We Are All Crew (12 page)

On this day, the water moccasin swam in the center of the river, searching for the big fish he knew still lived there.

He failed to perceive the
whoosh-whoosh
of the clean boat that hugged the old shoreline as it passed. But close behind the clean boat, he sensed three mammal-made crafts of the suicidal variety.

Now the moccasin paused. What was passing through the air and the water? He lacked the ability to perceive something so complex yet meaningless, an aberration to the instinct that had guided him for nearly ten years. He was a very old water moccasin, old enough to have known and experienced all manner of alterations in the water.

This was a warning. These three passing boats were not to be taken lightly. They were to be obstructed.

The water moccasin felt the air change. There was to be nothing natural about this storm.

the storm

It isn’t really a storm until midnight. What Kang should do is find a safe spot to port and wait it out, but we can practically feel the Green Police boats bearing down on us. The storm strikes when Kang has taken the
Tamzene
into a narrow crevice between two rock walls, through which knifes deep, fast-moving water. Jagged rocks surround us, and there’s no place to anchor. The water throws us around like a volleyball. Arthur and I—Esmerelda is belowdecks with Seabrook—fall all over the deck, and the river water slaps at us. A couple of times, gusts nearly take me overboard.

A swell pitches the boat to the side and she careens out of control. Bellowing, Kang spins the wheel, but it’s too late. The
Tamzene
crashes against the wall. The side of the boat throws itself at me, and the world goes black.

When I come to, everything is yellow and red. A fissure has snaked down the side of the hemp cooker, and I can see the fire blazing inside. Smoke boils from it. Then a blast of water crests over the boat, and the fire winks out with a hiss.

The wind howls like Fang on the
Live From the Meadowlands
opening track “I Conquer All,” but over it I hear the humming noise of the engine fizzle and die.

Kang tries the wheel, but it doesn’t respond. Without the engine to give the craft thrust, we’re a dead hunk of wood and metal drifting down a river between jagged rocks.

Arthur scrambles from one side of the boat to the other, tying down equipment that has become untied.

“What can we do?” I shout.

The boat skids along over rapids, crashing against rocks. Kang tries to stoke the fire in the hemp chamber, but it won’t start.

After a while, the rain slackens and the river grows more shallow and slow. Kang is able to steer the boat over to a sandy bank at the water’s edge and drop anchor.

We collapse on the deck. The clouds have thinned. The boat rocks in the current, sloshing water back and forth over the deck boards. I allow the exhaustion to swallow me and sleep without a single dream.

we stop for repairs

I’m awoken by bright sunlight and chirping birds, and for a minute I think I’m back at my grandmother’s house. It was an old farmhouse with a nasty old barn where Grandma used to park her car. She and the Moms would talk about old times in the kitchen—His Eminence never went with us on these visits. But we hadn’t been back to Grandma’s house since before we moved into the Compound, which was a long time ago. Grandma’s farm—one of those half memories that don’t come to you unless you’re not thinking about anything in particular.

A rushing sound buzzes in my eardrums—Kang working on the hemp cooker. He wears a black mask with a visor, and directs the flame of a blowtorch at the crack in the cooker. Arthur and Esmerelda stand slightly behind him, watching.

I also watch for a couple of minutes from my supine position, with my chin pressed against my chest. My skin is seriously pruny, and my clothes are soaked. Esmerelda turns and smiles when she hears me groaning.

“Hey, Sleepy Dwarf!” she says. My hair seems to be sticking up in a million places, and is plastered to my head in others. Plus I smell worse than the river. I edge away from her.

“What time is it?” I ask.

“It’s like nearly nine. You’re a heavy sleeper,” she says. She helps me up. “That was some badass storm, Winthrop. The doc, well, he was thrown around a bit, but he’ll be okay. I think he might not have a fever anymore. He was down there talking and everything.”

“That’s good,” I say.

“The boat,” she continues, “is a little worse for the storm. But Kang here says it’ll be, like, up and running again by midday, isn’t that right, Kang?”

