The Drift Read online

  Many were love songs. Others were songs of adventure on the sea, of strange voyages to mythical places that reminded him of The Dance of The Nine Islands. One was a ballad about a land beyond the stars. Another told of a goddess of the sea who on her wedding night wove a robe of seafoam to enchant her mortal husband. Another told about how, a hundred years ago, The East Bridge was two hundred miles long and reached almost to The Land of Bermuda. Still another described a city made of coral that lay at the bottom of the ocean somewhere beneath The Drift:

  Swim down with me, my love,

  Where the fish are wan and pale

  And waving weeds are dark

  And light is sure to fail;

  For far beneath,

  I know a coral city

  Where all The Elders stay,

  And wait for us to make our downward way,

  And wait for us to make our downward way.

  And still another told of a giant bird that comes at night to bring dreams to children:

  Coo, my little one, coo, my love:

  The Blackbird has a thousand journeys

  which he nightly keeps,

  And nothing in his world is really what it seems;

  His cloudy wings touch everything that sleeps

  And the shadows of his wings are filled with dreams.

  Coo, my little one, coo, my love.

  As the music played on and on, he closed his eyes, and his mind began to wander. He thought again of the shark. Pao had told him once that sharks were beautiful. But sharks had teeth and they lived in a deep world where Peter could not breathe and where everything was dark. A shark can tear your legs off, Tabor had said. Yes. It had been a moment of insanity, that moment when he swam down to meet the shark. The singers were singing of love, of blackbirds carrying dreams, of kingdoms at the bottom of the sea, but only an hour or two earlier he might well have been torn apart by a mindless beast.

  Together they listened to the music for an hour and then made their way back to Peter’s schooner. The Nightsongs faded behind them, blurring into the sound of the water. It was Pao’s music, and it was the music of the ancient boats. But as they lay in bed together he heard, in the moments before they embraced, sounds that were not a part of those things that had enchanted him. It was an alien murmuring, a discordant melody that cut across the wavering romantic fragments that still drifted in from the torchlight singers forty or fifty boats away. And it occurred to him that there were really two kinds of music on The Drift: there was the music of the people and the boats, and there was also the music of The Hatchmaker.

  Sixteen

  RAVEN

  When the sun broke across the horizon and a shaft of light from the porthole above the instrument panel touched his cheek, he woke abruptly, and in that sightless moment before his waking mind had lifted out of his sleep, his dream continued. He was drowning. He could not find the rubber breathing tube, and he struggled desperately against the heavy water that would not let him breathe or move his arms. Suddenly he struck Pao on the ear, and she moaned, turning in her sleep.

  Then he opened his eyes. The room came back to him, silent and familiar. He breathed deeply, closed his eyes, and slept for another hour. When he awoke again, Pao was gone.

  There was an overflow of supplies on The Mary Strattford from the previous day’s harvest, and so there was no work to be done that morning in The Seafields. Peter felt very much at loose ends. He wandered up toward Northside looking for Pao, who had not appeared for breakfast.

  “Sustenance,” said Reuben, clucking his disapproval. “Nourishment and sustenance are the keys of life. Man cannot sing, dance, or work without three meals a day. Pao will come to no good end if she neglects her stomach.”

  “Her stomach,” said Javitt, nodding in agreement.

  The two old men followed him for a while, then settled down on the slanting deck of an eighteenth-century English ship of the line, crossed their legs, and began to play a game with Tarot cards on the warm sunlit boards.

  Peter wandered on by himself. He still felt queer about what had happened the previous day. He was of course an inexperienced diver; perhaps he had breathed too quickly and hyperventilated. That and the pressure and the drop in temperature at that depth seemed to have produced a very strange state of mind. The Rapture of The Deep, they called it. The whole experience made him uneasy, but of course it was only a single incident to set against days and days of happiness. It was as if he had been made over, changed into a creature of a different species, or as if he were asleep, dreaming of a faraway land where there was no time, no death, no struggle against the impossible odds of mortality. The dream had a logic of its own, as dreams will, and the beauty, the warmth, and the deceptive reasonableness of everything around him made the waking world, the world beyond The Drift, seem unreal and remote and filled with absurd conflicts.

