Ahab's Return Read online

  Ahab sat there like the frontispiece of a ship trapped in ice. He seemed to sense that while he might be getting taken, he had no other choice if he wanted to see his family again. We had him right where we wanted him, but my plan was proceeding too smoothly. Even Garrick was on board. I should have been ecstatic, but before me now was the prospect of ushering Ahab through the city for days, maybe weeks. The captain’s personality was dismal and his conversation was scant. A peculiar aroma clung to him as well, a miasma that cut through the cigar stink in Garrick’s office—decidedly low tide. That ax, ever in attendance, was more than a bit disturbing. On balance, though, I had a premonition he was a world of story, at least two weeks’ worth of articles.

  There was a quick round of handshakes and the next thing I knew we were out on the cobblestones. The hunt had begun. He left behind his canvas bag with a promise from Garrick to have it delivered to my home, and I slung my writing satchel over my left shoulder. The offices of the Gorgon’s Mirror were at the bottom of John Street, facing Burling Slip. We stepped into the cold blue morning and headed northwest. Scarves, mufflers, hats, and gloves were worn by those passersby who had them, rags for those who didn’t. Winter was around the corner.

  The street was busy with commerce bound for the shipyard, wagons of trade headed to the wharf to be loaded. As we walked along, Ahab slipped the handle of his ax into the deep pocket of his peacoat, and with the opposite hand, retrieved a small whalebone pipe from another pocket. I took a glance at the bowl and glimpsed a scrimshaw scene of a stack of tortoises. I never saw where the tobacco came from that suddenly filled it, but the match he struck with his thumb came from the brim of his hat.

  “Captain, for this venture to work, you’re going to have to be forthcoming.”

  “Certainly,” he said in a puff of smoke, but his voice lacked all conviction. He trudged along, the peg leg tapping a dreary rhythm. Every few steps, he grumbled to himself. At the sight of him, people stepped gingerly aside, and some fled his path as if he were the Flying Dutchman of the sidewalk.

  I noticed, now that we were in full daylight, that the captain had a pale white scar, which had been undetectable in the candlelight of Garrick’s smoke aquarium. It began, I assumed, at the top of his crown beneath his steel-colored locks and ran down the side of his face and neck to disappear below his collar. I thought better of inquiring about it.

  “You said the street your wife lived on is named for a fruit?” I asked.

  By the time he answered we’d walked all the way to Pearl Street, and “Aye,” was all he ventured. At Pearl and Fulton, we encountered a crowd. A stoppage of fish carts and omnibuses and streetcars coincided with a packed sidewalk. A wave of humanity swept around us and ignited my claustrophobia. My glance was everywhere, knowing the dangers of crowds. As for Ahab, he moved wearily, yet deliberately forward, never making eye contact. The multitude eventually released us at Chatham. My plan was to head for Mulberry Street. We would start there and then move on to Orange Street if need be.

  “How old would your boy be now?” I asked, to keep him engaged.

  He tapped out the pipe and the ashes trailed behind us. “I’m not sure.”

  “Can you describe your wife?”

  “She’s beautiful.”

  “This’ll be a cinch,” I said as we drew ever closer to the Five Points.

  3

  We walked along the edge of Mulberry Bend Park, yellow leaves rolling in waves across the field. “You see up ahead here?” I said to Ahab, nodding. He didn’t glance at me. “We’re in the Five Points, so be vigilant of your wallet and your way. These streets are swimming with thieves, cutthroats, and deviants. Look alive, Captain. We should be okay this time of day. The gangs usually don’t stir till noon.”

  When we reached a cluster of shops at the elbow of the road, we each dove in and began inquiring. “Have you met a woman from Nantucket? I’m looking for a local woman who hails from the isle of Nantucket.” I was reluctant to offer money in exchange for information, although I realized it might come to that eventually. Every now and then, I’d pause and look over at Ahab as his lumbering form approached some nervous passerby or merchant. We pushed on, slowly making our way up Mulberry in a northerly direction.

