Fortuna and the Scapegrace Page 5

  I regretted putting it that way.

  The bully pulled a knife from his sleeve and held it pointed at my suddenly galloping heart.

  Bosco was still otherwise engaged and some distance away.

  There was no one on hand besides my fellow galoots, and they all looked to share the same opinion of my guilt and were eager to see Scarface exact a swift and hurtsome justice to my person.

  Still, for all the grimness of my immediate pickle, and for all its imminent pain, I felt hopeful that I would not die just yet. Call it a fool’s confidence, but the powerful vision I had seen in the soothsayer’s lair – the very one in which I had previewed my someday death – did not involve a bleeding wound. Surely some deliverance was nigh.

  It would arrive shortly.

  I needed only stand by and believe.

  Any second now I would be saved… without a doubt…

  Sweet salvation was on its way.

  Unless, of course, I was mistaken.

  Scarface sneered and adroitly twisted his stiletto in the air close to my chest, as if positioning it so that the blade might pierce more readily the soft gap of flesh between my ribs.

  I gulped, waiting for my saving angel’s dramatic entrance.

  Scarface drew back his arm, as if cocking a spring.

  “Heh.”

  I began to wonder just how badly this was going to hurt.

  But then, in that at-the-last-moment catharsis so favored by the good-humored gods, Neptune delivered the goods.

  From nowhere, a blur flew over my shoulder and struck Scarface Smith directly in the forehead – smlack!

  I did not immediately understand what was happening as the Goliath then flopped onto his back with a whump, his knife skittering across the boards.

  The others all crouched as one, their mouths agape, their eyes wide.

  Scarface clambered onto his elbows. He displayed a stunned demeanor. A gash had opened above his nose, and it was spurting blood over his brow.

  The others looked down on him, then turned their startled gaze toward me.

  I knew a thing or two about this particular breed of man-creature, and I quickly weighed it in my mind – for all of their seeming godlessness, such dullards are generally quite superstitious. As their pea-sized brains worked out what action to take next, I moved fast with the momentum of the situation, endeavoring to turn their hesitation and surprise to my favor.

  Raising my arms out to my sides, I glared at them with the most malicious expression I could muster. “Who is next?” I hissed like a devil. “Who else dares to challenge the Chosen One?” I swept my arm over their group theatrically, pointing at each one of them in turn, as if selecting my next victim. “Which of ye lowly toads dares to gamble against the awesome powers of Hoper Newfangle?”

  I then raised my arms to the heavens, as if summoning all my dark magic. I clenched my fists, laughing maniacally. “Ha-ha!” I howled. “A ha-ha-ha-ha!”

  Of course, nothing happened except that the raindrops continued to drip down through the sails, but the lot of them was made wary enough by my overwrought actions to abandon any immediate ideas of doing me harm. If nothing else, they deemed me a man too crazed and unpredictable to dare mess with.

  Scarface struggled to his feet, pressing the heel of his hand to his injured forehead. His cheeks were red with gore, and he swayed blearily, blinking his bloody eyelashes. He had been none too beautiful before, but now, truly, his was a countenance that only a shortsighted mother could love.

  Bosco had at last finished chatting with his mates and was coming our way. Accompanying him was the man-woman in whose arms I had found myself so disturbingly mollycoddled upon first gaining consciousness aboard Cloud. Bosco gazed around at our wretched gathering – at Scarface and his bewildered throng, and at me standing before them like a conquering hero. He evaluated the situation, and then chuckled upon ascertaining that I was somehow responsible for the spectacle.

  “It’ll do no good for you to carvey up all the new birds,” he said to me. He picked up Scarface’s knife and flipped it by its blade over the side of the ship. “We need ‘em to swabby up the decks.”

  I nodded and grinned at his compliment to my warrior prowess. “My apologies,” I said. “I will try harder to control myself in the future.”

  I sensed that this exchange was further clinching my superiority in my fellows’ dimwitted estimation. If Bosco admired me, they surely reasoned, then I must be someone with whom to contend.

