Supernatural: Bobby Singer's Guide to Hunting (9 page)

Nishigo Maru

NISHIGO MARU
’S FIRST MATE WAS A GUY
by the name of Yoshiro. I tracked him down at a local dive bar where he was celebrating the freighter’s impending launch by getting fall-down drunk. Didn’t take much to convince him that I’d be an asset to the crew, especially when he couldn’t pay his bar tab and I offered to cover him. I was to report to the ship the next morning to meet with the skipper, who Yoshiro assured me was a very reasonable and understanding man. Without anyplace better to go, I decided to make sure Yoshiro got back to the ship safely so I could meet with the skipper that same night. I was glad I did, since the ship was preparing to leave dock when we arrived. They had been warned by the weather service that a large storm was due near the San Francisco harbor the next day, and their captain wanted to avoid it if at all possible. Yoshiro was the last crew member to return, having missed his curfew by several hours.

For bringing the slobbering drunk back to the ship, I’d already ingratiated myself with the skipper, but he didn’t have need for any extra hands in the engine room. He was sympathetic to my desire to find work, but couldn’t afford to take on any more crew. Yoshiro’s drunken promise wouldn’t be honored. Since I wasn’t in great spirits to begin with, that was quite a blow. I stood in the skipper’s office, staring at his vast collection of books and charts. I wondered what it must be like to have read that many books, to know so much about the world. Looking back, the captain’s library pales in comparison to the one I’ve got, but at the time it was real impressive.

I left the captain’s office with no plan. At some point, I was going to have to get a job. Probably as a mechanic at an auto shop, and since I was running out of money, it’d have to be close by. The thought almost killed me. I couldn’t imagine showing up for a nine-to-five job and not having Karen to come home to at the end of the day. Getting out of the country was the only thing that felt right. Once the seed was planted, it was all I could think about—I had to go someplace where nothing would remind me of her. I turned on my heel and barged right back into the skipper’s office, laid out my case. Told him that I’d lost everything I’d ever loved, that I was a broken man, the whole sob story. They still didn’t have a job for me, he said. I told him I’d buy a seat on the boat if I had to, but like I said, I was almost out of money. I only had my car to trade, but that was enough. Luckily, the skipper was a fan of Chevelles. I handed over the keys and told him where I parked it in the port lot. When
Nishigo Maru
returned from Japan, he’d pick up his new ride. And if I found myself bored, I was welcome to help out in the engine room—but they weren’t going to pay me a single yen for my services. That was fine by me; as long as I could eat at the crew mess, I didn’t need money.

We left port within the hour, but I didn’t feel any relief. From the aft deck, I watched the lights of San Francisco disappear over the darkened horizon, and everything was the same. My wife was still dead.

The next morning, I partook in an absolutely disgusting Japanese breakfast of broiled fish and dried seaweed. Honestly, if I’m gonna eat seaweed, I’d almost prefer it to still be dripping wet. At least the salt water would mask the flavor a bit. After gagging down the food, I took a self-guided tour of the ship and came away impressed. She was a cargo container freighter—there must have been hundreds of containers aboard, most of them now empty after dropping their shipment of televisions, game systems, and compact cars in San Fran. They’d reload in Japan and be back in a month.

The crew lived the lives of ancient nomads, going from East to West and bringing the treasures of each across the sea. That’s the polite version of the story. The truth is that they may as well have been a band of pirates. Dean Winchester could have taught that lot some manners, and that’s saying something. The officers were all right, but the crew had been out at sea too long, and it had turned them into crude, hormonal animals. Any time more than two of them gathered, it was like a seventh-grade boys’ locker room. I couldn’t imagine how they must have acted when they were at port in Japan, where they knew the language—their English was shoddy enough that I didn’t see them getting far with American women, though not for lack of trying, and hey, some women value persistence over manners.

