“We’re the sea’s music now, aren’t we, Vadim?”
“This is what I’ve been trying to tell you,” he sobbed. “But you don’t making sense when you speak. It looks like you are taking vacations after all.”
“What about Montreal?” Titus said, elevating his voice, less concerned with his own well-being than a man’s adherence to his word.
“I have job here, you know,” said Vadim. “I had to paint winches. Grease chains. Low work, you must think, Titus, beneath you. But it must be done. And my tugboating friend did not come. It is not all easy for Vadim. He does not get to slumber all day in a soft bed.”
Titus clenched his teeth and once again considered piling up a mound of oats so he could climb out and throttle the man, though now the hatch was even higher. Perhaps Titus was eating his way down.
“But there is another problem,” Vadim said sheepishly. “This man I told you about. The Panamanian. Titus, I told this man about you when I have been drinking. A mistake. I am a talking friend, Titus, my weakness. And now he is going to Visser about you. He said this with his mouth. About how you have stolen your passage and have been eating the cargo. This is not good. He is also a rapist, this man. He boasted to me last night, as though I would applaud?”
“Okay,” said Titus, “get to it.”
“If you don’t deal with him soon, I don’t know if I can come again. Too dangerous for me.”
Titus understood now his position. That he’d rid himself of his desire to die and attained something near peace in the dark hold meant nothing. He would not go unpunished for everything he’d left broken behind him. It seemed fitting now that the price for no longer yearning to cast himself overboard would be to further degrade himself, but he’d already constructed the armored vault in which to put all the vile things he had left to do in his life, and its dragging weight meant there would be no more good days for him, no more comfort or kindness.
“When?” Titus said.
“He is on watch tonight, before me,” said Vadim, his eyes on fire. “I will fetch you when the time is clear.”
Later, a knock came and the hatch opened, and rain fluttered in as Titus heard the slap of feet retreating on the wet deck. Titus had hoarded a large pile of oats that allowed him to grasp the lip of the hatch with two hands and hike himself up.
On the deck, he drew the sweetness of sea air into his body. No stars, only a tin roof of cloud and waves crashing like shunting trains. He removed his work boots and set them beside the hatch, which he closed but did not fasten. He crept in bare feet along the railing in the dark toward the bow of the ship, as rain swept in fizzy sails overhead. He spotted the man: short, but sturdy looking, copper skin like an Indian, smoking, sparing the tiny ember from the spray with a small cave made with his hand. He stood exactly where Titus had weeks before, the morning of the accident, when he nearly plunged himself into Thunder Bay’s harbor, which he’d now left so far behind.
With the sweet air in his lungs and his head clearing, Titus came to the knowledge he could do this man no harm. He’d picked up some Spanish while gambling with sailors laid up in Thunder Bay and was sure he could piece together enough words to inform the Panamanian of Vadim’s plot. Then Titus would throw himself at the mercy of this Visser. Titus had been beaten plenty in his life, and the thought of it didn’t quicken his pulse in the slightest. At worst he’d be thrown overboard.
The Panamanian couldn’t hear Titus when he called, so Titus touched him kindly on the shoulder. The man spun and his eyes cracked open and popped with panic and he started yelling in a guttural tongue that Titus had no acquaintance with. The words came faster the more he spoke, the way an avalanche gathers speed. He was something closer to black, light-skinned, but black. Tranquillo, Titus repeated a few times, until the man clenched his fist over his cigarette with a hiss and swung. Titus half-ducked and took it hard on the ear. They grappled. Perhaps it was his time in the hold, or the lack of oxygen, or his oat diet, but Titus did not find the strength he’d expected. They scuffled for some duration, each trying to upend the other, slipping wildly on the slick deck. When exhaustion took them, they spent some time in a clinch. Each instance the man made to cry out, Titus squeezed his chest and killed his breath. Titus tried every word in every language he knew of to reach him, even making some up, as the man breathed in his ear like a dog, but none of it registered inside him. After a period of rest, the man commenced thrashing in earnest and wailing his fists. Blows landed on Titus’s chin and face and neck. The man was strong and pinned Titus to the rail. Titus grabbed the seat of his rubber pants and desperately hoisted upward. Upended, the man clutched at the air and caught hold of the railing with a leg and an arm on his way over. Clinging there, he started calling in his inscrutable language toward the rear of the ship where the wheelhouse was. People’s names, sounded like, and Titus wondered momentarily if they corresponded to his parents, or friends, or crewmates. Panicked, blood and voices howling in him, Titus struck once at the man’s bulging throat and it yielded and instantly he lost all wherewithal to breathe. He choked like he’d swallowed a box of fishhooks, dangling there, before strength abandoned him and he dropped into the dark roar.
The next day Vadim came to the hatch with a grin. He lowered down a bucket on some twine. In it was cabbage, fried beef, potatoes, aromatic as anything ever put before him. “You have saved me, my friend,” Vadim said.
Titus sat looking at the bucket but did not touch it.
“But I must tell you. Visser is not happy about the losing crewman. He said he was sure-footed. Seasoned. And that he does not believe in falling accidents. So, Titus, they are searching the ship. And it won’t be long before they see the holds.”
“I’ll entomb myself here,” Titus said. Sculpting an old word in the air with his tongue comforted him.
“Don’t be stupid. There is weeks of your shit down here. They’ll find your traces.”
Titus looked beside him. Blood from his nose and face from when the Panamanian had struck him had left clumps in the oats like cat litter. “I knew this would transpire,” he said, unable to believe Vadim couldn’t tell he was already dead.
“Come, Titus. I’ve found you a new place.”
A great weariness came over each of his muscles. “I need to wash,” Titus said with a sudden distaste for his hands, the blood that had been on them.
“No, no, no—” Vadim began.
“Either that or I ring Visser,” Titus interrupted.
Grumbling, Vadim led him to the lockers at the base of the wheelhouse. Titus stripped, set the shower as hot as it would go and kept his head down, water hammering his neck as he hissed every word he’d ever known into the steam. He put his clothes at his feet, letting his own steps and the runoff clean them. He shaved with a razor he found hanging from a screw in the scummy tile. After, he wrung his clothes over the drain and pulled them on wet before returning to the hatch. He lay down, the oats coating him like batter.
Back in the dark, finally clean, Titus turned his soothed mind toward the walks he used to take with her to find the blue and yellow prairie wildflowers that grew all along the tracks that snaked their way east to the elevator. Sown by seeds that the threshers inadvertently swept up along with the grain, the flowers were found all the way down the line in high summer. The thought of this set him weeping.
Vadim returned that evening and helped Titus climb up onto the deck. He threw a line and looped it over a lifeboat hanging from some rigging high above. “They’ve already searched these, so they should be safe. And here,” Vadim said, handing Titus a laundry sack filled with oats and three jars of clear water. “I found some more vessels,” he said quickly.
Titus took the line and shimmied up to the boat. He snapped away the vinyl cover and crawled beneath it. The bench seats of the boat made it so there was nowhere to lie flat, and the wind rattled the craft as though it was airborne. He shivered when night came, piling the oats in the driest corner and wrapping himself in the laundry bag, missing the muffled gloom of the hold, the warmth of his nest like the afterglow of a lover.