  Most people, being like most people, took a moment to stop and listen to my question. They’d either shake their heads or give me a quick, “Sorry.” Then there were those who never slowed but just kept moving. The hard cases shouted at me, “Shut your bone box,” or, more directly, “Fuck off.” I knew my way around the Five Points, what was possible and when to run. I also knew that it was where the stories were. One of the more miserable patches of God’s earth.

  Not too long before Ahab lurched into my life, I wrote an article for the Gorgon’s Mirror about a man who set himself up on Mulberry Street as a nepenthe dealer. The elixir was supposed to erase one’s painful memories: of love lost, opportunity squandered, and so on. The first few customers went mad and ran screaming from their hovels as if their hair were on fire. The police caught the salesman. The mysterious cure was tested and turned out to be eight-tenths turpentine and two-tenths shoe polish and whiskey. “Remember this,” Garrick told me early on. “Ignorance is the handmaiden of Wonder.”

  The traffic in the street got too crowded, vendors at the curbs and carriages in the middle. It was a narrow thoroughfare with ill-kept wooden tenements on either side that formed the likes of canyon walls. Within those buildings, they packed an entire family to a room. I took to the sidewalk to keep from being run over. Once there, passing the open doors of the shops and listening to the vendors cry out their wares in the street, I must have heard a half-dozen languages. The area was like some clearinghouse of Babel—there were the Irish, the blacks, the Chinese, the Germans, the Italians, the Scots—tongues and dialects intermingling.

  I stopped by the open door of a drinking house called Gulley’s and inquired of a small woman sitting on a chair at a table if she might know our quarry. She stretched out her hand and invited me to sit in the chair across from hers. I felt vulnerable with my back to the street, but from her look I surmised she had something to tell me. When I was seated, she pointed to a sign leaning against the building. She was some kind of soothsayer, one of the many prophets who could predict the inevitably grim futures of her neighbors.

  I began to get up, but she put her hand on my forearm and gently pushed me back into the seat. Once I was still, she poured me a cup of hot water from a teapot on the table. Steam rose out of it and I became curious as she slowly added to the cup pinches of tea leaves she picked from a small silk purse in her lap.

  “Drink,” she said with a brogue. The sign gave her name as Mrs. Harris, and her pinched and haggard looks hinted at an affair with the bottle. She wore circular specs and a pair of dangling earrings fashioned from knucklebones.

  I lifted the cup and watched the loose tea swirl, wondering if she meant to drug me. After sniffing the brew, I drank it down. The taste was not unpleasant—a dark fruit flavor mixed with clover and thyme. She pulled on my arm to prevent me from finishing it off completely. I handed the cup to her. She swirled what was left in the bottom three times and then upended the cup and dumped its contents onto the saucer. The two of us stared at the mess. Her long fingernail hovered two inches above the leaves, tracing the outline of something unseen by me. A gasp came from the street, a familiar sound for that area, and I suddenly saw a death’s head in the green remains.

  I fled in search of Ahab. Mrs. Harris yelled that I’d not paid her, but I was convinced my charge was in danger. I bolted between a pair of carts into the street and headed for the other side where I’d last seen him. I was nearly clipped by a carriage, and when I made it across, the captain was nowhere to be found. Garrick wouldn’t be at all pleased if I’d lost him. I moved desperately along the sidewalk. Before long I spotted his high hat at the opening to an alley.

  In that part of town, alleys were the dens of monsters. You could wander into one b
y mistake and never be seen again. I gave their openings a wide berth. From where I stood, it looked like the seaman had attracted the attention of three members of the Forty Thieves gang. I could tell by the truncheons they carried. They were surrounding him, and he was turning on that peg leg, trying to keep them all at bay with wild swings of the boarding ax.

  “Hear, hear!” I said in hopes of diffusing the situation. “Police!” I called, and those around me on the sidewalk snickered. Before I could assist Ahab, one of the Thieves made a move, rushing the captain with a crowbar held high. The man’s weapon was met by the boarding ax and blocked in its descent. At the same time Ahab flung back the bottom of his coat and pulled from his waist a pistol—single shot, ball and powder—that I’d not yet seen. With the handle he smashed his attacker in the mouth. Teeth flew and the man went down. Then the captain spun as the fellow behind him lunged. The gun went off with a bang and a cloud of smoke. The ball passed directly through the thief’s right thigh. Blood spurted and there was a scream. At this, the third attacker grabbed his wounded compatriot. They all fled down the alley.

