Refiner's Fire (46 page)

Instead, the Captain sent out the boats to reconnoiter a circle of ten miles around the ship. Heavy launches and forty-foot lifeboats were lowered with great caution and ceremony. Lifejacketed, Marshall, Lydia, and the crew manned them with the intent to explore. In a near-nitrogen rapture, they pulled apart from the mother ship. The heat and the green met at the horizon in waves of air and light. In a motor launch with the stewards, who (except for Dave) were virtually midgets, Marshall and his bride skimmed over the sea until the
Royal George
was only a small block on the blue prairie.

Patches of weed, sometimes miles in circumference, covered the sea. Often, the mats were so dense and piled that it was possible to walk across the top. Dave and Harvey guided the launch and moored it to an island of sargassum. Though they thought it was all “silly,” they did it for Lydia. She and Marshall jumped onto the dry crispy weed and ran across it as if on a giant mattress. The sun was hot, and as they ran they liberated perfume from sea berries crushed underfoot. Finally, at the base of a gray-green rill, out of sight of ship and launch, in the middle of deep ocean, they lay on the fragrant undulating mat and slept in the sunlight. After a few minutes they awakened filled with incredible desire and made love in the lee of the rill, in the open heart of nowhere.

Heading back, they peered over the gunwales through impossibly clear water. Far below, strange animals proceeded with their daily intercourse. There were the Great Slick Eels—150 feet long, as thick as trees, as sinuous as whippers' whips at carnivals, with heads larger than horses, and huge idiotic smiles. These Great Slick Eels hunted the foolish and fatuous Agrolian Fish—600 pounds, completely round, gaps in its front teeth, and scores of useless little legs. They saw the fabulous Shmata Ray, as lithe as linen in the wash, as colorful as a Third World flag, moving in the deep with short repulsive jerks. Then there was the Noiseless Laughing Dill, a huge columnar Coelacanth which Lydia swore was wearing opera glasses. Harvey and Dave thrust their heads into the salt water and observed with wonder the Honey Fish, the Water Bat, the Decapus, and the Optamoovulgian.

Speechless from what they had seen, flushed and burnt from the sun, the crew hoisted up the boats and went to fetch their mattresses. Then they lay on top of the hold covers as afternoon turned into evening, when the stewards brought around sandwiches and bottles of tea. When darkness came they looked at its starred walls as the Christians must have done on the first night that they had driven the Moors from Granada. Then the Scottish cabinboys discovered that the fish were luminous and blinking, coiling in the waters like Broadway. The mats too were lighted by organic phosphorescence, and as night proceeded they grew brighter and brighter. When everyone was nearly asleep and only the Captain stood, staring from the bridge to the sky, they were awakened and energized by the rising moon, which danced self-contained on the horizon and twisted in distant sea vapor as hot as a flame in a cup.

They were resting on a deluge of bioluminescence. Planetary groups lit the ship's sides and were visible on the horizon for 360 degrees. Their pulsations and patterned telegraphy, as some slipped out of sight in the curve of a wave and then returned, were like the winking lights of a computer panel or the blackened mantle of a glittering city seen from the air. What shakings and awe must the first navigators have had when becalmed perhaps forever in the center of an infinite half-sphere, the sky and floor of which ticked clear celestial and diffuse animal light. The
Royal George
was surrounded by glassy glowing waves—an evening of silence for the assembled crew.

Then they started from fright, for the Captain had arrived with the grace of a ghost, and stood tall in his white uniform amid the reclining men. Seldom did he move among them. Close to seventy, he had been an admiral of the Royal Navy, who, upon retirement, could not stand to part from the sea. When the water was as smooth as a mirror, pastel by day, rich and blue-hearted by night, he grew restless.

“For those of you who would wonder,” he said, largely in pretext, “we are at the center of the sea, off the trade routes, where few have seen fit to travel. To the northwest is North America”—he pivoted and faced the various directions as he spoke, as accurately as a compass—“to the southwest, Brazil with its jutting northern chin, and then the Amazon and the white Andes; to the southeast, Africa, being worth three or four continents; to the northeast, Europe, the clockmade heart of a mechanical world. We are roped between the four, nearest the dry shelf of Spain.

