Terrors (31 page)

When the
Regensburg
had launched its depth charges against the submarine where Shanahan was serving,
Shanahan was at his post, checking the condition of the torpedoes assigned to his care. He’d just shared chow with his best buddy, Albert le Fleur, known to one and all aboard the
Cichlid
as Frenchy. He came by the appellation honestly. He hailed from a tiny town on the American side of the line that separated Vermont from Quebec. He spoke English with a French accent and he could cook like a
French chef.

Frenchy and Splash hit it off from the outset. They used to head out on shore leave together and hit the bars and pick-up joints of Providence and Boston. When their tab came due they’d throw fingers, calling evens or odds, loser paid. Splash figured that Frenchy had some kind of system. He could never figure it out, but Frenchy won almost every time, and Splash paid for their drinks.
Somehow Frenchy managed to lose just often enough to keep Splash interested. Someday, Splash vowed, he’d figure out Frenchy’s system, and when he did he’d balance their accounts.

Frenchy was also rumored to be the brother of an amazingly beautiful woman. Splash Shanahan had actually seen her photograph once. He and Frenchy le Fleur were on shore leave and le Fleur had opened his wallet to pay
for a round, one of the very few that Frenchy ever bought. But Frenchy had made it clear that he didn’t welcome questions about his family. Still, even that single glimpse had made an impression on Shanahan that he would never forget. The smooth features, the glistening black hair and the deep shining eyes of Frenchy’s
sister would haunt his dreams for years to come.

On the day that the
Regensburg
killed the
Cichlid
, Shanahan heard the depth charges exploding in the cold Atlantic waters and felt the sub shudder. He and Frenchy were working together in the torpedo room. There was a frightening
whoomp
. Then with a terrifying roar the sub’s hull split. Shanahan felt the deck tilt beneath his feet. The electric lights flickered and dimmed. He had to think fast. He knew that the
Cichlid
was
doomed.

The torpedoes were Shanahan’s babies, they were his fish. Nobody else was supposed to interfere with them, but Shanahan found time every day, between his other duties, to check on them, side by side with his pal Frenchy, checking out the controls that would fire the fish when the helm ordered them launched.

That day the depth charges sent their shock waves thudding against the
Cichlid’s
iron hull. The iron cracked. Shanahan and le Fleur exchanged a single, intense look. The only word spoken was Frenchy’s, “Odds.” Then their fingers shot out. As usual, le Fleur won.

He reached past Shanahan and yanked open the iron door that sealed off Torpedo Tube Number One. Silently he pointed. Shanahan knew in an instant what le Fleur had in mind, knew that the thrown fingers had decided
which of them would live and which would die.

Obediently he climbed into the tube, heard the iron door clang shut behind him leaving him in silence and darkness. Then with a rush he was immersed in icy brine, disoriented and screaming. He twisted in the darkness and caught sight of the
Cichlid
beneath him, folding gracefully in half. Some of her lights still glowed but as he watched they winked
out and then the sub was gone.

With the sub went every officer and man of her crew, including Shanahan’s best friend.

He was in shock now, he knew that but he didn’t know what he could do about it. He decided he was going to die. There was nothing he could do so he might as well relax and see what dying felt like.

The next thing he knew he was staring at the sky.

The captain of the
Regensburg
was a gentleman of the old school. The rules of war dictated that he pick up any survivors of the ship he had sent to the bottom, and he ordered a boat lowered and the sole survivor of the
Cichlid
brought on board his cruiser. Yes, he was a gentleman of the old school, or maybe he thought Shanahan had information that would prove useful to the Kaiser’s Imperial Navy. If
that was his notion, he
was in for a disappointment. First on board the
Regensburg
and then back on land, Shanahan was interrogated for weeks, then thrown into a camp with other prisoners of war to wait for the Armistice that was, by now, not long in coming.

Every night in the German prison camp he relived the death of the
Cichlid
. He relived his youth as a marine mechanic working in a commercial shipyard in Providence,
Rhode Island. He relived his boot camp training in the Navy, his friendship with Frenchy le Fleur, the hell-raising adventures they shared when they got shore leave and their comradeship aboard the
Cichlid
.

