Driftwood
by Pol Montgomery

The old man had been living in the whale’s belly for some seventeen days before the puppet passed, along with several pounds of shrimp and one sea cucumber, through the baleen filters.  The beast had been gluttonous this day and with each gulp, the old man had tumbled in the murky backwash.  He cursed and pounded at the slick walls of the belly for the eighth time that evening.  For an hour he’d been gathering undigested prawn, using his tunic as a collecting basin.  In this last surge he lost every one of them, once more delaying his supper. 

He didn’t recognize the puppet at first—the whale often ingested scraps of canvas and dunnage—and wondered if it might be the makings of a potential fire.  Warmth and a way out, he thought.  There was still a drum of whiskey from the wreck, and perhaps a bit of gunpowder.   If only he could keep the wood dry long enough. 

The driftwood blinked. 

The old man reeled.  He never expected to see the puppet again, not even when he booked passage on the trader.  There’d been days when he hardly thought of his search, so mired was he in the opportunities afforded a sailor.  When they’d docked in Barcelona he was privy to rumors of a wooden boy abroad in Africa, a treacherous and deceitful wretch with the tail of a donkey.  He never trusted these stories and dismissed them as fantasy.  But now he cradled his son, the puppet, in his hands.  He untangled its limbs with pruned, quivering fingers.  He prayed and kissed its forehead.

“Papa,” gurgled the puppet, a little uncertain in the dark.  It studied his arms and found familiar wrinkles mingling with strange tattoos.  For a moment, it tried to pull away. 

“Yes, lad,” said the old man.  “You’ve found me.” 

It had been three years and the puppet had done many terrible things.  But so had the old man.  There would be no questions of Africa.  Not tonight.  He lowered the puppet down. It cowered from the prawns flopping in the grime.

They huddled together in the wreckage of the lifeboat and slowly began to scheme.  The old man sucked the salt from the beard at the corners of his mouth.  Necessary to their escape, the boat itself was useless for firewood.  Each day the thing was slipping further and further toward the tail end, the very guts of the creature.  Earlier in the week, the captain’s cat had ventured into that darkness never to return.  Something needed to be done, lest the shadows take claim of everything.

“I could open the barrel,” he mused, “make the beast silly with drink.”  He laughed.  What good would that do them?

They began to pace.  Their footsteps made wet echoes. 

“Maybe we’re meant to stay here,” the puppet said.

“Maybe,” said the old man.  It seemed a dire penance.  But if he’d learned anything, it was that God was set in His ways. 

“I’d rather be home,” confessed the puppet.  “In the workshop.”

“We’ll think of something.”

They were both very quiet then, and the old man knew the puppet was thinking very hard.  He knew how that could be. 

“Do you know the day, little puppet?” he asked, but the puppet could only offer the month.  December.  The old man counted on his fingers.  “Christmas Eve, then.”  It was close enough.  “How did you ever find me?”      

The puppet pointed up above their heads.  “I followed that,” it said. 

“By God.” 

The rasping, puckering blowhole had been his sole window on the world, but the old man hadn’t noticed the star in those three weeks.  He looked at the puppet with something close to pride.  “That is called celestial navigation.  It is old, but very advanced.”

The puppet told him he’d made a wish.  This was something the old man hadn’t done in a long time.  He prayed before bed or whenever he was distraught.  But he hadn’t wished since he’d sold the workshop.  He’d forgotten what a wish could do.

“That’s older still,” said the old man.  “And even harder to get right.”

He sat down, nestling between the tips of two ribs.  The puppet asleep in his lap, he peered up and out to that same star.  And though his lips moved, he didn’t make a sound.