We Are All Crew (5 page)

He looked up, waiting for the V to pass. He hated boats; they left trails of black water in their wakes. Black water made it hard to breathe. He supposed the boat was another device of the two-legged creatures, and he long ago learned not to truck with their kind.

He was a strong fish; he had learned to swim to the bottom when a V cut the water above. Some of the older trout had simply given up. The river had changed, they said. It was too shallow. The food was gone. The water had soured and could no longer be breathed.

The time of the trout, they said, was gone.

But this trout believed the other talk. There were those who said the time of the two-legged beasts was at hand, that the world above was as bleak a wasteland as the world below. So he swam deep, fought for air, and waited.

The V passed overhead. The trout swam on. Its gills detected the clearness of the water—whatever had passed seemed not to sour it.

Strange
, the fish thought.

After some time, a new sound sent him below again. As he watched, three more Vs skimmed white across the surface, following the first one. Soon he found himself drowning in the black water from their wakes.

i think of his eminence

“My dad’s going to kill me,” I hear myself say at last—and there it is, people, the thought I’ve been dreading because with it comes all the other thoughts that tag along with His Eminence.

I am a disappointment. A scrawny runt. I’m not the kid he wants. By the time he was my age, His Eminence was a jock. Five foot five, I’ve read on his football roster. I’ve seen the pictures: the old football uniform, hair that didn’t need product, and a killer smile, even at fourteen. I’ve often searched for his face in the mirror, but His Eminence is a DNA cul-de-sac. The freakishly slender nose? Not too good on my melon head. The girlish arch to the eyebrows? Not too cute when you’ve got little girl arms to match.

One time, back when he was a kid, he and some college buddies ripped off a dean’s car and drove all the way to California and back. His Eminence already had publicspeak working for him in those days, and it took some fancy maneuvering, but he got out of it without a blemish to his good name.

He’d hoped I’d be like him, but Wimp Winthrop had too big a grip on me. I could already see the disappointment in his eyes when I pleaded with him not to make me go to camp. I stood in his office beneath the Bitchin’ Poster—my favorite thing he owned. I’d admired it for as long as I could remember: a black metal frame with the snarling, profiled face of a cougar in the center, its fangs exposed beneath bloodshot eyes. The letter C cupped the cougar’s head from the left side of its face. The cougar appeared to be spitting at a large letter S on the right side of the frame. Circling it are the words,
Duty to God, Country, and Species
. I don’t know what the C and the S stand for; His Eminence never bothered to explain.

“You’re going,” he said. “End of story.”
You’re pale. You’re girly. All you do is sit inside. How could you be my son?

I’ve never openly defied him before, though I’m sure being a Paste Eater probably cheeses him off. This one might mean military school, but you never know. I’d be lying, people, if I said I don’t sort of hope that maybe he’ll pick me up when this is all said and done and that disapproving look of his might actually go away because the little runt might not be such a wimp after all.

The Allwyn pisses along, and so do we on its grimy, stinking water. It twists, squawks, and chatters over the rocks the bald guy steers us around. It sighs when it gets wider and deeper.

The sun is nearly straight overhead when the Allwyn finally stretches out its banks on both sides and dumps into a big lake. The bald sad sack sticks to the cabin, leaning on the steering wheel and staring out the mosquito gut–speckled windshield. Kang joins him. Up until the Allwyn took this breather, he’d stood in the bow watching for rocks.

It’s summer, all right, hot as a mofo and not even noon, although there’s a mountain range of storm clouds leaning on the trees. Gnats, mosquitoes, and dragonflies have been buzzing all day, but here, where the water has slowed, their swarms violate all the holes in your head and hum in your ears.

And that’s what I first think the other boats are: a buzzing dragonfly or a horsefly or a gnat humming in my ears. But when I see Kang’s face go sour as he stands and walks out of the cabin, I hear their engines.

Three identical white yachts are humming along behind us. His Eminence would drool over them. Their white paint reflects the sun, the rails are spit polished, and their drivers are probably nice and cool and showered behind the tinted windows that seal the cabins.

All three run parallel to one another, lazily droning along. Actually, no—they seem to be coming up on our asses, plowing white water trails, though they are still probably a football field away. I’m not sure exactly where they came from—the part of the river we’d been in before the Allwyn turned to lake was too narrow for a yacht. The town the bald guy mentioned must be nearby, which means civilization. Upscale civilization, from the looks of these boats. I can already feel the warm hotel shower, water washing off the river slime, and me all clean and mapping out the quickest route to California.

“Check it out, Arthur,” I say.

But when I turn back to the deck, Kang is clearly the one to watch.He still isn’t laughing or crying, but the sun he painted on his chest bends at right angles atop his tense muscles. His moccasins are planted parallel the deck center, and his eyebrows are caving the rest of his face in. He shoots the white boats a stare that would make me want to change course if I was one of them.

“Put them below,” Baldy says. I jump. He’s stepped in behind me so that he and Kang have me sandwiched. The wrinkles around his eyes and mouth gather before he turns and goes back to the cabin. When he looks over his shoulder, his face has gone red as a Coke can.

“Now, Kang, goddamn it!” he yells—spraying it, not saying it.

Evidently Arthur and I are the stuff Baldy wants below—the Indian stoops and puts Arthur over his shoulder, then grabs me by the wrist. He takes us to the opposite side of the cabin, where a retractable stairway leads down to blackness. Baldy puts on a head of steam—I can tell because the the trees are now whirring past.

Kang marches us down the steps and leaves us there, retracting the stairway and closing the hatch without turning on the light.

