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Thin Ship
by Zachary Kanin
Benjamin abruptly stopped singing. The sea was calm despite the clouds in the sky, and tiny drops of rain wet his two-week-and-two-day-old mustache. He stood still to better hear the noise that had startled him.
“Plez!”
Climbing on top of a crate he scanned the deck for the source of the shouts. It was quiet again and he wiped the drizzle out of his eyes.
“Fuckin’ Cossack piece o’ shit!”
Benjamin followed his ears and peered around a corner to witness two sailors holding down a young looking man while two others beat him across the legs and stomach. Tears streaked his face and his translucent ivory skin was blotchy and orange beneath the surface.
“Get below deck like yer’ ‘spose to!” yelled a sailor with a tattoo of the ocean on his arm.
“Captain’s orders!” chimed in the other one, while delivering a stinging blow with the back of his hand across the man’s face.
“I was looking for you!” Benjamin cried. “I’m sorry sirs, this is my bunkmate.” He approached the beaten man and the sailors were confused enough at this interruption that they neglected to impede him. He kneeled down. “He got lost and I came up to find him.”
The sailors, alarmed that an English speaking passenger had caught them, opted to let the two men be. “Well get back to your bunks goddammit. ‘Else I’ve the captain’s permission to slit any ‘yer throats.”
Recognizing the truth in the sailors’ threats, Benjamin and the stranger decided to relocate themselves onboard, and hurried hand-in-hand to the bow of the ship. Panting, they sat down against the gun wales of the forecastle deck.
"What are you doing above deck?” asked Benjamin, staring at the stranger. His gaze was returned, but he received no response.
Afternoon shadows wiggled into the creases in Benjamin’s face, but could find few features to hold on to on the stranger’s. His forehead ballooned out from his weak chin and elusive jaw-line, and his closely cropped red hair did nothing to deter the illusion of an upside down tear-drop on a broad, flabby body, slumped over. “Krushkya,” he said, slapping his hands against his chest.
Krushkya was Russian and Benjamin had been to Russia twice, but of the language he had picked up only a few words, and even these were only useful in specific contexts. The two men silently watched sailors changing shifts as the bells pealed for six-o’-clock. Then Krushkya pulled out a piece of artist’s charcoal and a small pad of sketch paper. He smiled at Benjamin and began to draw.
Benjamin had assumed that the drawing would somehow illustrate Krushkya’s life story or at least explain his presence at sea. Thus he found it bewildering that the Russian kept looking at him while drawing, nor was he overjoyed when the drawing was revealed to be a portrait of him – a very bad portrait. The mustache was placed correctly, and one of the eyebrows was passable as a cloud, but otherwise the drawing was a disaster. It was evident that Krushkya had not used charcoal before, and as he drew his arm wiped away all but the very mote his hand was rendering. This was an especially upsetting problem when Krushkya used that same arm to wipe his nose, leaving a large gray smudge across his ivory face.
“Man overboard!”
Benjamin and Krushkya looked around, but the coming night hampered their view. Gently tugging the sketch pad from Krushkya, Benjamin drew a small stick figure man riding a boat to suggest the narrative powers of drawing. Beads of sweat formed above Krushkya’s upper lip and crawled through the charcoal, leaving rusty stripes of white between the gray. He pulled out his lapel with his right hand and reached inside with his left. “Herr,” he explained, handing Benjamin the frayed photograph from his jacket, though it was unclear whether he meant “her” or “here.”
Torches were lit around the ship, and Benjamin was able to get a slightly better look at the photograph. The woman in it was young and pretty because she was young. She had a large bosom and very tiny hands. She was looking askance, but her smile seemed genuine and her dress was likely her own, with lace endings and an intricate collar. The smell of a fading fever and lye hit Benjamin and he noticed that Krushkya’s face was now almost touching his own, as if Krushkya was trying to see the woman from Benjamin’s eyes. This was a man truly in love.