“Half a thousand years ago the Spaniards, as if sprung from seed, burst in virility upon the sea and passed this point in little ships to find and conquer a new world. Since that time we have been retracing and elaborating their routes, but have none of our own. Since that time we have become as immobile as whales upon the beach—fat, shoddy, recreant, dissolving. For there is only one condition in which a man's soul and flesh become as lean and pure as his armor; in which he finds in the art of his language and the awe of his music, unification with his own mobile limbs; in which he can find entertainment so intense as to draw him without a twitch into complete abandonment of the things of the world; in which he gathers speed and rises to his natural task as if he were an eagle destined for flight or a porpoise propelled in arcs across the water.

“Do you doubt me? Doubt not. I learned in Algeciras what this was, as I looked upon the Spanish walls which are not walls, as the lines of earth and sea were solid in one piece inviting passage, as the poverty appeared infinitely rich. I learned in the blink of an eye. I learned as the thin slapping music beat to ceilings and beams, as the percussion of dancers' feet seemed to exhort going out beyond the harbor and into the straits—beyond the straits.

“Doubt me not. A pair of dancers was dancing twenty years ago when I thought that I had settled in. We touched at Algeciras for only a day. The secret was that they moved when they did not, and did not move when they did. They wore black, and were as concentrated as birds startled upon alarm. Their dance was like that of the bees, for God in heaven they retracted and they turned and they jugged and they jiggled, and her back was as smooth as the gust from a fan, a sweep of vanilla, and in their movements unknown to them they pointed always west and to the sea. Though they moved up and down and to right and left, the lay of their furious dance pointed west and to the sea.

“It was that way too, five hundred years ago, when from Spain's jutting shelf they moved to fullfill the neglected task, their dancers doubtless pointing them. They found a new world with twenty-thousand miles of spine, peaks we have yet to climb, plains like seas, plants and animals humorous, terrifying, and new. Like bees, their passionate dancers had pointed them. I fear that I will die before I see such dancing anew, directing us after half a thousand years outward and to the heavens, where we must go if we are to be men.

“For we are on the brink of new worlds, of infinite space curtains drawn and colored like silks, luminous and silent, moving slowly and with grace. We have come to the edge. Our children will view a terrible openness, and the vastness will change us forever and for good. I will never see it. I am seventy and I wish only to see dancers who will arise to set the right course.

“In my heart of hearts at seventy on this ship stalled in the middle of the sea and stars, I wish for the dancers who will arise as did their predecessors in one wave linked with the past, moving when they do not move, not moving when they move. When I had passed half a century, I was awakened in the fury of a dance in Algeciras. Though a captain for many years, it was that day by the curve of her back that I became a Captain and a man—when I watched history artfully running its gates with iron grasp and steel-clad direction.”

R
OTTERDAM IS
approached rapidly from the sea through sand-flanked jetties. On the beaches, tents stood for the last of the holidays. The light was dimming as the
Royal George
dashed in past the Hook of Holland, and, when finally it was moored in a forest of tanks and spires, darkness spread across the flat as if a Flemish devil had sucked away the light through a crunchy reed.

Marshall did not like it when Lydia kissed the crew goodbye. He resented that she pecked in affection at Wonderful Bellchicken and Greylock Oceanard, though he knew that as she kissed the bashful bastards of the deck force, she was extending as well his deep fraternity caught behind the proper ice of manhood.

Then in a taxi to the city he ravished her and she ravished back. Hegenbuckle, the Dutch taxi driver, nearly crashed into a limestone mile post, a bus stand with a soup advertisement, and a group of sweet daisylike schoolgirls on bicycles, because he was glued to the mirror in which Marshall and Lydia kissed with such verve that the glass fogged.

As they rode through the flats of Rotterdam they paused momentarily to see great constructions of flame and spidery steel spreading for mile upon mile around them. Sparkling refineries beat against the clouds with bright ventilations of pulsing fire, drawn and tenuous like cotton candy, orange and upward in an explosion of the new virtues, an exposition of a new lifeblood. Certain fools thought that this was chemical engineering, a studious necessity, an obvious alacrity, a logical linkage. It was nothing of the kind, but rather a portrait by complications, an abstract of humor from above as impennous necessities were snared by thematic joking.

