It had always been there, almost staring at him. He had always seen it, but never noticed it. The boiler, or its remains, had always been in perfect view of the house that Jimmy had been born in, eleven years earlier. He had memories, some of his earliest memories, of waking up safe in his bed, and instead of calling for Mom, standing on his mattress and looking out his bedroom window.
Before him, whenever he looked out from his home, was the wonderful town, his home town, of Boundary Harbor. His house hadn’t been at the peak of the tallest hill, but it was on the slope, and it gave him and his family an excellent view.
There was a fair amount to view. There was the neighbor’s house, or at least the roof of it. The houses on the slope leading down to the water. There were the buildings, proper business buildings, of Boundary Harbor. These were three or four story brick affairs. They held a pharmacy, a bank, a small department store, a grocers, plus upstairs apartments for the owners or employees. Some of the sides of these buildings had no windows, and so had been painted with advertisements for products They sold things like Dr. Jensen’s Soap Powder, Enderson’s Patent Barbed Wire, and Coca-Cola soda. The paint was now all chipped and peeled, nobody bothered replacing them or touching them up. There wasn’t a point any longer. The population of Boundary Harbor had never been large enough, not even back when the advertisements had been painted. The town had only gone downhill since then.
Further downhill from the town itself, was the harbor proper. Separated from the base of the hill by a short stretch of swampy sandy useless land, the road leads to the dockyards, the wharves, old log pilings, ruins of warehouses, and the ship graveyard. There was a little sandy beach, where the townspeople would go if they wanted to stroll by the sea. It was next to the remains of the old salmon factory. The factory had processed Atlantic salmon and forced it into little tin cans. Sometimes the tin cans would be misprinted, or otherwise defective, and the workers collected the rejects into one big ball of scrapped tin cans, like a running joke. The factory was gone now, but that ball was still there, just offshore from the public beach. If you rowed out to the giant ball in a dinghy, you could still make out the canning company’s logo, sometimes misprinted, on the rusted surface.
Beyond the abandoned warehouses and rusting hulks were the two long breakwaters, reaching in from either side, like mother earth reaching out to give you a hug, to restrain you from setting a course out into the Atlantic Ocean beyond. Near here were the remnants of the boiler, itself the only sign of the ship it once propelled, stuck fast to a rocky reef just above the water line. It had always been there, as long as Jimmy’s life, and some time before. Other than having listened to the story of the ship that had wrecked there, Jimmy had never given it a second thought. Later, Jimmy would struggle to tear his sight away if he had ever accidentally glimpsed it through the panes.
The great warship was hardly visible, indistinct, through all the sea haze. Still, the outline was enough to give it away. The raked bow, the tall superstructure, the big gun turrets.
“So what do you think?” Pete said.
“That’s a heavy cruiser alright,” Jimmy agreed, not really capable of distinguishing a heavy from a light, but in this case he was correct.
Boys like him out here on Boundary Island were lucky. Well, not completely, but this was one of their bits of luck. When the great warships of the United States Navy set out from the shipyards of New Jersey and Massachuesetts on proving tours, they were likely to sail past Boundary Bay, near enough for excited boys to spot them with binoculars. It felt like a real connection to a very distant war, something that news on the radio couldn’t really provide. Jimmy had always wondered if the crew of those ships could see them too. Certainly the binoculars they had on deck were much bigger than the pair he held now. He supposed that, because every know and then the passing warships would practice fire their secondary armament. If Jimmy paid very close attention, he might see the flashes of those five inch guns. Then, a surprisingly long time later, he’d hear the rattling peal of their thunder. Even at this long distance it was powerful enough to feel the shock wave pass through his small body. Sometimes he wished they’d test their main guns.
They boys were particularly interested in the big battlewagons that occasionally steamed by, but cruisers would do too. It used to be that they’d place imaginary bets on the destination the ship would steam to, once they were commissioned, of course. It’d either be the Mediterranean or North Sea, fighting the Nazis, or on the other side of the Pacific, fighting the Japanese. There wasn’t much point in betting anymore, now that Germany was beat. The ships would all be heading for the Pacific. So they had to make imaginary bets on something else.
“Hmmmm,” pondered Pete. He grbabed the binoculars back from Jimmy, and put them back in their stiff heavy leather case. “I’ll bet… the Seattle!”
“No way,” said Jimmy. “It’s the Cheyenne. Got to be. What about you, Josie?”
Josie stood up from where she’d be sitting on the old wooden pier, and stretched her back. She’d been very bored, and not interested in the ship at all. You wouldn’t think it from looking at her, but she was the same age as the boys, in the same grade at school. Yet for some reason the boys couldn’t fathom, she now stood a foot taller than either of them. Pete and Jimmy figured if she kept growing so fast, she’d be the tallest woman in history. She’d probably have to join the circus or something. She was already over five feet tall. “Cities, right?”
“Yup!” Both boys answered, excited for a third opinion.
“Then I guess she’s the Cincinnati.”
Pete groaned. Jimmy said, “you always guess that.” And why not? She liked how it sounded.
Josie just wasn't as excited about war as the two boys, and they couldn’t figure it out. She had older brothers fighting in the war, and in the navy no less. One brother was on a submarine she wasn’t supposed to know the name of, the other on a flattop called the Franklin. She’d done a report on Benjamin Franklin for school. It was pretty much the best report they’d ever heard, but that was as close to talking about the war as she got. The boys were worried the war would be over before they grew old enough to join. On the other hand, maybe they’d be just the right age for the next one. Imagine the battlewagons they’d have around then.
Indifferent to their dreams and fears and misconceptions of the children, the USS Albany cruised on, concerned only with her own mission.
The three kids got up from the end of their particular pier, stretched, which was a fair ordeal on Josie’s part, given her frame, and proceeded back towards the inner part of the port. There simply wasn’t a lot to do if you were a kid in 1945 on Boundary Island. Technically, Jimmy wasn’t even supposed to be down here.
It was too dangerous, Mom had always said. You’ll get tetanus. You’ll fall in the water. Stick to the beach.
The beach was for little babies. He and his two best friends were way too old for that. There wasn’t much to do down at the beach anyway, except play in the sand, and that was for babies. He was pretty sure they’d already tossed out all the best skipping stones out into the bay and there weren’t any good ones left. If you turned over the bigger rocks by the water line, you’d find little tiny crabs that scuttled away to new hiding spots. Even that had lost its appeal, after some lady had publicly scolded him for catching the crabs and chucking them up in the air for the seagulls to snatch. No, the beach was no place for him.
No, it was the Graveyard for him. The Ship Graveyard.
