Stephen Graham Jones - Captain's Lament.pdf - Stephen Graham Jones - widez2

My name is Quincy Mueller, but since the merchant marines I've been known

almost exclusively as Muley. It has nothing to do with my character, however.

Far from being obstinate or contrary, I'm in fact liberal and engaging. A more

enthusiastic conversationalist you're not likely to find; sailors are lonely,

I mean, and hungry for company. If anything, I suppose—and this just because

I'm honest to a fault—I err toward the overbearing, as isolation is something

I've had my fill of.

And yes, if you detect a hit of defensiveness in my voice, you're not far from

the mark. That so much should have come from a simple misunderstanding one

night twenty years ago is so far beyond comprehension that it's actually

amusing, I think, or at least revealing of human nature.

But I get ahead of myself.

Never mind that you already know my story. That you more than likely grew up

with it.

To begin, then, twenty years ago I was thirty-eight, salty and fully-bearded,

recovering from a near-fatal accident which had left me convalescing for

nearly fourteen months. During those weeks upon weeks in bed, the room

uncomfortably still—I hadn't been landlocked for more than two consecutive

months since my twenty-second year, when I thought marriage was the cure for

loneliness—I could feel my skin growing pale and translucent, my lips becoming

tender without salt to rime them. Because of the injuries to my throat, too,

the doctors wouldn't allow me any tobacco; I couldn't even chew upon my pipe.

I'll spare you the fates I wished upon those doctors—curses I picked up in

ports all over the world—but, looking back, I see of course that they more

than likely wanted me out of their hospital as much as I wanted out myself.

Since the ninth month, I had said so little, even, that they called for a

battery of tests to gauge my psychological health. Though I tried to tell them

all I needed was a view of the sea, the smell of brine, still, they poked and

prodded my mind until I did in fact shut down. I'm not proud of it, but, like

the tarpon on the deck, his side still bleeding from the gaff, I'd flopped

around as long as I could, and found that useless, so was now just staring,

waiting for this ordeal to be over.

The nurses took turns rolling me from side to side to ministrate my sores and

perform other indignities.

In my head, though, I was sailing. On the open sea, a boat pitching beneath

me, I was beyond the reach of their needles and swabs and catheters and small,

polite questions.

As the days passed, they came to my room less and less, content that my body

would either heal itself in time or that I would, one day when they weren't

looking, simply stop trying.

To them, I mean, even twenty years ago I was already an antique, a throwback

to another century, another way of life.

And, if I'm to be honest here, yes, I did indeed stop trying, finally. But the

body breathes whether you want it to or not. The heart keeps beating. Perhaps

because it knows more than you do—knows that, past this experience, a whole

new life will open up, and whatever infirmities persist, they can be dealt

with one by one.

That's all in the future, though.

Right then, on my back in bed, miles from the shore, dose upon dose of

antibiotic and painkiller pulsing through my veins, it was hard not to feel

sorry for myself. To let that consume me.

It was finally a nurse by the name of Margaret whom I woke to one day. She was

dabbing the wetness away from the corners of my eyes, and adjusting the

various lines that went into and out of me.

"Does it hurt?" she said, her fingertips light on my right forearm.

I closed my eyes, made her disappear.

The next time I woke, however, she was there again. Evidently she'd been

talking for some minutes, telling me about her social life, her family, her

dreams and aspirations. I let her words flow over me like water and studied

the cursive letters of her name, and watched as, in slow motion, like picture

cards flipping one after the other, she pointed a syringe into one of the

tubes that fed me.

How long this went on, I don't know. If I'd first seen her on a Wednesday

though, her badge still new enough to be hand printed, then this was at least

a Monday.

What she talked about the most was a certain boy named Billy, I think. How

he'd wronged her and was continuing to wrong her, but she was going to show

him.

I opened my mouth to tell her something but only emitted a rusty creak, my

voice broken from dis-use.

She smiled, pursed her lips, patted my tender right arm and asked if I wanted

to see the ocean?

