The Dream Vessel by Jeff Bredenberg

studying.”
    “You wish you could read at night—why not just feel the holes with your fingers,” Billister asked, “the way blind people among the ancients did?”
    Saple held a withered hand aloft. “With these old bones? Hmph. Blood circulation bad as it is, I’m lucky I can feel well enough to find my pud. Besides, the Braille the ancients had was raised bumps. Much easier to feel than tiny holes in paper.”
    Billister picked a sand burr from between two toes. He decided to drop the subject, although he continued to speak Rafer. “I heard that there was an escape the other night,” he said slowly.
    “Quince—that was his name.”
    “Then it is true, that the bulliards found him here. That you had spoken to him?”
    “There’s not a thing ullegal, ya know, about having your home broken into by an escaped red-legger.” In a shadowy kind of way, perhaps borne of imagination, Jersey Saple could see the young Rafer before him, shaved head nodding now sullenly.
    “They doused him, ya know. He is dead.”
    “I know,” Saple interrupted.
    “…for killing the doctor, Scaramouch…”
    “He’d a died the same just for the escape.” There was a palpable death of enthusiasm between the two friends. Saple pulled the hair away from his face distractedly, trying to make the salty scraggles stay matted to the sides. It was a habit left over from sighted days, pulling hair out of his face. When Billister turned to leave, the writer reached out and clapped him accurately on the left shoulder, stopping him.
    “You must know,” Saple said, “that there was nothing I could do to save the man. I was sending him up to take Murdoch’s boat when they surrounded the house. My only regret is that we dallied briefly in discussion. A few extra minutes, and…” The journalist’s voice was low, almost a whisper, even though they were the only free men on the island to know the language.
    Billister sniffed and walked toward the beach.
    Saple stood helpless, knobby knees poking into the sunlight from ragged holes in his drawstring trousers. “Not a thing I could do, Billister, but I give ya this—he didn’t kill Dr. Scaramouch. I’d mentioned the doctor to him in passing that night—and Quince had never heard of the blubber-butt bastard!”
    The blind man heard the footsteps pause in the sand, and then he tracked their silent progress southeast—fifty feet, seventy-five, ninety….

13
The Photograph
    Big Tom stepped into the dank, natural perfume of the garden shed—rotting leaves and fertilizer—and steadied himself against the seed bins. The aisle seemed to be swaying under his feet, something like walking the bottom hold of a storm-thrown skimmer.
    When he had stumbled his way to the cat-boy Cantilou, he felt that recurring, uneasy surprise—a wash of cold saltwater prickling his scalp and rushing down his spine. The feline sat paws forward, motionless except for its eyelids lapping down over those wide ebony pupils-gone-wild. Big Tom bent at his thick waist and marveled again at the total wet blackness of those eyes.
    The little-boy lips on the animal’s near-hairless face did not move, but there came the voice: “So, you think I am your madness, Big Tom?”
    “Unh?” The merchant scratched at the front of his sweat-moist blouse.
    “The skimmer is down and the crabs are feasting on what the feeder beasts did not bother with. The Lucia is well on its way to driftwood. But the dying won’t stop—will it?—until you let her go. That’s your madness.” The Cantilou whacked its tail on the manure-filled burlap.
    Big Tom wiped his nostrils between thumb and forefinger. “A fool ’ud let the gold go. It’s mine, an’ my secret.”
    “Ah,” replied the Cantilou, closing its eyes, “too many died, and not enough died.”
    “Wha?” Big Tom squinted at the beast. “You mean me? Or who? Wha riddle is this?”
    The Cantilou’s eyes remained closed, and it appeared then nearly lifeless.
     
    Billister