Fleet of Stars - Part 3 (A Dark Shadows Story)

[lovesrain44]

Three days later, a pair of guards came for him. By that time, his pants had dried, and though still stiff, they did not rub his skin raw. He followed them down the hall, signed whatever papers they thrust in front of him, and listened silently to the lecture, delivered in accented English, about drugs and their dangerous nature. He nodded, and went out the door pointed to him. And there was Jason, waiting for him outside the jail in the bright Turkish sun.

 

He was looked at by narrowed green eyes, sweat-mottled beneath the curl of dark thick hair. Jason had had a bath recently by the looks of things, even though the heat was already eating at him, and Willie found himself almost salivating at the thought of it.

 

But Jason had not missed the swaths of stain along the inside of Willie’s trousers; Willie knew he couldn’t possibly miss them. Two rinses had not gotten them out and in the end Willie decided he’d rather be dressed than clean. The bruises around his neck were also impossible to hide, and the dark brown streaks on his formerly white t-shirt stood out like they’d been painted there.

 

“You get me out?” Willie asked, his voice flat.

 

Jason offered a wrist, bare except for one bright, pale-skinned band. “A nice watch goes far in a place like this,” he said, not sounding sorry.

 

Willie shrugged. The heat of the courtyard and the low sidewalk were bouncing off his eyes, and in tandem with the streaks of sunlight, a storm swell was forming in his skull with piercing, ragged hands, and he knew if he didn’t sit down, he was going to fall down. Except he couldn’t sit down, not for very long. Almost to the day after Ruaf’s exit from the cell, his backside had determined that sitting was out of bounds and he’d spent most of his time either standing, weak-kneed, or lying on his side. It was as if he were frozen up inside. A gut-sized block of ice and spikes.

 

“Willie, are you alright?” Jason’s voice came to him as if through a long, narrow pipe.

 

“Yeah,” he said, shaking his head. That made it worse, and his eyes clouded over, like fog dropping.

 

He felt hands on him, someone was pulling him into the shade, trying to make him sit down, and he exploded, throwing off the hands, stalking away, except that he only got as far as the sunlight before he staggered and fell to his knees. Now Jason was behind him, a shocked indrawing of breath before the hands pulled him to his feet, and began walking with him quickly away from the courthouse and the jail.

 

“What did they do to you in there, Willie?” asked the voice as if from a long-distance phone call through very bad wires.

 

“Didn’ do nothin’,” he replied, letting the hands take him. If he were walking, he wasn’t throwing up, or passing out. That much he’d learned, pacing hour after hour in the cell. Movement kept him from falling apart.

 

“Don’t lie to me,” said the voice, now severe. “You’re all over blood and bruises. Did you—did they—”

 

Jason stopped, his face was suddenly stark and clear, in front of Willie. Brows drawn together, the eyes serious and dark. Willie realized they were standing in an alleyway not far from the place where they’d bought the hashish.

 

“The guards are probably smoking it right now,” he said, his voice coming out in an uneven whisper.

 

“Never mind that now, I want to know—”

 

Willie shoved off the hands, falling back to lean against the wall. “I don’t give a damn about what you want, Jason,” he said. “I want a bath. I want clean clothes. And I want to get the hell out of this place.”

 

His palms were pressed flat against the crumbled brick and stucco, absorbing the heat, and now in the shade, his headache began to fade and he could concentrate a little more. Realized that he’d just shouted at Jason, spoken forcibly, as he’d never done at home in Brooklyn. Then again, at home, he’d not been recently set upon by an overly amorous WOP with thin lips and strong hands and a cock the size of what felt like a policeman’s bully stick.

 

He tried it again.

 

“Take me someplace cold, and I mean cold. Snow. Ice. You got me?”

 

He watched Jason’s eyebrows rise up to his hairline, a troubled light flickering behind the green eyes, and he felt the push of a fierce anger whose origin he could not identify.

 

“Now,” said Willie, “now, damnit, or I swear to God, I’ll find him and I’ll kill him, no lie. I’ll get him and cut him and then I’ll take—”

 

A wave of fast acid pressed around his stomach, moving up his spine as if squeezed through a sieve, and he found himself toppling sideways, clenching his stomach with both hands. The knife forgotten, revenge taking a back seat, and Jason, bending over him, holding his shoulders as he spewed out the bread from his morning’s breakfast. Trying not to choke on the string of mucus and sick, his thighs crumbling beneath him.