Though I couldn't talk, still, she saw the answer in my eyes—I've always had

expressive eyes—and, with the help of another nurse, maneuvered my atrophied

body into a gleaming silver wheelchair, pushed me down hall after hall, my

heart beating intentionally for the first time in months, the fingers of my

left hand gripping the brown plastic armrest, her subdued laughter behind me

tittering out between her closed lips.

If I could have spoken, I was going to tell her how, if she wanted, I might

name my next ship the Margo, after her, and all the rest after that as well:

Margo II, Margo III, Margo IV, a fleet of Margos fanned out across the

shipping lanes from here to the South Pacific.

But of course that was just talk—I'd never owned my own ship before, and

didn't have one waiting for me when I got better.

And anyway, where she was taking me was a joke of sorts.

She finally stopped our perambulations in the waiting room, with my chair

pushed up to a small aquarium with exotic fish, and, every ten seconds, a

treasure chest that would burp air up to the surface.

I closed my eyes, woke again to Margaret's hand on a syringe, then slept and

slept and slept.

The next time I came to she was stroking the top of my left hand and talking

about Billy again.

Evidently I was supposed to have forgotten about the waiting room, about the

ocean.

I can remember ever shoal in every port I've ever drawn water in, though.

I shut my eyes and shut my ears and let her have my hand. Just that.

How long this cycle repeated itself, I don't know. My guess would place it at

two months; after a while Margaret became a practiced-enough nurse that she

could haul me into my chair herself, just by leveraging me with her hips and

the brakes on my bed, and I was a practiced-enough patient to believe that

what she was shooting into me syringe by syringe was salt water, and that the

dreams I had were just the ocean inside, bending itself to the moon.

Instead of going to the waiting room now, she was walking me outside, her

voice drifting around me. The air was supposed to be good for me, I think. It

was stale, though; there was no salt in it, no spray, and the horizon was

forever blocked by trees and buildings, the sky empty of properly-winged

birds.

One day, as had to happen, I suppose, Margaret asked her question again: Did I

want to see the ocean?

I tried to move my left hand to indicate that I got this joke, yes, thank you,

how nice, but I don't think she was looking anyway.

Back in the room this time, instead of pushing the sharp nose of the syringe

into the line that went into my injured arm, she instead emptied it an inch

into my mattress.

"I don't want you going to sleep just yet," she said, winking.

It made my heart beat, not with fear, but, in spite of what I knew, hope.

That night—I could tell it was night by the window—she came back for me. Her

shift was over; she had her overcoat on over her thin cotton uniform.

I opened my mouth to ask a question but she just patted my shoulder and swung

me down into my chair.

As you've by now of course guessed, we weren't going to the waiting room and

we weren't going to the paved walking path, but the back door, and, past that,

Margaret's large car.

She folded me into the passenger seat, my chair in the trunk.

"Wher—?" I tried to get out, but she guided my hand back down to my lap, eased

her car down the slope of the parking lot.

Across the road there were sirens, and, walking through a pool of light, a

police officer with a dog on a leash.

Margaret tensed and smiled at the same time.

"One of the slobbering maniacs, Mr. Mueller," she said, nodding to the woods.

"Probably just wanted to see the ocean, right?"

"Muley," I tried to tell her.

Even though the road we took was more downhill than up, which is to say we

were heading generally closer to sea-level, I had no illusions. After the

aquarium in the waiting room, I knew I was going to be lucky to even smell the

salt through her air conditioner vents, much less feel any spray on my face.

At the same time, however, if this was to be an end to my suffering, then so

be it.

I pushed my back into the cup of her passenger seat and waited for whatever

was to come.

As I'd expected, instead of following signs to the marina or some other place

of portage, she instead wound us through a maze of residential streets I could

never retrace. Billy wasn't down any of them, though, in spite of her

muttering his name. Vaguely, I had the idea that her intent was to induce pity

in him by pretending I was her war-addled uncle; that, for a few minutes, he

was going to have to pretend to be who I was supposed to be expecting him to

be. Which is to say Margaret's.

