wooden-walled gomorrahs of the deep

Gibson’s trousers are down past his knees — it wouldn’t take a close inspection to tell what they’re doing, not like this. Cock hard and ever-ready, wet with spit and salt-seed, fucking between his legs in the hot place at the tops of his thighs — the back way has brought them plenty of joy on this voyage of the damned, and Gibson makes such greedy sounds when they come together like this that Hickey has to half-smother him to maintain secrecy. He mouths at the back of Gibson’s neck — arm braced around his body, feeling the drum rattle of his heartbeat through his sleeves, feeling the bellows-heave of his ribcage, those strong lungs pumping out gasps and laughter and loving words. Gibson had found him first, had courted him with looks and smiles and courtesies, and Hickey hadn’t had to teach him a thing. He’d known it all. But there’s more beyond this place — paths Gibson has never deigned to tread.

The sound of their coupling is lost in the jangle and groan of the ice — it’s as romantic a backdrop as any man could wish for. Oh, Gibson is beautiful and he is alive, here in this frozen place — beautiful and besotted with his own satisfaction, as if it were too broad and wild to fit into a life spent on shore. If he restricts the practice of his passions to places like this, deep below decks and out of sight, he will never suffer for them. He needn’t suffer on land, either, there are ways — Hickey will show him ways, Hickey will show him things he’s never dreamed of. The pair of them are seamless as a single piece of flesh — Gibson takes him so greedily, and Hickey gives without reservation.

Billy spends into his hand, and Hickey murmurs good things in his ear — encouragements, pledges. He never knows if Billy really hears these things, in his throes as he is, but the words escape him with an easiness that could pass for honesty. No man could keep from singing praises when thrust into proximity to that tight little passage and all its pleasures, the hairs on the backs of Gibson’s thighs prickling against Hickey’s skin, the heat of Gibson’s breath spilling against his arm as his good hand slicks him clean. After the fact his sighs turn to whimpers and Hickey cinches him tighter, in the last strokes.

Hickey’s own finish comes without a fanfare, in the broken sound of both their breathing. He does not withdraw himself.

In all their months of carrying on, they have never been discovered here. Never caught out in a secret glance or a common joke. Here is their place, stifled and sweating and cramped — here is their best place. Hickey whispers Gibson’s name, there in the dark. It has a pleasing weight on his tongue.

They don’t call each other by name down here, not often, and it sends the tremor of alarm through Gibson’s body until Hickey smooths it out with a stroke of the hand. He presses his mouth to Gibson’s hair — with curls like these, he’d be the belle of the county in skirts. He smells like sweat, and closed spaces, and it’s sweeter to Hickey than sugar. Billy Gibson, steward to the high and mighty — he keeps himself sweet, he trims his beard to hide the slimness of his cheeks. This Mr. Gibson was a common seaman once; someone put in a good word for him and stuck a clothes-brush in his hand and now he’s here, every inch cut out for service.

“Where’ll you go when all this is done with?”

“Straight back home with my pay, I reckon. My friends will hardly recognize me.”

No, they will not, buggered bow-legged and sporting a beard.

“I’ll keep moving. I never could sit still.” Hickey presses his face to Gibson’s cheek, pensive. Gibson snorts with quiet laughter.

“Bet that’s what the schoolmaster used to say.”

Hickey never had a schoolmaster in his life. He learned to read at another man’s elbow on a Sunday evening, reading around the rings left by beer-glasses. Hickey smiles.

“Don’t you ever think of setting a course for someplace you haven’t been before?”

“I’ve done more than my share of that, I think.” Hickey’s had to scrape for the details, Gibson won’t share them — Billy’s braved China with Commander Fitzjames, and slogged down the coast of Africa. To look at him you’d think he’d never been further east than Spitalfields. “I’ve got a family to look after,” Gibson says, with mild reproach. “I’ve got a mother.”

“Every man on this ship has got a mother.”

Hickey props up on his elbow, hitching up his trousers with one hand. Gibson twists his shirt-tail in his fingers — it’s a funny habit he has, a nervous one perhaps. What lovely fingers he has. Scrubbed nails.

“I’ve got responsibilities,” he says with a touch of ruefulness, as if he’d rather he didn’t. And he needn’t have them, really — Hickey had responsibilities once, and he left them behind like a twist of paper. Can’t he know that? “I’ve been at sea too long, and I want to be home again. I’ve got an aged father to keep out of the gutter or the gin shop. You’d like him if you met him — he’s full of trouble.”

Hickey has no father and no mother besides. His vision ranges further than that. What are the names? What are the places? Nukahiwa, Owhyhee, Taura, Tahurawe. Sandalwood and smoking mountaintops and cocoanuts and wild hogs. Yellow sand, and endless light, and decent work — the open air, and pleasure. All these things are figured for Hickey in mere words — they are the names of places he has never been.

Hickey strokes those soft curls and thinks of wild places.

“You’re a good fellow to know, Mr. Gibson. I would have you with me. Will you come with me or not?”

