Free Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos

Hamilton said. “I got us here, now you get the dinghy and go ashore. Somewhere beneath that stand of trees you’ll find a tarp covered with sand. Under that is the hash. Start bringing it on board—but don’t get it wet.”
    â€œFine,” I said. But inside I was dancing around to a pirate jig. “Yo-ho-ho,” I sang in my belly, imagining myself as Long John Silver about to put to shore. “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest! Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. Drink and devil had done the rest. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!”
    I never would have made a good pirate like Billy Bones or Black Dog. I didn’t have the stamina. I dug up the canvas bags—each weighing fifty pounds—dragged them through the
sand, loaded four at a time into the dinghy, rowed through the choppy surf and out through the rocks to the Beaver, tied up, precariously balanced on the dinghy gunnels while heaving each sack on deck. I did this ten times in a row, until finally, when I had finished lugging the two thousand pounds of hash on board and had hauled up the dinghy and secured it to its cradle, I dropped down onto the deck and lay there as if I had fallen from the top of the mast. I was exhausted.
    Hamilton had been packing the bags in the fo’c’sle, in his cabin, and in mine, and wasn’t nearly as tired. “Grog time!” he hollered from down below, and rang a brass bell. I forced myself to stand and staggered down the ladder into the main cabin and over to the galley door. “Here you go, sailor,” he said, suddenly full of good captainly cheer, then poured me a tumbler of rum and locked the bottle away.
    I drank it straight back and asked for more.
    â€œBritish navy rules,” he replied. “Only one grog per day per man.”
    â€œAre you serious?” I asked.
    â€œSailor, this is serious business,” he replied, underlining each word with his tone. “I can’t have any drunks on board.”
    â€œAye, aye, captain,” I said sarcastically.
    I never did get drunk, but I got after the hash like a mouse at cheese. I nibbled on it each day—a gram here and a gram there. Hamilton took his hash in tea—the British way, I
assumed. He shaved his down to a powder with a straight edge razor then dipped a heaping spoonful into a cup of hot water and stirred it up with sugar. Stoned out of our minds, we navigated through the long madhouse days of the voyage as if crossing the ocean in a floating sanitarium. I spent hours sitting cross-legged on deck with the ship’s log on my lap recording the day’s events as if I were drifting around in Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradise.
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    The ship was a strange floating cell. A blue cell. Blue sky. Blue ocean. We weren’t locked in, but there was nowhere to go, and aside from the weather, each day unfolded very much the same. Bright, blinding blue. What changed was the drama on board. Hamilton was insane. Or so I thought. He wouldn’t talk to me, except to order me around or humiliate me in some way. He stopped wearing clothes. He constantly paced the deck in the nude, staring out at the horizon line and stroking his beard. He must have been thinking about something because the moods on his face were as shifty as the clouds overhead. He whispered things I couldn’t make out. He counted numbers on his fingers as if he were making lists. For hours he practiced tying and untying knots. At times he looked at me as if he had never seen me before.
    We had two bunks, a toilet, a galley, no radio, plenty of books, a deck of cards, a chess set, and two thousand pounds
of hash. After we had loaded the hash at Little Dog Island I began snooping around the boat, just to see what else I could find. I lifted the cushioned lid of a galley bench and inside were all sorts of sailing gear: flags for half a dozen countries, a rusty flare gun (which made me think of Rik’s forehead), a fire