Beyond that lay the scrap-metal huts and forges and toolsheds and machine shops of the breakers, mostly Indian and Malaysian men working out the contracts that had bought them passage under the Arch. Farther on, hazy in the morning air, forested hills unrolled into the blue-gray foothills of the mountains.
He couldn’t stay on deck during the beaching. The standard way to deliver a large vessel to Breaker Beach was simply to run it up the littoral and strand it there. The breakers would do the rest, swarming over the ship once the crew had been evacuated. The ship’s steel would end up in re-rolling mills downcoast, the ship’s miles of wiring and aluminum piping would be extracted and sold in bulk lots, even the ship’s bells, Turk had heard, would be marketed to local Buddhist temples. This was Equatoria, and any manmade thing would find a use. It didn’t matter that beaching a vessel as enormous as the Kestrel could be a violent, destructive process. None of these ships would ever float again.
He went belowdecks when the signal sounded and found Tomas waiting in the crew mess, grinning. Turk had grown fond of Tomas’s bony grin—demented-looking but genuine. “End of the road for Kestrel,” Tomas said, “and the end of the road for me, too. Every chicken comes home to roost, I guess.”
“We’re positioned off the beach,” Turk said. Soon the captain would start the engines and engage the screws and send the ship dead for shore. The engines would be shut down at the last practical moment and the prow of the ship would gully into the sand while the tide was high. Then the crew would drop rope ladders and scurry down the hull; their kit bags would be lowered; Turk would take his first steps in the grit and wash of Breaker Beach. Within a month Kestrel would be little more than a memory and a few thousand tons of recycled iron, steel, and aluminum.
“Every death is a birth,” said Tomas, who was old enough to get away with such pronouncements.
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
“No. You strike me as somebody who knows more than he lets on. End of Kestrel. But your first time in the New World. That’s a death and a birth right there.”
“If you say so, Tomas.”
Turk felt the ship’s elderly engines begin to throb. The beaching would be violent, inevitably. All the loose gear in the ship had already been stowed or dismounted and sent ashore along with the lifeboats. Half the crew was already ashore. “Whoa,” Tomas exclaimed as the vibration came up through the deck plating and the chair legs. “Making some speed now, you bet.”
The prow of the ship would be cutting a knife-edge through the water, Turk thought, as it did whenever the vessel began to throb and surge like this. Except they weren’t in open water anymore. Their slot on the beach was dead ahead, the continent rising beneath them. The captain was in radio contact with a shore pilot who would call in minor course corrections and tell him when to cut the engines.
Soon, Turk hoped. He liked being at sea, and he didn’t mind being belowdecks, but he found he very much disliked being in a windowless room when a deliberatelyengineered disaster was only moments away. “You done this before?”
“Well, no,” Tomas said, “not from this end. But I was at a wreckers’ beach near Goa a few years ago and I watched an old container ship ground itself. Ship not much smaller than this one. Kind of a poetry to it, actually. It rode up the tideline like one of those turtles trying to lay an egg. I mean, I guess you want to brace yourself for it, but it wasn’t violent.” A few minutes later Tomas looked at the watch that hung like a bracelet on his skinny wrist and said, “About time to cut engines.”
“You got it timed?”
“I got eyes and ears. I know where we were anchored and I can tell by listening what kind of speed we’re making.”
This sounded to Turk like one of Tomas’s boasts, but it might be true. Turk wiped his palms on the knees of his jeans. He was nervous, but what could go wrong? At this point it was all ballistics.
What did go wrong—as he sorted it out afterward—was that at a critical moment Kestrel’s bridge lost electrical power, due to some short or component failure in the antique circuitry, so that the captain could neither hear the shore pilot’s instructions nor relay his orders to the engine room. Kestrel should have come in coasting, but she beached under power instead. Turk was thrown from his chair as the ship ground into the littoral and listed grotesquely to starboard. He was alert enough to see the brushed-steel cutlery locker break loose from the near wall and tumble toward him. The locker was the size of a coffin and about as heavy, and he tried to crawl away from it, but there wasn’t time to pull himself out of the way. But here was Tomas, somehow still upright, grabbing for the screeching metal box and managing to snag the corner of it as it slid by, giving Turk enough time to scramble aside. He fetched up against a chair as Kestrel stopped moving and the ship’s engines finally, mercifully, died. The old tanker’s hull gave a ratcheting, prehistoric groan and fell silent. Beached. No harm done . . .
