by Boyle, T. C.
The last of the sun was tangled up in the mist ahead of them, due west and west the sun doth sink, the lines of a nursery rhyme scattered in her head. She lifted her feet to the varnished rail and studied her toes, seeing where the polish had faded and thinking to refresh it when she had the chance, when the boys were fishing in the morning and she was stretched out in the sun without a care in the world. The engines hummed. A whole squadron of dark beating birds shot up off the water and looped back again as if they were attached to a flexible band, and not a one of them made the slightest sound. She lit a cigarette, the wind in her hair, and watched her husband through the newly washed windows as he held lightly to the wheel while his brother sat on the upholstered bench beside him, talking, always talking, but in dumb show now because the cabin door was shut and she couldn’t hear a word.
She finished her cigarette and let the butt launch itself into the wind on a tail of red streamers. It was getting chilly, the sky darkening, closing round them like a lid set to an infinite iron pot. One more minute and she’d go in and listen to them talk, men’s talk, about the pie in the sky, the fish in the sea, the carburetors and open-faced reels and lathes and varnishes and tools and brushes and calibrators that made them men, and she’d open another beer too, a celebratory last beer to top off the celebratory three—or was it four?—she’d already had. It was then, just as she was about to rise, that the sea suddenly broke open like a dark spewing mouth and spat something at her, a hurtling shadowy missile that ran straight for her face till she snapped her head aside and it crashed with a reverberant wet thumping slap into the glass of the cabin door and both men wheeled round to see what it was.
She let out a scream. She couldn’t help herself. This thing was alive and flapping there at her feet like some sort of sea bat, as long as her forearm, shivering now and springing up like a jack-in-the-box to fall back again and flap itself across the deck on the tripod of its wings and tail. Wings? It was—it was a fish, wasn’t it? But here was Till, Warren bundled behind him, his face finding the middle passage between alarm and amusement, and he was stepping on the thing, slamming his foot down, hard, bending quickly to snatch the slick wet length of it up off the deck and hold it out to her like an offering in the grip of his good hand. “God, Bev, you gave me a scare—I thought you’d gone and pitched overboard with that scream.”
Warren was laughing behind the sheen of merriment in his eyes. The boat steadied and kept on. “This calls for a toast,” he shouted, raising the beer bottle that was perpetual with him. “Bev’s caught the first fish!”
She was over her fright. But it wasn’t fright—she wasn’t one of those clinging weepy women like you saw in the movies. She’d just been startled, that was all. And who wouldn’t have been, what with this thing, blue as gunmetal above and silver as a stack of coins below, coming at her like a torpedo with no warning at all? “Jesus Lord,” she said, “what is it?”
Till held it out for her to take in her own hand, and she was smiling now, on the verge of a good laugh, a shared laugh, but she backed up against the rail while the sky closed in and the wake unraveled behind her. “Haven’t you ever seen a flying fish before?” Till was saying. He made a clucking sound with his tongue. “Where’ve you been keeping yourself, woman?” he said, ribbing her. “This is no kitchen or sitting room or steam-heated parlor. You’re out in the wide world now.”
“A toast!” Warren crowed. “To Bev! A-number-one fisherwoman!” And he was about to tip back the bottle when she took hold of his forearm, her hair whipping in the breeze. “Well then,” she said, “in that case, I guess you’re just going to have to get me another beer.”
She woke dry-mouthed, a faint rising vapor lifting somewhere behind her eyes, as if her head had been pumped full of helium while she slept. In the berth across from her, snug under the bow as it skipped and hovered and rapped gently against the cushion of the waves, Till was asleep, his face turned to the wall that wasn’t a wall but the planking of the hull of the ship that held them suspended over a black chasm of water. Below her, down deep, there were things immense and minute, whales, copepods, sharks and sardines, crabs infinite—the bottom alive with them in their horny chitinous legions, the crabs that tore the flesh from the drowned things and fed the scraps into the shearing miniature shredders of their mouths. All this came to her in the instant of waking, without confusion or dislocation—she wasn’t in the double bed they were still making payments on or stretched out on the narrow mattress in the spare room at her parents’ house where she’d waited through a thousand hollow echoing nights for Till to come home and reclaim her. She was at sea. She knew the rocking of the boat as intimately now as if she’d never known anything else, felt the muted drone of the engines deep inside her, in the thump of her heart and the pulse of her blood. At sea. She was at sea.
