TWENTY-SIX
A crab, just a pair of ragged claws, scuttled across the surface of the moon reflected in an oily pool.
Rats scurried over broken glass. The air stank.
You came in this way: There was a pipe, on its side, an immense section of pipe tall enough to walk through standing up—and three peacoats now walked through it—a gateway through the sawgrass that rimmed the last remaining acres of wetlands of Long Beach.
It was after one.
“I hate these last hours,” Jimmy said.
Angel, in spite of himself, felt his own spirit dropping. It was all converging, and it was all about death. He spoke a prayer in his head, the words echoing there as if he’d said them aloud: Lord, just let me see Your face. He wanted to be strong. Clear. Sure. The one the others depended upon. They all hated this time, when it came round again, the blue moon, for all the pressure, the insecurity it brought, the questions it threw at them. They even hated it for what was at its core, the promise or the threat of resolution.
The tide was coming in. Before them was a wasteland of flotsam and jetsam, of abandoned boats, of bleached logs, of weather-battered and sea-battered squares of plywood, of hundreds of big and little chunks of Styrofoam reflecting white in the light of all that moon, looking like bones strewn across a cemetery after a flood.
“There’s a fire up there,” Angel said.
They were closing in on the hull of a rusted tuna boat, big as a gas station, at a wrong angle, listing in a sea of mud and grass. Fire flickered in the broken-out windows.
They were looking for Drew.
“I don’t get this,” Angel said. “Why’d they do this?”
“They just want to mess with us.”
As they slogged forward, they came upon a body floating face down, a peacoat, arms outstretched, the dead man float. Angel lifted him by the collar. He was alive. Angel yanked him out of the muck, holding him by the collar like something foul.
The man coughed his thanks.
“I know you, Brother,” he said, like a punch line.
Angel deposited him in a derelict turquoise speedboat. The man sputtered and then grasped the wheel, as if heading out for a day on the lake.
“Get me out of here,” Jimmy said.
A few faces appeared. Fifty or more of them lived down here, who feared the downtown, not Walkers, but who didn’t have it together enough to be of use to the powerful Sailors. Or maybe they were just waiting like everybody else and liked the water, even this brackish swamp. They lived in houses made of boat wreckage, cabins from cruisers stripped of their hulls or shacks of plywood built in where the grass was tallest, to hide them. Some had put a few boats seaworthy enough to cruise out to fish in the dark. Some of them now stood in front of their shacks, watching without much feeling as Jimmy and Angel passed.
They reached the stern of the tuna boat where the fire burned. There were crude steps made out of oil drums stuck into the mud. Jimmy and Angel stepped up them, though the bow of the boat was almost afloat with the rising tide, shifting, moving underfoot.
They crossed the canted deck and went down into the hold. Below, the fire burned in another oil drum, black smoke rising through a rusted out gap in the overhead. The space was empty but there were rough sounds, men’s voices, from the next chamber.
The boat shifted. The oil drum fire slid sideways. Angel danced out of its way.
In that next chamber they found three men beating a kid. Jimmy saw a flash of blue, Drew’s snowboarder’s cap. He pulled away one of the men as Angel slammed another against the bulkhead. The third man struck the kid two more times and then stood up.
The kid said, “OK. All right.”
It was some other kid.
Jimmy yanked him to his feet.
“Where did you get the cap? Where is he?”
“I don’t know, man,” the kid said. “What difference does it make? He was here. Now he’s gone. Who are you?”
Jimmy snatched the snowboarder’s cap off the kid’s head. The boat shifted again. Angel fell against the steel wall. Something crashed down behind them.
“Let’s get out of here,” Angel said.
The tuna boat was fully afloat though still heeled over onto its side when they came back out onto the deck into the stinking air.
“Maybe they already took him on board,” Jimmy said.
There were people all around the tuna boat now, wading up to their chests some of them, others trying to make use of the wrecked boats that still flo ated. A pregnant woman, full and round in her rags, sat in a Zodiac as a man waded beside her, hand on the gunwale, hauling the boat tenderly, as if she were Mary on the donkey.
They all moved in the same direction across the wetlands.
“What time is it?” Jimmy said.
“There,” Angel said. “Your guys.”
Across the watery grasslands, the bad-joke Sailors Lon and Vince slogged through, dragging Drew with them.
They were in water up to their knees and easy to catch.
Jimmy pulled Drew away from Vince, the shorter one, and knocked down Lon, the tall one.
Drew wore a peacoat and watch cap now. Jimmy yanked at the lapel of Drew’s coat.
“They put this on you?”
“We didn’t do nothing,” Vince said.
“He did it,” Lon said.
“They said if I was with them I could go home,” Drew said.
Jimmy dragged him away.
“They lied,” he said.
Lon came back after him. Jimmy grabbed him by the back of the neck and shoved him facedown into the tide and held him there until his legs stopped kicking.
Angel pulled Jimmy’s hand away.
Lon surfaced, sucking in air again.
Vince half thought of coming after Angel. Angel hit him in the face for it, three quick blows, dropping him backwards into the water beside Lon.
“So this is where—” Drew began. It was like he was stoned.
“No,” Jimmy said.
“Come on,” Angel said.
And so Jimmy and Angel and Drew fell in with the others, moving like an arrow, all of them, in the landscape of refuse and nature, men and women, the moon reflected a hundred times in scattered shards of water. A wider, higher view would show their destination five-miles distant across the wetlands and then across the sculpted landscaping and empty parking lots of the Long Beach harbor.
There, lit like a cathedral, The Queen Mary.