Sink or Swim

by Steve Watkins

  Mama hugged me when I told her that. “Absolutely not,” she said. “Your job right now is to go to school and learn. You can help out in the afternoons like you planned, but you’re too young to do more than that. We’ll figure this out. We always do.”

  I really didn’t see how we’d be okay this time. I started to protest, but she interrupted me. “It’s not your fault, Colton,” she said. “It’s not anybody’s fault except the Germans on that submarine. And that horrible man.” She practically spit the name “Hitler,” and her face darkened when she said it.

  “That’s whose fault it really is,” she continued, as if she knew him—and hated him—personally.

  I hated Hitler, too. I hated all of the Nazis and wished I had done something, anything, when I had the chance. Maybe I could have started my motor and attacked them. Got close enough to throw my knife at them. Rammed their U-boat with the dinghy and done some kind of damage to something.

  But I’d just sat there, scared.

  Mama finally talked me into going home. “You need to change your clothes, take a bath, and get a good night’s sleep,” she said. “Then you can come back.”

  It was the middle of January and already getting dark. I’d been sitting so long that my legs felt weak when Mama and I stepped outside the clinic and stumbled down the street. I’d walked here a million times before, but now everything was different somehow. Ocracoke had always seemed so safe. The ocean could be terrible sometimes, but the island was always something you could take for granted. Only now I kept looking around as if I was expecting Hitler himself to just show up with his Nazis to take over the island.

  We didn’t even make it a block, to the Methodist church, when suddenly there was an explosion out on the ocean. At first we couldn’t see anything except a sudden red sky, but we felt it.

  Everybody stopped dead in their tracks, right in the middle of the street, cars and everything, then they all started talking at once, wondering what that could have been, miles out on the ocean somewhere south of the island. In the back of everybody’s mind was the same thing, though, and in an hour we knew it was true. U-boats had sunk a freighter called the Allan Jackson down at Oregon Inlet. Every fishing boat available was rushing out to search for survivors.

  I never did end up going home, even when Mama ordered me to again. I turned around and went back to the clinic to be with Danny. If I couldn’t help on the water, I might as well be with my brother. As I walked, I saw people dashing about dimming lights, pulling the shades tight, nailing up blankets, and doing whatever else so the whole island could make itself safe by disappearing into the dark.

  We’d only had electricity on Ocracoke for about three years. Goats on the island had long ago eaten up just about all the vegetation, so there was nothing to block anybody lurking out on the ocean from seeing every lit-up house and building and car and boat and dock and barn at night. But without anyone talking about it, the whole island either turned off their lights or blacked out the windows. Even the clinic was dark by the time I returned.

  In the dim room with Danny I leaned close to his ear, so mad at Hitler and the U-boats and the Germans that I trembled the whole time, and I made him a promise. “I’m going to get them back, Danny. I don’t know how, and I don’t know what it’s going to take, but I swear I’m going to do it.”

  * * *

  The next day, we found out there weren’t any survivors from the Allan Jackson. Just oil and debris washed up on shore. And then the following day, the U-boats sank another cargo ship, the City of Atlanta, seven miles off the North Carolina coast.

  Only three out of forty-six survived that torpedo attack.

  The Coast Guard put a call out for anybody with a big enough boat to volunteer for U-boat patrol duty. Everybody agreed it was crazy, since no fishing boat had any sort of gun on it, and no shark rifle would do damage to a submarine. But they figured we had to do something while we waited for the navy to send help. Maybe if a fishing boat spotted a sub and radioed any cargo ships in the area to warn them, they could take evasive action, change course, do something to save themselves.

  And I kind of understood why folks might want to help, even if it was crazy. Because as scared as I was about the Germans attacking us, I was also mad. Mad that they were invading and mad about what they’d done to Danny.

  So once I heard about the call, I finally left Danny and went down to the docks to see Mr. Jenkins, an old friend of Dad’s, who I knew had the biggest shrimp trawler on Ocracoke. I figured he had to be going out to look for subs, and I was determined to get him to take me with him.

