The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [41]
They watched the Second Mate track the point of light to the horizon, and when the light went around the curve of the earth, the broadcast vanished. The crew kept staring at the Second Mate, and the Second Mate kept staring at the sky. Finally, he looked down at them. “They’re in space together,” he said. “They’re supposed to be our enemies, but they’re up there laughing and screwing around.” He lowered the directional and looked at Jun Do. “You were wrong,” he said. “You were wrong—they are doing it for peace and fucking brotherhood.”
Jun Do woke in the dark. He rose on his arms to sit on his bunk, silent, listening—for what? The frost of his breath was something he could feel occupying the space before him. There was just enough light to see water sheen on the floor as it shifted with the movement of the ship. Fish oil that seeped through the bulkhead seams, normally a black gloss down the rivets, was stiff and milk-colored with the cold. Of the shadows in his small room, Jun Do had the impression that one of them was a person, perfectly still, hardly breathing. For a while, he held his breath, too.
Near dawn, Jun Do woke again. He heard a faint hissing sound. He turned in his sleep toward the hull, so that he could imagine through the steel the open water at its darkest just before sunrise. He put his forehead to the metal, listening, and through his skin, he felt the thump of something nudging the side of the ship.
Up top, the wind clipped cold across the deck. It made Jun Do squint. The pilothouse was empty. Then Jun Do saw a mass off the stern, something sprawling and gray-yellow in the waves. He stared at it a moment before it made sense, before he understood it was the life raft from the Russian jetliner. Where it was tethered to the ship, several tins of food were stacked. Jun Do kneeled and held the rope in disbelief.
The Second Mate popped his head from the raft to grab the last tins.
“Aak,” he said at the sight of Jun Do. He took a deep breath, composed himself. “Hand me those tins,” he said.
Jun Do passed them down. “I saw a man defect once,” he told the Second Mate. “And I saw what happened to him after he was brought back.”
“You want in, you’re in,” the Second Mate said. “No one will find us. The current is southerly here. No one’s going to bring us back.”
“What about your wife?”
“She’s made up her mind, and nothing’s going to change it,” he said. “Now hand me the rope.”
“What about the Captain, the rest of us?”
The Second Mate reached up and untied the rope himself. He pushed off. Floating free, he said, “We’re the ones at the bottom of the ocean. You helped me see that.”
In the morning, the light was flat and bright and when the crew went on deck to do their laundry, they found the Second Mate gone. They stood next to the empty locker, trying to scan the horizon, but the light off the wavecaps was like looking into a thousand mirrors. The Captain had the Machinist inventory the cabin, but in the end little was missing but the raft. As to the Second Mate’s course, the Pilot shrugged and pointed east, toward the sun. So they stood there, looking and not looking at what had come to pass.
“His poor wife,” the Machinist said.
“They’ll send her to a camp for sure,” the First Mate said.
“They could send us all away,” the Machinist said. “Our wives, our kids.”
“Look,” Jun Do said. “We’ll say he fell overboard. A rogue wave came and washed him away.”
The Captain had been silent until now. “On our first trip with a life raft?”
“We’ll say the wave washed the raft overboard.” Jun Do pointed at the nets and buoys. “We’ll throw that stuff over, too.”
The Captain pulled off his hat and his shirt, and these he tossed aside and he didn’t look where they landed. He sat down in the middle of the deck and put his head in his hands. It was only then that real fear seemed to inhabit the men. “I can