He remembered the last meal he had shared with Frenchy, the terror that he had felt when he realized the
Cichlid
was under attack, and the moments when he was so near to death that he didn’t
know if he was in this world or the next. But mostly he thought of his comrades, the fifty-five officers and men who had gone down with the
Cichlid
, leaving him, Splash Shanahan, the sole survivor of the submarine’s sinking.

The result was funny, he thought as he set foot in the saloon on the island of Efaté. He had come home from the German prisoner-of-war camp with a fear and revulsion against
water. He couldn’t drink it. He hated to wash in it. For a while he tried dry shaving but eventually he gave that up and just let his beard grow in.

He found it hard to get a job and harder to keep one. He spent more and more of his time in saloons, moving from city to city, from respectable lodgings to flop houses to the sidewalk to the hobo jungles that grew up around freight yards and railroad
depots. By the time Prohibition came in he was a drunk, and the arrival of the anti-booze laws did nothing to keep him from getting what he wanted whenever he wanted it—and whenever he could afford it.

By the time he was twenty-five years old he looked like a man of sixty. His face was lined, his hair and beard were gray, his hands shook. He lived by begging, stealing, and lying. He ate at soup-kitchens
and missions, lived in hobo jungles. Even by the lax standards of the homeless and the hopeless, he was by now a shunned figure.

How he got to San Francisco he didn’t know, but he found himself one day wandering the city’s fishing piers, begging for a half-eaten sandwich or a half-consumed drink. He heard the sound of voices quarreling and the clank of tools. He stopped and peered, bleary-eyed,
at a pair of men in watch-caps and sweaters working over an ancient
one-lunger in the stern of a commercial fisherman.

The sun cast his shadow over the men and one of them looked up, anger marking his seething eyes and his unshaven jaw. “What the hell you want, creep?”

“Me?” Shanahan mumbled.

“Yeah, you, who d’ya think I’m talking to, Calvin Coolidge?”

Shanahan mumbled something.

“Speak up,
creep. Say your piece and beat it, we got work to do here.”

“You’ve got a cracked ring gasket,” Shanahan repeated.

“Oh, for cripes sake, just get out of here before I wallop you one.”

The man turned back to the one-lunger but his partner, an older man, straightened up and looked Shanahan in the eye. Maybe he saw something there. He turned back and studied the cranky engine. “He’s right,” the
older man said.

“What’s that? Come on, Pops, you gonna take the word of some wobbly lush? What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing, Charlie. Take a look.” He was holding a long-handled wrench. He used it as a pointer. “See that? I wouldn’t have spotted it in a million years but he’s right, we’ve got a cracked ring gasket.”

Charlie spat an oath. “Wouldn’t ya just know it! It’s gonna take two days
to get that thing off and a new one set up. It’s all the lush’s fault, that’s what I say.”

“No it isn’t,” Pops insisted. “This guy just spotted it. He must really know engines. Hey, fella, what’s your name?”

Shanahan told him.

“You’re really something, Shanahan. You ever work on marine engines?”

Shanahan hesitated, then muttered an affirmative.

Charlie was still growling angrily about two
days’ work.

“I can fix that thing in an hour. Half an hour to get the old one off, half an hour to get the new one on, if you’ve got a new ring gasket.” Shanahan found himself getting interested in something for the first time in months, maybe years.

“Not a chance,” Charlie growled.

“A double sawbuck if you can do what you say,” Pops offered.

“And no pay if you go over an hour. I can get a
new ring gasket here in fifteen minutes, don’t worry about that, Shanahan.”

The deal was struck. Charlie went off to get a new ring gasket. Pops stood by to supervise. Shanahan had the broken part off by the time
Charlie got back with the new one, and he had the job done not in an hour but in thirty minutes flat.

Pops paid off with a greasy, crumpled gold certificate. Before he handed Shanahan
the bill he asked, “How would you like a job, fella? There’s always work here for a man who’s good with his hands.”

That was the beginning of Splash Shanahan’s rebirth. He still couldn’t bring himself to drink plain water, but he drank coffee by the gallon, and he forced himself to wash. He shaved off his beard and paid for a haircut out of his first week’s pay working for Pops and Charlie.

