The Heart is a Poor Judge Ch. 09

Amazingly, most of the people on board hardly modified their behavior. They acted as it they were not off course at all, still beating on toward that great destination--the promised land that was Malaysia. He was astonished by the unbreakable attitudes as he wandered, smiling faces somehow still not not facing reality--at least as it occurred to the boy. Eventually he found himself huddled down in a corner of the boat, once again next to the young pregnant woman.

"Is it true what you said?" he asked her. "About the gasoline--is it true that there wasn't enough to make it all the way?"

"It's just something I heard," she replied softly. "I don't know for sure." She looked very pale and generally not well.

"If it's true," the boy reasoned slowly, "then it doesn't matter if the motor is broken."

"I guess that's right."

He looked at her. "Are you feeling okay?"

"No. I am feeling very sick."

"What can I do?"

"Nothing," she said. "There is nothing anyone can do. I will just have to feel this way for now."

The boy couldn't think of anything worth saying to try and improve her situation. No response felt adequate.

A moment passed. She leaned in like someone revealing a secret. A tear left a thin, glistening trail on her dry cheek. She told him, "I think there is something wrong with the baby."

He crouched, put his arm silently around her shoulder, no clue in the world as to what could possibly help. He asked again if there was anything he could do. She said she was thirsty. So he set about fetching her some water, even though it was not time for the rations to be distributed. As his special request met the ears of two women (mothers already) who watched over the tanks, they were alerted to the grave condition of the young woman, and they brought water over to her themselves, asking the crowd to make way as they went.

They boy knew her well enough by now to guess that she wouldn't like the attention. But perhaps it was for the best. Even as they drifted at sea with no working engine, a new crisis had been set into motion, as the hours that followed saw her condition deteriorate.

He wanted desperately to be by her side, but he was shooed away by one of the women. He felt better upon overhearing that one of them had been a nursing student. A shrill call was made for any doctors on board, but no one stepped forward.

"You are in labor," one of the women informed her. "You will have the baby soon."

Others on the boat made a considerable sacrifice in backing several feet away, giving her as wide a semicircle berth as they could bear from where she lay propped near the edge of the boat. He approached again, squatting precariously on the rail, terrified for her safety. This time, when one of the three women attending her asked him to back off, the pregnant woman shouted, "He is my brother," between gasping inhalations. They let him stay. He crouched by her shoulder. She grasped for his hand and squeezed it tightly.

As the women helped her prepare to deliver, he sat and stared stone-faced at wood planks lining the bottom of the boat. Once she was settled and positioned in a way the women deemed suitable, she was told to push. She squeezed his hand once again, harder this time, and he was aware of pain in the bones of his fingers yet somehow hardly felt it. She seemed to have taken on a new air of resolution. Over and over she pushed, guided by the chanting voices of the women. He did not know exactly when it finally happened, because he averted his gaze from the direction in which he felt it would be indecent of him to look. All he knew was that, all at once, the air became silent.

He was hardly aware of the throngs of people waiting just beyond the brink. Nearly everyone had suspended themselves in hushed expectation. The boat itself seemed to cease rocking.

The words of the would-be nurse sliced cold and hollow through the breeze: "It's still." He instantly knew their meaning. There was no sound of a crying newborn. No rejoicing cheers at the miracle of life. He finally looked and saw that the baby was a strange color, very small and dead.

One of women who had helped began crying softly. The din resumed on the boat, as people dismissed the tragedy en masse. (What else could they have done?) The young woman who had claimed him as her brother did not cry. She breathed in and out with a vacant expression.

"I am sorry," said the nurse. "I will take him away now."

He saw that it was a boy.

"Please keep him safe," said the young woman. "I want to hold him when I am clean."

She agreed, and the other two women led her to the back of the boat where the transom dipped low, making the ocean water accessible enough for her to dip into and clean herself.

