, and there was this baby, and … he shivered. Sometimes he managed to gross even himself out.

What was dying? He knew he didn’t understand it, ’cuz his dog, Julie, had died the last time he was in the hospital, and sometimes he thought she’d be waiting for him when he came back from somewhere. He had looked at the pictures of bodies
in one of his dad’s medical books, but they didn’t look real. In his head, they were mixed up with horror movies and comic books, and the stuff other kids talked about in the hospital. Like how you rot, even though they fill you up with formaldehyde.

That word was cool and scary at the same time.

“Daddy?”

His dad started. Matt said, “C’ai have two hamburgers? I’m really hungry.” He was trying to reassure his dad. Because the first thing to go was always his appetite. Especially when he had to stay in the hospital.

There was a trick to it: if
he
could convince his dad he was okay, then his dad could convince
him
. And then, maybe, he would be safe.

Matt’s dad looked down at him for a long time. Then his lips curled downward and he cupped Matt’s cheek.

“You are so good,” he said in a choked, funny voice. “I don’t deserve you.”

Matt was more afraid than ever.

“Would you like three hamburgers?” Captain Reade asked. Matt shrank. He used to like the captain, but he had changed his mind. Captain Reade talked to his dad a lot now, about Matt’s cancer, and Matt knew it was upsetting his dad. He wanted to tell him to shut up about it, but Captain Reade was an adult and anyway, Matt was too nervous around him to say much.

And that lady, the statue lady who was the cruise director. No one listened to him about her, but she was strange, too. Not just because she looked like the figurehead in the museum—Matt understood about resemblances—but because when she was around him, sometimes he fell asleep and had dreams, saw things. He couldn’t remember much after he woke up, but he knew they had to do with being on the
Pandora
.

“Hasn’t Nemo had those kitties yet?” Donna asked him. She had on her red dress and she looked so pretty. He wanted his dad to bring her home with them. He hated the thought of never seeing her again.

“We’ll hit Australia before she does.”

Australia. Kangaroos. Wallabies. Matt couldn’t wait to get there.

“I—I don’t know,” Matt stammered. For some reason he didn’t understand, he wanted to go sit on her lap and have her hug him. That was a real baby thing, but the urge was so strong he almost did it.

Then he heard his dad murmur something to the captain and Matt got quiet. Sometimes his dad said a funny thing: Don’t rock the boat. Matt sort of knew what it meant, and he sort of knew he’d better lay low. He just didn’t know why.

“Matt, won’t you come sit by me for a few minutes?” Mrs. Hamilton asked warmly. “My seat mates are gone and it’s kind of lonely on this side of the table.”

The old lady sat between two empty chairs. The funny thing was, it almost seemed like there were people sitting in them, shimmering, like; people he couldn’t really see. He didn’t want to get anywhere near those chairs, but all that was baby, too. Like seeing a heap of clothes in a chair and thinking it was a monster. Or being so sure the closet door was opening, and it wasn’t.

Or imagining the captain was some big bad guy. All baby stuff.

Manfully, he scooted his chair out and walked around the table. She smiled and patted the empty chair next to her. Oh, no, he’d have to sit in it. He swallowed hard and slowed down. There wasn’t someone there, was there? There really wasn’t.

He got closer. A blur of white, a … a hanging, a thickness.

He stopped. Stared at the chair.

The captain was watching him. Now his dad watched, too.

“Matty, go on,” his dad said gently. “Mrs. Hamilton is lonely over there by herself.”

It wasn’t empty. There was a …

a …

“I gotta go to the bathroom,” he blurted, and ran-walked away from there as fast as he could.

*  *  *

“You scared him,” Donna mockingly accused Ruth. “Really, Ruth, you shouldn’t flirt with younger men.”

Ruth spread her hands and made minute corrections to the placement of her silverware. “I didn’t mean to. Frighten him, I mean.”

“I know.” Donna sighed theatrically. “I’m always scaring them off, too.”

“Well, here’s one man you haven’t frightened.” Reade touched his napkin to his lips and laid it beside his plate. “Won’t you dance, Miss Almond?”

“Now?” She looked around, startled to see several couples on the floor.

He pushed his chair away and came to her side with his hand extended. Donna flashed with dislike—he was like Daniel, pushy, arrogant—but what the hell, maybe she could finally get him to listen to her.

She put her hand in his, and rose, and he escorted her to the square of wood at the other end of the room. Mirrors gleamed back the candlelight and twinkling ice sculptures on the dessert tables; in the far distance, the huge picture windows gleamed with moonlight. It was a stunning effect.