Runners

I'm on a small vessel, going nowhere slowly. It's been thirteen days since I last saw land. The vessel ain't much, a rusty main and winches gummed up with salt, so that reeling in the main sail is all but impossible. The men are beginning to have hallucinations. It takes time out of my work to get them from the side of the bow.

The hallucinations come from not seeing land for too long. I've been there myself, staring out into all that blue. After awhile a shadow, hell anything can make you see somthing. Your mind fills in what your eyes don't see. The food's all but spoiled, we lost our refrigeration a few weeks back. The maps were tossed off deck one night when we still had rum. The men don't say much these days, and when they do, you know somebody is going down, and I'll see the body drifting in the water the next day, with that paralyzed look on their face.

I no longer worry about mutiny. I'm not even in charge of this ship anymore. When it's been this long, the elements take over a man's mind, and all authority is rendered moot. I've been on enough of these things to know it comes down to the man with the toughest constitution, he'll be in the remaining four when we bring this thing back to the cape. Carrying the cargo that we do, we have to keep armed and awake. We loaded the cargo underneath the floor boards down in the cabin. We've been waiting for the pick up for a few weeks now, and after two more weeks we can claim ten percent of it as our own, even though we've consumed more than that, and I don't even know if there is any left.

I saw Johnson on it the other day, rifle slung around his arm. He was picking at his arm, at a scab that lay there black with infection. I hit him with the butt of my rifle, to see how jacked up he was, and he growled at me, with eyes that already had found me dead.

The radio's fucked, so there's no way of knowing if the whole thing has been called off. All we have left is a little acoustic guitar, rancid rations and a calendar that has become the focus of our days and our nights.

We sleep in shifts, two or three hours at a time. Day detail is the worst. You get sweat in your eyes, because of the heat, and you never know when one of your crew will lose it, start shaking, screaming, talking about moving, about movement. Fights usually break out at this point, and someone has to stop the guy from losing it before he gets killed. Acting out is not tolerated here.

It's been months since I've been on land for any long period of time. This being my what,fourth, fifth mission? I don't really have a steady woman, or home. On my off time I got out west, anywhere really, rent a ranch for a month, sleep, shoot some and forget about the rest of the year when the concept of leisure just doesn't exist. The sun makese everything shiny. Your forehead, the occasional pieces of glass, visible from the horizon back when a few miles back, when we broke a starboard porthole. We wear are sunglasses all the time, so that our world is permanently tinted. The drinking water is warm, tepid at the coldest times at night, when the temperature is a balmy eighty two degrees.

On the sixteenth day a boat is visible from the horizon. This is big news around here,and the men sit around and guess as to whom the shadow belongs. They take their rifles out and aim at the figure, moving slowly, it's hard to tell, with the occasional swells we get out here from activity miles away.

"I hope it's them"

"I hope so too, so we get off. I'm done."

I've never admitted it to another soul, but its true. Years in the smuggling business can make a man paranoid, even for someone like me, everyone's armed and for all you know your boss is out to kill you. I've seen it happen before, whole missions can be set ups, and I have a feeling that is the case here, right now.

"Go down there, and check underneath the floor boards, and see if there's any left to sell."

His footsteps disappear down in the cabin, and I hear the latch go, then the footsteps running back up. "There's enough for you, and me, and whoever is on that boat that needs to die."

It's Just Jim and me then, the rest will be told there's plenty to sell, that we've done a good job. They are so cracked, they'd come back to watch their families hang at this point.

"Boys, get moving, we've got company"

The shadow has grown larger on the horizon. We can make out the front, its a boat, a
cigarette one, blue teal, and we can see the shine left by the new chrome. I think we're in business.

Then the motor goes on, had it just been sitting there? Through the binoculars I can make out a set of rifles. There's familiarity there, in the way the motor races, like it's my boss and this is my last mission. We've been pirates for too long. The last few missons,they didn't go over to well.

"Let's play it cool boys, it's them, play it real calm like. Forrest! Calm! put the fucking gun's down!"

they're antsy, their fingers are sweaty. The boat is in clear view now, the upturned bow is planing on a small wave, and we can see the neck of the shift, as it sways through the surf. Two men stand on top, with goatees and sunglasses. They look pretty mean, but not the boss, not the boss.

It's them, the people whose coke we've all but consumed. They'll be pissed, right before their dead.

One of my boys up at the bow, his leg starts twitching like he's nervous.

"Forrest, what's wrong."

"The merchandise, is there any left?"

"there's plenty left, I brought extra that y'all didn't know about"

"Oh yeah?"

"How long have I been running these?"

"long time"

"Allright then, just be cool till they come aboard"

There's a seagull overhead now, his cawing is bleeding into the sound of the boat headed our way. What's he doing out this far?