  He took one look at me when I asked, though, and just shook his head. “Son, your mama needs you here, and your brother needs you here, and if I let you go out on my boat, the ghost of your dad would come down and put a haunt on me sure as anything.”

  We were in a small tin shed that Mr. Jenkins used for an office and for storing stuff, or just to hang out when he didn’t want to go home, which was a lot of the time because his wife took in stray cats and Mr. Jenkins hated cats and said the whole house smelled of cat business and he couldn’t stand it.

  So he sat in his little shed when he wasn’t out on the water, and he smoked a pipe like Dad used to do, and ate cheese and sardines from a can on saltine crackers with mustard, and washed it down with warm beer.

  He offered me some—the crackers and all, but not the beer—and my stomach rumbled since I’d hardly eaten all week because I’d been so worried about Danny. I sat on a barrel next to Mr. Jenkins and wolfed down a whole pack of crackers piled high with cheese and sardines, though I said “No thank you” to the mustard.

  “You know, Colton,” Mr. Jenkins said after a long silence, broken only by the sounds of us eating and the occasional boat leaving the docks. “There’s going to be a lot of our boys going out on patrols and not coming back. Brave or foolish, or both, they’re heading out there thinking they’re going to sink ’em a U-boat with a peashooter. ’Cept it ain’t going to happen.”

  “But you’re going, aren’t you?” I asked, sure that Mr. Jenkins was. Dad told me Mr. Jenkins had been a soldier in the Great War, and he’d been in trenches in France that got poison gas exploded on them, which was why he had a gaspy way of breathing all the time.

  Mr. Jenkins shrugged. “You do what you got to do. I got a big enough boat. Maybe it’ll scare ’em away. Meanwhile, you’re needed on land. I sure am sorry about your brother. I been praying for him to get better, and I have faith he will. Just going to take some time is all.”

  I wanted to believe him, but now that another week had passed, and Danny was still in a coma, I was starting to lose hope. If only Danny had left a week earlier for Raleigh, the North Carolina capital, where he was supposed to report for duty, none of this would have ever happened. He’d have already been on a bus from the navy recruitment office up to the Great Lakes naval training center in Illinois to do his basic training on Lake Michigan.

  I thanked Mr. Jenkins for the cheese and crackers and all, wiped my hands—oily from the sardines—on my jeans, and headed back to the clinic.

  On the way there I thought about Mama, about how she hadn’t cried once since meeting us on the beach when I came in that night with Danny. The closest she’d come was one night when I fell asleep in the chairs in Danny’s room, and I woke up to see Mama sitting so close to Danny that she was practically on the bed, her hands clenched tight together and her eyes squeezed shut. She was praying—whispering so I couldn’t hear, but I still knew—and drops of water rolled down her cheeks but it wasn’t tears. It was Mama praying so hard she was sweating.

  I didn’t think Mama had cried since Dad died, and I knew she wasn’t going to start now. She was going to believe Danny would get better, and she was going to pray that it would be so, and she was going to go to work every day and take care of us.

  I also knew, thinking about all that, that I had to do something to help, and it wasn’t just going to be sitting around by Danny’s be
d waiting for him to wake up out of that coma. Since he wasn’t bringing in any money now, it was up to me to do it, just like Danny had been the one to step up after we lost Dad. That’s the way it was in our family and on the island.

  More than anything I just wanted to be a kid, though. To go back to school and play baseball with Dean Shepherd and my other friends, and ride my beach pony, and play checkers with Mama when she wasn’t too tired from working, and talk to this girl Denise Olsen who was in my Sunday School class and who I kind of liked but wasn’t going to admit it to anybody, especially her.

  But it was my turn to help our family, and halfway back to the clinic I stopped. Because it just hit me how I was going to do it—this crazy idea that left me out of breath just thinking it.

