October Light (14 page)

Outside the door and upwards a little, a voice said, “Yes, it's all unloaded. Let's clear out.”

Mr. Nit blanched. Quickly he said, “We'll kill ourselves together! We'll make a pact!”

Peter Wagner frowned. “How come you people had marijuana on this boat?”

Mr. Nit made a fast swipe at his forehead with his sweater sleeve, then again clasped his hands around the jackknife, holding it in front of his belly now, ready for the plunge. “You do it on the eels,” he hissed. “I'll use the knife. One … two …”

But Peter Wagner turned away a little, eyeing Mr. Nit intently. “You want me dead.” And now it came to him. “They told you to kill me, that's why you're so nervous.” He thought about it and saw it was true. Mr. Nit was shaking. Peter Wagner said, “Because of the marijuana, that's it? You're smugglers, and if you let me off this tub—” He moved a step toward Mr. Nit, smiling at last. He understood it all.

“You
see?”
Mr. Nit said, throwing his arms out and backing up a step. “You see how ridiculous the whole thing is? One moment you want to drown yourself, and the next moment you think someone's trying to kill you and you want to bash their brains in! That's humanity! Idiots! Fart-heads! We're supposed to be the idealists, vectors for all the world, us Americans—you and me. Where are our ideals? We live for nothing, not even filthy materialism. What true materialist would settle for a McDonald's hamburger? We're filth, dead garbage and creators of garbage! For the love of God, can
no
one rise above it?”

Peter Wagner stopped advancing on Nit and frowned. Mr. Nit had a point. He had long ago given up any hope of improving himself, much less the whole grisly race. He said, stalling, “You should see the kind of life I lead.” His face puckered, and Mr. Nit's face mirrored it. “Awful,” Peter Wagner said, and he felt again how serene it would be to be dead—physically, no longer just spiritually dead. There were certain women to whom he had made certain promises, not in so many words; there were certain bills he had allowed to mount up; above all, there were certain dull mechanisms he had observed in himself, impossible for him, at his age, to change. There was, incidentally, the matter of his sister Clara.

Mr. Nit nodded eagerly, eyes slanting downward, filled with grief. “All our glorious civilization is like this leaky ship, Mr. Wagner! Cargo of artificial joy, five-cent oblivion, now emptied, and for guidance, only a sea-sick, half-cracked landlubber Captain that can't tell which way's larbard.”

“Larbard?” Peter Wagner said.

Mr. Nit looked embarrassed. “Whatever that may be.” He explained in haste, “Actually, none of us knows much in the nautical line. We're better with airplanes.”

Someone was coming below now. He could hear the creak of wood and a heavy man's breathing. Mr. Nit became urgent. “I'll tell you the truth. The Captain may not be too happy with me if he walks in and finds you alive and well. You see, it's awkward, you see. You
know
now. About our business, that is. And even if you didn't we couldn't let you leave the ship. Somebody'd ask you how come you didn't drown, and sooner or later they'd turn up the
Indomitable,
and they'd come visit us, to ask questions, say, or give us medals or something, and maybe one of those officials would have a nose on him, and he'd get a little whiff of the
fish
we carry, if you see what I mean—find us out by blind accident, the way human beings do everything, and poof!, whole thing up in smoke.”

Peter Wagner nodded.

“In other words, I've been asked by the Captain … It's not the kind of work I like—a scientist, you know, and a family man. But it's a living, you see. When your Captain says he wants X done, if you want to keep your job you do
X.
I don't mean I'm a murderer. Heaven forbid!” He threw his hands up, shocked at the idea. “I just thought, you see, if what you really wanted—that is, if after considered thought you went up there on the bridge tonight, if you follow me …”

Peter Wagner looked down, considering the eels.

“My hope was, actually, that you'd wake up, still half-unconscious, and get up and start to take a step …”

He understood, now, the tied feet. If all had gone well he'd have gotten up and pitched into the eels. He wouldn't have known what hit him. The whole thing was queerly touching. Nit was odd, certainly odd, but he had a devious humanity about him. Most people did, when you really got to know them. That, in a way, was what made the whole thing so depressing. But Peter Wagner had no time to think that through. Mr. Nit had been talking faster and faster, hands fluttering like birds, now to the sides, now back to each other to make knuckles pop. Mr. Nit was scared. Because of the Captain, of course.
Poor devil,
Peter Wagner thought. He wondered about Mr. Nit's family, but there was no time to dwell on that either.

