NEVER SPEAK THE WORD DROWN by Kate Blakinger
Larsen met her at Shakey’s, where the bar girls wore number tags pinned to their dresses so a man could remember who was “his girl.” Number Eleven sat apart at the bar, paying no attention to anyone, blades of her shoulders stretching the fabric of her blue dress, waxy red lipstick on her frowning mouth. A band played Elvis covers on a rickety stage not ten feet from her, but she remained self- contained, indifferent to the music, as if saturated with secret thoughts. The other girls, circled by the entrance, trying hard to entice, interested Larsen less.
He ordered a beer, and a cocktail for her. Ignoring his chit- chat, she leaned over and plucked an egg out of a covered basket that sat on the counter. She rapped the egg against the edge of the bar and cracked it open. Eyes on him, she sipped liquid from the bottom of the shell, then spilled the rest of its contents into her palm: a baby duck, feathers half- formed, a blind eye like a drop of licorice, tiny twig feet, whole thing wet and glistening. This was a surprise, and it shut Larsen up. She shook salt over the abomination curled in her hand, lifted it to her mouth and bit it in half. His stomach clenched.
She leaned toward him, face lively, watchful, and she offered him the rest. “You want to try balut?” she said.
He fingered the blob tentatively, shoved it in his mouth. The taste was savory, not terrible, but the texture undid him, the wetness, the feel of feathers and feet on his tongue. He tried to make his jaw work. He was sweating. The guys at the nearest table hooted at him as he lifted his San Miguel and gulped sloppily. He drained the bottle, and somehow, by some shred of grace, he swallowed the dead duck.
The girl’s name was Tala. He found she lived all in one room, a little refrigerator and hot pot on one side, her bed along the opposite wall. The floor was cement, the walls unpainted wood – a modest place but not one of the shanties that piled up along Olongapo’s back alleys.
As she squatted before Larsen and ran her scissors across his yellowed toenails, it occurred to him maybe he was putting her through something more intimate than sex. His toes were in a state of grotesque neglect. The nails dirty and jagged, his feet pale and stinking. She didn’t seem fazed. When she finished, he asked if she’d also cut his hair. She lifted the scissors. Every tension he held in his body fell away with the hair she removed. He listened to the creak and snip as the blades closed and cut and bits of hair fell free to the floor.
He touched the crown of his head, feeling the change. It was late, and she was likely tired, but still she smiled at him as she swept hair from the floor.
Larsen’s wife, Josie, said it was a small tyranny the way men were always wanting women to smile upon them. Josie would no longer smile, or tolerate his touch, or touch him, not since their son had died then been born, face grey- blue as a storm cloud, cord around his neck.
Tala set the broom aside. She lifted her dress over her head. Larsen felt his wife looking at him through the shack’s tiny window. This was impossible – 7,000 miles of ocean separated San Francisco and Olongapo City – but still he couldn’t shake the vision of Josie spying through the glass. Fumbling, sorrowful, he made for the door at once, leaving a pile of cash behind on the bed, alarmed at himself, for it was damning to be here, enclosed in this room with a naked woman, noticing, in flashes, her breasts, the softness of her stomach, the dark hair at her groin. She wore no undergarments. All this time, she’d been practically naked, and now he would never be able to forget.
***
Tala was glad the same American chose her again the next night. She wasn’t the most beautiful. She wasn’t the youngest. What the men wanted was someone who drew them out, who listened, a woman whose touch and attention made them feel the exact shape of their lives mattered.
He told her he wasn’t stationed at the American naval base, wasn’t fighting in Vietnam. He’d come to the Philippines from Saigon, though. The war was where merchant mariners ended up, their ships winding up the Saigon River, shuttling supplies in, hauling away the army’s trash.
Haircuts were easy, but still, Tala was relieved to coax him into bed. It would mean more money. He folded the clothes he removed and piled them neatly. He lay beside her. In a hoarse, half- whisper brushing at her ear, he confessed he had a wife.
