“Engine,” said the man. “The sail is just to keep her steady. She used to be rigged for sail when my father was alive. Not now. Too much fucking trouble. This way I get there, I get back, I have a good time ashore, no trouble. I come over with wine and cheese, I go back with oranges, melons, whatever. You're on your way somewhere, right? You're going somewhere. Where are you going?”
“Where you're taking the oranges,” said Boaz-Jachin.
“You're hanging around looking for a boat. You're hoping maybe you can work your way across,” said the trader. When the light at the harbor mouth flashed and turned one side of his face was lit up. He had a big smile, large teeth, looked desperate.
“I had a feeling when I saw you,” said the trader. “Sometimes it's like that — you see a person, get a feeling. I'll make a bet with you: I'll bet you've never been on a boat before, you don't know how to steer, you can't cook, and if I told you to cast off the mooring lines you wouldn't know which rope to put your hand to.”
“That's right,” said Boaz-Jachin.
“That's what I thought,” said the trader. Again a big smile. “It's all right. You're in luck anyhow, because my cousin isn't coming back with me this trip. You can help me take her over. I'll show you how to steer, and all you have to do is keep awake.”
“All right,” said Boaz-Jachin. “Thank you.”
“We'll go out in the morning,” said the trader. “You can sleep on board.”
The bunks were below, next to the galley, and smelled of petrol, salt wood, tobacco smoke, and old frying. Boaz-Jachin took a blanket and lay down on deck, watching the stars, large and bright, rocking above him. Between him and the stars the beam of the harbor light swept as it turned. He fell asleep thinking of Lila and the night they had slept on the roof of her house.
In the morning he was awakened by the sun on his face. There was a professional-looking seagull perching on the mast. It looked down at Boaz-Jachin with a contemptuous yellow eye that said, I'm ready for business and you're still asleep. Other gulls were flying over the harbor with creaking cries, screaming over the garbage behind the cafés, perching on masts and piles.
The trader treated Boaz-Jachin to coffee and rolls at one of the cafés. Then he took on fuel, cleared his cargo at the harbormaster's shack, hoisted the steadying sail and started the engine. Towing her dinghy astern the Swallow puttered past freighters and tankers from whose galleys came the clink of cups and the smell of coffee. Here and there men in shorts or pajamas leaned on railings looking down, standing in the morning shadows that moved slowly in the sunlight on the metal decks. This is life, thought Boaz-Jachin. This is being out in the world.
They cleared the harbor mouth, passed the old stone mole with its lighthouse now standing sleepy like an owl in strong sunlight, and went out past the channel markers, heading into a fresh wind from the west and a slight chop outside. The sunlight danced in glints and sparkles on the green water. The gull, still on the masthead, expressed with his eye that it was a late start but never mind.
The trader was still wearing his pointed shoes, his dark suit trousers, and his wrinkled white shirt, now more wrinkled and less white, but no jacket. The boat pitched slowly as she went, her big-bellied hull pounding in the chop. The sunlight glinted on the little brass wheel as the trader handled the spokes.
“She pounds, eh?” he said. “She's not built for an engine, the old bitch. Built for sail. With an engine it's like driving a big heavy pancake over a bumpy road. Wears you out.”
“Why don't you sail her?” said Boaz-Jachin.
“Because she's motorized now,” said the trader. He seemed almost angry. “She's not rigged for sail any more. This is not the old days. My old man used to keep me hopping. One of these things rigged for sail, you've got two masts, big long yards. Every time you go about you have to dip the yard, bring it around the other side of the mast, set everything up again on the weather side. Big sailing deal. 'Move, boy! Hop!' I can still hear him. Big deal sailor, my old man. Fuck that. This is modern times, eh? He was a wonderful man.” The trader spat to leeward from the wheelhouse window. “Sail like the devil, afraid of nothing. Great pilot. You never saw anything like it. Knew where he was anytime. Middle of the darkest night, no land, no nothing, knew where he was.”
