Eclipse by Shirley John

Author:Shirley, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2017-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

In one of the notebooks in which Rickenharp wrote ideas and lyrics, the last thing he’d written was: Synchronicity laughs when we see it and laughs when we don’t.

At the precise instant Swenson was replying to Ellen, a long way away, Rickenharp was saying, “Yeah, I know.” Because Carmen had just said, “What did you expect? It’s not easy and it’s not fun and it’s not romantic.

“I mean,” she went on, “did you expect there would be a kind of TV fadeout on our shaking hands, agreeing to take you with us, and then maybe a quick cut to the action, some street fight in which you blow away the enemy, and then cut to the scene where you get your medals?”

“No, I didn’t fucking expect that,” Rickenharp growled. “But this is fucking ridiculous. I didn’t know heaps like this still existed anywhere.”

Yukio shrugged. “It’s a typical Maltese fishing trawler.”

Yukio, Willow, Rickenharp, and Carmen were huddled miserably in the hold of a fishing boat. A lantern swung pendulously with the wallowing of the creaking boat. An engine rattled and coughed somewhere behind them. The hold stank of rotting fish blood, and Rickenharp kept waiting to get used to it and he never did. Every breath was a fight with gagging. He was cold. The hold was clammy. The inner bulkhead behind drank heat from him. But if he sat anywhere else, or in the middle, he got seasick. He’d already thrown up twice, in the far corner, and he didn’t want the dry heaves. The swinging lantern made him sick, but he didn’t want the darkness either.

He’d sat hunched like this for hours. Somewhere between five and twelve hours—probably closer to five—and it seemed like days. He coughed, and he felt faintly feverish.

I’m getting a fucking cold, he thought.

But he’d complained once, and he wasn’t going to let himself complain anymore, because Carmen’s tone told him she was one step from contempt for him.

And the worst of it, the deep muddy trench of it was, the drugs were gone.

Here he was, slogging along in a boat Frankie’s source used for smuggling drugs, among other things, but the hold was empty now, and they’d gone through Carmen’s supply and Rickenharp’s three grams—one gram ruined by a slopover wave when they’d boarded from the rowboat . . . They’d done them all, and now he felt burnt and enervated, and he was on a tightrope over the pits of the various pits of his personal hells, pits he knew like a man six months in solitary knows his tiny cell.

How much longer? he wanted to ask.

Is it much farther to Denver, Mom?

Your father’s fed up with hearing that. You kids play with your holo-boy or something . . .

The fever rose, and warmed him, and he slipped into a pleasant delirium; driving with his parents across the country, he could almost feel the vinyl of the car’s seats against his cheek . . .

We’ll never get there, the little boy whined, in the delirium.

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