“But you’re so young,” she said. “No ring.”
He laughed, flattered, said he wasn’t that young.
As the American pressed into her, she lay still and she left, her body pinned against the lumpy mattress, her mind lifting. A vexed and tender warmth billowed in her chest as she thought of Vito telling her a boastful story, veering into make- believe, his childish voice leaping, his dark, gleaming eyes staring at her even as he sprung about the room, pausing his motion only to give her a serious look, lips a tight line, stubborn chin warding off disbelief. When he was with her, stories crowded his mouth. Capers, tricks he’d played on soldiers. Quick escapes, rides hitched on Jeepneys, dodging the mayor’s thugs. He was only eight or nine, small, carved and bony – but he was lit with vitality, and people leaned close when he spoke.
She sank back into her body. In the sweaty afterward, the American held her. His face, buried in her hair, grew wet. Crying sailors were nothing rare. She soothed the American, stroking his back, somehow stirred to sympathy, yet at the same time repulsed, resentful, turned to ice. She pretended to care, and then she did, but only a little.
Sweat still lay wet on their bodies when Vito entered without warning. Tala made a sound of surprise. The child knew which nights not to come. Yet, here he was, and the skin around his right eye was purple, swollen tight over his eyeball like a closed mouth, eyebrow above flecked with crumbs of dried blood. The American pushed out of bed, began putting on clothes.
She yanked on her dress, touched Vito gently on the small of his back. He wore no shirt. “You must run faster, Vito. What happened to the lightning in your legs?” Whenever large foreign ships docked, the mayor’s men captured the street children and locked them out of sight in the jail. If Vito was caught, she wouldn’t see him for days. He’d return crawling with lice. Raw sores from sleeping on damp stone floors would ooze on his back.
“Who did this? Same men as last time?” she asked.
“There were three of them. Thought they had me.”
“You got free.”
“All they got was my shirt,” he said, flashing her an amused look, then wincing. Tala could picture Vito twisting deftly free of his shirt. He wanted her to laugh, but she couldn’t. Looking at his mashed face, anger squeezed out every other feeling. The American eased his feet into battered shoes. “Your son?” he asked. With his golden skin and loose curls, Vito did not resemble Tala. She’d given birth to a boy who would be about his age, but her baby had been taken from her, and now she looked out for Vito, gave him her mothering.
“This is Vito.”
“What happened?” the American asked.
“Please. You need to leave.” She dabbed Vito’s torn skin with iodine, helping his body heal. She wanted to do more, guard whatever fire still shimmered inside him. “We could ice that eye,” the American said. “I have aspirin. I could get some.”
“What does he want?” Vito asked her in Tagalog.
“To help, he says.”
She thought of that wife, across an ocean somewhere, in a house with many rooms. Married to this man, this American who carried himself with an easy swagger, in the bar, in the streets, in Tala’s home. He waded into the world, and the world made room, accommodating him easily as a warm bath. His eyes were pale, like the edges of the sky where the blue fades, easing into smoke and haze. Too pale to show his soul. His nose had been whittled to crooked angles, cheeks stubbled over, hair a dusty brown and neatly cropped now along his creased forehead, sadness imprinted lightly around his eyes.
“If you want to help,” she said slowly, “you could hide us.”
“Hide you.” A bemused disbelief colored his voice.
“Take us with you in your ship.”
“Nowhere safe to hide on a ship. People crawl into the damned bilges in the engine room. If we didn’t fish them out, they’d drown.”
“You see what happens here. He’s a child.”
“You need a man who can marry you. Someone who will take you to a new country with papers. Ships are searched from top to bottom.”
“We stay hidden. Quiet.”
“No.”
“I can get married, but Vito. How will I bring him?”
“All you need is his birth certificate.”
Vito insisted on knowing what they were saying. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said when she explained.
“You’ve been beaten by grown men,” she said. “How could you not want to escape?”
“I’ll be big as them soon enough.”