Krushkya’s beaming smile and pleading eyes filled Benjamin with an intense pain. He felt as if the Russian and his waiting bride were welcoming him into their happiness, and he wanted nothing more than that happiness should increase for all three of them.
“You all better had been below decks, you was needed to be there!” screeched the cook’s boy, from across the deck, startling the two seated friends. It happened that the cook’s boy was in fact the cook’s mother, who had been hired unbeknownst to the captain, because the cook, a pathological liar, was too nervous to cook for a whole crew by himself. When the cook’s boy said that both gentlemen were supposed to have been below decks, what she meant was that they were going to need to go below decks, because dinner was soon. Baffled by the changing time-zones on board trans-continental ships, the cook’s boy had never quite understood the past and future tenses, and thus consistently confused the two. “You missed dinner,” she cackled before disappearing into the forward hatch.
It was not untrue that Benjamin and Krushkya were breaking a serious rule on the ship, nor was it out of order for the cook’s boy or the sailors to point it out, however violently. Benjamin and Krushkya, along with the other 43 passengers aboard the Scowling Susan had been ordered to remain below-decks at all times, for the very simple reason that the boat was far too narrow.
In the early 1900s, when large waves of immigrants were seeking passage to the New World, some could not afford to ride on large steamers. For a cheaper fare, poor travelers would often risk their lives on illegal sailing ships, steered by unscrupulously frugal captains.
Captain Seton of the Scowling Susan was one such captain for several reasons which really all related back to the same reason: he needed money. He needed paying passengers for their money, but he also needed passengers as extra crew, as his boat was so narrow that hardly a day went by without between one and five people falling overboard – generally to their deaths (I say generally because it is possible that one of them could have survived, though there is no evidence to support that hypothesis). This was not an uncommon phenomenon. When it came to expediency and economics, the most efficient solution was to spend money on length rather than width, as width is generally reserved for the fancier, superfluous mechanics of a ship, and not to mention the obvious fact that a longer boat will reach its destination first, having covered more ground than a shorter boat before ever leaving port. It was often not until too late that the problems with this engineering became clear; namely, that the boat was prone to falling over on its side, and when it was upright, the passengers and crew were prone to falling over its sides, being as there was limited room to move or stand. Therefore, non-crew members spent their time below deck, and if Captain Seton ran out of too many sailors to effectively run the ship, the strongest passengers were promoted. Not surprisingly, no passengers complained about having to work and pay, because they were so glad to once again see the sun. Of course the complaining started up again once they remembered that the ship was, as the cook’s boy would say, “far too narrow, it’ll be.”
Which doesn’t quite explain how Benjamin and Krushkya came to be above deck, but does explain that they are not going back up for a while.
“Oof!”
“That’s my face, you shit!”
“Sorry,” Benjamin whispered, and then, “Sorry!” a bit louder as he became exasperated. In order to fit 22 passenger bunks (two passengers per bunk) in the ship, the crew had constructed two four-foot wide by three-foot tall tunnels in the hull, one on top of the other. The floorboards of each tunnel were covered with a long, thin piece of torn off canvas from a sail that had grown mold through poor storage and from use as a tablecloth in one of its past lifetimes. This was the bedding.
Benjamin shared the eleventh “bottom bunk” with a woman from Vilna, Lithuania, and as the beds were connected head-to-toe, he had to traverse the entire lengths of two score other people to reach his resting spot. The one advantage of having the extreme-most bunk was that there was a small open space beyond it which allowed Benjamin to feel a bit less claustrophobic. The space was actually created to hold a large bedpan, and while Benjamin appreciated not having to climb over anyone to relieve himself, he was less pleased at being stepped on when others had the same need.
“I’m resting,” explained the Lithuanian woman. She smiled and grabbed Benjamin’s hands as he settled in.
“I think I’ll rest too,” he answered, but both bunkmates’ eyes remained open.
