"The Whirlpool"

The fishing boats were in and the racks were cold and the dock at Kulún stood empty.

He brought the canoe in slow along the boards. The hull came up against the wood without a sound and he held it there with the oar braced against a piling and did not tie off. The smoking racks were grey ash. The whole village stood up on its long legs over the black water and held still.

One window had a light in it.

A man stood in the light. Old, by the shoulders, by the way he kept his feet. A fisherman's stand. He was looking at the dock, and at the canoe, and at the place on the boards where Osogó held the boat against the piling, and he did not move and he did not call out and he did not look away.

Ésa climbed out onto the boards. She was better at it than she had been at Òsè. She went across the dock without a word, the white of her clothing against all that dark, and she stopped at a skiff tied off at the far corner under a tarpaulin and bent to it.

Before she had the tarp half back, the first of it came across the water to him.

A voice. Low and quick and going on, a child's voice pitched down under the slap of the water and still not stopping, the words running one into the next so that he caught none of them whole, only the shape of the going-on. It came the way the crow comes in the reeds. One hard word. Then, when you have decided it is finished, more. Then more.

Two shapes came up out of the skiff. The girl first---small, fast, on her feet before the tarp was off her, and the voice belonged to her, the whole low running stream of it. Then the boy. Smaller. Slower. He came up out of the skiff unsure of the air, and he had both hands shut around something, and even in the dark there was a colour to it. The girl had the boy by the hand. She had it before his feet were under him and she did not let it go.

Osogó had cleared the barrels before he came in to the dock. Two oil drums cut down the middle, packed to the brim with the morning's catch, the fish lying oily and salted and reeking, and he had set them low and amidships where the weight would ride best. He put his hand on the rim of the nearest and tipped his head at the open dark inside it.

"Get in."

The girl looked into the barrel. She looked at the fish. She looked at him.

"It smells."

"It's fish."

"It smells like dead fish." She had let go of nothing; the boy's hand was still in hers. "I'm not dead. He's not dead. We're not getting in a barrel for dead somethings."

The boy shook his head, small and hard, and brought the red closer against him.

Osogó looked at Ésa.

He had never known what to do with children. Children were small and they were loud and they asked the questions a man spent his life not answering, and these two were small, and one of them was loud, and the other one asked nothing at all, and both of them stood on the boards and looked at him the way he had seen men look, at the water's edge, when the choice was already made for them.

He had known the word since Gbán. She had set it down in front of him in the daylight with the whole market moving around them---children---and he had taken her gold and taken the work and let the word stay a word. Now the word had a face. Two of them. A girl with an argument in her mouth and a boy with both hands shut around the one bright thing in all that grey, and his jaw worked once, and held, and he did not look away.

Ésa came and knelt on the boards. She put herself down to their height, the ruined sandals flat under her, the white going dark where it touched the fish-water, and she said something to the girl, low, that he could not hear. The girl listened. The boy watched the girl listen. The argument went out of the small shoulders the way water goes out of a net, all at once. The girl looked one more time into the barrel and climbed down into it and folded herself small among the fish.

Ésa put her hand on the girl's head. Then on the boy's. He went into the other drum with the red held against his chest and would not be parted from it.

She laid the lids on. The fish-smell came up off the open drums and lay over everything, over the boat and the boards and the two of them, the old river smell that hides a great many things from a great many noses.

At the lip of the boy's barrel, where the lid sat off its rim, a corner of the red showed. Bright. The one bright thing on all that dock. He put the oar in the water. The red stayed at the edge of him anyway.

He pushed off the boards.

The dock went back. The huts went back on their legs. The window with the light in it went back too, and small, and the old man was in it still, not moving, a shape against the yellow---and then the channel turned and the dark came between them and he was gone.

⁂

The channel ran black and the oar was the only sound.

Ésa sat in the bow with her back straight and her face to the front, and her head was turned a little toward him. Her looking sat between his shoulder blades, a small, steady weight. He gave it nothing. He rowed.

"You're quiet," she said.

He rowed.

"Quieter than the last time."

"You bought quiet."

"I bought it about the work." The oar went down and came up. "Not about the rest of you."

"What do you want me to say."

"Most men in your place would have asked something by now. You've asked nothing."

"The contract says I don't ask what the cargo is."

She was quiet for a while.

"Children." she corrected. "Not cargo."

He let that go by on the water with the rest of it.

"Does it matter what you carry?"

"It matters to the boat. It matters at the checkpoints. It matters to whatever stops us out here and asks the Ferryman why he carries cargo---children---that talk."

In the bow her hand came up off her lap and went back, behind her, and found the lid of the barrel nearest her, and rested there.

The silence grew heavy.

"I'll pay four times," she said.

"Then they're trouble."

"I didn't say that."

"You said it in gold."

The girl's voice came up out of the barrel then, through the wood and the wet fish and the dark, low and fast and meant for no one but the boy beside her---a bird, she was saying, there was a bird that walked on the top of the water and never once went through it, and the words spilled and ran and would not stop---and the boy gave her back nothing, and she went on anyway, the way she had gone on at the dock, the way he understood now she would go on for as long as there was breath in her to do it with.

