John Gardner - October Light

“They’ve shut down to listen for us,” Mr. Nit whispered. “Thank God our engine’s off.”

Peter Wagner hollered down the speaking tube, “Don’t start her yet, Jane!”

“Can they see us, you think?” Captain Fist called softly.

“Not yet,” Peter Wagner said. “We’re pitch dark.” He wiped away the sweat from his nose and forehead. If they were going to stop and listen from time to time, it would be hard to move the Indomitable out of range.

The Militant’s lights came on again, and then the chug-chug-chug of the motor. Peter Wagner darted to the speaking tube. “Move it, Jane,” he shouted. “Let’s get out of here.” That too, he was certain, was a line from a movie. He was feeling increasingly glassed in by the minute, mere shadow in a film.

Jane’s voice came not from below but from the hatch, where she’d just stuck her head up. “It won’t start,” she said.

They all turned their heads to stare at her, then turned them again toward the lights of the Militant. “It won’t turn over,” she said. “Won’t make a sound.”

He ran for the hatch.

The starter of the Indomitable was a mechanism so complicated it seemed never to have been intended to be used. Its colored wires in their rusted iron box were as thickly intrinsicate as congressional by-laws, as impenetrable to the casual eye as the Truths of the Church. Standing in water that sloshed to their knees, Jane held the mechanic’s bulb and Peter Wagner traced the wiring with his fingertips, swearing beneath his breath. He saw almost at once that it was hopeless, at least for him.

“Get Mr. Nit,” he said.

She hooked the light over the patched, pitted tie-rod that held the hull together and hurried out the engine room door and away up the ladder. A moment later Mr. Nit was bending there, pulling at his earlobes and shaking his head. “Take us hours,” he said. With trembling fingers, he drew out one of his cigars.

“It can’t take hours,” Peter Wagner said.

“True,” he said. “But I can tell you it will. It’s a very sophisticated starter, Captain, because the engine, y’see, is extremely complex. It’s built so it can run on oil, diesel fuel, or gasoline. A heavy fuel, see, takes a hot starter, whereas a lighter fuel … So the wiring’s what we call sophisticated.” He gave a monkeyish laugh and felt in his coveralls pockets for the matches. When he found them, he lit one and made several quick passes — not watching what he was doing — at his cigar. At last, successful, he blew out smoke, then nodded, sucking at it quickly, as would a rabbit. “Sophisticated little machine,” he said, and nodded.

“Lot of good that is when you’re stalled in the Pacific,” Peter Wagner said.

Mr. Nit was defensive, as if he’d invented the wonderful machine himself. “What do you expect, with all that water from the seam-leaks. See here? They’re half under water. It’s a perfectly good system. It’s just those leaks.”

Peter Wagner said, “Wires should be sealed against leaks, Mr. Nit.”

“Boats aren’t supposed to leak,” said Mr. Nit and looked sullen.

Peter Wagner wiped his forehead. “Well, bail her out and get to work,” he said.

But again Mr. Nit shook his head. His upper lip jittered and the wrinkles around his eyes twitched. “Can’t do it, Captain. The pumps run off th’engine. I could bail her out with a can or something, but how you expect me to throw out the bilge? Carry it up the ladder can by can?”

“Figure something out,” Peter Wagner said. He went up on deck. His heart banged, just behind his collarbone, when he saw how much nearer the Militant was now. She looked like a coal furnace floating through the night. He sent Mr. Goodman below, put Jane on watch in the darkened wheelhouse, and crooked a finger at Captain Fist, inviting him to the cabin. Captain Fist hung back at the doorway, still watching those lights. Peter Wagner closed his hand on the old man’s flabby arm, urging him in, guiding him through the darkness to the chair at the desk. “Sit down,” he said. The Captain groped behind him and carefully sat down. Peter Wagner himself, when he’d felt his way to it, sat down on the Captain’s bunk. “As you see,” Peter Wagner said, “they’re practically on top of us. I think you’d better tell me what’s happening.”

The Captain sat, baggy with hopelessness, his face blooming from the darkness like blue cheese. He watched the doorway as if expecting the bow of the Militant to come through it.

“Who are they? Why are they after you?” Peter Wagner asked.

“What’s the difference?” Captain Fist said. He looked toward the door as if to show that by plain inspection their evil was essential, beneath complexity.

“Who are they?” he said again.

Captain Fist sucked his breath in, ground his teeth, then brought out like an explosion: “Devils! That’s who! I’ve scrimped and saved and sweated and slaved, building up this business, and just as I’m putting a little pittance by—” The outrage brought tears to his eyes and hushed his tongue.

Sally Abbott looked up, a discovery tingling at the back of her brain, then hurriedly read on.

“But who?” Peter Wagner asked, bending toward him.

“Parasites! Scavengers!” Captain Fist said. “People that want the whole world for themselves, and refuse to work for it! Nihilists, barbarians, Ostrogoths that destroy people’s empires for sport! Lucifer’s legions!” He banged his cane. After a moment he calmed himself. “They’re smugglers,” he said. “Small-time chiselers that resent my existence. I beat their prices, I beat their quality, I carry tons to their miserable kilos. Also—” he glanced at Peter Wagner, eyes flashing: “I was here first!”

“So!” cried Sally Abbott and, despite the shotgun in the hallway, laughed. How long, she wondered, had she been missing it? The novel was all about Capitalism — about those pious, self-righteous and violent True Americans who’d staked out their claim and, for all their talk about “Send me your poor” (or whatever the Statue of Liberty intoned), would let nobody else in on the pickings. Captain Fist was exactly like her brother James. That was the reason she enjoyed him so. He thought he was the real, true American stock — An Hour’s Work for an Hour’s Pay, and Don’t Tread on Me, and Semper Fidelis! — and what was he? What was he if the truth be told?

She laughed again. He was a miserable, snarling, brawling old smuggler, living off the scraps of the plutocrats’ dream and hounded by the envious even lower. Her laugh this time sounded, even in her own ears, maniacal; a fact which she enjoyed. The Captain even talked like her brother James. “Parasites! Scavengers! People that want the whole world for themselves, and refuse to work for it!” It might have been James Page talking of Sally Page Abbott, come here to live with him and now gone on strike. Men of brute violence, both of them; mad as March hares.

She cleaned off her glasses, polishing them on the sheet, fogging them with her breath and polishing them again, and returned to her story, smiling a little, reading hurriedly now, wondering if what she had discovered had really been intended.

Now Jane was at the door, her lovely eyes wide. “They see us,” she said.

“Then we’re dead men,” Captain Fist said. He tipped up his face and started praying. He had, as he prayed, an incongruous, crafty look.

“Did you hear me?” she said, and touched Peter Wagner’s arm.

He got up from the bunk without answering and crossed to the door, morose, trapped in a battle for which he’d never volunteered. The Militant was now about half a mile away, bearing down, engines Full Ahead. Their searchlight laid out their roadway on the water. He went to the speaking tube. “You got that starter cleared, Mr. Nit?” No answer.