Category Archives: Strange Jobs

“Our Wish…”

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One of the villains has surrendered in DRC.

Meanwhile…

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Below, in the lower fields that stretch up the long valley that leads to the Mountain of the Moon are the refugee camps. We don’t stop at any of these because we want to see those that have been established at the higher, more precarious encampments, but we know they’re down there, full by the tens of thousands.

One day I sat down with one of the Virunga Park rangers, Paulin Ngobobo, and asked him to explain the situation in Congo’s east to me. “There is a profusion of armed groups here,” he said, “That’s the biggest problem. People thought something was going to work after the war, but the warlords around here were just rewarded with bigger posts in the Army, or they got paid off, and other people started to see that it was a good way to get ahead.” Paulin said the near constant insecurity about the political and military situation resulted in an ever-increasing pool of people who fed off the conflict – poachers, scavengers, hunters, Rwandan war criminals eager to seek revenge on their Tutsi enemies, Tutsi militias eager to finish off the Hutu Interahamwe who were still living in the forests by the thousands, Mai Mai rebels whose grievances dated back to colonial times and whose allegiance was constantly shifting.

Paulin was responsible for the southern end of the Virunga Park, where many of the militias were living, and fighting. “Sometimes we go out and nothing bad happens,” he said, “But there are parts of the park that we’ve totally lost control of. You get five guys with guns in the jungle and one of them declares himself a general and the government comes in and either promotes him or pays him off – that says a lot about the state of affairs we’ve got here.”

Laurent Nkunda was the general responsible for a lot of the conflict. It was complicated, but Nkunda bore a significant share of the blame for the chaos in the Kivus. He was a Tutsi and many people believed, and he had said as much in interviews with the press on various occasions, that his loyalty was to the Tutsi population that spanned the Congolese-Rwandan border, more than to the sovereign governments of either state. Tutsis were still being massacred on the Congolese side, he said, which was true. The Hutu Interahamwe that had fled Rwanda after the genocide had come here, to these hills, and most estimates put their numbers at around 10,000, and they were still out for Tutsi blood.

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Nnkunda had fashioned himself as a sort of uber Tutsi protector, holing himself up in a jungle redoubt in North Kivu, and taking the righteous Tutsi war to anyone and everyone who dared to put his people in danger. Nkunda’s detractors said that his Tutsi soldiers were as responsible as anyone for the proliferation of rapes that were spreading through the little villages along those lush hillsides, that his righteous Tutsi anger meant that any Hutu had become a target, and they pointed to numerous cases of group executions, mass graves and roving bands of Tutsi thugs whose only aim seemed to be to spread mayhem and chaos and destabilize the Congolese government.

Nkunda was a murderous thug and a war criminal. Nkunda was a hero and savior. No one really knew the truth. But no one doubted that the killing was rampant, gruesome, and that ultimately nobody gave a damn. “Nkunda can kill all the innocent civilians he wants and nobody bats an eyelid,” said Emmanuel, one of the supervisors of Virunga’s park ranger program, and the one showing Brent and me around, “But as soon as a gorilla gets killed the whole world rises up in protest.”

Just north of the Kivus is a region called Iturri. This was one of the places Joseph Conrad visited when he came to the Congo during the murderous reign of King Leopold II, when hundreds of thousands of Congolese were being slaughtered to satisfy Leopold’s rapacious need for the rubber that was fueling his empire’s expansion. Again, after the Rwandan genocide, Iturri became a place of horror. Between 2001 and 2003 Tutsi sympathizers swept through plundering and murdering as they went. They had Rwandan government support. One day, Emmanuel tells me that he has a video of a gang of Tutsis who killed a woman and then made her children eat her. “It really is like Kurtz,” Emmanuel says, “Nkunda? Is he a saint? A sinner? This place makes those kinds of people possible.”

In Virunga, every time the militias emerge from the forest the people living in and around the park have to clear out. The regular army, on the heels of the militias, sweeps through and destroys the towns. They rape and pillage. They steal. The Congolese Army isn’t getting paid, or at least it wasn’t when I was there, and so they take what they can from the villagers instead.