“You think it will be easier when you’re grown? You think there will be more for you? Every Pinoy who looks at you will still see a souvenir baby.”
“I’m quick on my feet. I make good plans. The others do what I say. They know my plans are good.” Slight as he was, Vito walked like he owned the street, shoulders back, head up, stomach taut. Other kids trailed him in a pack, and when they displeased him, he could be wrathful. Still, she imagined he was young enough that, in a new place, he might become a child again, that his rage was not like hers.
“You’ll get by,” she said. “I want more for you. I want you never to feel fists on your face again, and that’s just the start.”
Vito puffed air out in an aggrieved sigh.
“What would happen when you arrived?” the American asked Tala. “Where would you go? How would you live?”
“I don’t know. We will find ways.”
“Was his father a soldier?”
“I don’t know.”
“He doesn’t send money?”
“I don’t know who his father is. His father doesn’t know he has this son.” The fathers often didn’t, so this was likely the truth.
* * *
Usually, the promises of sailors were not worth as much as their dollars, but the American met Tala at the corner at dusk the next day, a package in his arms. A gift, he called it as he showed her the bananas and bread, the tins of meat and sardines, the flashlight, two canteens, a blanket. She told him they had to search for Vito. “He’s not meeting. us?” the man asked.
She shook her head, and started to walk. She didn’t want to explain all the ways she was not in charge of Vito.
The mud of Magsaysay Drive sucked at their shoes when they crossed. A band of white skin circled the American’s wrist and he kept lifting his arm, forgetting. She wondered if he was the kind of man who’d stripped off his watch before landing, or the kind who’d had it stolen. To not know even this much about him made her stomach swim. Children shouted by the Po River, the border dividing Olongapo City from the naval base. Two Americans in dress whites tossed coins off the bridge into the fetid water. They laughed at a boy who dove after the money. Where his thin body broke the surface, plumes of flies buzzed into the air. Her belly tightened, cramped, as if the boy’s future had seeped into her. Droves of children milled about, watching or playing games, begging or stealing, but none were Vito. Nearness to the base conferred safety from the mayor’s men, but Vito went where he wanted.
She steered the American onto side streets, where they found Vito drawing in the mud with a stick. His proud and sullen bearing, his swollen eye, the scabs that sheathed the knobs of his knees – she loved all of him. He was broken but strong, the way a bone heals thicker at the site of a break.
“Wish- heart,” she said. “Come to America with me.”
“You don’t know what it will be like there.”
“It can’t be worse. Look at your face. I’m not wrong. Things will
go differently for you in America.”
“What about you?”
“Staying won’t get me anywhere.”
Vito pushed his stick deep into the dirt, dragging it through, making a trench as if he planned to hide himself by slipping down into the earth. It seemed he would not come. “Have you heard about an American grocery store? There are shelves in every direction filled top to bottom with food. We will eat meat every day. Candy.” She would have said anything. Imagining such abundance, and the people accustomed to it, she felt a vague dread, but he would feel differently.
She promised herself, if Vito came, she wouldn’t miss the green hills of the rainy season, the heavy heat, not even her disappeared child, whose nearness she sometimes imagined she felt, the way she could taste the salt carried on a breeze.
“You’re going? No matter what?” he asked.
She nodded. It wasn’t true, though.
“I guess I have to come,” Vito said. “Help you conquer this new place.”
She held in her smile so he wouldn’t see her happiness and relief.
By the time they reached the wharves, shadows had smudged the outlines of the ships and gathered thickly under the bloomfestooned branches of the narra trees. The American placed a hand on her shoulder and guided her to a small rowboat. He lifted her into it, and he set the boy on her lap. Vito didn’t stay there, but she felt his startling lightness before he scooted away. A boy made of vapors. She couldn’t understand how the force of his will could be squeezed into such a wisp of a body.
When the American stepped in, water, black in the darkness, sloshed against the sides of the boat. She squeezed Vito’s shoulder. He shrugged off her hand. The man began to row.