  Why didn’t I take Danny’s recruitment papers and his identification and get to Raleigh? I could join up as him. Everybody said we looked alike and that I was big for my age. I didn’t shave, and I didn’t have much hair in places you’re supposed to get hair, but maybe they wouldn’t check down there. Maybe I could wear some of Danny’s clothes and a hat pulled down low on my face so they couldn’t see me too well. And make myself all dirty, like I just came from working on a farm or something. You always looked older when you were wearing a hat, and when you had dirt on you. And I’d wear boots so I was taller, too.

  And if they let me in, and if they sent me to the Naval Training Center Great Lakes, and if I got through that, then maybe, just maybe, they’d put me on a ship in the Atlantic and I’d chase down every last one of Hitler’s U-boats and sink them to the bottom of the sea.

  I went back down to the ocean instead of to the clinic and sat on a high sand dune and stared out at the Atlantic. Hours went by while I thought over what I was considering doing. It was crazy. And it probably wouldn’t work. And I’d probably just get found out and sent back home. And if it did work, wouldn’t I be so scared and homesick that I’d crack being so far away and by myself? Would I even be able to make it through basic training? I’d never been farther away from Ocracoke than Morehead City, and I was just five years old that time and got lost, and when they found me I was standing in the middle of a street bawling my eyes out. What made me think I could handle leaving the island to join the navy?

  In the end, though, it felt like there wasn’t really even a choice to make. In our family, you stepped up when you had to. Danny did it. Mama did it. And now it was my turn.

  Scared to death as I might be, I was going.

  If I was going to go, I had to do it today. Otherwise, I might not make it to Raleigh in time. It would be another hour before Mama got home, so I didn’t have long to write a note and pack.

  Dear Mama,

  I’m sorry but I can’t wait here anymore for Danny to wake up from his coma. I know he will one day, but in the meantime I have to do something, and since I can’t take the boats out with him anymore to fish, and since nobody’s doing any fishing anyway with those U-boats out there, I’m going over to Morehead City to find a job to make some money to send back to you. There aren’t any jobs on the island—not even any tourists are going to come over when it’s summer, I bet—and I don’t have it in me to go back to school right now. I feel so awful about what happened to Danny that I hate even being on the island anymore, to tell you the honest truth. I expect that will change once he wakes up and is okay, but for now this is the best plan I can come up with. I will send money soon and write to let you know that I am okay. Don’t worry about me. Dad was my age when he went to work, and it’s time for me to do my part to help out. I love you and Danny.

  Your son, Colton

  Of course, I wasn’t really going to Morehead City—that was just to make Mama think I was. I felt bad about lying to her, but I couldn’t tell her the truth or she’d come right away and find me, or contact the navy and they’d send me right back home.

  I had all of Danny’s recruitment papers wrapped up safe in the bottom of a canvas sack with some of his clothes. I wouldn’t need much. Danny had told me you just showed up at the recruiters with the clothes on your back and they even take those away when you get to the Naval Training Center Great Lakes and give you your uniforms, and from then on you belong to the navy and do what they tell you and wear what they tell you, even down to your underwear and shoes.

  I headed over to the sound side and got into the dinghy and navigated through choppy water across the Pamlico Sound to a little fishing town called Oriental. My plan was to stash the boat there and hitchhike to Raleigh, even though I hadn’t ever hitchhiked before. I figured it was just like they said—you stood by the road, stuck out your thumb, and when somebody stopped, you told them where you were going.

  It was nighttime when I got to Oriental. And it was bitter cold and had been for hours during the crossing. I wanted to find someplace to eat and a warm place to sleep, except I didn’t have but a couple of dollars to my name. So I dragged the dinghy high up on shore, flipped it over, crawled under, and spent the night shivering, wearing Danny’s heaviest coat with a tarp pulled over me.