  “Good Lord, Ahab, let’s get out of here.”

  “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “Trust me. It doesn’t matter.” That’s when I felt the muzzle of a gun in my back.

  “Where’s my money?” I heard a small voice say.

  Turning around, I confronted Mrs. Harris, who held her own percussion pistol on me at belt level.

  “Forgive me,” I said. “I had to come to my friend’s assistance.”

  “Looked to me like your friend did just fine without you.”

  I reached into my vest pocket and took out a three-cent silver piece. Once she had it in her hand, she lowered the gun. “The woman you’re looking for lives over on Orange Street, as far as I know.”

  “Did you see it in the tea leaves?” I asked.

  “No, I met her once. She come to inquire as to whether her husband was lost at sea or still alive.”

  “That could be her,” I said and turned to see where Ahab had gone off to. He was standing next to me, mouth agape and his eyes, for the first time, bright.

  “How long ago, madame?” he said. She waved him off and stowed the silver piece in the pocket of her coat. “Less than a year,” she replied and walked away.

  We hightailed it to Grand Street and then one block east to Orange.

  By evening we’d traversed the length of that street twice and spoken to a hundred citizens each. To no avail. We sat, exhausted, in Yancy’s and watched out the huge front window the last rays of sun and the shadow creeping across the cobblestones. Traffic on the street thinned as people headed home for dinner. Ahab smoked his pipe and nursed a pint, and I sat with pencil in hand, poised above my notebook, sipping gin. For more than two hours, we rested our feet, and I peppered him with questions. He gave me a few grunts, a strangled reminiscence, and I took that scant, weak dough and baked it with the fire of my pen. Here’s what I say he told me—

  The mail boat arrived in the harbor late, beneath a half moon and with lanterns set as running lights. I disembarked, thanking the captain, and, hoisting my seabag over my shoulder, made my way along the planks of the wharf. The town was sleeping. I stood at the foot of Main Street, in the silence and the night sea wind, and looked around through the glow of the lamps that dotted the way. Some of it I remembered as if from a dream and the rest meant nothing. I knew I lived up a street in the direction of Prospect Hill. For no good reason, I hoped that when I arrived at my house and lay in my bed, it would all make sense.

  My house was wrapped in shadow, and I could barely see it from the street. The front gate was unlatched and hanging by one hinge. It gave a screech as I pushed it open. I wondered if Iris was lying awake in bed, listening to the tap tap tap on the slates that led to the front door. I took the three porch steps slowly and waited a moment for my vision to adjust, but as I raised my hand to rap upon the glass, I finally saw there was no glass. It was covered over by planks of wood. In fact, it became clear that the door was boarded completely shut. Twice, thrice, I circled the house, jabbering to myself as I discovered each boarded window. I knew long before I was willing to believe it that they were gone and I was cast away.

  I sat on the porch step, face in my hands, lost in the world and wishing I could remember how to weep. A voice said to me, “Who be there?”

  I moved my hands and opened my eyes to a bright beacon’s glare. It was Pollard, the night watchman.

  “Ahab,” I said.

  The old man lowered his lantern and didn’t speak but I heard a gasp. A moment later, he stuttered and said, “Be gone malicious spirit,” and waved his walking stick at me.

  “Captain Pollard, it’s me, Ahab. You’ve known me since I was a boy.”

  “Oh, Ahab, don’t you know you’re dead?”

  “I’m not dead. I’ve returned.”

  “We read in the papers that you and the Pequod and the crew, save that one lad rescued by the Rachel, all turned flukes-up in the wake of Moby Dick. It must be certain, it’s been put in a book.”

  This was the first I’d heard of Ishmael’s account. “What lad rescued by the Rachel?” I shouted and stood up. Pollard took a step back and held the light out before him as if in protection.

  “I forget his name. A biblical name. But are you sure you’re not a bereft spirit wandering the night?”

  “I’m sure of nothing,” I answered. “But come here and touch my arm and see if I’m not real.”