Jimmy loved the old boats, even though they were wrecked hulks. He couldn’t help but imagine days gone by. He imagined himself a crew member, maybe even the captain of some tramp steamer, steaming across the great ocean blue. His supercargo would load up the ship with some mundane cargo out of American factories, then they’d head off to distant storybook ports, like Limerick, and Zanzibar, trading at each place. They’d visit the spice centers at Bombay, then closer to the Spice Island themselves at Macau. On to Manila, Shanghai, Honolulu, across the rest of the Pacific to San Francisco, his home country, but still so far away, Lima, Rio de Janeiro, Havana, and then all the way back up to trade the finest, most exotic goods to sellers in New York, or Boston, fetching a pretty profit, and a lifetime of adventure, then a short scoot off to to Boundary Island, to visit Mom, and Josie and Pete, then off again on another great trip.
Boundary Harbor, he’d always been told to believe, had once been a haven for tramp steamers, back in their golden age. There’d been a fine coaling station here. The smarter steamer captains would put into port here, top off their coal stores on the cheap, then make the short jaunt over to Boston or New York, where the supercargos would do their business selling and buying cargo, all while avoiding the exorbitant charges for new coal.
Somebody, somewhere, had gotten wind of this. There had been some dirty backroom deals, and the coal station shut for good. The tramp steamers stopped coming to Boundary Harbor, and with it their business, and then the local economy. People left, mechanics and sailors left. With that, the fishing industry likewise collapsed. All around 1920.
Boundary Harbor wasn’t a ghost town. But it was an infirm old dame on her last leg. Half the houses stood empty. Even Pete and Josie and Jimmy had started Kindergarten in different classes, but they were all consolidated into a single class per grade now. That was within their short lifetimes. They’d already lost several friends, their families moving to the mainland. Every school year that passed Jimmy wondered if he’d have to say goodbye to Josie or Pete too.
If the town had almost given up the ghost, the Graveyard had earned its name. Jimmy loved it for what it had become. Nothing here was seaworthy anymore. All of it was rusting and rotting.
In lieu of a trim and proper boat in shipshape and bristol fashion, a rusting hulky would do. Jimmy liked the way the rust started in little spots and grew outward. They were sort of like ugly fried eggs, with dark red in the center, lightening to a faint orange at the edge. They seemed to particularly love the iron rivets. He liked the way the white paint streaked down, owing to countless rains, where the drops collected and finally fell under their own weight. It was a bit like tears, but without the sadness. If formed fine fetching stripes. There was beauty in decay.
There were lines of barnacles all just below the water lines. The water was just clear enough to see great big fat ones a little further down. He could just make out hints of anemones below that. Some of the holes in the hulls had bits of oil slowly leaking out, creating intricate two dimensional clouds of rainbows.
Old ropes laid all over the place. Some were in great rotting coils on the docks, looking like the strange corpses of giant snakes from the adventures in the radio shows. Other lengths of rope were run out to the hulks, their nadirs dipping into the water. You could just see the seaweed growing on these portions. “Mermaids’ hair,” he had always heard it called. It flowed like long luxuriant hair does underwater, except it was a vivid green. It had always been a fitting name, he thought.
Many of the hulks listed to port or starboard. It gave them character. Like they were old soldiers after a long march, leaning to one side for a little bit of rest. On a few of the oldest fishing boats, the pilot houses were beginning to collapse through the top deck, leaning forward or backwards rather than to either side. They looked like drunks about to fall over. Or maybe Pete when he would nod off at his desk at school.
“I wish I could go out,” Jimmy said, not realizing he was speaking. Unconscious that anybody was around. Not realizing that Pete and Josie were right there, hearing him perfectly clear.
“Huh?” Pete asked.
“What?” Josie asked.
Jimmy turned a bit, realizing that there were other people here, and that he had been thinking his thoughts out loud. “Oh,” Jimmy said. He hadn’t meant to do that. “Out there,” he waved his hand. “I wish one of these ships were sea worthy. I wish we could go out there.”
He gestured again, this time by nodding his head. Out there. Out past the big boulder breakwaters. Out past that little reef with the giant old boiler wrecked on one end. Out there, where the great white breakers broke on the shallows, white caps beyond that. The Atlantic Ocean. Zanzibar. Macau. Tahiti. Talcahuano.
The three of them stood on the wharf, silent, staring off at the horizon. It was a thousand mile stare, well past the curve of the horizon, to ports of call unknown. “You'd just sink,” Pete said.
“What?” Jimmy asked, snapped out of his daydream.
“You'd just sink before you got out of the harbor,” Pete explained. “All these ships are just rust buckets and deathtraps.”
“Yeah, no kidding, you sack,” Jimmy said. “That's why I said I wish they were seaworthy.”
“Pfft,” Pete waved his hand.
“You'd miss your family and your house,” Josie said, a little more considerate. “And Frankie.” Frankie was a shaggy black mutt Jimmy had adopted when his previous owner abandoned him and Boundary Island.
“I don't mean now,” Jimmy said, “Not exactly. I mean in a few years. When I'm grown up, whenit's time to leave. Besides, I'll take Frankie with me.”
They all stood there, and thought a little bit more about it. “Well,” said Pete, “We could just board 'em and play at it.”
Josie and Jimmy stood a bit confused. “What do you mean?” they asked.
“Well we can just get on those boats and pretend to be sailors or marines or pirates of whatever,” he explained.
“We're not supposed to get on them,” Jimmy said, doubting, “And besides, there's no way on.” On a proper wharf there'd be gangplanks to the ships, but those had long been dismantled for use elsewhere.
“Pfft, who cares? Ain't nobody watching us. We're not even supposed to be down here in the first place according to your mom. What, you think she watches us out the window?” Pete nodded towards the hill. Jimmy's house, and its windows, were clearly visible, and yet far enough away that the idea of his mother spying on him was laughable. “And besides, what's stopping us from getting on board? We can make our own gangplank, there's one right over there.”
Josie and Jimmy turned to look in the direction Jimmy was now indicating. It wasn't a gangplank per se, but it was a plank, and it would do. It was about three inches thick, two feet wide, and a good twenty feet long. It looked like it'd been sitting there for years, mildew inching up its side from all the harbor's moisture. What it had been originally intended for was anybody's guess. It could have just been uncut lumber for somebody's pet project. Given the way it was stuck behind an old iron anchor just showed nobody had any use for it, except for now, and except for them.
It took all three of them to maneuver it into place, one end on the dock, the other across the gunwale of an old fishing trawler. It didn’t have any visible name on it, and they were unsure what to call it. Knowing Jimmy would appreciate it the most, the other two deferred to him, and asked for him to cross first.
It was a little slick. It made Jimmy a bit nervous. The idea of slipping off and into that murky stagnant bay water was just about the worst thing he could think of. Of course Jimmy was a great swimmer, and with plenty of rope around for the other two to rescue him with, it’s not like his life was in danger. Yet there was an existential dread as the little rainbow oil slicks twisted and gyred beneath his feet. Still, he didn’t cower. The long impromptu gangplank acted as a lever and caused the trawler to dips a bit lower in the water as Jimmy neared owing to his weight, but he’d been expecting that. He didn’t have his sea legs, but he knew he wanted them. With a proud “hurrah,” Jimmy leaped down onto the trawler's deck and, excited, turned to prompt the other two to follow him. “Welcome aboard!” he told both proudly as they made the same trip.