“Do you have any food?” she asked, her forehead brushing against Benjamin’s chin in the dark. Benjamin cleared his throat and extricating one hand from hers, pretended to search his several coats. He knew that he had not saved any food that night, as Krushkya and he had made a big show of eating heartily (as heartily as possible) to cement their friendship.
“I’m sorry,” he shrugged. Her scalp instinctively tensed and relaxed, as did her hand on his. Though likely in her late forties, her ignorance of English – other than the few phrases consistent with their ritual – made her seem much younger to Benjamin. “You’ll be sorry, son of a bitch,” sneered the man whose head ended where Benjamin’s feet began. “I’ve got a lot of fucking kids sleeping here.” There were in fact, four very small children sleeping with their father, as in order to count every two of his children as one paying “passenger” there could be no accommodations made for extra beds. Benjamin guessed that the pregnant woman three beds down was their mother, and due to her state, both of the “passengers” were sleeping perpendicular to their father, like a litter of pigs at his teat. “Quiet down, Marley. Goddamn shit.”
“Sorry,” Benjamin repeated, but the word got caught in his throat and he had to cough to expel it. The Lithuanian woman lifted her arm, turned her back to him slowly and pushed against the wall – every passenger knew better than to risk disease in those conditions. Benjamin dropped his shoulder and lay on his back.
Krushkya was somewhere above him. Their meal had been a strange one, though mutually enjoyable: both were assured of their affection for the other, though they were unable to communicate. The only noise in the hall was the cook’s boy’s grumbling as she waited for them to finish so she could clean off the table, but the friends took their time chewing nonetheless. Other than his happiness, the only other unusual thing about the meal was the cryptic note the cook had slipped Benjamin in his soup, which read: CapcalQE0. The QE0 was Benjamin’s best estimate at the second word, as most of the ink had run off in his soup. Nevertheless, he had felt compelled to return the cook’s persistent winks in his direction.
The Lithuanian woman curled her back against Benjamin and her breathing became louder and more regular as her mouth fell open in sleep. Benjamin shivered as her foot fell against his pant leg, but he soon felt warm. He closed his eyes so he could better see the image of Krushkya’s love. He envisioned a rural Russian villa. Krushkya was small and quiet, his red hair wild against the nostalgic sun of imagined memories. He would blush when he saw the dainty daughter of his parents’ friends, hiding behind her mother’s patchwork skirts, peeking glances at the gawking Krushkya. He would show her the pond behind his house and they would kiss for the first time, too young to know what they were doing, but old enough not to forget.
Benjamin inched his arm around the Lithuanian, pressing his nose into the back of her hair. He could not hear what she murmured in her sleep due to a scuffle on the bunk above. The rhythm of the softer noise and the slowness of the louder informed Benjamin that a rat was easily eluding a thrashing in the dark. The woman’s back was now almost entirely in the concavity of Benjamin’s chest as he returned to his dream of Krushkya.
The girl was educated, and grew to be a beautiful firebrand, stirring the hearts of the town’s boys. Krushkya was timid, but he could be strong when he was alone with her. Benjamin grunted into the Lithuanian’s hair. His penis expanded but did not grow hard. Krushkya, because of his simple parents, had a love of his country despite the oppressive political environment that his lover so despised. She wanted to go to America to study and to teach, so Krushkya worked three jobs to help her save the money for a trip. Back-breaking jobs. Benjamin imagined jobs that would kill a man three times Krushkya’s size, but the force of his love gave him strength. Krushkya lifted entire huts out of the mud and carried them for poor families; he plowed fields with a butter knife; he delivered messages to the capital and returned in a day so as not to miss a single moment with his soul-mate.
Benjamin pulled the Lithuanian in tight. Krushkya and his lover were sitting up all night discussing plans and memorizing each other’s faces through tears. Then they were reaching for each other. His lover was pretending to be a queen, while Krushkya was prostrating himself as a courtier or slave. He was stripped naked except for his socks, for one catches cold first through the feet, and more important than love in Russia is warmth. He kisses the queen’s feet and when he lifts his face it is Benjamin’s. The queen gives a gasp and he covers her mouth, spinning behind her and grasping tightly her right breast in his other hand. Her body slackens but Benjamin keeps it taut by pressing his against it and constricting his muscles.
