John Gardner - October Light

“Look,” Jane whispered, closing her hand on his arm and pointing. On the Militant, just below the lighted American flag, they were winching something up out of the foredeck; he couldn’t make out what. Captain Fist appeared in the doorway of his cabin, wobbly-kneed, clinging to his cane.

Peter Wagner snatched the binoculars from their shelf on the bridge and trained them on the Militant’s bow. He saw, at first, nothing but bleary light and the delicate patterns of glittering mold on the lenses. He fiddled with the range. And then suddenly, strikingly clear, at the exact center of the ring of mold like a jungle creature in a sunlit clearing, he saw a black, old-fashioned cannon. It had wheels. They must have stolen it from in front of some public monument. He lowered the glasses, and the same instant he saw a white puff of smoke, a bloom of dark flame at the cannon mouth — the Militant bobbed like a cork — and then he heard the report. Something splashed, twenty feet portside. Jane ducked into the wheelhouse, scrambled on the floor, then in the corner, and emerged a second later with a rifle. Captain Fist aimed his pistol, steadying his right hand with his left. Peter Wagner looked around wildly for some weapon, then stopped, shocked. He was doing it again, slashing out crazily, like an animal.

“Don’t shoot!” he cried out. He grabbed the Captain’s pistol with one violently shaking hand, Jane’s arm with the other. “Come with me!” He dragged them to the cabin. “Sit down, be quiet!” he said. The cannon boomed again, and again there was a splash, much closer.

“We’ll die like foxes in a hole!” Captain Fist whispered hoarsely. He was indignant but also, again, distinctly crafty.

“Be still,” Peter Wagner said. His heart was whamming and his tongue tasted brassy. He’d read that that happened.

The Militant’s engines went off, and now they could hear voices. Holding Jane’s hand, Peter Wagner crawled over to the door to peek out, just in time to see the cannon belch smoke and flame. The muffled report of the cannon and the crash, somewhere above his head, were almost simultaneous.

“We’re hit!” the Captain whimpered, clutching his heart.

“Sh!” Peter Wagner said.

Then came rifle fire. Six shots, a pause, four more. The Militant was right alongside them now. If they fired the cannon it would knock the whole cabin off. The searchlight swung around and slammed the deck and bulkheads like the flat of a hand; every bolt or bar, twist of rope, slant of cable was like a razor cut.

“We surrender!” Peter Wagner shouted, then instantly ducked back — a premonition. They machine-gunned the cabin door.

Then everything was still. They listened to each other’s breathing in the cabin. Except for the lapping of the water, it was all they could hear. Mr. Nit and Mr. Goodman, down in the flooded engine room, made no sound.

“Why don’t they sink us?” Jane whispered. She lay pressed to the floor, sheltered under Peter Wagner’s arm.

“Sh!” he said. But he too had been thinking about that and believed he knew the answer. He felt foolish, plotting like some cowboy in a thriller — felt revulsion, in fact, thinking of the alphas in biological laboratories, the animals that always won out because they thrived on challenge, stress — but he also felt, puppet of the universe or not, exuberant, bound to be victorious. “Give me your guns,” he said.

“You’re crazy,” Captain Fist whispered, but he gave up his gun: Peter Wagner had snatched it from his hand before the whisper was out. Jane gave him the rifle. He rose up off the floor cautiously, balanced like a gibbon, moved to the cabin door, and tossed the guns to the foredeck, one at a time.

“That’s all we’ve got,” he called. “Don’t shoot! I’m coming out!” He took a deep breath, raised his arms, and stepped through the door. He had a brief sense of noise and of being hit in the chest, like a dream of death, and he felt himself fainting for a split second, but nothing had happened. His innards were like jelly, but only for a moment. He stood waiting, and little by little his eyes adjusted to the reddish light. Three men stood on the Militant’s deck, two blacks and an Indian. Two had rifles, aimed at the Indomitable’s fore and aft decks; the third, a heavy-set, bearded black man, handsome as a king, had a machine gun aimed at Peter Wagner’s belly.

“We want to talk,” Peter Wagner said. His throat closed with fear, such fear as not even the bridge had made him feel, though he’d been drunk then, granted. But this was a greater fear nevertheless, such fear as one feels of snakes or scorpions, things living and in some sense intelligent — such fear as the black feels of whites in an unfamiliar alley.

“What have we to say?” the black with the machine gun asked. He had dark glasses and a beard, and though he smiled, his face showed …

There was a gap. She leaped it like a spark, reading on:

… with a grapnel and threw it up onto the Indomitable. Before Peter Wagner could reach it to help, the Indian jerked it back with a whip-snap, and the grapnel dug in. In seconds the gunnels were lashed together and the three-man crew of the Militant was climbing aboard.

“Get us the gentleman who understands about engines,” the leader said. The accent was not English, Peter Wagner realized, but universal Shakespearean. He stepped up onto the bridge and looked around, cradling the machine gun in his left arm, the fingertips of his right hand in his suitcoat pocket; then he leaned the machine gun against the wheelhouse door. “But first, if you don’t mind—” he nodded toward the bulkhead. Peter Wagner leaned on his arms to be frisked. When it was over he went back to the hatch, the lean black following him, and called down to Mr. Nit and Mr. Goodman. When he returned to the bridge, Captain Fist and Jane had their hands against the bulkhead and the leader was checking them for weapons, a pistol in his hand. He stepped back. “That’s fine,” he said. “You may lower your arms.”

“Where’s Dusky?” Captain Fist said.

“He died,” the man said. “Made the great decision—

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing …”

“Died, you say,” Captain Fist said.

“Deceased.”

Captain Fist looked dubious.

Mr. Nit appeared in the searchlight’s glare, popping his knuckles, the muscles of his face twitching as if separately alive. Mr. Goodman came a moment later, the black prodding him with his rifle.

“Good evening,” the leader said with a bow, two fingers on the brim of his Tyrolean. The machine gun was once more under his left arm, casual as an umbrella. Peter Wagner thought of stories he’d read about smiling, sweet-talking murderers — the Jones-men of Detroit, the innocent-eyed Green Berets of Viet Nam who pushed captured enemies out of helicopters to make their comrades talk, or Mafia men who took friends out to lunch and carried home their bodies in the trunks of their Lincoln Continentals. Such things were unthinkable for an ordinary man, even for Peter Wagner who’d sailed the seven seas. Yet they happened in the world, like other fictions; killers spoke their trivial, predictable lines, laughed, offered cigarettes, talked about the weather; and then, when the time arrived, out came the pistol, or the acid or the knife, and one more poor sucker, still laughing, was lightly blown away. It was difficult to believe, though he carefully fixed his mind on it. He was not so naïve as to doubt that the trashiest fiction is all true, as the noblest is all illusion. Yet for all Peter Wagner’s fear of him, the man in the Tyrolean seemed too good for trash: his majestic looks, his seemingly unstudied gentleness, his accent, suggesting good background and education, his Stratford gestures, they all hinted some story more noble and interesting than the one he’d apparently been chosen for. Yet one thing was sure: he’d shot at them, and shot to kill. It was purest luck that Peter Wagner had jumped back when he’d fired his machine gun at the door. So he too, Peter Wagner, was committed to trash drama, if he intended to survive. Like all the world, Peter Wagner thought. One meets no King Lears in the ordinary world, no Ophelias.