The Captain and the Vagrant

The boat crawled up the waterfall, and then things got worse. The man who woke up encrusted in wet sand, who learnt his name was Batts by reading the sticker on the suitcase lying next to him, couldn’t remember exactly what had happened though. He did remember the rending screech of metal, the stutter of a surrendering engine, and someone falling the way of normal gravity.

Batts massaged the sore spot on the back of his head. He pulled his suitcase into a hug, and got steadily to his feet. Another thing he noticed – his left shoe was missing. Given circumstances, he’d feel bad about complaining.

A knot of hunger squeezed his stomach. Batts half-stepped along the flaxen sand in a one-shoed gait. He cast his gaze around for anyone else, but the beach was empty. Empty, except for the boat lying beached on its side, wreathed in smoke. The stink of it made him divert towards the sea. He peered into it, then waded as far as his short-legged trousers allowed.

The sea tumbled away through the clouds. He stood atop the waterfall, his socks now sloshing with saltwater. Puckering his lips as he thought and massaged the bump on his head, Batts wandered back to the beach. Beyond the sand, trees grew the wrong way up, their roots reaching for the sky. The sun peered through them from the east, level with the island – a heavy-lidded, tired eye.

“You there, sir!”

Batts pivoted. Relief momentarily displaced hunger, flowing cool through him. A stout man in captain’s regalia – wrinkled jacket and hat pulled low – strutted over the sand towards him.

“Where’s the rest of the crew?” demanded the captain.

Somewhere in the upside-down jungle, a vulture cackled. Batts pulled his remaining shoe on over a sopping sock, and took up his suitcase again. He extended a hand to the captain.

“I’m afraid I must’ve been your passenger, Captain. I haven’t seen anyone else.”

The captain mumbled through his heavy walrus moustache. Batts noticed the collar of a priest undone around the other man’s throat. His sleeves were too long, and flapped around his hands as he waved his fists.

“Bloody scoundrel mutineers again, may all the gods curse their wives with headaches and their children with sharp-edged toys.”

“Yes,” said Batts. “Well, I’m glad to have a captain here. Maybe we can think about getting off this island.”

As he looked around, one of the bushes along the fringe of the jungle shifted to engulf a smaller bush. Batts thought he heard noisy chewing, but chose to ignore it. The captain had reverted to mumbling again, and his squinting eyes kept moving back and forth.

“Well!” he shouted, making Batts flinch. “Forgetting my unreliable bloody mutineers, let’s say we make a fire and settle down to think things through.”

“That sounds good,” said Batts. “What did you say your name was, Captain?”

“No time!” The other man marched past him, and Batts got his first whiff of the captain’s cultivated pungency. Then again, his suit had a similar stink under the salt of the sea.

By the time the sun disappeared under the other side of the island, the moon was looming up next to their beach. Batts sat upwind of the captain, trying fruitlessly to brush sand from his suit, while the captain spat into the fire and tended it with what looked like a cricket bat. The wood laughed as it burned, but Batts tried to ignore it.

“Where are you from then?” he asked the captain, who seemed content to mutter to himself for conversation.

The captain looked at him as if he’d forgotten he was there. “A long place away, my friend. Long away and far ago, and I remember it all. I even remember things from before I was born.” He chortled through his moustache, tapping a stubby finger against his forehead.

Batts checked the pockets of his suit. Nothing there revealed anything. His suitcase lay yawning beside him – full of nothing but sodden, salt-smelling, unreadable documents. Even the sticker from which he’d divined his name had disintegrated.

In the jungle, the bushes let out nocturnal howls. Batts shuddered, and shifted himself nearer to the flames, which emanated a damp coolness. It seemed everything about this island was the wrong way round.

“I suppose you might think this is a stupid question. Do you know where we are, Captain?”

The captain chortled again, spat into the fire. “I have never planned a voyage in my life, my friend. Even my own birth, I showed up too early for my mother and too late for my father.”

“But, you were the captain.”

The captain shrugged. As he prodded at the fire, Batts noticed the talisman of a shrivelled cat’s paw hanging from the man’s wrist. Something about it…

“We should get off this island though, I think,” said Batts.

“True, the land doesn’t agree with me, eh, Batts,” said the captain, as if having a separate conversation.

Batts dug himself a burrow in the sand, and soon drifted to sleep. He presumed the captain was taking a watch for the night, but when his eyelids fluttered open at the tickle of sunshine, the captain was sat in the exact same spot.

The new day brought nothing much. Batts hadn’t found any revelations in his dreams, nor did the island look any different to him. Well, except the bushes were now snuffling in herds along at the edge of the beach.

“Any ideas where we are yet, Captain?”

“Someplace, I reckon,” said the captain.

“Well, I think I’ll get started making us a raft.”

“Bad luck to use materials from a washed-up boat.” The captain waggled a finger, and the cat’s paw amulet swayed from his rolled-up sleeve.

Batts left the captain to sit there, and marched into the jungle with as much confidence as he could conjure. The bushes juddered away from him. Under the stretching roots of the upside-down trees, he found fruit covered in coarse fur. Seizing one, he froze when it unpeeled in his grasp, revealing a flat face and two startled yellow eyes.