My second night on board
Nishigo Maru
, we ended up smack dab in the middle of the storm that we had left early to avoid. I didn’t think I got motion sickness, but just try and hold in your dried seaweed after getting rocked around by thirty-foot swells. While trying to keep from hurling, I noticed that my duffel had fallen off the shelf, spilling out its contents. A few shirts, some boxers, and a small leather pouch that I’d never seen before. I picked it up and noticed markings on its side—a pentagram and some gibberish in a foreign language that I couldn’t understand. All I knew for sure was that it wasn’t Japanese, which meant it wasn’t from
Nishigo Maru
. It must have ended up in my bag before I got on the ship, but when?

I opened the pouch and found several small bones and a collection of herbs inside. Even as a layman, I knew that it reeked of witchcraft, and that meant one thing—Rufus had put it there. He must have found my bag after I packed it and added the hex bag. Not knowing anything about the purpose of the bag, I assumed it must have been used for keeping tabs on someone, locating them or even eavesdropping on them. After what I’d seen in the last few weeks, anything was possible.

Without another thought, I searched my duffel and found a silver dagger and a book of spells, neither of which I had packed. The fact that I didn’t find them in my bag until over a week after I had left Sioux Falls should tell you how often I was changing my clothes—it was a dark and smelly time for me, I ain’t proud of it.

I took the hex bag, spell book, and dagger to the top deck, where huge waves were crashing over the cargo containers. Yoshiro and a few of the deck hands were lashing lifeboats to the deck, just in case the ship took on water and we had to abandon it. Hundreds of miles from shore, that idea didn’t warm my heart, but I had a mission to accomplish. I got as close to the ship’s edge as I could without getting swept overboard and threw the magical bullshit into the water.

It felt like there should have been more fanfare to the moment, a trumpet blasting or a burst of light as it hit the water . . . a big splash, at the very least, but there wasn’t any of that. The stuff just disappeared into the waves, never to be seen by man again. A small amount of the weight on my shoulders lifted, but the majority remained. Yoshiro and the deck hands looked at me like I was crazy, then went back to their work.

Below deck, I tried to get some sleep, but it was impossible. I couldn’t even stay on my bunk with the rolling of the ship in the waves. Instead, I sat, played cards with a deck the room’s previous occupant had left behind, and thought about how different my life was now than a week and a half ago. Then I barfed from seasickness. Life ain’t pretty.

In the morning, I dreaded going to the mess. More broiled fish and seaweed. As I shoveled a helping onto my plate, the chef appeared from the galley, smiled at me. She was a lady of about 65, which explained why I hadn’t seen her fraternizing with the rest of the crew (the savages) the day before. She musta been able to read my expression, because she took my plate and dumped the food. Told me that she’d get me something I’d like better—if she had
anything
else back in that galley, it wouldn’t be hard for me to like it more than seaweed.

When she came back, the plate was heaping with scrambled eggs and bacon. The woman was my savior. She spoke a bit of English, so we got to know each other over breakfast. Her name was Keiko, which had a nice ring to it. She’d been on
Nishigo Maru
a few months, but had been at sea her whole life. Her father was a deep sea fisherman, and often took his children out on his extended fishing trips. She was the sort of gal who could really tell a story, and I listened to her talk for hours. With the breakfast rush over, neither of us really had much to do on the ship until lunch, so we compared life stories. I left out the most recent chapter of mine, since I didn’t want to be thrown overboard for being a raging lunatic.

That conversation felt like the first human thing that’d happened to me since Karen died. When I went down to the engine room afterwards, I musta gone ten minutes without thinking about how godawful life was.

Yoshiro came to my quarters that night, whiskey on his breath. Probably around two A.M. He told me that men were going to come and ask me some questions, and that I needed to tell them the truth. Not having a clue what he was talking about, I smiled politely and closed the hatch in his face.

Ten minutes later, two burly-looking men opened the hatch without knocking, let themselves in. One of them had a holstered pistol, the other was intimidating enough unarmed. They spoke rapidly to each other in Japanese, which I didn’t understand a word of. When they finally turned to me, they narrowed their eyes and spoke like they were talking to a child.

“Where is Tamuro-San?” they barked. Tamuro was the skipper’s name. Apparently, they’d gone to his quarters to report on a typhoon warning ahead, but he wasn’t there. They’d searched the whole ship, there was no sign of him. Everybody on board knew Yoshiro was too big of a drunk to stage a mutiny, so all eyes were on the foreign guy who just came aboard.

