Michael Christie - If I Fall, If I Die

Vadim caught it and put it under his arm like a football.

“This tugboat, in Montreal,” Vadim said before he shut the hatch, “this is not free. He is my friend, but he must make a living.”

When Titus started digging for his wallet, Vadim shook his head. “There is a man,” Vadim said, shifting his weight and checking over both shoulders. “He is from the center of America somewhere, Ecuador, Panama — who knows. He has a name, but this is not matter to you. It’s a poison on the tongue. He is causing many problems for me. For your friend Vadim. He is a vile man. A nastiness. Like in Bill Shakespeare, or a novel by Charlie Dickens — yes! A man like Sikes.”

Titus nodded. He couldn’t keep his eyes from the empty jar under Vadim’s forearm.

“Well, this man has been stealing from me, Titus. He tells me I owe him money when I do not. He tells me we have made bets that no crew has witnessed. At night he comes to me when I sleep. He whispers that he will cut my a killings tendons. You know these?” Vadim made a slashing motion over the back of his leg.

Again, Titus nodded.

“So this is this thing I need helping with. You see I am small man. I am watchman. I watch. But you are not, Titus. You are a man who does not only watch. Who has seen much bloodshed. I tell this by your face. You have scars. You are a hardness. So, I’m hoping for this. Help this man fall from the boat. That is it. Like Bill Sikes. Give him what is his own. It would save me from so much …” His gaze fixed on the edge of the hatch as he trailed off.

Titus took a breath. “I’m sorry, Vadim,” he said. “You’ve been real helpful. And I appreciate it. But I don’t think—”

“No,” Vadim barked and grabbed the hatch. “I knew this. This is okay. This is my problem. You have your problem and I have mine. These are separations.” He said he would return with the water, then closed the hatch. Later Titus woke to find two jars of water had been tossed down into the hold while he slept. They were murky with green bits spinning in them like tiny meteors.

Maybe it was the sight of his best friend’s blood dripping from the handcart he’d used to transport him or the limited oxygen or some mysterious fumes, but the texture of Titus’s mind had altered. There in the dark hold he watched time pour time down the drain indifferently, lying for hours, unchafed by boredom or unwanted visions. He played chess with old friends and directed theater productions entirely in his head. He remembered whole texts he’d read as a child, enough to recite them backwards. His time in the hold had nearly turned pleasant — empty spaces like a stack of newspapers printed blank, nothing but dates at the top of every page.

He ate oats soaked in one of the jars and reserved the other for drinking. Soon from the scuffing sounds he knew the ship was again in a series of locks. Then for a period anchored. With the engines quiet he heard more voices above, some footfalls, then nothing. In the dead quiet he listened to the rustle and snap of himself blinking.

Then the engines roared again. The ship sounded its foghorn. The boat rocked. After a while he detected a briny scent skulking into the hold. After another day he heard a tapping at the hull. All kinds of clean notes like a glockenspiel: ice, he soon realized. The water in both jars was gone when Vadim came again.

“I’m sorry, Titus,” said Vadim sorrowfully. He was drunk again, his face rosy with blood.

“We’re the sea’s music now, aren’t we, Vadim?”

“This is what I’ve been trying to tell you,” he sobbed. “But you don’t making sense when you speak. It looks like you are taking vacations after all.”

“What about Montreal?” Titus said, elevating his voice, less concerned with his own well-being than a man’s adherence to his word.

“I have job here, you know,” said Vadim. “I had to paint winches. Grease chains. Low work, you must think, Titus, beneath you. But it must be done. And my tugboating friend did not come. It is not all easy for Vadim. He does not get to slumber all day in a soft bed.”

Titus clenched his teeth and once again considered piling up a mound of oats so he could climb out and throttle the man, though now the hatch was even higher. Perhaps Titus was eating his way down.