“How do you know where you are when you're out of sight of land?” said Boaz-Jachin. He saw nothing scientific-looking in the wheelhouse but the compass and the fuel and engine gauges. No instruments that looked like navigation.
The trader showed him a wooden board in which were drilled many little holes in the thirty-two-spoked wheel of a compass rose. Below that were short vertical lines of holes. Pegs, attached to the board by strings, were in some of the holes.
“When I need to I use this,” he said. “Every point of the compass is divided into half-hours. I mark with a peg how long I've been on any heading. Down below I mark the speed. I add on or take off for wind and current with me or against me, and that's how I know where I am. That's how my father did it, and I do it the same.”
“I thought you had to have instruments, charts, maps, take sights and all that,” said Boaz-Jachin.
“That's a lot of crap for playboys with yachts,” said the trader. “I know the winds, the currents, the bottom, I know where I am. What do I need all that machinery for? My father was the best sailor, the best pilot out of our port. Fifteen, twenty other men masters of their own boats in our village, but if you came there a stranger and asked for 'the Captain' they knew you meant him, nobody else. From him I learned the sea.”
“You had a good father,” said Boaz-Jachin.
The trader nodded, spat again through the wheelhouse window. “Nobody like him,” he said, and sighed. “'Keep the boat and follow the sea,' he told me. Left it to me in his will. So here I am. This trip oranges, next one wine, cheese, olives, whatever. It's not a bad life, eh? I mean it's a proper thing for a man to do — not like running a restaurant or some shore thing like that. Dressed up like a gentleman all the time, greeting your clientele, making them feel big by remembering their names. White tablecloths, flowers, snapping your fingers for the wine waiter. A mural on the wall with the bay and the grottoes. All the same, for some people that too is a way of life. Takes all kinds, eh?”
“Yes,” said Boaz-Jachin, “I guess it does.”
“That's how it is,” said the trader. “For me, as for my father, it's the sea. Always the other thing looks good, you know — the thing you don't have, the road you didn't take.” He put his arm out through the window, slapped the side of the wheelhouse. “Swallow's all right,” he said. “She's all right.”
The coast slid by — stretches of brown, stretches of green, old red rocks, lion-colored cliffs, ruined forts, oil tanks, water tanks, pipelines. Blocks and planes and facets of houses, roofs, walls, angles scattering down hillsides, each casting a morning shadow. White walls, red tile roofs, black-cut windows and doorways. Clusters of boats painted blue, painted white. Boats in twos and threes, single boats passing. Sometimes a tanker, sometimes a big white cruise ship. The gull flew off the masthead as the Swallow left the coast astern and headed out to sea. The salt wind had a deep-water smell.
“Where are we on the chart?” said Boaz-Jachin towards the afternoon. There was no land in sight.
“I don't have a chart,” said the trader. “A chart's a picture. Why bother with a picture of the ocean when you've got the ocean to read? We're half a day out from the port we left and we're two days away from the port we're bound for. Keep her on this heading while I make some lunch.”
Boaz-Jachin, alone in the wheelhouse for the first time, suddenly felt the weight of the sea that Swallow pounded through, the depth and the weight of it heaving against the boat's old bottom. The engine chugged steadily, driving her on. She answered the wheel easily as he gave or took a spoke, his eye on the quivering compass card. Ahead of him the sunlight on the water danced, and dancing light reflected from the water rippled on the wheelhouse ceiling li
ke flashes of mystic writing, like word-flashes in an unknown language. The blue dinghy followed astern like a child of the boat, its bows slapping the water in the wake of the Swallow, its own smaller wake spreading briefly behind it. Up forward the smoke from the galley stovepipe heat-shimmered against the sky and water, wavered the near and distant images of other boats and ships.