A loud thud comes from the front of the boat, and we all turn. It’s Doctor Seabrook, who has climbed up from the hold. He shuffles forward through the trash and debris on the deck.

“My boat,” he says, his voice faint and airy. “What happened to my boat?”

He looks like the baddies in
Zombie Cannibals
. Two bloodshot eyes stare out at the world. Hair and muttonchops are tangled in a wild tilting halo. Blood has soaked through the gauze Kang tied around his shoulder.

Kang puts up his visor and lowers his torch, cutting off the flame. Arthur’s mouth gapes.

“Doc,” Esmerelda whispers, “are you high? What are you doing out of bed?” It occurs to me that it’s not actually a bed, but a steaming hard metal corner of the hold. The man should be in a bed in a hospital somewhere.

“Kang, what happened?” he says, louder this time. He closes his eyes and reaches for the gunwales, pressing his weight into the railing as tremors pulse through his body. Then he calms and opens his eyes again.

“The boat hit a rock in the storm, Doctor,” I say. “It put a hole in that cooker thing. Kang’s patching it.”

Seabrook’s eyes widen, and they looked wicked red. “You’re
welding
it? Kang, it’ll never hold!” He pushes himself off the rail, loses his balance, and falls on his backside.

Kang drops his torch and helps Doctor up.

“Those welds will never hold, Kang,” Seabrook says. “We have to patch the cooker with steel, don’t you see?” Kang grabs him around the waist and helps him back to the hold. “And where the hell are we?” Seabrook bellows. “Good God, man, don’t you see we’re
exposed
? The Green Police will be all over us in a minute . . .”

Kang guides Doctor back below and redresses his wound. He continues to grumble for a while, but soon falls fast asleep.

we go for cigarettes

Time inches along. I watch the clouds make faces at me. I count the plastic bottles on the shore around the boat and up in the trees. I trace the picture of the cougar face on the patch with my index finger. Kang keeps clanging away at the hemp cooker.

“I need a smoke,” Esmerelda says finally. “Maybe there’s a convenience store or something nearby. You guys game?”

Kang clangs around the hemp cooker and wipes the sweat from his brow with a bandana. He doesn’t seem to be listening.

“What if those guys in black come back?” I say.

“Are you an old lady or a rock star, stubby?” she asks. “I’m talking like five minutes. I’m jonesing.”

Without another word she scrambles over the side. Arthur watches her disappear into the trees. Kang, absorbed in engine parts, pays no attention.

“This is crazy, right?” I say.

Shrugging, Arthur leaps over the side.

I follow.

We weave our way between the trees. Esmerelda walks ahead of Arthur and me.

“What do you think of her, man?” I ask him.

Arthur shrugs and smiles at the bullhorn on his chest.

“Yeah, she’s all right,” I say. “Smokin’ bod. My girl back in Philly is way hotter. Bigger jugs, you know?” I try to quickly piece together an imaginary girl that will impress. “She’s studying to be an acrobat. Can do all kinds of contortionist moves. We’ve got a killer sex life.”

Arthur beams at me.

Making up shit again, eh?
Wimp Winthrop says.
Pathetic.

“What about you, man? Getting any?”

He chuckles and shakes his head.

“Yeah, well wait’ll we get to California. More ass than sits on a toilet seat goes to those Grizzlies shows. Just stick with me.”

Arthur shrugs, still sticking his teeth out in that same stupid grin.

“So what are you going to tell your folks?”

The smile wavers for a second, then comes back full force. He holds his arms out to his sides and shrugs.

“Yeah, mine’ll be wicked pissed,” I say. “But they’re learning not to fuck with me. Sooner or later, you gotta take off the Pampers, cut the cord, you know . . .”

Then Esmerelda whirls on Arthur and presses herself into him. She taps him on the arm. Leaning close, she whispers, “Tag.” She’s rekindling the game we started at the Growing High farm. Arthur, who I bet is hornier than the Primose School band, flushes pink and chases after her.

