April had just been beaten senseless for the third time. Her first week on the ship had not been bad. The captain was willing to take on a new hand, one without experience or papers, provided the new hand not choosy about where she slept, what she ate, or what kind of work she did. So April slept on rags in a corner of the engine room, ate whatever was left when everyone else had eaten, and worked harder than she had known it was possible to work lifting heavy crates, pulling at heavy cables, scraping paint off the ship's hull, cleaning foul-smelling gunk from the bilges. At the end of each fifteen-hour day, she dropped onto her rags, every muscle aching. but particularly the muscles in her back and calves, and drifted off to sleep despite the roar of huge machines only feet away. But despite the toil and discomfort, the first week was bearable because the Crew pretty much ignored her.
Her second week was bad. She was not ignored; she was tormented. It began when a wiry man, a bosun's mate, motioned for April to join him on the ships fantail. April smiled, thinking that she was finally going to make a friend.
The bosun grinned and said, "I am Hector. "
Still smiling, April neared the bosun and was kicked between her legs. She doubled over, falling to the deck, and without a word the bosun kicked her on the top of her head. April fell into a whirl of eddying color and awoke hurting.
The following day, a member of a different gang hit her with a garbage-can lid, and as April reeled against bulkhead, he tossed the lid aside and punched April, twice in the chest and once in the face. When April opened her eyes - a minute later? An hour? - her attacker was gone.
April went to the toilet and turned on a rusty faucet. She splashed cold, salty water on her bruises and tried to understand what was happening to her. An Initiation? Maybe that, but probably she was being hit because she was a stranger and life aboard ship was boring. Okay, she'd accept this reality and take what she could from it. She didn't like being punched and the color of her own blood held no delight for her, but she felt there were lessons to be learned here, and April was determined to learn them.
The bosun initiated the third attack. This time, April was ready and managed to land a blow before being knocked out. April awoke with water in her face. She looked up and saw the bosun standing over her with an empty pail.
"I teach you," the bosun said.
And he did—in odd, five-minute intervals between jobs, he educated April in dirty fighting. The lessons amounted to this: trust no one, hit first, preferably with something harder than a fist, and then hit or kick again, until your enemy can no longer resist. Then hit him once more. Or kick him. Or stomp him.
April had an idea of her own. Hector, and a lot of his other shipmates, were bigger and more powerful than she, the hard labor she'd been doing for months they'd been doing for years. But none of them seemed particularly bright, including Hector. By contrast, April was smart, as a whole battery of IQ tests had proven.
Okay, I can't outmuscle them, but I can out think them . . .
When they were within sight of land, April asked the captain about her salary. Salary? The captain chuckled. April was a stowaway and stowaways did not get paid.
After the ship was off-loaded and the crew had gone ashore, the bosun, Hector, invited April to the fantail.
"Let's see how good I teach you," he said.
Okay, pal, you asked for it . . .
While April was thinking about her first move, Hector knocked her down and began kicking her senseless.
April was starving.
She knew that her body had exhausted its store of fat and was consuming its muscle and that soon she would collapse and would probably lay in the filthy street until she died, unnoticed unless someone decided her rags were worth stealing. How long had it been since she had eaten? At least three days. It had been a cup of undercooked rice and April had gulped it down almost without chewing. She sat with her back against a tree, and raised her hand to her eyes and looked out over the African marketplace.
There were dozens of tents and tables heaped with fruit, vegetables, curried meats, and a throng of colorfully clad shoppers Inspecting, buying, and hurrying off to feed their families, April forced herself to her feet and joined the throng. She stopped by a fruit vendor, and as the old woman behind the table eyed her suspiciously, she picked up a mango in her right hand and made a show of examining it; with her left, she stole a plum from the table and dropped it into her pocket.
She hurried into an alleyway and bit into her plum and almost fainted from joy—the sweetness of it—nothing had ever tasted so good. Nothing could ever taste so good. She heard something; the slightest stirring, and saw a child, about four, squatting in a doorway. The child, a boy, was naked and covered with grime. His ribs stretched on his skin and his eyes, wide and glazed. The child gazed down at the half plum in April's fingers— the wonderful plum—and then handed it to the boy. April could probably get more food. The boy probably could not. Later, April was able to steal a handful of dates, and eat them, greedily sucking the last bits of flavor.
I've committed my first crime. I'm a criminal. Well, well, well.
