Herr Bildungs liked teaching, and every time I wanted to learn, he would leave what he was doing and go on with me for hours—I lost interest before he did. But this time he only spent two evenings to help me with the sounds you have to make like a rasp on the back of your tongue. I had to coax and pull every word from him. I gave up.
There were too many other things he liked to talk about, the three chambered hearts of birds, the evolution between the bird and the lizard. Later, when I took my boat to the east and came to ports where German is still the trade tongue, I had to try all over again. It is still my least good language.
He said once, walking from his house in the village to the sea, “Do you want to know the most valuable piece of information there is? Always remember the objects you are working with. When you make a bridge, remember you are putting steel on stone and dirt. When you build a raft, remember you are floating wood in water. Someday you will write poems to a little girl: marks with ink on paper. When you want to turn them into songs and sing them, remember you are squeezing wet bags of air over the cartilages in your throat. When you are making love, you are moving flesh against flesh. That is the basis of all magic. It is very simple and very complicated.” Later he asked me, “Do you know any more magicians besides me?”
“Two,” I said. He was surprised. I told him about the man and woman in the doorway.
But I haven’t told what makes Herr Bildungs one of those special kinds. The third night I worked for him, nearly two years before what I just told you on the beach, he was working one night and I came to ask something. I surprised him, he turned and dropped the lens and it missed the rug and broke on the tiles.
There it is.
The two of us staring at the bits of glass, the metal ring. He was mad, too. He called me a little black devil and said I was clumsy and tried to hit me, and that I couldn’t work any more if I didn’t learn to knock first and know manners. But too many people had hit and cursed me already for it to make much difference but I was scared.
He changed his mind. But can you see with that attention by kerosene light a white man, a black boy, a broken lens?
I took trips with Herr Bildungs in my two and a half years with him to Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Caracas. Once we flew to Houston, Texas, for a weekend when he went to all sorts of meetings. That’s when I decided I would have to make my English much better.
It was a good idea. Six months and Herr Bildungs went back to Germany. I started working on boats. The third one I was on stalled in New Orleans. The Captain disappeared. I liked the city, and in a week I had been everywhere from Dekator Street to Tulane. It was a city of many magicians.
Four years, mostly there and the rest working the coast with New Orleans to return to, maybe made almost an American out of me. You see?
And maybe gave me an advantage.
Therese in New Orleans, big as a barrel of chocolate, who had red hair and wore dresses she was always near falling out, and white socks over ankles with lots of burn scars on them, and shoes split down the back. She modeled at art classes in the university, brought me books from there, and all the time sat in a bar I found out (first surprise) she owned and (second surprise) gave me a job on a boat I didn’t know she owned as well as the bar. She talked with me a lot and (third surprise) spoke Spanish. And became one, one afternoon sitting in front of her establishment on a sagging board between two pork tubs.
At her feet was a puddle like glass run with slick rainbow. She was squinting at the sky. I was looking at her reflection run with colored oil and it began to rain, just like that. The reflection blistered. Just before it went completely, she looked down and the expression I saw (while I saw it I was wondering what was really on her face) was changed by the shaking water to something between scared and knowing as she watched herself breaking up.
There.
She was laughing and squinting with the rain down her cheeks when we looked up and saw each other. “Come in and have a drink,” she cried. We went inside and I thought she didn’t know.
A year later, the day before I left New Orleans for good, I told Therese about that with the rain. With a bottle of bad brandy on the roof where I was sleeping that trip in, she was sitting like a ton of shadow on the edge of the roof and I was stretched on the mattress and just talking on and I told her and said, “You know what I mean?” like when you don’t think there’ll be an answer. But she stopped me and said, Yes, she did.
I asked her if she really did.
She said she did.
I told her about the others.
She said, a little smiling, she was sad she wasn’t the only one. We finished the brandy. Her boat she owned was the first Scorpion. Therese went off to Gulfport next morning and I took the boat.
You want to know the next now. I took the boat to Spain and to France. You know it was easy? I thought it would be hard, and I wanted to do something hard and to see some of what Herr Bildungs had showed me. But it was easy, and I sailed in the Mediterranean a long time. You could haul tankers if you could speak languages and make friends. There’s always been more people liked me where I went than I liked. Which is pretty good. Over there too. It was the first white man I killed. I had killed two niggers before and the white man was in
I shouldn’t talk about these though. I don’t know who’ll read this, and if it is somebody else, I don’t want trouble. I’m going to tear this page out and start again. But it was cold and the ice kept clicking the side of the boat, and he saw I was going to kill him, and that was when it was. I knocked him into the winch and kicked the safety, and the chains jumped and caught some cloth on his shirt that pulled him into the chains and wrapped him like a rag around the spool, arm, shoulder, neck. His eyes came out and blood ran out his hair. He knew I was going to kill him, but he didn’t know I was going to do it that way. Then I put the safety back on and went back to my boat and he’s the only one of those I ever killed. Yet. Births. Deaths. [The page ends here and has been torn from the log, then folded and stuck in its proper place as though the writer changed his mind.] Marriages; it says in this newspaper on the back page. I should tell you about that since I’m telling you about where I’m from and all.
