The Rattling Dancer
Short Fiction
Being at sea for days always creates an altered perception. The strange vistas of blue and gray, the constant search for a flicker of light indicative of a human presence, the rocking to and fro in the immemorial evening, the endless night skies all take the seafarer into an alien realm. By the time a ship makes land fall the sailors dreams have welled up deep from within the traveler. At first the a distant horizon my appear hazy and then the littoral zone will etch itself upon the horizon. Sailors will gather at the rail to verify that the scant sketches of difference separating the sea from the sky are in fact earth. Upon occasion upon this realization a sailor will break out into a few steps of a jaunty jig.
Other sailors will meet the swells of intuition that arise at sea in other ways. Among the ship's musicians a text concerning Zen meditation practice may be passed about. One sailor steeped in Zen would evoke the face of an animal as he would pass a fellow musician in the narrow passage ways of the ship interior, hissing or growling quietly to let his fellow know his spirit yet remained free.
Others dreamed of fair skinned full breasted mermaids whose cold hue was adorned with wild strands of sea weed. They swimming along side the ship diving before the bow as it cut through the crystalline aquamarine filling the waves with foam as the sailors slept deep inside the ribbed body of the vessel.
Raoule would often awaken from his dreams of the mermaids in the middle of the night to take a meditative seat cross legged below the bridge of the ship's bow. He would watch his thoughts rise and fall with his breath his mind emptying to the space of the galactic vaults of the night skies above him. He would monitor the power residing in his solar plexus. He would sit in empty perception for hours in the mid night as the vessel heaved and fell in dark strange waters a cool frothy mist enveloping him in a subtle salty glistening aura. Finally, Raoule was over come with the memory of the taste of a spice coffee from his time in Mombasa. Now he road the strange night passages of ancient oriental currents in the night rhythms of the Northern Indian Ocean.
Suddenly a figure materialized before Raoule on the bow in the cool salty mist of the night sky, a skeleton dancing on a tiger skin wearing a necklace of golden monkey skulls. The skeleton danced a rattily jig like the sailor spotting land fall. Raoule's breathe stopped quietly as his body tensed in the presence of the apparition. Above on the bridge he could hear the quiet beep of a radar scan and imagined the green glow that the radar screen cast on its operator and on the ceiling of the bridge above. Yet here the apparition of the rattling dancer of with luminescent bones was real.
Soon the apparition faded never ceasing its rattling dance and Raoule stared intently into the ink black sky above. There were rumors of Russian freight ships in the Straights of Hormuz. One sailor had reported seeing a Soviet ship laden with tractors heading for the Horn of Africa the day before. Upon leaving the Red Sea one sailor who fought the ocean dreams jumped ship and attempted to swim ashore from fifteen miles out. A young officer a year and a half out of Annapolis had jumped ship in the Caribbean and suffered a collapsed lung attempting to drunkenly escape his billet.
The gravity of the nuclear payload was palpable. The rocket launched nuclear depth charges were hardly deployed at a distance where the fleeing ship which had deployed could escape the shock wave of a detonation. The frigate was an imperfect platform, though its sonar and radar capacities made for particular value to the fleet command.
Raoule finally left the bow as the faintest halo of sunrise touched the Eastern horizon. Breakfast was being served by now the galley. Raoule waited in line receiving word that the Egyptian President had been assassinated in a military coup the night before. The frigate had called on Alexandria six weeks prior, the street corner presence of the military dictatorship ubiquitous. Finally, Raoule asked for scrambled eggs and bacon. Fresh fruit had been flown in from the supply depot in Memphis and on loaded in Mombasa. This morning Raoule would have diced melon with his eggs, slightly preoccupied the rattling dancer who visited him in his mediation beneath the fo'cstle that had ended a short time before at dawn.