 

Jason caught him on the way down, settling him to the flagstones at the mouth of the alley, crouching beside him to take a corner of his own shirt to wipe Willie’s mouth with it. He seemed untroubled now, shrugging a bit, as if to say that it was all the same to him. “Snow then. Someplace cool. Where the ladies are willing to be seen in the altogether, shall we not?”

 

Willie closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the brick. Ignored Jason’s unconscious humming as he rocked a bit on his heels, and tried not to think.

 

“Snow, damnit. I don’t give a fuck about the ladies.”

 

“Oh, now, sure and you do, you only just—”

 

Willie lifted his head and opened his eyes. “Only just nothing, Jason.”

 

Jason nodded, reaching out his hand to pat Willie on the shoulder, drawing it back at the glare that Willie felt shooting out of him. His back ached, and his ass was on fire, and if anyone walked by who even so much as slightly resembled Ruaf, he was a dead man.

 

“Snow then,” said Jason. “I’ll take you to the hotel and then I’ll go check in the harbor and I’ll be right back. Then we’ll get our things and go. Yes?”

 

He had the tone of someone who is not willing to argue with a crazed man and Willie found he quite liked it. Let Jason wonder and jump for a while, and he smiled to himself as Jason helped him to his feet and walked him through the alleys to their hotel. Was still smiling as Jason lowered him to the bed, which felt like a thing crafted by angels, and left, closing the door behind him.

 

Crazy man, yeah, that’s me.

 

Jason might come back. Or he might not. It didn’t matter, Willie was never moving again.

 

Only he did move. Down to the docks with Jason, carrying his bag of gear, onto the Athena Rose, a steamer carrying cargo to Sweden, and down to his bunk, slam up against the boiler room. Out of the heat and into the steam, and he fell into his bed and slept. Got up and shoveled coal, ate, showered, and went back to bed. All the way to Sweden. He remembered Jason standing nearby, a worried expression pushing at his normally smooth, calm features.

 

There was another vague memory too, of Jason dragging him down the narrow metal passageway. Into a room. Taking off his clothes in hard, brisk motions, pushing him under a spray of hot water. Making him wash. What Jason had said was unclear, but he had said something, a whole string of something, and Willie remembered nodding, the water slipping into his eyes and ears, and then Jason had handed him the soap. Jason had not let him out of the shower until he had used the soap, after which Jason had let him out, had helped him get dressed with new clothes he’d gotten from somewhere, and then put him back to bed. There had been some shouting too, between Jason and someone else, but he’d fallen asleep, and when he’d woken up, the shovel-eat-shower-sleep routine had begun. And then ended when they’d docked in Sweden.

 

The most boring, coldest place he’d ever been to. Within a week, he hated it, and since Jason could not find any blonde strapping Swedish lass who would answer to the name Laureen, it was agreed that they would light out. Took a ship on which they’d lost half their pay, the Bonny White Lady, and berthed in Brooklyn. Willie would not go ashore, and Jason had argued with him, and in the end gone alone. To the Bulldog, he’d said, where the beer had been damn good. Willie had flipped him the bird, and they chugged with the Bonny White Lady down to Boston, where they’d caught the Carrie Dee down to Charleston, and then the Virgo Maris to Martinique, where they’d caught up again with the venerable Fitz Pomeroy.

 

“All the way to San Francisco, this time, lads?” asked the captain, joking with them as they signed their papers. Willie began to mutter under his breath until Jason elbowed him in the ribs, at which point he quieted down and kept his fingers crossed that he would not be needed in the boiler room. He was starting to hate the taste of coal in his mouth.

 

“Guess you’ll be in the boiler room, Loomis,” said the quartermaster looking at his list.

 

And then Jason was looking at him, a worried frown pulling at his face. “Ah, you know, sir,” said Jason, plying the air with a smile. “Willie and I, well, we were kind of hoping to help above decks. You know, to keep watch and all.”

 

“You got sharp eyes?” asked the quartermaster.

 

“Oh, the sharpest,” Jason assured him.

 

The quartermaster shrugged as if it were all the same to him, and jotted that down on his clipboard. “Go and see Mr. Stiers, he’ll get you a duty chart. Anything else?” The quartermaster looked up, and they shook their heads, knowing there had better not be anything else or they would find themselves shoveling coal.

