Next morning, moored in the Morro Channel

Well, to tell the truth, thingshavegotten sort of loose and lackadaisy. At mess this morning, Captain Smythe requests an audience with Peter, myself, and Lieutenant Yerk. The great bungler, Tailtackle, is not asked to join us -- and for the obvious reason that we're probably going to talk about his recent escapade.

"Tom," says Captain Smythe, straight off the cuff, "I'm not a man to mince words, you know. Yesterday was a debacle." From that, and his scowly eyebrows, I know that he is stone-cold sober.

He rivets an angry, clear blue eye on us. Peter throws me a glance, and winks. Captain Smythe looks down the barrel of his big nose, his white side-whiskers all aboil, his wig on crooked. He's a sight, all right. But he means business. "How many crew does it take to come into Morro Channel?" he asks the three of us.

Mr. Yerk, bald head agleam, pipes up pleasantly: "I'd say, sir, it takes a powerful lot of us, judging from yesterday's performance, which was bollixed all the way in..." He's all aglow with his wisdom.

"Shut your pie hole, Mr. Yerk," snaps the captain. "I was speaking, as they call it, rhetorically. Have you any idea whatthat is,Mr. Yerk?"

The accused shakes his head in confusion, for he thought his contribution to the meeting was going quite well. Now his little beady eyes look dazed and moist. He sallies forth, "Well, it means..."

The cabin door opens a crack.

Halsey pops in, says, "Beg your pardon, sir, there's a man overboard, sir."

Captain Smythe scratches his snowy muttonchops. He is sweating like a boiled beet. "Overboard --how?"

"Swimming, sir."

"A sea bath -- while on duty?" Captain Smythe's eyebrows hitch up a notch, and he starts to spit, checks himself, thinks better of it, swallows.

"It seems so, sir," says Mr. Halsey.

Captain Smythe glances sharply from me to Mr. Yerk, then back again to Mr. Halsey, who's wearing a most unappealing blood-spattered apron.

"Well, out with it, Mr. Halsey, who is it...Tailtackle?"

"Tim, the cabin boy, sir."

"Oh, for love of Lucifer...well, get on deck, Mr. Cringle, and see no harm comes to the lad."

As I get up, Mr. Halsey rubs his hands on his stained apron. "I dumped some guts in the channel this morning," he confesses.

"Are youdaft,man?"

"I'mdreadfulsorry, sir."

"Good Christ, Mr. Cringle, get on the deck and see to the boy's safety. Now!"

When Sneezer and I get there, one of Tim's mates is half over the bows, shouting encouragement to him. In the water, splash-wet, his hair all matted down, he looks joyous as a seal pup.

"Tim," I call out, "you know the standing order of the ship?"

He whirls around, midstroke, smiling. His green eyes dancing, his white-white skin so peculiar pale against the blue green flowing stream of the channel current.

"Sir?"

"Come on, Tim, pull for the cable. Get out of the water now."

"What's wrong with me taking a bath? I swabbed deck all morning."

"Well, I'll tell you what's wrong. First, it's against orders. Second, Halsey's tossed some goat guts in there, and we don't know what fish are in there with you. So get out -- I won't tell you again."

A couple men in the rigging look over and yell, "Woooo," and show their very obvious mocking, mawkish pleasure at my tough-sounding officer talk. This gives me a bad feeling all over again, and I sweat under my stiffish bolted collar, and I have half a mind to call them down and make them filch the goat guts out of the channel with a net -- but to what purpose? They'd like me the less and mock me the more.

"This water's as safe as a Portsmouth tide pool, Mr. Cringle," Tim cracks back in his playful, ringing voice.

The uneasy feeling in the rolling pit of my stomach makes my belly feel chill as ice. And I think of my old messmate, Johnny, who died so suddenly last year. Well I recall his fading face and dying eyes piercing into mine, as if I had some personal responsibility for his wounds, which I did not.

And then there are many voices shouting at once -- men from amidships, men from the rigging, men by the anchor chain. A seaman on the yardarm shouts, "Shark!"

Tim, twisting fore and aft, yells, "That's a joke."

Tailtackle, at my elbow, remarks, "They done that afore with the lad, teased him 'bout shark this and shark that, so as to throw 'im off balance on the cable as he was a-goin' in."

