The Dream Vessel (15 page)

Billister marveled at the grand stairway that led to nowhere. They were outside of the abandoned school building that served as temporary dormitory for the freed farm workers. A playing field gone to weeds flanked the brick building, and two large nets were rotting at either end. Soccer. Billister had heard of it.

The large stairway actually was a seating arrangement, for large amounts of observers of the game. Let’s see. A cow’s stomach was filled with air and sewn closed. Two teams would kick the inflated stomach about the playing field until….

“Over there, please.” One of the shelter staffers had tapped him on the shoulder. Billister had been in an obedient line of former farm workers filling the bleachers, but a man in a drab green shirt was directing him to the little wooden platform down front.

“Me?”

The shelter man nodded yes.

Another shelter man, this one wearing a brown tunic reaching to his feet, waved to Billister from the speaker’s stand. His head was shaved, like Billister’s had been until recently, except that the shelter man wore a small pony tail sprouting from his left temple. Also on the stand were a thin metal post topped with some kind of electronic instrument and a cabinet connected to the post by a wire.

As Billister stepped through the high grass to the stand, dozens of burrs attached themselves to the cuffs of his trousers. He mounted the platform and began picking them off, grumbling to the man in the tunic, “Irritating vegetation.”

“My name is Ponzer,” said the shelter man, ignoring the complaint. He tapped at the electronic instrument and the cabinet to his side boomed with the amplified noise. He stepped away from the microphone again. “I am told that you are the man Billister from the islands, the one what speaks both English and Rafer.”

Billister finished picking the burrs, and two of his fingers were smeared with blood. “Ya,” he said. “And Spanish and Latin and French.” He watched the orderly crowd, half of them dark skinned, filling the bleachers. They moved so cautiously, precisely as told, as if they doubted their new freedom. Billister wiped the blood onto his newly issued trousers, a pair of Government surplus khakis given to him in the shelter. They bore the name L. Banner stenciled inside the waist, and Billister amused himself imagining a man by that name driving his delivery truck, or whatever, with no pants on. They were rather roomy, as trousers go, but still Billister preferred tunics and he felt jealous of Ponzer’s.

“I need you to translate for those who do not unnerstand,” Ponzer said. “Please say into the microphone, in your Rafer language, precisely what I say in English.”

Billister nodded. They waited until all of the new shelter residents were seated, filling three-quarters of the bleachers. The sun was rising, a blinding ball of mist, and Billister was beginning to dread the steamy mainland day that was coming.

“My fellow Merquans, welcome,” Ponzer said into the mike, and his tinny voice howled across the unused playing field and bounced back off the brick apartment building beyond. “I am Alo Ponzer, director of the Chautown Shelter. Let me apologize first for the limited accommodations and provisions, but I can assure you that we are diligently rounding up sufficient food, clothing, cots, and other materials to make your short-term stay in our shelter comfortable.”

Ponzer stepped back from the microphone and motioned Billister up to it. Billister repeated the essence of the message in Rafer, and was surprised at the feeling of power brought by his voice dashing over the stands. He stepped aside and noticed that two of the new Government men were now flanking the door to the old school, each with a semiautomatic with those curved ammo clips.

Ponzer continued: “In a moment, I will review the possibilities of new, voluntary work assignments, relocation arrangements, and options open to every one of you. But first-now, I would like to set the record straight about the inevitable rumors, as it is easy to misinterpret what is heard or seen without the proper background. The Government, for which we desire unity and power, has taken a humane turn and has decided that Ag Agency field work will be voluntary, and not punitive as it has been in recent past. This has merely involved a few personnel changes in the supervisory positions.”

Ponzer motioned Billister forward again. Personnel changes? Billister glanced back at the sentries with their evil-looking bangers. He paused to compose his translation, then began, “The Fungus Person standing here asks me to make you believe that….”

In exchange for his services, Billister was allowed to be among the morning’s first shift of shelter residents to use the men’s shower room. They were rationed a quarter hour, and Billister showered quickly, saving most of his time to razor away the tight black curls that had sprouted on his head and face. The razor was a flimsy device, built so that the blade itself could not be removed. It was tethered by a thin chain to the wall beside the locker room mirror. He used the old razor carefully, in his methodical pattern, to avoid cuts. Then he toweled off and dressed again in the same clothes.

Back in the main school building, Billister feared that he might be asked to man one of the information tables clotted with the curious and confused. He gaped at the array of hastily scrawled signs, the milling suspicious and unshowered field workers. He found a door, marked in fading English lettering “Fire Exit Only—Alarm Will Sound” and leaned into it. It fell open and there was no bell.