The next day, April got herself hired by a tramp steamer and in the following months saw a lot of Africa and some of Asia. She jumped ship in Marrakesh, slept under a bridge for a couple of nights, and signed onto a tanker bound for the United Kingdom. She hung around London long enough to learn something about stealing cars from the ship's cook, then shipped out on a freighter and found herself in Shanghai. One Of the deckhands from her last ship had a way to make some quick, easy money, and April was interested. She went with the man, whom she had nicknamed "Stocky," and together they traveled by taxi to an airport terminal at the edge of the city. There, they sat on a bench across the street and watched laborers fill a truck with crates. That night, April felt fear, the fear of one preparing to commit a crime, and perversely, she was exhilarated by it. Stocky and April hijacked the truck: no problem, the driver was not about to be a hero. After the job was done and they were speeding down a dark road, April suddenly began to laugh. Soon she was laughing and gasping and pounding the dash board and Stocky, who was behind the wheel, began laughing, too.
"We did it," April said.
"We did it."
Stocky drove into a warehouse near the docks. The two climbed down from the truck's cab, still laughing.
In Mandarin, April asked Stocky, "Where is your friend? The man who is supposed to meet us?"
"Not a friend," Stocky replied. "The friend of a friend."
Something in Stocky's tone April voice, in his body language . . . April knew she was being lied to and began looking for an exit. She was considering a run at a side door when it slammed open and at almost the same second every other door in the warehouse opened and uniformed policemen with guns and truncheons ran through them, shouting in Mandarin. The policemen surrounded April and several other men who had been in the warehouse when he arrived, pointed guns at them, handcuffed them, and shoved them down to sitting positions on the floor. Stocky had vanished. Obviously, he had made a deal of some kind, traded April for his own freedom. The policemen began unloading the truck and stacking the crates near where April sat.
One of the policemen, a young man with cold eyes, asked April her name in English.
April considered telling him and decided against it. Whatever April was doing—and she still was not sure what it was—she knew she had to do it alone.
"I would rather not tell you," April said in Mandarin.
"Bitch, what do I care? You are a criminal. It doesn't matter anyway."
"I am not a criminal."
"Tell that to the guy who owned these," the policeman said, kicking a crate bearing a Mouser Enterprises logo.
April expected a formal internment procedure: a reading of her rights, an appearance before a judge, perhaps even a phone call. Because she continued to refuse to give the policemen her name, she got none of that. Instead, she was put into a cell with four other women. After a few days behind bars, someone got her released. She never learned the identity of her benefactor, but she was met outside the jail by a small Asian man wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and a diamond ring on his right index finger who asked her if she might be interested in some work in Bhutan. It seemed to be a given that the work would be illegal.
Why not? I'm already a criminal . . .
She was taken to a small airstrip in a rural area and put on a World War Two vintage aircraft, a refitted old DC 6, with smoking engines and no passenger amenities, and flown over the Himalayas to a similar airstrip in southwestern China. She never learned what she was supposed to do there because a company of soldiers armed with automatic weapons erupted from the surrounding woods as soon as the plane's engines had stopped and placed April and the two pilots under arrest. Obviously, another deal had been made, somewhere, by someone, with April as a bargaining chip.
As in Shanghai, April refused to give the authorities her name. She was taken to a prison near some farmland and told she would remain there until she cooperated.
Was this the time to reveal her identity? To call her aunt or Irma or maybe even one of the Turtles and go home? No. She still didn't know whatever it was she had to learn. She had a hunch, though, that her next lessons would be painful.
The first night, in the mess hall, as April was carrying a metal bowl of gruel to a table, one of the inmates stuck out a foot and tripped her. April broke her fall with her left hand and the bowl skittered across the floor. The man who had tripped April drew back a foot to kick. April grabbed the man's other leg and yanked and as the man was falling April threw an awkward punch and caught the man under the chin. The man's head snapped back and struck a chair and he lay still. April got up and looked around: the guards, who had not moved from their places along the wall, were grinning. Apparently they enjoyed a good fight.
April waited, without supper, until she was returned to her cell. She slept fitfully that night.
She snapped awake to find her cellmate, a young woman who looked to be at least twenty-two and was almost as skinny as the child April had shared her plum with in Africa, staring at her. Already, the corridors of the prison rang with shouts and the occasional scream.
"Did you 'ave a weird dream?" she said with Scottish accent.
"No" April said, "nightmare".
The next incident happened during the afternoon recreation break in the yard. The day was bleak. A cold drizzle was falling, turning the tan dust on the ground to a dark brown mud. April was walking toward the cover of a tower when someone grabbed her from behind in a choke hold. April drove her elbow into her attacker's ribs, twice, and reached back, grabbed the man's hair, pulled forward, and then got her shoulder under the attacker's chest and heaved. The attacker, a young man whose skin was mottled and flaking, fell into the mud.
April continued to the tower and hunkered down, scanning the yard, aware that he was being stared at. This is bad, she realized. Life had been hard on the ship and she had acquired a few scars, but none of the crewmen had actually wanted to kill her. They tormented her because they were bored, and sometimes drunk, and they did not know how else to amuse themselves. But here, these men . . . they were full of hate and rage and she was a stranger, not of their kind, and so she was their natural enemy, and enemies died.