The Dream Vessel (6 page)

Big Tom pressed the tip of his drawing lead into the U-shaped sharpener on the edge of his drafting table. He whittled it to a sharp point. The shavings dittered into a cup screwed just under the sharpener, where they would be collected eventually for remelting.

With a wad of rubber he erased the line he had just drawn, repositioned his flexible snake rule on the paper, and rechecked the curvature. Ah. Then he drew that segment of the hull line again, satisfactorily thin and precise this time.

The merchant-shipbuilder faced the open veranda windows of his stilted office building, a perch from which he could watch for ships coming in—the Lucia, ah, that would be a blessing. But the Windon Wait or the Darwip, out to scout for her two days now—word from either of them would do.

So it was that from this lookout he was likely the first person on the island to see the Darwip heading into harbor from out east—even at such a distance identifiable by its single yellow streamer flying from masttop. Big Tom dropped his drafting lead and hobbled to the telescope pointing seaward from a tripod. He swung the telescope to the left and tightened the brass wing nut on the joint to stabilize it once he had found his mark.

The Darwip was full sail, yet there were four or five idle men on her foredeck—which would not be, unless she had picked up passengers. Extra crew meant wasted wages. Especially while full sail, all of Big Tom’s sailors had duties.

As the skimmer drew nearer, he thought he could make out the tall frame of Bark among the laggards, and that would mean that the Lucia was disabled at least—and possibly down. Big Tom could feel his heart beating, and he argued with himself over whether to grab his cane and hurry down to the dock.

It would not do to appear unduly concerned about one skimmer—his son aboard notwithstanding. He heaved himself up onto the stool at his drawing board and took up the lead again.

Taking shape on the paper before him was a seagoing fantasy, a ship scaled to roughly twice the size of any vessel ever seen in the Caribbean. Why, if ever the timbers could be had to build her, she might even hazard a crossing of the Great Ocean itself. The timbers. Yas, that was the problem. All that the Government would ship to him came from the closest sources—yellow pine from the Southland forests, which was too small and weak to make a reliable craft over 200 feet or so. And even with the better timbers, what design could keep such a monstrosity from falling apart under its own weight? He dropped the lead and sighed.

This was more thinking of a madman, he knew. Wouldn’t it be better to start a draft of the Lucia II?

The door at Big Tom’s back threw open and he heard a single person step in tentatively. He did not look up from his drawing.

“Come in and sack ya in a chair, Bark,” Big Tom said, scouring the rubber wad over a smudge on the paper—making work for himself. “Glad ta see you’re near ’bouts in one piece.” He heard an irregular shuffle heading for his frayed easy chair, and then the long form of Bark, bent over some, entered his line of vision. His black beard was wilder than ever and fanned out over a once-white blouse, now gray from a sea-drenching and terribly ragged. He eased himself into the chair carefully.

Big Tom looked directly into the first mate’s pain-squinting eyes. “You’ve not been ’ome.”

“Ma kin wait. In this shape, I’ll not do much for her anyway.”

Big Tom chuckled uncomfortably. A mild breeze wafted through the room, seeming unreal, impossible to enjoy.

“The Lucia—she’s down, isn’t she?”

“Ya,” Bark replied, his voice sounding high and anxious, “with a lot of crew an’ cargo. Six men of our own, an’ I’d guess ever last one a the red-leggers.”

Big Tom emptied his lungs out his nose in a whoosh. Couldn’t have been much worse. But the knowing of it was not unlike relief. From his pocket he drew a slender folding knife and clicked it open. He glanced at Bark and noted the sweat droplets collecting in his eyebrows.

“And my boy?”

Bark tried to sit up straighter. “Dead—down with her. He done it to himself, Big Tom, a fool’s suicide—forgive me speaking of kin, but it’s so. Smoke-headed, an’ ordering us full sail inta storm. Bumping a Rafer girl below decks….”

“Ho up!” the trader grunted, and Bark wondered if he was going to pay now, for telling too much of the truth too quickly.

Big Tom pulled open the pencil drawer at the base of the drafting table, drew out a silver cylinder and screwed its cap off. His knife blade fit into it neatly, and when he eased it out it was covered with a ridge of fine white powder. He placed the dull side of the blade against his upper lip, under his nose, and when he inhaled violently, the powder disappeared. He thought to offer a snort to Bark, his friend and fellow conniver for decades. Hmm. Not yet.

“Now,” said the big-bellied man, working his rubbery lips side to side and brushing the last of the white dust from his face, “start again, at the start.”