The noon street of Chautown sweltered, and Billister noted how even in a mainland capital, the weather did not cooperate—just two blocks from the waterfront, there was no cooling breeze. No relief.

The street itself was a clatter of horsecarts and motor wagons, sand and potholes and dung. The dainty ladies in long dresses carried parasols; the male drivers cursed, shirtless in their seats; businessmen hurried about with leather cases. All of them were Fungus People.

Billister looked high for two landmarks and memorized their positions—a steeple here, a towering oak webbed with Spanish moss there. He set out north, feeling secure as long as he could catch a glimpse of the sea when the buildings parted at the end of each block.

Four blocks up he found a flower stand, a wall-less shelter with bins of blooms displayed in the shade. The sidewalk was wet from sprinkling to preserve them. Hah. A little outdoor store with no purpose other than to sell pretty plants that would wilt in a few days.

A particularly beautiful woman was buying a cluster of purple irises. He studied her profile under the white, wide-brimmed hat—faultless cheeks and a rounded nose poised over an open purse. She selected a few centime notes and gave them to the attendant, then walked west with her paper-wrapped stalks.

Billister stared into space, still studying the ghost she had left behind, that profile. Her hair had been the blackest possible ringlets, her nose gently flared, her skin the color of coffee with a dash of cream. Undoubtedly a Rafer. At home here in the festering coastal capital of the Fungus People. Gliding uphill into the elegant residential neighborhoods overlooking the harbor. Trailing behind her a waterfall of white skirt ruffles.

He followed. Up the easy rise to the shaded streets, where water hissed in precise spray patterns over trimmed lawns, where staunch iron fences guarded mansions, where even the wide edifices losing their whitewash looked regal in their timeworn weary.

When she turned a corner, Billister hung back, tactfully watching children torture a small park’s swing sets and little steel carousels. Some of the youngsters were dark skinned, as were some of the distant parents watching from the row of benches. For the first time ever, he imagined himself a parent, watching his son dip himself upside down from a plank on two chains, swinging gaily in a public park.

He almost lost her, for she turned again at the next corner. But her form was an unmistakable beacon along the oak-shrouded walkways. With a series of rapid trots, he caught up to a respectable half-block distance. She never looked back.

There were few men on the streets—not particularly unusual for a residential neighborhood during a work day, he guessed. He did meet on the sidewalk a dark-skinned gentleman, equally elegant as the woman he was following—finely tailored linen coat and trousers, a dark brown leather case dangling from one arm.

Billister greeted him with the traditional Rafer salutation used among strangers, “Sownda say-bode, hom.” It was not a taxing exchange, even for a busy man, but the manicured gentleman merely flashed him a quizzical look and walked on.

Finally, the stunning woman, the object of his hesitant pursuit, threw up the latch of an iron gate and glided up the concrete steps toward a broad, three-tiered mansion. Billister stopped at the closed gate and watched with frantic helplessness as she ascended the wide porch hung with swings and jungly potted plants.

She drew out a key, and as she fit it into the door, Billister shouted in desperation. It was an improvised plea, a rough one, for there was no tradition fitting such a situation—a Rafer man daring to follow a Rafer woman down the streets of a foul mainland metropolis.

“Woun-nuitte!” he shouted, the way one man might ask another to stop for casual conversation. “Woun-nuitte!”

The woman turned slowly and regarded the rumpled man at the gate. She propped the bundle of irises over her right shoulder, soldier-style, and swayed down the steps again. Her eyebrows rose, asking the vague question, asking for a repeat of whatever had been said that could not have been heard from such a distance.

Billister now faced her directly, and he felt that tingling privilege, that reward. The purple iris blooms shimmered over her shoulder, and Billister considered how envious all plant life must be, for there was no flora known that glowed with the deep brass of her complexion.

He said it again, almost a prayer now, “Woun-nuitte!”

Her lips pressed together and curled in unison. “You’ve been out ta long in the noon sun,” she drawled in that rough tongue of the Fungus People. “Makes a man talk oddlike, no? You here ’bout the sign? The sign?”

Billister felt his chest collapsing, his hope dissipating at the horror of a delicate dark-skinned woman cognizant only in the Fungus People language: How could this be? And he felt his reason sliding its battered self over to that frame of mind in which one human may converse with another in the rocky tongue of English. He asked meekly, still in awe of her, “What sign do you speak of?”