The Lithuanian woman’s eyes opened wide but Benjamin covered her mouth quickly.
“Go to fucking sleep, you fucking shit,” growled the father in the tenth bunk, pushing his children further into the wall to get more space.
Benjamin ached to see Krushkya again. It would be a full week before he did, and in that time his fantasies about Krushkya’s grand, ocean-spanning love affair became so elaborate and fanciful that they ceased to excite Benjamin at all. He needed real details, but he was denied them by the simple fact of non-intersecting schedules. The more people above deck at a time, the less deck space there was, and the greater likelihood of someone falling overboard. Thus, the passengers were allowed only twenty minutes of fresh air a day, in two person shifts corresponding to bunks. This meant that Benjamin’s shift was with the Lithuanian woman.
Benjamin did not like to look at her in the day. Her eyes were young, but the skin around them was old, and living in steerage had not improved her appearance. She came up next to Benjamin as he leaned against the starboard-side banister. He pretended to concentrate on the horizon, and shaded his eyes from the glare off the ocean.
“Do you have any food?” she asked. He knew she knew he did not have any food, but he turned his head anyway. Her wavering eyebrows betrayed her smile, and Benjamin noticed two sailors laughing beyond her, probably at a dirty joke one of them had told.
“No,” he said, and added, “Sorry.” He focused again on the sea, but changed his mind and began to walk along the side of the ship, running his hand along the balustrade and whistling a song that sounded familiar.
“Man overboard!”
Benjamin jerked his head around, but the Lithuanian woman was there, following twenty paces behind him and startled by his attention. The cry of “man overboard” was so common that to one who knew no English it had as much significance as “all’s well” or “batten the hatches.” Benjamin contorted his shocked expression into one of minor discomfort, as if he had stepped on a pin, and resumed his walk.
Every night of that week Benjamin would have his way with the Lithuanian in her sleep, and for twenty minutes every day he would avoid her. The more clingy and pleading she became, the more he worried that she would grow pregnant. She was acting more and more like a flustered wife, and he began to compare a life spent with her to the lives of Krushkya and his passionate lover. Towards the end of the week, fears of fatherhood and the need for more concrete details in his fantasies left Benjamin flaccid, and happy that the Lithuanian woman was asleep. The final night before he was able to reunite with Krushkya, he tried to pleasure himself while squeezing the Lithuanian woman’s breasts. A burning sensation in his penis caused him to scream out, while biting down on his arm to muffle the sound. He sat up sweating on the edge of the bunk with his legs splayed into the bedpan space, hands on his knees. He would not understand until he reached America that though he had given the Lithuanian no child, she had given him something.
Aside from the twenty minutes of open air, the only other time passengers could mingle was at meals. To minimize bottlenecks, the top bunk ate after the bottom bunk, meaning that even this contact was denied Benjamin and Krushkya.
When Benjamin first felt the effects of the syphilis, he realized he had found a way to see his friend, and the photograph. If he could miss his scheduled dinner, he would be able to eat with the passengers from the top bunk, including Krushkya. During lunch he grimaced and ate nothing. The Lithuanian woman did not look at him, but ate quickly and played with the fringe of her sweater until it was time to return to her bunk. Benjamin approached the cook, clutching his stomach as if doubled over.
“I… Excuse me, but I’m feeling very… very ill. I need to see the captain.” He could feel the Lithuanian’s eyes on him as she left.
“Hmm. Well there’s no need to see the captain, as I’m just as certifiably a doctor as he is. In fact, it’s a good thing you came to me first, as I think you’re just about in better hands even,” said the cook, who was rather emaciated for a cook.