One day I sat down with a villager, a woman named Nyira Machuri. She was 50 years old. She started to tell me about the fighting in 1996, right after the Rwandan genocide. “The Tutsi military came and said they wanted to liberate the Congo,” she said, “They brought their goats and killed my husband. After that they killed my son as well.” Ten years later, when the war with Laurent Nkunda was in full swing, Machuri got hit again. “They came again and stole all our vegetables, our goats, everything, and then took off for Mngongo. The military that is based around here don’t have any salaries so they stole all our food, they ate our dogs! It’s difficult.” A week before my visit, she told me, the military came again and killed her father. “The troops came and asked for food. They ate the food. Then they took my father to his room and asked for money. He said he didn’t have any. They beat him. Then they killed him.”

I met with another villager, Zabonimba Mbunyimbuga, 47, who related a similarly gruesome tale. “At night sometimes we think we won’t make it through. A month ago bandits came through here and hacked a guy to death with machetes. It’s mostly the Congolese military that comes through, they ask for money, anything, they take what they want. When there are problems we tell the officials but they don’t do anything. Even now the Interahamwe live close by. Right now they’re not doing anything but when they do, they’ll start killing people all over. The only way for us to have peace is to get these people out of here.”

I asked about the time when the bandits came and killed the guy with machetes. He seemed to have glossed over it. It had happened seventeen days earlier. A group of men came and started drinking some banana liquor called kassiksi.

“We welcomed them in,” Zabonimba told me, “One guy wanted to drink, so they all started. Then he said, ‘We’re eating now, but our wish is to kill the people in this house.’ So people started to run away when they heard that. The whole village panicked and fled, but that was when they killed the guy with machetes.”

Zabonimba said the whole village sleeps in the jungle now, so they can escape if they need to. It was on the edge of the park, an hour’s walk distant. A few nights earlier he had gone back to his village to see how things were. He stayed on the edge of the forest and peered over, but the huts were destroyed or burned, the animals were all gone, the stench of abandon had set in. That night he slept in the bananas and in the morning he returned to the forest.

– DR Congo, 2007

Medicina

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Violence in Mexico City is complicated, with or without headless bodies.

The medics there have their hands full. Back in 2002:

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A week later I called her and asked if she wanted to go out with the Red Cross. Her children were staying with their father. That night was the celebration of the Virgen de Guadalupe. There would be lots of people, lots of problems. The crew had called and asked if I was coming and I said yes. The medics gave her the white jersey with the insignia of the Red Cross and elastic straps to keep it tight around her waist. We sat side by side on one of the gurneys in the dark and she grabbed my hand and put it on her leg.

The streets were choked with pilgrims. Small children carried likenesses of the Virgin and colored candles that they shielded with the palms of their hands, and their mothers carried baskets of tortillas and blocks of goat cheese and bright woolen blankets. They peered into the tinted windows of the ambulance and moved in one long illuminated procession towards the darkening mountains that rimmed the valley.

There were a few calls, drunks and vagrants; a woman passed out in a market and a crowd gathered around to stare; a man feel down dead on a street corner. We went home early and lay in bed, and watched the sun fill my curtains with a green light.

We began to take these trips several times a week, mostly at night. Edgar stole furtive glances at us now and again. She laughed when I sang along to the English pop songs on the ambulance radio, and teased me that I knew all the words.

One night we visited a poor barrio where a crack addict was in the midst of a miscarriage, another to a slum where a drug-addled man who had gone off his medication was threatening his neighbors with a 9-mm pistol. We saw countless old people suffering from one ailment or another. Each night, cars crashed all over the city, wrapping themselves around poles and guardrails, and we hopped out and poked our cameras into the backs of other ambulances or the faces of the survivors.

Once the medics took us to a congested neighborhood where people had spilled into the street like partygoers after word had gotten out that there was a dead body lying behind a garage. A sickening odor of decomposing flesh permeated the air, but it could have just been dead birds. Nobody knew.

One night, as we drove along Reforma, a small blue car tried to pass the ambulance. It had been stuck behind us for the last several minutes, and the agitated driver had begun to get frustrated, but the Captain, perhaps overcome with fatigue or the late hour, hadn’t wanted to let it pass.