* * *
Back inside the black nights of an ocean crossing, with the sea under his feet again, Larsen missed all that enticing neon, the blazing of the lights of Olongapo City, how the sound of so many women laughing and talking had burned a wild kind of happiness into him. Tala’s touch had lifted him out of the dark churn of his thoughts, and so he’d brought her on board the ship. Now though, he felt dogged by guilt and unease.
Ever since her stillbirth, his wife had left him to drift in the currents of silence that swirled between them. Larsen didn’t dare reach for her, not even to help her out of the bed where she continued to convalesce, not to comfort her, certainly not to try for another child, all of which was no excuse. There was no excuse. Only a reason, only the fact of Josie turning her back, flinching at the slightest touch of his skin against her skin. She was hostile even to the soft flannel of her favorite nightgown brushing against her breasts.
Before he’d shipped out, Larsen had donated blood just to feel a nurse take his pulse, wrap a blood pressure cuff around his bicep, swab his skin with alcohol. She’d held his arm steady with her whole freckled hand as she slid the needle in.
He’d never been one to get stuck in a bad feeling before. He’d never been prone to loneliness. Solitude was welcome from time to time, but married loneliness, which could steal over you as you shared a room with the person who’d spoken solemn vows to you, that was something altogether different. He’d fled it, signed a new contract, even though work as a merchant mariner was treacherous now. The Flying Gull had taken sniper fire while winding up the Saigon River. Lost two hands. A swimmer had placed a mine on the deck of the SS Baton Rouge, and the detonation ripped a hole in her and killed every man in the engine room. Merchant ships were targets like the Navy’s vessels, but they had no defenses. They bobbed along, old wrecks, hardly sea- worthy.
Larsen needed a clear head. He was chief mate, in charge of the men. Instead, he dreamed of the concentrated intoxication of Tala’s small, brown hands, the salty smell of her, the way she looked at him, how her gaze tightened a band of feeling across his chest.
* * *
In the Kestrel’s hold, heat stifled Tala. She felt as though she were trapped underground in monsoon season, with a mouth full of mud. There was a strong odor of mildew, and of something that wasn’t kerosene but had the same sharp bite.
Vehicles, bound together with thick ropes, had been crammed into the space: jeeps, busted tanks, a helicopter. American forces didn’t want a single broken- backed tank to fall into enemy hands, her American had told her.
Vito and Tala took refuge inside a jeep. They lay down across the seats. The leather suctioned to their skin. The powerful noises of the ship muted all the small sounds of their bodies. Usually in the dark, with no one looking, Tala relaxed; she could be only herself. Inside the ship though, the darkness had a density that made her heart race, sometimes spurring her to blink on the flashlight the American had given her, just to see with her own eyes Vito still sprawled across the backseat.
She cupped the glow in a palm, fingers turned to embers. Vito blinked, smiled. He pulled a star apple out of his pocket, squeezed the fruit until the skin split. He pried the halves apart and held one out to her, and she bit into the center of the star. The purple flesh filled her mouth: sticky, milky, sweet.
They ate bananas, and sardines. They ate tinned meat, which was oily and salty and so soft it melted against their teeth. Tala wanted always to be tasting something. In the darkness of the hold, each flavor gave off its own small flare.
Sometimes, she couldn’t eat. Sometimes, the jostle of the rolling water made her too seasick. This nausea carried her back to pregnancy, when her belly had been so huge it hid her swollen feet from her view. Her baby had kicked and her feet had ached, but she hadn’t minded. Others in the village had shunned her, because she wasn’t married, and she’d hardly felt their slights, all self- consciousness sloughed away.
She had marveled at her body, containing within it another body. She was making a new heart, a new brain. She was making tiny toenails. She had the power to make a new person. It shocked her that all this time, the obvious had been kept hidden: a woman, any woman, had a power beside which the powers of men seemed small.
