The Dream Vessel

The Dream Vessel by Jeff Bredenberg Page B

Book: The Dream Vessel by Jeff Bredenberg Read Free Book Online
Authors: Jeff Bredenberg
touched up with drawing lead. From fifteen feet away, one might think the photo had never been mangled.
    Tacked to his drawing board before him was a sheet of drafting paper, wide and blank.
    It was Sunday morning, and Big Tom gazed lazily in a hangover fog from the board to the motionless shipyard below. Most workers had the day off, as had been the custom since Jesus People worked the island generations ago. Only those in essential positions were on duty—Sanders Lafitte, for instance, down at the pub. And Big Tom considered that he could use an ale or maybe even two.
    No. He returned to his ruminations over the Lucia II. From the scant witnessing that Bark had given him, he had to decide where he had gone wrong—if it was a bad design at all. Had he really been the victim of monstrous chance, as the excitable Bark had suggested? If he had not exiled the Jesus People from the island, he knew, they would be saying that the sinking had come by God’s will, some sort of cosmic comeuppance. Ach.
    Big Tom heard the shouts of Captain Bull’s bargemen on the hillside. He hissed a long sigh, pushed himself back from the drawing board, and treated himself to a machine-rolled cigarette. This is what he had really come to the office for, and he could set aside his dalliance with the Lucia II.
    Outside, leaning into the veranda rail, he sucked on the cigarette, thought how good it would go with an ale, and watched the procession winding down the shell-and-gravel main road. In front marched a haughty little toad-like man, huffing out an unintelligible count that seemed to make sense to the red-leggers shuffling behind. They were march-manacled, wrists to waistband and then to each other as well, front to back. For this no leg irons were needed—it moved things along, and an en masse escape was impossible. It was better that this be done on a Sunday, as some workers were still unaccountably haunted by the sight of the very commerce that fed them and their babies.
    Big Tom listened to the count from the little, fat man. It sounded something like “Oad, umpa, thail, tu…, oad, umpa….” Around Rafers long enough, he supposed, and you pick up a few words.
    From that, his thoughts drifted to the young Rafer, Billister, just the night before. Big Tom was barely aroused from a day’s bedridden stupor when the shave-head kid proudly presented him with the Scaramouch photograph, pasted together and retouched. The house boy’s eyes had glinted and begged for approval. Big Tom had twisted strands of his beard irritably, thanked him gruffly, and dismissed him.
    But Billister had insisted on presenting the commander of the Caribbean with one more gift—a titillating shred of gossip to consider, that Quince the red-legger might not have buggered Dr. Scaramouch as everyone had suspected, that the escapee had not known of any such doctor. Not that Quince would have died any differently, Billister noted in his diplomatic smoothness, but it did raise the issue of whether there was some other murderer on the island.
    And now Big Tom sucked in cigarette smoke, enjoying the satisfactory sting webbing across the tip of his tongue. His red eyes followed the procession, scores of ragged men and women, most of them gray-black of skin and all looking sickly and sad. A half-dozen of Captain Bull’s men kept pace alongside, jabbing at the laggards with the tips of their chopped shotguns, jovial at the prospect of getting off to sea toward the carnal lures of mainland.
    Big Tom spat at the thought of having to keep the redleggers in the holds so long, and he wondered what discount he would have to surrender when they were sold finally to the Southland farming concerns. Money would be pig-ass tight until the gold was recovered. He wondered often about those farms, how they managed to keep a man secure yet working the land at the same time. And he thanked chance, or God, or whatever there might be to thank, that the red-leggers kept escaping and returning

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