My first reaction—maybe I
had
been the cause of his disappearance. Maybe that demon had burrowed back up from hell or wherever it went and followed me here. Not that I could tell my two muscle-y Japanese interrogators that. I pled my innocence every way I knew how, but they didn’t buy it. They didn’t have any proof, either, so for the time being I wasn’t getting locked in the brig.

Early the next morning, I went to the mess hoping to see a friendly face. Keiko already had my plate of eggs ready. She was like my mother, but, you know,
nice
. I told her what had happened the night before, and she was sympathetic. She suggested I watch my back around the rest of the crew, since they were all fiercely loyal to Tamuro-San. If they thought I was the one who offed him, well, I’d have trouble. As I heard other crew members coming down the corridor towards the mess, I made a discreet exit. No sense starting anything over a plate of eggs. I passed a few of the crew in the hall, and they just nodded at me, warily. Not angry, just suspicious.

Yoshiro, on the other hand, would have killed me if he thought he could get away with it. He was sure I’d repaid the skipper’s kindness with violence, and since he was now in command of
Nishigo Maru
, that meant trouble for me. I made a mental note to avoid him, but there’s only so many places to hide on a tin can. The next two weeks were going to be rough.

I felt an obligation to look into Tamuro’s disappearance. If it
was
related to the demon, I needed to do something about it. Rufus had told me the basics about exorcising a demon, but I’d thrown the book he’d given me overboard. Seemed like a stupid move once I needed it. After searching the ship for traces of sulfur and cold spots, I realized how foolish the whole thing was. More than likely, Tamuro just got drunk and fell off the top deck. Working on a ship like that wears on a person, that was plain as day. I woulda predicted that Yoshiro’d be the one to pull that move, but everybody’s got their demons. Well, demons in the metaphorical sense. It’s hard to use that phrase when often you mean it literally. When I didn’t find any evidence of supernatural involvement, I gave up and spent the rest of the day holed up in my bunk. No use stirring the pot by sticking my nose in the engine room.

I met up with Keiko after dinner, heard more stories about her family. It was calming to hear about someone else’s life, especially one that was so different from mine. She knew all of the Japanese folklore about the sea—an extensive topic—and could go on for hours about it. I heard about this mythical sea serpent Ikuchi, which used to harass ships sailing between the Japanese islands. Hadn’t been spotted in years, so of course the prevailing wisdom was that it never existed at all—that it was just a myth the fisherman cooked up to pass the long hours at sea. Since my encounter the week before, I was much more willing to accept the existence of the otherwise unbelievable, and that included sea monsters. Ikuchi could still be out there, keeping a low profile, waiting for the day when it was again safe to come to the surface. Or maybe those fisherman just saw a big whale. Either way, it was a welcome diversion.

Though I mighta been content to listen to her prattle on, Keiko wanted to hear my stories, too. In particular, she wanted to know how a guy like me ended up on a Japanese cargo ship thousands of miles from home. I guess you can take the boy out of South Dakota, but you can’t take the South Dakota out of the boy. I told her as much as I could stomach, that my wife had been killed and that I couldn’t bear to stay in that house any more. I told her how much I loved Karen, how it was hard to imagine myself growing old without her. Funny thing is, “Old” to me then was how old I am now. And now, well . . . hunters don’t get old. We all die young. So I guess that means I’m still young.

I could sense that Keiko was uncomfortable with my story—who wouldn’t be—but I’m grateful she didn’t ask me any hard questions. Some people in her situation would have suspected that I was on the run for less sentimental reasons than what I claimed. Hell, if someone told me the same sob story, I absolutely would assume that they’d killed the wife in question and hopped on the boat to Japan to avoid prosecution. All Keiko wanted to know was whether I thought I’d see Karen again. I told her that I really hoped that I would, but that was all I could say for certain. Little did I know that I’d be seeing Karen again on earth, and that I’d have to go through losing her all over again—that I’d have to
kill
her all over again.