Her newborn son had pressed against her as if to push through her skin and muscle, back inside. He’d wailed as Tala’s mother lifted him and whisked him to the kitchen. Tala had lain in bed, dizzy with the pain of having been ripped open, calling out for her baby. She could hear him crying, and panic clawed her insides. She tried to stand, but her legs folded.
Time passed, and she no longer heard her child. Swift as a kick, understanding hit her. He was not in the kitchen any more. He was not in the house.
When her mother returned, arms empty, Tala saw her as a stranger: this woman was a mother, Tala’s own mother. Her body, Tala’s first home. This woman was Tala’s enemy. How could both be true?
* * *
Spray slashed Larsen’s face as he emerged from the bridge to the deck. It was the fifth day of the return voyage, and they were rolling easily twenty degrees from the vertical, sky above stacked with cloud. Soon, cold rain pocked the water. A shrill hum filled the top decks from the rush of siphoned wind, and the propellers on the lifeboats spun and spun. The ship rolled heavily, hull slapping down in the troughs.
A sound snapped Larsen alert, a booming, as if bombs were exploding. The Kestrel began to shudder each time she rolled. This noise confounded him, then he knew. They were fucked. It sounded like the load had come loose. Those broken- down armaments they’d stashed below were slamming into the walls of the ship as they wallowed. Unchecked, they would punch through to the sea.
No one else knew a woman and child were hiding in the turbulent dark. Maybe already crushed. He’d overseen the loading. If his stowaways were killed, if the boat went down, if they all perished, it was on him.
A cargo light swung from the manhole as he climbed through into the main hold, scattering shadows over the shifting freight. The sound, walled in, was stupefying. From the ladder, he climbed onto the tank nearest the entrance, holding on with one hand, flashlight in the other.
When the neighboring tank slammed against the one he clung to, he scrambled from first to second. He moved in this way, from one vehicle to the next, through the hold, scanning for people. The jeeps had been crushed. The helicopter’s flank had been caved in. A person snagged between vehicles would be mashed to jelly.
He slid to the floor, timing his motions to the roll of the boat so he could dodge the moving tanks.
He almost jumped out of his skin when he felt a hand on his shoulder.
Tala was holding the child, cocooning him with her body. She sank to her knees from the weight. Larsen could see the path back to the manhole materialize as if he’d arranged for it, and he hauled her to her feet. She didn’t have her sea legs. He wove through tanks and trucks, half dragging her. At the ladder, he pried her child from her though she raked at his face and chest with her nails. The boy was limp, damp, glassy- eyed. Larsen passed him to one of the deck hands, and then wrestled with Tala until she calmed down enough to be helped up the ladder.
If she said one word about how she came to be aboard, Larsen would never work a ship again.
“Take care of them,” he said, bellowing to be heard. “Get them to the second mate.” Larsen and the second mate were the only officers aboard trained in first aid. The deck crew stood in a line, awaiting Larsen’s lead, chains, turnbuckles, and shackles at the ready. Usually, they lashed loads to the floor, but there was no way he could see to stop the sliding without lifting all that heavy cargo into the air. He decided to chain the armaments to the loops of the steel padeyes that studded the ceiling, stringing up jeeps and tanks and the bashed-in helicopter like he was hanging hammocks. “Feed me chain,” he told his men. He kept the others off the floor as much as he could. It took until sunrise to secure everything, and by then the rolling of the ship had lessened.
He emerged into the cool air of morning, and gulped water from a cup the bosun brought. The time at the hospital came alive in his mind. He couldn’t fend off the memory. He’d felt his son kicking in Josie’s belly, but in his arms, when he finally held him, the child was still as a stone. The nurses carried off their child without a byyour- leave, abandoning Larsen and Josie to their grief, no body to bury. He still couldn’t believe it, though this was ordinary. Routine procedure, they’d told him.