She sat up. A shaft of moonlight cut through the cabin behind her, slicing the table in two. Beyond that, a dark well of shadow, and beyond the shadow the steps to the bridge and the green glow of the controls where Warren, with his bunched muscles and engraved mouth, sat piloting them through the night. She needed—urgently—to use the lavatory. The head, that is. And water—she needed a glass of water from the tap in the head that was attached to the forty-gallon tank in the hold that Till had made such a fuss about because you couldn’t waste water, not at sea, where you never knew when you were going to get more. It had got to the point where she was almost afraid to turn on the tap for fear of losing a single precious drop. What was that poem from high school? “Water, water, every where/Nor any drop to drink.”
The mariner, that was it. The ancient mariner. And he just had to go and kill that bird, didn’t he? The albatross. And what was an albatross anyway? Something big and white, judging from the illustration in the book she’d got out of the library. Like a dinosaur, maybe, only not as big. Probably extinct now. But if albatrosses weren’t extinct and one of them came flapping down out of the sky and perched itself on the bow right this minute, she wouldn’t even think about shooting it. Uh-uh. Not her. For one thing, she didn’t have a gun, and even if she had one she wouldn’t know how to use it, but then that wasn’t the point, was it? If the poem had taught her anything—and she could hear the high-pitched hectoring whine of her twelfth-grade English teacher, Mr. Parminter, rising up somewhere out of the depths of her consciousness—it was about nature, the power of it, the hugeness. Don’t press your luck. Don’t upset the balance. Let the albatross be. Let all the creatures be, for that matter . . . except maybe the lobsters. She smiled in the dark at the recollection of Mr. Parminter and that time that seemed like a century ago, when poems and novels and theorems and equations were the whole of her life. She could hardly believe it had only been four years since she’d graduated.
Her bare feet swung out of the berth. The deck was solid, cool, faintly damp. She was wearing a flannel nightgown that covered her all the way to her toes, though she wished she’d been able to wear something a little sheerer for Till’s sake—but that would have to wait until they were back home in the privacy of their own bedroom. She was modest and decent, not like the other girls who’d gone out and cheated on their men overseas the first chance they got, and she just didn’t feel comfortable showing herself off in such close quarters with Warren there, even if he was Till’s brother. She’d seen the way Warren looked at her sometimes, and it was no different from what she’d had to endure since she’d begun to develop in the eighth grade, leers and wolf whistles and all the rest. She didn’t blame him. He was a man. He couldn’t help himself. And she was proud of her figure, which was her best feature because she’d never be what people would call pretty, or conventionally pretty anyway—she just didn’t want to give him or anybody else the wrong idea. She was a one-man woman and that was that. Unlike Sandra, who looked as if she’d been around and who’d shown herself off in a two-piece swimsuit when they’d run the boat down to San Pedro the week before—in a breeze that had her in goosebumps all over and wrapp
ed in Warren’s jacket by the time they got back to the dock. But thank God for small mercies: Sandra had been unable to join them this time around. She had an engagement in North Hollywood, whatever that meant, but then that wasn’t Beverly’s worry, it was Warren’s.
She slipped into the head, used the toilet, drained her glass of water and then drained another. Her stomach was queasy. That last beer, that was what it was. She ran her fingers through her hair and felt all the body gone out of it, though she’d washed and set it just that morning. Or yesterday morning, technically. But she was at sea now and she’d have to make do—and so would Till, who expected her to be made-up and primped and showing herself off like one of the movie stars in the magazines. She cranked the hand pump to flush, rinsed her hands—precious water, precious—eased the door open and shut it behind her. As she slid back into bed she was thinking she’d just have to tie her hair up in a kerchief, at least till they got there and she could take a swim, depending on how cold the water was, of course. Then she was thinking of the mariner again and of Mr. Parminter, who wore a bow tie to class every day and could recite “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by heart. Then she was asleep.