  He remembered once when he had been only twelve years old he had dreamed of a world in which everyone lived in trees. Sap, leaves, and bark had provided all the necessities of life, and everyone lived in a great forest where it was perpetually autumn and the brown and gold and crimson leaves gathered in huge drifts upon which he and his companions played endlessly. For several hours that morning it had seemed like an eminently sensible arrangement, so much so that at breakfast, when he saw his father reading the financial page of The New York Times, his mother cooking Mother’s Oats, and the gray kitchen walls of the old brownstone apartment, he had burst out laughing at the tenor of his own life, a breach of etiquette for which he was severely reprimanded; and often now he had a similar urge to laugh when he thought of his old life at Harrington University, when he thought of Miriam, Harry Ranton, and Dr. Ratcliffe, when he thought of the tennis courts where he went to show his summer tan and, in rare and shy moments, agreed to play tennis with a pretty undergraduate coed or prove his masculinity by soundly trouncing the fourth-seeded member of the college tennis team.

  It had been such a futile life, tiring and somehow mindless. He had always been pushed by forces he had never understood, forces that destroyed his will and his vision. Now he was in so many ways a different person. Seldom now did anything ever tire him, and everything, it seemed, was a source of profound interest. People were interesting. There had been a time when, in his own secret way, he had needed people very much and had been terribly concerned about the impression he made upon them; but he never wondered about them, about what they thought or felt, and he had never really trusted anyone. Now all that was changed. His love for Pao and Tabor, his interest in the children’s games, in the bold arts and strange beliefs of the adults, in the mystery of the ancient boats and their forgotten cargoes—all this had sent his mind in so many new directions that he was now less aware of his own feelings as such, and less conscious of himelf as an intellect painfully set apart from the world around him. He was alive now in a way he had never been before.

  But the episode with the shark disturbed him. And there was something else: a moment of lost consciousness, a dream that he could not remember.

  All at once he found himself at The Southern Edge. What, he wondered, had brought him to this part of The Drift? Then he remembered the dinghy. He had not seen it in over a week now, not since before The Dance of The Nine Islands. He thought about the sail, the motor, and all his homemade rigging. Probably by now The Outlanders had destroyed all of it or had taken it for their own purposes. Still, it might be interesting to take a look. He had spent a lot of time working on it. He might have used it to sail around The Drift and perhaps someday if he had changed his mind, perhaps then he could have persuaded Pao and Tabor to come with him back to—the phrase came into his mind quite naturally—The Island of Connecticut.

  He had to admit that even now there was doubt in his mind. Granted, his old life was absurd. But dimly he realized that there might also be something rather profoundly absurd about spending forty or fifty years on an island of derelict ships.

  He stepped down into the dark hatchway of
the old bilander where he had hidden his dinghy. Slowly his eyes adjusted to the dim light. To his great surprise, the dinghy was just as he had left it. And the sails, the motor, and the five gallons were all there. But when he moved forward to get a closer look, he saw a figure sitting near the point of the hull. His muscles froze. It was a trap. That was why they left everything as it was. He whirled around, raising his arm to ward off an expected blow, but there was no one anywhere behind him, no one anywhere else in the ship. Puzzled, he stared at the single figure crouching in the hull. Why would one Outlander lie in wait for him? But perhaps it was not an Outlander.

  “Who’s there?” he said finally.

  The small figure rose off its haunches and walked toward him. In one hand he held a knife, and in the other, a long paddle.

  “Raven!”

  The figure recognized him and lowered his weapons. For a moment they stared at each other.

  “I thought you’d never come,” said Raven. “It’s been eight nights now.”

  “I don’t understand. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m defending your boat,” he answered.

  “I still don’t understand. Why should you guard my dinghy? I thought you rather disliked me.”

  “You’re right about that,” said the boy in a matter-of-fact tone. “I hate you.”