She coughed into a gloved hand, a broad polite excusing of everything that had come before, and pointed her bundle of flowers at a living room window behind her. A small hand-lettered sign there read, “Live-in house servant desired.”

It was as if Billister had lost control of his own mouth, for he felt it spread out into a gentle smile and he heard the throaty English words escape his lips, “Ho, ya. The sign. Of course, I came about the sign.”

Her brow tightened with consternation under the white hat brim, and she asked, “But do you have any experience?”

Moori led the horsecart herself, up the steep slope of the back access drive to the mainhouse’s delivery door. Gregory was there squatting on the stoop sipping a Liberty Ale and it was not even noon—looking a bit bemused, she thought. Hmph.

Her hair had sagged into sweaty bronze-red tentacles about her shoulders. She tied the horse’s leader to the ring post, gave the hitch knot a yank and a piece of the leather came away in her hand. She snapped: “Pig-fuckin’-poke bastard!”

Gregory was on his feet. “Lemme help with those sacks.” He grabbed a corner of burlap but Moori stopped him, a firm hand pushing his wrist away.

“Noooo,” she said emphatically. Gregory read the tension in her voice, resentment. “As I explained in the kitchen lass night and in the out garden—ho—two days ago, Big Tom says you are not to even lift yer own willie ta pee. You’re the recuperatin’ patient, he says, though the truth is that he wants not ta be drawn and quartered by yer buddy Fel Guinness and the other new mainlanders.” She muttered the last part.

Gregory had decided against looking hurt anymore. He returned to the stoop, where he picked up his ale and tipped it back. He sniffed. “Ya, okay. But she’s your house too, an’ I figure this ta be part your desire as well.”

Moori undid the knot, pulled more of the leather through the ring, and redid the hitch in exasperated tugs.

“Ya know what these vegetables are costing now?” she said, sweeping her hand at the cart. “And I say this not just ’cause I never had to haul the deliveries before. The produce here was never so up with the centimes. We quit sending the mainland the red-leggers to work the farms, an’ the farms can’t pull in the crops like they used to. And now the produce they send back to us costs twice what it did before. While we’re makin’ pig-poke for money!”

Gregory gulped the last of the bottle. “Thass what’s bothering you? The price of beans?”

She pushed her hair away from her face defiantly, and Gregory had simultaneous thoughts: She was quite beautiful. But even with his protected, non-working status on Thomas Island, Big Tom probably would slice out his liver just for the thought.

That sexual pipe dream led him quickly to a more serious memory, as if his brain had tightened up a few notches, his mind imploded a few degrees. Tym. He saw her stretched in the shadowy hammock asleep—how many weeks ago?—the stress of a beseiged life absent for a moment from her smooth face. Lips pressed together in sleepy consternation. Small breasts, firm as fists.

The clean and vivid lust of his once-impaired mind. Ah, that was the quandary. Had it been the ignorance of a dimmed consciousness, or was it a valid, lustful memory being tempered now by the return of cautious human reason?

Gregory looked at Moori again—beautiful, yes, but pathetic somehow in her sweaty desperation over the mere hauling of vegetables. He turned through the door into the large pantry, where he hoped to find another ale.

He lifted the lid of the icebox and turned his head aside at the stale and dank odor of the warming chest. Across the metal bottom of the box little nuggets of ice were quickly shrinking and disappearing down the drain hole. Four Liberty Ales stood in the puddle at the bottom, their labels slipping down the glass. The lettuce and green bell peppers probably were okay, but the eggs in the wire rack would not last the night. He didn’t know about the cheese.

He knew the routine well, although he was supposed to forget. He was houseguest now, no longer house boy. He grabbed the two buckets beside the chest, went downstairs to the ice machine at Big Tom’s bar, and filled them.

The door to the downstairs bathroom was ajar, and whimpering noises came from inside. Gregory pushed at the knob, a heavy brass fixture the shape of a woman’s breast. Little Tom was hunched over the round porcelain sink, a wire brush in his hand—the one Gregory had once used to clean the outdoor grill. A patch of Little Tom’s brown-dyed forearm was rubbed raw.

The heir to a crumbling Caribbean kingdom turned his red eyes toward the intruder.

Gregory jabbed a finger toward the near-bleeding skin and said, “Ho. Now you black and you red.”

Little Tom’s nose was twitching. He took the nub of a hand-rolled cigarette from the edge of the soap dish and sucked hard. “Gregory, do you smell something?” he asked weakly.

