The North Water(3)

“Tell me what you want,” he says, “and I’ll buy it for you.”

The boy looks back at him speechlessly, like an animal surprised in its lair. The man notices he has no smell to him at all—amidst all this filth he has remained somehow clean, unsullied, as if the natural darkness of his pigment is a protection against sin and not, as some men believe, an expression of it.

“You’re a sight to see,” the man tells him.

The boy asks for rum, and the man takes a greasy half bottle from his pocket and gives it to him. As the boy drinks the rum, his eyes glaze slightly and the fierceness of his reticence declines.

“My name’s Henry Drax,” the man explains, as softly as he is able to. “I’m a harpooner. I ship at dawn on the Volunteer.”

The boy nods without interest, as if this is all information he had heard long before. His hair is musty and dull, but his skin is preternaturally clean. It shines in the tarnished moonlight like a piece of polished teak. The boy is shoeless, and the soles of his feet have become blackened and horny from contact with the pavement. Drax feels the urge to touch him now—on the side of the face perhaps or the peak of the shoulder. It would be a signal, he thinks, a way to begin.

“I saw you before in the tavern,” the boy says. “You had no money then.”

“My situation is altered,” Drax explains.

The boy nods again and drinks more rum. Perhaps he is nearer twelve, Drax thinks, but stunted as they often are. He reaches out and takes the bottle from the boy’s lips.

“You should eat something,” he says. “Come with me.”

They walk together without speaking, up Wincomlee and Sculcoates, past the Whalebone Inn, past the timber yards. They stop in at Fletcher’s bakery and Drax waits while the boy wolfs down a meat pie.

When the boy has finished, he wipes his mouth, scours the phlegm from the back of his throat, and spits it out into the gutter. He looks suddenly older than before.

“I know a place we can go to,” he says, pointing across the road. “Just down there, see, on past the boatyard.”

Drax realizes immediately that this must be a trap. If he goes into the boatyard with the nigger boy he will be beaten bloody and stripped down like a cunt. It is a surprise that the boy has misprized him so thoroughly. He feels, first, contempt for the boy’s ill judgment, and then, more pleasantly, like the swell and shudder of a fresh idea, the beginnings of fury.

“I’m the fucker, me,” he tells him softly. “I’m never the one that’s fucked.”

“I know that,” the boy says. “I understand.”

The other side of the road is in deep shadow. There is a ten-foot wooden gate with peeling green paint, a brick wall, and then an alley floored with rubble. There is no light inside the alley, and the only sound is the crunch of Drax’s boot heels and the boy’s intermittent, tubercular wheezing. The yellow moon is lodged like a bolus in the narrowed throat of the sky. After a minute, they are released into a courtyard half-filled with broken casks and rusted hooping.

“It’s through there,” the boy says. “Not far.”

His face betrays a telling eagerness. If Drax had any doubts before, he has none left now.

“Come to me,” he tells the boy.

The boy frowns and indicates again the way he wants them both to go. Drax wonders how many of the boy’s companions are waiting for them in the boatyard and what weapons they are planning to use against him. Does he really look, he wonders, like the kind of useless prick who can be robbed by children? Is that the impression he presently gives out to the waiting world?

“Come here,” he says again.

The boy shrugs and walks forwards.

“We’ll do it now,” Drax says. “Here and now. I won’t wait.”

The boy stops and shakes his head.

“No,” he says. “The boatyard is better.”

The courtyard’s gloom perfects him, Drax thinks, smooths out his prettiness into a sullen kind of beauty. He looks like a pagan idol standing there, a totem carved from ebony, not like a boy but more like the far-fetched ideal of a boy.

“Just what kind of a cunt do you think I am?” Drax asks.

The boy frowns for a moment, then offers him a beguiling and implausible grin. None of this is new, Drax thinks, it has all been done before, and it will all be done over again in other places and at other times. The body has its tedious patterns, its regularities: the feeding, the cleaning, the emptying of the bowels.

The boy touches him quickly on the elbow and indicates again the way he wants them both to go. The boatyard. The trap. Drax hears a seagull squawking above his head, notices the solid smell of bitumen and oil paint, the sidereal sprawl of the Great Bear. He grabs the nigger boy by the hair and punches him, then punches him again and again—two, three, four times, fast, without hesitation or compunction—until Drax’s knuckles are warm and dark with blood, and the boy is slumped, limp and unconscious. He is thin and bony and weighs no more than a terrier. Drax turns him over and pulls down his britches. There is no pleasure in the act and no relief, a fact which only increases its ferocity. He has been cheated of something living, something nameless but also real.

Lead and pewter clouds obscure the fullish moon; there is the clatter of iron-rimmed cartwheels, the infantile whine of a cat in heat. Drax goes swiftly through the motions: one action following the next, passionless and precise, machinelike, but not mechanical. He grasps on to the world like a dog biting into bone—nothing is obscure to him, nothing is separate from his fierce and sullen appetites. What the nigger boy used to be has now disappeared. He is gone completely, and something else, something wholly different, has appeared instead. This courtyard has become a place of vile magic, of blood-soaked transmutations, and Henry Drax is its wild, unholy engineer.