My eyes are glued on Tim -- no shark anywhere in sight, but still the odd, queasy, upsy-daisy feeling in my belly.

Then, out of the dappled depths, there is a monster fish. His dorsal fin breaks surface with a dismal, audible hiss.

"It's just a dolphin," Tailtackle cackles out. But even I know the rushing sound of that predatory fin and what it means, and where it is going in that fury of predatory speed.

"What's all the hollering about, Tom?" Captain Smythe questions, striding up with Peter and Mr. Yerk at his sleeve. "It isn't Tim, is it?"

"Afraid so, sir."

In my ears is a small, thin, pitiless ringing. In my gut, a roly-poly ball of undigested hardtack wishing to come up.

I crack the spell of inaction, however, and run for the gaff hook that is tucked up by the scuppers. Dashing to the cable -- I begin to slide down, one hand on the chain, the other on the hook. Out of the corner of my eye, the great fish circles, swings in.

I'm halfway down, and Peter shouts, "Hook a leg."

I do.

The cable begins to shake as tension takes hold of it. Tim is climbing, hauling himself upward, his body half out of the water. I inch closer, readying my gaff. The shark curves, and its glistening white belly glances in the sun and it comes awfully close, turns smoothly, reroutes, comes round again. The taut cable quakes -- this time, it's Tim kicking at the shark's head. I aim the gaff hook.

Then, amid the monkey shrieks of the crew, I sink the hook into the beast's bluish gray hide.

The gaff bends away; the shark takes it under with him.

I slide down close and get hold of Tim's right hand. The gaff pops up, the shark just under it. There is a crunch, and the water bubbles with reddish foam.

My legs are locked tightly round the cable.

My left hand's holding Tim's right.

"I've got you, Tim," I tell him, but the gaff's awhirl in the water, and the shark makes a sideways pass, and there is another terrible crunch noise with the water bubbling red; and Tim drops down, his eyes fixed on my face, his hand slipping damply, weakly.

I grab him up just as that gleaming, grinding head jerks him down again with a tremulous, seesawing pulling. Tim's legs below the knee are lost in the boiling redness as the monster shark stirs the channel like punch, his dorsal dancing and the popping gaff going up and down and side to side, and I hold Tim hard, crushing his hand in mine, and his palm's slipping, slipping into the sickening purplish tide.

Then he just seems to melt out of my grasp as in a nightmare and he sinks into that death froth with the shark jerking him, at all possible angles, so that half of his body remains upright like a marionette puppet, stiff and straight, while the other half is gone in the blood-water tide.

Again and again, Tim is borne up and down as the shark controls him completely -- and he is neither dead nor alive, but a thing, just a thing that was once human but is now nothing, and I watch helplessly as Tim's gray face wobbles away like a mask, his eyes, frozen from shock, locked on mine, and his lips, yes, his lips mumbling something.

Then --swifft-- he vanishes.

In a twinkling, all is still.

No one man speaks. The ship is quiet. The hissing fin of the shark shows once more, but no Tim, and with that goes my last hope of ever doing anything good for anyone, ever again; and I dare not look at the faces of the crew, for they are all on me. I can feel their eyes boring into me and their cold, hard, knifelike stares as I come up the cable.

Hard stares, too, as I walk tween-decks to bury my face in my hammock. And cry. Cry like a baby, as they say. Even sob. It isn't manly, but then I'm not a man yet. I'm still a boy in a man's uniform. My eyes are filled with tears that take me back to Johnny's corpse-face...now Tim's...their identical gold curls pasted to their foreheads...their eyes locked on mine, neither accusing nor forgiving but staring into my face. I feel something bump my hammock from underneath -- Sneezer's head. He bumps me like this whenever he's worried about me.

He bumps the hammock again -- this time hard -- and nearly knocks me to the floor.

I climb out and bury my face in his neck fur, still sobbing, and him backing up and licking the salt tears from my eyes, and me remembering a song of Peter Mangrove's --

Ash to ash,

Salt to salt,

Me sailor's life,

Me own damn fault.

Text copyright © 2001 by Gerald Hausman

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Excerpted from The Pirate and the Patriot by Gerald Hausman
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.