“Never claimed to be.”
“What Pollard needs is someone real easy to talk to. Somebody with some compassion.”
“You for chrissake?”
“No, not me. But I know just the guy.”
Then they were both looking over at George and he was looking back at them and wondering what in the hell he was doing wrong to get those hard-assed swabbies staring him down like that.
Marx went over to relieve Pollard on the oars, gave him a ration of shit for being crazy and spooked, said the first sea monster they came across he was throwing his shitting ass to that mother. Might even season it first so it tasted better.
Gosling smiled as he replaced George at the oars.
Marx. Jesus, he was something else, all right.
Saks would not tell Menhaus or Makowski where he had gone with Cook. He refused to say anything about it, just that they had business to hash out in private. But Menhaus saw how Saks had looked when he came back. Like he was all bound up, needed to shit something out but couldn’t find the proper opening.
After that, for the longest time, in the flickering orange candlelight, Saks just sat there with his knife in his hand and a dangerous look in his eye. Now and again, he’d cock his head as if he were listening for something he just did not want to hear.
“Rats,” he finally said after a time, “ship’s full of rats.”
“Rats?” Menhaus said.
Saks nodded.
Menhaus was beginning to believe that to Saks, ‘rats’ was the key word for anything he couldn’t or wouldn’t put a proper name to. A metaphor for just about everything unex-plainable aboard the
Cyclops.
“I ever tell you, Menhaus, about the rats in Vietnam? Jesus, but we had rats there. Millions of rats. Bastards big as cats, sometimes bigger. They loved our dumps. They’d come into camp at night.”
Saks looked sullen with the memory, as if he could see them running in packs in his mind. Smell them and hear them squeaking.
“Did you poison ‘em out?”
But Saks didn’t seem to hear the question. “I was a Seabee, Construction Battalions. We put in air strips and docks and roads, threw together camps in godforsaken places.” He shook his head. “My first classification was gunner’s mate. So when the river rats, the river patrol sailors, took some bad causalities and were under strength, they would yank guys from other units to build the riverine forces back up to strength. Yeah, they pulled my ass off a big Cat dozer and stuck me in the stern of a PBR, a river patrol boat, on the fifty cal. Had to pull that shit for a month until the replacements made it in-country. What a clusterfuck that all was. Cruising around that stinking brown water down in the Delta, blowing the piss out of little villages. Taking fire and giving it back. Riding herd on all those sampans out in the channels. Most of ‘em were just gook fishermen, papasan and his fucking net, but now and again you’d run across some VC.”
Menhaus wasn’t really in the mood for war stories. He was watching the shadows and thinking about that black, oozing tissue that had nearly consumed Makowski. Wondering if it was coming back and if he’d really seen that woman’s face in it.
“What’s the rivers have to do with rats?” he said.
So Saks told him. “One day, the chief gets a call from an A-6 pilot. There’s some barge drifting downriver, looks derelict. We gotta go check it out. Quick-and-dirty like everything else. The brass says that hulk is a hazard to navigation and the chief is pissed. Hazard to navigation? Down there in the fucking mud flats? Sheee-it. Command says for us to take a peek at her, if she’s derelict, they’ll have some UDTs or SEALs go in there and blow it.”
“So you went aboard the barge?”
“Sure as shit we did.”
“What did you find?”
Saks clenched his teeth, then said, “It was like this tub … dirty and rusting, taking on water. Full of spiders and slime and stinking of decay. Thousands of flies. We found a weapons cache and called it in. Then we found the bodies …”
About twenty VC sappers had been using the barge as a staging point. They had weapons and ammo, explosives and det cord, the works, Saks told him. All the shit they needed to cause all manner of suffering and trouble. The bodies had been there over a month and were just black and rotted, the worms all done with them. Just husks like mummies. But they were chewed-up looking, their bones full of teeth marks.
“About then, the rats show,” Saks said. “Hundreds of ‘em. Their eyes were red in our flashlights. Red and glaring and hungry. Those rats were hiding in the dark corners and debris … but when they saw us, they were hungry enough to come out. Just starving and slat-thin, having picked those bodies down to bones, they wanted some meat and they were going to have it.”
