Night came fast out on the open water.
One moment the sun was a smear of orange on the horizon, the next it was gone and the stars were out and the wind had gone cold.
The crew ate quick and turned in.
Nobody wanted to be awake for whatever came next.
The ships went quiet.
Lanterns got doused one by one until the only light left was the moon and the soft glow coming from the galley.
That was where Bjorn found the last of the cargo hold alcohol.
He had gone looking for a nightcap.
That was his story and he was sticking to it.
What he actually found was a barrel tucked away behind the salted fish, a dark rum that smelled like burnt sugar and old wood.
The good stuff.
The stuff the captain had been saving.
Bjorn looked at it for about two seconds before he cracked it open.
The cork hit the ceiling.
Pickem found him not long after.
The little man had been sulking on the bow, nursing a grudge and a bruised rib.
But rum smells travel.
They travel especially well when they are coming out of an open barrel on a quiet night.
Pickem followed his nose down to the galley and found Bjorn sitting cross legged on the floor with the barrel between his knees like a mother cradling a babe.
“Oi,” Pickem said.
Bjorn looked up.
His eyes were already glassy.
“Oi yourself,” he said.
There was a long pause.
“You gonna share that, or you gonna sit there hugging it all night?” Pickem asked.
Bjorn stared at him.
Then he reached into the barrel, cupped a handful of rum, and flung it.
It hit Pickem square in the face.
Pickem stood there dripping.
Then he laughed.
It was a wheezy, surprised laugh that turned into a cough.
“fucking cunt,” he said, but he was grinning.
That was how it started.
An hour later they were both shitfaced beyond all reason and the barrel was half gone.
Bjorn drank straight from the barrel.
He had picked up a cup at some point, looked at it, and tossed it over his shoulder.
What good was a cup when a man could just tip the whole barrel?
Pickem, on the other hand, had found a shot glass.
A tiny thing meant for measuring spices.
In his two foot hands it looked like a tavern tankard.
He was treating it like one too, sloshing it around, raising it high, slamming it down on the table between them.
“Cheers, you great lumbering bastard,” Pickem said, lifting his glass.
“Cheers, you little shit,” Bjorn said, lifting the barrel.
They drank.
The rum did its work fast.
All the sharp edges of the day went soft.
Bjorn set the barrel down with a heavy thunk and stared at Pickem with the kind of watery, wobbling affection that only comes from a man who is very drunk.
“Pickem,” he said.
“What?”
“I love you, man.”
Pickem blinked.
“What?”
“I said I love you. I fucking love you, man. You’re my best friend.” Bjorn’s voice cracked on the last word.
“You’re the best mate a man could ask for and I treated you like shit today and I’m sorry.”
Pickem’s face went through about six expressions in three seconds.
Then his eyes went red and wet.
He set his glass down and his chin started to wobble.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Don’t you start, you big red bastard, because I’ll cry, and I don’t cry.”
Bjorn was already crying.
Fat drunk tears rolled down his face and into his beard.
“I threw you off the ship. I threw you TWICE. I choked you.”
“I was a right asshole today. I called your mother a whore.”
“She was a whore, I was born during the winter and I didn’t get a name till i was 3” Bjorn said.
“Still,” Pickem said.
“It was out of line.”
There was a moment of silence.
Then they both lunged.
Bjorn scooped Pickem up in his massive arms and crushed him against his chest.
Pickem’s tiny arms could not even reach halfway around Bjorn’s neck, but he was hugging back with everything he had.
“I love you, you little rat,” Bjorn sobbed into Pickem’s hair.
“I love you too, you giant cunt,” Pickem sobbed into Bjorn’s beard.
It went on like that for a while.
They traded apologies for every grievance they had ever held against each other.
Bjorn apologized for the time he ate Pickem’s birthday cake.
Pickem apologized for the time he put laxatives in Bjorn’s stew.
Bjorn apologized for every time he had accidentally sat on him.
Pickem apologized for every time he had deliberately bitten him.
They apologized for the monster bounty, for the last twelve years, for the very day they met.
“I been a shit partner,” Bjorn hiccuped.
“No, I been a shit partner,” Pickem hiccuped back.
“You’re the best partner a man ever had.”
“No, YOU’RE the best partner.”
“Stop being nice, it’s weird.”
“You stop being nice, it’s weirder.”
At some point Pickem tried to stand up and fell over.
Bjorn tried to help him up and fell over on top of him.
They lay on the galley floor in a heap, laughing so hard they could not breathe.
Pickem’s hiccups were going off one after another, and every time he hiccuped Bjorn laughed harder, and every time Bjorn laughed harder the whole ship shook a little.
“I ‘ave to take a piss,” Pickem announced.
“I ‘ave to take a shit,” Bjorn announced.
“Then let’s sing,” Pickem said, as if that made any sense at all.