“Come on,” he shouted. “Cabron.”

When the car finally did get alongside us, the driver leaned out his window waving a silver pistol in Edgar’s face and let loose with a string of epithets. The Captain sped up and radioed for police help, as we dove out of sight in the back, clutching one another in the darkness and laughing. I realized I was enjoying the feeling of trying to protect her, which I tried to prolong for as long as possible.

Mexico City, 2002

Dead in Alaska — Part 2

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People just keep wanting to drill in Alaska.

So it might not always look like it did back in 1997.
The fishing story continues…

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He had lost track of the hours. They had been here for days, he didn’t remember how long, up and down along the coast. They slept in their clothes, ate when they could. Miner was covered in the rank of halibut. He stank guts, and he hadn’t taken his boots off since they started. There was one small yellow light in the galley that was always on, a single bulb above the flexi-stove that hammocked in its bolts as it cooked. In the fatigue he stared at it for long moments, in a daze until it was time to work again, to feed and bait and cull, until the belly of the boat was full and there was nothing to do but return to port and offer the flesh to somebody with a mind to distinguish color and size, to match them to desire.

Out the galley window he could see Jim, his red hood pulled up over a mat of white hair and his knees bent gracefully against the bulwark, watching the horizon. His hand was hanging down limp by his side, loosely holding a red metal cup. When the boat dipped he reached out lightly, as if to touch his own sense of equilibrium.
Miner abandoned the stove, stepped through the open galley door out onto the deck. Butler was there, smoking a cigarette and watching the flotilla of sea-birds that followed them, hovering over the long-line and the occasional wash of innards that got sucked their way.

“I’d like to shoot them fuckers,” said Butler, gesturing to the birds with his chin.

His clear blue eyes bridled with a cantering beauty. But he shouted at them, waved his arms. He picked up a starfish and hurled it skyward, the loopy arms trundling over themselves like some fast-moving galaxy, but the birds glided effortlessly away, extensions on a careening mobile, and the creature in its dead orange blipped into the green sea and returned to its depths.

The sea was icy and green, fed by a northern coastal stream that brought berg water down from Kodak, galoshing and wild. The rollers glided by in trilobitian majesty. An unbound pulse, a substantive and quiescent thing cascading in shivering arcs across itself.

Miner and Butler moved to the stern where Jim was standing, next to the hydraulic spool and near where the gear line had been coiled. Jim was fiddling with the knots on the two floating pink buoys. He looked up when the boys approached.

“Paul wants to lay another couple sets,” he said.

“Jesus Fuck,” said Butler, taking a final drag and flicking his cigarette in a long arc out towards the birds.

Jim looked up to the cockpit.

“We’ll lay these here now, just up ahead,” he said, indicating some invisible smear of current toward which they were moving, “Then we’ll go pick those two sets we laid this morning.”

“I don’t know where the fuck they are, but they ain’t here,” Butler said.

“They live on the bottom,” Jim said, “They suck the bottom.”

“Scum suckers,” Butler said, “Just like us.”

“Just like you, maybe.”

“Shit.”

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Paul came out onto the rear deck of the top house and looked down at them and then scanned out to sea and lifted his face into the wind and like a dog his eyes lulled. He looked down at Jim.

“Ready?” he shouted.

Jim nodded and Paul turned the boat back around away from shore and soon the engine picked up and they began to make a slow five knot line into the rollers and out to sea. Jim hooked up the two floating pink buoys and tossed them off into the wake. The seagulls scattered from the splash but settled back again when the buoys had passed. Miner looked up and saw the sun was moving up again, shining off the starboard aluminium of the top-house, the streaks of shaved mite glinting vibrantly along its surface.

They were one on each side of the now trolling line, and as it sped out from the hydraulic spool they snapped and baited and hooked lanyards onto it, and stepped quickly back out of the way as the cutfish flicked at them from the rebound. The small lines flung about on the stiff wire until it dragged them under and down. Sometimes the gulls tried to loop in and steal one before it disappeared but the wire was quicker and they retreated upwards in squawking fury. And then it was done, the line exhausted, the lanyards too, and Jim strapped on two more floating pink buoys to mark the other end of the line and tossed them over the side where they began to drift, and soon they were the only two floating things out there. Underneath, along the floor, lay the thousand hooks.