Once all aboard they scurried about, exploring every inch of the little boat that, by all rights of childhood discovery, was all their own. They found drawers full of discarded tools and charts in the wheelhouse. There was a hatch on the main deck leading down, but they found that the lower deck was full of greasy bilge water emitting the foulest stench they’d ever smelled. Naturally each had to lift the house themselves just to confirm the stink that the other had only alleged.
The true discovery, however, was that this old fishing boat was only the beginning. The entire harbor, that day, became their play yard. Next to the fishing boat was a proper old tramp steamer, a good two thousand tons if she were in drydock, now she was half sunk and resting on the bottom, thus her main deck was about at the same height as the boat.. LIke the little fishing boat, there was no obvious way to get on board, yet just on the starboard side of the boat, nearest the old steamer, was a great strong fishing net, improbably still in good condition. When they heaved the net a few short feet across to the steamer, they caught it on not two but three cleats of the steamer’s gunwale on the first go. They pulled it taught and the net held fast. Now all they had to do was secure the net to the fishing boat. They set to work, finding lengths of rope and using every knot they knew to tie it down fast. Jimmy and Pete knew a number of knots, having spent a year in the boy scouts each, and Josie knew a few more, having come from a house full of older brothers who took great pride in such things.
Testing it for safety cautiously at first, they soon crossed over one by one to the steamer and found it as solid a crossing as you could ask for. Each was reminded of the cargo netting they’d seen Marines crawling down in the newsreels, and each took no small amount of pride for displaying the same bravery and skill. Oh, the steamer was full of wonders.
Pete quickly ran around the superstructure and the others followed behind, up to the starboard aft quarter. Here Pete bent over the gunwale so far that Jimmy and Josie feared he'd pitch right over into the gunky water, yet he straightened back up, beet red and with a smile. This one's got a name, he said. The port side had been rusted over, but the starboard side, not visible from the wharf, retained enough paint to still make it out.
The “Athena” she was named. That was a beautiful Goddess from Greek stories, Josie informed them. It was a fitting name, they decided. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder, and the three looked right past the rusting half-sunk wreckage and decided the Athena was still a beauty. Oh, and they found treasure here. On a table in what they guessed had been the galley was a fine old compass set in a wooden frame. Why it'd been left here they couldn't gather. In a drawer in some compartment, maybe a radio shack, they found a beautiful piece of scrimshaw. They guessed it had been a walrus tusk, and now was covered in illustrations of the whaling industry. A Nantucket Sleighride riding down its curve.
In the bridge they found more stacks of old charts, likely abandoned because they were long out of date. These showed swampy coast lines with funny names. Obscure islands in unknown seas that reminded them, in their unknowable manner, of strange islands the Marines were fighting on now, on the other side of the world.
Then beneath the charts they found their very first dirty magazine. Truly the jackpot. It had pictures of ladies without any blouses on. Sure, Jimmy and Pete had seen ladies' boobs before. Up in the library there was a book with pictures of old Roman sculptures with boobs on them. Sometimes they were missing arms or heads, but still they were sculptures of naked ladies. Naturally they'd snuck peaks from time to time, when the librarian wouldn't notice.
This, though, was a whole other level of amazement. For starters, you could tell it was more real. Not sculptures but proper photographs. The nipples were a different color from the rest of the skin, not just the same marble gray all over. Jimmy and Pete slowly paged through the magazine like it were the Holy Bible. They would never know if they would get caught, and they might never have an opportunity to see such sights again for the rest of their lives. Or at least for years and years, and when you're that age, that may as well be the same thing. It made them feel more justified, in behavior that was supposedly so naughty, that Josie seemed just as interested in the photos as they were. If she had different reasons for her own curiosity, they never thought to ask.
It wasn't all perfect fun. They wanted to explore the aft starboard quarter, but this was blocked off on the main deck by piles of debris. There was one clear way to access it through a corridor in the superstructure, but there was a problem. It was just about the creepiest “hallway” they'd ever seen. There was a large open hatch forward and starboard the ship, that let in plenty of light to explore by in that forward section. And they could see the exit to the aft starboard hatch, also letting in plenty of daylight. The problem was just how dark it was in that corridor. The starboard side of it, between the two hatches, had its bulkhead set back a good ten feet or so. So while the corridor's port bulkhead could just be made out of the shadow, since you'd walk right next to it, that long starboard compartment was pitch black.
What was worse was that the ship's crew had used this space for storage. If you had the courage to stay in that corridor long enough for your eyes to adjust, you'd just make out basic strange shapes of the refuse. Great coils of ropes and chains. Old crates that had once held cargo, and perhaps still did if anybody cared to check. Discarded old rubberized bad seas rain gear, half decayed and forgotten- rain jackets and boots mostly. The boots looked like severed legs. They reminded Jimmy of stories from the Civil War, piles of legs stacking up like wood piles outside of field hospitals after big battles. The coats looked like nothing, unless they happened to be hanging from a hook or the corner of a crate, and then they looked like a person standing there, silently, in the dark. It occurred to the three children that it would have been very easy for one of them to stand in there in the dark and wait for another to come by, then jump out and yell “boo!” Jimmy, Josie and Pete all loved a good practical joke, but that was going way too far. They held their tongues, each hoping the other two could never be so cruel to play that on them. Worst of all, was that for some absurd reason they couldn't even fathom, there was a life size mannequin standing among all that junk. Featureless, it looked like one of those you'd find in a tailor's shop. The kind they'd use to get the collar and shoulders and waist just right.
No matter how much fun they'd have on that old steamer, no matter how many times they criss-crossed down that corridor, it always sent chills up their spine. Each time they'd stare down that long corridor and hesitate, catch their breath, pump up their courage, maybe count down from ten. Each time they set foot they'd walk slowly, almost reverently, like at a funeral when you view the body. Each time they'd stare straight at the opposite hatch, and the hopeful gleam of sunlight reflecting off of the metal deck. They had to keep their eyes on the sunlight, that was a silent rule they each independently invented. As long as they kept their eyes on that light, they wouldn't be grabbed by something in the dark, and dragged off to a terrible hell. Each time they'd break their own rule, and sneak a quick sidelong glance at that mannequin, just in case. It was impossible to resist.
Oh, but there was a reason they’d gladly endure this suffering time and time again. It was a reason they discovered for themselves the first time they inched themselves down that passage. Once outside, they looked over the aft starboard gunwale of the Athena, and found a tugboat stuck fast ,perpendicular to their hull.
Then beyond the bow of that tug, another steamer, and another, and more boats, and ships, more than a dozen in all. The circular nature of the current in the northern edge harbor had pressed these hulks together before the decay had fixed them permanently into place.