When she woke again it was daylight and Till’s berth was empty. She tried to focus on the deck but the deck wouldn’t stay put. A great angry fist seemed to be slamming at the hull with a booming repetitive shock that concussed the thin mattress and the plank beneath it and worked its way through her till she could feel it in the hollow of her chest, in her head, in her teeth. On top of it, every last thing, every screw and bolt and scrap of metal up and down the length of the boat, rattled and whined with a roused insistent drone as if a hive of yellow jackets were trapped in the hull. And what was that smell? Mold, hidden rot, the sour-milk reek of her own unwashed body. Before she could think, she was leaning over and spewing up everything inside her into the bucket she’d kept at her bedside for emergencies—the last of it, sharp and acerbic as a dose of vinegar, coming on a long glutinous string of saliva. She shook her head to clear it, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. Then she got up, fumbling for her blue jeans and a sweater, Till’s sweater, rough as burlap but the warmest thing she could find, and how had it gotten so cold?
It took her a while, just sitting there and picturing dry land, a beach on the island, a rock offshore, anything that wasn’t moving, before she was able to get up and work her way into the galley. She filled the percolator with water, poured coffee into the strainer directly from the can without bothering to measure it—she could barely stand, let alone worry about the niceties, and they’d want it strong in any case—and then she set the pot on the burner, but it kept tilting and sliding till she hit on the idea of wedging it there with the big cast-iron pot she intended to make chowder in when they got where they were going. If they ever got there. And what had happened? Had the weather gone crazy all of a sudden? Was it a typhoon? A hurricane?
She looked a fright, she knew it, and she’d have to do something about her hair, but she worked her way up the juddering steps to the bridge and flung herself down on the couch there—or the bench she’d converted to a couch by sewing ties to a set of old plaid cushions she’d found in her parents’ garage. The bridge was close, breath-steamed, smelling of men’s sweat and the muck at the bottom of the sea. Till was right there, just across from her, sitting on his bench at the controls, so near she could have reached out and touched him. The wheel jumped and jumped again, and he fought it with his left hand while forcing the throttle forward and back in the clumsy stiff immalleable grip of the other one. Warren leaned over him, grim-faced. Neither seemed to have noticed her.
It was only then that she became aware of the height of the waves coming at them, rearing black volcanoes of water that took everything out from under the boat and put it right back again, all the while blasting the windows as if there were a hundred fire trucks out there with their hoses all turned on at once. And here was the rhythm, up, down, up, and a rinse of the windows with every repetition. “Where are we?” she heard herself ask.
Till never looked up. He was frozen there, nothing moving but his arms and shoulders. “Don’t know,” Warren said, glancing over his shoulder. “Halfway between Anacapa and Santa Cruz, but with the way this shit’s blowing, who could say?”
“What we need,” Till said, his voice reduced and tentative, as if he really didn’t want to have to form his thoughts aloud, “is to find a place to anchor somewhere out of this wind.”
“That’d be Scorpion Bay, according to the charts, but that’s”—there was a crash, as if the boat had hit a truck head-on, and Warren, all hundred and eighty Marine-honed pounds of him, was flung up against the window as if he were a bag full of nothing. He braced himself, back pressed to the glass. Tried for a smile and failed. “That’s somewhere out ahead of us, straight into the blow.”
“How far?”
Warren shook his head, held tight to the rail that ran round the bridge. “Could be two miles, could be five. I can’t make out a fucking thing, can you?”
“No. But at least we should be okay for depth. There’s a lot of water under us. A whole lot.”