Paul turned the bow once again and this time headed south, back towards the two remaining lines they had set the previous morning.

They wandered around the deck as they waited, waiting for the sea to turn in their favor, for it to unloose something from its skin, its wandering patterns in the currents. The lines were out and they had very little.
Butler paced back and forth between the two sides of the boat, his shoulders squared, and Jim watched him without moving his head.

“Why don’t you sit down?” he asked.

Butler turned his head slowly.

“Why don’t you shut up?”

“Wouldn’t be anything interesting to listen to then.”

“Shit.”

“See?” said Jim.

– Alaska, 1997

La Guerre d’Algerie (or Libya?)

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I see that Algeria isn’t too happy about what’s happening in Libya these days.

Algeria has good reason to be worried about another civil war. The last one was simply awful. I visited in 2001, when it was still in the grip of fear, and no one knew who was still doing the killing.

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Part 1 — In the heart of downtown Oran, not far from the port, and a five-minute car drive from a half dozen or so Internet cafés, is the Military Hotel. It’s an ugly concrete building surrounded by high brick walls and yellowing palm trees. Young military recruits wander in and out, or hang out in the hotel’s cafe drinking soda and watching football on T.V.

One wall of the entrance foyer is a long, dusty mirror. Behind that is a private meeting room where the top brass of Oran’s military police often gather for meals, or to sit and smoke and talk. The room has several large red sofas at one end, and a long wooden dining table at the other. The morning I arrived, the table had been set for eight people. Just after 2:00 p.m., four senior Algerian military intelligence officers came in. After exchanging greetings and small talk, we sat down for lunch. Shabbily dressed waiters in white tunics promptly brought in our food. Several times during lunch, a walkie-talkie would crackle to life under the table, and one of the officers would quietly whisper some instructions in Arabic to his interlocutor before picking up his fork again.

Over lunch, the man whom I would get to know best explained his view. Mohande was a captain in the anti-terrorist section of the Oran police. He had been married for over 20 years and had two children. He was tall and lanky with thinning hair and his cheeks were gaunt and marked. He looked tired, and at the same time very energetically nervous. He looked as if he enjoyed hunting terrorists.

“We have mostly won the war,” he explained, “But there are still terrorists. These people are animals. They kill babies and slit their throats. They kill women. There is no way to negotiate with them. We try, of course, but you can’t negotiate. The only thing they want is violence. They don’t understand Islam. They don’t understand anything.”

Every day I saw him, he wore a short-sleeved polo shirt with a pack of Gitane cigarettes in his breast pocket, and a pair of amber-colored sunglasses. He spoke French with a thick flowing Arabic accent, rolling his R’s with a long trill.

One night, Mohande rushed into my room at half past ten p.m., and told me I had to be ready to leave in five minutes. He only explained more once we had bundled into a bulletproof jeep and were on the road. The G.I.S were on nighttime patrol nearby, he said. The government created the G.I.S, which stood for Special Intervention Group, in 1998 specifically for counter-terrorism missions. It is Algeria’s most elite special forces unit. They operate at night in two teams, one from dusk to midnight and another until dawn, then sleep during the day. They had a simple goal, I was told – to find terrorists and kill them.

“They deliberately go into places where we think the terrorists are hiding,” one official told me, “Their job is to be bait.”

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After half an hour or so, we pulled over to the side of the highway where two cars full of G.I.S troopers were waiting for us. Normally, the men wear black masks with holes for their eyes, nose and mouth. So I was surprised when one walked straight up to me and said hello. He was young, perhaps no more than 23 or so, with a babyish clean-cut face and bright black eyes. His black hair was cut in a tidy trim. He wore black military pants and a bulletproof vest stuffed with ammunition for his AK-47. When I asked him what his name was, he told me I could call him anything I wanted. I chose Khaled, and he said that would be fine. When Khaled found out that I was an American, he thumped his vest proudly and told me his accoutrements were from the United States. He also said he had visited Washington D.C., as part of a training program with the Americans. He was about to tell me more when his commander rushed over and roughly pulled him aside. He dragged him away by his arm, scowling at me.