Gregory sighed. “You’re in a crapper, poo-bah. You’re bound ta pick up somethin’ foul. But all I smell is ganja. Why don’t you give it all a rest? The ganja. The skin, hey. Give it a rest, too.”

Little Tom was naked, skin an even coffee color. Although Pec-Pec had denied darkening the young seaman’s skin on purpose, Gregory preferred to think of it as an intentional prank. But Little Tom’s infections did seem to have subsided. Gregory pointed and asked, “So how’s your willie doin’?”

“Good anuff. Works.”

“All them holes, I thought we might use you for a lawn sprinkler.”

Little Tom kicked the door closed in his face.

Ho. This whole house is pig-poked—no humor left, Gregory said to himself. He went back upstairs with the filled buckets, removed one of the ales from the box, then dumped the ice in. Gregory arranged the buckets where they had been before, hoping no one would notice he had performed a service for the house. He hesitated, then pulled a second ale out of the ice and shut the lid.

He took the ales up the stairway to the second tier and walked down the polished hallway past the quiet rooms. Ashtrays overflowed. In the smaller bedrooms, little used since Big Tom’s other wives left him, the closet doors gaped open and abandoned bedclothes still lay in rumpled heaps. Most of the women had returned to trug work on Cell Island; a couple of others caught a tug for Chautown. They were a blur to Gregory, a half dozen sweet faces he recalled from the time before Pec-Pec had healed him. He shrugged—he found it less than sad. They had all been trugs before, and were hardly more than that in the service of Big Tom.

Change of assignments, that’s all. Gregory had seen many changes of assignment in the Revolution.

Ironically, Moori seemed to miss the other wives more than Big Tom did. Gregory sucked at one of the ales as he walked. He wondered if Moori had had a lover among Big Tom’s “lesser” wives. He had heard of that. Sometimes, in a house full of women….

The end of the hall opened onto the veranda, the same one that curved past Big Tom’s master bedroom. Out here, the air was moving ever so slightly, like the whisk of a passing bird, but Gregory was thankful for the little breeze. He propped the two ales on the rail and watched the shipyard below. He picked out Big Tom by his squat form—strutting about, waving his arms, having to supervise the yard himself now with such a tight payroll.

If Gregory squinted his eyes, he could imagine the hull filled in the rest of the way, the ship taking form at the waterfront. It seemed absurdly huge, and Gregory thought of the mythological beasts called elephants—those cumbersome creatures Rosenthal Webb had told him about. The old revolutionary had told him many a tale to alleviate the boredom as they had crossed the western sectors—how long ago? two years?—to kill the Monitor. Like an elephant. Gregory imagined that a ship of this size would be about that graceful.

Four of the dozen men from the new government were down in the shipyard, as always, observing the construction, making Big Tom uncomfortable. They were a surly lot—cliquish, quiet, bunked out each night up the hill in those cells that had once held the red-leggers. How odd, Gregory considered: These men had been as much a part of the Revolution as himself. Yet he had never known them, except for Fel Guinness, and felt little kinship. He wanted to tell them he had been part of the band that actually had slain the Monitor. He wanted them to know, to suddenly snap into reverence like a soldier grunt stumbling across a general. But he could not think of a modest way of bringing up the subject.

Out far beyond the harbor, two low and sleek skimmers eased their way east. Rafers, Gregory figured—the new long sailcraft they seemed to be favoring these days over their traditional catamarans. Big Tom had pulled in most of his own skimmers, and what few crews remained in his employ spent most of their time just patrolling the perimeter of Thomas Island.

Gregory watched the new Rafer skimmers until they melted into the horizon. Hmph. That new design—like some hell-bent sea swan. Where had they learned to hammer out yachts like that? They were certainly nothing that ever crossed Big Tom’s drawing board—not his style at all. And where would they be getting their timbers for such craft? Pirated lumber from the mainland?

Gregory spat over the rail. Depression: Tastes like a mouthful of brackish water. He had seen many men damaged in the service of the Revolution—Rosenthal Webb himself was missing a fistful of fingers. Did it always feel this way—after? Like a lone duck hurled aside by a hurricane? Directionless, loveless.

(Webb had warned him once: “Careful not to follow that pènis of yers too often. I see that it changes direction more ’n a weather vane.)

It had seemed just a few minutes, but both ale bottles were empty. Gregory thought of wandering down to Sanders’s Shebeen—the pub would be fairly empty this early. A long afternoon of lazy thoughts….