Except to Tomas, who had briefly taken the full weight of the locker and whose left arm had been sliced open below the elbow, deep enough to show bone.
Tomas cradled the injury in his blood-soaked lap, looking startled. Turk applied a handkerchief as a tourniquet and told his friend to stop cursing and keep still while he went for help. It took him ten minutes to find an officer who would listen to him.
The ship’s doctor had already gone ashore and the infirmary had been stripped of drugs, so Tomas had to be lowered from the deck in an improvised rope-and-basket litter with only a couple of aspirin to dull the pain. The Kestrel’s captain, in the end, refused to admit liability, collected his pay from the breaker boss, and caught a bus for Port Magellan before sunset. So Turk was left to look after Tomas until an off-shift Malay welder could be convinced to summon a genuine doctor. Or what passed for a doctor in this part of the New World. A woman, the skinny Malay said in broken English. A good doctor, a Western doctor, very kind to the breakers. She was white but had lived for years in a Minang fishing village not far upcoast.
Her name, he said, was Diane.
CHAPTER SIX
Turk told Tomas Ginn about Lise—a little bit about her. How they had connected when they were stranded in the mountains; how he couldn’t get her out of his mind even when they were back in civilization, even when she stopped returning his calls; how they got back together during the ashfall.
Tomas listened from his tattered easy chair, sipping beer from a green glass bottle and smiling placidly, as if he had discovered some kind of windless place inside his head. “Sounds like you hardly know this lady.”
“I know as much as I need to. Some people, it isn’t that hard to tell whether you trust them or not.”
“Trust her, do you?”
“Yeah.”
Tomas cupped the crotch of his baggy jeans. “This is what you trust. Every inch a sailor.”
“It’s not like that.”
“It never is. But it always is. So why you want to drive up here and tell me about this woman?”
“Actually, I was thinking maybe I could introduce her to you.”
“To me? I ain’t your daddy, Turk.”
“No, and you’re not what you used to be, either.”
“Don’t see what that’s got to do with it.”
Turk had to tread carefully here. With the utmost delicacy, insofar as he was capable of it. “Well . . . she’s curious about Fourths.”
“Oh, my Christ.” Tomas rolled his eyes. “Curious?”
“She’s got reasons to be.”
“So you want to serve me up to her? Exhibit A or whatever?”
“No. What I really want to do is let her talk to Diane. But I want your opinion first.”
Diane—the Western doctor, or nurse, as she insisted on calling herself—had hiked to Breaker Beach from some inland village to treat Tomas’s slashed arm.
At first Turk was suspicious of her. In Equatoria, especially out here in the backwoods, nobody was checking anybody’s medical license. At least that was the impression
he got. If you owned a syringe and a bottle of distilled water you could call yourself a doctor, and the breaker bosses would naturally endorse any self-appointed physician who worked for free, regardless of results. So Turk sat with Tomas inside a vacant hut waiting for this woman to arrive, making occasional conversation until the older man fell asleep despite the blood still leaking into his makeshift bandage. The hut was made of some local wood, round barked branches knobbed like bamboo holding up a flat tin roof. It smelled of stale cooking and tobacco and human sweat. It was hot inside, though the screened door admitted an occasional slow sigh of air.
The sun was going down when the doctor finally walked up the plank steps to the platform floor, tugging aside a layer of bug netting.
She wore a tunic and loose pants of a cloth the color and texture of raw muslin. She wasn’t a young woman. Far from it. Her hair was so white it seemed almost transparent. “Who’s the patient?” she asked, squinting. “And light a lamp, please—I can hardly see.”
