under her husband’s arm against the cold. Joe Bill waved, but the Wades didn’t see him, and again he felt the kind of utter loneliness we can only feel when there are other people around to amplify that loneliness. The Wades, the deckhands, the officers, they all had each other, and Lee, well, Lee seemed to want nothing more in life but to be alone, and thus wasn’t really lonely.
Joe Bill was pacing now, counting his slick-shoed steps like a man in prison. The urge to fling himself into the water actually entered his heart, only failing when the urge reached his mind. It wasn’t death he wanted, just a new medium, a new color besides the gray steel of the boat, the grayer steel of the sky. He began to rehearse the letter he would write to his parents as summer neared and it came time to return home, the letter that would beg, cajole, demand the terrible expense of airfare. And as he crushed out one cigarette and reached for another, he heard two of the deckhands speaking in French about the “young American.”
He couldn’t tell where their voices were coming from at first, but soon he realized he’d made his wandering way down by the cargo stacks. Among the boxes strapped and tarped there, the men must have made some space for themselves to be alone, away from the captain or the mate or the steward.
“He was in the engine room, drawing something in his book,” one man said, and Joe Bill realized it was not him they were discussing, but Lee.
“He is a strange one.”
“Then Thierry found him in our cabin.”
“I’ll kill him.”
“And Thierry said to him, ‘But monsieur, surely you know this area is private.’”
“And he said?”
“He said he was lost.”
“Lost at sea.”
“Thierry said, ‘Yes, monsieur, it happens. This ship all the decks look alike.’”
“Uh-huh.”
“And the American says, ‘In Russia, where I’m going, there is no private property. I can come into your room any time I like. And you into mine.’”
“So it’s Russia, now?”
“And Thierry says, ‘But monsieur, this is not Russia.’”
“Naturally. And the American said?”
“He said he was sorry and left. But it was what he said as he was leaving that is the point.”
“What was that?”
“He says, ‘Ask your captain why this passage is taking so much longer than usual.’ He says, ‘Ask him about the other boat, the one that met us last night, and the people who got on and off.’”
“What?”
“That’s what he said.”
“He is a lunatic.”
“But it is taking longer.”
“Conservation of fuel. Budget cuts. Low-paying passengers. I was up all night. There was no other ship. He reads too much.”
“Did you hear anything?”
“Michel, do not be a fool. We are in the middle of the ocean. And we are heavy, too. And the wind is against us, and it is autumn.”
“It is taking longer than usual.”
“When we land, you’ll see that nothing has changed.”
“Let’s hope.”
“Your hope will be rewarded.”
So in addition to being surly and rude, Lee was a sneak, probably a thief. And crazy. You could never know what someone was up to. What was this business about Russia? What could Lee have been drawing in his notebook? What was he always writing in those journals? This nonsense about another boat meeting up with them? Why did he have that tiny camera? Joe Bill was sure now that what he had seen fall from Lee’s bag that first day on board was a camera. It was no bigger than the pack of cigarettes he now pulled from the inside pocket of his overcoat. Again he struggled to light his smoke.
After a couple more cigarettes, Joe Bill went back inside. It was still too early for bed, and he wasn’t tired, but he was going to go into his cabin and read in his bunk until he fell asleep. He didn’t care if Lee was in there anymore. He was tired of feeling like he was the one who was wrong, like he was the intruder. He wasn’t some boy to be pushed around; he was a man, and it was his cabin, too, and if Lee didn’t feel like sharing it in a civil manner, that was his problem. But when he brusquely opened the door of the cabin, Lee was not inside.
When you’ve lived in a place so small for as long as they had (how long now?), you can feel before you even see it that something is out of place. Joe Bill took off his overcoat and loosened his tie and looked around the cabin. It just felt wrong, but only barely wrong, like the motion of the ship had shifted things around. He sat down on the bottom bunk to unlace his shoes, then quickly kneeled on the floor to check his luggage. It was there, securely strapped just as he’d left it. He stood again and unbuttoned his sleeves, took off his shirt and hung it by the collar from the hook at the foot of the bunk, and when he did, he saw what was out of place.
One of Lee’s journals was lying open on the desk. They usually sat, carefully locked, one atop the other in perfect order, but tonight he could see the words on the page, if not make them out.
This was not good. Lee never left the journals opened. Every time he got up for even a moment, he’d close and lock the tiny hasp of the journal and return it to its spot at the edge of the desk.
Had he just gone down the hall to the bathroom and forgotten to lock this one? Or was it some sort of a trap? There was no right thing to do. If he closed and locked the hasp and returned the journal to its place, Lee would know. If he left it there and Lee hadn’t done it on purpose, he’d think Joe Bill had opened it. If he just got dressed again and left the cabin, acted like he’d never been there? This might work, but what if Lee should walk in while he was dressing, and wonder why, and see the journal open there?
He’d never been like this before this trip with the lunatic Lee. He’d never had to worry about being a sneak or a louse because he wasn’t one, and so he had no idea how to get out of looking like one now. There was no reason for anyone to be suspicious of Joe Bill, but Lee certainly would be. There was no reason for Joe Bill to be suspicious of himself. Lee had done this to him, with his sneaking around and disappearing and never talking to anyone except to say something awful and rude and arrogant, and how could anyone get along with someone like that?
Well, damn it all. He’d walk over there like a man and close the damn journal, and if Lee so much as asked him about it, Joe Bill would let him have it, but good. Or to hell with it, leave it open, just like he found it. No, close it. That’s the thing to do. That’s what a man would do, and if he were asked about it, he wouldn’t let Lee have it. He’d calmly tell Lee that he’d left the journal open—or anyway, that the journal was open on the desk when he came in, and he’d simply closed it out of respect for Lee’s privacy, because two men sharing such close quarters should have respect for each other. That was the idea. He walked to the desk.
And he wouldn’t