 

“Thanks, Jason,” he said, elbowing his way past as they went down a thin flight of stairs to belowdecks. “And I get the upper bunk this time.”

 

It was a weird feeling to come back to a ship he almost remembered, to find the things that had changed and that had not. To see the land slipping away, and to dock in a port that had an air of familiarity to it, along with the still strange smells and sounds.

 

“Watch out for jellyfish,” warned Jason, as they stepped ashore for their last night before they weighed anchor and headed up the west coast of South America.

 

Willie nodded. Jason was in search of a local Laureen, and Willie was in search of a bar. With cold beer. And maybe a fight after.

 

This he did not find, though he stalked through at least three bars, bumping and pushing. No one took the bait, and high tide came before he could get a single punch in. Then the Fitz Pomeroy took them round the Horn to San Francisco. There they caught the Ardent Heart, and along the way Jason taught Willie how to darn his socks, how to make better trades on shore when they docked, and how to make it look like you were working harder than you were. Which Willie always thought was like trying to teach a monkey to swing from trees.

 

In Anchorage, they caught the Diligence, which was a reefer on a small scale, carrying supplies to outposts along the Bearing Strait, crossing back and forth when the ice was melted back in summer. When they caught it, it was the end of summer, the bold, last dash of the Diligence to make some extra pocket money for the captain and regular crew. To Jason, it was a step closer to Japan.

 

“Japan?” asked Willie.

 

“Yeah, Willie,” said Jason, clapping him on the back as they signed up. “I got a deal going on there. The spice trade, you might say.”

 

Whatever Jason had going on, spice was the last thing on his list. But Willie signed anyway, saying, “I’d rather be on the Ardent Heart.”

 

“So would everybody,” replied Jason, leading them down the gangway to their cabin where they stowed their gear. “But Japan is where we want to be, and the Ardent Heart doesn’t go there.”

 

Willie had the impulse to ask why it was so important, to get that information on what was going down in Japan, but from the look on Jason’s face, it was something big, and besides, Jason didn’t like to be bothered when cooking up a scheme. He liked to leave the details to the last minute. Willie’s job was to help him swing whatever was going down, and to back Jason up. So he waited, leaning on the bulkhead, for Jason to finish.

 

The metal beneath his shoulder was cold to the touch, but considering the cabin they’d been assigned to, this was not unusual. They were underwater. Nothing to worry about, the hull was inches thick and the chance of them getting snapped by a hunk of ice or the lip of an iceberg this time of year was slim to none.

 

“C’mon, Jason, let’s get some chow, huh?”

 

“Right-o,” said Jason, straightening up, his expression telling Willie that Jason’s mind was already in Japan. He was liable to get rough if Willie pressed him, so he led the way back up the gangplank, trying to ignore the fact that the linoleum was curling back from the metal floor, which was rusting all the way along the narrow corridor. Or that there was a runnel of water and rust along the seams of every doorway they went through. Where it ended up was another matter. The engine room? Willie found that he could imagine it all too easily the water piling up to the pistons of the engines and stopping them flat. A ship as out of trim as this one appeared to be, well, it wouldn’t be that long of a shot.

 

A stiff breeze whistled past his ears as he tromped ahead of Jason, smelling his way to the galley, his stomach growling.

 

When they got there, they ate what was put in front of him. Grey something with crisp, fried fish, and something sweet that could have been tapioca gone bad, or some very runny custard. He ate it all; within days of his first berth, he’d learned not to be picky. Eat now or starve later. Jason was eating as well, washing everything down with large gulps of hot coffee.

 

“Where you posted, Jason,” he asked, when it looked like conversation could now take normal directions.

 

After a moment of silence, Jason apparently agreed. “Navigation, of course,” he said. Smiled.

 

Of this Willie had no doubt. Jason knew the captains and could pull the best duty offered to a non-member of the regular crew. But he pulled Willie up with him as often as he could, and this Willie knew, so he couldn’t complain.

 

“Engineer’s monkey,” he said to the unasked question. An engineer’s monkey’s job was to see that the equipment was greased up and to put away tools. That was it. Willie had gotten very fast at doing this, and could spend more time having a smoke and playing cards in the galley. Or dozing off in his bunk. Or trading for girlie magazines so he could doze with them in his bunk.

