Sailing in the Sea of Red He Sees a Black Ship on the Horizon

As a boy, Roy dreamed of going to sea, working as a deckhand on an oceangoing freighter, an ambition he was one day to realize. This vision took hold when he began reading the stories of Jack London and, later, those of Melville, Traven and Conrad. For awhile, he had a recurring dream in which he was a lookout positioned on the bow of a large boat at dawn. As the sun rose, the water turned red, and in the farthest distance Roy spotted an unmarked black cargo ship teetering on the lip of the horizon, as if it were precariously navigating a razor’s edge of the planet. Roy felt that at any moment the mysterious freighter could tip over into the unseen and be lost forever.

When he was twelve years old, Roy’s friend Elmo got his father to pay for him to take trumpet lessons. The old man operated a salvage business and didn’t know much about music but he was proud of Elmo’s desire to play the trumpet. The only tune Elmo ever learned to play all the way through, however, was “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Every so often, the old man would come home tired and dirty from the junkyard, plop down with a can of Falstaff in his favorite chair and ask Elmo to play something. Elmo would get his horn and stumble through “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” which never failed to delight his father.

“How’s the trumpet lessons goin’, son?” the old man would ask him. “Makin’ progress, Dad,” Elmo would say. “Makin’ progress.”

When Elmo quit taking trumpet lessons, the old man was visibly disappointed. “Don’t know why he stopped,” he said, shaking his almost entirely bald head. “He was makin’ progress.”

Many years later, when Elmo’s father learned that he was dying from stomach cancer, the old man refused to have chemotherapy. All he wanted was morphine, to dull the pain. The old man had been a Marine during World War II and had seen combat in the Pacific, where he’d contracted malaria, of which he still suffered occasional bouts. He told Elmo and Roy that war was stupid.

“War’s a business, boys,” said the old man, “big business, a way for the fat cats to make more coin when things ain’t goin’ so swift. This way they figure the ordinary citizen’ll appreciate what they got and spend more after the shootin’ stops. The fat cats live to make suckers out of us regular Joes.”

Every day for the last six months of his life, the old man sat in a lawn chair in front of his garage and never complained, even when his burly body shrunk down to the size of a boy’s. He was never mean; all the kids in the neighborhood liked him.

“I want to go out being who I am,” he said, explaining why he refused to undergo chemotherapy.

After he passed away, Elmo called up Roy and said, “The old man died today. He’s on that black ship you used to dream about.”

“He was a great man,” Roy told him.

“That’s what I always thought,” said Elmo.