* * *
Tala’s jaw ached from clenching her teeth. Vito was quiet, his head in her lap, eyes unfocused, energy turned inward, as if he had to concentrate to push his blood around his veins. She’d noted his scrapes and bruises, but there was something else, an invisible wrong. His skin was clammy and hot. His breathing was rough, as though his exhalations were a gauzy fabric tearing on hooks in his throat.
They’d been locked into a small, sweltering cabin. Someone brought her a spoon and a bowl of water and mimed she must make Vito ingest the water, spoonful by spoonful, and she tried. Liquid dribbled from the corners of his mouth.
“Your son is gravely injured,” the American told her when he came. The word “son” made her think of that other boy, the son she’d birthed, who might now be one of the children running in packs through Olongapo, or might call some other woman mother, or might even be at the bottom of the Po River, adding his own stink to the water’s as his muscles unknit from his bones.
“Something broke inside of him,” the American said. “That’s our guess, anyway. We think a rib broke and pierced his lung.”
“Lung?”
He took exaggerated breaths, patted his chest.
“Help him,” she said. The words were gritty in her mouth, something to spit out. She pushed a hand into Vito’s hair, which was soaked with sweat. “Where’s the doctor? The doctor must help.”
“There’s no doctor. The second mate did all he could. I don’t know a thing he doesn’t.”
“You brought us onto this ship,” she said. “Help us.”
“There’s nothing I can do. We’re in the middle of the Pacific. Twelve days at least from San Francisco. Factor in the storm, it could be thirteen or fourteen.”
“Turn us around. Turn the ship back to Subic Bay.”
“We can’t. That’s not going to happen. It’s not up to me.”
She wondered what she failed to understand about him, feeling him out in a language that wasn’t her first. She didn’t know the kind of man he was, and he didn’t know her, either. The woman she appeared to be when she entertained men in Olongapo City was just a daydream the men were having, that’s how she thought about it, a dream she helped to conjure, biting back her sourness so it didn’t show. “You are an officer. Chief mate.”
“I don’t have the power to reroute the ship. Only the captain can order that, and he won’t, not for stowaways.”
“There must be a way to change his mind.” She was afraid. She’d followed this stranger into the middle of a vast ocean she couldn’t even keep afloat in, compelling Vito to join her, and now it had gone wrong, and this man would be no help.
* * *
Wounded, Vito was more Tala’s than he’d ever been. He allowed her to hold him. The limbs that pushed away from any touch no longer resisted. Weakly, he squeezed her fingers. To feel this joy of putting her hands upon him when he felt only pain shamed Tala.
Sometimes his face would close down, his breath quicken, a begging moan slip from his lips, hardly a human sound. The pain seemed to wash him out of himself. His gaze roamed aimlessly, casting furious shadows wherever it landed.
She was not sure why she and Vito were released from their cell. Pity, perhaps. When the sun shone, some of the men would carry Vito up to the deck on a stretcher. Cooped up or out in the fresh air, he slept. She hardly ever did. The smallest shifting of his body, a hitch in his breathing, the slightest sound emerging from his throat, would wake her and bring her into a needle- tight focus, as if keeping him alive depended on her constant, diligent will. Time warped, stretching and doubling, so that she crawled through its long miles painfully slowly, the minutiae of his body overwhelming her. Other times, the minutes seemed to vanish before they’d arrived, time swallowed as if dropped overboard. Watching the water, the swirl and ripple, the endlessness, a person could start to see things that weren’t there. Ghosts. Visions. Spirits from old tales.
The distance was so empty, so exactly the same in every direction.
Vito was light enough. She could lift him over the rails. The water would hide them if they leapt, would knit back together, the ocean undisturbed by their entrance. There might be mercy in that leap. She didn’t want to be gone like that though, didn’t want Vito to be gone while all these other people still breathed and moved and lived. Still, he suffered, and she wondered.