“So if you wanted to save us a lot of trouble,” Mr. Nit was saying, his eyes imploring … “If you cared to be, for one brief moment in your life, a real American, a servant of others in the highest sense …”

The key turned in the lock and the door creaked open. Peter Wagner glanced at the eels, but he couldn't do it, not just like that, without even one good deep breath. And so it was too late. The old man stood peering in, incredulous, outraged, leaning fiercely on his cane as if to crush it. He came slowly, unsteadily into the room, and looked from Peter Wagner to Mr. Nit. Peter Wagner backed toward the eels.

“What's this?” the old man croaked.

“Nothing, sir,” Mr. Nit said.

The Captain looked back at Peter Wagner.

And then the other two were there—the girl, Jane, and the muscular man, kindly looking, exceedingly distressed. He saw at once that those two had not been in on the Captain's scheme. They could save him, and would; he had no doubt of that, if he wanted to be saved. But looking at the girl, with her fine square jaw, her cowgirl stance, her comic-book blue eyes and granny glasses, he decided, with sudden vehemence, on the eels.

The Captain watched him with eyes like fires at the city dump.

He would do it. They could toss him like a burnt potato chip into the sea.

Hand over heart, eyes raised toward heaven, Peter Wagner said, “Farewell, cruel world! Another poor sailor goes down to Davy Jones.”

“You're a sailor?” the Captain said, screwing up his eyes.

“I was Merchant Marine.”

All four of them dived on him at once, and though he threw his arms with all his might, he could not quite get his hands on the nearest of the eels.

~ ~ ~

6

PETER WAGNER'S VISION

“God bless you, sailor!” the Captain bellowed, pounding him somewhat violently on the back.

Sally looked up, smelling cooking. Lunchtime already? She listened to her brother clumping around the kitchen, the cat meowing at his heels. After a moment she put her novel on the table and got up, slipped her feet into her slippers, and made her way up the attic stairs for three apples. She put the apples on the table beside the book, used the bedpan and tucked it away out of sight, then went over to the door and pressed her ear against it. James was whistling as he'd done when he went out to chores this morning. She scowled. “We shall see what we shall see,” she said aloud, squinting fiercely, half crooning it, sing-song. She smiled, distracted by her witch imitation, thinking of her friend Ruth Thomas crooning impishly-wicked poetry to children at the library. She had a wonderfully expressive face. She could do idiot looks, greedy looks, pompous looks—she could make her face do almost anything. Her eyes seemed to slant, and you'd almost have sworn that her dog-teeth grew longer when she recited the wolf poem.

The Wolf is a very good watchdog, it's true;

The only trouble is,

He considers all he protects, and you too,

His.

Ruth and her husband Ed had a cabin—more like a hunting lodge—in the mountains above East Arlington. Ed was one of those well-off farmers who could get away when he liked. Often she and Horace, and sometimes Estelle and Ferris Parks, had driven up there for a day or two. In the evening sometimes they would sing. Ed Thomas had a wonderful voice, of course; he was one of those Welshmen who would sing all day on his farm tractor, sing while he was milking or bathing in the tub, sing harmony with Ruth as they drove along the road. He was in church “every time they left the door unlocked,” Ruth liked to say—she was a great joker—“thumbing through the hymnal and tuning up his throat.” Estelle's tall, handsome husband Ferris had a bass voice, thin compared to Ed's but a pleasure to listen to, all the same. Horace's voice was ordinary. She smiled. The cabin had no electricity. The Thomases had put up large Japanese lanterns, and they had candles, of course. They would all sit on the full-width porch in front on a cool summer evening, the dark, shallow river driving past them, rattling—it had always been a river just jumping with fish—and she and Horace would hold hands, as would Ferris and Estelle, and Ed Thomas would talk of the weather or of things he'd seen. She'd never known anyone like him for talking of the weather. It was like poetry. He would speak of otters playing in the river—otters as big as large dogs, he said—or he'd describe precisely how locking time came, here in the woods, or he'd speak of the past. He told of the British spy who painted murals, over near Marlboro village, and of the pig-iron days in Shaftsbury and halfway down Prospect. They would sit hushed, entranced, and once while Ed talked she had been aware that Ferris Parks was looking at her. She'd been a beauty in those days. Stood out in a crowd. Aware of his watching her, she'd smiled just a little, pretending she still listened, and she'd slipped off her shoes, and crossed her legs, moving one stockinged foot rhythmically, and she'd let tall, quiet Ferris Parks think whatever he might please.