  Peter looked at the boy, trying to decipher in his face the meaning of his hatred. Raven was trembling now. His long hair fell over his eyes and he brushed it away.

  “Did someone make you do this?” said Peter.

  “Nobody makes me do anything. I do just what I like.”

  “That’s marvelous,” said Peter. “You must be very happy.”

  The boy glared at him. Then his eyes darted from one thing to another and his lips trembled as if he were trying to find words.

  “Now look,” said Peter. “You’ve got to tell me what this is all about. If I’ve offended you in some way I’m very sorry.”

  “You’re sorry. That’s pretty good. Well listen, if you’re really sorry, who don’t you just get out of here? I mean, way out of here like back to the moon or wherever you came from.”

  “Is that why you’ve guarded my boat? So I’ll have a way of leaving?”

  “You bet it is. I even stole some food from Bright and a net and some clothes and an extra paddle. So now you got everything you need.” The boy stared at him fiercely and then threw the paddle across the hull. It landed with an enormous clatter that seemed to please him. He closed the blade on his knife and put it in his pocket. “I had lots of time down here,” he said quietly. “So I finished what you started. I made outriggers so you could use your sail, and I fixed all your lines. So you can leave anytime.” Again he pushed the long shock of black hair out of his eyes. He seemed on the verge of tears now. He looked so young, so raw-boned and angular, so very vulnerable. He was even younger than Pao.

  Pao? Could that be it?

  “Pao,” he said out loud. The boy winced. The word was like a blow in the face. So that was it. He should have suspected it long ago.

  “What about Pao?” said Raven.

  “You’re in love with her,” said Peter.

  The boy stiffened. “Love!” he said. It was a cry of pain.

  “I don’t love anyone!” Then he began to shake and cry out in a wordless, incoherent way. He rushed at Peter, swinging his fists, beating at the air like a drowning man. A blow glanced off Peter’s temple and he staggered backward against the old wooden steps leading up to the hatch. A sharp pain shot through his head, but he had the presence of mind not to cry out or to strike back.

  Raven stopped all at once, gasping for breath. It was as if he had suddenly come out of a seizure.

  “I’m sorry,” said Peter very quietly. “I’m really very sorry.”

  “You’re sorry about everything,” said Raven.

  “And thanks for pocketing your hardware. Otherwise, we might really have hurt each other.”

  “Don’t thank me for anything.”

  “I only meant that it showed a certain amount of good sense.”

  “I don’t have any sense,” said Raven, whose fury had turned suddenly upon himself. “I don’t have sense about anything and I don’t know anything about anything.”

  “Tabor says you’re one of his best men.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not. He told me that when you began to skip work three days ago. He says he misses you.”

  “Nobody misses me. Do you know what the other boys over at Madrid call me?”

  “What do they call you?”

  “Seaweed.”

  “Hmmm. Well, your problem then is to find better, nastier names for them. You know, like Blowfish, Bilgewater, Fishguts—”

  Raven tried very hard not to smile, and suddenly Peter felt enormously pleased with himself. “Come on,” he said, putting his arm around the boy’s shoulder, “let’s get back to The Mary Strattford before all the food is gone and we both starve to death.”

  On the way he learned that one of The Outlanders had tried to get down the hatch two days before, but that Raven had beaten him off. Since then they had left him alone. He could not help thinking what an act of courage and hatred it had been. One lonely boy spending eight nights in the black hull of a creaking old ship, waiting with his pocketknife and his paddle for The Outlanders. He felt a surge of admiration and pity.

  “Would you be happier here if I went away?” said Peter.

  Raven shook his head. “Probably not. I’ve never been happy here. I hate shadowgames and dances and all those things. I work on the boats. But there isn’t anything else. It’s always the same, like being in a cage. Someday I’ll kill someone and then they’ll put me on The Outland. And that’ll be the end of me. No one lives more than a few years on The Outland.”