The sailors watched her out of the corners of their eyes. She felt their fear, and their hunger. They kept their distance, except for her American, who would check on her and Vito when his shifts ended. In that tiny cabin, with Vito soundly asleep, she had sex with the American, just once more. She took a pleasure from it that had nothing to do with bodies or the sensations they hold. She felt as though she was stealing something from him, and she wanted to grip it and yank, pull out whatever dark thing would unspool, fill the space left behind with a rage that could flame as bright as her own. He cried his silent tears afterwards. She wanted to crush all tenderness, and now when he wept she rose, dressed, turned away.
She left Vito asleep in the American’s care, not often, but sometimes, desperate to be a sole person not wrapped around another person, just for a few minutes. Closeness with Vito, the pleasure of his head in her lap, his hand in her hand, couldn’t curb this restlessness when it came. She’d say she needed a shower, a bathroom, some privacy, anything, and she’d haunt the ship, padding barefoot through walkways smelling of vomit and brine, of onions burnt in the galley.
Freed, she touched things, turned dials, broke switches, loosened bolts until they dropped into her hands, moved objects from their places, stoked her fury with these small acts of violence against this ship that held her and Vito hostage in the nowhere of the sea. She felt unlike herself. The ghost of her lost baby was inside her, making mischief – she sometimes felt sure of it. She waited for some kind of answer of what to do to float up from whatever had come to occupy the hollow inside her. At first, all that came were these urges. She loosened knots in ropes, tugging until her fingers burned. She sifted through dented forks and spoons dripping dry in the galley while the messman peeled potatoes. When his back turned, she palmed the paring knife she found. Beyond the galley, in the laundry, she tipped powdered detergent into a running washing machine, soap flakes pouring into the gray water and cloth, forming a powdery island that crumbled, then frothed up, a frenzy of foam that grew and grew and spilled over.
She figured out which was the captain’s cabin. Sometimes he was in the control room, where she would never be allowed. But for long stretches, longer than seemed right, he shut himself inside his private cabin, and no one disturbed him, not even the officers.
The men eyed her, true, but they also ducked out of her way when she neared, quickening their steps, pulling their elbows close when she passed in the tight corridors that burrowed through the ship. To the sailors on board, she was a bad omen. The American had told her. She’d thought it was because of Vito’s injury, but Larsen said it was only because she was a woman. To deny that they were at the ocean’s mercy and the ocean had no mercy, they clung to superstitions. As if, given they remembered never to whistle, never to cut their hair or nails at sea, never to speak the word “drown” out loud, they could keep themselves safe until they’d docked.
The afternoon Tala entered the captain’s cabin, she was thinking of seductions. Her breath came in fast bursts, her daring a flame inside her, bright and hot and tipped with worry about Vito, whom she’d left alone. The captain was snoring, sprawled on his back in bed, the flesh of his face and neck worn from sun, slackened by time, all of him sagging downwards except his jutting nose, which seemed to part space in defiance of gravity. The room stank of sweat and drinking. Whisky bottles clustered in a crate on the floor, many empty. He didn’t stir when she touched his arm. She’d seen many different men sleep. Whatever they’d been like awake, asleep they were all inert, helpless.
It wasn’t hard to find rope on a ship. When she returned, the captain slept still, sprawled in the same position.
The puzzle before her: how to ensnare him without waking him. She slid her hands beneath his closest leg, and dragged it toward its mate. She wound the rope around his ankles three times and knotted it with fisherman’s knots she’d learned from her father. Though one knot might suffice, she made four because such thick rope was difficult to tighten. She bound his legs to the bedpost. As she tied his wrists together, her hostage stirred, shifting from back to hip, and she waited to see if he would wake.
* * *
Larsen watched Tala cross the deck and thought of the bad luck everyone whispered about. By the looks of her, the boy had died. He walked to meet her, and her gaze tore into him. He pictured Vito as he’d been when well – eyes agleam with scornful delight, rakish, restless, a child but not quite seeming so – and the idea that this boy had ceased to live seemed impossible, injury or no. But why else would she leave him below, alone?