“You can’t ask me that like this. I’d give you anything you wanted if you asked like this.” Laughter in his voice, shifting his legs. He’s still slick with their spendings — both of theirs, mingled together as freely as their sweat. There’s no temperate place on this ship, between the blistering heat below decks and the murderous cold. They say with Back’s crew in ‘37 it was worse, but Hickey must have missed that one in the penny papers — too busy dodging a good kicking from his own old man. This sticky unforgiving alcove down with the rats and the coal-dust spans the world for the pair of them together — their pleasure garden and their Sunday parlor and their bed. He has never slept with this man by his side, not once.

Hickey reaches for Gibson’s hands, clasping them in his own. Gibson’s hands make a freak of him, a nimble-fingered doll. “Then say yes.”

Make the best of a bad situation. What’s there for men like them? A whitewashed room, and a patch of grass with the dirt showing through, and a kettle on the fire — the two of them, the two of them, Hickey will make a home in a warmer climate than this one and they will walk the restless world together arm in arm.

*

“I’ve disarticulated the hands and feet, the shoulders and the hips. I had to use the saw for that; it’s like a spatchcock hen. Split the belly and joint the rest.”

The rest. Billy Gibson no longer exists; what’s left is holy trash, as impregnated with the memory of him as an old silk waistcoat or a cotton kerchief. The fucking nerve of it, the very gall, for the surgeon to stand there stone-faced in the flapping canvas doorway — this butcher of the poor-house, this man who saws legbones in two — and to condemn Hickey for making use of that which would have gone unclaimed. Goodsir’s voice is tense and low, and that makes it worse than a scolding. How would it have gone, Hickey thinks, if he’d found him first? For dear Mr. Goodsir is a mary-anne of the first water whether he knows it or not, his case full of knives and his cruel wit can’t keep that at bay, and he’d have yielded to a helpful hand as readily as Hickey himself had crumbled before a solemn face and a merry eye — a little touch of Harry in the night, and all that dogshit. If it had been the two of them instead, Hickey would never have hoped for more.

“Right,” Hickey says, grimacing and feeling his teeth creep in his jaw. “That’s that.” He cannot even take pleasure in having bent this man under the yoke at last, not with that godawful pious look on his face.

“Right.”

The surgeon claps him on the shoulder in a mockery of concern, and he must realize it’s a miscalculation as soon as the deed’s done — he withdraws his hand with a jerk before the owner of that shoulder can stick a knife in the back of it. Mr. Goodsir thinks this task is distasteful; he resents it. He has never known the glory in the body of a man, he has never worn a borrowed coat or a shirt with another man’s laundry-mark in the tail of it — he has been well-appointed in life from first to last, and he’d begrudge those who were not.

“Touch me again,” Hickey says with more patience than before, as if he is speaking with a very young child, “and I’ll have those fingers.”

“I’ve butchered the better parts for you and your men. Biceps, triceps, thighs, buttocks. If there’s anything else you want from the man, you’d better take it now before the others fall to it. I’ve left him as he was. You needn’t look at his face, Mr. Hickey.”

What cause was there for such cruelty? Hickey sees Billy’s face whenever he shuts his eyes, white as plaster and gaunt as the grave — what would you have me do, Mr. Goodsir, wait until he keeled over on the rocks and struck the ground face-first without even throwing out a hand to stop himself? Wait until he could haul no further and fell beneath the sledges? How much more humane would that have been?

Hickey snags him by the sleeve, and pulls him close. “Stuff your moralizing. Do you think you can sicken me? Do you think I don’t know what’s inside a man? We’re all meat, Mr. Goodsir, crammed with shit and blood. Like a pie.”

“I’m doing what you ask of me,” the surgeon says. Bland as milk. His black beard has grown thick and coarse, his eyes pouched and hollow. He carries his weight back on his heels, rocking back in the gravel.

“I know it better than you.” Hickey shoulders past him, pushing past the tent flap. The loosely lashed-together canvas is meant to let out the stink, but it hardly even diminishes it.

It isn’t Billy any more, waiting for him in there. A man is not himself when he’s dead — he’s only a lump, an insensible thing. The spirit’s fled. What’s left is meat. What’s a knife in the back, to a hand’s worth of crushed fingers, or a leg lost to the machinery, or a pocky liver giving up its last? A knife to the heart. Simplicity itself.

“You’ll need a chisel,” Goodsir calls in after him, “to crack the bones.”

In Goodsir’s eyes he’s a tyrant, ruling his little kingdom through violence and indiscriminate buggery. Not so. Tozer weeps loathsomely whenever they belly together, and the tears freeze to his cheeks. And Manson is an idiot, a simpleton, guileless as a baby; the mere thought of pressing such a giant into service is enough to turn your stomach. A man requires better company than this. All these men must and shall be glorified, they will rise up clothed in the gristle and blood that men like Gibson have laid down for their friends; they will all be saved.

A man needs comfort from wherever he can find it. A man must eat.