Fearing that the cook would cure him quickly or at the very least quicker than the captain who surely had many priorities before a syphilitic, Benjamin tried to decline. “I really think it would be best if I saw the captain…”
“Hmm. Why don’t I give it a shot, and if I do you no good, then we’ll go straight-aways to the captain, no harm done.” Benjamin could see no objection to this plan, as his only concern was timing. If anything, this might overstep the mark and he might miss both dinners altogether, but at this point one plan was as good as another. “In fact,” the cook went on, “Captain Seton himself let me know at the outset of this voyage that this was the exact procedure to take in a matter of course such as this. First I give it a go, then he takes a gander, then we start from scratch. Follow me. Never lost a patient.”
The cook led him out of the small dining room (one table, no seats) and sternward down a short corridor to the room he shared with the cook’s boy, his mother. A circular porthole lit the two bare cots, a striped knee connected to the cook’s boy, and the edge of an iron bird cage hanging from the ceiling. “Have a seat,” said the cook as he washed his hands in a sink pinkish with rust in the corner of the room. Benjamin sat on the cot against the wall beneath the porthole.
“Just the other day a woman comes in here, she was probably thirty, maybe young thirties. Actually, on the last trip, I delivered three babies, all on the same trip, in this very room. They were going to name one of them after me, but it turns out I had the same name as a man this woman was previously involved with so the father of course wants nothing to do with that. Another one they named “Immaculate Confection” because the way I told the mother to think about it – actually, she had twins and she didn’t know it – so I told her the first one was the main course and she was ready to call it quits but then I explained that the second one was dessert and dessert is always worth working for.”
He had stepped away from the sink and was drying his hands against his apron. “Now let’s have a look at you,” he said, finally standing in the light. He leaned in and started sniffing around Benjamin’s neck and face, while counting the vertebrae underneath Benjamin’s shirt. The three hairs rooted in the raised mole on his left cheek bounced with each lunging sniff. It seemed to Benjamin as if the cook, for his own benefit, was trying to smell something – anything – that didn’t smell like a slaughtered animal.
Abruptly the cook walked back to the sink and began to loudly rummage beneath it. Having found the object of his search, he marched back to Benjamin and, grabbing his hands, leaned in again and whispered, “Did you get my note?”
“What?” asked Benjamin, and then remembered, “Oh. Oh yes. CapcaloE. Yes.”
“What?” asked the cook. “No, no. Capcab0300!”
“Oh, of course. Yes. Yes,” answered Benjamin. The cook began to slowly file away at Benjamin’s nails. It is not necessarily untrue that diseases enter the body through the space beneath one’s fingernails. In fact, a widely held belief is that the cobalt and cerulean blue paints that dig into artists’ nails cause cancer. Nonetheless, the absolute abolishment of fingernails has never gained credence as a medical theory, nor, until Benjamin gave himself over to the cook, had it been put into practice. “Ah. Capcab0300. Ahh.”
“It means,” urged the cook, “That you and your friend are to meet me at the captain’s cabin at 0300 hours. Hold still.”
“That looked painful,” said the cook’s boy, moving from the other bed to be able to restrain Benjamin.
“What did?” asked Benjamin nervously. “Oh god, what are you doing!”
As the cook went to work filing away Benjamin’s nails over the next two hours, he told the story of a king who had back pains so he borrowed the back of a servant only to discover that the servant was 3 inches shorter than him, causing his neck to fall back and his head to stare straight up at the sky when standing. He told the story of a general who thought everything was “so dull” after war that he wound up dying of boredom on his own wedding night. He told four different stories about cooks solving impossible riddles only to find out that they had left something burning in the oven, and one story about a political prisoner who discovered they hated politics, but loved prison. Benjamin thought only of the story of Krushkya’s love. With eyes rolled back in his head and a string of drool ringed below his mouth, Benjamin dreamt the cook’s boy’s hands on his shoulders and occasionally around his neck were the hands of Krushkya’s lover, fighting and then caressing him.
“Rest up,” said the cook, as he let Benjamin collapse on the bed. “I’ll be waking you at 0300!”
