TWENTY-SEVEN
Angel looked at the sky as they moved up the gangway. There was a little breeze. It was cool in that off-the-water way. A few clouds were crossing the moon.
Tonight it almost was blue.
“Beautiful night,” Angel said. He looked at Jimmy. “And it’ll be a good day tomorrow, whatever comes.”
Jimmy nodded, but didn’t look like a believer.
Not everything in the Sailor world had a name but this was called The Hour. It came—it was not an hour but a moment, a click of the clock—when the blue moon was at its zenith.
It would come tonight at forty-seven minutes after three.
The Hour had a certain formality to it, a ceremonial air, nothing handed down from on high but a man-designed affair which had become this over time. Or so the older Sailors said. They could have been lying or simply had it wrong. Theirs was not a holy order. A few Sailors were on the decks, leaning over the railing as people will do, smoking, watching the others. Some strolled the promenade deck, arm in arm. Others were just arriving. Everyone knew not to come too early so they all tended to appear at once, when the hour changed, when the last hour came.
The long iron gangway that during the day carried tourists onto the haunted black and white ship now carried the wetlands people, the people from The Pipe, the moody Sailors from downtown, regular citizens, the powerful from on high and the weakest of the weak.
All but the Walkers, who no longer knew to come, to hope.
As they stepped onto the gangway, some removed their peacoats and watch caps, threw them in a pile as if they’d never need them again. Underneath, some wore period clothes, clothes from their specific time, polyester from the seventies, denim from the sixties, a few ancient Sailors in wool suits who at least looked like they belonged on the Queen Mary. Some, like the people from the wetlands, walked in in that stunned, doomed way, but others were treating it like a holiday. Inside there would even be Sailors in festive costume as if putting on some other guise would better prepare them for what was to come.
At the end of the gangway, an officer greeted them, or at least a man in an offic er’s uniform. He nodded to each man or woman as they stepped aboard and checked his watch from time to time, a large gold pocket watch.
The pregnant woman from The Pipe stepped forward on the arm of her man. A gentleman in a cutaway tuxedo, vest, and striped trousers, certainly the oldest among them all, tipped his hat and gave a little bow. The woman blushed at the attention. The night had already become unreal and otherworldly, even for them.
The welcoming officer stopped the pregnant woman.
She wasn’t a Sailor.
The man with her protested but without much conviction because he knew the rules. She waited where she was and her “husband” went aboard without her, looking back once. She picked up his watch cap where he had dropped it.
More cars were pulling into the parking lot. Some were big, expensive. The custom was to leave the keys in the ignitions, the doors unlocked. Whoever was left when it was over could take what they wanted.
A security car arrived. An excited guard jumped out almost before the car stopped rolling. He pushed his way into the middle of the Sailors, wide-eyed at the improbability of it all.
“Who are you? What is this?”
What did he expect to hear? A prom?
A hand touched the excited guard’s shoulder.
It was Connor. In uniform.
“It’s a private party,” the cop said.
The security guard started to protest.
“It’s all right,” Connor said calmly. “We’re here.”
The guard went away.
Jimmy and Angel were about to board when Jimmy saw Jean.
She was at the mouth of the gangway. Waiting, watching.
Jimmy went down the ramp to her, against the stream of Sailors boarding.
“You have to go,” he said.
“What is this?”
The clouds passed off the moon. The light brightened.
“I can’t explain it,” Jimmy said. “And you can’t see it.”
He started away.
“Is my father here?” Jean said.
He stopped. He was ten steps past her. He looked at her.
“I talked to him,” she said. “Tonight.”
“What did he tell you?”
Jimmy didn’t want to know, but it was the next thing to say.
“That he didn’t kill my mother.” She waited a moment. “And what this is.”
He felt as if she was suddenly across the widest ocean.
“Go back to the beach house,” he said.
“I’m coming aboard.”
“No.”
Angel stepped up. “It’s time,” he said.
“You can’t be here,” Jimmy said to Jean.
“Tell her,” he said to Angel and walked away from her.
“Go home,” Angel said. “He doesn’t want you hurt.”
Angel went after Jimmy.
She followed after them.
“I’m coming aboard,” she said. She caught up. “I’m coming aboard,” she said again.
The officer on deck put out a hand to stop Jean.
“You know she can’t come aboard,” he said.
Jimmy shoved him back out of the way. Let her see it.