Rather than lose his mind, Hegenbuckle spoke. “I have noticed,” he said, “that you are Americans. I told from her chestnut hair, her green eyes, her face worthy of a princess, and her long and articulate fingers—a very Dutch attribute. She is undoubtedly of the South, of Virginia, and a Jewess.”

“Yes,” said Lydia.

“I have been learning English. Since the time of Erasmus we Dutch have envied English. What an ecstatic language, a language to fill the boots of the greatest dream, a language of milk, a language of jewels. In itself it is worth more than nations. It strives and it loves, in words and phrase. Needless to say, like the water-bug, or the needle, we too love it and respect it as our king.”

“It is everyone's king,” said Lydia, squinting through the windshield as rain came down and wet the fields as green as watermelons.

“He's mad, isn't he?” asked Marshall.

“No, he's not mad—just a little confused,” answered Lydia.

At the train station, Hegenbuckle refused payment, saying, “It is not necessary. I never accept fares from Captain Keslake or his men. I am delighted to serve him, for I too have memories, of the flaming places of Djakarta and unkindled Curaçao. Throughout the Netherlands and throughout the world, they are quiescent and self-serving, dwellers on the human condition, lookers to the self, incapables of independence, living shanties of bastardized language, mechanicals who draw downward. But some day,” he said, lifting hands and eyes gradually in imitation of ascension, “we will rise. Rotterdam will be an old city like old wood. We will breathe easily as the universe opens to us. And the world will cease to agitate and boil.”

T
HERE WAS
a train to Paris, which took many wonderful hours. On board were hundreds of musicians from New Orleans completing a vast worldwide tour. They played continuously as the train crossed Belgium and northern France. They were not practicing, but rather they played because they could not stop.

Fat, brown, and bullet-shaped, Malcolm Tucker led his band in Marshall and Lydias car, and made his drummer base the tempo on the knocking of the tracks. Across heavily breathing countryside the train traced a steady line like ink from a mechanical pen. Malcolm Tucker had an uncanny resemblance to
Mon
roe, but Marshall never had a chance to ask about it, for he and Lydia were held in their seats by the internal combustion of the music. When Malcolm Tucker played “Blue'n the Blues” over and over again, they were pushed against the furry backs of their chairs as if by a wave. New Orleans appeared before them hot and gleaming near the lapping Gulf.

“I know this music,” said Lydia. “I grew up with it. It's the music of the South, a distillation of war, slavery, and death, the unleashed human spirit cavorting in mathematics without symbols, flowing from weighted souls. Malcolm Tucker sure can play.”

They reached Paris in the middle of the night. As if summer had come again, fiery music resounded through the train shed. Marshall and Lydia went with the herd of musicians through dark and silent streets lined with trees which had just begun to lose their leaves. In the attic of the Hotel Scribe, among giant drums pulling elevator cables, overlooking the arched and bow-shaped roofs of Paris, the musicians continued to play—slowly, slurring, half-dead. They played as they lay in their beds, as they ate, as they shaved. The roof vibrated. The sky was confused, having once looked down upon the ground of the Scribe when a farm had been there, and, before that, when it was green and waxy, a wolf-filled wood.

Lydia took off her dress and washed at a pink lavabo by the bed. She lay back against Marshall, and he kissed her on the long, straight side of her face. As his forehead brushed against the soft hair of her temple, he tasted cold
water. She told
him to wash, and after he did and the blood had stopped beating in his eyes, when it was mild and soft, they lay back and listened to the arrogant strutting music. The warm autumn was soon to be cold and clear.

In the morning, the musicians got each other up like a row of rising mah-jongg pieces. Malcolm Tucker lay in his undershirt, bunched-up on the bouncy bed. The pianist ran into the room.

“Hey Malcolm. Hey Malcolm. Wake up. Those white kids is gone.”

“Gone? Let's see.” The two of them went to look. They stood in their underwear, exhausted but itching to play, and their faces had furrowed looks.