“I brought you some dinner,” said the cook’s boy, as she followed the cook into the kitchen to make dinner.
The smell of roasted bullock roused Benjamin awake. The cook, cook’s boy, and Krushkya were worriedly standing over him, though if one had to guess, Krushkya would have been the most worried. Benjamin reached for the plate of bullock and then recoiled at the reminder of his bloody fingers.
“We really can’t dally at this point,” said the cook to the two standing onlookers. The cook’s boy knelt at the edge of the bed and cradled Benjamin’s head in her arm as she spooned cold soup into his mouth. “Alright, that’s enough, he’s fine. Let’s go.”
The cook’s boy and Krushkya lifted Benjamin to his feet and the three of them followed the cook up and then down two short flights of stairs. The corridors were only wide enough for them to cross if they walked sideways, although the cook was lithe enough that he had no trouble walking regularly and confidently. Something through a porthole caught Benjamin’s eye, but the cook reprimanded him and walked faster.
They stopped at a heavy mahogany door. The cook shushed them and put his ear against the paneling. After several moments of intense listening he took out two small pins and went to work on the lock. Benjamin patted Krushkya on the shoulder and the Russian looked down and smiled. “Here we are gentlemen, the tomb of Long John Silvers,” announced the cook, swinging the door open.
Benjamin had never before seen a room so opulent and so strange. The thick red carpet sunk a full two inches wherever his footsteps fell and every groove he felt on the dark wood paneling was intentionally carved in by a craftsman.
“Smells like peppermint,” noted the cook’s boy (she had no problem with the present tense).
“Your shirt smells like peppermint,” explained the cook. “The room smells like steak.”
A large oil painting covered the aft most wall. Krushkya approached it and traced his finger along the contour of one of the two horses depicted. Both horses faced each other on their hind legs, forming an arch over a detailed Noah’s ark. The entire picture was framed by a snake, whose head was not painted but instead continued into the low-relief bronze frame.
“Ok, here’s the plan,” the cook said, pacing from golden candelabras and deerskin chairs to the center of the room. “You two are gonna stand watch. Now, as you can’t exactly get in any trouble – being paid customers – all you gotta do is just say you got lost and was wandering around. Actually, say you were sick and looking for the captain, and this guy can’t speak English so he thought you were a ghost and was trying to follow you and protect the captain. Just make up something.”
“Where are you going?” asked Benjamin, trying to grab the cook’s bony arm in vain.
“To the moon!” laughed the cook as he pushed open an easily found secret panel and stepped inside. Benjamin and Krushkya watched the gray ponytail of the cook’s boy bob against her back as she alternately trudged and hopped after her son, closing the door behind her.
Krushkya sighed and sat on the edge of the enormous quilted bed, only to find that, like the rug, it sunk considerably where he sat. To balance out the effects of the rolling ocean, Captain Seton had his mattress filled with sand, having observed that sand covers the ocean on the shore, and there are hardly ever waves in beaches. Benjamin sunk in next to his friend.
“Krushkya, hello.” He made a motion with his hand of a pen writing on paper, and Krushkya caught on, taking out his charcoal and pad. To sit upright each man had to constantly pull his body out of the falling bed, their butts almost touching the mattress board. They smiled with a raised eyebrow at their predicament.
Benjamin gently took the charcoal from Krushkya’s hand and drew a small child learning arithmetic. He then pointed to himself to indicate that this was an autobiographical history painting. He then pointed to Krushkya, who opened his eyes wide, and wiping his nose, gripped the charcoal in his fist.
He first drew a happy child wearing many coats, and Benjamin pointed to Krushkya, but got no response. He then drew a child with no face, wearing few clothes, carrying the first child on his back to school. He then erased the school and redrew it on the opposite side of the paper, to show that the poor child carried the other both to and from school. After drawing a few coins he raised his head and Benjamin nodded solemnly.
