“I hear you were adrift by yourself for a time.”
Pollard shrugged.
“Must have been tough being alone out there.”
Pollard cleared his throat. “I wasn’t alone.”
Contact. “Who was with you?”
Pollard looked at him briefly, as if he couldn’t believe George was quite that naive or stupid. And you could almost see it in his eyes: You’re never alone here, George, haven’t you guessed that yet?
“I went overboard with Gosling. We bobbed around in our lifejackets, Christ, for hours and hours, maybe most of the day… what a day would be back home… and then we found this raft. Thank God for that.”
He hoped that would be the wedge he’d need with Pollard, but Pollard still said nothing. He just stared off into the fog, now and again squinting his eyes as if he were looking for something, suspicious of something.
“Whatever you’re looking for,” George said. “You won’t find it out there.”
That got the thinnest of smiles from Pollard. Other than that, his face was still dead as cemetery marble. His eyes were hollow, blank things which emoted about as much as bullet holes in driftwood. Now and then, his lips quivered as if there was something he really needed to say… but that was about it.
George gave it another shot. “What is it you hope to see out in that soup?”
Pollard said nothing.
Jesus, this guy. Getting into his head was like trying to pick a lock with a hairbrush.
“Do you know why I’m sitting here with you?”
That got Pollard’s attention. “Because they told you to.”
“You’re right,” George said. Maybe being truthful here was the proper tact. “Don’t take it the wrong way, I might have come chatted with you anyway… but, yeah, well, they’re worried about you.”
Pollard seemed unimpressed by that.
So George said, “I know Marx has been riding you like… how would he put it? Like a swayback mare? Like a five-dollar mule?”
Pollard almost smiled at that.
“Marx is a hard guy, I know that,” George said to him. “Gosling has his moments, too. But I wouldn’t be too quick to judge them or write them off as assholes. They’re dealing with all this the best way they know how, which is toughening up. They won’t allow weakness in themselves or others. Gosling told me you were in the Coast Guard once. Well, you know how it was in the Coasties, you know how those guys get bullying each other. It’s the same here.”
Pollard was looking at him now.
“Sure, think about it. Marx is a tough guy. That’s pretty easy to see just looking at him. Looks like he should be riding with the Hell’s Angels or one of those outlaw biker gangs. He’s not a guy I’d want to piss off. But you know what? You know why he’s riding you?” George asked. “It’s because he’s fucking scared. He’s scared like I’m scared and you’re scared. He just shows it different, is all.”
Pollard blinked his eyes. “I know.”
That was something. George worked it, thinking maybe when he got back – if he got back – he was going to get off the construction gangs and become a therapist. George Ryan, blue-collar therapist. The Dr. Phil of the working class. “Sure, you know. Marx is all wigged-out about you and you know why?”
“Because he’s scared?”
George shook his head. “Partly… but mostly because there’s only a handful of us. And me, you, Cushing, and Chesbro? We’re the meat of their command, Marx’s and Gosling’s. They need us as much as we need them. They’ve got some ideas on what we’re going to do here and I think they’re pretty good ideas, but without us, they’re screwed and they know it. They need us. And the idea that their command, their crew is disintegrating around them, well, that’s enough to put them over the edge. Do you see?”
George was just rolling with it, wasn’t even sure he believed everything he was saying, but, dammit, if it all didn’t sound pretty convincing. Regardless, it was enough to begin thawing Pollard a bit. And that was something.
Pollard didn’t say anything for a few moments, then, “I keep looking out there… I keep looking for Mike.”
“Mike?”
Pollard nodded. “Mike Makowyz. We called him ‘Macky’.” Pollard smiled for a moment at the memory of it. “Macky. He was my bunkmate. Me and Macky and another guy, we shared a cabin.”
“Did he go down with the ship?”
“No. We both made it off her okay… Mike’s arm, I think it was broken, but other than that he was okay.”
Pollard opened up then, like a flower he bloomed and let the sunlight in. And once he started, nothing could stop him: “We… me and Mike… we had lifejackets on, we were drifting on a crate. I don’t know how long. Only that we got into the weeds, the real weeds like here, before the rest of you. I don’t know why.”
“What… what happened to him?” George asked.
Pollard shook his head, his face sallow and drawn. “We were hearing things… things in the water, other things roaring out in the fog. Awful things. Big things moving out there and roaring… like some sort of prehistoric monsters. We were scared shitless. Mike was thinking we’d went through one of those time warps like in a movie he saw, that maybe we were trapped on the back side of the Jurassic or Triassic or one of those. I thought he was nuts at first, but then.. . well, those sounds, Jesus. I guess I was sort of expecting one of them monsters with the long necks and the big teeth… they got one in Chicago at the Museum there, thing’s gotta be seventy, eighty-feet long, has flippers like a whale… one of those things, those sea serpents to come gliding out of the fog and bite me in half. Christ, I don’t know what I was thinking. Just that I was scared shitless and I couldn’t believe any of it had happened. Maybe I still don’t.”
George licked his lips. “Did something come out of the fog?”
But Pollard shook his head. “No, not really. Something came out of the water. Two things came out of the water.”
“What were they?”
“They got Mike,” Pollard said, his hands balled into fists now. “They came out of the fucking water and they took him.”
Pollard started talking fast then, not making a lot of sense to George, but purging what needed purging. He started talking about another guy, someone called Burky. How Burky was a good guy and all the crazy shit Burky would do in port, always with a couple black hookers on his arms, crazy old Burky taking the boys to back room card games and shows with dancing transvestites. How Burky had been on watch and Pollard had come to relieve him right after they went into the fog. And how Burky had been just fine, saying how he was hearing flapping sounds out in the mist like big Jesus birds, joking around about it, but kind of scared, too. And everything was just fine and then Burky lit a cigarette and, bam, something out there… like a bird or a bat with big scaly wings and a sideways beak like a sickle. .. swooped out of the fog and took him right over the side into the mist. Right in front of Pollard. Just goddamn took him and it was like nothing you ever saw in your life. Just swooped down and took him without breaking stride. And Pollard saw it carry him into the mist and the goddamn evil, horrible thing was laughing and laughing.
“Laughing?” George said, feeling the flesh at his spine moving now.
And Pollard nodded, his eyes dark as flint. “Yeah, laughing… it was fucking laughing, but an insane, shrieking kind of laugh like a laughing hyena. The sort of sound… just echoing, mocking… Christ…”
George just sat there, feeling numb, feeling doped-up, unable to say a single comforting or reassuring thing.
Pollard was breathing hard, squeezing his fists so tightly you could hear the knuckles popping. “And Mike… oh then those things got Mike. That bird just went past me and got Burky, then… then those others, they got Mike, you know? Came right up and got him. Not me, but Mike.”
And maybe that was it, George was thinking. Twice now, two of his friends had been snatched away by things and Pollard himself had gotten away without so much as a scratch. Guilt. Maybe that was what was burning a hole through his soul. Guilt. Never him, always his friends.
George found his voice, said, “What got Mike?”
Pollard opened his mouth wide, looked like he was going to scream, then his mouth slowly closed as if the jaw muscles were being gradually paralyzed. “That fog, that terrible goddamn fog… you know how it looks? How it’s
