Free Fishboy by Mark Richard Page B

I feel that Big Miss Magine had stowed away aboard the ship and was laying in wait for me somewhere. The first time was when I had been sleeping in Mr. Watt’s empty calendar clock box. I was asleep, slipping into a dream, and the back-and-forth rocking of the ship seemed to me the way the purple bus rocked back and forth when Big Miss Magine stepped and climbed aboard. It startled me awake and sitting up seeing Mr. Watt’s silver-veiled head floating in the captain’s chair, I knew it had just been one of those tricks of sleep. But this time I was awake and the feeling was different, I felt she was close, I felt she was hiding in the engine room somewhere waiting for me. I kept turning to see her face gape from oily filters, her form in hunkered cowlings, her fingers flailing in ragged ropes fluttering from exhausts. In the fish oil sloshing hot in the bilge and in the burning rubber gaskets I smelled her skin and I smelled breath.
    I kept to the main street, looking over my shoulder for footfalls the roar of the place made me deaf to.
    I passed the salvage yard, the piles of accumulated wreckage dredged up in John’s net, wreckage scavenged from maritime graveyards, heaps of any machinery John thought Black Master Chief Harold could use to build an ark engine, a motor that ran on brilliant particles, a motor John had only heard about third-hand, a motor that could run forever and pull an infinite amount of net, a motor that the master chief was consigned to construct with only pages torn from books and hearsay to help him.
    I found Black Master Chief Harold and his fire lackey and boiler devil arguing at the construction site. They were huddled in the frame of the ark engine, their tools within reach around them, levered lengths of chain spanning the workspace, dirty work rags dried stiff and hanging above them like icicles of filth. They were arguing in the hand symbols men use when confusion and machinery drown language, when tossed thumbs mean to lift tons and jigged wrists signify
We could all be crushed
. Fingers punched asbestos-vested breastbones to punctuate a point, and fists of oven-mitt gloves wiped clean the blueprints that had been drawn in the air.
    In a place like this, among men where my whistling lisp could never be mocked, I stood mute with my message from John.
More power!
    Tugging on the master chief’s oil-soaked sleeve Itried in my best hand-twisting monkey talk to explain the size of the net John had set out, how the ship was stalled in the water, how what was needed was more power, but the master chief brushed me aside and made a pipe-fitting motion with a fist butting the heel of his glove, which the boiler devil responded to by throwing a wrench across the floor in disgust.
    I turned to the fire lackey with my message, pulling him to the coal bunkers that spilled around the mouth of the red-grated furnaces. I drew a shovel from the mound of coal and made a motion as if to feed the fires, but the fire lackey took the shovel from me and pointed to a color guard of gauges, the needle noses in their faces pegging red, and I understood that there was no more power, no more gain to be gotten, the engines were so stoked that the rivets used to hold the boilers together were occasionally popping off and stinging us where they struck us like wasps.
    All I wanted was just a little more power for John’s net, even just a little extra puff of black smoke from our stack to show I had completed my errand, and when the fire lackey left me to finish his argument with the master chief and the boiler devil, I took up the coal shovel again and turned the bolt on the furnace grate. The door swung open and there she was, there was Big Miss Magine, her big black face laughing in the fiery coals,laughing and hissing in the draft of the open door,
FISH-
hissing,
BOY
-roaring, the rushing air stoking her arms, her arms reaching out to snatch me against her burning bosom. I dropped the shovel and twisted away, out of