“My name’s Turk Findley,” Turk said.
“Are you the patient?”
“No, I—”
“Show me the patient.”
So he turned up the wick of an oil lamp and escorted her through another layer of netting to the yellowed mattress where Tomas slept. Out in the dusk, insect choruses were warming up. They sounded like no insects he had heard before, but you could tell that’s what it was, that steely staccato buzzing. From the beach came the sound of hammering, the clatter of sheet metal, the chug and whine of diesel motors.
Tomas snored, oblivious. The doctor—Diane—looked at the bandage on his arm with an expression of contempt. “How did this happen?”
Turk told her how it had happened.
“So he sacrificed himself for you?”
“Sacrificed a chunk of his arm, anyhow.”
“You’re lucky to have a friend like that.”
“Wake him up first. Then tell me whether I’m lucky.”
She nudged Tomas’s shoulder and Tomas opened his eyes and promptly cursed. Old curses, Creole curses, pungent as gumbo. He tried to sit up, then thought better of it. Finally he fixed his attention on Diane. “And who the fuck might you be?”
“I’m a nurse. Calm down. Who bandaged you?”
“Guy on the ship.”
“He did a lousy job. Let me see.”
“Well, I guess it was his first time. He—ow! Jesus! Turk, is this a real nurse?”
“Don’t be an infant,” Diane said. “And hold still. I can’t help you if I can’t see what’s wrong.” A pause. “Ah. Well. You’re lucky you didn’t cut an artery.” She took a syringe from her kit and filled it. “Something for the pain before I clean and stitch.”
Tomas started to protest, but that was for show. He looked relieved when the needle went in.
Turk backed away and tried to give Diane room to work, not that there was a whole lot of space in this little hut. He wondered what it must be like to make a living as a breaker—to sleep under a tin roof praying you wouldn’t be hurt or killed before your contract played out, before you got the payoff they promised you, a year’s wages and a bus ticket to the Port. There was an official camp physician, the breaker boss had explained, but he only came in twice a week, usually to fill out forms. Diane did most of the routine cut-and-stitch duty.
Turk watched her as she worked, a silhouette cast by lamplight on the gauzy bug screen. She was skinny and she moved with the calculated caution of the very old. But she was strong, too. She worked methodically and smoothly, occasionally muttering to herself. She might be around Tomas’s age, which the sailor variously gave as sixty or seventy—maybe older.
She worked, and from time to time Tomas swore with fierce intent but a certain drugged lethargy. There was a stink of antiseptic, and Turk stepped out into the rising dark. His first night in the New World. In the near distance there was a stand of flowering bushes he couldn’t name, six-fingered leaves moving in an offshore breeze. The flowers were blue and smelled like cloves or cinammon or some other Christmas spice. Farther off, the lights and fires of the industrial beach guttered like lit fuses. And beyond the beach the ocean rolled in faint green phosphorescence, and the alien stars turned grand slow circles.
“There’s a potential complication,” Diane said when she had finished with Tomas.
She came and sat with Turk on the edge of the wooden platform that held the floor a foot or so above the ground. She had worked hard cleaning and closing Tomas’s wound, and she mopped her forehead with a handkerchief. Her accent was American, Turk thought. A shade southern—Maryland, maybe, or those parts.
He asked her what kind of complications those might be.
“With luck, nothing serious. But Equatoria is a completely novel microbial environment—do you understand?”
“I may be dumb, but I’m not ignorant.”
She laughed at that. “I apologize, Mr.—?”
“Findley, but call me Turk.”
“Your parents named you Turk?”
“No, ma’am. But the family lived in Istanbul for a couple years when I was a kid. I picked up a little Turkish. And a nickname. So what are you saying—Tomas might come down with some local disease?”