The profanity seeping over from the driver's side of the car, too, though

vituperative and heartfelt, still it was light, amateurish. I'd heard worse in

Morocco at fourteen years of age, and just over a bow line tied improperly.

How that Moroccan sailor might have cursed had his intended been with someone

else, it burns my ears just to think about it, and makes me smile a little

too. Other people's suffering can be comical, I mean, when seen from a

distance. Even mine, I suppose.

That's not to say I can't still remember the fear that rattled up through me,

however, when Margaret took her car from asphalt to gravel, and then from

gravel to dirt. The trees crowded around us, made the sky small. I started

breathing faster, so that she had to look over, narrow her eyes.

"This isn't a good time for this," she said.

I closed my eyes.

Under her thigh was a hunting knife, the kind with a rosewood handle and a

brass finger guard.

At a certain point on the dirt road, she turned the lights of her car off,

and, when we saw the tail lights she evidently knew, she turned her car off as

well, coasted into a slot between two large trees.

For a long time then we just sat there, the two of us, and, slowly, I tuned

into a new set of sounds: the woods. And, unless as I was mistaken—as it

turned out, I wasn't—the taste of salt in the now-still, un-air-conditioned

air.

The sea. She was close.

I tried not to let this knowledge flash across my face.

In her lap now, Margaret had a rope. She was trying to tie a knot but making a

complicated job of it. My left hand floundered over almost on its own, guided

the end of the rope up and under and back on itself. She appreciated this,

pulled the knot tight, nodded a reluctant thank you to me and then would no

longer meet my eye. Such is the way we treat the rabbit we're about to carve

for dinner, I suppose.

It had felt good though, the rope against my skin again.

Margaret patted the noose she now had and stood from the car, locking all four

doors before walking away into the darkness.

What did she need me for then? The knot?

I stared at the spot she'd disappeared into but couldn't figure it out, and

finally consoled myself trying to roll my window down to bring the sea nearer.

It was electric, though, and I had no keys.

How long I sat there after she left, I have no idea. If I slept, it was only

for minutes, and if I hummed, it was only to hear my own voice. In the absence

of monitors and pumps and footsteps, the world was rushingly quiet, and not

close enough.

At some point, anyway, Margaret strode across a bare place between the trees.

The rope was no longer across her shoulder, and the knife was held in her

fist, low.

I tried rolling my window down again, and was still clattering away at the

button when she was suddenly at my door with the car keys.

"Your turn," she said, smiling.

Sprayed across her shirt was blood that had dried almost black.

I nodded, gave my weight to her, let her heave me into my chair, pull me

backwards through the trees, tump me into a clearing behind the car I was

pretty sure was Billy's.

The reason I say this is that, hanging from a thick limb above the car was a

man of no more than twenty-two. A boy, really. His hands had been tied behind

his back, and his throat had been carved out. From years of handling knives, I

instantly understood the angles: someone had sat on his chest and worked on

his neck with a blade. Calmly, deliberately.

And then he'd been strung up, with a knot only a sailor would know.

Which was of course what she needed me for.

She pulled the empty wheelchair back into the darkness and I looked where she

was looking: to Billy's car, its vinyl roof pattered with blood.

Through the foggy glass, facing forward—away—there was a girl.

I shook my head no, no, and, because the sea was close and because it didn't

matter anymore, I found the strength to pull myself forward with my left hand.

It was torturously slow, however, and filled my loose pants with twigs and

dirt which nettled my bed sores. But the girl. I had to tell her, had to get

her to leave, to live.

Because I couldn't stand, I of course latched onto her bumper with my left

hand, and then on the fourth try was able to hook my right under her wheel

well, pull myself forward by inches.

By this time she was aware of the sound I was, had locked the door, had, even

though it wouldn't help her see, turned on the dome light and started grinding

the starter.

She was saying her boyfriend's name louder and louder, and then shrieking a

Stephen Graham Jones - Captain's Lament.pdf

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