Travis had just entered the room when he heard a woman screaming in the dark.

“It’s alright, Cassie,” another woman’s voice said, followed by more voices and encouragement.

Travis ran over. Several flashlights illuminated the scene. A woman was in labor, lying on the floor. Her pants were off. A friend supported her from behind. Dr. Joel Conrad kneeled between her legs.

“Travis!” the doctor shouted. “Get to the clinic! No one here knows where anything is. You know what I need? We’ve got water already, need everything else.”

“On my way.”

Travis flew.

When he returned with soap, gloves, forceps, scissors, sterile pads, sutures and needles the delivery had progressed. The woman was crying, and only one of her friends continued to encourage her, as others backed away fearing tragedy. The father knelt behind her, silent.

“Push!” Conrad said.

She cried and grunted.

“I’ve got the head,” Conrad shouted.

The umbilical cord was tangled. Travis and Conrad worked together to get it clear.

“Almost there,” Travis said. “Come on!”

The woman screamed, her friends again encouraged her, hope returning, and then the baby’s cries pierced it all.

“A healthy girl!” Conrad shouted.

There was a cathartic cry from around them, and around the room, a joyful sob.

From the shadows came a long swirling and bubbly run of notes from a clarinet, and then the musician’s comrades joined in, a small jazz combo with a joyous Dixieland tune. Travis held the baby and cleaned it, while Conrad tied and cut the umbilical cord. Travis’s eye stayed on the tiny toes, and he thought of Darren’s birth, that beautiful boy. He’d felt so much hope on that day, and on this day, he couldn’t help but feel it again.

The father took the baby, both of them crying. He collapsed to his knees and passed the girl to the mother who sobbed uncontrollably.

The sound of the clarinet, trumpet, trombone, banjo and tuba soaked them in a heavenly joy, and they all laughed and cried.

“Trying to work here!” Conrad complained with happiness in his voice as he cleaned and sutured the mother’s skin tears.

Travis too found himself on his knees laughing and crying, and the band played on. Suddenly Travis was pulled up and dancing with strangers in the dark, and soon they all danced in a circle around the mother and father and baby and doctor. They had all hungered for something to let them feel good. He thought of his baby boy, the first time he held him, and the smile stretched so far his cheeks began to hurt.

When it was over, and he’d thrown out his gloves and washed his arms, Travis felt high. He put his arm around the doctor.

“How have you been?” Travis said.

“Good now, my friend. Come, let’s celebrate. Come with me.”

The cardiac surgeon put his arm around the shoulder of the paramedic and led him down a large hallway, then down flights of stairs to a small side-hallway, where they could hear rock-and-roll music.

32

“Welcome to the Viking Sports Hall,” Conrad said, “or as I like to call it, the Bowels of the Festival.”

It was a Viking themed sports bar. There were rough wood long-tables, bulky beams overhead, and creatures of Norse mythology in sports jerseys. Eight-foot Thor, holding his hammer in the air, wore a Michael Jordan pinny. The All-Father Odin, on a throne, wore Fran Tarkenton’s purple Minnesota Vikings jersey and cradled a signed football in his lap. Big screen TVs dotted the walls between the portholes. They were here just above the water level, and it occasionally washed the window with green spray and champagne foam, so that they felt as though traveling in a Viking longboat.

Dividing the booths, extending from the outer wall were replica ship masts with carved maiden figureheads, each with famous sports jerseys painted to their torsos. There was Edmonton’s 99, Cleveland’s 32, San Francisco’s 24, and Brazil’s 10.

There were a few dozen refugees and tourists in the bar, and the sound of loud chatter. A stereo system played Bruce Springsteen, and a young man and woman, dressed in informal server’s outfits in the ship’s colors, served drinks with smiles on their faces to customers with smiles on their faces. They’d get tips occasionally.

There were young and old, two very pretty girls danced, people sat in booths and at tables, in groups freshly made or with their own. They drank pitchers and cocktails. A young couple in the corner booth smoked a joint. Travis saw the woman Conrad had been with on the deck. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

“The bartenders opened it up,” Conrad said, leading Travis over to the bar. “The captain had them lock up all the booze, but the captain – he dead. What’ll you have? It’s on me. Everything’s warm, by the way, but we got a guy working on siphoning some juice for the fridges down here. And the beer taps work. They got the stereo on batteries, can you believe it?”

“Guinness,” Travis said.

“One Guinness, one scotch and soda. Big one this time, Sue-Anne, what are we saving it for? A better class of customer?”

Sue-Anne laughed and got them their drinks.

“Yeah. The bartenders are good people,” Conrad said as they carried the drinks to their table. “They work a few hours, then let some of the others work behind the bar, and they drink, or go out, wherever the hell they go. They’ve been raiding the cabin mini-bars. They sleep here. In the back room. They just make sure the bar’s well stocked so no one bothers them. I assume they’re engaging in what we call sex, but who knows?”

Conrad’s mistress sat at a table with a tourist couple. Conrad sat next to her, and the couple made space for Travis. Conrad introduced him around. The couple were honeymooners, Travis figured. Conrad’s mistress he introduced as Marianna. She was very beautiful, and smiling. Conrad told the others how he’d worked with Travis after the pirates.

“What have you been doing?” Travis asked.

“I’m retired from medicine. I keep getting dragged back in, I admit. Yesterday I killed a guy. Well, I didn’t kill him. But I didn’t save him. Man, bullet wounds are getting old. We’ve been staying in a stateroom on the fifth deck- abandoned. Left some nice clothes though, don’t you like this shirt?”

“It’s silk,” Marianna said.

“Are you by yourself?” the man next to Travis said.

“I’m with my family, kind of,” Travis said.

“We just met,” the woman said, her arm entwined with the man’s. “I was actually on the cruise with someone else. But it’s funny, you can fake loving someone your whole life until you think you’re about to die, and then you don’t want to anymore.”

“I’m sick of talking about that stuff,” Conrad said.

“The way I see it,” Marianna said to Travis in a New York Puerto Rican accent, “we’re gonna die or we’re gonna live if we get rescued or not. Either way, we can’t do anything about it.  My gramma always taught me not to worry about things one cannot affect. So… let’s party!”

She screamed a party scream, YEAAAAAH, and raised her beer, and the couple screamed and raised their drinks, and Conrad raised his. Around, a few others screamed and raised their drinks.

Travis raised his to the other four.

It was strange at first for Travis, a room full of smiling people. He hadn’t seen that since it had begun. He was disconcerted. But he felt great seeing smiling people again, it was intoxicating. He enjoyed Claude for the same reason, he seemed unaffected by what went wrong, and in his humor Travis felt an outlet for the stress inside himself. Here in the Viking Sports Hall it was an unexpected vacation from the seriousness of everything. He realized he was smiling, too, at their audacity, their exuberance in the face of everything. Their defiant exuberance.

He stayed for two more beers. In his hungry, tired state he felt drunk. In the end, he pulled his wallet out and tipped the bartenders twenty dollars. He had sixty-five left. He wondered at the idiocy of holding onto this money and thought of throwing it all on the bar. But wouldn’t he feel like an ass if a little money somehow came in handy later?