The boy stood up and watched her disappear through the crowd. He looked down. There was a mess from the birth. He remembered a bucket he had seen inside the driver's room. He went and retrieved it. He was happy to see that there was an old rag in the bucket. Back out at the edge of the boat, he dipped the bucket into the sea until it was half full, then started to scrub the area, cleaning it as well as he was able. He avoided a strange bluish-black sack, which he had not yet learned was called a placenta. One of the women returned and voiced her approval of his efforts. She took the sack away.

For a long time he scrubbed at the floor of the boat, wringing out the rag, fetching fresh water from the sea over and over, until it was no longer apparent that a birth had occurred in that spot. He worked hastily because he didn't want the young woman to know he had touched what came from her.

After what felt like a long time, the young woman returned, stepping carefully through the crowd, one arm linked with the nurse's, the other cradling a bundled, peach-colored towel. She came back to the place where she had given birth and sat down, pressing the dead baby close to her chest.

She held on to the bundled towel for the rest of the day. The baby was completely wrapped inside it so that no part of him was visible; the young woman confirmed that she could feel the small weight inside, and that was enough for her. "Things that are dead do not need to breathe," she told him solemnly. The boy did not leave her side except to relieve himself sometime in the late afternoon. The nurse continued to attend her as there was blood coming from between her legs. By early evening she needed to go wash again at the back of the boat.

"Can you hold him, please?" she asked. "I'll come back soon. I'm not ready to say goodbye."

In the next moment, the bundle was in his arms. He balled himself, cross-legged in the bottom of the boat, guarding it with his life. He wondered if the baby ever had a soul, and if so, whether that soul still resided beneath the layers of the towel. It would seem so, as he thought he could feel a strange, vibrational energy absorb into his cradling arms. But as always, the war between real and imaginary waged on in his head, and he determined it must only be a lump of underdeveloped skin, organ and bone, the same as he had once seen slip from a pregnant goat tragically crushed beneath a tractor tire.

As he returned the bundle to her, he felt its power fade. They sat together in silence--and it was very silent because of the ruined motor. The commotion of the birth and ensuing tragedy had distracted him, and surely many others. But now, it seemed more and more people were settling into the reality of their predicament. Not one person made a public display of panic, but he read on multiple faces a state of fear. A mustached man with three daughters (whom up to this point he had only seen smiling) now hung his head in anguish.

An elevated platform in front of the now-defunct driver's room became a place for discussion. The driver from the first day announced that he had seen the red and black wall of a cargo ship that morning, far in the distance. There would be others. Attempts should be made to signal SOS.

"Who in their right mind would pick us up?" asked another man.

The crowd was quick to hiss at his pessimism.

"We shall all maintain the attitude that it will happen," continued the driver. "It must happen."

The boy watched as many people around him nodded in eager agreement. One part of him sympathized with the man who had spoken up to voice his doubt. He appreciated the logical appeal. It seemed both strategic and brave to arm oneself with a realistic and sober point of view. But the other part of him saw clearly how there was no worthwhile option other than to be hopeful. He thought of his mother, guided religiously by superstition, always imagining only the best of outcomes. By the adjourning of the impromptu meeting, he knew he would try and be like her.

At dinner, she ate like the boy had not see her eat before. With the bundle still snugged against her, she consumed the entire bowl nearly as quickly and he finished the much smaller portion in his hands. As she ate, he noticed the small hunks of gray mixed in with her rice. It was not the same as the fish in his (now an abysmal one or two flecks among the white slurry). He asked her what it was.

"It came from me. It will make me recover quickly, according to tradition," she explained. "It is the placenta."

Now he knew what it was called. The concept seemed very strange to him, but he said nothing.

That night he stayed up long past dark, once again, this time in the company of the young woman. She had told him she preferred he stay by her side. They said little to each other until all souls around them had drifted off to sleep, and the last of the blue light snuffed out of the night sky. They whispered so that no one would wake.

"Why did you call me your brother?" he asked.

"So that the women would let you stay."

"Why did you want me to stay?"

