Rudolph Wurlitzer - The Drop Edge of Yonder

After the dory was tied up alongside the prison hulk, Snake Eyes and Bent led Zebulon up a gangplank, where a guard was waiting to take him below.

NCE AGAIN, ZEBULON FOUND HIMSELF TRAPPED INSIDE the stinking carcass of a ship. No sails billowed above or water slid below There was no past, no future. Only backbreaking daily routine.

At night his legs were shackled to a bulwark below deck along with twenty-two other lost souls. He knew their stamp: horsethieves, high-line riders, short-trigger men, bunko artists. Seven women were quartered on the other side of the foc'sle, mostly whores and thieves along with an ax-murderer and a cook who had poisoned the owner of a Hangtown saloon after he insulted her pork chili. Through the long suffocating nights, men and women prisoners shouted insults and declarations of love back and forth, pounding and throwing their broken bodies against the bulkhead. At dawn they were transported across the river under armed guard, the women in a separate dory to cook the prisoners' greasy midday gruel or clean up the Warden's house and wash his family's laundry. At night they rowed back to the prison hulk. Too exhausted to speak, they were allowed a halfan-hour on deck, where they stared with vacant eyes at the river that never moved or offered the hint of a breeze.

Jammed head to toe on hard wooden planks, they were never alone. Rats as big as possums scurried and sniffed across the deck, wet with vomit and slop from blocked weep holes and overflowing buckets of waste. Mosquitoes that felt big enough to mount swarmed through open portholes to feed on raw, exposed flesh. At night, rinky-dink piano music from one of the city's saloons drifted across the river, invading their wretched dreams like a drunken surgeon scraping flesh from bone. Every sound and movement seemed designed to encourage their longings for early death.

Zebulon dealt with despair the way his Pa had taught him: by beating up the first man that crossed his path or dared to step on his shadow. In this case, rather than some lost mountain man gone loco from lack of stimulation, the target available on the neighboring bunk was a twisted sack of venom by the name of Plug. He was a scrawny bank clerk convicted of killing a stagecoach driver and two female school teachers when their combined savings didn't measure up to a steamship ticket to Brazil, much less a stake to Mexico. Due to a shortage of manpower to help build the booming state capital, Plug's execution, along with that of three others, had been delayed until further notice. Zebulon didn't give a damn about Plug's past. What bothered him was Plug stealing his tobacco and using his waste bucket when his own was only half-full. Not to mention Plug's nightly screams for a whore named Lucy Goosey who had left him to run off to Hawaii with a shipping clerk. The final straw, one that made Zebulon jam his knee into Plug's stomach and smash his nose into his forehead with an open palm, was waking up with Plug's fingers around his neck, whispering to his darling Lucy Goosey that when he broke out he was going to track her down, wherever she was, and nail her fat whore's ass to the outhouse door. It was a satisfying solution, smashing up Plug, but the result wasn't worth it.

From then on, Plug treated him like a savior, or at least someone he feared was crazier than he was; it was as if all the anticipation and dread Plug had projected onto the Warden, he had now switched to Zebulon. To his dismay, Plug began to follow him around like a whipped dog, offering tobacco and scraps of food and whatever else he thought Zebulon might appreciate, including a rattlesnake skin and a broken arrowhead he had found clearing brush on the riverbank. Plug also revealed a secret: any day now, wait and see, he planned to uncover a hole he had dug near his bunk and then, hallelujah, sink the entire fucking ship and everyone in it.

"It takes a Plug to work a plug," he declared. "The job will be done when we come back from work detail. Everything is ready I got other holes drilled just in case. A few of the women know about it. Large Marge, that big Irish snatch that chopped and pickled her boss, she's dug herself some holes. You wait, all hell will break loose. When the guards experience water risin' over their ankles, they'll jump like chickens runnin' from the ax. Ain't one of them can swim. That's the beauty We'll grab their rifles and shoot one or two to show we mean business. If the Warden is around, we'll skin his righteous ass or take him hostage. Glug, glug, glug. Know what I mean? Before they know it we'll be in that little skiff. Just the two of us. It'll be night, and we'll slide down that fat river like Egyptian pharaohs with the stars above and freedom just ahead. We'll row all night until we float into San Francisco. When we pass a steamer carryin' a load of gold- suckin' pilgrims headed for the gold fields, we'll stand up and shout: `You'll be sorryyyyyy, sorryyyyyy, sorryyyyyy!"'

Plug turned over on his side, chuckling and chewing his lower lip, congratulating himself on the efficiency of his plan.

A week went by. Then two. Then a month. The prisoners measured the passage of time by marking incidents and occasions on the side of the bulwark: the arrival of a prisoner, an execution, an accident. Otherwise time would stop, and a day would become a year.

The list always changed and was always the same: a card cheat committed suicide by falling onto a pick ax he had propped up on the side of the road, three runaway Chinese suffering from opium withdrawal hung themselves from their long pigtails, a Samoan whore was caught giving a blow job to Snake Eyes behind the chuck wagon. The Warden shot the whore out of hand and relieved Snake Eyes of his duties, a rejection that incited him to rob two well-heeled prospectors from Virginia of enough to make a run for the gold fields.

As the days went on, Plug fell into an increasingly dark and deluded lethargy. Unable to summon enough nerve to execute his plan, he retreated to a closed-off section of his mind and a defensive silence that was broken only by bursts of maniacal laughter and further threats to his true love, Lucy Goosey.

The Warden remained a distant and ominous presence. Occasionally he and his wife journeyed to San Francisco for a few weeks to attend the opening of an opera or music hall, or to promote himself to the Eastern businessmen that were continually staking out the city. On his return, the prisoners would often see him at dawn, standing in a nightdress in front of his house, staring at them through a spyglass as they rowed to work across the river. On one occasion as they approached the shore, oars raised, they floated past the Warden bathing waistdeep in the river. Cupping his hands, the Warden poured water over his head, smiling at them as he waved a salutation.

Plug grabbed Zebulon's arm. "Look at that slime-coated bastard. He knows what I'm up to. And you, too, for bein' an accomplice. He'll cut off our heads, that's what he's thinkin'; he'll place them on stakes in front of the courthouse. A warning to all malcontents."

Rowing back that evening, they saw the Warden and his family swinging in a hammock beneath the branch of an oak tree. A uniformed Large Marge stood in attendance before them, waiting for them to stop swinging long enough to offer cookies and lemonade from a silver tray. The Warden wore cream-colored linen pants and a long-sleeved blue-and-white striped French jersey; his wife wore an ankle-length white dress. Their son sat squirming between them as if a platoon of ants were crawling up his sailor suit.

On holidays the Warden hosted lavish picnics attended by the city's elite. Kites were flown along the riverbank, and a band from Sacramento or Sonoma played lively marching tunes and Scottish and Irish jigs. At the Warden's fiftieth birthday celebration, his son ran along the riverbank dressed as a miniature George Washington with a long white wig and a general's peaked hat, slinging rocks at the prisoners as they rowed slowly back to the prison hulk. When a rock struck Zebulon in the forehead, the band celebrated the boy's marksmanship with a triumphant drum roll and bugle blast while the guests clapped hands, applauding the boy's spunk and spontaneity.