Bjorn hauled himself upright.
He grabbed Pickem by the scruff of his shirt and set him on top of his head.
Pickem sat up there with both tiny hands wrapped in fistfuls of red hair to keep his balance.
“The song,” Bjorn said.
“The Fluvenmire SHANTY.”
“YES,” Pickem shouted.
“THE SONG.”
They started to sing.
It was loud.
It was off key.
It was the single most obnoxious sound that had ever come out of either ship.
“Catch a sea beast by the tail and throw him in the waaater!”
Bjorn’s voice was a bellowing roar.
Pickem’s was a high, reedy shriek stacked right on top of it.
They were both completely tone deaf.
“We’re setting sail! No land in sight! So say bye to your mother!”
Pickem was bouncing on Bjorn’s head with the rhythm.
Bjorn was stomping in a circle, nearly taking out the table.
“With stockpiling of the wind charge! Look how fast we are sailing!”
They hit the last lines at full volume, shrieking them together like a pair of possessed seagulls.
“OH GEE! THERE’S A PIECE OF LAND! THERE’S NO CHANCE WE ARE FAILING!”
They sang it again.
And again.
And again.
Every time they finished, they just started over from the top.
The same eight lines, over and over, growing louder and more off key with every pass.
Up in the crew quarters, men were groaning.
A sailor threw his pillow at the door.
The cook, who had been asleep for two hours, sat bolt upright and screamed.
The ships were dead quiet except for that one endless song and the sound of grown men weeping into their bunks.
“Someone make them stop my ears are fooking bleeding!” a voice wailed from below.
“Throw them overboard!” another shouted.
“I’d do it myself if I wasn’t so scared of the big one!” a third admitted.
The song went on for another hour.
Bjorn and Pickem staggered through every corner of the ship, bellowing at the top of their lungs, waking every man aboard.
By the time they finally collapsed, Bjorn on a pile of rope and Pickem still on his head, the sky was starting to turn grey.
Morning came with all the gentleness of a boot to the face.
The sun was brutal.
The light stabbed through every crack in the hull.
Somewhere a bird was shrieking and it sounded like it was inside Bjorn’s skull, which it might as well have been.
(bird brain joke)
Bjorn woke up face down on the deck with a mouth that tasted like a dead man’s sock and a head that felt like someone had been hammering on it all night.
Pickem was curled up in the hollow of his collarbone, twitching.
“Whuh,” Bjorn said.
“Shut up,” Pickem said.
His voice was barely a whisper.
“Shut your mouth. Don’t speak. If you speak I will die.”
Bjorn sat up.
The world tilted violently.
He grabbed his head with both hands.
“Fuck,” he groaned.
“Fuck fuck fuck.”
Pickem rolled off his chest and landed on the deck with a soft thump.
He lay there on his back, staring up at the sky with the thousand yard stare of a man who had seen too much.
“You,” Pickem said, pointing a shaking finger at Bjorn.
“This is your fault.”
“My fault?” Bjorn croaked.
“How’s this my fault?”
“You egged me on! You know my limit is a quarter pint and you sat there with your barrel going ‘one more, one more’ the whole fahking night!” Pickem’s voice was getting stronger as his anger built.
“I can’t handle that stuff and you knew it!”
“Not my fault you drank yourself to death,” Bjorn grumbled.
“Nobody held your little glass up for you.”
“Oh, how about I fucking kill you then, ey?” Pickem shoved himself to his feet.
He wobbled, steadied himself, and jabbed a finger at Bjorn’s face.
“How about that? Want a second round? Want me to finish what I started yesterday?”
Bjorn rose to his full height, swaying badly on his feet.
“You couldn’t finish a glass of water without hiccuping, little man.”
“COME HERE!”
“YOU COME HERE!”
They were back at it.
Screaming across the deck, fists up, both of them pale and shaking and miserable but too stubborn to back down.
The crew who had been woken up by their singing the night before watched them go at each other again with a grim, exhausted acceptance.
A maid shuffled past with a bucket and a mop.
Her eyes were bloodshot.
She had not slept.
None of them had.
She stopped next to a coworker who was leaning against the wall with a cup of what was probably the first of many cups of coffee.
“Do they do this all the time?” she asked.
Her voice was flat.
The coworker took a long sip of coffee.
She did not even look at the fighting.
“They’ve been partners for twelve years,” she said.
“This bickering’s been going on since they picked up a monster bounty back in the day. First one they ever took together.”
The maid stared.
“And they’re still together after all that?”
“Partners,” the coworker said.
“That’s the thing about partners. You can hate each other every waking hour and still not want anyone else at your back.”
The maid watched Bjorn and Pickem scream at each other for another moment.
Then she sighed, dipped her mop in the bucket, and went back to work.
She needed a new job.