on the gunwale, hauling the boat tenderly, as if she were Mary on the donkey.

They all moved in the same direction across the wetlands.

“What time is it?” Jimmy said.

“There,” Angel said. “Your guys.”

Across the watery grasslands, the bad-joke Sailors Lon and Vince slogged through, dragging Drew with them.

They were in water up to their knees and easy to catch.

Jimmy pulled Drew away from Vince, the shorter one, and knocked down Lon, the tall one.

Drew wore a peacoat and watch cap now. Jimmy yanked at the lapel of Drew’s coat.

“They put this on you?”

“We didn’t do nothing,” Vince said.

“He did it,” Lon said.

“They said if I was with them I could go home,” Drew said.

Jimmy dragged him away.

“They lied,” he said.

Lon came back after him. Jimmy grabbed him by the back of the neck and shoved him facedown into the tide and held him there until his legs stopped kicking.

Angel pulled Jimmy’s hand away.

Lon surfaced, sucking in air again.

Vince half thought of coming after Angel. Angel hit him in the face for it, three quick blows, dropping him backwards into the water beside Lon.

“So this is where—” Drew began. It was like he was stoned.

“No,” Jimmy said.

“Come on,” Angel said.

And so Jimmy and Angel and Drew fell in with the others, moving like an arrow, all of them, in the landscape of refuse and nature, men and women, the moon reflected a hundred times in scattered shards of water. A wider, higher view would show their destination five-miles distant across the wetlands and then across the sculpted landscaping and empty parking lots of the Long Beach harbor.

There, lit like a cathedral, The Queen Mary.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Angel looked at the sky as they moved up the gangway. There was a little breeze. It was cool in that off-the-water way. A few clouds were crossing the moon.

Tonight it almost was blue.

“Beautiful night,” Angel said. He looked at Jimmy. “And it’ll be a good day tomorrow, whatever comes.”

Jimmy nodded, but didn’t look like a believer.

Not everything in the Sailor world had a name but this was called The Hour. It came—it was not an hour but a moment, a click of the clock—when the blue moon was at its zenith.

It would come tonight at forty-seven minutes after three.

The Hour had a certain formality to it, a ceremonial air, nothing handed down from on high but a man-designed affair which had become this over time. Or so the older Sailors said. They could have been lying or simply had it wrong. Theirs was not a holy order. A few Sailors were on the decks, leaning over the railing as people will do, smoking, watching the others. Some strolled the promenade deck, arm in arm. Others were just arriving. Everyone knew not to come too early so they all tended to appear at once, when the hour changed, when the last hour came.

The long iron gangway that during the day carried tourists onto the haunted black and white ship now carried the wetlands people, the people from The Pipe, the moody Sailors from downtown, regular citizens, the powerful from on high and the weakest of the weak.

All but the Walkers, who no longer knew to come, to hope.

As they stepped onto the gangway, some removed their peacoats and watch caps, threw them in a pile as if they’d never need them again. Underneath, some wore period clothes, clothes from their specific time, polyester from the seventies, denim from the sixties, a few ancient Sailors in wool suits who at least looked like they belonged on the Queen Mary. Some, like the people from the wetlands, walked in in that stunned, doomed way, but others were treating it like a holiday. Inside there would even be Sailors in festive costume as if putting on some other guise would better prepare them for what was to come.

At the end of the gangway, an officer greeted them, or at least a man in an offic er’s uniform. He nodded to each man or woman as they stepped aboard and checked his watch from time to time, a large gold pocket watch.

The pregnant woman from The Pipe stepped forward on the arm of her man. A gentleman in a cutaway tuxedo, vest, and striped trousers, certainly the oldest among them all, tipped his hat and gave a little bow. The woman blushed at the attention. The night had already become unreal and otherworldly, even for them.

The welcoming officer stopped the pregnant woman.

She wasn’t a Sailor.

The man with her protested but without much