Saks said they came charging out of the darkness, all squeaking and chittering and snapping their teeth. The sailors opened up on them, drove most of ‘em back, but still dozens got through, biting and clawing and drawing blood.
“What did you do?”
“We got off her in a hurry. But you know what?”
Menhaus shook his head.
Saks grinned. “Those fucking things were so hungry, they dove off the ship into the water, started swimming after our launch. Hundreds of ‘em. The chief flooded the water with fuel oil and lit it up. Fucking barbecue. What a smell. Jesus lovely Christ, I’ll never forget that smell. The A-6 pilots came in and dropped napalm on the barge until she was nothing but a blackened, smoking hulk. They put a few missiles into her and down she went.”
“Damn,” Menhaus said. “Of all things.”
“You know what?” Saks said to him. “That’s why I hate this fucking hulk, because it smells just like that barge. Like vermin and bones and death.”
Of course George didn’t know much about Pollard, thought he’d seen him around on the
Mara Corday
once or twice, but had never actually spoken to him. It was Gosling’s idea for him to have a chat with Pollard. Pollard needed someone to talk to, a sympathetic ear. That’s what Gosling said. So while the others pulled at the oars, George was sitting with Pollard in the back of the raft.
“There’s some bad shit in this place, isn’t there?” he said, trying to break the ice.
Pollard didn’t even look at him.
“I hear you were adrift by yourself for a time.”
Pollard shrugged.
“Must have been tough being alone out there.”
Pollard cleared his throat. “I wasn’t alone.”
Contact. “Who was with you?”
Pollard looked at him briefly, as if he couldn’t believe George was quite that naïve or stupid. And you could almost see it in his eyes:
You’re never alone here, George, haven’t you guessed that yet?
“I went overboard with Gosling. We bobbed around in our lifejackets, Christ, for hours and hours, maybe most of the day … what a day would be back home … and then we found this raft. Thank God for that.”
He hoped that would be the wedge he’d need with Pollard, but Pollard still said nothing. He just stared off into the fog, now and again squinting his eyes as if he were looking for something, suspicious of something.
“Whatever you’re looking for,” George said. “You won’t find it out there.”
That got the thinnest of smiles from Pollard. Other than that, his face was still dead as cemetery marble. His eyes were hollow, blank things which emoted about as much as bullet holes in driftwood. Now and then, his lips quivered as if there was something he really needed to say … but that was about it.
George gave it another shot. “What is it you hope to see out in that soup?”
Pollard said nothing.
Jesus, this guy. Getting into his head was like trying to pick a lock with a hairbrush.
“Do you know why I’m sitting here with you?”
That got Pollard’s attention. “Because they told you to.”
“You’re right,” George said. Maybe being truthful here was the proper tact. “Don’t take it the wrong way, I might have come chatted with you anyway … but, yeah, well, they’re worried about you.”
Pollard seemed unimpressed by that.
So George said, “I know Marx has been riding you like … how would
he
put it? Like a swayback mare? Like a five-dollar mule?”
Pollard almost smiled at that.
“Marx is a hard guy, I know that,” George said to him. “Gosling has his moments, too. But I wouldn’t be too quick to judge them or write them off as assholes. They’re dealing with all this the best way they know how, which is toughening up. They won’t allow weakness in themselves or others. Gosling told me you were in the Coast Guard once. Well, you know how it was in the Coasties, you know how those guys get bullying each other. It’s the same here.”
Pollard was looking at him now.
“Sure, think about it. Marx is a tough guy. That’s pretty easy to see just looking at him. Looks like he should be riding with the Hell’s Angels or one of those outlaw biker gangs. He’s not a guy I’d want to piss off. But you know what? You know why he’s riding you?” George asked. “It’s because he’s fucking scared. He’s scared like I’m scared and you’re scared. He just shows it different, is all.”
Pollard blinked his eyes. “I know.”
That was something. George worked it, thinking maybe when he got back —
if
he got back — he was going to get off the construction gangs and become a therapist. George Ryan, blue-collar therapist. The Dr. Phil of the working class. “Sure, you know. Marx is all wigged-out about you and you know why?”
“Because he’s scared?”