Each ship or boat was accessible from the deck of the other. All they had to do was clamber over the railings. Or stack a few sturdy crates to make makeshift stairs, or shift a few ropes.
Within a matter of an afternoon the children found they could traverse the lot of them, from the fishing boat with the old lumber gangplank, to a three thousand ton steamer at the eastern end of the row. They had discovered, and partially made for themselves, the greatest playground and obstacle course in the history of childhood. They were old enough to take care of themselves for most of the day, yet still take joy in constructing the perfect play fort. It was of the children, by the children, and for the children. As the afternoon drew on, they couldn’t believe their luck.
And there was treasure at the end of this ochre and red rust rainbow. Over the starboard side of the easternmost ship, if you stood at the railing and looked down, by some trick of the eddying currents, the water of the bay became crystal clear. The water of the bay was at best brackish and cloudy, in more places than not covered by a thin colorful smear of oil. Yet here, at the edge of their playground, they could peer straight down to the sea floor.
They all marveled at the sight, but none more than Pete. Whereas Jimmy had always daydreamed of the ships and the life of a merchant explorer, Pete had always had a special fondness for the creatures under the sea. Miss Birch, the librarian at the town's sole library, always doted on his obsession, keeping a series of picture books on under sea organisms at an easy reach, every time he visited. She had told them they had just gotten a new novel, called “Cannery Row” that she said was quite good. She said it was about a man who had a special laboratory just for sea creatures, and he would beachcomb at low tide to supply his collection, and send specimens to biologists and universities for scientists to study. Pete had said that just about the swellest thing he’d ever heard of. Though Miss Birch didn’t actually let any of them read the book, and told them they would have to wait until they were a little older.
Here beneath the three excited faces was a menagerie of sea creatures that could have suited an illustration in one of Pete’s favorite books. There were white and green sea anemones. Little darting black fish. Sea stars patterned like patriotic decorations all over the rocks. At one point they saw a school of pale little squid dart before their eyes, then vanish again in a little longer than the blink of an eye. There were purplish splotches which could have been urchins or great chitons. Way down at the bottom of large overcropping stones they spied a rockfish, and under another, what they were pretty sure was a horseshoe crab. Jimmy had read somewhere that the trade currents sometimes brought seahorses up north from the Caribbean. It had been his secret fantasy to catch one someday, but even as young as he was, he’d almost given up on that dream. Now he had a good view of this other world, hope came back to him.
A part of Jimmy wanted to jump in. Just strip off all his clothes, even his briefs since they weren’t proper swim trunks, and dive right in. He resisted this for two reasons, he’d never hear the end of it from his mother, and Josie was a girl. Though the latter part he could have ignored if he didn’t fear his mother’s just wrath.
It was late in the afternoon now, bordering on evening. Three different mothers in three different kitchens would be preparing three different suppers. They wouldn’t be fancy, just typical war time poverty meals made with what rations were available. The kids couldn’t have cared less. After a day like this, perhaps the most extraordinary of their lives, their stomachs were rumbling like glaciers driving down a mountain valley.
It was still hours away from sunset, but the sun was behind them. To the east, the blue sky was as dark as they get, and the fog from the morning had risen up to higher altitudes, turning a sort of purple in the process. It all looked like an ugly blue and purple bruise, but not in a bad way. Like the kind you take pride in when you show them off to your friends, or you use to greedily seek sympathy by revealing to your concerned grandmother.
They were growing introspective and philosophical as they stood at the east most ship, their elbows propped up against the railing. It was sort of the deep thinking kids could get into, but lacked the vocabulary to properly describe. They’d had a fine day. They conquered the whole ship graveyard. It was a feat that would go down in the elementary school’s history.
Yet it was incomplete. There was one last potential goal that taunted them, just out of reach. There were no hulks to board to cross the distance. To the east of their playground, across the crystal clear water was the northern breakwater. This was just a line of giant boulders and chunks of old concrete. It was only tall enough to stay above the highest of tides. Yet to the south of that, right in the harbor’s entrance, was the reef. The Boiler Reef. A long stretch of natural submerged stone, sticking up a few feet out of the water, not quite as high as the breakwater. And wrecked against that, the one wreck they couldn’t explore, was the boiler itself. It was the boiler Jimmy could see out of his second floor window.
From this perspective, only a hundred or two yards away, they could only see the top of it, it was on the far side of the reef. It was just one corner of a rusting old steel cylinder. Long ago, long before any of three of them had been born, a ship had been wrecked on that reef. Men had been killed. Some of them had never been found. Perhaps their bones were still down there, in Davy Jones's Locker. Maybe they were even visible in this clear patch of harbor if they looked carefully. All that was left of that ship now was her boiler. Still stuck fast on the reef. It might just have been the greatest local legend in this old storied harbor.
And it was just out of reach. If only there were a way to get out there, to the reef, to explore that boiler. It would be the cherry on this day’s sundae. Despite their accomplishments, they turned west, and headed back through their extraordinary obstacle course.
They swung like pirates from ropes. They clambered up and down cargo nets like marines. They crept through the Athena’s starboard corridor like gravediggers through a haunted cemetery. Then once they got back on land and into the town proper, they broke into separate directions and ran straight home, washing up for supper before any mother could ask where they’d been all day.
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
A new morning came to Boundary Harbor, and like usual a chilly sea fog laid over the island. It curled up from the gables of the old wooden houses that studded the hill overlooking the harbor. Most of these houses were typical traditional shingle-style. They'd look right at home on not-too-distant Nantucket Island. Here and there were a few Queen Annes, with their fancy decorative exterior woodwork. They too were gray, or painted an unremarkable brown, and like the rest of the homes, just sort of blended in with the fog.
Altogether they made the Boundary Harbor Public Library stand out like a diamond in the rough. The waterfront wharves and warehouses were all plank construction, the downtown buildings red brick, and nestled up among the dull gray houses was the library, completely unique. For some reason lost to time, the library had been finished with stucco. It was always bright white, getting frequently repainted, almost a lighthouse without a light. It was like some demigod sailor of long ago and picked up a building from some far off Latin American port, and decided he liked it and brought it home.
By some remarkable coincidence, all three of the children had independently shown up here when it opened at 10 AM. The boiler in the bay was still on their minds, and there was only one place to find information. Besides, it was still too chilly and early to go down playing on their ships.
Miss Birch was of two minds about the inrush of these three kids when she opened the doors to her library. Miss Birch was of two minds about a lot of things, like her taking the librarian position in the first place. Oh sure, the job itself was mostly what she'd expected. Lots of filing card catalogs, stamping books, reshelving them, long periods of time with nothing to do but read. It was more that she was still doing it. She'd expected to have married by now, passing the torch to a younger girl. It turned out finding a husband wasn't as easy as she'd hoped on an island twenty five years into economic decline. And all the men her age were either fishing from the mainland or off fighting in the war. As for the kids, well, naturally as a librarian she was excited to help people find the information they needed, especially for children who were so impressionable and in the early stages of literacy. She could have just as easily been a school teacher after all. Yet it still drove her nuts the way they'd get excited and start shouting, no matter how many times she scolded them. These three in particular never seemed to listen. Sure they'd make an effort at first, but their enthusiasm always got the better of them.
