Shore Leave

Pavel knew a ship with him in the crew would never go down. It wasn’t because he was a fine seaman, and it sure as hell wasn’t because he was lucky. No, Pavel‘s ship would never go down because even the sea didn’t want him.

Pavel was the only customer in the nameless place. On the stool next to him sat a pair of broken old work boots. There was no sign of their owner other than a neat parade of empty glasses on the stretch of bar in front of the stool that the boots occupied. At the end of the bamboo bar a record player popped and wheezed. The needle had run out of groove and the old mono speaker now hissed its impression of the sea out through the bar’s storm shutters onto the black beach.

There was one small table by the door. On the table sat another pair of ownerless boots, a bunch of dead flowers stuck in the left of the pair, the right lying dead on its side. A pool table filled most of the remaining space. The bar’s owner played an endless game against himself without a black ball, slamming down colours and slugging from a dented cocktail shaker. His drink left a slick, pink horseshoe on his fat chops.

“I’m the only man that drinks these,” said the barkeep, toasting the seized-up ceiling fan with his invention. “My sweet Russian Mary. Vodka, tomato juice, Kahlua, or coffee if you can’t get it, and cream.” He rocked back on his heels, draining the shaker into his thick neck. The pink horseshoe melted down onto his greasy shirt. “I’m the only man that drinks ‘em.”

“I’m the only man drinking this whisky,” said Pavel to the back of his own tanned hand and its long-since-blue swallow tattoo. He patted his hip pockets and counted his empty glasses. Five dollars left, enough glasses to account for the rest, give or take. He’d given a dollar to the confident local boy who’d said he would take him to the only bar with American beer and Kentucky whiskey. He sipped his bitter whiskey and knew he should’ve only given the boy fifty cents. The bottle behind the bar had a wonky Buffalo Trace label, and not a trace of real bourbon inside it, but the beer was familiar shit, so that was something. On the shelf next to the bottle was an old pair of combat boots, creased and salt-bleached, a pair of red high heels and a rusty bayonet.  All in all, the place felt kind of homely to Pavel, just like Brooklyn in a way, nobody liked him here either.

Pavel reached for the chest pocket of his open Hawaiian shirt and after some flapping around in the sweaty parrot-print, found that his deck of cards was still there. Two dollars for a dockside shave and some playing cards with girls on the back. Maybe he could play the fat man for another round, go home a winner with the five in-tact. Waking up with a five to his name would make tomorrow more successful than today before it had even started. He looked at his navy watch, it suggested that the time was two fifteen and for all Pavel knew, it could be right.

Pavel slumped forward on his stool and slapped at the tight back pockets of his pants, comb in the left one and knife in the right. He decided that tomorrow he would write a letter home with news of his promotion; First Mate on a tramp ship full of gypsum bound for Hong Kong. She didn’t need to know his demotion had come half a bottle out of port. A detail like that would cast him in a bad light, and would probably make the lack of enclosed money harder for her to take. The poor woman had enough trouble in her life, no need to be cruel.

”Play me at cards for a round?” said Pavel.

”Pool,” said the fat man.

”Nah, man, I can’t stand.”

”Then it’s time for you to walk.”

The door scraped shut over sandy concrete and Pavel was left facing the black beach, a string of fairy lights looping overhead throwing a twinkling carnival light onto a few feet of lunar sand. The hiss and pop of the neglected record player bleeding out through the shutters was the only sound. The ocean waited, silently out of sight.  

Pavel patted all of his pockets and felt his boot heels sink into the sand.

”I’ve got a pair of alligator boots,” he called back to the bar owner through an open shutter. ”Real good quality…”

”Fuck off,” said the fat man, his record player serenading him and his Russian love. Pavel headed off into the horizonless black. 

Loose sand doubles distance. Distance trebles for a drunk on loose sand. Distance and time mean nothing at all to a drunk on the sand on a black island night. Pavel put some staggered tracks between him and the bar’s fairy light perimeter, his stride swooping and stalling, rushing and swinging, like jazz. At least there were stars to show him which way his head should be pointing. His feet were dry and his head was in the stars, so everything wasn’t wrong. He tracked the shore making sure not to wander in the direction of the hissing and clicking, which might have been the record player and might have been the sound of the invisible sea, either way, he needed to avoid that direction. In time the lights of the bar were lost in the distance and the whole galaxy appeared above him. He walked under clouds of stars in the boyish awe that even a thousand working voyages hadn’t taken from him.   