She put the apple to her mouth, lined up her dentures, and bit. Juice sprayed. Carefully chewing, she set the apple down and climbed back into bed. She pulled up the blankets and took up her book again. “Now where were we?” she said, and adjusted her glasses a little. Into her mind came an image of Mr. Nit, in his black cap and black sweater, talking of atheism and accidents. She saw that she was picturing him as her Ginny's husband, Lewis Hicks, and it made her smile. And who was Peter Wagner? Sally couldn't say yet, except that he was tall, with beautiful, sad eyes, and blondish.

6

PETER WAGNER'S VISION

“God bless you, sailor!” the Captain bellowed, pounding him somewhat violently on the back. And then, apparently to those around him: “He's alive. Just a bump on the nose where he met with the floor, ha ha!” They laughed, as filled with joy as the risen saints.

Peter Wagner felt spray and headway wind. They'd brought him up on deck to revive him.

“If we only had some whiskey to pour on his face,” the girl said.

“There's cold coffee in the galley,” Mr. Nit said.

“Good!” the Captain said. “Get it!”

Hastily, Peter Wagner opened his eyes and got up on his elbows. They were buried in fog, the engines running Full Ahead and nobody up in the wheelhouse.

“He's coming around,” Mr. Goodman said, leaning down, hands on knees to look at Peter Wagner.

Peter Wagner groaned and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. It came away bloody. He instinctively tensed himself to fight, but caught himself.

“That was a nasty fall, sailor,” the Captain said. “Here, smoke this.” He reached down his pipe.

Peter Wagner sniffed, winced back like a cat, then reconsidered. It was pot. He took a puff. A more than physical calefaction spread through his broiling chest and head, and the contrasting chill of the breeze and fog made him shudder. All four of them saw it, watching him like sea-hawks. “He's cold,” “He's shivering,” “Get him inside,” their voices all said at once. Before he could avoid them, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Nit had his shoulders and legs and were carrying him up onto the bridge. He was too tired to resist. He let his arms drag, and puffed in and out, in and out, on the pipe. The violence in his heart evaporated.

Then he was in a dim room—the Captain's cabin. There was a flag on the wall, the red and blue slightly faded.

“Welcome aboard, sailor,” the Captain said heartily. The others echoed it, and they slapped Peter Wagner's shoulders so cheerfully that he would have fallen down if they'd given him room to. “Sit here,” the Captain said, and they forced him to a chair. Now they all had pipes. Blue smoke rose around him, thicker than the fog out on deck.

“This is Mr. Goodman,” Mr. Nit said. “Mr. Goodman's who saved your life.”

Mr. Goodman beamed, childlike, and his pipe-charge burned bright red.

“We're like a family, here on the
Indomitable,”
the Captain said.

“We have our little disagreements, of course,” Mr. Goodman said quickly, earnestly, as if it were very important that things be kept straight.

The Captain laughed like an alligator and Jane patted Mr. Goodman's musclebound cheek.

“We're like a society in small,” the Captain said, growing more philosophical, leaning back in the chair Mr. Nit had produced. A foghorn boomed, dangerously close. No one but Peter Wagner seemed to notice. The Captain appeared to be far away, almost invisible in the smoke. It was excellent pot, quick-grabbing.

“Mr. Nit represents technology.” The Captain chuckled, delighted with himself, then pointed with his pipe to the smoky shadow of Mr. Goodman. “Mr. Goodman here is our moral guardian, as his name implies. The clergyman, the humanist, in his small way the artist.”