"Because I feel safer when you're next to me."

Her answer placated him. Words like that left him with nothing more to ask.

The moon was gone. The stars were left to illuminate the night sky all by themselves, and they shone as millions of brilliant points of light. A broad, vertical streak of purple shot up through them. Around them fell a curtain of utter silence; even the water was too still to lap against the wood sides of the boat. The boy looked around at all the vastness and, just for one second, did not feel trapped. A breeze hit his face, and on it he smelled wildflowers.

"I don't know how long to hold him."

The boy thought about it for a long time. "I don't think there is a way to know something like that."

"You're wiser than I was at your age," she said after a moment.

He did not understand why she said it, because the answer he had given her was an empty one--not wise at all. He looked slowly down from her face to the light cotton fibers of the towel, then whispered boldly, "I think he is already gone."

"I know." She straightened her back, hugged the towel to her chest, then said, "I would like to put him in the water now. That is how I want to let him go."

The boy said nothing, only nodded. If there was any proper etiquette for such a situation, he wasn't aware of it and didn't care. "Then you should do it," he urged.

Thankfully, they sat near the back of the boat where the water level was high. All she had to do was stand (which she did with some effort) and lean over the rail. He stood with her and helped secure her at the waist as she bent over, suspending herself above the water, down as far as she could reach, outstretching her thin arms, hands grasping the bundled towel until the bottom of it made contact with the sea. It slipped silently beneath the surface.

The towel unfurled as it became saturated. The fetus floated out of it and away, a black lump in the moonlight no bigger than a rat. There were no discernible features except for a tiny stemlike protrusion from its middle. The boy was not unnerved to see it exposed like that in the calm water.

The breeze exhaled again and the boat began to move away. The towel and the baby drifted separately back until they were out of sight.

"Goodbye, little one," said the boy.

"Goodbye," said the young woman. She stood still with a vague heaviness, propping herself on the rail, hands white and planted, arms stiff and straight. She released a long sigh and slowly sat back down. He sat beside her. For a few seconds, before she realized what she was doing, her arms curled up to shelter a phantom.

;-;

A day and a half passed. The outlook gradually became more grim. They hadn't spotted a single other vessel since the fabled sighting by the driver. With nothing else to do, several men heaved the outboard motor onto the deck and began dismantling it. The boy got close enough to see a gaping, broken-out hole in its iron casing. "I've never seen anything like it before," said one man. "Highly improbable--look the piston is fine. There's no reason it should have happened." The man's wife scowled at him and asked: "What does probability matter when it's already come to pass?"

Some rags were soaked in motor oil and lit aflame. A few men practiced a technique of collecting the black, billowing smoke under a suspended tarp, releasing it in careful bursts in order to signal S.O.S. The boy watched as they concluded, nodding confidently to one another, assuring each other they would be ready when the time came.

The past two meals he had eaten contained no fish--only a thin soup of waterlogged rice. He longed for another miracle sardine, even scouring the water at night until doing so became torture and he forced himself to believe it never happened.

The young woman's path to recovery was fraught. She continued to bleed until the boy worried she would run out. He tended to her every fluctuation in mood, carefully tuning his senses to her changing states of wellness. He walked a self-conscious line between doting to the point of irritation, and backing off--though doing so made him fear missing some crucial sign of her deteriorating condition.

She was not subject to the food rations imposed on all the others, but she imposed them on herself. She did not want to take more than her fair share. The nurse told her to eat more, otherwise she would die. She did so with great reluctance. On the sixth night, she became very ill, and the boy whispered to himself a soothing reassurance just in case, by dawn, she was gone. But the next morning she was still alive, pale but reporting that her symptoms had eased. To the boy, she still looked very unwell, but he still smiled encouragingly.

It was now the seventh day. The hot weather had gradually, mercifully given way to cooler temperatures. At nights, he shivered, but he was glad to. A constant breeze bore them in God knows which direction. Three teenaged boy teetered on the rail, high up on the bow, and just as one of the mothers scolded them and yelled for them to get down, one of them shouted that he saw another boat.