  I barely slept—mostly I just lay there and cried, then got mad at myself for crying and made myself stop until I got so scared again that the tears started back up. I thought about when Mama told me there wasn’t time for me to be crying, that I needed to tell her what happened and then go get help for Danny. And I told myself that that’s what I was doing and why I couldn’t cry anymore—because I was going to go get help for Danny and Mama by doing what I was doing. And that’s pretty much how it went all night long. I’d get scared, almost start to cry, tell myself those things again, and maybe fall asleep for a little while, but then wake up shivering and start all over again. I just hoped they wouldn’t ask me too many questions in Raleigh, or look me over too close, or laugh at me and tell me to go home. In the darkest hours of the night, the thing that got me through—and got me up the next morning, and got me out on the highway to thumb down my first ride—was remembering the other reason why I was doing all this: to be a subchaser and make them pay for what they did to Danny.

  * * *

  I got lucky on my first ride, because it was a preacher in a Rambler going all the way to Durham, which was the other side of Raleigh, so I figured I would be able to lean back and catch up on all the sleep I didn’t get the night before, with that Rambler’s heater warming me up so I could feel my fingers and toes again.

  My luck ran out pretty quick, though, because it looked like that preacher expected me to have a conversation with him the whole way there, and most of that conversation was him trying to save my soul, even though I kept telling him my soul had already been saved by the Methodist Church.

  Eventually, he stopped for gas and offered to buy me a cup of coffee and a sandwich, and I was grateful enough to put up with his preaching for another couple of hours.

  “That’s mighty nice of you,” I said about the sandwich and coffee, and he must have liked that I said it because he bought me a giant pickle from a pickle barrel they had in the store there at the gas pumps. He warned me not to drip any on the front seat of his Rambler because he liked to keep his car neat and clean the way the good Lord intended.

  I didn’t know anything about that but did promise to be careful with that pickle.

  We finally made it to Raleigh.

  “Well, thank you, sir,” I said as he slowed the car down.

  It was only when he pulled over and turned to me that I think it occurred to him how young I might’ve been. “Son, are you a runaway? Or are you in any kind of trouble?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “I’m joining the navy. I’m going to fight the Germans.”

  He looked at me with a funny expression. “Why, you’re just a boy. How are you joining the navy?”

  I sat up as tall as I could. “I’m seventeen,” I said, trying to keep my voice from cracking, something it had been doing a lot of lately.

  The preacher shook his head sadly. “I’ll be praying for you.”

  “Thank you. If
you could also pray for my brother, I’d appreciate it,” I said. I figured he was a preacher and must’ve known how to say a lot better prayer than somebody like me.

  “He younger or older?” the preacher asked.

  I thought about it, then decided since I was pretending to be Danny, I should probably pretend Danny was me. “He’s my kid brother,” I said. “His name is Colton. We were out fishing and one of those German subs ran into us and he got hurt pretty bad. He’s in a coma.”

  The preacher shook his head again. “Sorry to hear that. I’ll pray that the Lord looks after him. And looks after you, too. We’re all going to need His help, I reckon. There’s an awful big storm coming.”

  I thought about that U-boat and the attacks on those first two ships.

  That awful big storm wasn’t just coming. It was already here.

  I was real worried that they’d have doctors at the recruitment center in Raleigh doing physical exams and they’d know I wasn’t as old as I pretended to be. And I was real worried that they’d have a dentist there, too, and they’d see that I still had a couple of baby teeth, and so couldn’t really be seventeen. And I was real worried that even with dirt streaked on my face, Dad’s old wool cap pulled low on my forehead, Danny’s baggy clothes, my boots on to make me taller, and the way I’d been practicing making my voice lower like a grown man’s that they’d see through my disguise and toss me out.

  But none of that happened. There were so many of us crammed into the recruitment office to report for boot camp that they just read off a list of our names and everybody said “Here” or “Present” or “Yeah” and that was it.

  “So they don’t have a doctor do an exam or anything?” I asked the guy next to me, who didn’t seem a whole lot older than I was.