The military calls areas where it is unable to guarantee security “Infected Zones.”

One day, a group of military policemen took us to a compound on the outskirts of Oran to meet with some of the former Algerian Mujahideen who, because they participated in the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, are known simply as “Les Afghans.” The road leading to the compound wound gently alongside the Bay of Oran for ten minutes until we hit a round-point and headed up a hill. An armed sentinel waved us into a sprawling parking lot in the shadow of a tall white building. A quarter of an hour later, we were sitting in a top-floor suite with a view of the Mediterranean. The curtains had been drawn away from the bay windows, and the afternoon sun flooded the room in an amber glow. Four tattered and stained sofas formed a semi-circle in the middle of the room, and facing us were three wooden chairs. Plates of sugar cookies, several teacups and five bottles of Pepsi and 7-Up were arranged in a neat geometrical pattern on a Formica table. In some other place, or some other time, a room like this would have been ideal for business conferences or lazy afternoon brunches. Instead, it felt like something in between an interrogation cell and an open-air sentencing chamber.

Our military intelligence escort – I’ll call him Abdullah — motioned for us to sit. Abdullah was a large, dark-complexioned man with a thick black mustache and kind, weary eyes. He chain-smoked Marlboro Reds, exhaling as he spoke which turned his voice into a choked tremor. He explained that under the Civil Concorde law, the men we would be seeing were not criminals anymore. They had renounced their pasts, and whether or not they had once waged holy jihad against the state, and the civilian population, didn’t matter anymore. They had been provided amnesty by the government, which meant they were free from prosecution, as long as they didn’t admit to ever killing anyone. Of course, they were kept under close watch, and sometimes the police could seek their “help” for their operations. Abdullah told us we would not be allowed to have their real names or ask questions about any of the men’s past terrorist activities. Then he paused to make the point. “We have made a deal,” he said, drawing on a cigarette and smiling softly, “It’s the only way forward for us.”

Oran, Algeria, 2001

Banditry

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There have been outlaws in Mexico for a considerable long time.

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Pete spent most of his life on the other side of the law. He had smuggled drugs and run planes. He only once gave up his freedom, and not for very long. He lived on the Mexican coast, somewhere, far enough not to be found, far enough to feel safe enough for another day on the run. He was a kind of sheepherder, operating outside the law for the benefit of those who wanted to live comfortably inside of it.

One day, many years earlier, one of Pete’s long lost daughters managed to track him down in Mexico. She walked up the driveway and into his house. He invited her up to his living room and sat her down on the couch.

“You’ve got fifteen minutes,” he told her, “You’ve got fifteen minutes and you can ask me anything you want and I swear to God I won’t lie to you.”

And then it would be over. When, a few years later, another daughter came down, Pete told her the same thing. You’ve got fifteen minutes and you can ask me anything you want and I won’t lie to you.

I wondered what I would have asked a long lost father if I’d had only fifteen minutes. Have you ever killed anyone? What’s the saddest thing that’s ever happened to you? Naturally, Pete’s daughter had asked him why he left her and her mother so many years before. He swayed in the memory of it, as if the recollection was as difficult as the decision itself. His eyes glassed over and a thousand-year old grin swept across his face like a frozen ray of sun.

“He doesn’t have to tell me shit, does he?” I said to Pete, as he rolled a joint. He dropped his hands into his lap, not letting go of the joint, and stared at me with a look of great surprise. His mouth formed a small O. A rill of sea light shone off the lenses of his reading glasses. He shook his head.

“Hell no he doesn’t,” he almost shouted, irritated at my impertinence, “It’s his own goddam business.”

Just harmless old criminals sitting around in Mexico, getting stoned and joking blackly about the man who lived next door.

“They’re not all bad, you know,” Pete said, referring to the lawmen he had clashed with his whole life, “I’ve spent my whole life in criminal enterprise but people are just people, any way you cut it, I swear to God, that’s the truth.’ It was the voice of moderation and restraint, coming from the other side of the law, coming from the dark recesses, pleading for understanding, for forgiveness.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I’m lying I’m dyin,” he said, and took a shot of back alley tequila he had gotten from a friend, forty barrels worth sitting in plastic jugs by his feet. The crow lines at his eyes were long and weary, worn from use and smiles, the creases tanned into life.