Oh well, it was still early, and the library didn't have any other visitors to disturb. So maybe she could help them out and get them on their way before anybody else came in. It's not like the library got a lot of traffic anyway.
“Here we go,” she said, pulling the paper out of the filing cabinet. They were down in the basement, where they kept the “archives,” though you could hardn't call it that, it was so small. She placed the paper down on the big table before the children. The Portland Herald, dated March 12th, 1920. As the library was on a steep slope, there were a few high set windows in the basement, and they let in plenty of natural light to read by.
“Ship Wrecks on Reef. Several Feared Dead. More Missing,” The headline read. It had to be the Portland Herald, of course. Or the Boston Globe. Salem Caller. Boundary Harbor was too little to have its own newspaper. There was the monthly newsletter that came out around the first, but by the time April came around everybody would have learned everything and it wouldn't be news any more. No, the newsletter was only fit for obituaries, weather, and only the most recent sports scores. Miss Birch supposed they probably wouldn't have even bothered to archive it, if not for the principle of the hometown library.
“Late on the evening of March 11th, through the early morning of the 12th,” Miss Birch read the article out loud to the children, ignoring her librarian instincts to whisper, “the steamship 'the Wanderer' became stranded on Hangman's Reef, near the mouth of the bay on Boundary Island.”
“Hangman's Reef?”
“Sure,” Miss Birch said. “They didn't start calling it 'Boiler Reef' until after the wreck,” she explained.
“Oooh,” the three children said, almost in harmony. That was the only name they knew, the idea it had ever been different hadn't occurred to them.
“1920?” Josie asked, it was a little hard to see over the heads of Jimmy and Pete. “Is that when the coal station closed and all the shipping went away?”
“That's about right,” Miss Birch said, “Though that didn't just happen overnight like the wreck, I think it was a thing that occurred over years.” At least she thought so, that was before her time as well. She kept reading, “Crew initially tried to save the ship as the tide came in, but ran the boiler too hot, causing an explosion.”
“It doesn't look like it exploded,” Jimmy said. From the town's perspective it resembled a giant tin can.
“I think it's on the other side,” Miss Birch said, this time to three responding “ahhs.”
She went on, “Experts suspect the list of the ship, as it was stranded on the reef contributed to the explosion, as this led to an unexpected change in water levels in the boiler.”
“I wonder if it was a firebox or waterbox,” Jimmy said.
“It was a steam boiler,” said Pete, not understanding.
“Well, duh,” Jimmy said, “That's not what I'm asking.”
“What's a firebox and waterbox?” Josie asked
“OK, so a steam engine burns coal, and boils water into steam, and the steam turns the turbine,” Jimmy explained, though that was for a modern engine of 1945, not the much more primitive version that had been aboard the Wanderer.
“Well, duh!” Pete said, still a little resentful.
“But there's two ways to do it,” Jimmy said. “You can have a big box where all your fire is, and then pipes running through that with water in them. Then that turns the steam and turns the turbine. Or, another way to do it is to have a big box of water, and have pipes with the fire going through them, and then the steam forms in the water box.”
“How do you get fire down a tube?” Pete asked.
“Something to do with the Bernoulli Principle, I should think” Miss Birch chimed in.
“Huh?” Josie asked.
“Like a flue... ah chimney. Air rushes through first from the heat, and that sort of sucks the flames in.”
The chorus of “ooh's” returned.
Miss Birch wouldn't admit it, but she was having fun with this little lesson. Things were being learned. “Well the article doesn't say. Let's see... '15 men were pulled from the water by nearby vessels. Three of them were taken to hospital by ferry. Another nine men are feared...' Well,” Miss Birch graciously stopped reading aloud right there. “It was a terrible tragedy. Such a shame. It says they'd try to free the ship from its position, but that was speculation.”
“I guess it didn't work,” Josie said.
“Sure wasn't,” Miss Birch said. “I'm guessing they were able to salvage some of it. And the rest just weathered away in storms over the years. Except for the boiler, of course. That was the biggest heaviest part, and it held fast.”
“Neat,” said Jimmy.
“Thank you, Miss Birch,” Pete said, happy to know the backstory in a little greater detail than he'd known it before.
“Yeah, thanks!” said Jimmy. The Wanderer, what a great name for a tramp steamer.
“You kids need anything else?” Miss Birch asked as she put the old newspaper away in a drawer. “I don't think there's a great deal else. I might be able to find some photos of the wreck at different times.”
“No thanks, Miss Birch.”
“Thanks for helping, Miss Birch.”
“You're the best, Miss Birch.”
“Okay,” she smiled, “you run along and have some fun now.”
Jimmy, returning to his usual playful, talking-around-other-kids voice said to Pete, “hey, you think we'll be able to see the explosion hole from the other side?”
“Geez, I don't know,” Pete responded. “Yeah, probably.”
The near invisible hairs on Miss Birch's arms stood on end. She spun to face the kids ascending the staircase towards the library exit. “Now wait just a minute, you!”
The three children froze midstep. They could positively feel the plurality in that 'you!'
“Now what's this I hear about looking at that boiler?” she asked, placing her balled fist against her hips. No time for Miss Nice Librarian now. This was her dealing-with-handsy-drunk-sailors mood. “You're not planning on going out to that reef, are you?” she asked on behalf of three mothers in absentia.
“N-no, ma'am!” Jimmy practically squealed.
“I didn't mean we were going to look,” Pete said. “He meant if we took a fishing boat out past the breakwater. On account of us going to be fishermen someday.”
“Honest,” Josie said, “We was all looking at it yesterday with Jimmy's Dad's binoculars. From the end of the wharf.” She thought that was a nice touch. No one had noticed they'd boarded all those boats yesterday, and it'd be best to keep it that way.”
The guts of the three kids turned in knots as they saw one eyebrow on Miss Birch's face lower into a slanting scowl, and the other improbably raise in the opposite direction, turning into a questioning curve. There was a pregnant pause that felt less pregnant, and more like a spider egg sac threatening to burst into a million little crawling horrors.
“We were all looking at it yesterday,” Miss Birch said, skeptically. It took them another pause to figure out what on earth she was talking about, and then felt a glimmer of hope as they realized she was only doing that librarian grammar-correcting thing. “Alright, out with all of you. If you get hurt, don't come crying to me.”
“Thanks, Miss Birch!” they all cried out, and flew up the rest of the stairs and out of the shining stucco library.
