The Cannibal Spirit (20 page)

Harry sat beside her in the wood shack out back of the other harlots' cribs, where her employers had put her to die. Rank odours came off her, choked by the grippe, sweat pouring down her body, grunting, coughing to her soon-forgotten end. “I weren't no soiled dove,” she said, over and
again. “You don't forget it, Harry. I sang for my keeps. I sang.” But it was lies. She spent her days on her back, just like all of them, however sweetly she could croon. She wasn't evil in her lies, though. She dreamed. She had her stories. She spun them to him. She spun them to herself. But always with a soft hand on his face and a kiss to his forehead. He was nine years old when she shut her eyes and left him.

He was in the orphanage for five years—his mother's madam saying how she'd do him right, fetching him straight up the hill from her deathbed and in through its gates. Some agreement she must have kept with the men there. He never heard what was done with his mother's body. The only time the boys were let out was in groups on Sundays for the trip to church, the two men who ran the place, decked out in black, both of them thin like strutting scarecrows, following their boys, close-eyed, out and back. Otherwise the boys played—or, as often, fought—in the yard, or they studied the scriptures, once they had learned to read, a rider's crop across their neck if they should dawdle.

One day there came to the orphanage a kind and Christian soul with a puppet show he'd brought back across the Pacific from Java. The old sailor, face burnt nearly black with the sun, promised Harry the freedom of the oceans, now he was come of age, if he but made his way to find him at the docks. The Jolly Waterman was the place.

So that night Harry went up the wall, fingers tight on the nailheads that held it together. He perched there a moment on top. Below, the two Mormon men had spied him. They hurled black vengeance if he wasn't back on the ground that instant, even as one of them worked, frantic, at the locks on the gate. A song his mother used to sing came in his mind. He sang it down to them. “I am fixing to leave, yes I am fixing to go. But where I am going, I just don't know.”

He dropped to the far side and ran down the hill through Sydney Town's tenements, sucking splinters from his palms where they had spiked him as he went over the wall. Chileno whores called out from their rough-board shanties to him, some cackling, showing their brown-tan buttocks as he went by, cooing and blowing him kisses—“Sweet boy,” “Beautiful boy.”

He scuttled past the doorways of the cheap groggeries—the Bobby Burns, the Tam O'Shanter, the Bird in Hand—hunching his shoulders, remembering the catcalls and violent, clutching paws the men inside had had for his mother. Vagabonds in slouch felt hats, smoking pipes. Australians with the shuffling gait of men who'd spent too long in irons. Maudlin prospectors belching away the paltry earnings they'd drawn from the hills. Those who had made more plied the salons and gambling houses round Portsmouth Square, down in the rich heart of the city.

He came out at the bottom of the hill and raced along Montgomery Street. There were no street lamps; what light there was came beaming out from the hotels and businesses—the Nianto Hotel, Bubb Grubb and Company, Frenchies' Irons and Hardware. He passed dogs fighting for dropped morsels in the thick mud, passed drunks rolling and squealing on the ground, passed Chinamen with big barrels of rank-smelling dried fish for sale. Men in tall hats and long beards stalked the streets as well, up on the plankboard walking ways. Page boys his own age hurled insults, jeering at his tattered clothing, and a flag on a pole proclaimed the city for the United States of America.

He turned on California Street toward the front. The corner of Battery Street, and the brick warehouses, many-windowed and five storeys tall. Then down the wharf until there, halfway along, a swinging wooden sign showed a red-faced, smiling jaunty: The Jolly Waterman.

The kind and Christian soul was inside, hanging off the bar by one arm, liquor-crazed amid the crowd of cursing, jostling stevedores and sailors at their drink. Harry stood at the doorway, half in, half out, until a clout at his ear threw him forward inside. Fearful, lacking option, Harry stood before the man. Remember me?

The man squinted at him, then took hold of Harry by his hair. He dragged him through the crowd, and a few cheered him on, and most ignored them. Then up the stairs at the back. Harry had learned enough from those who worked the orphanage to know what was coming. So he hung limp in the drunkard's grip, until it loosened as the man fumbled outside a door in the upstairs hallway, the sounds of the bar still loud around them.

