Louis held a hand to his face and found it came away sticky. Blood was trickling out of one of his eyes and the other didn’t like to open. Suddenly he felt tired, a terribly heavy tiredness. I could fall asleep right here, he thought. His own square face surprised him in the water below the barge; he had at some point pitched forward on the railing. His reflection blinked up at him, as if the boy below was trying to remember how they knew each other. The otters, he noticed, had vanished.
“Gideon needs a hospital!” Hector screamed. “He’s killed, he’s killed!”
Apparently Hector had forgotten the usual chronology of death and medicine as it worked on the mainland, Louis thought grimly — if Gid was killed then it was late now for the hospital. It was almost impossible to push through the wall of steam, and when he finally located the door to the engine room Louis found the scalded body of Gideon Tom. Gid was lying on the floor with his right hand wrapped around his throat. Dead, Louis thought — the steam from the exploded boiler and the still-burning fire must have seared his eyes and lungs. But then as Louis watched the hand began to move, massaging Gid’s black skin. His eye opened like a blue crack of sky and his other hand pushed flat against the metal wall — and then, impossibly, he was standing up, staring abstractedly at Louis, half his face a sputtering blank. His mouth was moving but no words came. His jaw made convulsive chewing motions, and above this his right eye regarded the deck incuriously, full of a blue ancient calm. The Mariner, Louis thought — this line bubbled up to him from some long-forgotten event, a poetry recitation that the youngest Auschenbliss had given at a church assembly many winters ago. The bright-eyed Mariner …
Somehow Gid had gotten upright and was now lurching toward them, trying to retch up smoke. This is a bad miracle, Louis thought as he watched Gid trying to move. Go to him! — but Louis was frozen, staring. Gideon took a step toward Louis and then said, with a grievous eloquence, “I believe my lungs are all burnt up, Louie. I do believe …,” before crumpling.
“A hos-pee-tal! A—”
“Goddamn you, Heck, shut up,” Louis said with the first true viciousness of his life. “Hos-pee-tal” sounded like an imbecile’s taunt. What place could they take Gid to? There were no places here. That was the point of the crew’s continued presence, that’s what they’d all been hired by the Modern Land Company to accomplish: to turn this morass into a real place. The swamp was a waste and men had built the machines to fix it.
Something was happening down below. The whole deck had begun to vibrate. Elsewhere the other cranemen were racing around, hauling water to put out the small fires that had spread now to the houseboat. Flames licked at the bleached planks of the cook shack. The smell of burning metal stung Louis’s lungs, throat. Lights rocketed up in the deep swamp like a July fireworks show, and then every bulb burned out at once — the governor belt on the steam engine must have broken, Louis thought, letting the engine run wild and burning out all the lights. This would be an interesting problem come nighttime, assuming everybody calmed down sufficiently to make repairs. The cattails hushed around the dredge, shushing each other and brushing close to the ship like alien observers. That’s what Louis remembered, the purple sky and the grasses winding upward — the world felt as though it were a bubble curving in on itself.
“Pop, pop,” Louis mumbled. Trees stood wide-armed in the river. He felt as though his thoughts were drifting loose from him and popping on the skeletal branches. Something or someone came crashing down onto the work deck on the stern of the dredge and Louis didn’t turn to look. The blood on his hands had become the blood in his brown hair, he noticed, the blood on his neck, on his dungaree jacket. Hector came to tell him that the backing drum was reeling in its cable; Hector’s scream had dropped into his shoes and now he was staring at Louis with a goggle-eyed, just-awakened look. He pointed at the engine room, where two coal lumps — two feet, Louis realized, Gideon’s boots — were sticking out. His legs were limp, and the soles of his shoes flopped outward from the heel in a heart shape. From the waist down he looked like a man relaxing on deck.
“Take his shoes off,” Louis said. “Please, goddamnit, just somebody take them off …,” but the other men stared at him and moved to give the flailing Louis space, as if afraid to get contaminated by his raving. Several of the crew had gathered now. Nobody knew what had caused the accident — corrosion, the captain speculated. He’d seen a two-inch rent in the boiler head. “It was Gid, it was Gid’s fault!” Hector said, then made the sign of the cross as if in apology to Gideon. “May he rest in peace,” he mumbled, staring down at Gid’s shoe soles.
As the men stood huddled on the starboard side of the barge, a now-familiar shape began to populate the sky: buzzards appeared and dotted the watery horizon in twos and threes, dozens more behind these. They moved so swiftly they looked like pure holes advancing through the air, a snowfall of inky holes. Talons began to hail down on Gid. The first batch dove and took Gid’s hat, tore at the buttoned collar of his shirt. Hector shot wildly at them and a bullet grazed the captain. “Put the gun away,” the cap screamed. “You’re liable to kill somebody …”
Everyone was watching the buzzards. These buzzards were nothing like the red-headed turkey vultures they’d been seeing since Long Glade; these were huge birds, black and wattled, and with their wings folded they made Louis think of the funeral umbrellas dripping rain along the stone walls of the St. Agnes Church in Clarinda. Several of them formed a heaving circle around Gid; within moments one had flown off with his cigarettes and another had torn his shirtsleeve loose from the elbow. Two buzzards worked industriously to tug the black shoe off his foot. Louis couldn’t move or think: his mind was helium light. The taste of screws and pennies pumped into his mouth until Louis felt sick with it. Around him the cranemen were hollering Fire! at a pitch that canopied the dredge.
What rolled through Louis’s mind were like the shells of thoughts, a series of O!s, round and empty, like the discarded rinds of screams. A fine tooth of purplish glass marked the spot on the deck where Gid’s eyeglasses had been and Louis got down on his knees to retrieve it; when he felt a prickling on his neck, he looked up.
In a scene that seemed as plausible and horrifying as Louis’s worst dreams, the birds descended on Gideon Tom and hooked the prongs of their talons into his skin; perhaps a dozen of them lifted him into the sky. Gid’s body shrank into the cloudless expanse. The sky that day was a bright sapphire, better weather than they’d had in weeks; for a long time, the men could still see the shrinking pinpoint of Gid’s black head. It was the only part of Gid that was not held by talons, and it lolled below his shoulders as if Gid were trying to work out a bad crick in his neck.
A strangled quiet came over the men after that. It felt like hours before anybody moved.
“You boys ever seen birds do anything like that?” Hector asked, close to sunset. His voice was a child’s squeak, and Louis thought there was real bravery in the act of speech. Louis’s own throat was a desert and he couldn’t have gotten a word out for one million dollars. No, Louis thought, you saw a thing like that and you went deep inward, you didn’t want to make a single ripple in the air.
“Never,” the launchman said behind him. “Never seen a bird behave that way.” His tone was mild and genial, as though he were discussing unseasonably cold weather, or food with a peculiar taste. Hector, in his panic, didn’t seem to hear the answer. Some of the men were still staring at the spot in the sky where Gid had disappeared into a bone-white ridge of cloud; some, including Louis, had fixed their attention on the spots of blood on the deck. The moon was rising. Louis, able at last to overcome his vast, black speechlessness, noticed something interesting that he pointed out to the other men — the buzzards were returning.