The three of them all hauled ass down towards the wharf with all the steely determination of three children who'd just lied to a librarian. They clambered down their makeshift gangplank to the fishing boat, holding their arms outstretched like tight-rope walkers, despite the ample width of the board. They clambered across the rope ladder to the Athena, and slowly crept through its haunted passageway. Each took a sidelong glance at the mannequin, like a ritual for a blasphemous idle. They shimmied down cargo nets and up slanted poles, crossing tugs, steamers, a barge, fishing boats, until at last they came once more to the eastern edge of the shipyard row. There it was, the old wrecked boiler, peeking up over the top of Boiler Reef.
It was tantalizingly close, yet they'd simply run out of enough old ships to get to it. Oh well, they would not be deterred. Jimmy had a plan. They'd have to cross the water by boat. Finding one wouldn't be an issue, they'd already found a little tub of a dinghy back on the Curacao Spirit, the steamer one over from the Athena. It was barely big enough for an adult, but it didn't have any holes, and so it would do. The trick would be getting it into the water and everybody in without tipping over.
That was a task that would consume the rest of the morning. There were ropes and pulleys and busted lifeboat launches, the trick was putting it all together into something workable. The morning turned to noon and the gray morning fog boiled off into what was promising to be a fine blue day. They experimented with different knots, different pulley systems and just when the sun started to get warm they had worked out an ugly yet elegant system for lowering both ends of the dinghy, plus themselves, ten feet from the railings of that last steamer and into the water of the bay, three kids included.
Josie was by far the tallest of the three, and self-admittedly the most ungainly and awkward. If anybody were to tip their little boat over, it probably would have been her, so she volunteered to sit in the bottom of the boat. The two boys took the only remaining space, little benches at either end, and rowed, careful not to get any water in and soak Josie.
If Josie wasn't going to capsize their tub, Pete was the next runner up. The water was as crystal clear as the day before out here near the breakwater. He kept peering over to admire the sea life. There were barnacles down there, big ones, titans compared to the little pimply ones on the rocks on the beach. They stuck out their fronds and waved them through the water, like millions of little waving hands.
Halfway out to the reef, perhaps a hundred yards, they started to regret their foolhardy bravery. Jimmy's mother could see him out their window from their house up on the hill. Even if she couldn't possibly make out the identity of the three children, she'd just know one of them was Jimmy. Same with the other two mothers. They shared an apocalyptic vision of a scorned Miss Birch marching down the wharf, in that fast walk that was somehow more intimidating than a flat run.
They shuddered, and reconsidered their whole plan. Should they turn around now? Never speak of it again? They weren't in trouble yet, maybe they could escape fate. The only investment they had made was the morning spent launching this little boat. What was so great about an old wrecked boiler anyhow? Hadn't they seen enough wrecks? All those steamers had their own boilers if you wanted to descend into their dark, bellies stinking of rust and bilge water.
In the end, they rowed on. Mothers be damned. They were island kids. Their whole life was spent on Boundary Island and they had, at least they had thought, explored every inch of it. That wanderlust had been building inside of them all of their young years. They wouldn't be denied their adventure, even if it was just to a rock at the mouth of Boundary Bay.
The reef, as it turned out, was indeed just a rock. Most of the part sticking out of the water was steep, except for a little flat portion where they could drag their dinghy onto. It looked like there could have been a tiny beach if the lower tide were a little bit lower, but it was still a few inches underwater. It didn't look very stable anyway, with their view deep into the clear water. It looked too steep, and made of trillions of little white broken sea shells in lieu of proper sand. It had probably all drifted here by the currents.
The boiler wasn't even visible on this side of the reef. There was perhaps fifteen feet worth of stone they had to climb up and over. It was slick and not easy, and they had to traverse out away from the flat portion, and risked plunging into deep water if they fell. Jimmy led the way, finding reasonable handholds and footholds, and the other two followed him single file.
Finally Jimmy pulled him himself up and over the crest, and out onto the far hidden side, the portion largely hidden from view his whole life. This sloped more gently down to the water. This was where the boiler lay in full. The others clambered up behind him, and saw the ruins of the boilers for themselves.
It was the most shocking thing they'd ever seen. The boiler was an insane monster.
Jimmy had correctly described the basic principles of how boilers worked back in the library, even if he had gotten some of the terminology wrong. Regardless of the design of the boiler, there would always be a lot of pipes. What Jimmy had failed to appreciate or emphasize was just how many pipes there were, or what would happen to them if the boiler ever exploded.
“Holy mackerel,” Pete whispered.
“I think I'm going to be sick,” Josie said.
“Yeah, I don't... I don't like this at all,” Jimmy added.
The sight of a ship's giant boiler exploded outwards from within was disturbing in the extreme. All of hundreds, seemingly thousands of pipes all violently bent outward made the flesh crawl. To say they resembled the tentacles of a giant monstrous octopus was far from adequate. An octopus only had eight arms, a squid ten, both were far too short to resemble this abomination. A bowl full of spaghetti might come closer to getting a sense of just how many pipes there were, but this too fails as a working analogy. Spaghetti just lays randomly, inert. These pipes, either black with carbon or red with rust, still evoked a sense of purpose. They emerged out of the dark recess of the remains of the boiler still parallel, but then all diverged outwards in a fanning shape, before starting to twist and bend, like a living thing searching for something. It was all as uncanny as it was sinister.
About half of what had been the boiler cylinder still lay slanted slightly downwards on the reef, with the tentac... with the pipes facing outwards towards the open ocean. Some of them were bent down into the water, where the other half of the boiler was still partially connected. Others reached twisting up into the sky, and every other direction. Correspondingly, pipes from the other half were sticking up out of the water like reeds in a marsh.
The three children slowly inched closer, compelled by the horrible marvel. It was like the dread from the corridor in the Athena but writ larger. They couldn't help themselves. Pete was reminded by some of the sea creatures out of his books, but he couldn't express which ones, and he wouldn't remember clearly until he'd get home later and look them up. It sort of reminded him of those sea worms that reside in long tubular seashells, and extend thousands of those little tendrils to feed.
It was such an opposing sight, that they were almost at the edge of piping before they even noticed the bones. They took them for white stones at first, and those underwater could have been those little undersea dunes of miniscule broken seashells.
“Hey, look!” Josie gasped, as she finally noticed the form in one of the larger bleached white objects. Boundary Island wasn't too far, as the crow flies, from Nantucket Island. Yet Boundary Island, owing to the local banks, had always been a center of fishing, rather than its more infamous cousin. Yet even the children of Boundary Island could recognize whale bones when they saw them. It was only because the bones were so massive in scale, and because the broken boiler was so distracting that they hadn't noticed them at first sight.
The whale bones were so strange and alien. They had those long curving jaws. The skulls had the strange gaping eye sockets, and the brow that extended out like prows. There were so many skulls here, forming piles beneath the reef. Some of them had become embedded in the rusting iron pipes of the boiler, the pipes extending out through the eye sockets like long thin maggots erupting out of a bloated corpse. There were long, elegantly curving ribs, many snapped in two. There were thick vertebrae, the size of car hubcaps, like flanges from some giant machinery.