  Pollard inched his way forward. I perceived a sinister irony in our meeting, for not only had Captain Pollard lost one ship in his command, like myself, but he had lost two. No one was willing to put another under him after the second, and he was relegated to the position of night watch in Nantucket Town. It was said that when his ship the Essex went down, also like mine, destroyed by a whale, he and a small boat of survivors took to cannibalism as they drifted at the mercy of the currents.

  The old man touched me with trembling fingers. “Ahab,” he whispered.

  “What has happened here?” I asked and motioned to my house.

  “Oh, let me see. It’s not been good, sir. While you’ve been off, the fishery has waned. Whaling, it seems, is moving to New Bedford.”

  “I don’t give a damn about the fishery, man. I mean where are my wife and the boy?”

  “Easy, spirit,” said Pollard, and I got the impression he was trying to remember. “Well, when we heard you had died, she and the boy left.”

  “Left and gone where?” I said, wanting to seize him by the collar and shake all the answers out of him at once.

  He closed his eyes and tilted his head back.

  “Where?”

  “They went to live with an aunt of hers on the Isle of Manhattan.”

  “Manhattan?”

  “Yes. Perhaps now you can rest, spirit.”

  “But I’m not a spirit.”

  “I see ghosts every night,” said Pollard, who closed the door of the lantern and turned away. He went down the walk and past the broken gate, leaving me in the dark. When next I looked after him, he had vanished, and I half wondered if my colleague in shipwrecks was not himself a ghost.

  Locked out of my own home, I curled up on the porch like a newborn and closed my eyes, repeating my wife’s name, an incantation that might conjure her image. Just as I succumbed to exhaustion and fell toward sleep, I caught a glimpse of her—heart-shaped face framed by dark curls and green eyes. Then a long shivering sleep, my stump firing off volleys of agony throughout.

  4

  As I was finishing my article and my gin at Yancy’s, I looked over at Ahab, who was a few seats down the bar from me. The place was empty but for us and the dozing barkeep leaning half off a stool at the opposite end of the place. Night was full on by then and the door to the street was open. Nothing but quiet and the subtle rustling of a cold breeze. I blinked to clear my eyes from the strain of writing in the failing lantern light. From that wavering glow
, Ahab asked, “What is our course?”

  “We’ll go back to my home and rest till morning. After which, we’ll return to Orange Street and pick up where we left off.”

  “Shouldn’t we put up running lights and push on through the night?”

  “There’s no pushing on,” I told him. “If we remain in the Points overnight, we won’t see morning.”

  By luck, we dodged the shifty characters in the doorways and skirted the errant piles of trash and hog turds. At Chatham we were able to hail a carriage to ferry us to my place on James Street. Ahab was silent for the entire ride. When we arrived, I had my maid, Misha, show the captain upstairs and indicate that he was very welcome to use the bath and my shaving gear if need be. Meanwhile, I stayed on the bottom floor in my writing parlor, facing out on the street through the large window.

  I took the notebook out of my satchel and laid it open on the desk. From my pocket, I retrieved my knife. As carefully as I could, I excised the most recent pages of my prose—the piece on Ahab’s return to Nantucket. Once it was free, I folded it, put it in an envelope, sealed the back with wax, and imbedded the design from the crest of the Gorgon’s Mirror, a snake-haired monster gazing into a looking glass, with a silver stamp Garrick had provided me.

  I poured myself a gin, lit a cheap cigar, and leaned back in my chair. Misha came from the kitchen to ask if I wanted to eat and informed me that Ahab was bathing. “A salubrious development,” I said, and we both laughed. I told her I wasn’t hungry and, after adding a log to the fireplace, she left the room. I sat with my feet up on the desk and watched the few parishioners heading home from a late service at Saint James. They passed through the glow of the gas lamp across the street, looking like ghosts.

  Ahab was much on my mind, a sort of ghost himself. All day I’d been trying to remember the impression his character had made upon me when I read Ishmael’s final draft of Moby Dick. It struck me that in those pages the captain seemed always onstage—strutting and fretting his hour, so to speak. All his oaths were melodramatic, all his actions a performance. I couldn’t get past the passion and the pity of it to see who Ahab really was.