Quickly I pulled Squibb’s papers from my waistcoat, unfolded them, then thrust them toward him. “I didn’t mean to be asleep, sir,” I said, maneuvering. “I’m ready now to report for work.”
Cringle frowned irritably down the first page. The other sailors, that blustering, braying gang of tormentors, looked over his shoulder like an infernal chorus and seemed to enjoy the agitation my discovery brought him; they watched him more closely than they watched me, elbowing each other and winking, like bullies having fun at the expense of a new boy — a sissy in short pants — at school. Above us birds veered, then vanished into diaphanous layers of mist high as the mizzenpole. The deck was silent, so quiet I could hear blood hammering in my ears and the hungry gurgle of gastric fluids in my belly. At length Cringle shut his eyes. He crumpled the papers in his fist.
“Josiah Squibb is down below, you bloody impostor!”
“Oh.” My breath stopped. “Odd coincidence, that. Imagine! Two of us with the same na—” He leveled the firelock straight at my forehead, but less to frighten me, I thought, than to make a point with the others. “Sir, my name isn’t Squibb. You’ve guessed that already? Uh, right. It’s Rutherford Calhoun, and I only came aboard to return these papers to—”
“Hold your tongue.” He faced around to the others. “And stop your row, all of you, and get back to work. I can handle this myself.”
Under Cringle’s stare the crew turned back, laughing less at me than at the mate, to their business — belaying sheets and halyards — and Cringle’s bunched shoulders lowered a little. He put away his pistol, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, whispered, “Hoodlums, every one of them,” then shoved me toward Captain Falcon’s cabin. “It’s the Devil, I do believe, that sends us the bloody flux, contrary winds, and rumpots like these!” We passed small pens of chickens and Berkshire pigs the captain kept on board for himself, but as we neared the cabin door my stomach dropped. I felt uneasy in my spine. Sweat began to stream into my clothes. The deck beneath me dipped and rose dizzily, and with that motion my center of gravity was instantly gone. My last meal, too, over the railing, which I ran to and gripped with all my strength as the ship — or so my confused inner ear told me — careened left. “Now, that’s a pretty sight. And you say you’re a sailor, eh? I think you’re a farmer, Calhoun.”
Between heaves, I said, “Illinois!”
A softening and a sort of pity came into Cringle’s voice. He withdrew his handkerchief, handed it to me, then watched as my belly turned inside out, like a shirt cuff. “But you’ll feel a lot worse if the skipper’s in a mood for cobbing. What on earth prompted you to stow away on a ship run by Ebenezer Falcon?”
“Debts,” I said, my eyes still swimming. “A woman. Maybe a jail sentence, or. . ”
Cringle smiled, and from out of his flash of even white teeth there flowered the relaxed, boyish grin, it struck me, of a young Presbyterian minister, or someone who’d grown up with a great deal of wealth, privileges, or personal gifts, and felt guilty about them in the presence of those who hadn’t: a man who’d maybe been a concert pianist at age five, or at twelve entered Harvard, or at fifteen solved some theoretical enigma in physics that had puzzled scientists twice his age, and who never spoke of these things without a touch of endearing humiliation because he hated not to be “regular,” yet who, it was clear, carried a core of aloneness within him that nothing on shore could touch. Cringle had, I was to learn, an almost psychotic total recall of everything he’d read. Had he been a woman — he certainly had a feminine air — he’d be the kind who could do Leibnizian logic or Ptolemaic astronomy but hid the fact in order not to frighten off suitors; or, if a slave, one who could bend spoons with his mind but didn’t so white people wouldn’t get panicky.
“Half the crew’s here for those reasons, or some other social failure on shore,” he laughed. “But I’ll tell you true: Jail’s better. Being on a ship is being in jail with the chance of being drowned to boot.”
“I can’t go back. .”
“None of us can. Come along. Maybe the captain can use someone in the galley. Can you cook?”
“Yes.”
“Liar,” said he. “Doesn’t matter, though. We’ve all gotten used to the taste of maggots in everything.”
At the captain’s door, which had three bullet holes in it, Cringle tried the latch. It was unbolted, but he decided against barging in and rapped instead, and a good thing this was, because from within the cabin, whose curtained windows were pulled shut, I heard the squeaking of mattress springs, then a stifled whimper, and at last a venereal moan so odd in its commingling of pleasure and complaint that I had, of a sudden, the vision of being not aboard ship but instead in a bordello. It made no sense then, those Venusian groans, that gasping yip of orgasmic stings, but soon enough it would. “Has he a woman aboard?” I looked to Cringle for an answer, but the mate wouldn’t look me in the eye; he chewed the inside of his cheek and politely pulled the door shut. “Didn’t I say this was worse than prison?” For another minute we stood waiting, looking at the door, at each other, and finally it opened and a heartbreakingly handsome cabin boy, with curly hair like wood shavings, young but hardly in long pants (and barely in these, for he was pulling up his striped duck pantaloons, tripping on the cuffs), came scrambling out, closing the door behind him, his jerkin unfastened, his face drained of color, and eyes crossed by what he’d been through.
“Good day to you, Mr. Cringle.” He kept his eyes low.
Cringle rubbed his face with one hand, peeking at the boy through his fingers.
“Are you and the captain finished, Tom?”
“Yessir. . I’m sorry, sir, you can go in now.”
The mate forced a smile that must have been harder to lift than a sledgehammer, looking down at the boy as you might a younger brother (or sister) you’d just glimpsed in a stranger’s set of pornographic pictures, pained by his shivering and rubbing his arms and standing bowlegged as if his bum was cemented shut by dried semen, as it probably was. Cringle tousled the boy’s hair, his lips tight, and moved Tom aside. “Tell Squibb”—his voice quivered—“I said he’s to fix you the finest meal he can, Tom.” And then to me: “Of course, you’ll say nothing of this to anyone.”
“Of course,” I said.
“It would not help morale, if the men knew. .”
“I’ve seen nothing,” I said, “but I wonder: Is my silence worth a word in my favor with the captain?”
His fingertips pushed the door inward. “Just go inside, Calhoun.” Ducking my head, I stepped down into a low-studded room, aware of Cringle’s breath and bodily warmth behind me, but of little else, for the cabin of Captain Falcon had the dank, ancient dampness of old ships, or a cave — that, and the clamlike, bacterial odor of tabooed pleasures. The air was denser inside, difficult for my throatpipes to draw. To my left, a small voice, like that of a genie in a jug, said, “Draw the curtains a bit, Mr. Cringle,” and when the mate did so, suddenly raying the room with bright light, a high-post bedstead with valances and knotted with dirty sheets sprang forth in the glare. Now I was rivering sweat. From the ceiling a pyramid-shaped poop lantern with horn windows swung low enough to crack your head, and to the right of that were a washbasin and clawfooted bathtub bolted to the floorboards — perhaps the only other landside luxury in the room. Across from these was a cluttered chart table. Seated at this, with his back to me, a big-shouldered man was barricaded in by maps of the sea and the African bush. On his table lay a gilded, ornamental Bible, a quadrant, chronometer, spyglass, and the log in which I now write (but this months later after mutiny and death, the reporting on which I must put off for a while). He kept to his business, refusing to turn, and said in that shocking voice thin and shrill and strung like catgut, “All right, stand at ease and state yer business.”