“Wow,” Pete whispered. “See any sperm whale teeth?” Back in the olden days of the whaling industry, sailors used to carve scrimshaw onto sperm whale teeth for decoration. You could still find examples in Boundary Harbor's weird old antique shop, then there was the tusk from the Athena. The idea of ever hurting a whale struck Jimmy as somehow offensive, but if their bones washed up in what was practically his own backyard, it might make a neat souvenir. He took off his socks and shoes to wade into the shallowest of the water.
The other two followed him. There was the brief high pitched strange squawk of a sea bird that made Jimmy glance up and back at the sky. There were no birds visible past the strange panoply of twisted pipes, now very close to him. Well, there was a constant sea breeze blowing back to shore way out this far in the bay. No doubt there'd be lots of birds.
Jimmy's attention turned back to the water. No sight of any giant whale teeth yet. It occurred to him that the boiler was all red and black. That was odd. Out here would be a fantastic roostery for gulls. It ought to be covered in white guano. In fact, now that he looked, there was certainly an abundance of water-soaked feathers floating in and around the water. Josie was just asking the obvious question. What were all these whale bones doing here in the first place, tangled up among some of the submerged pipes, when the bird returned to squawk again. Now it seemed as though it brought the whole flock with it. This time Jimmy looked back up to find not birds, but horror.
The pipes were all moving, twisting, animated. He only saw pipes and the clear blue beyond them, and as the pipes moved and wriggled he lost all sense of depth perception. It seemed the whole sky was filled for miles with twisting rusted unworldly eels. He had no sense of how close they actually were until he felt a rough hard vice press into the flesh of his forearm, and he was pulled bodily up into the air.
Josie and Pete reflexively jumped backwards in fear when they saw the boiler screech into animation. Then as they saw their best friend being pulled upwards, they rushed forward again to beat upon the pipes with their fists. It had no effect. Jimmy screamed out, more in fear than in pain.
The pipes didn't bend and twist smoothly. Pete had once seen a rubber pneumatic tube burst, and one end went swinging around wildly like a whip as it sprayed compressed air. No, these pipes moved in a jerking fashion. Some parts of the rust and iron pipes stayed straight, while other parts bent wildly at uneven intervals. It gave a sense that the pipes were jointed. Metal didn't bend that way naturally. It was almost as if there were something inside of the pipes, and the pipes were merely its puppets. With each bend, rust popped off of the pipes, sometimes in little red clouds of dust, sometimes in chips, sometimes in great long flakes. It gave the effect of clouds of locusts buzzing about the boiler. Rising above it all was the terrible din. Each time a pipe bent, and they were all bending rapidly in multiple places, an ear-shattering metallic screech rang out, what Jimmy had first mistook for a gull. All of them moving wildly now sounded like a madman striking randomly on a hellish pipe organ.
All three were screaming now. They tried grabbing at the metal, pulling and bending. It was as useless as a prisoner trying to bend the metal bars of his jail cell. They were still heavy solid iron. Josie and Pete kept losing their grips, their palms coming away, scrapped up and covered in red rust. The pipes, while moving, seemed clumsy. One of them struck Pete in the chest and flung him back onto the reef. He gasped, the wind knocked out of him. Another briefly caught Josie around the waist, but when the end of that pipe found Jimmy's foot, it unwound from Josie and tightened around Jimmy.
No, this thing, or things, wasn't clumsy, it was only blind. They could see its coordinations now. There were waves to the writhing of the pipes. Tentacles. Fronds. Feelers. It was coming out of the inky blackness of the center of the boiler. They all moved hypnotically, reflexively, a general pattern that would bring food from the outside, into its... mouth.
Jimmy screamed anew as he recognized this fate. He could tell what the pipes wanted, they were fixing on him, bringing him closer. Josie despaired, not knowing how to fight it. Pete, enraged, picked up a piece of whale rib, and chucked it at Jimmy, like some kind of javelin. His intention, and he'd later admit it wasn't well planned, was to hit Jimmy and knock him loose. Like a kite out of a tree.
Pete missed, but the effect was better than expected. Many of the pipe-tentacles nearest to Jimmy wrapped themselves around this rib instead. Being long and brittle, it was soon snapped into several pieces, and as these pieces dropped to the ground, the thing seemed to refocus on Jimmy.
Josie and Pete knew what to do now. In their near panic they didn't hesitate. They picked up the discarded bones, the remains of the boiler's past meals no doubt, and flung them into the mass of writhing iron. The thing, being blind, could not tell the bones from its prey. They flung more long ribs, almost like piling firewood. They flung vertebrae from a spinning stance, like an olympian in a hammer throw. Together they wrested a whole skull from its position low on the reef, and hurled it into the mass of pipes. They could not reach as high as poor stricken Jimmy, it landed lower in the mass, but it was so large that there must have been a hundred pipes forcing themselves on it.
Each time they threw another bone, a pipe loosened its grip on Jimmy to participate in the larger blind rhythmic orgiastic feeding. Within seconds Josie and Pete's labor had filled the boiler's pipes with white shattering bone, each piece getting smaller and smaller as it was moved towards that dark center. For a second Jimmy was reminded of a great whirlpool, the bones all flotsam and jetsam being dragged down to the abyss, never to be seen again.
At last, only the original pipe still held Jimmy by his right arm, dangling him a few feet off the ground. Josie grabbed and pulled. There was just a little bit of give. The pipe pulled back, and she felt herself starting to lift off. Another pipe wrapped around Josie's ankle, hiking up the leg of her hand-me-down overalls.
Pete, fearing Josie would be lost too, grabbed a hold of her, one arm around her waist, one hand on the strap of her overalls, and heaved down. Poor Jimmy felt a sickening pop from his shoulder, and he screamed out again, now as much in pain as in fear. Josie refused to let go of him. Pete, however, let go. He'd heard the pop. He recognized the sound of pain in his best friend's voice. He now attacked the pipe on Josie's leg. First stomping on it, then whacking at it with a piece of rib. He didn't seem to hurt it, but it seemed to notice him. It let go of Josie and took a swing for him, and missed.
Sensing their last chance, Josie pulled again, ignoring Jimmy's scream. Pete threw more bones, this time targeting the specific pipe holding Jimmy, striking it further down its length. Owing to Jimmy's weight, and Josie's pulling, the sole pipe started to bend, not at one of the “joints' ' that was constantly bending, but at one of the straight portions. Hoping as hard as they could, they all saw the pipe start to crack at the apex of this bend. There was a strange lurching rotation as the pipe rotated in its bend, then a smattering of rust as it finally broke free. Pete wasn't sure, but he thought for a split second, he saw something black and wirey retreat down the new exposed end of the pipe.
Jimmy and Josie crashed down onto the ground. The length of broken pipe still on his arm clattered as it struck the stone. Fast as they could, all three of them clambered backwards like crabs, to the far end of the reef, out of the reach of the horrible black pipes.
