Free In the Land of the Living by Austin Ratner Page A

morning the ocean was calm. At 6 A.M ., they went down into the hold, where pillows and feathers and socks had spilled everywhere and the splinters and nails grabbed your clothes and your skin. And though they had cowhide gloves, they had to take them off and tuck them inside their belts to hold a nail or use a tape measure, and their blood began to spatter the bright broken wood. But he felt grateful, in a way, for the disaster, because of the industry and the exercise of matutinal reason it demanded of him after his night of dancing with death.
    “You’re a strong bastard, ain’t ya?” Happy said with an air of approval as he watched Isidore toss away a broken plank. “Last time this happened was in the South China Sea. Coop was there. He’d tell you. You come into the China Sea and there’s all these little Chink fishermen in their junk boats in the dark, like a bunch of fireflies all over, little boats lighting their way with lanterns, fishing for eels. They’re too stupid to get out of the way, those junks! Or too slow. I must have run down a hundred of ’em in one night at the wheel, the stupid Japanese fuckers.”
    “Hey, give me a hand with this, Happy,” Isidore said, lifting up one side of a broken crate and blowing at a floating feather. Happy helped him lift it.
     “South China Sea is a beautiful place for pussy, Schooner Rig. Between me and Coop, we probably fucked every hooker in Hong Kong. I told you I got a tattoo on my prick in Hong Kong?” Happy said. “A little spot right there on the end. When it’s hard, it says ‘Josephine Cunningham.’ You get it, Schooner Rig?”
    Isidore hammered a nail into the side of the crate while Happy held the side in place for him, breathing out an acetone-ish air of cherry bourbon.
    “No, what do you mean?” Isidore said.
    “I mean—”
    “I know, Happy, I get it.”
    They hammered together another couple of broken crates and Happy kept on talking and talking about his prick. But just when Isidore thought he couldn’t take it anymore, Happy went climbing up the ladder with surprising strength and energy, up toward the blue light of the hatch with an anchor-chain link in his left hand—the hand missing a finger.
    “See ya, Schooner Rig, my turn to drive.”
    That morning, Happy had emptied his last bottle of Red Stag cherry bourbon. “You’re going to the wheelhouse,” Isidore said. “You sure you should?”
    “Coop and me used to take a bottle into the wheelhouse sometimes. We was hellraisers, me and Coop.”
    A gust of wind whooshed against Isidore’s ear and banged loud on the hold floor next to his feet. The chain link that Happy had been carrying had dented the hold floor.
    Happy looked down but didn’t say anything.
    “That link weighs thirty pounds!” Isidore said. “Jesus H. Christ!”
    “So it does,” Happy said. “You’re learning more every day, I tell you.”
    Happy went on up the ladder, occasionally missing a rung and swinging off the ladder in a very unintentional yet balletic way.
    At lunchtime, Happy didn’t come down to eat. Isidore looked out a porthole.
    “I don’t think we’re meant to be sailing into our own wake, are we,” he said.
      
    They said Happy, who had fallen asleep not at the proverbial wheel, but on it, would be put off the boat in Hawaii.
    This led to a long period of uncharacteristic silence from Happy, who didn’t laugh at Isidore’s farts anymore, or even complain about them. The weather was fine and Happy slept much of the days.
    But at Honolulu, Happy sat down to his food as though there were no trouble.
    “This fish has been dead a long time,” he said cryptically.
    It was extra crowded in the mess hall. The crew of the SS President Buchanan, which was docked beside them, had come over to the Garfield to eat.
    “Hey, Happy, isn’t your friend Cooper on the Buchanan ?” one of the sailors said.
    Happy said nothing.
    “Isn’t that Cooper?” another man said, pointing to a long and