Harry twisted suddenly loose. He slipped the knife from the man's belt, where he had seen it earlier. The man cursed and stumbled, rickety with alcohol. The boy drove the blade up into his face, both hands about the handle. It jarred along the cheekbone and slid in through the man's left eye. The eyeball split and darkened. The lens and the mucus inside slid down the blade, and the blood following. The two of them slumped against the unlocked door. It fell open under their weight. The boy lay halfway inside the dark room, atop the man's body, until at last it ceased its shuddering.

Afterwards, he walked among the men downstairs. The knife was stowed in his belt, the dead man's money in his pocket, the corpse hidden in the locked room, no one taking notice of the blood upon his face and on his thin body. He was not the only one stained in gore that night, or any night, from the fighting that did not cease along the wharf each evening, once the drinking was begun.

He walked outside and stood by the quayside. The still waters mirrored the brilliant firmament. The vast forest of ships' masts broke the horizons about him. He knew then the call of the world's oceans indeed, just as he understood the horror that lurked around every corner of a boy's life.

A day had passed since their passage through the Nakwakto Rapids. Harry had brought the
Hesperus
through the heavy water on the far side. He'd lain up in a cove he'd come upon by fortune in the blinding rain. He had dropped anchor and staggered forward to see what had become of Charley.

The old Indian was on his hands and knees in the prow, the lump of his back raised up like a whale's, and shaking his head from side to side. Where he had been thrown from his feet in the storm surge, he had cracked his temple against the railing, before sliding away forward out of Harry's sight. Blood flowed still from the wound at his head.

Meanwhile, the
Hesperus
was beginning to list.

“We took a bang to the hull,” said Harry, squatting beside Charley. “I'm going below. See what's there. You all right?”

Charley waved him off. “I live,” he said.

In the hold, some bales of blankets had spilled across the floor, but mostly all was still tightly stowed. A section of the hull about a foot long had been forced inward, low on the port side. Water spurted in through the broken planking. The corners of the spilled blankets twitched in the several inches of water they had already shipped.

He was half an hour hammering it right, retching with the pain from his shoulder, the sling Charley had fashioned for him hanging loose about his neck, groggy and stupid as well with exhaustion, so that more than once he drove the hammer on to his own fingers. By the time he came back on deck, gasping and seeing ghost images all about him, the storm had diminished and Charley was up and moving about in the pilothouse.

“No good,” said Charley from the door. “All gone break.” Inside, most of the cupboards and shelves had opened or fallen, throwing out their contents of jars and bottles, boxes and crockery. These had rolled and smashed until the floor was little more than a midden.

Charley held up a length of filthy bandage. “All gone bad.” He pointed. Amongst the detritus were the shattered remains of the jar of iodine.

“Christ almighty,” said Harry.

Charley nodded. “All gone bad,” he said.

They set fresh water to boil on the stove. Then they washed Charley's head. The wound was ugly and did not want to stop bleeding, but it was also shallow. His fat skull, at least, was still intact. Harry sewed it closed with canvas twine. The old man sat without comment through the operation.

“Not get sick,” he said. “Blood same raven.”

Harry was in a worse state. The wounds in his shoulder and his leg had both reopened from his efforts at the helm and in the hold. His bandages were soaked with blood, and there were no more clean for him to replace them with.

“Sea water best,” said Charley. “Keep bandage for now, go in ocean. Go on—all you in water.” So he lowered Harry into the water on a rope. He swung in the tide and the salt water ground at his wounds until he could bear no more. After, Charley took off the bandages, washed them in the
ocean, placed them to boil in the water on the stove, and then hung them to dry in the sharp breeze, now the rain had finally stopped.

They brewed coffee and chewed dry salmon. Charley put back the bandages. Then they slept.

Harry woke shivering in the dawn. He felt chilled, though the day did not seem cold. Charley prepared a breakfast of canned fish boiled in water to a stew, with a little of the bread that had not been soaked during the storm. They sat, side by side against the front of the pilothouse, drinking coffee.