  “Now listen up,” said Bosco. He gestured to the large, gender-dubious person beside him. “Sweet Molly here has need of a helper in the sail room. Does any of you have know-how with awly tools and twines?”

  Awls and twines, I figured, were just podgier versions of needles and threads, and so, seeing this as an opportunity to be free of this unsavory crowd, I quickly raised my hand. “I do, sir! I do indeed!”

  “Fine then,” said Bosco. He pointed at Scarface. “You go to the doctor and stitchy up your face. You others comey aft with me.”

  Scarface wandered off to sickbay, while the others hobbled after Bosco to the back of Cloud, leaving me standing there in the driving rain with one Sweet Molly.

  I smiled uneasily, steadying myself against the rolling of the ship, cold rainwater pouring down my collar. “Alors,” I mumbled.

  Molly smiled and peered down at me with crisscrossed eyes. “Well, sugar biscuit, how do you know about sail work?”

  The falsetto voice uttering forth from out of Molly’s beard was startlingly incongruous with the otherwise towering bulk of masculinity.

  “Oh. Uh, well. Not sails, per se, but the stitcherly arts in general. You see, I grew up with a seamstress.”

  “Lovely!”

  My new boss appeared to be on the verge of stepping forward to give me a big hug and kiss when we were both distracted by a frantic slapping sound coming from near our feet.

  I knelt and peered into the hollow between two barrels strapped to a post. Then I reached and grabbed the little creature held within, carefully extracting it from the darkness and cradling it in my hands.

  “A flying fish,” said Molly.

  And so it was. Not a bird exactly. But neither was it entirely a fish. It appeared to be a confusion of the two, as if caught in the act of transfiguring from one species to the other. It was the color of tin and had long blade-like fins that functioned as wings when it leapt above the waves. I knew at once that this was the sea-sent dart that had so handily felled Scarface on my behalf.

  Sweet Molly reached and stroked it with a finger. “We don’t usually see them this far north.”

  Its eyes were bright and startled. Its mouth was opening and closing, the gill slits pumping for air as it shivered in my hands.

  Not wishing it to expire, I stepped close to the rail. “Thank you much, friend,” I whispered, and then heaved the little mystery up into the sky.

  At once, the bird-fish set its fin-wings and caught the gray wind.

  Up and up it went.

  Joining with the rain and clouds.

  THIS LIFE IS BUT a variable loop of depreciating sameness.

  Thus my revelation as I took up a spool of twine, unraveling its tangles and feeding it out to Sweet Molly. The scene was every inch a duplicate of the daily one I lived in my earliest childhood. Molly was a weirdened copy of my mother in this reenactment, and I was an admittedly inferior and bedraggled version of my long-lost boyish self.

  To be sure, the sail room was not nearly so pleasant as my mother’s dress shop back in Cherbourg. Yes, this shipboard shanty was generally protected from the rain, but the open walls let the winds whip unhindered through our workspace, numbing one’s fingers and causing a drip to one’s nose with an annoying perpetuality. The rough canvas and twine with which we worked were far removed from the plush velvets, soft chiffons, and shimmering satins of my mother’s finest gowns. There was no hot peppermint tea steeping in a nearby cozy, no petits gateaux, and no padded chairs. But for al
l these disparities, an unmistakable symmetry resonated between the two settings that caused me to swoon with a wistful wonderment and consternation.

  Alas, I reflected, it is plain to see – I am trapped on a great big wobbling bobbin going round and round and round the place and time where it all began.

  Molly sat on an upturned box before a squat table. He-she drew a hooked needle through a sail as if sewing up an old wound, all the while humming a tune. I knew the words to that tune. Again, from my distant past. It was the selfsame lullaby my own dear maman used to warble while working her shears through a bolt of cloth. This ocean world seemed to fairly slosh and echo with it over the intervening years.

  Little fishy of the sea

  Won’t you be a friend to me?

  Of course, the song was originally in French, its slanting rhymes falling between mer and moi.

  “Petit poisson,” I murmured to myself. “Mon ami.”

  Oh, coincidental bother and vexation!

