Man Eaters

The mess. Mid rats.

He came in a couple minutes early. He ate fast, at a table that became a hospital bed for the wounded, and then he cleared his tray and dishes and moved into the narrow passage with the pipes running low overhead, ducking his head around them. Up the metal stairs to starboard. A couple of minutes with the sea before the watch.

The deck was nearly empty. In a few minutes the others would join him, shadowed faces moving through the dark.

He stood at the rail to watch the sea under the dark sky. Clouds. Stars. The wake ran out like a long trail behind the ship, two glittering edges. In the morning he would commune with the sea again, and the wake would have a bright spine where the sun shone along it, further and further until the sea stopped being water and became sky.

Forward of him a younger sailor stood the rail, eyes on the water, a phone cord running from his chest into the dark. The boy would relieve him.

Then the watch. Below him the ship hummed, scopes and gauges and green light on men’s faces. Up here there was only his eyes and the water. He watched for the thing that would come out of the trail in the dark that the machines could not catch, and when he saw it he would call it down the wire to a man he could not see. He knew the man would answer. Nothing came for hour after hour. You stood there for a thousand nights so that you would be there on the one night it did. No thanks for the thousand. No one would know about the one.

The wind crossed the swell and laid whitecaps on water. He smelled salt in the air.

Act One. Brasada

The brush did not care that he had left, or that he had come home.

It just was, gray and low and thick, mesquite and blackbrush and cenizo that flowered purple after the rain but was not purple now. The ground under it, white dust that stayed on his boots. Nothing in the country was soft. The catclaw reached out and took his sleeve. He stopped and worked the thorn loose and then went on.

By midmorning the heat had settled in. A caracara sat the fence post and watched him. To the south the river and past the river more of the same.

He had stood the watch a long way from here. He had thought about this ground and what it would mean to come back. Now he was on it, hot and full of hooks, and he was glad to be here.