He then took the photograph out of his lapel and placed it on the pad. Benjamin reached to pick it up, but Krushkya shook his head violently from side to side and grunted. He began to breathe heavily as he stared intently at it, before pushing it onto the bed away from Benjamin and grabbing his charcoal again.
He drew himself holding hands with the woman. He drew them kissing, and as he drew their lips his lines became darker as he pressed the charcoal against the paper and part of it broke off at the top. His body began to shake and Benjamin tried to sit up vertically, helpless to help his friend, this stranger.
Krushkya drew a boat and himself on the boat. He drew large buildings that were supposed to be an American city. His breathing slowed and he closed his mouth tightly and squinted his eyes. His hands were as pale as the paper as he drew the woman in the American city, and a different man with a beard, smiling. He smudged away their smiles and drew them larger, and then did it again, larger still. Benjamin gritted his teeth. Finally, their smiles were too broad for their faces. He turned over the sheet of paper.
Moving nothing but his arm, Krushkya drew himself with a knife, smiling, on a boat – the American city on the horizon. He lifted the photograph to the pad, and then replaced it in his lapel. The screeching of the secret panel reopening broke the silence.
“Still alive boys?” hollered the cook, his clothes bulging with lifted sundries. “You’ll never believe what was in there! It was horrible, some of the worst torture I’ve ever seen.” He skipped across the rug. “I’m just gonna have a look at the old man’s facilities if you don’t mind, and then we’ll be right out of here.”
The cook’s boy entered the room using both hands to carry something concealed in her shirt, which, from the shape and size, appeared to be a kind of rich man’s Yule log. She sat down cross legged on the carpet and picked at her shoe. Neither man spoke, nor did they react when a silver teapot clanged out of the cook’s boy’s sleeve.
“Guys, that was something,” announced the cook, returning. “Full length looking glasses covering every wall from head to toe. I swear I could see into my own butt while I was taking a piss! Frankly I don’t know why a man would want to be so honest with himself, but I do believe you should try everything once.” Tucking in his shirt he extended his free hand to his mother and tried to pull her to her feet. His expression drooped when it became apparent to all that his puerile build was unable to lift even a limb of his vast mother. With Benjamin and Krushkya’s help, the cook’s boy was set on her feet, and the four cohorts traced their steps back through the corridors, now lit by the seeping dawn light, to their bunks.
Before parting ways, the cook winked at the two passengers and promised them they would be rewarded for their work.
“You had a double helping of rations,” the cook’s boy promised, and closed the door to her cabin.
Three more crew members had fallen into the sea during the cook’s heist and as a result, Captain Seton needed passengers to take on working positions. This meant two things: One: There was the possibility of moving above decks and into the somewhat more spacious quarters of the regular crew, and Two: The rest of the passengers were under even stricter orders to remain cramped in their bunks. Whether Benjamin would have been asked above deck before his syphilis and his “surgery” was moot, as afterwards there was no way he could hold a rope let alone pull. He could not decide whether Krushkya would be needed, for although the Russian was fleshy and weak, Benjamin had not had a chance to assess the other passengers. As it was, it concerned him very little.
“I’m resting,” said the Lithuanian woman, clawing gently at his chest. “You are resting?” Benjamin did not answer. He thought only of an apartment in America. Of a woman sitting, eating a piece of toast and drinking a glass of milk at her kitchen table. The man with the beard – the man Benjamin understood she had run off with – was absent, and Benjamin did not think of him. He thought of Krushkya ringing the bell; of her, not looking through the peephole, expecting someone else. Had she looked, she would see the red hair, the pale, sweating face, like a fish. She begs for her life, screaming, pleading, explaining, crying.
Benjamin could not get the screaming out of his ears. His head itched and the Lithuanian woman was scratching hers as well, spitting a little as she worked. Benjamin got up use the bedpan. As he sat on the edge he felt a pain in his lower buttock. He scratched at it and tried to pop it, thinking it was a pimple. He inspected his fingernail. It was the headless body of a tick. The head was still inside him, but without a needle and scissors it would have hooked in too deeply. Benjamin grimaced and flicked the tick’s body into the bedpan. As he pulled up his pants he realized what he had to do.