He thought of the apartment building he probably wouldn’t send a letter to tomorrow, the worn stone steps where the cats pissed and the closed-down gas station across the street where the weird kid from upstairs kept writing his name on stuff. The freight trains that pushed past the back yard shook so loud that they put a crack in the kitchen window, and everybody’s sleep. He knew that building couldn’t exist under this same sky. This sky was beautiful, and beauty, he knew from a book he once read, was in the eye of the beholder. So this sky needed him and his beholding eyes. This sky was a deal between heaven and his mind.

He walked on, watched only by the nebula he toured, a human being under an impossible everything on the edge of an unfathomable nothing. His tracks stopped at a spot where the light of the stars put a smooth, curving form in his path.

Crescents of starlight carved the night into the shape of something beautiful that he’d only recently seen on the back of a playing card. A lithe body, the breasts wearing a sprinkling of saline droplets, each holding a diamond of celestial light, lay on the sand, propped on an elbow. An arm glittered as it rose to sweep a heavy eddy of hair back from the face of a coal-eyed angel. The body was mainly silhouette against the galaxy filled sky and its ocean mirror. Pavel stared, his eyes lusting after details. They found the shape of a toned shoulder, fell to the jeweled breasts, slid down over a bloom of hip where the smooth skin was studded with clusters of tiny star-bright scales that grew in size and number until the serpentine sweep of the body ended in an iridescent tail.   

Pavel rocked back on his heels and sat heavily in the cold sand. His comb snapped and his knife pressed hard into his bony ass.

”Hi, honey,” came a whisper, seeming to hiss from the distant record player, still popping and grinding somewhere out on the invisible horizon.

Pavel pulled half of a comb out of his pocket and gripped it so hard he felt blood grease his shaking fist. He fumbled for the other pocket and stammered in an adolescent voice, ”I’ve got a knife.”

”And here we are without a birthday cake,” came a smiling whisper from somewhere in the galaxy behind the star-picked contours of the woman on the beach. With a slick flex of piscine muscle, she rolled over him, flattening him to the sand and covering his prone form.

Pinned at the wrists in an irresistible grip, cruciform on the sand, Pavel looked up into a face that was just a black hole in the spinning firmament, crowned by waves of bladderwrack hair that tumbled down to rest on his heaving chest. As he stared into the void, specks of light swirled above him and coalesced into a pair of glittering eyes. The smooth, cold torso pressed his own beached wreck of a body into the sand. The absolute terror of the ocean he’d known since he was fifteen years old was distilled into the constellations in her eyes, but he wanted nothing more than to submit to the tide-strong hands and be lost in the galactic gaze.

White, star-lit lips began to chant the last song that Pavel had heard, something mournful and French, accompanied by the pop and hiss of the ocean as it crept up the beach towards the couple. Pavel was mesmerized by the eyes and lips as the song swelled in his heart. The ocean played around his feet and crept up his legs as the heavy body ground against him, crushing the tension out of his muscles. As the perfect body pressed the breath out of his chest, it sighed its song into his mind where the words faded and the volume rose until it was nothing but a twisted lyric of roaring static that filled his skull and pulsed in quickening time with his surging blood.  

Pavel felt the water rising around him and cooling his blood-hard body. For the first time in his life, he felt a new, beautiful fear under the spell of the angel and her universal hymn. He saw his short future, with one last scene remaining in his pulpy story, but knew his remaining time would be spent in ecstasy. He’d often fantasised about a blameless death, but never thought he’d be lucky enough to enjoy one. He was pretty sure that when someone finally put a stop to him, it would be on account of something dumb that he’d done, getting what was coming to him from someone who owed it to him, but not this, not floating in stars being sung to sleep, slipping out with an autumn tide.     

In the bruised-peach of a Pacific dawn the booze-sick fat man pushed the door of his bar open. He scraped aside a night’s worth of wind-swept sand and found a pair of alligator boots with five dollars tucked into one of the toes. He took the five and put the boots behind the bar with the rest.