Sometimes Boaz-Jachin saw his face reflected in the wheelhouse windows, recalled the blank face of the king, the frowning face of the lion-king. The being-with-the-lion came back for a moment and was gone again. Again the emptiness, the urge ahead towards something gone out from him.
The chariot wheel, the wheel in his hand . . . He felt himself on the verge of understanding something, but could go no farther. He held fast to being where he was.
The trader came on deck with a napkin over his arm, carrying a tray on which was a covered dish, a bottle of wine, a basket of bread, a wine glass, silverware, a clean folded napkin. He set the tray down on the hatch cover, took the napkin from his arm, spread it out, arranged a place setting on it, put the covered dish, the wine bottle, the bread basket in their proper positions, stepped back, looked at everything critically, then came aft to the wheelhouse window.
“The gentleman's table is ready on the terrace now,” he said. “I will take the wheel. I ate below before I brought your lunch up.”
There was an omelette under the dish cover, very light and delicate, flavored with herbs. Boaz-Jachin sat on the hatch cover and ate and drank while the trader watched him from the wheelhouse, smiling his desperate smile and showing his large teeth.
Late in the afternoon the trader took a nap while Boaz-Jachin steered. When he took the helm again he said, “Tonight we'll stand regular four-hour watches.” In the evening he told Boaz-Jachin to heat a tinned stew and brew a pot of coffee, and he had his dinner in the wheelhouse. “I'll stay here for a while yet,” he said to Boaz-Jachin. “You might as well get some sleep.”
When the trader woke Boaz-Jachin it was two o'clock in the morning. Boaz-Jachin looked out through the windows of the dark wheelhouse, saw nothing ahead but the phosphorescence of the bow wave in the blackness of the night. “Aren't you afraid to leave me alone at the wheel for four hours?” he said. “What'll I do if something goes wrong?”
“What could go wrong?” said the trader. “All you have to do is stay awake and keep out of the way of big ships. Our running lights are lit. Here's the switch for the masthead light if you think somebody doesn't see you. Here's the button for the horn. I've showed you how to steer and how to reverse the engine. If you have to relieve yourself you use these two eye-spliced lines on either side to tie down the wheel.”
“How do I stop the boat if I have to?” said Boaz-Jachin.
“For what?”
“I don't know. But if I have to?”
“It's not like an automobile where you can put on the brakes,” said the trader. “And it's too deep to drop the anchor out here. You have to steer around things or put her in reverse if something shows up in front of you. And if you shut off the engine and let go of the wheel the sail will bring the boat up into the wind and she'll lose way, stop going forward gradually. Right?”
“Right,” said Boaz-Jachin.
The trader looked at his watch, moved some of the pegs in his navigating board, gave Boaz-Jachin a new compass heading. “In a couple of hours we'll pass a light on the horizon on the starboard side,” he said. “After that there's nothing until I come on watch again. All you do is stay on the heading I gave you. Right?”
“Right,” said Boaz-Jachin. The trader went below, and he was alone in the dark wheelhouse with the lighted circle of the compass card and the dim green eyes of the gauges before him. Forward in the blackness the phosphorescent bow wave parted always while the Swallow's wooden eyes looked blindly into the night.
After a time the aloneness became comfortable, the darkness was simply where he was. He remembered the road to the citadel and the ruined palace, how it had seemed nowhere the first time, but the second time it had become the place where he was. The wheel felt good in his hands. When he found his father he would simply say, May I have my map, please? Nothing more than that.
There was a light, a light that turned and flashed from a lighthouse, but it was much closer than the horizon, much sooner than a couple of hours, and it was on the port side.
He said starboard side, thought Boaz-Jachin, and he said it would be on the horizon in a couple of hours. Him and his fucking pegboard. He shut off the engine, let go the wheel, and went below to wake the trader.
“What time is it?” said the trader. “What happened to the engine?”
“I shut it off,” said Boaz-Jachin. “It's quarter past three and there's a light on the port side and it's pretty close.”