Harry's body shook. His mind kept threatening to stray into daydream. So he wrapped his arms tight about himself and stood. He looked out. The inlet stretched away to either side, northwest and southeast, a mile wide. The rapids were still visible on the far side, the foaming waters almost benign from this distance. He was so tired still. He slumped back down beside Charley. “Where now?” he said at last.

“Teguxste south,” he said, pointing. “But you shake and sick. Go back is better. Find medicine.” Charley put a rolled cigarette into Harry's mouth. He struck a match, his gnarled fingers shielding the flame from the wind. Then he leaned back and looked intently at Harry. He put his hand to Harry's forehead. The skin on Charley's palm was like bark. The old Indian's nostrils twitched. “You sick,” he said again, his gloomy face more grim than ever. “Maybe die sick. What we do?”

Harry leaned his head back against the railing. “Find George,” he said. “Maybe he'll have medicine. Maybe he'll have a plan. He's a fucking medicine man, ain't he?” He hunched his knees up close to his chest. “And if that fey black fucker—demon, dreamer, whatever you call it—and don't think I've forgot you ain't told me one chunk of the truth of things—if it's off whispering to Walewid about where we are, then he'll be on his way for certain, now his brother's dead. If we are yet ahead of them, we ought to press on.” He squeezed his palms together. “I've but a chill. It'll fade through the morning. See if it don't.”

Charley muttered something in Kwakwala. Then he nodded. “South,” he said.

So Harry turned the
Hesperus
south and followed the mainland. But he did not improve through the morning, and his fever did not fade. In the end, Charley took the helm. Harry dragged out some canvas and lay down to rest.

And now there came a faint aroma from the bandage on his shoulder. He knew it all too well. That smell like molasses left too long on a stove.

Damnation, but he was in the grip of trouble now. Jammed between one bad choice and another. Turn about, brave the rapids once more, and make the passage home. In what: three days? Perhaps hope to sight another vessel on the way, one with a surgeon aboard, or at least with some disinfecting agent to delay the rot's hold upon him.

Or go on and find his father-in-law. And what then? George was skilled in healing, though it was of the Indian sort. Maybe he had iodine with him. As likely not. If it all weren't too late already.

To turn back risked leaving his father-in-law to his fate, whatever that might be, should Walewid track him down. Though Walewid was first and foremost after him and Charley, was he not? But he had said he'd take the skulls of Harry and Charley, and of George as well. The dreamer had seen them come through the rapids, so he'd report that back to Walewid. He'd surely work it out, where George might be. If he had even cottoned to their mission. Though what other fool mission could they be on to take them through the rapids anyhow?

So they went on and hoped to find George, and the rot might take him, unless George had the salves and skill to save him. Or they turned back, and hoped they got lucky and made it to safety. If he went back without George, then that cocksucker Halliday would confiscate the family's treasures—Christ only knew what kinds of chaos that would be the starting of—and probably the
Hesperus
as well. If that happened—well then all his plans would have come to nothing.

All this thinking exhausted him. Soon enough, he drifted into sleep.

“Fat Harry.” Charley's voice drew him back to consciousness. “Fat Harry, look starbud.” Harry was still propped against the gunnels of the
Hesperus
, a nest of sail canvas beneath him, a waterskin by his side. The air was filled
with sea spume from the boat's passage through the water. It caught in his hair and on his brows and lashes, stinging at his eyes. Yet the breeze and the water were cool against the heat of his fever. He pulled himself up with his good arm and looked out over the side.

A killer whale rolled up out of the water not twenty yards away. Its tail rose up to hang for a moment, black against the water, the mountains and the forest behind, before it slid away beneath the ocean.

“Sign!” called out Charley. “Maqenoq, him speak loud! Shout for us hear. Why come inside rapid? Should be he only out on ocean.”

The killer whale rose again farther ahead. The explosion of its breath threw spume into the air, which drifted above the water until the boat passed through it. Harry smelled fish and brine and something else, sharp but nameless, the very essence of the whale.