by Joseph Wallace
It was a beautiful June day, confetti whirling upward toward the peaks of the skyscrapers, a quick wind chasing the last clouds away, the sun gleaming in the puddles left by a vanished rainstorm, flocks of trained pigeons flying overhead, wings snapping like an echo of distant gunfire.

I'd never seen the city so full of joy. Strangers hugged on the streets, children rode laughing on their fathers' shoulders, a young man and woman, barely more than teenagers, kissed passionately outside the Automat, then ran hand in hand across 42nd Street and kissed again outside the doors of Grand Central Station. I shoved them out of my way as I went past, sending them stumbling into a puddle of grayish water by the curb. That helped a little, but not enough. I knew that this was going to be my last view of New York City, and it made me sick to my stomach to see my beloved city sullied by such innocence and excitement.

Twenty minutes later I was aboard the Frying Pan, me and the clothes on my back and nothing else. Jack McCully had carved out a space from me in the corner of the galley. It cost me every penny I had, but the Ferret would have taken that anyway, and then he would have killed me. So it was worth it. Not that it was my money to start with. That was the problem.

Even though I wasn't included on the manifold, everyone on board the lightship knew I was there, even Captain Simpson. They just pretended I wasn't. I guess Jack spread my cash around to buy their silence, but I didn't ask questions. I just crawled into the corner of the galley and spread out the battered old blanket Jack had scrounged up for me somewhere. And sat, listening to the thrum of the engine and the happy shouts out on the pier, and waited for the boat to take off or the Ferret to find me, whichever came first.

*

I'd met Jack at Lady Rose's place on West 55th just three days ago. I'd drunk enough rotten gin to make my tongue loose, and along around three A.M. Jack and me were sitting on the stoop and started talking. I told him that I had two, maybe three, days before the Ferret caught up with me and sliced me into two even halves with that blade he used for taking the skins off oranges.

"Stay in one piece," Jack said. "Go someplace."

"There's noplace the Ferret won't find me," I told him.

"Sure there is," he said. "The Frying Pan."

I looked at him.

"It's the lightship I crew on."

"A lightship?" I laughed. "What, I get to hide out off New Jersey, watching you flash your lights at fishing boats, till we come back in for your next leave? I might as well let the Ferret get me now, save myself all the boredom."

But Jack was shaking his head. "You got it wrong," he said. "We been decommissioned. We ain't heading for Jersey. We're taking the old Pan across the Atlantic to Dakar. It's gonna get refitted and used as a ferry across a big river they got there. They already using some old Staten Island ferries for the job."

Now he had my interest. "A big river, huh," I said. "The Gambia?"

He stared at me, then nodded. "Yeah, I think so. How you know about that?"

"I always wanted to go to Africa," I said.

Jack leaned forward, his face full of gin-fueled friendship. "Well, sometimes you get to do what you want in this life."

*

The journey took more than a week. By the fourth day the Ferret had stopped taking over my dreams. During the day albatrosses scudded across our bows and dolphins rode our wake. Once, just as the sun was setting, it revealed a destroyer on the horizon, steaming home at the end of the long war. Heading back to the homeland I would never see again, back to a world full of new opportunities that would be denied to me forever.

At night I stood on deck, looking down at schools of phosphorescent squid glowing like drowned rainbows below the surface. On the ninth day the air smelled like sand. As a flock of tiny birds, blown off course by the stiff wind, fluttered to the deck, I saw Africa for the first time, a low brown line in the distance.

We landed on Goree Island at dawn. The ground seemed to roll under my feet as I stepped off the Frying Pan and walked among the crumbling stone buildings, the rotted ropes and rusting iron loops that had once held countless slaves about to begin their long journey to America. This was their last foothold in Africa, and they had spent it in chains.

I looked across the shallow straits to the mainland. The wind had blown a sandstorm over from the Sahara Desert, and the air was suffused with brownish haze. The rising sun, red and tired, hung low over the vast continent. My eyes were gritty, and the windblown sand seemed to cling to my hair, my skin, my clothes. Jack stood beside me. "Christ, look at that," he said. "It's the end of the world."

I took a deep breath, pulling the first rich smell of Africa deep into my lungs. Through the dusty air, I almost thought I could see the gold mines and cattle ranches and trading posts that were waiting for me over there.

"You got that wrong," I said. "It's the beginning."