  “Why don’t you like the shadowgames and dances?” said Peter after he had thought about what Raven had said. “Because they don’t mean anything,” said Raven.

  Before they had gone very far they heard behind them the sound of splashing water and paddles slapping against wood. Raven smiled and pointed his finger to a place perhaps a hundred yards away, beyond the near edge of The Outland.

  “Look!” he said. “They have their own dances and games, just like Pao and The Madrids.”

  When Peter turned to follow the direction of Raven’s finger, he saw a large flat-bottomed barge, apparently built from scraps of other ships, where eight scarred and bearded men, all stripped to the waist, were shouting and waving their arms in the air like children. The scarfaced man was among them, beating his paddle against the barge and jumping up and down. There seemed to be no pattern or focus to what they were doing, and from that distance they reminded Peter of ants trapped in a glass jar running in all directions.

  “It gets more organized after a while,” said Raven. “Watch.”

  “We’d better get back to The Mary Strattford,” said Peter. “We’re going to miss dinner.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Raven. “See what they’re doing?” He led Peter two boats closer to The Southern Edge where they could get a better view, and from there they watched for what seemed to be the better part of an hour. As they stood there, clouds of mist began to form and roll slowly inward from the far side of The Outland.

  The Outlanders played three games while a dwarfish, white-haired old man with one leg missing beat out an even rhythm on a drum. One side of his chest caved inward, as if the ribs had been removed, and was covered with purple scars. The first game was something Raven called Ropes and Knives. The contestants received long knives which they held in their right hands. Then a one-foot length of rope was tied first to the right wrist and then to the left ankle of each man, so that they were forced to bend over and hobble at each other like crippled beasts, flailing and pushing with their left hands, lifting their legs and leaping awkwardly when they saw openings to lunge with their knives. The first man to slash the other’s chest was declared the winner.
The second game, Paddles and Rafts, involved teams of two men, one to paddle and steer a small round craft and the other to strike out against his opponents and their rafts with a long oar. The winner was declared when three of the four teams had been dumped into the water amid cheers and shrill whistles and stamping of feet and loud cries of despair. The third game was a free-for-all called Stinking Fish. To Peter it was a weird variation of vaudeville’s pie in the face. The scarfaced man brought a large wooden table of fish to the center of the barge, and then each of the eight men chose the largest fish he could find and proceeded to use it as a weapon against his fellows. The game was played amid a kind of screaming, frantic laughter that all but incapacitated those who played. One man simply rolled around the barge, hugging his huge dead fish and giggling. The scarfaced man was perhaps the most aggressive of the Stinking Fish combatants. He had the largest weapon of all, and after a few moments he managed to sneak up behind a small dark man who was busily swinging at someone else, and with a prodigious heave he struck him squarely on top of the head with such force that viscera and pieces of fish flew every which way, drowning his victim in fish parts and spraying everyone nearby with blood. With that, the scarfaced man leaped into the air, laughing and shrieking at his fallen opponent.

  Peter noticed then that other people had gathered on other ships to watch the games of The Outlanders. They talked very quietly. Hardly anyone moved. They made him think of the reticent uncertainty of children watching lions at a carnival, their fear of the roars and the open jaws and the sharp teeth set against their faith in cages and steel bars.

  “It’s nearly done now,” said Raven. “This part is called The Dance of Friends and Enemies.” But it was not a dance at all, as far as Peter could tell. The Outlanders were simply shouting and running around again, everybody slapping everyone else and shaking everyone else’s hand. And then quite suddenly it was over. The scarred, bearded men dropped their hooks and fish and knives onto their four small rafts and slowly paddled their way into the rolling mist, like elves in a fairy story drifting off into the land of sleep. They talked quietly now. Their faces were calm. Just once, the scarfaced man turned and smiled at the men from The Drift who had watched them. Casually, with the air of a boy skipping stones on a lake at sunset, he threw an iron boat hook at the silent watchers. It fell far short, clattering on a ship’s deck somewhere at the edge of The Outland. He waved once and then turned back just as his raft began to disappear in the mist.