  The past could be such an unrelenting nuisance. One would just as soon submerge its pain and disappointment. One would like to forever bury its failure and indignity. That haunting cradlesong brought such a nostalgic and confusing ache to the region of my sorry heart. Had I not just recently determined to leave my past behind me once and for all? And now here it was again, stepping up to taunt me like an ornery bogey bear.

  How, oh how, I asked, is one to get off this troublesome wheel?

  Directly, two options leapt to my mind for consideration.

  The first answer, predictably, was Death. For is not that the hackneyed conclusion drawn by so many wearied souls made simple by desperation?

  Emptiness.

  Dark sleep.

  That welcoming peace of post-existence.

  I confess, this was not the first time I had contemplated that route of escape. There had been some lonely black nights in my life, starless chilly hours when I could find no reason or rhyme. More than once I had stood teetering at the edge of a high precipice in anticipation of its delivering freedom.

  But I could not make that leap.

  Time and again.

  Call it a delusory hunch, but something always warned me that my life was not my own to extinguish, although to whom it belonged, I could not rightly say. I had been schooled in the Thou shalt nots, and although I had pretty much disregarded each of those rules at some time or another, that old commandment of Do Not Kill! always seemed just as pertinent to the murder of one’s self, no matter how bothersome and deserving of extinction that self might be. Add to that the possible punishment of a hot and eternal hell – a foreseeable residence I have always wished to postpone – and suicide lost its luster.

  But most of all, I was stopped by Hope.

  Life can be grim. Life can be humorless. But I cannot say for certain that life is not magical. Who has not experienced just enough wonder to stay encouraged? Who has not been subject to just the right measure of mystery to suspect that something is going on – some plot unseen?

  An infant’s knowing smile.

  A pretty girl’s sigh.

  A sunset offering a glimpse of heaven’s door.

  These are the places wherein Hope dwells.

  And perhaps it was only a fairytale I refused to relinquish to reality’s cruelness, but I still believed – no matter how laughable it might seem to someone observing my glaring unworthiness – that I was somehow important to the world, that I mattered, and that the gods, in all of their cumulative wisdom, had a special plan waiting just for me alone.

  At least that is what I hoped.

  So Death was not a viable option just yet. Death would dash my hopes to ruination. Which left me with the only other option I had ever found – Change.

  Through focused attention and force of will, I needed to change my debauched and imprudent ways once and for good. If I were to ever escape this wheel, it was plain I had no choice. Like teaching a fish to fly, or a sparrow to swim – it did not come natural. But I believed it could be done. At least, I hoped it could. I needed to correctify my fortunes. I needed to rewrite my life’s onerous poem, giving it, this time, a more pleasing meaning and lilt.

  Little fishy in the depths

  Oh, how much your mum has wept

  I looked over at Sweet Molly, thinking of my mother.

  I had not lived up to my potentiality.

  I had betrayed my boyish hope.

  “Change.” I whispered it like a prayer. “Newly fangle yourself and evolve.”

  THE GOOD SHIP CLOUD continued on her way. Although honestly, except that a curtain of wet darkness descended at end of day and then lifted somewhat with each new dawn, no sense of progression could be felt through space and time. Yes, we appeared to be blowing onward, our wind-stretched sails plump as pillows, but the horizons remained so congested with rain and fog that any direction one gazed appeared the same as any other – a monotony of plashing brine and enveloping inclemency. For all we knew, we might have been endlessly rolling over a single acre of ocean, struggling against some invisible tide, while remaining completely ignorant of our dearth of measurable headway. Perhaps it was only the habitudinal bent of my own illusory proclivities, but a disconcerting sense of being played with seemed pervasive of the setting. One felt oneself to be bobbing aboard a toy boat in some oversized bathtub.

  First Mate Starkey stalked the decks with his sextant, his face ever upturned to the drizzle as he searched for a glimpse of the sun, or a lonely star from which to triangulate our position on the globe. But no solarial orb revealed itself to the frustrated seaman, and so Starkey had to rely on nothing but the ship’s compass to soothe his navigatorial longings. Its brass needle suggested we were heading in a general southerly direction, but it was a matter of faith to believe it so.