People who had long acted cavalier, as though they were not waiting in desperation for such a sighting, quickly abandoned their pretenses and also their manners, rudely pressing through the crowd to get a better view from the edge of the boat. The boy had not suspected such pent up expectation until he witnessed its release.

"He's right!" shouted a stout man in a faded blue t-shirt. "It's not far."

Many pointed in the direction of the small boat as if helping others to spot it. In fact, it was impossible to miss the black, draped outlines making up its distant form.

The oil soaked rags were fetched and the signal was prepared, but it was not needed. To the entire boat's delight and near-disbelief, the mysterious black boat made a roaring sound as it motored toward them. It must not have occurred to anyone to be fearful. Perhaps there was no sense in fearing the only thing that might save them.

As the boat drew near, the faces of the several men aboard it sprang into focus. Fuel to the motor was cut and the boat became silent as their own as it came up in a rush of water only ten feet away. The boy felt their boat begin rocking in all the wake.

The water settled and strange voices began to rise above it. "Thai!" shouted the man in the blue shirt. "They're Thai."

Many uncertain glances were exchanged at this point. They had all heard the news stories, directly or indirectly.

"What's the matter with this boat?" asked one of the men near the bow. Apparently he knew they were Vietnamese and he spoke the language well. His lanky frame rose and fell as the two boats rocked out of sync with one another.

"The motor is shot," replied the driver from the second day. "Hole through the block. There's no way to fix it without a new casing."

The lanky man paused. His angular features shifted in consideration. "We have an extra motor, perfect for this boat. We will give it to you if you allow some of your women to come with us. They can come back when we are through."

Because of something that had happened in his village a year earlier at the hands of soldiers from the North, the boy knew immediately what was insinuated, and roughly what the men would do to the women.

The man in the blue shirt spun around to face them all, shocked and even scandalized by the proposition. The boy hadn't realized it, but each of the several preceding days, which felt easily transposable to months, carried a certain positive energy. Each person had succeeded so thoroughly in treating the next with dignity, that few could have even imagined the alternative. But now, this new event crashed into what he and surely many others had taken for granted as a safe and supportive time.

The man turned slowly back to face the Thai boat. He shook his head. "No," he said. "We do not agree to those terms."

Naively, for a few seconds, the boy believed these words would arrest the exchange.

The men on the Thai boat stood eerily still and silent.

"Please," the man in the blue shirt implored, "consider giving us the engine in good faith. We cannot accept the trade you have proposed."

Maybe the shaking doubt in the man's voice foretold what was about to happen, but the boy, shrewd for his age about such matters, realized the Thai men would take what they wanted regardless. He even suspected there had been no spare engine in the first place.

Seconds later, several of the men on the Thai boat took out large guns. The loud engine started and the boat charged forward, crashing against their own, causing it to shudder and rock violently, knocking several people from their feet. Everyone backed away from the guns, toward the far side of the boat. In all their fear and shock, they took care not to trample those who had fallen.

With no defenses, they stood frozen as the Thai men stitched the two vessels together with rope. And then, guns pointed chaotically by some, machetes at the waists of the rest, the men began to board their boat.

The boy thought of no one else except for the young woman. He was incapable of broader reasoning. He threw himself over her and did not move. The men were shouting amongst themselves, voices clanging unintelligibly like metal against metal. He hoped that by some miracle she would be overlooked. But soon the moment arrived. One of the voices became suddenly clear as it switched to his own language, heavily accented: "Move." He didn't.

He knew what was to come before it happened, because he recognized the sound of a blade unsheathing. It fell hard against his back, half bludgeoning, half slicing. But it fell only once. Before feeling any pain, he twisted around to see the man gripping the machete, face stricken, held back by his cohorts. All the terror and lunacy of the moment did not obscure the staggering impossibility of the sight. She would be spared.

;-;