The Lithuanian woman was asleep in the fetal position when he lay back down. Her eyelids fluttered open and shut just a crack and she gasped every few seconds. Benjamin felt pity and rage staring at her stupid face. He would have no trouble killing Krushkya. The cook could surely get him above deck, and no one would suspect that one more man overboard was a crime. The more Benjamin thought about it the easier it seemed. He would go to Krushkya’s lover’s home and deliver the news himself. She would invite him in.
Benjamin grew agitated. It would take days to get above deck, even with the cook’s help. The Lithuanian woman scratched at her head and stomach. Lice fell on her face and on the canvas bedding. He would have to do it right then.
Sleeping children grabbed at his limbs like calves to udders, dragging beneath him as he crawled over the tenth and ninth bunks. He didn’t dare speak but shoved them against the wall and pushed downwards, as if wiping shit off his shoe. As passengers started to yell at him and poke and prod him, Benjamin worried that he did not know what he would do when he reached Krushkya. He felt more rage than ever, but his memories of Krushkya’s lover were fading and his mind raced to bring them back. He closed his eyes to imagine her but instead saw the Lithuanian woman’s face for an instant and then only a body without a face and then the cook for a flash. A rat bit his leg and scurried off.
“Get the fuck back in your bunk! What the fuck are you doing?” shouted a large woman whose belly had just enveloped Benjamin’s hand. “Piece of shit.”
Benjamin blinked but continued crawling. At the fifth bunk a hand shot up and smacked his face, pulling his eyelids and his mouth into his nose. Benjamin yelled and slapped the wrinkled arm away. He sat back against the wall, his knees stretched over the arm’s owner: a shriveled Hasidic Jew, with tufts of his beard rent and his entire top row of teeth missing. He was sobbing and Benjamin felt ill. He would have to wait.
Within three days of ordering the passengers below deck indefinitely, Captain Seton was forced to retract his command, and the passengers entered the open air. The lice, ticks, and rats had taken their toll on the sleeping tunnels, and three passengers had expired from related diseases. Needing to preserve potential crew members, the captain allowed the immigrants to come up above, but on the condition that they were either tied to the mast, or to someone else who was. This precaution was short-lived. The wandering passengers created Gordian knots around the deck, causing busy sailors to trip. Like Alexander the Great, the sailors saw that the easiest way to solve their problem was by cutting the ropes, and thus, after one long afternoon of tripping and cutting, the rope system had been abolished.
At first, Benjamin avoided Krushkya. He talked politics with a Frenchman, but it soon became clear that they were complaining about two different tyrannies, quite the opposite of each other, and so they parted ways, exchanging sidelong glances.
The sun bounced off the tick dwelling in Krushkya’s right eyebrow as Benjamin sat down beside him against the foremast. Benjamin’s voice quavered.
“Krushkya. You have a tick in your eyebrow.”
Krushkya nodded.
“Do you want me to get rid of it?” He made a gesture of picking it out.
Krushkya nodded.
Benjamin took out a small sewing needle he had borrowed from the cook for this purpose. He hovered over Krushkya. With one hand he balanced off of Krushkya’s forehead, and with the other he picked deep in the skin to dig out the hooked head. Krushkya winced. Benjamin scraped the red and black scraps of the tick off on his pants. He would not kill Krushkya now. There were too many people. He would wait for some to go below for dinner and bring Krushkya towards the railing in the dark.
Then the unthinkable happened. They rescued someone.
“Man overboard!” screamed a sailor. A man who had fallen overboard several days ago was now floating in the water close to the ship. Ropes were lowered and hands were lent. The man was still alive, but barely. They pumped his stomach and he spewed ocean onto the deck. No one knew whether to be happy or terrified, least of all Benjamin. Krushkya rose to his feet and walked away on the deck, scratching his side furiously.
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