“Shit,” said the trader, and started for the deck. As he got out of the bunk there was a horrible grating sound along the keel. The boat lifted sharply as they reached the deck, they heard the splintering of planks. The boat lifted again, grated again, with more splintering.
“Get into the dinghy and pull clear,” said the trader in a calm voice to Boaz-Jachin as they half-fell down the slanting deck towards the stern.
Boaz-Jachin, pulling away from the Swallow into the darkness, heard the engine start up as the masthead light went on. The Swallow leaped glaringly out of the night, the sea lifted her again, she came off the rocks in reverse and started to settle by the bow as the trader jumped clear with a great splash.
My guitar and my map, thought Boaz-Jachin. Gone. By the time the trader had got himself into the dinghy, half swamping it, the masthead light had gone under and they were in darkness again, across which the beam from the lighthouse regularly swept.
“Son of a bitch,” said the trader. “Son of a bitch.” The sea slapped and gurgled quietly against the dinghy as Boaz-Jachin pulled farther away from the rocks that had sunk the Swallow. He could see the trader's hunched shape leaning forward, darker than the sky behind him. Whenever the light swept over them Boaz-Jachin saw his wet white shirt and dark trousers, his face open-mouthed and wet. Suddenly the being-with-the-lion feeling came to Boaz-Jachin. He almost roared. Then it was gone. Emptiness.
“How did I do this to myself?” said the trader quietly. “How did I find you? What demon possessed me to put my boat in your hands? Mother of God, who sent you to me?”
“You and your fucking pegboard,” said Boaz-Jachin. “How did that lighthouse get on the wrong side at the wrong time?”
“That's for you to tell me,” said the trader. “I was sure at least that you could hold a wheel in your hands and look at the compass. When I went below at midnight you were on a safe course. Tell me, you fateful one, imp of the devil, bringer of ill fortune, what did you do then?”
“It wasn't midnight when you went below,” said Boaz-Jachin.
“All right,” said the trader. “So it was ten past twelve. Not exactly midnight. We're not quite so precise here as in the navy. My humble apologies.”
“It wasn't ten past twelve either,” said Boaz-Jachin. “I looked at my watch.”
“Don't play games with me, imp,” said the trader. The light swept over them, and Boaz-Jachin saw doubt in his face.
“It was two o'clock in the morning,” said Boaz-Jachin. “The little hand was at the two and the big hand was at the twelve. If you want to call that ten past twelve, go ahead, do as you like.”
“Ten past twelve is the other way around,” said the trader. “The little hand, the big hand.”
“Wonderful,” said Boaz-Jachin. “You're learning fast.”
“Two o'clock in the morning, not ten past twelve,” said the trader. “We were two hours past where I thought we were when I put you on the new heading.”
“Right,” said Boaz-Jachin. “Which I stayed on as you told me to, and here we are.”
“Son of a bitch,” said the trader. “The big hand and the little hand.”
“'Keep the boat and follow the sea,'??
? said Boaz-Jachin, and he began to laugh.
“I'll tell you something,” said the trader. “Fuck the sea. I'll never be able to collect the insurance on Swallow because of the way we sank her, but I have a piece of land I can sell, and I'm going to open a restaurant.”
“One thing about a restaurant,” said Boaz-Jachin — “when you wake up it'll be exactly where it was when you went to sleep.”
“Right,” said the trader. “So that's that. It's out of my hands. The sea made the decision.”
“Tell me,” said Boaz-Jachin. “What's the name of the rocks that sank us?”
“The rocks I don't know. The light is Rising Sun Light.”
“S-U-N or S-O-N?” said Boaz-Jachin.
“S-U-N,” said the trader. “It faces east.”
“Where the son sank,” said Boaz-Jachin. “Well, on my new map the rocks will be called Rising Son Rocks, spelled S-O-N. I'm naming them after you.”
“Thank you,” said the trader. “I'm deeply honored.”