  I did my best to keep busy in the sail room. It offered poor enough protection from the weather, but it greatly exceeded the alternative in preferablement. Occasionally, I caught sight of the Smith and Jones contingent from under my dripping shelter – grumpy wet rags beavering in the open air without enthusiasm. They toiled with ropes or scrubbed the deck boards with pumice bricks. They glanced sidelong at Molly and me as we sewed and nattered like ladies piecing quilts in our makeshift parlor. Scowls of resentment compounded their already bloated antipathies. It had only been a short while since I had impressed those clowns with my superiority, but I sensed their respect for me – overpowered as it was by their mushrooming rain-doused envy – had already begun to significantly diminish. It seemed those same feeble intellects – the very ones that had so readily inclined them to become my stupefied subordinates – were now unable to retain any recollection of just why they had ever feared me in the first place. Only Scarface stayed deferential in my presence, but one assumed that once the stitches were pulled from his puckered purple wound, he too would resume his former malevolence toward me and my vulnerable physicality. Indeed, my time of safety appeared limited. The stack of work in the sail room was fast growing short, and I would soon lose my high standing and be sent out to rejoin that fellowship of slaving doltery.

  I sorely needed a tactic by which to avoid such a woeful inevitability.

  While idly winding twine, I pondered what to do.

  Hmm, I thought. Huh.

  With no better ideas immediately coming to mind, I decided to toss a few random aphorisms at the problem in hopes that one might stick said problem squarely in its middle.

  “Well, Mister Newfangle,” I considered, and stared down at my wrinkled wet toes. “Shoes worn backward will rarely get you where you are going.”

  Hmmm. That one seemed simultaneously apt and inane. Footwear as a symbol had always been troublesome for me in my poet days, and it seemed to be an equal bother for me now as a sea-going aphorist. My anxiety was obviously hindering my philosophical gifts, and so I tried to calm myself before endeavoring another go at Guiding Truth.

  I closed my eyes, drew a deep breath, and then exhaled it slowly through my nostrils.
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  “Never an ass trust with its tail at both ends.”

  I had heard that one somewhere before. It was a borrowed insight at best. Sure, it offered a sort of roundabout logic, but it was obviously irrelevant to this particular dilemma.

  I breathed in, then exhaled.

  “Water, once broken, can never be repaired.”

  No. Too stupid.

  “A poet without his pen is like a pansy without its stem.”

  No.

  “A loving bosom in the dawn is worth a baker’s dozen fly-by-night.”

  Reputedly true, but no.

  “A man who never casts his net into the pond is sure to never catch a fish.”

  Yes. I nodded at this last bit of developing wisdom, thought it held potential enough to work with, and then attempted to apply it to my troubles.

  “And neither is a prayer likely to catch a god’s ear if it is never cast unto the heavens.”

  I peered out from under the edge of my shelter at the leaden canopy looming over our watery world.

  Now prayer and I had always been an offbeat pairing. Not that I doubted its value. But the problem I had always had with prayer was in knowing to whom it was, exactly, I was praying. Although your typical blinkered monotheist would argue to the otherwise, the world, in my experience, is fairly lousy with gods. They are, I have noticed, a generally regional phenomenon. And whereas it is all well and good to offer up invocations to Zeus when in Old Hellas, wherein lie the boundaries of his, or any deity’s, jurisdiction? Just how overarching are a god’s powers? Did that hoary old Titan-spawn hold sway over this particular watery dominion, placed, as it was, so far from Olympus? And what of his moody brother Poseidon? Sure, I had credited the Roman Neptune with the flying fish that had saved me earlier in the voyage, but could it not just as soon have been sent by Allah, Yahweh, or possibly some other more localized and well-endowed female spirit whom I had yet to meet? Were all these gods and goddesses in league? Were they possibly in competitive worldwide conflict? Or were they merely various interpretations of but one divine power source, all with differing names, and all with a single celestial strategy? And which of them, I could not help but wonder, was responsible for the golden coin that had set me on this odyssey in the first place?