“Drunk as the parson’s wife, eh?” McGaffin slapped his leg. “I like that. What say you, Mr. Cringle? Are you in this?”
“I’m in. But if Rutherford is caught. .”
“Aw, he’s a thief,” said McGaffin. “Nobody’ll think nothin’ if he’s caught. It’s his nature to be in places he ain’t supposed to be. Worst come to worst, he’ll get a few stripes, that’s all.”
Cringle’s eyes softened, the most sympathetic I’d seen them in days. Unlike the others, he did not drink, but moved among them with a mug in his hand, so as not to offend, lifting it to his mouth occasionally but never taking a sip. “Can you do it, lad?”
In a narrow room filled with grizzled, desperate sea rovers, all in agreement (and armed), except for Josiah Squibb, standing a little off to one side and behind the others, pulling at his fingers and swinging his head side to side for only me to see — encircled by conspirators such as these with the nerve tips of my index finger throbbing where I’d nervously torn off a nail, I could only do as they wished and say, “ ’Tis done.”
Thus things stood when the meeting ended. Each sailor cut a notch in his thumb, dripped blood into McGaffin’s mug, and drank from this, sealing the bond. Did I sip from this cup? Aye. Once they were gone, their lips and teeth stained crimson, Squibb and I set to fixing mess. We worked in silence. One thing I liked about the cook was that he knew when to shut up even when he was mubblefubbled and dying to talk. Occasionally, I felt his eyes, like fishhooks, try to catch mine as we squeezed past one another in the narrow galley, but he kept his thoughts untongued. Personally, I was too pitchkettled to trust my own speech. My eyes began to sting and steam a little; I wiped a sleeve across them, and kept my back toward Squibb, more than a little ashamed for not standing my ground earlier. But here, let it be said, that in waters strange as these, where any allegiance looked misplaced, I could no longer find my loyalties. All bonds, landside or on ships, between masters and mates, women and men, it struck me, were a lie forged briefly in the name of convenience and just as quickly broken when they no longer served one’s interests. But what were my interests? No question that since my manumission I’d brought a world of grief on myself but, hang it, I wished like hell I had someone to blame — my parents, the Jackson administration, or white people in general — for this new tangle of predicaments.
“Blame for what?” Squibb stared at me.
“Nothing. I was just thinking out loud.”
“Oh.”
He was very quiet, was Squibb. He finished carefully arranging a plate of fresh prawns, earthapples, and kale he’d bought special for Captain Falcon in Bangalang. No French chef could have better composed the meal to seduce a hungry man’s eye and mind. To my way of thinking, that’s pretty much what you paid for in fancy-dress New Orleans restaurants anyway: a skimpy meal that left you famished hours later but laid out oh so beautifully, as Tintoretto might prepare a still life in eye-catching colors and forms. Added to that, Falcon insisted on the best silver and a freshly lighted candle with his supper. The funny thing was that while he demanded, like the rich, meals served in ever more inventive aesthetic configurations that took the poor steward hours to prepare, the skipper, after a second of appreciation, approached the act of eating like a task, falling to it with silent, single-minded determination, seldom looking up from the table, glopping it down with efficient, steady forklifts that favored a farmer baling hay. In a trice he was finished, sprang up from the table, throwing down his soiled napkin, and was off to see to some shipboard chore.
“Yuh wanna carry this fish ‘n’ tayters over to him?” Squibb wiped his fingers down the front of his apron. “If yuh’re in with them others now, I guess bringin’ his chow’d give yuh a chance to look his cabin over a little. Better wipe that stain off yuh mouth first.”
I took Falcon’s meal and climbed through the hatchway, a clean napkin draped over my forearm. At his door, feeling like a waiter, I rapped three times on wood with my knuckles, the keel and bottom planks beneath me swaying on waves pulsing to the pull of the moon. I heard chair legs scrape on wood. Latches were thrown, a key turned in the lock, and when the door whipped open the Old Man stood before me naked except for his gunbelt and steel-toed boots. Instinctively, I swung my head away and took a step backward.
“Sorry, sir!”
“Don’t stand there, man.” He sniffed at his food. “Bring it in.”
I stayed in the doorway as he went, boat-necked and tattooed over half his body, back to his chart table, his quill, and his logbook. There was meat on this man. It dawned on me, as I waited outside, watching his bare, freckled shoulders hunched over whatever he was writing, that he threw off his habiliments and wrote naked as the newborn for purely literary reasons. I had known a poet in New Orleans who told me he did the same. Rumor had it that Benjamin Franklin was a nudist too. Something to do with inspiration and freeing themselves up. That sort of thing. Naturally, I understood nothing about these matters; I only knew that I had no interest in seeing an empire builder in the raw, and so I stayed in the doorway. Falcon saw my bewilderment, growled something under his breath, a barely audible oath about philistines; then he opened a bureau with swinging brass handles and lifted out a Tyrian robe of Chinese design. He fumbled into it, rolled the sleeves to his elbows, then came tripping back to me.
“Well, now will you come in?” His voice was crisp. “Close and lock the door as you do, Mr. Calhoun.”
I did as he bade me. “I’ve brought your dinner.”
“And a report, I hope.” He uncovered the food I set on his chart table beside a most curious glass container I’d not noticed before. Inside it was a 45-caliber ball flattened on one side. Falcon spread the napkin over his knees, used his fingertips to tweeze a strand of hair off a potato, and handed his fork to me.
“You first, Mr. Calhoun.”
“You want me to eat some?”
“Eat a little of everythin’, if you will.”
Actually, I was happy to oblige. I hurried from one item to another, then back again, trying to stuff myself before the skipper snatched the fork from me and said, “At ease.” He squinted at me for several moments to make sure I didn’t gag or change color or collapse face down on the floor, at last seemed satisfied and sat back, his head bent in prayer, then poured himself coffee. At some time in his childhood, I suspected, he’d learned to drink hot coffee the same way he ate soup, with a spoon, slurping up the black stuff like broth. So he did now; his father’s habit, most likely. In between steaming spoonfuls he asked:
“D’you think I’m overly cautious?”
“Well — a wee bit, yes.”
“I gather you trust, even like, other people, don’t you?”
I was a little startled by his question. Was he joking? I laughed a second too late. “Yes, I do, sir. Don’t you?”
“Not a bit. Never have. I suppose they’ve never been real to me. Only I’m real to me. Even you’re not real to me, Mr. Calhoun, but I think you like me a little, so I like you too.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Falcon broke off a hunch of biscuit. “Your report, laddie.”
Please don’t think poorly of me if I confess that during the next half hour I unbosomed myself. I withheld nothing. Did I lack liver? Touching my side I assured myself this organ was there. Perhaps I simply needed to talk. Perhaps I was, at heart, a two-faced coward as bad as my brother when it came to betraying rebellious slaves to Master Chandler. (I’ll tell of this treachery in my own good time.) However it may be, I outlined the mutineers’ plan to deep-six him, citing each rebel by name, and described the central role they had assigned me in the takeover, the whole account spilling from me in fits and starts, for I feared Falcon’s Jovian wrath more than theirs. More than once, his rages had sent men climbing to the crow’s-nest for safety, and he’d turn to one of his officers, chuckling, “They think I’m loony.” I told everything, talking louder toward the end because the ship’s dogs began a howling brangle outside louder than before, belike timber wolves or wild coyotes. When, finished, I looked up, Falcon was smiling and picking his teeth with his thumbnail.