I try to keep up, but their legs are longer. You might not believe this, people, but I’m beginning to envy Arthur. I mean, the kid is lower on the pecking order than I am. At Primrose, he wouldn’t have lasted five minutes—none of us would have had anything to do with him. But out here in the woods it’s different. The same kid who was bawling like a nancy boy just a couple of days ago has scored us a bunch of ganja, regularly chats with a badass Indian dude, and is now running around the woods with a blond hottie who I’m starting to get the feeling might be more interested in him than me.

I lose sight of them in the trees, but follow the sound of Esmerelda giggling. The mental iPhone is restocked with Grizzlies tunes, so I click on some of the numbers from the
Journeys
album.

That’s when I hear the noise. It starts like a little chuckle, and at first I think it’s Esmerelda giggling. But she’s stopped. Then there’s a humming—the bumblebee buzz of a gasoline engine. It rises up under the sounds of the crickets chirping. I can make out something white through the trees and black figures weaving around. Why did we get off the boat? Why did we get off the boat?

I stumble toward the boat, hot tears smearing all the trees. I yell for Arthur and Esmerelda to follow. My shoulder smashes against a tree, and I fall to the ground. The buzzing noise is getting louder, and a new noise climbs up over top of it—the chattering noise I heard in the woods in Ohio.

It’s the black things again.

Esmerelda’s white legs and browning Keds seesaw past me. “
Run!
” she screams.

Propping myself on an elbow, I look back into the burst of tree limbs—just the empty forest with the light streaming between the boughs. My shoulders ache. The chattering noise grows.

Then, all at once, the woods are streaked with shadows. Animals are everywhere. Small ones, no bigger than my hand, zipping up through the trees, bounding across the grass, swarming at me.

They’re squirrels. Gray squirrels with puffy tails, the same ones I see leaping through the little trees back on Broad Street. They pile on top of one another, and soon a big boiling cloud of squirrels tumbles toward me, closer and closer.

Then two hands grab my shoulders and pick me up, and I’m running blindly behind Arthur back to the boat.

The squirrels follow.

Soon we wade into the water, climb the ladder, and collapse onto the deck. Kang has started the engine, and when I land on the deck next to Arthur, I see why: three white boats have appeared around a bend in the river where we’d crashed into the rock wall. They’re closing in.

I look at the shore. Nothing but bottles and wrappers and junk. The squirrels are gone.

The
Tamzene
crawls along, bug-like, barely churning the water. Kang’s eyes have gone wild. He signs something at Arthur, fingertips darting like gnats.

Arthur writes on his pad: “
The cooker isn’t sealed. We can’t get up to speed
.”

frogs

Evening was their time to shine. When the sun fell from the sky, the male frogs came to the rocky shore to sing. They swelled with air until they might burst, filling like balloons and forcing the air from themselves with a thrum. If they sang well the female frogs would come. Day was a time for keeping submerged, climbing occasionally from the water to catch insects, but mostly waiting for nightfall, when mates were won.

Then came a single, jarring thought, an obliterating whiteness that cut through all desire and instinct. The frogs swam without realizing that they were shoulder to shoulder with other frogs and had collected into a great mass of frogs.

That they were swimming directly into the path of an electric motor.

we get lucky

The white boats get bigger and bigger as the hemp cooker sputters and shakes. Kang turns to face the oncoming boats. He pulls the bowie knife from its scabbard and holds it at his side.

When they’re almost upon us, I hear a grinding noise—like when His Eminence’s gardener runs over one of my lightsabers in the courtyard. Then there’s a deep-throated blast from the center boat as a plume of white smoke lifts from the cabin. The boat shudders. It turns and strikes the boat next to it. The third boat slows to a stop.

Green and white blobs bubble up in the black river. They’re floating frogs—millions of them, many dead and showing their white underbellies. Some are just pieces, severed legs or shredded torsos.

“Dude!” Esmerelda says. “They must have run over, like, a colony of these things.”

She’s right. Evidently the white boats plowed over the top of a giant army of frogs, and the Green Police engines evidently weren’t designed to sail through amphibians.

Kang lowers his knife and watches the boats as they disappear in white smoke.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN