With the sweet air in his lungs and his head clearing, Titus came to the knowledge he could do this man no harm. He’d picked up some Spanish while gambling with sailors laid up in Thunder Bay and was sure he could piece together enough words to inform the Panamanian of Vadim’s plot. Then Titus would throw himself at the mercy of this Visser. Titus had been beaten plenty in his life, and the thought of it didn’t quicken his pulse in the slightest. At worst he’d be thrown overboard.

The Panamanian couldn’t hear Titus when he called, so Titus touched him kindly on the shoulder. The man spun and his eyes cracked open and popped with panic and he started yelling in a guttural tongue that Titus had no acquaintance with. The words came faster the more he spoke, the way an avalanche gathers speed. He was something closer to black, light-skinned, but black. Tranquillo, Titus repeated a few times, until the man clenched his fist over his cigarette with a hiss and swung. Titus half-ducked and took it hard on the ear. They grappled. Perhaps it was his time in the hold, or the lack of oxygen, or his oat diet, but Titus did not find the strength he’d expected. They scuffled for some duration, each trying to upend the other, slipping wildly on the slick deck. When exhaustion took them, they spent some time in a clinch. Each instance the man made to cry out, Titus squeezed his chest and killed his breath. Titus tried every word in every language he knew of to reach him, even making some up, as the man breathed in his ear like a dog, but none of it registered inside him. After a period of rest, the man commenced thrashing in earnest and wailing his fists. Blows landed on Titus’s chin and face and neck. The man was strong and pinned Titus to the rail. Titus grabbed the seat of his rubber pants and desperately hoisted upward. Upended, the man clutched at the air and caught hold of the railing with a leg and an arm on his way over. Clinging there, he started calling in his inscrutable language toward the rear of the ship where the wheelhouse was. People’s names, sounded like, and Titus wondered momentarily if they corresponded to his parents, or friends, or crewmates. Panicked, blood and voices howling in him, Titus struck once at the man’s bulging throat and it yielded and instantly he lost all wherewithal to breathe. He choked like he’d swallowed a box of fishhooks, dangling there, before strength abandoned him and he dropped into the dark roar.

The next day Vadim came to the hatch with a grin. He lowered down a bucket on some twine. In it was cabbage, fried beef, potatoes, aromatic as anything ever put before him. “You have saved me, my friend,” Vadim said.

Titus sat looking at the bucket but did not touch it.

“But I must tell you. Visser is not happy about the losing crewman. He said he was sure-footed. Seasoned. And that he does not believe in falling accidents. So, Titus, they are searching the ship. And it won’t be long before they see the holds.”

“I’ll entomb myself here,” Titus said. Sculpting an old word in the air with his tongue comforted him.

“Don’t be stupid. There is weeks of your shit down here. They’ll find your traces.”

Titus looked beside him. Blood from his nose and face from when the Panamanian had struck him had left clumps in the oats like cat litter. “I knew this would transpire,” he said, unable to believe Vadim couldn’t tell he was already dead.

“Come, Titus. I’ve found you a new place.”

A great weariness came over each of his muscles. “I need to wash,” Titus said with a sudden distaste for his hands, the blood that had been on them.

“No, no, no—” Vadim began.

“Either that or I ring Visser,” Titus interrupted.

Grumbling, Vadim led him to the lockers at the base of the wheelhouse. Titus stripped, set the shower as hot as it would go and kept his head down, water hammering his neck as he hissed every word he’d ever known into the steam. He put his clothes at his feet, letting his own steps and the runoff clean them. He shaved with a razor he found hanging from a screw in the scummy tile. After, he wrung his clothes over the drain and pulled them on wet before returning to the hatch. He lay down, the oats coating him like batter.

Back in the dark, finally clean, Titus turned his soothed mind toward the walks he used to take with her to find the blue and yellow prairie wildflowers that grew all along the tracks that snaked their way east to the elevator. Sown by seeds that the threshers inadvertently swept up along with the grain, the flowers were found all the way down the line in high summer. The thought of this set him weeping.

Vadim returned that evening and helped Titus climb up onto the deck. He threw a line and looped it over a lifeboat hanging from some rigging high above. “They’ve already searched these, so they should be safe. And here,” Vadim said, handing Titus a laundry sack filled with oats and three jars of clear water. “I found some more vessels,” he said quickly.

Titus took the line and shimmied up to the boat. He snapped away the vinyl cover and crawled beneath it. The bench seats of the boat made it so there was nowhere to lie flat, and the wind rattled the craft as though it was airborne. He shivered when night came, piling the oats in the driest corner and wrapping himself in the laundry bag, missing the muffled gloom of the hold, the warmth of his nest like the afterglow of a lover.

The next day, he discreetly opened the part of the cover that faced outward and bathed various parts of his body in a triangle of sunlight. He tossed a few oats to the seabirds that followed in the ship’s wind, listening to their gorgeous shrieks, until a crowd began to form around his hiding place and that was the end of that.

It was the following day that Titus sighted the green shoulder of land. He tried releasing the lifeboat, but the mechanism was padlocked. Hurriedly, he drank all the water and sealed air in the jars as tight as he could manage and tied them up with his money and boots in the laundry bag. He drew back the vinyl cover and jumped as far out from the ship as he could manage to clear the engines. He bobbed for hours in the high waves, clutching the jars, which weren’t enough to buoy him completely but lessened his labors.

When he emerged from the seawater onto a mucky rise he was met by black men on rafts preparing some cylindrical traps. After he’d finished vomiting from exhaustion, one of the men prodded his chest with a fishing rod, probably to see if he was a ghost. But Titus could find no handhold in the sounds they made, could make no order of their faces. He walked inland from the dock and followed a baking dirt road for hours until he reached a disorienting city. There he found a bank. He handed them the money from his wallet and the smiling woman handed back colorful bills in a wad so enormous he had to distribute them among the pockets of his trousers.

He bought half of a barbecued goat and some yellowish fruit chunks in a plastic bag and brought it to a public sitting area. As he ate, garbage burned in a wire incinerator nearby, and the smell pleased him. He rented a room in a squalid hotel he felt he deserved and walked for hours each day, finding the Panamanian’s face in the crowds, as well as his best friend’s, speaking out loud to himself, happy at the incomprehensive looks he received in return. After a week of wandering, he asked for directions to a port where he contracted on a ship carrying chemicals out of Liberia.

After that he signed with other boats. Years passed at sea, quick as a shudder. Aughinish. Hamburg. Latvia. Antwerp. Murmansk. Vancouver. Shanghai. Rotterdam. New Orleans. Nagoya. Amsterdam. Hay Point. After all his time on the water, both stowed away and now as crew, he attuned himself to loneliness, to the captivity of oceangoing, to a life spent between ports. Visions rarely troubled him. Though he still disliked the talking required with the other crew, minimal as it was, and frequently retreated to his cabin to read and whisper into his pillow.