Free In the Land of the Living by Austin Ratner

slammed down on his tailbone and rolled against the side rail with the speeding blackness just beyond it. He scrambled to his feet, and made it up to the fly bridge as the Garfield crashed into another swell and he nearly lost his teeth on the forward rail. Down below, liquid tons of seawater poured into the deck lights, washed over the entire bow, and rained out the scuppers as the booms again reared back and the ship pushed up the face of another swell.
    It seemed at that moment he’d made a terrible mistake, and his hunger was still a hunger, but not for the alien desert waves. He saw in his mind the lamp at home on the bedside table, and the oven mitts on a hook by the kitchen window, and the exact place beside the sink where Laura kept her hairbrush, and her bathrobe, warm and dry in the early morning hours.
     
    “I can’t say I’m sorry you didn’t drown,” Happy said.
    The upper bunk seemed to roll through an arc of 180 degrees and to try to dump Isidore out of his bed each time, or to punish his aching tailbone, and every other minute the foghorn, which was next door, would blow Isidore’s ears out.
    “Sleep tight, sweetie,” Happy said. And then he added, “You ain’t been in my locker, have you?”
    Isidore answered in the negative.
    “I told you what I did to the kid I caught stealing from me? The little kid in Vietnam, cleaning the ship? I caught him in my locker. So I said, ‘You want to go in my locker?’ And you should know by now I’m a stone-cold killer, Schooner Rig. I held his wrist with one hand and with the other I took my whiskey bottles out of the locker and put them under my mattress. And I stuffed the little gook inside my locker and locked him up inside. It was tough to get him in there. I had to fold him up. And you think I let him out?”
    Isidore felt like puking. He kicked his foot against the ceiling to moor himself in the bunk. “Yes?”
    “Fuck no! I put him in the hold. And when we got out to sea, he been in there a day and a half and he wasn’t screaming no more and the locker smelled like a toilet. And I said to myself, ‘Chips, you can’t use this locker no more for your whiskey bottles. It smells like a fucking toilet.’ And I threw the whole thing overboard. What do you say to that?”
    “I say, I’m glad I can’t fit in your footlocker.”
    Happy hooted and laughed hard at that. “I say, you’re right about that, Schooner Rig!”
    Isidore could hear the Red Stag bourbon sloshing in the footlocker, and in a rhythm syncopated with the bottles in the locker another bottle sloshed in the lower bunk, along with personal noises of lips and wet exhalations.
    Daylight did not bring calm. They adventured through mountains of water big enough to spin ten thousand tons; white trails of foam rinsed down the dark mountain waters like branches of lightning. When the wind came in, the waves got even bigger, and the bulkhead lamps popped and fell down and rained on the halls a ruin of mosaic glass. In the hold, crates went wild and blew up into splinters and nails.
    It occurred to him that ships did sink, that misfortunes were littered over history like shipwrecks on the sand beds of the world, and he tried to talk to Laura in his mind.
    “Don’t drown,” she seemed to say. “Don’t get killed by a drunk.”
    “Where are you?” he said.
    And there was no answer, even in his mind, a silence like a death. In the middle of the night, when it began to rain hard against the porthole, he wondered if he’d ever get home or if he might die there alone in this raw black cold wet desert place and he’d sink and his bones would be gnawed by cold, blind hagfish. Death seemed so lonely—he felt death out there in the sea and it seemed that Laura was the only thing attaching him to the earth. Without her he might sink to the bottom of the sea or fall off the earth and into the bottomless black hole of space.
    But then the foghorn stopped blasting and he fell asleep, and in the