047
The three of them entered the grand ballroom, a tall Deco space with funereal elegance. There were multiple levels where once there had been cocktail tables or roulette wheels. An enormous crystal chandelier hung over their heads.
The room was filled with Sailors. They stood in clusters, among friends, waiting. Scott the bartender was there, Krisha, the woman doctor who treated Drew, one of Angel’s bodybuilder friends, Connor.
And Perversito.
And Boney M.
And Lon and Vince.
The old man in the tuxedo played an out-of-tune grand piano, the bad notes giving the scene the feel of a cheap dance hall somewhere or a wake.
The room was ablaze in blue light.
Jimmy held Jean’s arm. She pulled away from him and set off on her own to find her father.
Jimmy just watched her go.
“Three minutes,” Angel said.
There was an ornate clock. Very English. It ticked loudly enough to be heard over the voices and the music.
“Just stay with us,” Jimmy said to Drew as they moved back through the crowd. “Just do what we do and watch.” He remembered the first blue moon, when he was a kid and went from knowing everything to knowing nothing.
Drew did as he was told, fell in behind Jimmy and Angel as they moved through the clusters of Sailors. The room was almost howling now in anticipation, pulsing like a blue cloud somehow captured in a room, like a storm in a box. The tuxedo man played louder and louder to be heard over the growing din, lifting his curled fingers in great dramatic gestures with each chord.
“Does this just keep getting weirder and weirder?” Drew said as they moved through it.
Jimmy looked at him. “It’s beautiful.”
Jimmy kept going.
Angel put an arm around the boy. “It’s a little weird,” he said.
Jimmy saw Jean with her father, talking, close. So there he was, just like the picture from the Press Telegram, the narrow black tie, the white shirt, the gray suit. The half smile.
Before he thought about what he was doing, Jimmy charged up to them and threw Jack Kantke against the wall. Jimmy’s anger wasn’t at Kantke and Kantke’s anger wasn’t at him but neither man cared in the moment, they both just wanted to tear something apart.
Kantke threw a punch. Jimmy avoided it and shoved him back into a glass cabinet, shattering it. Kantke recovered and came after him and Jimmy knocked him down onto the bed of broken glass.
Jimmy ripped the leg off of a table. He stood over Kantke. He raised the club.
The ticking grew louder and louder as the piano fought it.
Angel seized Jimmy’s arm. Jean screamed.
Peacoats arrived and pulled Jimmy away from Kantke.
Red Steadman was behind them, dressed as an admiral. With him were Boney M and Little Evil, but it was Steadman himself who seized Jimmy by the neck, lifted him off his feet.
“Not here! ” he yelled into Jimmy’s face.
But then the ornate clock chimed.
The ship’s bells began to sound.
Steadman released Jimmy.
Kantke got to his feet.
Jean stepped back.
The men and women on the floor lifted their hands.
Angel took Drew’s hand in his and lifted it.
“What?” Drew said.
The piano player stood, lifted his hands.
Was it praise or surrender?
Jimmy looked at Jean. She was terrified.
He closed his eyes and raised his hands.
Steadman raised his hands.
The ship’s bells ceased.
There was stunning silence, the silence at the end of the world.
Someone started crying.
The blue pulsed so brightly it hurt the eyes.
And then, as one, as if there was no time in the world, as if there was no Now, only Always, all in the room spoke a line, as one . . .
“Come The Flood, we will say goodbye to flesh and blood . . .”
Jimmy’s voice could be heard.
Angel’s voice, loud and prayerful.
Steadman, rough, impatient, chafing at obedience.
Drew, repeating the line a half beat late.
The room hummed with expectation.
There was a long, hollow moment . . .
THE LAST MINUTE OF ETERNITY
And then a man collapsed where he stood.
And then another.
And then the man who had brought the pregnant woman, falling dead away.
All in, twenty or more of them.
Drew watched them fall.
And then there were no more. “Whoa,” he said.
Jimmy opened his eyes.
It was over.
He scanned the room. There was Angel, still on his feet, tears in his eyes. Scott. Krisha. Connor.
Steadman.
Behind him, Jean knelt over her father’s body. He was gone.
Jimmy went to her, leaned over and put a hand on her back. She looked up at him.
She shook her head. Sometimes what you have to do is walk away. She got up. He didn’t try to stop her as she pushed through the others, left them all behind.
The piano man began again, a tune that started out sad, and those who remained began to tend to the bodies around them, crumpled forms in the clothes they last wore living.