Ship Breaker (Ship Breaker #1)(11)

Then again, without the storm, he wouldn’t have been back in the hole twice on the same day.

Nailer drank again, enjoying the view of the beach. In the night, you couldn’t even see the oil slicks on the water. Just the liquid silver reflections of the moon. Far out on the distant water, a few red and green lights glowed like fairy fire—the running lights of clipper ships crossing the Gulf.

The sailing ships slid silently across the horizon, blown so fast that their lights disappeared over the curve of the earth within minutes. He tried to imagine standing on the deck of one of those ships, leaving the beach and light crew behind. Sailing free and fast.

Pima took the booze bottle from him. “Daydreaming?”

“Nightdreaming.” Nailer nodded out at the colored lights. “You ever sail on one?”

“A clipper?” Pima shook her head. “No way. Saw one dock once; they had a whole bunch of half-men for guards. Wouldn’t let beach trash paddle close.” She grimaced. “The dog-faces put electricity in the water.”

Tick-tock laughed. “I remember that. I tried to swim out and started tingling all over.”

Pima scowled. “And then we had to drag you back like a dead fish. Almost got us all zapped.”

“I would have been fine.”

Moon Girl snorted. “The dog-faces would have eaten you alive. That’s how they do. Don’t even cook their meat. Those monsters always tear in raw. If we left you out there, they’d have been using your ribs for toothpicks.”

“Grind that. There’s a half-man who muscles for Lucky Strike… what’s its name?” Tick-tock halted briefly, stymied. “Anyway, I’ve seen it. It’s got big damn teeth, but it don’t eat people.”

“How would you know? The ones it eats aren’t around to bitch anymore.”

“Goats,” Pima said suddenly. “The half-man eats goats. When he first showed up on the beach, they paid him goats to work heavy crew. My mom told me he could eat a whole goat in three days.” She made a face. “Moon Girl’s right. You don’t want to tangle with those monsters. You never know when their animal side will try to take your arm off.”

Nailer was still watching the lights moving out in the deeps. “You ever wonder what it would be like to ride a clipper? Get out on one of those things?”

“I don’t know.” Pima shook her head. “Fast, I guess.”

“Damn fast,” Moon Girl supplied.

“Red-rip fast,” Pearly said.

They were all looking out at the water now. Hungry.

“You think they even know we’re here?” Moon Girl asked.

Pima spat in the sand. “We’re just flies on garbage to people like that.”

The lights kept moving. Nailer tried to imagine what it would be like to stand on deck, hurtling across the waves, blasting through spray. He’d spent evenings staring at images of clippers under sail, pictures that he had stolen from magazines that Bapi kept in a drawer in his supervisor’s shack, but that was as close as he’d ever gotten. He had spent hours poring over those sleek predatory lines, studying the sails and hydrofoils, the smooth engineered surfaces so different from the rusting wrecks he worked every day. Staring at the beautiful people who smiled and drank on the decks.

The ships whispered promises of speed and salt air and open horizons. Sometimes Nailer wished he could simply step through the pages and escape onto the prow of a clipper. Sailing away in his imagination from the daily mangle of ship-breaking life. Other times, he tore the pictures up and threw them away, hating that they made him hungry for things he hadn’t known he’d wanted until he’d seen the sails.

The wind shifted. A black cloud of smelting smoke blew over the beach, enveloping them in haze and ash.

Everyone started coughing and choking, trying to get some clean air. The wind shifted again, but Nailer kept coughing. His time in the oil room had hurt him. His chest and lungs still felt tender and the taste of oil lingered in his mouth.

By the time Nailer looked up from his coughing, the clipper ships were gone. More smelting smoke blew across their campfire.

Nailer smiled bitterly in the acrid wind. That was what thinking about clipper ships got you. A lungful of smoke because you weren’t paying attention to what was around. He took another swig from his bottle and passed it to Pearly.

“Thanks for the luck gift,” he said. “I never knew Black Ling was so damn fine.”

Moon Girl smiled. “Damn fine drink, for a damn lucky bastard.”

“He’s lucky, all right,” Pima said. “Luckiest bastard I ever saw.”

She inspected the other luck offerings that had accumulated over the night. Another stick of pigeon that Nailer offered around to the group, a pack of hand-rolled cigarettes, a bottle of cheap liquor from Jim Thompson’s still, a thick silver earring, wide bored. A sea-polished shell. A half-kilo sack of rice.

“Luckier than Lucky Strike?” Nailer teased.

“Not after you lost all that oil,” Moon Girl said. “If you were Lucky Strike, you’d have figured out how to sneak it out, instead of wasting it. Be a big rich man now, owning the beach.”

The others grunted agreement, but Pima had gone still, her black skin a shadow. “No one’s that lucky,” she said bitterly. “Everyone daydreaming about being the next Lucky Strike is what made Sloth go bad.”