Ghost Sea: A Novel (Dugger/Nello Series) by Ferenc Máté Read Free Book Online Page B

lowly, slowly, catchee monkey.
    —Chinese Proverb
     

    B y the time I woke up, the stove had gone cold and the fog hung dark over the skylight. I counted the bills from the envelope Hopkins had left—I hadn’t seen that much money in a long time. There was also a note about a passenger: Katherine Hay’s husband was coming along.
    I went to look for Nello.
    In the gloomy alley, the smitty’s fire glowed, and lantern light came from the cobbler’s shack. The door to the shop of the frail Welsh beauty was ajar, and she sat by the fire knitting sweaters as thick as armor. And the Gypsy woman, who patched and darned, came out and hung a lantern on her sign, and beckoned to read my palm, always the same: I would live and be in love forever.
    In the street, the gaslights burnt yellow through the fog, and the drizzle dripped from wires overhead. Horse carts and rickshaws popped up like apparitions, then just as quickly disappeared again. My head still swam from the rum; I sucked in cold air but it did no good.
    I kept along the docks. Smokestacks of steamers jutted from the fog, and the rigging of the last clipper ship, which, hogbacked from weariness, still managed to sail the coast. More than a thousand of them were built on the west coast in fifty years—clippers, schooners, brigantines—but less than a hundred still survived; the rest had been wrecked, burnt, abandoned or sunk, or run on rock, or were simply and forever “lost at sea.”
    The Sunshine , a three-masted schooner, was found bottom-up off Cape Disappointment in 1875—the year she was built. Aida , a four-master, “vanished” out of Shanghai in ‘96. Rosario , a schooner, was crushed by ice in ‘98; Parallel blew up in San Francisco a year later; and D. H. Talbot , whose skipper fell ill, and his sixteen-year-old daughter steered her, broke up on the Chinese coast—only two of the crew survived. Oceans of dead ships. God rest them all.
    I asked after Nello but no one had seen him for a while. Someone heard he’d gone on a Jap fish boat, but fishing was tough now, the fish all gone, didn’t sound to me like a place he’d hang his hat.
    Water Street swarmed with the drunk and nearly dead. Stevedores jostled in the road, hungry immigrants cowered in doorways, Indians from up coast, with heads down, lumbered on; and the dead drunk curled up like curs beside the boardwalk or splayed out devil-may-care where they fell. But some were resurrected when coins spilled on the boards, slipping through the cracks, and they dove and clawed about in the gloom below.
    I found a lodged penny, and from a stall with mounds of sauerkraut bought myself a pickle.
    I turned uphill to ask Mr. Chow. He supplied Chinamen to everyone in town—had a cousin or nephew in every sawmill, cannery, beer parlor, and hotel—no one sneezed without Mr. Chow hearing about it, so if he didn’t know where Nello was, Nello had left the planet.
    I left the wood-blocks of the road and turned down an alley into Chinatown. Planks formed haphazard bridges in the mud, and the air was a stench of fermenting things, smoke, spices, burnt meat, and sweat. Lanterns dangled in the steam of noodle carts whose owners called or whistled, weaving among people lugging nets, pots, children, bamboo cages, or sacks of coal, all searching for a small space in the mud among the vegetable stalls, and butcher stalls, and stalls where fish hung, still alive, cut clear in half, their head on one hook the rest on another. A goat head with dangling tongue hung on a hook and one with lonely eyes sat in a bowl—and I wondered who they got: the captain or the cabin boy. In a wicker cage, puppies whined. A cleaver thudded and a hammer beat a rivet in a pot.
    I swung a door open. At a long table strewn with dishes sat a mob of Chinamen of every age, size, and description, all chop-sticking noodles as fast as they could. Old Mr. Chow, tiny and gaunt at the head of the table, waved me over and the others slid along the