“There are no native human beings on this planet, no hominids, no primates, nothing remotely like us. Most local diseases can’t touch us. But there are bacteria and fungi that thrive in moist, warm environments, including the human body. Nothing we can’t adjust to, Mr. Findley—Turk—and nothing so dangerous or communicable that it could be carried back to Earth. But it’s still not a good idea to arrive in the New World with a challenged immune system or, in Mr. Ginn’s case, an open wound bandaged by an idiot.”
“Can’t you give him some kind of antibiotic?”
“I did. But the local microorganisms don’t necessarily respond to standard pharmaceuticals. Don’t misunderstand. He’s not ill, and in all likelihood he won’t become ill, but there’s a certain unavoidable risk. Are you a close friend of Mr. Ginn?”
“Not exactly. But like I said, he was trying to help me out when he got hurt.”
“I’d prefer to keep him here a few days, under my observation. Is that all right?”
“Fine by me, but you might have to go some to convince Tomas. I’m not his keeper.”
“Where are you headed, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Downcoast to the city.”
“Any particular address? A number where I can reach you?”
“No, ma’am. I’m new here. But you can tell Tomas I’ll look for him at the union hall when he makes it down to Port Magellan.”
She seemed disappointed. “I see.”
“Or maybe I can call you.”
She turned and gazed at him for a long moment. Scrutinized him, actually. Turk started to feel a little awkward under that relentless stare. Then she said, “Okay. Let me give you a number.”
She found a pencil in her kit bag and scribbled the number on the back of a Coast & Urban Coach Lines ticket stub.
“She was evaluating you,” Tomas said.
“I know that.”
“Good instincts, that woman.”
“Yeah. That’s the point,” Turk said.
So Turk found a place to live in the Port and lived on his savings for a while and dropped by the Seaman’s Union every now and then to look for Tomas. But Tomas never showed. Which, at first, didn’t worry him much. Tomas could be anywhere. Tomas could have taken it into his head to cross the mountains, for all he knew. So Turk would have dinner or a drink and forget about his messmate; but when a month had passed he dug out the ticket stub and keyed the number scribbled on it.
What he got was an automated message that the number had been discontinued.
Which piqued his curiosity as well as his sense of obligation. His money was running out and he was getting ready to sign up for pipeline work, but he caught a ride upcoast and hiked a couple of miles to the breaker compound and started asking questions. One
of the breaker bosses remembered Turk’s face and told him his friend had got sick, and that was too bad, but they couldn’t let a sick sailor take up time and attention, so Ibu Diane and some Minang fishermen had hauled the old man back to their village.
Turk bought dinner at a tin-roofed Chinese restaurant at the crossroads, then hitched a ride farther upcoast, to a horseshoe bay turning gaudy colors under the long Equatorian dusk. The driver, a salesman for some West African import firm, pointed Turk at an unpaved road and a sign marked in a curvilinear language Turk couldn’t read. Minang village down that way, he said. Turk walked a couple of miles through the forest, and just as the stars were turning bright and the insects bothersome he found himself between a row of wooden houses with buffalo-horn eaves and a lantern-lit general store where men in box caps sat at cable-spool tables drinking coffee. He put on his best smile and asked a local for directions to Doctor Diane’s clinic.
The pedestrian smiled back and nodded and called out to the coffee house. Two muscular young men hurried out and positioned themselves on each side of Turk. “We’ll take you there,” they said in English when Turk repeated his request—and they smiled, too, but Turk had the uneasy feeling he’d been politely but firmly taken into custody.
“I guess I was pretty fucked-up when you finally saw me,” Tomas said.
“You don’t remember?”
“Not much of it, no.”
“Yeah,” Turk said. “You were pretty fucked-up.”
Pretty fucked-up, which in this case meant Tomas was bedridden, emaciated, gasping for breath in the back room of the big wooden building Diane called her “clinic.” Turk had looked at his friend with something approaching horror.
“Jesus Christ, what happened to him?”
“Calm down,” Ibu Diane said. Ibu was what the villagers called her. He gathered it was some kind of honorific.
“Is he dying?”
“No. Appearances to the contrary, he’s getting well.”