Pity swallowed his words, but then she smiled, and reached for his hand. She led him through the ship to the captain’s quarters. She pushed open the hatch as if the room beyond were her very own bedroom.
The captain was passed out, and more startling, tied up. She didn’t know a Flemish knot or an anchor’s bend, but her knots were sturdy.
“What have you done?”
“Turn the ship back,” she said.
“I can’t do that.”
“We must. The captain no longer decides where we go.”
“There’s no ‘we.’ ”
“No one would believe that. They have ears,” she said. “They have eyes. Don’t you think they guess I am here because of you?”
“Turning the ship requires a willing crew. Not one man and a girl who knows nothing.”
“My father had a boat.”
“This is a Victory ship with 8,000 horsepower steam turbines. Not a dinghy.”
“They are afraid of me. The men. You use that. There must be a few you can make help. Tell them about the captain. Tell them he is a prisoner.”
A comfort, he’d thought her. Someone he could save. She stood looking at him, her cheeks smooth planes, eyes all afire. He’d been stupid and blind. He’d mistaken smallness and prettiness for weakness and sweetness.
He already regretted everything that would happen next, even now, when it was still not decided. He felt a throbbing, like hands were pressing down on him in a rhythm, pushing air out of his lungs, pushing on his heart as if to make it beat faster. Even if Larsen could sway a couple men, there was a whole crew to contend with.
He dragged a breath into his chest. He could talk a hand or two into staying, couldn’t he? Then, clear the ship with a ruse, by triggering the alarm. He could almost hear the whistle sound across the Kestrel, and the footfalls of his men as they rushed to tear tarps off the lifeboats and haul them into the water. Abandon ship, that’s what they would hear when the whistle sounded. Every sailor would remember how the load had crashed around during the pitch of the storm. They’d be certain the ship had been damaged and they were sinking after all.
He could smell Tala’s sweat. She brushed her tangled hair from her face, touched his arm. To send his men to the lifeboats unnecessarily was a betrayal so large, he couldn’t hold the thought fast in his mind. In his reach, mounted on the wall, was one of the switches that would sound the alarm. He seemed to see it even when he wasn’t looking that way, as if it glowed with a terrible light.
Tala watched her American. Her chances, and Vito’s, would be best if he helped. She would do what she needed to do. He would care more about consequences. She let herself feel a pang of sympathy for him, and she let it dissolve, let her fingers shift to touch the knife she’d wrapped in a rag and wedged into the back pocket of her pants, where the tip of it pricked her as she stepped toward the captain in his bed.
She heard the staccato of her mother’s voice ringing out in her memory. She hadn’t seen her mother in years, but Tala didn’t doubt the woman still had a smolder to her gaze. That perfectly round mole on her mother’s cheek – surely she still wore it like a jewel. “I chose the best I could for him and for you,” she’d said to Tala. “An unmarried girl with a baby, what life would that child have? Or you? I freed you from the persecution of whispers.”
Tala had not known what to say, how to best rip the thin skin of truth off this lie. In the weeks that followed, all her efforts to find her child had come to nothing. She’d hardly rested, and so she didn’t heal, and even when she finally left the village for Olongapo City, each step she took, blood soaked the wad of cloth she had stuffed into her underwear.
Now, the knife was warm from Tala’s fingers. She could see the captain’s chest rising, falling, rising, falling. Under her feet, in the humming deep of the ship, Vito breathed. The simplest act, done by everyone, everywhere, without a thought. It always became impossible eventually, but not for Vito, not yet.
The hostage opened his eyes. The ship rolled lightly on the water, shifting and quaking as if it were awakening, and that prickly thing that had come to occupy Tala’s insides pushed for the surface, that ghost child, that wanting, that fearsome will, like it was coming up for air, like it would pour darkly from her mouth, and she thought, maybe I am a pox upon this ship, maybe I am a witch, a curse, bad luck to all sailors, maybe I am fury.
Kate Blakinger’s stories have appeared in Epiphany, The Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, and New Stories from the Midwest.