Ferry
By Barry Yourgrau
A member of a criminal gang rides a ferry crossing the strait to the Eastern side of the sprawling, water-hallowed city. He has a grim task to carry out. A former member of the gang has gone into hiding there, after being implicated in an ill-planned but ambitious scheme involving one of the gang’s gambling operations. Discovered, he made off with confidential documents which he hopes will secure his safety and safe flight very shortly when turned over to a rival gang.
But his former associates have found out where he’s gone to ground (literally, in a basement room on a street of dingy shops). The gunman on the ferry is on his way to retrieve the stolen documents and put an end to the desperate fugitive’s escape plans. He carries a discreet but lethal revolver in his pocket.
But he is strangely uneasy, as he sits on the ferry’s open rear deck, in the smart hard-brimmed straw hat and dandyish ankle boots he likes to effect on his business doings. Getting on board, he tripped on the ramp. This is a bad omen to commence a serious mission. Then once aboard, a second bad omen: his little glass of tea splashed on these same tripping boots. He is a veteran of the grim criminal life; but the slim, nervous type, a scrutinizer of hazards and portents, not devil-may-care and thoughtless.
And now he gasps in shock and swarms to his feet, clapping wildly at his head. But too late: a malicious gust of wind has torn off his dapper straw hat. It bounces twice on its rim along the bench topping and sails away overboard.
The gunman stares after it in horror. His heart contracts in foreboding. He looks around, aimlessly, then sinks down onto his bench in consternation. Several of the scattered passengers grin over at him. He glares back stonily.
The ferry blasts its horn, approaching the landing. It slows to a halt, and pivots churning and lumbering, and shoulders against the wharf side. The elegant gunman sits bareheaded and immobile, fists clenched, caught in the vice of duty and the dark insistences of omen. A sign in threes can’t be ignored. And to lose your hat in this part of the world is an intimate symbolism. Minutes tick by. A couple of times the gunman starts to rise to his feet, staring at the jetty, hand on the revolver in his pocket.
But when the horn blares again, and the ferry churns and swings about and heads back toward the Western shore, he remains there, hunched on his bench.
Sweat beads on his brow. The breeze licks at his bare head, as if taunting. He squirms and twists, smoking cigarettes in clenched teeth, trying feverishly to calculate what he’s brought himself to. The ferry draws on to the landing he departed from less than an hour ago—in a different world, it seems. Heart in turmoil, he stands slowly up as the ferry boat bumps against its mooring. But what exactly will he answer? How will he explain his failure to those who entrusted him with his critical mission? An evil wind blew his hat off? Some tea splashed on his boot?
He sinks unsteadily back to his seat. Then he wrenches back up. He stands throbbing at the railing, clutching savagely on a pole, gaping down at the passenger ramps. The horn blares; the ferry heaves and starts on its way. The gunman groans, under the weight of his auguries and what they have spawned. Seagulls beat alongside the ferry; the domes and minarets of the great edifices slowly unfold the timeless panorama of the retreating shore.
The ferry boat tracks across the strait, swaying over the wake of a passing freighter to the opposite shore, then pivoting and heading back again. Its desperate hostage remains on board, transfixed between destinies, unable to dare to disembark. East to West, West to East the ferry churns, little grey streaks of anguished cigarette smoke trailing back now and then beneath the thick charcoal billows from its old yellow smokestack. The sun sinks, the fabled citadels on the shore hills turn to silhouette in the golden dusk; the calls to prayer float out in the first starlight. The moon rises and rides, and still the gunman hunches on his bench, fingering his bare head, the revolver tame in his pocket.
In another world he perhaps would ride the ferry like this forever, avoiding a choice of fates, suspended to infinity between the rims of two continents. But in this world, ferries have schedules and last crossings.
The ferry boat thuds a final time for the day on the Eastern landing. The supposed agent of doom slinks ashore, traumatized and bewildered, doubtless marked for doom himself now. He will find somewhere to hide himself, too, like the other, deep in these grimy alleys, while he tries to figure out the monstrous puzzle that has caught him—that a gust of wind has spun out about him.
A few miles away down the strait, the moon for a minute or two lights up a second tiny moon—the gunman’s jaunty straw hat, caught in some rocks on the shoreline.
The current has carried it off by the next morning, when another gunman stands at the jetty on the Western shore, waiting to cross to the Eastern side. He has this new critical problem to resolve: two fugitives. The ferry boat thuds to its mooring; the arrivers hurry off. And the gunman, grim and smartly dressed, starts up the ramp, adjusting the tilt of his fine hat in the breeze.
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Writer-performer Barry Yourgrau is the author of books of surreal, funny, intensely short stories, including A Man Jumps Out of An Airplane, Wearing Dad’s Head, Haunted Traveller, and The Sadness of Sex, in whose film version he starred. He’s also written a memoir, Mess, and anti-kids’ stories for kids, Nastybook, and is the only American author who’s published short fiction on Japanese cellphones (keitai sosetsu) His work has a fine following in Japan. Yourgrau’s fictions have appeared in New Yorker.com, The Paris Review, VICE, Story, Bomb, Poetry, Film Comment, Monkey Business Int’l, Little Star, Harvard Design Magazine, and various anthologies. He’s also written for the NY Times, New Yorker.com, Wall St. Journal, Spin, Paris Review Daily, The Baffler, HuffPost, Salon, Independent (U.K.), Artforum. Born in South Africa, he now lives between New York and Istanbul and travels a lot.