 

It would be a good trip.

 

Except that it wasn’t. By some fluke or oversight or misspent funds, there was enough fuel to sail them from port to port, but not quick enough to outrun the encroaching ice along the Bearing Strait. They’d kept going through the night, expecting to beat the weather, only to find themselves going slower and slower and finally stopping as the ice thickened all around and the ship had to come to a standstill. The first Willie felt of it was the jolt as the engines were slammed shut and the screech of metal grinding into a powder blasted in his ears. And then came the bad news. No rescue for two days. The nearest ice-breaking vessel was two days away. Russian patrols had picked up their SOS and were on their way. But the Diligence only had fuel for one more day. Which meant that in less than a day, everything would be turned off and they would be locked in the ice, frozen solid.

 

“Won’t they keep the heat on?” Willie asked Jason as soon as he could plow through the confusion of men in galleyways and on the deck. He found Jason in the radio room, leaning through the doorway, not getting in anyone’s way, but finding out what was going on.

 

“No,” said Jason. He didn’t look worried, but then, that was Jason’s way, to always put a good face on things. “They’ve got a cargo to protect, and they expect us to manage without.”

 

“What will we do?” He wanted Jason to tell him that it would be okay, that they would make it. Of course they would. But how, that was the question.

 

“We hunker down, laddie,” said Jason. “And eat cold food for a day or so.”

 

The heat went off near midnight, just as Willie was coming off his shift of packing the engine with grease to keep it from freezing. He wanted nothing more than a hot shower and a warm bed. But there was only a sliver of light in his cabin to heat the space, and Jason, putting on two pairs of socks, thickly darned, and searching for his hat.

 

“I don’t like the cold, Jason,” he said, digging around for layers of his own. Going to bed coated with grease that he could only get off with cold water and hard soap was nasty.

 

“You wanted cold,” said Jason, only that far from sounding angry, “well, now you’ve got it.”

 

The air was like snow, even as it was very still without a single breeze, and Willie shrugged himself into the lower bunk, under the woolen blankets that seemed too light to keep him warm, even though on other nights they had been plenty. His hat slipped off, and his socks itched, and his nose felt like a chip of ice was sitting on top of it. Jason shifted only once in the upper bunk, and Willie imagined, even as his teeth began to chatter, that there was nothing that would ruffle Jason’s feathers. He’d never seen a man like him.

 

An hour more and Willie felt like a block of ice, and he was not asleep.

 

I’m not going to make it. I gotta get warm.

 

“You not asleep, Willie?” came the question through the darkness.

 

“N-no,” he managed, shuddering.

 

“Alright then.”

 

He heard the muffled thump of Jason’s socked feet on the floor and then the heavy weight of a body on his bunk.

 

“What?”

 

“Scoot over, laddie,” said Jason, pulling back the blankets. “It’s just me, I’m no WOP, and I don’t have a taste for men, so scoot over.”

 

A small sharp lance cut through his gut. So Jason knew. Of course he knew, he wasn’t stupid, though they’ve never talked of it.

 

Willie moved back, toward the wall and lifted the blankets. Felt the weight of more blankets drifting on top of him and then felt Jason slide in beside him. Blankets settling down, and the banked warmth of Jason’s body.

 

“Take a deep breath,” said Jason, low, as if he were talking to himself, “and think of a fireplace. You like fireplaces, don’t you, Willie?”

 

“I’m gonna kill the guy who got us stuck in the ice,” he said in reply.

 

“Fine,” said Jason, his head moving on the pillow. “But tomorrow. Sleep now, I’ll find you something to kill him with tomorrow.”

 

Willie rolled over on his side, toward the wall, feeling pulses of warm and cold as the air sifted between their bodies. Then Jason scooted right up behind him, and they were hip to groin, Jason’s legs tucked up behind his. He froze.

 

“Breathe,” said Jason, his voice soft. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

 

A heavy arm laid itself across his waist, sealing in the heat of their bodies, casual, as if it were over the back of the family pet and nothing more. Willie could hear Jason breathing, slower and slower, and finally a little snort and a snore, and he realized his eyes were still open, staring at the grey darkness of the metal wall.

 

Stay. Breathe. Bend over.