No. He stepped back from the rail. Time for a walk, he decided. A project. Exercise. This boredom, this inability to contribute to the working of the island, was going to drown him in ale. He would….

His eyes darted about.

He would….

The garden below: pebbled paths, fruit trees, shrubbery growing ragged, the locked shed.

He would…open the shed.

Big Tom had specifically forbidden it. Only the old merchant himself could go in there—and he did, almost daily. One of the recently departed wives joked that he was having sex in there with Five-Finger Rose—his right hand. “Wat else ’ud it be?” she asked. “He ain’t got it up no other time! Haw.”

Ah. A daring idea. He turned back down the hallway to the master bedroom.

There were secrets to a house known only to the person who had spent a long time emptying its waste baskets, hanging up tunics carelessly tossed aside, sweeping up the remnants of the last night’s revelry. Gregory pulled at the double oak doors of Big Tom’s wardrobe, let them creak softly as they always did, and listened for reaction from anywhere in the house. There was none.

A half-dozen of Big Tom’s finer tunics lay on the floor of the wardrobe, a tangle of silk. Gregory sighed and leaned in. Across the top inside panel of the cabinet was a row of keys hanging from finishing nails. Back door, front door, office, hospital supply room, Sanders’s pub, garden shed. He took the last key and closed the doors again.

At Big Tom’s dresser he stopped to peer at the little looking glass mounted on a lacquered driftwood base. Gregory pushed the blond curls away from his forehead and studied the pink and crooked scar. He thought through a now-very-familiar conumdrum, a recurring daytime nightmare: I can not say for sure that my mind is healed. Is that because it actually is healed? Or because it is not healed?

He touseled his hair back over the scar and turned for the door.

The shed was oddly aromatic, the lushly pleasing rot-smell familiar to plant tenders. Gregory shoved the door closed behind him, the top hinge being relaxed enough to make it drag the ground. He hadn’t brought the lantern hanging outside, and it was possible he wouldn’t need it. Reeds of light criss-crossed the interior—from the cracks around the door, from slipped shingles, from the paint peeling off the single window.

As he stepped down the alley between the bins and the bales his disappointment grew. It seemed to be a very normal garden shed—soils and clay pots, dozens of seed packets sorted out into the slots of an old post office letter rack.

Oh, but here was an odd thing. To his left, atop a pile of manure sacks, sat a cat-looking beast. It had been stuffed by an amateur taxidermist perhaps two decades back. Stitches showed at each shoulder joint. The lips were split and curling back into a ghastly sneer. Most of the hair had worn away from the face. The taxidermist had used large dark marbles instead of natural-looking eyes, and the effect was as mesmerizing as it was horrifying.

As he stared, the voice came out of nowhere: “Gregory,” it said softly, and a chill howled up his spine.

He leapt back from the creature. The corner of his eye caught the glare where the shed door had been pushed open. He had been discovered, and his heart hammered.

The voice came again, louder, this time a question: “Gregory?” And he saw then, silhouetted by the blinding sunlight, the unmistakable form of Moori standing in the door. It was she that had spoken, not the frayed cat. Still, his veins throbbed audibly. Perhaps Moori would not tell Big Tom he had stolen into the shed. Gregory tried to retrace his reasoning: What did he think he might find that would have been worth being de-balled by the old slaver?

Moori pushed the door closed behind her and walked hesitantly toward him, head nodded. She was mumbling, and her words were punctuated by sorrowful gasps: “…can’t do it anymore…Big Tom, he’ll hardly speak to me. Nothin’ but powder, bourbon and that pig-pokin’ boat….” She stopped just short of touching him, head still down, thick red hair brushing his chest.

“Your friends?” She looked up, chin trembling. “Can you help me get…he’d kill me…get to Chautown?”

Gregory watched his own hand rise slowly, in awe of the motion as if he were detatched from it. His fingers combed through the outermost strands of her hair, lifting them into a narrow beam of light.

“You didn’t leave the vegetables out in the sun,” he said, “did you?”

Moori’s chin stopped quivering, and she shook her head a bemused “no.” The rest was a spontaneous combustion. No tease, no parry, no hints or invitations or calculating give-and-take. Their mouths pressed together urgently. Gregory’s hands slipped easily into her loose blouse and found her breasts sweat-moist. Moori pried open the military clip of his belt and tore open his fly buttons in one motion. She sighed desperately and ducked her head to give him a quick and delicate tonguing—a promise. Gregory stood helplessly in the dark, hands lightly stroking the corners of the mouth that needed no guidance—knew exactly what to do.