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that could tell directions in an unremarkable sea, and the moon, the moon was the sun when you looked at the sun through dark smoked glass, like the dark smoked glass of John and Lonny’s ship’s wheelhouse, and that is where I was.
    I heard them call you Fishboy around the dock
, said the man turned inside out.
My name is Watt. I sometimes steer the ship but don’t call me Captain
.
    I shook my head no, I wouldn’t.
    You should stay up here in the wheelhouse until we pick up John this evening
, said Mr. Watt.
We can then find something for you to do
.
    I nodded my head yes.
    Something small fluttered through the air over us and left oily marks on the inside of the smoked glass as it struck and burst against it.
    Shoo out that sparrow before we get too far from shore
, said Mr. Watt.
    It was my first job aboard a ship. It was my first job being back alive.
    I chased that bird around the wheelhouse under Mr. Watt’s pedestaled captain’s chair. I chased the bird across the electric boxes and through the tangle of wires that came out behind them. I chased that bird across theempty chart tubes to a dog-door hatch that led to the rest of the ship. The bird went out and I followed.
    I followed the sparrow down a passageway past a stateroom strong with the smell of large animal skins—elk, deer, and horse.
    Beyond the stateroom was a sealed hatch hot to the touch. I swung it open to a hot roar, and two steps led down to a floor of cumulus cloudbanks ripping with thunder and lightning. The tapered top of a ladder rose up from the middle of this place I figured to be the way down to the engine room.
    I sealed the hatch and went down the passage shooing the sparrow along into the galley. I found the galley just as the crew had recently left it sacking for food. Broken cupboard doors opened and clapped shut. Condiment bottles rolled across the floor as the ship dipped and eased along. A crock of rancid butter and a jar of syrup were stuck to the table, the spoons the sailors had used to eat from them cemented wherever they had been tossed. The crude sink was more spittoon than wash-place, and a tub of something rolled around with the fingerprints of each man who tasted of it for something edible other than what it actually was, lard. A large tin of spent grease had another record of its own, samples of several flying insect species collected from several portsof call along several coasts. Beside this the brown-and-black sparrow pecked at a bag of spilled rice.
    I scooped up the sparrow and went to the aft cabin door which opened onto the deck. I opened the door and the air was bright and fresh, the sun strong on my face. I tossed the bird skyward but it fluttered back in fear and now beat around my face like a horsefly would. It finally lit on my head and nested itself in my hair.
    Out on deck Lonny was running lifting lines down into the lazaret, the cargo storage in the stern, to bring up mounds and mountains of nets. Ira Dench and the weeping man who said
Fuck
were mending and weaving together the odd-fitting nets they had stolen at the fishhouse. I had never seen such mending and weaving, the way they used their teeth to hold and cut the twines, spreading the meshes between their knees and elbows. Near them on the main hatch sat the Idiot, safely out of the way, playing with a clutch of fetishes, his right foot stuck in a pot of red paint.
    In the crease of the port rail the two men in prison blues were scattering tools from a toolbox, working at the shackles that held them together at the wrists. It was an exasperating huddle of cursing, dulling files, and breaking saws. As they did their work, they cut their eyes around them and muttered, secreting sharp punchesand shanks of broken blades into their institutional boots.
    In the stern quarter the sheriff’s corpse sat tilted on a nail keg. The way his head leaned over the rail it appeared he was blissfully considering our wake.
    Fishboy!
    Slimy strong fingers pinched my