Free Mr. Timothy: A Novel by Louis Bayard

flinch and stagger backwards, but when my eyes spring open again, I see Gully, stretched like a footbridge between the boat and the cargo, plunging his good hand into the net's cavity and scooping out great fistfuls of streaming black mud. There's nothing anchoring him to the boat but those two mite-sized feet of his, and my stomach clenches when I imagine him dropping into the water, dropping face-first and then sinking like marble, and me unable to follow, and I'm just about to let go the grappling iron and rush to his aid when I hear Gully snarling over his shoulder.
    --Lever him up, lad!
    Acting purely on instinct now, I lower the iron until it's lying athwart Gully's bench, and with that fulcrum in place, I throw all my weight to the far end. The handle creaks with the strain, and the boat lists back to port and swallows another couple of gallons of water, and the water ices my hot, chapped hands, gnarls and welds them so completely to the pick I don't think I could let loose now if I tried.
    And after perhaps half a minute, our great bundle, with an almost human groan, climbs above the surface. And with it rises a measure of hope, for with each new second, the bale sheds weight, coughing up shards of fish, plumes of half-solid water. And there! Projecting from it like a buttress: mad Gully. Still anchored by his feet, still clawing his way to the prize. The mud has smeared his face, soaked him all the way to his shoulders, but he can't be deterred, keeps pumping his arms into and out of the cavity like a furious midwife, sending up storm clouds of rock and sediment and grease.
    And just then a lathe of wind catches the shrunken bundle and swings it sharply to the bow. And Gully swings with it. Torn from his perch, kicking like a spider, the great dredger disappears into the fog and then, with a roar, reemerges on the other side.
    --Captain! Are you-- But I cannot finish the question. My fist, you see, is crammed in my mouth to keep me from laughing, for Gully resembles nothing so much as an outraged crustacean: his upper limbs pinioned in the net, his bandy legs adangle, his red mouth sluicing out streams of oaths.
    --I'm sorry, Captain, I can't hear you.
    It's only when he stops to draw breath that I notice that his right arm is curled around something, some knob or appendage, rendered nearly amorphous by its silt coating. I realise now what Gully's been yelling.
    --A foot! God damn you, a foot!
    Snatching up the iron, I fling it one more time at the net and drag the bundle and its human barnacle back to stern. And Gully, once he's clear of the water, loosens his grip and, with a short, satisfied grunt, drops into the boat. The impact triggers only the slightest bend in his knees, and as he once again rears up to his full five feet, he looks unaccountably large, as though transfigured by Nike.
    --D'you see that, Tim? Now was that a bleedin' horse's foot, I ask you? By God, it bloody well warn't.
    No, indeed. But as Gully and I open the net's cavity, my eyes keep flicking back to that protruding appendage--that strange bare peninsula, extending from its still-dark continent-- and the more I study it, the more clearly I see something that Gully has, in all his excitement, missed.
    I see how tiny it is.

    A human foot, no question, but too small, surely, for a stoker from Jamaica Road. And when I try to imagine who could own such a foot, my mind stops me from venturing any further.

    Gully, though, soldiers on.
    --Who's to say, Tim? Sod may've been carrying two weeks' wages in his pockets. On his way to the pub, like. Oh, we'll shake him head t' foot, Tim. Such a Christmas it'll be! And with luck like this, why, we'll be in bloody bleedin' Majorca by Holy Week, can you doubt it?
    And just then, our cargo, stripped of its swaddling mud, plunges into the boat with the muffled, otherworldly force of a meteorite. The boat lowers to accommodate the new weight, and Gully and I, acting on the same sacerdotal impulse, remove our