In the beginning his muscles ached and his body cried out for the booze it was deprived of. By the end the first week he didn’t know if he was going to make it. By the end of the second week he thought that maybe he could, and by the end of a month he realized that he was a man again. His demons were not gone, they would never be gone, but Shanahan was a man once more and he knew that he would be
able to live with them.

He worked seven days a week. His muscles hardened. The skin on his hands and his face tightened and toughened. He saved his pay. Soon he was pulling his weight as a commercial fisherman, bringing in nets of salmon and mahi mahi, even diving for abalone.

At the end of a year he told Pops that he was quitting.

“What’s the matter, son? You’re not trying to hold me up for
more money, are you? You don’t like the atmosphere in San Francisco?”

It wasn’t either of those things. Shanahan had a hard time explaining why he had to move on, he just knew that he did. He was grateful to Pops for giving him a chance to regain his manhood and his self-respect. He’d even formed a kind of grudging friendship with Charlie. It was nothing like the bond he had felt with Frenchy
le Fleur, but it was pretty good.

But now Shanahan had to face the ocean, the ocean that had swallowed his fifty five mates on the
Cichlid
, including his best friend, Frenchy. The ocean had become personified to him, and he would have to face it down, one on one. To make friends with the Pacific as once he and the Atlantic had been friends before the Great War, if he could. And if he couldn’t,
then he would make the Pacific his enemy, and defeat that enemy or die trying.

How could he explain all of that to Pops? There was no way. He simply collected his pay and his gear, shook hands with Pops and with Charlie, and walked away.

That was when he bought himself the
Goby
, restored and repainted the boat and started learning to run a one-man sloop and to navigate deep water.

But those
last minutes aboard
Cichlid
were never far away. The memories never ceased to hover around Shanahan’s mind, ready to pounce and take him in their skeletal fingers and squeeze until he realized that he was holding his breath, holding onto the last bit of air in his lungs before icy sea water invaded his body and ended his life.

The sun woke Shanahan and he sat up, listening to the surf as it advanced
and retreated across the sand. He’d had a dream, or maybe he’d been visited by Frenchy le Fleur’s ghost. How could he know?

He’d visited Efaté before, starting with Port Vila. That was the island’s chief city. It had streets and stores. It was the seat of the local governing authority, such as it was—a commissioner sent from England and replaced every few years. The storekeepers in Port Vila
took pounds, marks, pesos, francs, lire, drachmas, rupees, yen, dollars. They didn’t care. Money was money, and they would gladly exchange their merchandise for whatever kind of money the customer had to offer. Always, of course, at a discount because the customer always had the wrong kind of money.

There was a pier at Port Vila’s waterfront, and buildings that passed for warehouses where trade
goods were stowed, coming and going.

Shanahan had climbed Mount Paponakas, had traveled the Teouma River, had swum in Emaotfer Lake. The colors, the shapes, the beauties of the islands were endless. If Pops and Charlie in San Francisco had given him back his manhood, the
Goby
and the islands and the Ni Vanuatu had given him back his soul.

By late afternoon he was back at Sivin. The tide was
in and he was able to wade out to the
Goby
for a lantern and supplies. He wore his usual costume of striped shirt and faded jeans, a flensing knife in a leather scabbard hung from his belt. The blade and his fists were the only weapons he carried and the only ones he needed. He stood on the poop looking out to sea. He thought he caught a flash of white but when he looked again it had disappeared.
He waded back to shore and headed up the beach.

It took him another hour or so to reach Valeva Cave. His heavy burden slowed him down. The kerosene lantern was light enough, and a box of matches sealed in wax against the moisture of the sea weighed next to nothing. But the iron tank, shaped eerily like one of the torpedoes that
had proved useless to the sailors aboard
Cichlid
, challenged even
Splash Shanahan’s bulging muscles.

That was the part of Russell’s story that he had held back from Rip van Roosevelt but the trader had either guessed it or learned of it from some other source. Russell claimed that the Red Robe Men had left a treasure behind when they sailed away to the west in their floating cities.