“Here,” he said, “Have another shot of this, best damn tequila you ever had, I swear to God, make you cry.”

– Mexico, 2006

emergencia

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Mexico City is a violent place, and more and more in the last few years.

I used to go out with the ambulances when I lived there…

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The rear of the ambulance was a jumble of hypodermic needles, respirators and gauze. Above an oxygen tank, Nicholas Cage stared down from a promotional poster for a movie in which he had starred as a disturbed Red Cross medic who sees visions of dead people and angels in New York. “Santissima Nicolas,” the medics whispered.

The driver, whom everybody called Captain, wore 1940’s era aviator sunglasses, left the chin strap of his helmet dangling loose and chain smoked Marlboro Reds. He peeled out of the parking lot blaring three horns at once. I asked him if he had ever been in an accident and he said it was unavoidable; at that moment he changed lanes so that we were heading, deliberately it seemed, the wrong way down Avenida Insurgentes. The Captain’s cigarette had gathered ash and it blew into the rear as he spun the wheel with one hand. Edgar, one of the chief medics, sat in the passenger seat leaning out the window and shouted at people through a bullhorn to get out of the way. A gurney clattered on the wall, the ambulance filled up with a pulsating red light, bottles of oxygen rocked in their plastic hammocks.

It was late afternoon by then, sometime in the autumn, the long summer rains were beginning to end. We entered the courtyard of a halfway house for juvenile delinquents. On a low wall made of stone sat a boy, no more than 15, bleeding from gashes in his shaved head; his eyes had been beaten black. A pair of female orderlies fluttered about until Edgar, donning rubber gloves and murmuring instructions into his radio, put his hands on the boy’s head and began to feel around. A gang had attacked him, said the women, probably over a drug deal gone badly. The boy had two deep gashes on each side of his head, and more scattered across his back and neck. Edgar and the Captain pulled him to his feet and put him on a vinyl bench inside the ambulance. He sat there dazed, staring at me as Edgar wiped the cuts clean and dropped the bloodied bandages into a plastic sack hanging from the rear door. If he knew where he was he didn’t let on, only now and again mumbling or nodding his head to Edgar’s repeated questioning. When we dropped him off at the hospital, Edgar stuck a hose in the back of the ambulance and pink water drained out slowly under fluorescent white lamps.

Later that night, in a rundown neighborhood where the streetlights didn’t work an old woman sat in a wooden chair in her kitchen with her head thrown back, laughing. Her eyes were rolled into white and her nose was broken. Her two sisters dabbed at her face with rags soaked in blood. They stepped aside while Edgar dug into his black bag.

“I fell on the floor,” the old woman said, and the two sisters laughed.

“She fell on the floor,” one repeated, laughing again. All of them were drunk. Edgar laughed as well. The woman turned her head and smiled at me through broken teeth and bleeding gums.
Edgar laid a gurney down and started to move her onto it. Her husband came out, and the sisters went quiet. He wore a white frock that ended just above his knees. The shirt was covered in blood, and he, too, was drunk. They had all been drinking since three o’clock that afternoon and half a dozen empty bottles of Tecate and Johnny Walker were scattered about the kitchen. He had gotten angry and smashed one of the glass bottles on her head, breaking her nose. Now he grinned stupidly.

“She fell down,” he said.

On the night of the Virgen de Guadalupe, the streets were choked with pilgrims. Small children carried likenesses of the Virgin and colored candles that they shielded with the palms of their hands, and their mothers carried baskets of tortillas and blocks of goat cheese and bright woolen blankets. They peered into the tinted windows of the ambulance and moved in one long illuminated procession towards the darkening mountains that rimmed the valley. Mostly it was quiet that night. There were a few calls, drunks and vagrants; a woman passed out in a market and a crowd gathered around to stare; a man fell down dead on a street corner. It made sense, seeking refuge in other sorrows. It was surprisingly easy to fall in love surrounded by the ostracized, the wounded and the dead.