Bishop had heard most of the story down on the docks, where he had elbowed his way to the center circle. There the telling would be the best, with the least exaggeration. Scrawny though he was, no one denied Big Tom’s assistant the right to hear it straight from the survivors of the Lucia.

And now the sun was down, and Bishop was pacing the veranda outside Big Tom’s office. The boss had dragged his drafting stool out and was sitting there, belly pressed against the rail. He had everything he needed laid out—knife, cylinder, and a bottle of mainland whiskey—and had said nothing for thirty minutes while he sopped his brain like Bishop had never seen.

A few minutes back Linsey, Big Tom’s third or fourth wife—Bishop could never keep them straight—rapped at the entrance. He sent her away, telling her not to count on Big Tom to come home till sunrise. Which was true. That much powder was likely to keep his mind running all night, even if it did go rudderless from the alcohol.

Bishop stepped up and down the planking, his mouth open in an O, his jaw locked into a concerned scowl.

How does Big Tom do it? When he finally spoke, he addressed the worry that had been tying Bishop’s mind in knots.

“I dint tell Bark about the gold,” Big Tom said, tilting back the whiskey bottle. “Everyone knows the Lucia’s ballast shifted, but not a word ’bout anything else unusual on that score. She went down too fast for anyone to see.”

“Half-a-billion centimes!”

Big Tom was just about to inhale another knife-load, but he stopped. “Look at it this way: You and I put the gold onta the Lucia in the first place, cause everyone spects we store it under the mainhouse, the prize for the first pig-fuck to knock off Thomas Island. But if the Government ever collapses, like some of those barge boys gossip? We’d already have it all in the bottom of the fastest little skimmer in the Caribbean.”

“But she’s down in fifty, mayhap seventy feet of water….”

“Where no one can get at her—that’s the saving part of it. Our gold is safer at the bottom of the sea than even in the mainhouse.” He inhaled the little foothill of powder. “Ah. Jeeze.”

“Oh, gawd, Big Tom! If the sands shift, or she breaks up, or if a current spreads it all up and down…”

“Ya, ya, the gold’s safe for now, but we got to bring it up soon. So here’s—mmm—so here’s my idea. Let Captain Bull out of the brig and tell ’im the damage at Sanders’s is forgiven. Goodness of Sanders’s heart—he’ll go along, no?”

Bishop nodded. “I spect he hopes ta keep his lease with ya, Big Tom. So I’d say he’ll go along.”

“So before any more red-leggers drop dead, or escape and then drop dead, we’ll get ’em all shipped off to the mainland. We’re not waiting on the Lucia no more, so let’s get the others out of here before we lose the whole lot of ’em. Tell Captain Bull he’s to alert the Government that we have need of a new doctor. And have that little lad—Farmington is his name?—run a rush order to his boss Cred Faiging. We’re to have some equipment down from his compound on Captain Bull’s next barge run south.”

Bishop was silent, his face fixed into that same gape, trying to figure it. “Winches, right? Faiging ’bout made his name manufacturing winches. But there can’t be a portable what’s big enough to draw up the Lucia.”

“Na.” Big Tom pulled a leaflet from his pocket, unfolded it and handed it to his assistant. The slaver tipped the whiskey bottle against his flabby face.

Bishop’s eyes widened at the diagram of a Sustained Underwater Breather. “Oh, gawd.”

The blind journalist and poet Jersey Saple had thrust himself into his sun reader outside his rotting ramshack near the beach. The sun reader was shaped like a storm-blown tent, a box made of thick scrap, sail canvas and wood framing. To follow the path of the sun it pivoted atop a length of piling left over from dock construction. The sandy yard was dotted with caugi cactus, but Saple’s feet never encountered their unforgiving needles, either from a gift of “vision” or a gift of memory.

He withdrew his head of tangle-hair from the dark frame, letting the cover shroud, which was tacked to the top of the box, flop over the hole he had occupied. In an exacting motion, he turned his head twenty degrees to the left and shouted, “Ho! It’s Billister, at seventy-five feet!”

The throaty reply that came indeed was young Billister: “Oh, clearly I made it to fifty feet. You should have your eyes checked.”

Saple harumphed, mushed through the sand to the opposite side of the sun reader, and there he released the latches that held a square frame to the back side of the box. He slid a pinpricked sheet of parchment out of the frame and returned it to the portfolio lying at his feet. He selected another page, clipped it into the frame and latched it back onto the box.