 

“What,” he asked, his voice sounding low and thick in his ears. “What’s a mediterraneo, Jason?”

 

“It’s the name of a thing,” said Jason, his reply, sleepy and soft. As if he thought someone else might overhear them. “The name of a person, really. It means—” he paused, arm shifting, the weight of it pulling Willie closer to him. “It’s Italian for someone with blue eyes. Someone beautiful, like a statue. Where d’you hear it, then?”

 

Willie shrugged. “Around.”

 

“Don’ worry about it, then,” said Jason. “Nobody will be calling you that while I’m around.”

 

Willie tucked his head into the pillow and made himself close his eyes. The weight of Jason’s arm was warm, warmer than anything, and the heat of it spread through him like slow butter on a hot pan. It melted through him. Reached up. And pulled his head into the pillow.

 

It was days later, as they finally docked in Japan, before he could begin to get that feeling out of his head. Jason’s body behind him, that arm, heavy across his middle, and the sure solid feeling that nothing and no one would get at him with Jason there. A little repair job had gone on that night, unbeknownst to Jason, Willie was only realizing it as they stepped to shore and Jason had them stow their bags in yet another little hideyhole motel, and told Willie to wait. And Willie did wait, even with vague feelings of doubt, as Jason did not usually leave him behind like this, not when first into port. He’d never been to Japan before. But it just might be that Jason had saved him that night on the Diligence,in more ways than one, so Willie could forgive him the leaving.

 

Japan was a land of paper buildings and dark haired people who made him feel like a giant towering over them. And it was where, for the one and only time, Jason landed in jail. Willie had been using his hands to barter some gum for a bowl of noodle soup from a street vendor and not getting very far, when two armed policemen approached him. As in Turkey, they were polite and quiet and bristling, Willie was to come with them now. As to why, he soon found out.

 

Jason, in the midst of some scheme or other, leaving Willie all unawares, had tried the schilling on the wrong person. Some mayor or other’s nephew had gone screaming to grand uncle, and now Willie stood, staring through the bars of the paper jail, at Jason, who looked like he wanted to throw up.

 

“Don’t like small spaces, boy-o,” said Jason. One of the guards poked him, and he grunted. His hair was askew, and his eyes looked deadly green.

 

A small man, so short and slight so as to appear to be a boy, came up. He was wearing a dark suit, and his hair, black as coal, looked oiled. He smiled and bowed, as everyone in this country seemed to do, and nodded. And began to speak in clear, though slow, English.

 

“Your friend here has broken the law. We put him in jail. He says you will bail him out?”

 

But of course. That’s what friends did.

 

Turned out that working off the bail, as Willie had no money, and now, neither had Jason, meant truly working off the bail. In a fish packing house, in a country that did not seem to have the grasp of ice and running water. It was Willie’s job to shovel the wreckage of slaughtered and gutted fish. Guts, and spines, and ribbons of pink and grey fin. Sliced eyes and still flapping tails, hacked off with large blades and spilling onto the floor to wither in a stink of pooling blood and mucus. The fishcutters stood up on low platforms and the bodies of fresh-caught fish trundled by on a rubber belt. They didn’t care about the blood circling their feet, no indeed. Chattering in Japanese, they walked above the swill, passing to and from their tasks on raised stones. Only Willie, his feet soaked inside of ten minutes, waded through it. Shoveling the muck into bins to be used as fertilizer.

 

He couldn’t decide later if it was the smell, an ever pervasive funk of sea salt and rotting flesh that got to him, or if it was the shower of scales that littered the air and settled on his skin like an unwelcome layer of bitter silver. Or maybe it was the ache in his shoulders that built very quickly each time he had to lift the heavy and clumsy shovel over his head. Or the constant slip beneath his feet as he trod on split flesh, sometimes bright red and still alive, somehow. Sometimes so old, stuck in some crevice and forgotten that the lump had grown new flesh that smelled as foul as the bottom of an overused privy that Willie had to allow himself to throw up.

 

Only for Jason would he have done this, and at noon on the second day he made a pact that he would never work again. Jason would hear of it, friend or no. Willie’s working days were going to be over very soon.