“But there is another problem,” Vadim said sheepishly. “This man I told you about. The Panamanian. Titus, I told this man about you when I have been drinking. A mistake. I am a talking friend, Titus, my weakness. And now he is going to Visser about you. He said this with his mouth. About how you have stolen your passage and have been eating the cargo. This is not good. He is also a rapist, this man. He boasted to me last night, as though I would applaud?”

“Okay,” said Titus, “get to it.”

“If you don’t deal with him soon, I don’t know if I can come again. Too dangerous for me.”

Titus understood now his position. That he’d rid himself of his desire to die and attained something near peace in the dark hold meant nothing. He would not go unpunished for everything he’d left broken behind him. It seemed fitting now that the price for no longer yearning to cast himself overboard would be to further degrade himself, but he’d already constructed the armored vault in which to put all the vile things he had left to do in his life, and its dragging weight meant there would be no more good days for him, no more comfort or kindness.

“When?” Titus said.

“He is on watch tonight, before me,” said Vadim, his eyes on fire. “I will fetch you when the time is clear.”

Later, a knock came and the hatch opened, and rain fluttered in as Titus heard the slap of feet retreating on the wet deck. Titus had hoarded a large pile of oats that allowed him to grasp the lip of the hatch with two hands and hike himself up.

On the deck, he drew the sweetness of sea air into his body. No stars, only a tin roof of cloud and waves crashing like shunting trains. He removed his work boots and set them beside the hatch, which he closed but did not fasten. He crept in bare feet along the railing in the dark toward the bow of the ship, as rain swept in fizzy sails overhead. He spotted the man: short, but sturdy looking, copper skin like an Indian, smoking, sparing the tiny ember from the spray with a small cave made with his hand. He stood exactly where Titus had weeks before, the morning of the accident, when he nearly plunged himself into Thunder Bay’s harbor, which he’d now left so far behind.

With the sweet air in his lungs and his head clearing, Titus came to the knowledge he could do this man no harm. He’d picked up some Spanish while gambling with sailors laid up in Thunder Bay and was sure he could piece together enough words to inform the Panamanian of Vadim’s plot. Then Titus would throw himself at the mercy of this Visser. Titus had been beaten plenty in his life, and the thought of it didn’t quicken his pulse in the slightest. At worst he’d be thrown overboard.

The Panamanian couldn’t hear Titus when he called, so Titus touched him kindly on the shoulder. The man spun and his eyes cracked open and popped with panic and he started yelling in a guttural tongue that Titus had no acquaintance with. The words came faster the more he spoke, the way an avalanche gathers speed. He was something closer to black, light-skinned, but black. Tranquillo , Titus repeated a few times, until the man clenched his fist over his cigarette with a hiss and swung. Titus half-ducked and took it hard on the ear. They grappled. Perhaps it was his time in the hold, or the lack of oxygen, or his oat diet, but Titus did not find the strength he’d expected. They scuffled for some duration, each trying to upend the other, slipping wildly on the slick deck. When exhaustion took them, they spent some time in a clinch. Each instance the man made to cry out, Titus squeezed his chest and killed his breath. Titus tried every word in every language he knew of to reach him, even making some up, as the man breathed in his ear like a dog, but none of it registered inside him. After a period of rest, the man commenced thrashing in earnest and wailing his fists. Blows landed on Titus’s chin and face and neck. The man was strong and pinned Titus to the rail. Titus grabbed the seat of his rubber pants and desperately hoisted upward. Upended, the man clutched at the air and caught hold of the railing with a leg and an arm on his way over. Clinging there, he started calling in his inscrutable language toward the rear of the ship where the wheelhouse was. People’s names, sounded like, and Titus wondered momentarily if they corresponded to his parents, or friends, or crewmates. Panicked, blood and voices howling in him, Titus struck once at the man’s bulging throat and it yielded and instantly he lost all wherewithal to breathe. He choked like he’d swallowed a box of fishhooks, dangling there, before strength abandoned him and he dropped into the dark roar.