It’s hot and close. The ammonia smell of cleaning solution wafts through the room. Beneath my Timberlands is a hard metal floor, and I guess beneath that is the pontoon dial I saw before coming aboard. Up above, Baldy is hauling ass—I can feel the water chopping against the hull.

I’m mad scared. It was only two years ago that I threw out the Power Rangers nightlight the Moms had plugged in next to my dresser because it was too pussy, but the dark still isn’t my bitch. Every noise emitted from the two men scraping around overhead makes me strain more desperately into the darkness, but it’s black as a coffin. I am going to bawl for sure.

Then the explosions start.

I have this majorly cool DVD called
Hell’s Boat
, which is about this submarine during World War II. The Germans dump barrels full of explosives into the sea, which go off all over the place—wicked close to the submarine. You see it shimmy and shake, and the crew members just get thrown ass over ears. On surround sound in the living room it practically shakes the whole house down, the Moms always says.

Whatever’s exploding around the
Tamzene
is like that, only louder—like somebody going up to the parapet that overlooks the courtyard at the Primrose School and shoving shelves full of hardcovers from the library over the edge. Giant fists punch the water next to the boat. I hear the bald guy and Kang running around yelling.

This is it, I’m going to die
, I can’t help thinking.

Every time it booms, I lose my balance, smack my head, and see those white fountains that flow behind your eyelids when you hit your head in the dark.

I see all kinds of things in the dark. I see the foyer in my house. I’m a kid. I look through the arms of potted plants and pretend they’re a jungle. I can stand up straight and still hide. The Moms chases me on her hands and knees. She pretends she’s a hippo. I slip and fall, but it doesn’t hurt, and the Moms leaps on me like an animal attacking. Instead of ripping my flesh, she attacks me with kisses, and our giggles echo through the marble hall.

Then, through all the banging and shouting and crashing water, I hear a voice.

It is a short distance behind us, electronic and piped through a public address system: “
Crew of the
Tamzene
. Crew of the
Tamzene
. Cut your engines, drop anchor, and prepare to be boarded. If you do not comply we will fire. Repeat: cut your engines . . .”

The cops!

A Paste Eater’s rep as being anti-society
requires
me to loathe five-oh. And of course the cops would
definitely
call our parents and totally rub out our trip to California.
Senator Mortimer Brubaker’s son was arrested with a pair of drug dealers in central PA
, the cable channels would tease.

Well, I’d be lying, people . . . and I hate myself for saying this . . . but I’m sort of relieved. The cops are going to off a couple of drug dealers. Lying down here in the dark with a bunch of people I don’t know and explosions going off, I felt pretty damn warm toward cops. Fuck California, and fuck the Grizzlies. We’re saved. In a few minutes we’ll probably be at police headquarters. “We got lost, and Arthur hurt his leg, and these guys offered us a ride,” I’ll say. His Eminence will send somebody to pick me up. Then he’ll glower at me for a while, but I’ll still be back in Philly in time for
Sniper Dude X.
I might get to see a real-time shoot-out once Baldy and Indian realize it’s pointless to try outrunning the cops’ cool boats.

But the
Tamzene
doesn’t slow down. As a matter of fact, it churns even faster. And the electronic voice from the cop yachts gives up pleading.

More explosions.

CHAPTER FOUR

the heavens

Twisting, supercooled shapes of vapor curled in absolute freedom until the word came to be.

The world was a thought from an unseen mind, and when it appeared, the undulating parabolas, parallelograms, and spirals stopped and took their necessary forms.

Warm air rose. Ice crystals collided with crackling blue light.

Then the rain began
.

the 
tamzene
gets hit by a storm

I’ve taken bullets at point-blank range before.

Once, on the streets of LA in broad daylight, some Chicano dude in flannel glocked me in the front of the skull. I’ve been riddled with machine-gun fire in a castle in Bavaria, whacked by lightsabers about a million times, and had some really big cats pummel my head with lead pipes over and over again. Not a big deal. In
Castle Wolfenstein
, that just means finding a couple of medical bags and running over them, and then you’re all good again.

But there’s nothing like that down here in the hold. We’ll get offed, and that’ll be that. One of the explosions will smash the hull, it’ll fill with water, and Arthur and I will drown.

I want to tell him it’s okay that he doesn’t have style or friends or anything because he had the balls to ditch camp and try to get to California, which makes him all right in my book. But the combined roar of the water and the engine is too loud. Since it’s pitch-black and we’ve been thrown around so much, I don’t know how Arthur’s doing. I hear him breathing—wheezing, actually—every time the boat lurches.

Soon I hear another noise on top of the explosions and shouts. It starts softly—a faint tapping against the hull that you can barely hear over the engine—but soon gets louder. It hisses.

I also hear a new explosion. It’s different from whatever the cops are shooting at our boat. This one is distant, a low rumble, as if another boat might be being fired upon in another river somewhere nearby. Then it gets louder, like dozens of rifles firing at once. These explosions are big, but they don’t shake the boat. Still, the
Tamzene
begins to pitch and sway as if a giant is using it as a cat toy.

The stairway descends again, the bald man with it. Above him, sickly white flashes fall down the stairs.

“We need your help,” he says. Now he’s wearing a brimmed rain hat and a slicker.

On deck, the sky has turned the color of the Grizzlies’
Bruiser
album, a bloody purple. Lightning crackles. Sheets of rain soak me, and the wind nearly hurls me from the deck. The monster trees are gone. Somehow, we’ve wound up in the center of a lake. Big swells pick us up, then waves slap us back down.

The white yachts, the five-oh, are gone.

Inside the cabin, Kang, also sealed in a black slicker and rain hat, has turned on a light. He grips the wheel.