 

At the end of the third day, they let Willie go. Funny that he had never thought of running, or of punching Jason out of the rice-paper jail. It wasn’t that he was too tired at night to move that stopped him. Or even the fact that they were in a foreign country and God knew what the punishment for unlawful release from jail was. No, it was the leery feeling that he got when he thought about it. You don’t build a jail out of paper if you expected that anyone would actually try to escape from it. It was almost as if they built the jail so flimsily because they knew you wouldn’t dare.

 

Jason hated jails. But maybe he could poke a little hole in the wall of this one and look out at the sky that way.

 

When he met Jason at the police station, oddly it was as simple as that. No escort. No last minute paper work or lectures about stupid Yankees in over their heads. He was walking up and Jason was walking out. Willie had their bags, surely the Japanese authorities would expect them to beat a hasty retreat and so they were. Jason nodded, and Willie remembered giving him the hard line of how the future was to go. Willie would do no more work. Ever. Jason would pay him to back up his schemes but that’s as far as it would go.

 

“Fine, laddie,” said Jason, taking his bag and hefting it on his shoulder. They were heading toward the docks as fast as Jason’s long legs could lead them, and Willie hustled to keep up. “I’ll think up something to keep us busy. But first, you and I are going to take a break. I’ve got us tickets on a ship headed south.”

 

“You bought tickets?”

 

“Indeed I did, laddie.”

 

“What? I thought—”

 

Jason patted his bag, and Willie could see how it seemed overfull at one end and that’s when he stopped and slugged Jason. Jason swayed back, dropping his seabag and came at him, both fists holding his collar.

 

“I had to keep it. It was my deal!”

 

“Your deal,” snarled Willie, shrugging himself out of Jason’s grasp, “cost me three days in fish guts, when all the time you had enough money to bail yourself out!”

 

“But I couldn’t, don’t you see? I needed that next egg, I had this plan—”

 

“I don’t care about your fucking plan,” he said, curling his hands into fists, “but you’re giving me half right now and I’m going on my own.”

 

“Half?” Jason’s eyebrows rose.

 

“I earned it, now hand it over.”

 

“The hell I will,” said Jason. Also curling his fists, socking Willie in the jaw so hard that he fell on his ass in the dirt, and Jason was on him, working him over, muttering about being trapped in that damn paper jail, with large, hard punches, till Willie was sagging on his arms, swallowing blood. And Jason, looming over him, sweating. Rage fading.

 

“Get up, boy-o,” he said, holding out his hand for Willie to grab. “I’ll take you out of here.”

 

“Fuck off.”

 

There was a moment of silence as the dust settled in the street around them, as Japanese people passed by, eyes averted, not making a sound. He stared at their eyes, trying to make them look at him as he got up and wiped his lip with the back of his hand.

 

He was almost nose-to-nose with Jason before the other man spoke. Low, in that way he had when delivering threats he knew he could make true. “You’re picking up your bag, and you’re coming with me. You got that? We’re taking the next boat that’s leaving the docks and we’re heading out of here. Now.”

 

A glare from Jason’s eyes, and Willie let himself be crumpled. He wanted out of here and he didn’t like fighting with Jason. “I ain’t never working again,” he said. “I swear it. I’ll help you with your schemes, but I ain’t never lifting no shovel, or carrying anything, or being no fucking grease monkey, you got it?”

 

Jason nodded. “I got it, boy-o.”

 

The next boat leaving was the Ki Li Si, heading out to Pacific islands that even Jason had never seen or heard of. She carried nothing more demanding than cinder blocks and meant to pick up exotic fruits to take to trade for supplies for the string of islands so far beyond civilization that there were no jails, paper or otherwise, and where Jason would feel no need to go dancing at the edges of the law.

 

“No work,” said Willie as they stowed their gear.

 

“No work,” agreed Jason. “We’re on vacation, I paid for our passage, square and proper.”

 

Willie could only grunt at this as they clambered up the narrow gangplank and stowed their gear in what was obviously a converted third-class passenger cabin, with wooden plank siding and even a little sink. It was small, but after double metal bunks and no storage space, the cabin was a piece of luxury. He claimed the best bunk under the little porthole for himself by throwing his sea bag on it, and brushed past Jason in search of a shower. He could feel Jason’s eyes on him, though neither of them said a word, and he knew that Jason would be scooping out where the booze was kept, and the two of them would have something to drink later. When the ship was underway. When they had left Japan.

Fleet of Stars - Part 4