She looked out ahead of them to where the bow dipped to its pounding, but she couldn’t see anything but waves, one springing up off the back of the other, infinite and impatient, coming and coming and coming. Her stomach fell. She thought she might vomit again, but there was nothing left to bring up. “What happened to the weather?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard over the wind, but it wasn’t a question really, more an observation in search of some kind of assurance. She wanted them to tell her that this was nothing they couldn’t handle, just a little blow that would peter out before long, after which the sun would come back to illuminate the world and all would be as calm and peaceful as it was last night when the waves lapped the hull and the sandwiches and beer went down and stayed down in the pure pleasure of the moment. No one answered. She wasn’t scared, not yet, because all this was so new to her and because she trusted Till—Till knew what he was doing. He always did. “I put on coffee,” she said, though the thought of it, of the smell and taste of it and the way it clung viscously to the inside of the cup in a discolored slick, made her feel weak all over again. “You boys”—she had to force the words out—“think you might want a cup?”
Then she was back down in the galley, banging her elbows and knees, flung from one position to another, and when she reached for the coffeepot it jumped off the stove of its own volition and scalded her right hand. Before she could register the shock of it, the pot was on the deck, the top spun off and the steaming grounds and six good cups of black coffee spewed across the galley. Her first thought was for the deck—the coffee would stain, eat through the varnish like acid—and before she looked to her burn she was down on her hands and knees, caroming from one corner of the cabin to the other like the silver ball in a pinball machine, dabbing at the mess as she went by with a rag that became so instantaneously and unforgivingly hot she burned her hand a second time. When finally she’d got the deck cleaned up as best she could, she fell back into the bench at the table, angry now, angry at the boat and the sea and the men who’d dragged her out here into this shitty little rattling sea-stinking jail cell, and she swore she’d never go out again, never, no matter what promises they made. “There’ll be no coffee and I’m sorry, I am,” she said aloud. “You hear that?” she called out, directing her voice toward the steps at the back of the cabin. “No coffee today, no breakfast, no nothing. I’m through!”
The pain of the burn sparked then, assailing her suddenly with an insidious throbbing and prickling, the blisters already forming and bursting, and she thought of getting up and rubbing butter into the reddened flesh on the back of her hand and between her scalded fingers, but she couldn’t move. She felt heavy all of a sudden, heavier than the boat, heavier than the sea, so heavy she was immovable. She would sit, that was what she would do. Sit right there and ride it out.
That was when the water
started coming in through the forward hatch. That was when her feet got wet and she began to feel afraid. That was when she thought for the first time of the life jackets tucked under the seats in the stern that was awash with the piled-up waves—and that was when she pulled herself along the edge of the table to look up into the bridge and see her husband and brother-in-law fighting over the controls even as she heard the engines sputter and catch and finally give out. She caught her breath. Something essential had gone absent in a way that was wrong, deeply wrong, in violation of everything she’d known and believed in since the moment they’d left shore. The ghost had gone out of the machine.
In the sequel she was on the bridge, trying to make Till and Warren understand about the water in the cabin, water that didn’t belong there, water that was coming in through a breach in the forward hatch that was underwater itself before it shook free of the weight of the waves and sank back down again. But Till wasn’t listening. Till, her rock, the man who’d survived the mangling of his arm and the fiery blast of shrapnel that was lodged still in his legs and secreted beneath the constellation of scars on the broad firmament of his back, sat slumped over the controls, distracted and drawn and punching desperately at the starter as Warren, wrapped in a yellow slicker and cursing with every breath, fought his way out the door to the stern while the wind sang through the cabin and all the visible world lost its substantiality.
Disbelieving, outraged, Till jerked at the wheel, but the wheel wouldn’t respond. The boat lolled, staggered, a wave rising up out of nowhere to hit them broadside and drive down the hull till she was sure they were going to capsize. She might have screamed. Might have cried out uselessly, her breath coming hard and fast. It was all she could do to hold on, her jaws clamped, the spray taking flight up and over the cabin as Warren pried open the hatch to the engine compartment, some sort of tool clutched in one hand—Warren, Warren out there on the deck to save the day, but what could he hope to do? How could anybody fix anything in this chaos?