“I can never keep these writings separate,” he grumbled. “Specially those what come before the coder system I started punching into the bottom corners—mmm—back eighteen months or so.”

The wirey man reentered the box up to the waist, with the shroud down his shoulders. As his sweat-dripping nose brushed along the sheet of paper stretched across the back of the box, his damaged eyes could just make out the patterns of searing sun dots poked through it. He heard just outside the sun reader the rustle of a tote bag laden with canned goods and fruit being eased into the sand. He swallowed, thankful.

Billister was at his side now, and the young Rafer heard the muffled voice inside the box declare, “This is the one! Hoo, I’ll mark it now. The theories we discussed—what, two years ago?—I was telling ya the principles of voting what the ancients used.”

Billister watched as the blind man felt about for the oil cloth sack he had laid next to the post of the sun reader. It was a ritual they never spoke of anymore—a few tins and pieces of fruit pilfered from the larder of the mainhouse. Saple tried his hand at surf fishing and container gardening, but it was not enough to keep even a slender old hermit alive.

Assured of dinner, Saple returned to his reading. Fidgeting, Billister drew a sheet out of the portfolio that had been flopped in the sand. He held it up against the midday sun, admiring the precise rows of clustered dots. “One day you should teach to me your prick writing,” he said, louder than usual to penetrate the canvas.

Saple grunted and tore the shroud off his back. “We will call it dot writing, please. It is a visual form of Braille, the tactile writing used by blind people way back when. By night I can write—all I need is stylus and paper. But daytime is the only time that I can read. For these sorry eyes, it takes the pure strength of the sun to penetrate the punctures I have put into the paper—the dot writing. Please, not ‘prick writing.’ More proper it would be to call what you do ‘prick thinking.’ Hah. I like it! I will write it up tonight: ‘Billister, prick thinker of Thomas Island….’”

“But I’m serious,” Billister said, rattling the parchment—Saple tolerated his habit of making unnecessary noises to announce where he was standing. “What is the point in having a library of writings that no one else in the world can translate?”

“It is a good question that, ahhh—” here Saple switched to the softer sounds of the Rafer tongue “—that there is no safe answer for. I lost my eyes for scripting much less than is recorded on these pages. There will be a use for them someday, ya, but for now they will just be my recollection, my second brain. Okay? Besides, knowing the dot writing would be even less use to you than that Latin what you’ve been studying.”

“You wish you could read at night—why not just feel the holes with your fingers,” Billister asked, “the way blind people among the ancients did?”

Saple held a withered hand aloft. “With these old bones? Hmph. Blood circulation bad as it is, I’m lucky I can feel well enough to find my pud. Besides, the Braille the ancients had was raised bumps. Much easier to feel than tiny holes in paper.”

Billister picked a sand burr from between two toes. He decided to drop the subject, although he continued to speak Rafer. “I heard that there was an escape the other night,” he said slowly.

“Quince—that was his name.”

“Then it is true, that the bulliards found him here. That you had spoken to him?”

“There’s not a thing ullegal, ya know, about having your home broken into by an escaped red-legger.” In a shadowy kind of way, perhaps borne of imagination, Jersey Saple could see the young Rafer before him, shaved head nodding now sullenly.

“They doused him, ya know. He is dead.”

“I know,” Saple interrupted.

“…for killing the doctor, Scaramouch…”

“He’d a died the same just for the escape.” There was a palpable death of enthusiasm between the two friends. Saple pulled the hair away from his face distractedly, trying to make the salty scraggles stay matted to the sides. It was a habit left over from sighted days, pulling hair out of his face. When Billister turned to leave, the writer reached out and clapped him accurately on the left shoulder, stopping him.

“You must know,” Saple said, “that there was nothing I could do to save the man. I was sending him up to take Murdoch’s boat when they surrounded the house. My only regret is that we dallied briefly in discussion. A few extra minutes, and…” The journalist’s voice was low, almost a whisper, even though they were the only free men on the island to know the language.

Billister sniffed and walked toward the beach.

Saple stood helpless, knobby knees poking into the sunlight from ragged holes in his drawstring trousers. “Not a thing I could do, Billister, but I give ya this—he didn’t kill Dr. Scaramouch. I’d mentioned the doctor to him in passing that night—and Quince had never heard of the blubber-butt bastard!”

The blind man heard the footsteps pause in the sand, and then he tracked their silent progress southeast—fifty feet, seventy-five, ninety….