George shook his head. “Partly … but mostly because there’s only a handful of us. And me, you, Cushing, and Chesbro? We’re the meat of their command, Marx’s and Gosling’s. They need us as much as we need them. They’ve got some ideas on what we’re going to do here and I think they’re pretty good ideas, but without us, they’re screwed and they know it. They need us. And the idea that their command, their crew is disintegrating around them, well, that’s enough to put them over the edge. Do you see?”
George was just rolling with it, wasn’t even sure he believed everything he was saying, but, dammit, if it all didn’t sound pretty convincing. Regardless, it was enough to begin thawing Pollard a bit. And that was something.
Pollard didn’t say anything for a few moments, then, “I keep looking out there … I keep looking for Mike.”
“Mike?”
Pollard nodded. “Mike Makowyz. We called him ‘Macky’.” Pollard smiled for a moment at the memory of it. “Macky. He was my bunkmate. Me and Macky and another guy, we shared a cabin.”
“Did he go down with the ship?”
“No. We both made it off her okay … Mike’s arm, I think it was broken, but other than that he was okay.”
Pollard opened up then, like a flower he bloomed and let the sunlight in. And once he started, nothing could stop him: “We … me and Mike … we had lifejackets on, we were drifting on a crate. I don’t know how long. Only that we got into the weeds, the real weeds like here, before the rest of you. I don’t know why.”
“What … what happened to him?” George asked.
Pollard shook his head, his face sallow and drawn. “We were hearing things … things in the water, other things roaring out in the fog. Awful things. Big things moving out there and roaring … like some sort of prehistoric monsters. We were scared shitless. Mike was thinking we’d went through one of those time warps like in a movie he saw, that maybe we were trapped on the back side of the Jurassic or Triassic or one of those. I thought he was nuts at first, but then … well, those
sounds,
Jesus. I guess I was sort of expecting one of them monsters with the long necks and the big teeth … they got one in Chicago at the Museum there, thing’s gotta be seventy, eighty-feet long, has flippers like a whale … one of those things, those sea serpents to come gliding out of the fog and bite me in half. Christ, I don’t know what I was thinking. Just that I was scared shitless and I couldn’t believe any of it had happened. Maybe I still don’t.”
George licked his lips. “Did something come out of the fog?”
But Pollard shook his head. “No, not really. Something came out of the water. Two things came out of the water.”
“What were they?”
“They got Mike,” Pollard said, his hands balled into fists now. “They came out of the fucking water
and they took him.”
Pollard started talking fast then, not making a lot of sense to George, but purging what needed purging. He started talking about another guy, someone called Burky. How Burky was a good guy and all the crazy shit Burky would do in port, always with a couple black hookers on his arms, crazy old Burky taking the boys to back room card games and shows with dancing transvestites. How Burky had been on watch and Pollard had come to relieve him right after they went into the fog. And how Burky had been just fine, saying how he was hearing flapping sounds out in the mist like big Jesus birds, joking around about it, but kind of scared, too. And everything was just fine and then Burky lit a cigarette and,
bam,
something out there … like a bird or a bat with big scaly wings and a sideways beak like a sickle … swooped out of the fog and took him right over the side into the mist. Right in front of Pollard. Just goddamn took him and it was like nothing you ever saw in your life. Just swooped down and took him without breaking stride. And Pollard saw it carry him into the mist and the goddamn evil, horrible thing was laughing and laughing.
“Laughing?”
George said, feeling the flesh at his spine moving now.
And Pollard nodded, his eyes dark as flint. “Yeah, laughing … it was fucking laughing, but an insane, shrieking kind of laugh like a laughing hyena. The sort of sound … just echoing, mocking … Christ …”
George just sat there, feeling numb, feeling doped-up, unable to say a single comforting or reassuring thing.
Pollard was breathing hard, squeezing his fists so tightly you could hear the knuckles popping. “And Mike … oh then those things got Mike. That bird just went past me and got Burky, then … then those others, they got Mike, you know? Came right up and got him. Not me, but Mike.”
And maybe that was it, George was thinking. Twice now, two of his friends had been snatched away by things and Pollard himself had gotten away without so much as a scratch. Guilt. Maybe that was what was burning a hole through his soul. Guilt. Never him, always his friends.