Steve Erickson: Tours of the Black Clock

MARC DID NOT GO to Samson the next day either, or the next. He continued sailing with old Zeno back to the island, hiding on deck and never stepping ashore. Zeno put him to work collecting the fares; it also became his job to yell at passengers who leaned too far over the side, and lie to them about things in the river. It might be alligators one week and piranha the next. The old man filled Marc in on how to operate the boat through the sophistication of the currents. Sometimes, on the trip over, the fog would clear enough for a moment so that Marc could see the whole of the island as he’d never seen it. Beyond the island, beyond the interminable river in which the island rested, he might almost have believed he saw the river’s other side; in the distance a red train crossed on its tracks high above the water. The dust out over the plains were the herds of short-haired silver buffalo that had begun appearing out of nowhere at the turn of the century’s final decade. “You don’t eat one of those,” Zeno said, “however hungry you are. Light you up like a city boulevard.” Past the end of the island was the old rubble of a small shelter that had been built on wooden pillars out over the river; it was charred black from a fire that had taken place before Marc was born. The boy believed he could still see the smoke of the inferno. It was something nobody, including his mother, talked about. Know anything about that fire? he asked the old man. “Not something I talk about,” the old man muttered.

T.O.T.B.C.—2

AFTER SEVERAL WEEKS MARC said to the old man one night, I’m not getting to Samson very quickly this way. “Don’t say it like it’s my fault,” Zeno snapped back, “I’m not stopping you.” Well, the boy said after thinking about it a moment, I don’t have a ticket for the bus. “I’ll give you the money for the ticket,” said Zeno, “you can leave tomorrow. I’m not stopping you.” You don’t have any money, the boy said, those fares don’t add up to anything, how do you get by with charging them four-bits anyway? What kind of business is that? “It’s my business, that’s what kind,” the old man answered, “the fares don’t mean puckey. Pocket money. I get my main cut from Judy on the island, a percentage of her take. I bring her the tourists and she provides a place for them to be brought. Don’t worry about my business.” He pulled a canvas sack from beneath his mattress. He pulled from it some ratty old bills and a lot of loose change. The boy turned away. He built a fire in the stove and lit the gaslamp, not looking at Zeno who stood with the money in his gnarly hands, affronting the boy with it. Marc’s head was light and pounding from the final trip back — the liquor of the passengers and the fumes of the boat’s motor. What about you? he muttered finally, still not looking at Zeno who by this time had dropped the money to his side. “Hell I got along forty years without you, punk,” said Zeno. The two of them sat and had a drink together, and at last the boathouse began to warm though it never lost its dampness. The fire burned down and the boy fed and stoked it again, and when it burned down again, before they slept, Marc said, A couple more days. Then I’m gone. The old man nodded and muttered back, “Sure. You can leave tomorrow if you want.” When Marc was sure Zeno was asleep he added, You fucking cheat at cards anyway. Closing his eyes he heard, “Sure, leave tomorrow. I’m not stopping you.”

A COUPLE MORE DAYS and Marc still hadn’t left. It wasn’t long after that, on an afternoon when the sun broke glancingly through the fog, that the old man plopped with a thump down on a fruit crate near the side of the boat; thirty or forty quarters fell through his fingers and skipped across the puddles of the deck. Marc instinctively knelt to retrieve them, and only when he looked almost casually at old Zeno did he see a face that was as white as his own hair. A fat man with a hat and camera said, “Is he OK?” and began picking up quarters. Marc shook Zeno’s shoulder and said, Hey. When Zeno didn’t respond the boy said, Old man? He still didn’t respond. Oh Jesus, the boy exclaimed, torn between attending to Zeno and steering the boat, which was now beginning to veer wildly off course. Other passengers were looking around in confusion. Finally the old man’s breathing resumed, his head lifted and he peered around, but he still didn’t move and everything he said was jumbled and without sense. When the boat reached shore he couldn’t feel his legs. Marc took Zeno into the boathouse and put him on the mattress. He canceled the rest of the day’s schedule. He got into a fight with the fat man in the hat and camera over the quarters he’d pocketed. “Shouldn’t have to pay to come back anyway,” the man protested, “people should have the right to go back where they came from.” Not on my river, said Marc.

Zeno was back out on the boat the next day for a couple of trips over, but his legs still weren’t right and things said to him had to be repeated. Then he collapsed on the rail and almost fell in the water. For the next several days the business didn’t run at all. Judy came over to see where everyone had gone. “You could have let me known,” she said. Not on that island, the boy answered back. The two discussed getting a doctor while Zeno lay on the mattress listening. “Forget doctors,” he croaked, in one of his more lucid moments.

Marc woke that night when the light of the gaslamp was only a point and the sound of Zeno’s voice in the dark was only a scrape of life against death. “I set it on fire,” Marc heard him, “are you listening? That house on the pillars out over the river, forty years ago. …” There was a pause; in the dark Marc, from his side of the boathouse, could feel the old man struggling. He began to say, Don’t struggle; but the old man said first, “Say nothing and listen. I … are you listening? The hand that set it on fire was my own and now I have to tell someone. Because a man died, see. A man burnt up. City man, some kind of gangster or private eye … your mother knows. He came looking for her. He waited in that house over the river, and at night when he slept I set it on fire. Never quite knew why I did it. So I have his ashes on my soul now, now I have to tell someone because your mother’s knowing isn’t enough. She’ll die with the secret the same way she hasn’t spoken to me since it happened, it’s not a secret that should be died with. …” Marc heard him gasp. He tried to keep the old man talking, if only to reel him back from whatever he was sinking into. Old man, called Marc. Nothing. Old man?

IT WAS OBVIOUS AND appropriate that the old man should be given to the river; Marc wasn’t about to let him hang in a tree for a week. So in the middle of the night he took Zeno into the river and bound him with rope to the bottom of the boat. He cried as he did this. The next day, wearing the blue coat with the dirty gold buttons, he opened up business; his first decision was to raise the fare to a dollar each way. As weeks and then months passed, he came to forget about Zeno tied to the bottom of the boat, except for those odd moments when his bones rattled in the currents of the river; the passengers would look curiously to their feet at the sound. But the new captain was certainly mindful of the old man that first trip across the river when the fog closed in and there was nothing but a world of water and vapor, leaving him to ask himself, Where in the universe am I? Which he might just as well have asked all those years his boat was only a floating chinatown. And that he asked it now without ever having asked it before was what made this moment the first lapse in a life of innocence.