The curled-up marmoset flung itself from his hand, and went scuttling away in the undergrowth. Batts swore the tree snickered at him as he retreated to the beach.

The captain was nowhere to be seen. Limping on his one shoe, Batts made for the beached boat. He hauled himself up-over-inside, and the reek of charred things became a fog around him. Walking on tiptoes on the wall of the cabin, something enticed him to reach for the captain’s drawer.

A crunch of sand outside made him flinch. The sore spot on his head thumped the ceiling, and he groaned into his hand. As the footsteps crunched closer, Batts drew himself up against the corner. The window was half-submerged, but he could see the captain’s boots coming towards the boat.

The captain paused. Batts clamped his mouth around his wrist to keep silent. Something unnerved him about those polished black boots. In fact, something about the captain’s cabin unnerved him. It seemed too familiar.

A trickle of blood dribbled down through his hair. He started to tremble. His breath locked in his lungs, and he fought not to gasp. No telling what the captain would do if he caught Batts going through his things.

Finally, the captain went crunching on, past the boat, towards the edge of the island. Batts detached himself from the corner, and yanked the drawer open. What he found made his knees quake. He shambled away, hit the wall again, almost dropped.

Memories began to knit together behind his eyes. He slid to the floor, nauseous. The sensation of the sea thrashing beneath him was so clear.

He remembered gripping the helm, screaming into the haze of seawater as his crew scrambled blind on the deck. An approaching ship. Stuttering gunfire, screeching metal. His hands tightening on the wheel. Footsteps behind him, but he refused to look back.

Then, there’d been a blow to the back of his head. He’d toppled, and his assailant had loomed over him, clutching a splintered cricket bat.

“I’ll take it from here, Captain,” the man told him, and the boat had lurched upwards, he’d rolled out of the cabin, hit his head again, and forgotten.

And there’d been a cat’s paw dangling from the wrist of the man with the bat. And, yes, he could remember further now. The deranged gambler, former entrepreneur, failed explorer Ulysses Batts. He remembered Batts in his fine suit with shoes falling apart, clutching a battered suitcase, his eyes shining with the hope of the damned.

“A lost island, Captain. A paradise. My men will guide us.”

“No, it’s just a legend, Mr Batts.” But he’d pitied Batts, and the fallen businessman had offered to pay for a cruise of the most remote islands in the ocean, and, in his pity, he’d agreed, and, therefore, had been lured into an ambush.

He looked down at his ill-fitting suit. He rubbed at his face, and scrambled for the drawer again, where the logbook lay untouched by fire, his true name scrawled across the front. Snatching it, he turned to leave, and a shadow fell over the cabin.

“Well, snooping around, is it?”

Batts jumped down, the captain’s outfit hanging ridiculously off his body. Captain and imposter stared at each other. The Captain staggered, but Batts grabbed him, and threw him across the cabin again. His bleeding head smacked metal.

“Don’t we see, this is how my fortunes change. A paradise where I can become a new man.”

The Captain struggled to his feet, and Batts aimed a kick at him. He jumped aside. Batts’ boot hit the wall, and the Captain punched. His fist met Batts’ throat. The imposter stumbled, gasping. The Captain seized the edge of the doorway, but Batts wrapped an arm around his ankles.

“Either I leave alone or neither of us leaves,” the man wheezed, and there was the same fanatic light in his eyes that the Captain remembered. “This is my paradise, Batts. This’ll make me again.”

“I’m not Batts,” growled the Captain. “You… won’t… trick me.”

The Captain’s fingers slipped from his ledge. He fell with Batts, managed to elbow the man in the gut. Batts crawled after him as he scrambled for the door again.

“Can’t let my new life get away from me,” said Batts, clutching at the suit he’d used to redress the Captain.

The Captain grabbed for the edge of the doorway again. His fists tightened, and sweat beaded his face. Batts pulled at him. The cheap suit tore in his hands.

In that moment of shock, Batts flew back with handfuls of fabric, while the Captain hauled himself out of the cabin. He fumbled for the metal door as Batts came charging. With the last of his fleeing strength, the Captain brought the door down, just as Batts wrapped his fingers over the frame.

There was another crunch. Batts howled, and thumped down on the other side of the door. The Captain backed away. Disembodied fingers stuck out where the door had slammed shut.

The imposter’s screaming curses followed him from the boat. They continued into the night, as the Captain lashed together lengths of broken wood. As the sun rose, he set the suitcase on the makeshift raft, sat atop it, and pushed out into the water.

The raft held, but the waterfall roared. Still, what choice did a man have on this island. The Captain rowed himself to the edge, closed his eyes, and let the raft fall.

*

Some time later, a haggard, dehydrated, starved, sunburnt and bearded man with holes torn in his suit looked up from his raft to see another ship approaching. He no longer had the strength to row, so he waited for the crew to pull him up in their nets.

The Captain flopped down on their deck. The raft he’d fashioned so long ago on that bizarre island fell apart under him. When he lifted his cracked eyes, a debt collector emerged from the throng of sailors.

“Yeah, looks like Batts,” he said. “Cuff him and gag him before he tries to get away again.”

The Captain tried to get to his feet. He tried to speak with a desiccated tongue. Before he could manage any resistance, the sailors grabbed him, and dragged him to the imposter’s fate.