An observer would have screamed at them, telling them to get further away, they lingered far too long as they caught their breaths. From their perspective, they thought it clear the thing could not see them and reach them. It would haunt their dreams later thinking that if it had willed it, it could have crawled about on those hundreds of pipe ‘legs’ and come after them.
Once they had their energy back, they slowly made their way over the ridge of the reef and down to their little dinghy. It took extra long, helping Jimmy move with his hurt arm. The screeching sound of the bending pipes was diminishing, and they were glad to have the horror out of eyesight.
It was only when they were halfway across the water to the wrecked ships that their emotions finally hit them, now that they had time to think about what just happened. Pete remembered when the wind had been knocked out of him. For a few seconds, even as he was picking up that first rib, he hadn’t been able to breathe. At the time, he didn’t even know he’d ever breathe again. He had come so close to death. He suffered his first true existential crisis.
Josie, once again, was sitting at the bottom of the tub, but this time their rowing was erratic enough that a lot of water got in. She ended up with a wet bottom. The leg of overalls was torn up pretty badly, and the blood from her less concerning scrapes was going to stain. The overalls would be ruined. She was going to catch hell from her mother when she got home. Her mother kept telling her she needed to start wearing girls’ dresses now that she was getting older, instead of her brothers’ old hand-me-downs. She wished her brothers were home from the war. She’d be able to tell them what happened. They’d understand her. They wouldn’t judge.
Jimmy, for his part, started crying about a hundred yards from their makeshift launch. Just bawling. His arm wasn’t hurting when he didn’t try to move it, but he struggled to row one handed. Josie took the oar from him and awkwardly rowed from her position, because she cared. She let him cry, because she would have too.
They struggled to haul the dinghy up to the steamer’s railing, but they made it. They struggled to help Jimmy up the cargo nets and rope ladders, but he managed. They passed through the haunted passage of the Athena, and this time they didn’t even bother to glance at the shadowy mannequin. They were too tired. They had grown too old for such childish things.
They crossed their impromptu gangplank and back onto the wharf that represented dry land. There, they saw approaching them, a sight they would have considered a true horror only an hour or two ago. Now it just looked like justice. Miss Birch was marching straight at them, brow furrowed, fully scorned.
“What on earth do you think you’re doing,” she said, still a distance off. This wasn’t at all the quiet voice of a librarian. This had all the authority of a mother, without one ounce of the love and affection. “You lied to me? You went out to that reef?”
“We did…,” Josie didn’t even get to the negative before Miss Birch cut her off.
“I saw you on your rowboat from the library,” she said. Behind her shoulder that white stucco gleamed like a lighthouse, or maybe a halo. “Did you really think I wouldn’t find out how naughty you’ve been?” She glanced at Jimmy. His arm was hanging limply by his side. If she looked really close, she’d have noticed it was hanging unnaturally. “Well? What happened to you?” she asked, without an external hint of sympathy.
“I… uh, fell,” Jimmy said. Technically that was true. He had fallen. Eventually.
“We was playing with ropes,” Pete tried to save him. “Tug of war, sort of. And I pulled really hard when he didn’t expect. I heard a pop, Miss Birch. I think it might be outta joint. I think he might be hurt real bad.”
“‘Were,’” Miss Birch said, this time none of them caught it, “And what about you?” Her attention turned to Josie and her ankle.
Josie looked down. All Josie’s attention had been on her ruined hand-me-down. And the big wet patch on her crotch and bottom. Now that she looked, the skin of her ankle was scraped up pretty bad. The kind of thing that adults always focus on. “I… uh… barnacles,” Josie squeaked.
Miss Birch groaned. “Fine. Follow me,” she already started marching off, and the three kids jumped then quickly ran after her. “The doctor’s office is closer. We’ll go and call your mothers from there.”
The time in Dr. Samson’s doctor's office was a bit of a blur. When the nurse/secretary saw the disheveled children walk in she yelped for the doctor, and in the absence of any mothers, the good doc led the three kids back into his exam room while Miss Birch phoned the operator from the office.
Doc lifted Jimmy up onto his exam table, and asked him a couple of questions about how his arm felt. After Jimmy answered, and a few seconds of thinking, Doc placed one hand on Jimmy’s lower arm, one on the upper arm, and in a surprise, jerked upward quickly, and there was a loud pop as Jimmy’s shoulder slid back into socket.
“Wow!” Josie laughed. “That was neato! My brothers said they once had dislocated shoulders but I never seen it before!”
Pete laughed, reflexively, then so did the doctor. That was simple medicine, marvelous medicine, and he was glad he could both help and impress. A few more tears came to Jimmy’s eyes, more from relief, then he realized his shoulder was feeling much, much better. Jimmy started laughing too. He was going to be fine.
The doc sat each of them up on the exam table, and painted all their scrapes with iodine, and complimented them on how glorious their bruises were going to turn out, knowing full well that these kids would love to brag and show them off to their peers, then came the tetanus boosters. He had Jimmy on the table a second time and was just fitting his sling when Jimmy’s mom came rushing into the office.
Jimmy was surprised to find that Mom was more worried than angry. Jimmy had been expecting the end of the world, instead he got bunches of kisses. When the three explained what happened, it was all on the wharf and they never mentioned their wrecked boat playground or the reef at all. Then they realized Miss Birch was still there and listening the whole time. Instead of ratting them out, she took it as her cue and left to go reopen her library. It would all stay between the four of them.
Mom walked them all to Josie’s house first so she could change out of those wet clothes, then they dropped Pete off at his house, and finally, pretty pooped, she led Jimmy back home, and he was finally through with his day.
In the early evening, Jimmy walked the second floor hallway of his home. His was warm, and full of an early supper of a big bowl of clam chowder, with toast for dipping. He was growing accustomed to his sling. Now in his pajamas, and feeling philosophical, he imagined himself a bit like Basil Rathbone out of the movie pictures, he wished he had an evening robe and pipe to play with as he paced back and forth, contemplating.
He looked out the windows, facing east. Below him was the roof of his neighbor’s house, then down the hill the other neighborhood houses, the brick buildings of downtown, the bay, and above it an evening sky. The blue sky had grown overcast, and the fog was coming in early tonight. WIth the sunset behind them, the sky was full of purples and lavenders. It looked like the bruises he and his best friends were developing.
Then he looked, and there was the reef. Boiler ney Hangman’s Reef. The intact portion of the boiler sticking up over the top. It had always been there, his whole life. Like it had been waiting for him.
What was it? He didn’t know. What he did know was that the world was a much different place than what all the adults had ever told him. It was a more frightening place than he had expected. But also, maybe, more wonderful. Did anybody know what it was? He supposed not. Was it supernatural? He couldn’t imagine in any way how it could be described as natural.
So if that was supernatural… what else is there? He should ask Josie and Pete in the morning. Maybe Miss Birch might know.