In Guatemala, the time when the boat went down, I got two wives in one week. But that was a joke with these friends who had money for the new boat. But I got babies off both of them, I found out when I came back, and later, when I was working good on the new boat I took a wife named Leora. Leora worked on this boat with me hard as I did a year, and the Father that married us hid me four times from the authorities—I was running things, then. She got two girls and a boy from me already and maybe I’ll go back. Some day. But I went to jail for eighteen months. When I got out, I thought it was good to go as far as I could. So I took my boat to Europe again. I’ve been through at Port Said.
And at Panama.
I stopped at Venice and Singapore.
I’ve been down Baja California and in Osaka. But maybe the best way to describe what I am trying isn’t to describe it clear. You read a story and suddenly there’s a part that becomes just words because you know nobody ever did it like that, or said it that way but you have to pretend just to find out what happened. What I am describing is like that, too. Everything flattens out and isn’t real. Attention, again.
You know the first two? They were a woman and her half-wit brother that lived in that town. When I was with Herr Bildungs, I got with the woman who was about forty then and she had a baby from me which was my first. I was fourteen and Herr Bildungs thought it was funny though he beat me when he found out first. Her brother the half-wit use to suck me off behind the schoolhouse at night. I told Herr Bildungs about the woman but nothing about the brother, because the first day on the beach Herr Bildungs did the same thing, though he wouldn’t ever do it again. In New Orleans there are a lot of fat women, and I like them. Therese liked me a lot too.
But I have more babies than deaths. There are men who are my friends who can’t say
that. I wonder how many of the children are alive. One of Leora’s is dead, I know. There was a lot of people sick then.
Once past Said it is even easier to work east in a boat without all the papers. Those boats there are not good. People don’t know what to do with them when they have them. The last, then, for me was in Bombay, maybe seven years ago. She ran a big house I went to a lot because it was really cheap. But expensive for there. Her name was Geana
[This is the end of the page. The next several are torn away. They are neither folded in the front, in the back, nor in place. Their absence suggests revelations which dwarf the episode of the winch, since that page only bares the injuries of hesitation. These pages are nowhere on the boat. The narrative takes up again with another fragment:]
how all these figures in my mind run together and become one like wax in the head of the volcano that shone off the first two. I think it is time to stop this, anyway, because now that I look back I don’t see anything here that tells what I wanted to say in a way that cannot be misunderstood. And there are somethings I shouldn’t have written about, so I will take those pages out of the log. Probably the next will be worse, anyway. It is getting into Autumn. I am going to take the children farther south, where we can get away from the stupid cold in this country. Maybe one or two stops at the coast. I might even go for Leora.
Will she like the children?
TWO
LABYRINTHS
That man about whom you have written me, Georgius Sabellicus, who has ventured to call himself the prince of necromancers, is a vagabond, an empty babbler and a knave worthy to be whipped that he might no longer profess publicly abominable matters which are opposed to the holy church. For what are the titles he assumes, other than the signs of a most stupid and senseless mind, which proves that he is a fool and no philosopher? Thus he has adopted the following title: Magister Georgius Sabellicus Faustus, Jr., fountain of necromancers, astrologer, magus secundus, chiromancer, aeromancer, pyromancer, second in hydromancy. Behold the foolish temerity of the man; what madness is necessary to call oneself the fountain of necromancy?
—Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim to
the mathematician and court
astrologer, Johan Virdung, August
20, 1507
“Fuck! I don’t see her . . .”
Colored boats strung the wharf like semiprecious stones among brighter gems the waves made in late September light. The captain stood at The Scorpion’s rail.
“Niger, where in shit did you get this? Come on, you black bastard, now. Show me.”
The dog leaped from the deck to the plank, and on.
The captain followed to the dock.
“Captain, what about supper?”
He looked back to see Kirsten at the rail. “Will it keep?”
“Yes. But—”
“Come on, then.”
Kirsten pulled off her apron, flung it over the locker, and ran down the board. She reached the dock as Gunner gained deck:
“Hey, wait!” He ran past his sister and grabbed the captain’s wrist.
“Hey, sticky fingers . . . !” The captain pulled his hand away, wiped it on Gunner’s head. The boy tried to duck.
Kirsten asked her brother, “Did you get seven?”
The captain cuffed the gold girl. “Don’t worry about seven.” He looked down the wharf where sunset’s brass blades cut water; evening, like smoke, rolled between the buildings. “Before midnight, I’ll drop another. Be God damn sure of it.”
Niger’s claws clicked on the broken paving.
On a piling next their slip sat a young man in old jeans. Cracked work shoes, a shirt too warm for the evening, his sleeves were bunched on his forearms. The captain hailed him:
“Have you seen a . . . a yellow headed woman around my boat?”
“Sure did,” with a heavy drawl. He stood up, smiling, when the captain came over.
“Which way did she go?”
The man scratched his plaid stomach. “Down that way.” He thumbed along the dock. His hands were work rough. “Pretty thing, too.” His face and forearms were burned. Hair and eyes were light. “She was leaning up against the side and looking in. First running off, then coming back to look again. Say, Cap,” his hand dropped to thumbhook his pocket, “do you know this port well?”