In the bow Ésa went still.

Her head turned, down and back, toward the sound, and she held it there. She was not watching the water now and she was not looking at him; she was listening to the child the way you listen for one voice in a market full of voices, the one voice, and her face was turned to a place that was not in the boat. He caught the side of it in the lamp. He could not read it. He looked back at the channel and left her to it.

Far off to the south the flare stood up off the water, red, doubled under itself in the black, where the company had opened the river's body, another one, and set fire to what ran out of it. It did not go down for the rain and it did not go down for the dry. He had crossed under it too many times to look at it, and he did not look at it now.

"Get me through the villages," she said, and the voice had come back from wherever the child had sent it. "The seven. After the last of them you're done with me. Whatever we meet on the way, I carry the cost of it. All of it."

He rowed.

"Fair?"

"Mm."

He put the oar back down into the black water. Neither of them said anything else.

In the bow, where he was not looking---his eyes had gone back to the dark of the channel ahead---her thumb found the gold band on her left hand and turned it once, around, and stopped. It stayed stopped. Then, after a while, it began again, slow, around and around.

⁂

He had wanted the deep water out. But Kulún sat in its lagoon and the lagoon had two routes and both of them had checkpoints, and that was the river. He took the one he knew.

The checkpoint came the way they all came. The light first.

A lantern low on the bank, and behind it the black stack of the sandbags, and the pole, and on the pole the flag hanging dead because there was no wind to give it shape. He knew the flag without its shape. Black, and on it the red spiral the Mouth's men put on every thing that was theirs-the Whirlpool, the open mouth of the god, painted by the men who fed it.

This was the last post before the water went bad, before the channel opened into the contested deep where neither side held the banks and both sides killed on them. He had passed it a hundred times. The boys who stood it knew the canoe as well as they knew their own hands.

Five of them tonight. Two stayed back at the sandbags. The other three came down the mud to the waterline with the lantern held up, and the one in the middle, seemingly the leader here, was young, and over one eye he wore a patch, and out from under the patch a scar came down his cheek and ran into his collar and went on under the cloth to somewhere it did not show. He was smiling. He had been smiling before the canoe came into the light and he went on smiling now, and there was nothing in it.

"Ferryman," he said.

"I am the boat."

"What's in the drums."

"Fish."

"You went up light." The smile again. "I watched you go up. Light boat, empty barrels, rattling." He looked the length of the canoe. "Now you sit low and quiet. Heavy fish. Quiet fish."

"Toll's paid," the younger one beside the one with the patch said, low. "It's the Ferryman. The boat goes---"

The one with the patch spun to face him. "Who is your commandant."

The younger one cowered. "You, senior."

"Fall back."

The younger one saluted.

He turned to Osogó. "Dock."

Osogó held the oar against the current and did not bring the boat in.

"I'm passing through. You know the boat."

"I know the boat." The smile did not move. "I don't know what's in it. Dock it."

He took the pouch from inside his kaftan---the gin, the few rounds, the toll he had laid on this bank a hundred times and taken up again on the far side of it as easy as breathing---and held it out over the water.

The soldier looked at it. He did not put out his hand.

And here was the wrong thing, the thing that had not been wrong on any of the hundred crossings before. At every post on the river the rifle came up slow and for the look of it, and the eyes found him and then slid off him, and the toll went into a shirt and the canoe went on into the dark. The eyes always slid off. That sliding was the whole of what had kept him breathing on this water for fifteen years.

These eyes did not slide off.

Behind the smiling one, the two at the sandbags brought their rifles up. They did not do it slowly or for the look of it. The other two came with their barrels up and stopped on the canoe---one on Osogó at the oar, one on the woman in the bow---and the one with the patch had given no sign for them to come up and gave none now for them to go down, and Osogó understood: the sign to go down was not coming.

In the bow, Ésa had gone still.

"I've crossed this water a hundred times," Osogó said. "What's different tonight."

The smile spread, and the scar drew white the length of it. The soldier lifted one finger and touched the patch over his eye, soft, twice, the way one touched a thing that still aches.

"Maybe I lost something," he said. "Maybe I have a mind to see what other men are still carrying." He came a step nearer the edge of the bank and the lantern came with him, and the light went out across the black water and reached the boat and began to climb it---the hull, the wet of the oar, the big hands on the oar, the woman, and low between them the two barrels with their lids set crooked and not sealed. "Maybe I don't believe in ghosts. Dock the fucking boat."

The light came to rest on the barrels.

At the lip of the nearest, where the lid sat off its rim, the corner of red showed in the lantern light. Bright, and unnatural, in all that oil-dark and mud-grey and black water, and the light was on the barrels, and the red was sitting there in it for any eye that thought to drop and find it.

Osogó did not look at it.

His hands lay on the oar.

The current went under the hull, slow and heavy and giving nothing, and turned the boat by the width of a hair, and he let it turn, and the lids of the barrels did not move on their rims, and the woman did not draw a breath, and the four rifles did not come down.

And in the drum, something moved.

The scrape of a lid against its rim. Or a knee come up against the wall of the drum. Or the first soft breath of the start of a word.