Mexico City, 2003

dead in alaska

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I saw this sad story from Alaska today.   “Alaska man shoots wolf”

I spent many months on a fishing boat in Alaska years ago.  I worked alongside this man, who had lost his son in a car accident.

And what it was like, on my halibut boat, some of the time:

Paul leaned into the void and craned a scrawny neck. He stopped the line before the fish hit the surface, leaving it dangling below on the tension, caught in a pane of green water, turning and twisting like a pale silver polyp. Peering back from the controls he looked at Butler, whose sealed-off eyes twitched from within his orange hood. The boat was listing in the swells, and the shapes of the men’s bodies shadowed the tick-tocking of the gulls.

“All right,” Paul yelled, “I’m bringing her up.”

Miner nodded. He kneeled and stared into the black glass.  His orange slicks dripped and gleamed. He pointed, a shunt of white limb visible.  The knives they had given him lay angled at his feet.  His cheeks were hard and he moved them with difficulty.  A root of light led to the horizon, where it would not hit until the next day began. From there, Miner could see the world: the sun tracing for countless hours through the near sky, the barely audible scrape of the sea through the scuttle holes, draining and blowing the empty plains they had floated on, they were now floating on, for days and days.

The boat sank into a swell and rose again.

“Get her,” Paul screamed when the fish broke through, “Get her.”

Butler and Jim were on their chests, leaning over the bulwarks with their hooks poised.  The tendons in Butler’s arms were taut, smooth, twitching like flanks.  The fish began to thrash when it felt air.  A gaff socked into her head, pierced her eye and yanked. Then it rose, and jumped of itself like an epileptic body. Paul was frantic at the controls.  Butler had dropped the gaff and picked up the hammer.

Time to go, time to go, he said, and then brought it down on the eye with a dull thump and the reverb spread across the wet wood.

Five or seven high walls were grey as sandpaper and rougher and beyond them a prairie full of sheet water where the light fell forgotten in the abundance of ocean.   Butler would have hit her again and again, but there was no time, and Jim had already grabbed the fish and was lugging her away to the stern.  Paul watched.  His brown hair was thin, the hood had blown off and he picked up a beer he had resting on the iron toe-ball and took a slug.  The foam gathered on his beard and he wiped it away with his hand. His lips were wet when he grinned.

Miner stood up and grabbed the tail to pull her over the two slot boards and into the stern.  As soon as she landed she began to twitch again.  Her mouth was gaping open and her lone eye-ball swung in its deltoid swivel like a ping-pong ball in a vat of oil.  Two knives had already broken. The boat took a swell, dipped, and resurfaced into a green light.  It was past eleven at night and the sky was still bright.  Twenty hours he had not slept drifted by as he stood up to pull her back to him. He held the knife while Paul worked the pulley again. Butler and Jim stood with their knees poised against the bulwarks, their hooks draped over the sides like branding tools.  No one was looking. He was on his knees.

He watched as the bile spewed onto her.  The rain was light enough not to wash it away.  Instead, it pelted at it as if it were feeding, pocked it like ionized steel, and slowly began to eat away at it until it broke up into slabs and began to disintegrate.  He rubbed his hand over her skin and wiped the rest of it away.  His face was about to erupt; he knew it now.  But he held it back. Paul stood there like a harpooner on the bow, his eyes fixated on the planes of green, and the tunnel of darkness from which the spinning fish had come.

He struck her with the knife. She tensed when the point entered her, and stayed still and rigid in a tight involuntary muscle lock.  He cut the jugular and blood seeped over the blade of the knife and dripped onto the deck.  She bucked again and he had to pull the knife out to keep from breaking it. He held her head to the deck and looked up to find the horizon for a moment.  There it was, a thin strip of muted grey, stretching above the sea in a parallel world.  The blood was flowing thicker from her thrashing, which had risen again and then faltered.  He eased the knife back in and when he saw that she didn’t yet feel it, slammed it into her cranium. Her one eye lolled in refuge.  He kept her fore down with his other hand and closed his eyes.  The whine of the pulley appeared again. A small mean snatch of darkness. The birds are purgatory now, needles of flight.  He heard himself whimper.  No one else had heard.  No one here.  Not one soul here.