“Docked here this morning.”
“Oh.” The man scraped his broad shoe toes on the asphalt before the captain’s great bare ones. “I was just wondering. You got these . . . women hanging all over your ship. You wouldn’t know how a guy goes about pickin’ up some pussy in this town, would you? They gotta keep it somewhere.”
The captain grinned. “I guess they got to.”
“I caught a ride up from Cugarsville yesterday. Spent last night in the fucking doorway over there, and, shit—” He plucked at his denim crotch, “I don’t usually have no trouble, but—” and looked up and down the docks “—you got that little blonde headed girl, and the other one who was lookin’ in your window.” He glanced at Kirsten, near the water. “I thought you might know where to go.”
“Like I said . . .” and wouldn’t say more.
The man wrinkled his face. “You ain’t from around here, are you? You West Indian or something? That earring and the way you talk.”
“Been through the West Indies,” the captain said.
“Now, hey! A whole bunch of nigger boys fish out this dock. Some of them real nice. Two already said I could work for them. But I’d like to get on a boat going someplace. I know boats fair. You don’t got no work for me on your boat, Captain?”
“Maybe.”
The man cocked his head in surprise.
“Only maybe, though. What’s your name?”
“Robin.” He grinned. “Robby is what they call me.” He plucked at his pants again: large hands on knobby wrists, on long, thin arms: but the muscles are sharply shaped. “I just come up from this damn small town. It held on to my ass twenty-four years. But not no more. Twenty-four years, and I decided there wasn’t noplace that wasn’t better than where I was. Nothing but odd job work. Our boats just fish the harbor. Some field work. And what all.” His frown came back. “Only, I guess it’s a little easier to get laid in a town where the girls know what you can do.” A weak grin; some of his teeth are broken.
“Sit out in the sun and keep it warm, boy.” The captain grins back. “They’ll smell it when they come by.”
Robby’s smile did not quite surface. He said, “I guess that’s about all I can do.”
“Which way did the woman go?”
“Down that street.”
The captain turned back to the dog.
The children ran up to him as he started across the street. “The lady—” Kirsten said as they reached him, “—is pretty.”
Gunner had shown her the wallet.
And Robby called, “Hey, thanks for the job offer . . . I mean, if the maybe works out.”
The dog lolloped before them.
‘The Hall of Mirrors’ windows were hung with maroon curtains. Niger floundered about the door.
The captain quieted him when they caught up. Kirsten pushed the handle. Gunner peered around her shoulder, followed her. The dog gained center floor, barked. The captain stepped in.
“What do you want? What are you doing here? Who are you?”
The captain stopped, barefoot, in the sawdust. Gunner and Kirsten blinked by his hip:
Big like a barrel. Arms, shoulders, chest and belly, snarled with amber. Round head shaved smooth. Wide belt (iron studs) worn low enough to show where red belly-hair thickened toward pubic. His crusty pants were tucked unevenly in the tops of his boots. One hand fondled the stock of the rifle on the bar. On the mirror a calendar marked it Saturday the twenty-first.
“I captain The Scorpion. It’s on your dock now. I’m looking for . . . someone—you?”
“Bull, I’m holding the place down till the owner gets back.”
Niger barked.
“I
like your dog, nigger.” Then Bull grinned. “I’m police in this town.” Leaving his gun, he walked with a listing stride to the captain, stuck out his hand — “You got business with Nazi? He’s out pickin’ up his new girl.” —thick with callous, gloved with red hair, nail wrecked with gnawing.
“I just want to know something.” The captain shook.
“About what?” Bull passed his fist on to Gunner’s hair, lifted Kirsten’s chin with a foreknuckle. “Fine kids.”
The captain looked at the bare-chested lawman carefully. Then he said, “You can have them for an hour, if you can tell me what I want to know.” (Sometimes, everything flattens, becomes unreal, but . . .)
Bull looked up, frowned. Then the frown broke on yellow teeth. “How old are they?”
“The boy’s thirteen. The girl’s fifteen.”
“You just sell them to pleasure strangers?”
“You bought a lot of it, ain’t you, mister?”
Bull frowned again. Then, still careful, he nodded.
The captain said, “I got Gunner on the streets of an Indian port just below Bombay: six, and pimping among the sailors for Kirsten here. I bought both children from the woman who owned them. They’d been kidnapped from a northern ship. What they got from me is better than what they would have had.”
Bull let his eyes drop to the girl. He stuck his finger under the neck of her smock, and brushed the upper slope of her breast with the red hair on his knuckle. “How would you like to sit in my face, little mama? Give your cunt some good tongue work.” Kirsten giggled.
Bull placed his finger on Gunner’s nose. “My spigot’s got a couple of good pumps underneath. It’s a fat dick, an’ you suck it, it’ll pump you full.” He pressed the boy’s nose away. “How do you take to the idea of me licking out your sister’s pussy?”
Gunner grinned, and scratched his pants with his thumb.