by Jack Gantos
Two days later we left St. Croix for good. We set out at night in calm water with our lights off and followed the channel markers north out of the harbor, past Buck Island, and farther, toward St. John and Virgin Gorda. When I turned to say good-bye to St. Croix I could see two warehouses burning down at the docks. The white exodus was even more frantic now. Already those who could see the writing on the wall were torching their own property for the insurance money before it became worthless. The flames illuminated a small city of wooden crates that had already been packed with personal goods and prepared for shipping.
But I was filled with joy and triumph, and the fires to me were the flames of Troy still burning as Odysseus pushed off for Ithaca. I was ready for adventure.
It was not lost on me that so many writers had gone to sea, and for them, setting off to cross the water was the same as setting down to fill the pages with their adventures. Before leaving I had gone to a used bookstore and selected every title I could find which had something to do with the sea. I had Billy Budd, Martin Eden, Treasure Island, Heart of Darkness, The Odyssey, Robinson Crusoe, and the Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy. I was armed with books the way the navy goes to sea armed to the teeth. I figured these books would have to live with me as cabin companions since Hamilton was so snappish. But I didn’t mind. I wanted to write while sailing, and I was more than willing to come under the spell of books.
All through the first night Hamilton took the wheel because only he knew where the hash was buried. At dawn I was asleep in the aft cabin when suddenly I was thrown out of my bunk and onto the floor. I could hear Hamilton cursing on deck. The ropes were slapping the mast and the boom was tangled in the stanchion ropes. I slipped on my Top-Siders and went up. By then Hamilton had the gaff and boom under control and I pulled down the jib.
“What happened?” I yelled into the wind.
“Riptide,” he hollered back. “Not to worry.”
Riptide my ass, I thought. I figured he had fallen asleep but wouldn’t admit it. I looked around. We had rolled up against a menacing chain of sharp rocks that stuck out of the ocean like a shark’s lower jaw. Hamilton started the engine and as we backed away I could see we were in a beautiful spot. It seemed to me to be the most wonderful sight I had ever seen. The rising sun was buttering the clouds, the sea was royal blue, and dolphins darted in and out of the water, weaving between the rocks with absolute grace. Finally, I thought, something good has happened. Maybe our luck will change.
Off the starboard side, now about a hundred yards away, was a small, uninhabited island no more than five acres. It was made of immense granite slabs each one the size of a train car and all piled up as if derailed. In each crack grew a gnarly sea grape tree deformed from leeward winds. And at the water’s edge was a perfect melon slice of a beach all protected by the outer chain of sharp rocks.
“It’s called Little Dog Island,” Hamilton said. “I got us here, now you get the dinghy and go ashore. Somewhere beneath that stand of trees you’ll find a tarp covered with sand. Under that is the hash. Start bringing it on board—but don’t get it wet.”
“Fine,” I said. But inside I was dancing around to a pirate jig. “Yo-ho-ho,” I sang in my belly, imagining myself as Long John Silver about to put to shore. “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest! Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. Drink and devil had done the rest. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!”
I never would have made a good pirate like Billy Bones or Black Dog. I didn’t have the stamina. I dug up the canvas bags—each weighing fifty pounds—dragged them through the sand, loaded four at a time into the dinghy, rowed through the choppy surf and out through the rocks to the Beaver, tied up, precariously balanced on the dinghy gunnels while heaving each sack on deck. I did this ten times in a row, until finally, when I had finished lugging the two thousand pounds of hash on board and had hauled up the dinghy and secured it to its cradle, I dropped down onto the deck and lay there as if I had fallen from the top of the mast. I was exhausted.
Hamilton had been packing the bags in the fo’c’sle, in his cabin, and in mine, and wasn’t nearly as tired. “Grog time!” he hollered from down below, and rang a brass bell. I forced myself to stand and staggered down the ladder into the main cabin and over to the galley door. “Here you go, sailor,” he said, suddenly full of good captainly cheer, then poured me a tumbler of rum and locked the bottle away.
I drank it straight back and asked for more.
“British navy rules,” he replied. “Only one grog per day per man.”
“Are you serious?” I asked.
“Sailor, this is serious business,” he replied, underlining each word with his tone. “I can’t have any drunks on board.”
“Aye, aye, captain,” I said sarcastically.
I never did get drunk, but I got after the hash like a mouse at cheese. I nibbled on it each day—a gram here and a gram there. Hamilton took his hash in tea—the British way, I assumed. He shaved his down to a powder with a straight edge razor then dipped a heaping spoonful into a cup of hot water and stirred it up with sugar. Stoned out of our minds, we navigated through the long madhouse days of the voyage as if crossing the ocean in a floating sanitarium. I spent hours sitting cross-legged on deck with the ship’s log on my lap recording the day’s events as if I were drifting around in Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradise.
The ship was a strange floating cell. A blue cell. Blue sky. Blue ocean. We weren’t locked in, but there was nowhere to go, and aside from the weather, each day unfolded very much the same. Bright, blinding blue. What changed was the drama on board. Hamilton was insane. Or so I thought. He wouldn’t talk to me, except to order me around or humiliate me in some way. He stopped wearing clothes. He constantly paced the deck in the nude, staring out at the horizon line and stroking his beard. He must have been thinking about something because the moods on his face were as shifty as the clouds overhead. He whispered things I couldn’t make out. He counted numbers on his fingers as if he were making lists. For hours he practiced tying and untying knots. At times he looked at me as if he had never seen me before.
We had two bunks, a toilet, a galley, no radio, plenty of books, a deck of cards, a chess set, and two thousand pounds of hash. After we had loaded the hash at Little Dog Island I began snooping around the boat, just to see what else I could find. I lifted the cushioned lid of a galley bench and inside were all sorts of sailing gear: flags for half a dozen countries, a rusty flare gun (which made me think of Rik’s forehead), a fire extinguisher, rain slickers, and a book the size of a dictionary. It was clothbound in green linen, and embossed in gold on the cover was the name of the ship. I set it on the galley table and opened the cover. It was blank. Dozens of pages had been ripped out. The remaining pages were wrinkled and stained from water damage. It smelled salty, and a bit like diesel fuel. I loved it, and immediately thought it was up to me to record my boat’s history, like so many other sea writers had done. I turned the page, smoothed it out with my hand, and got started.
3 / ship’s log
July 15: Today I took a photograph of Hamilton sitting at the wheel with the sun setting behind him. He frowned. “Now take a picture of me,” I said, and handed him the camera.
He flipped the camera over, unsnapped the back, pulled out the film, and tossed it over his shoulder into the ocean. “If I find any more film on board it will join that roll,” he said.
“It’s just a photo,” I replied.
“It’s evidence,” he snapped back. This is the first evidence I have had that he even thinks we could be caught.
“Let me see your wallet,” he said.
I gave it to him.
He threw away all my identification except for my fake Florida license. “Might come in handy,” he said.
July 16: Dead calm today. Hot. The sails hanging limply from the gaffs like sleeping bats. At one point I dove overboard and swam around the boat as if it were at anchor. Hamilton threw an empty bottle overboard and we bobbed along next to it for
hours. By the end of the day we may have covered a mile. No more. Feel like a sitting duck. Said so to Hamilton. He drifted into a story about his biggest concern on the ocean being pirates, not police. Told me about friends in the business who were boarded by pirates who tied them to the masts, and then took their stash. Somehow I find this absurd and can’t stop thinking of Captain Hook and his crew of pirates in Peter Pan. Wish Hamilton would swallow a clock so I could hear him creeping around. He stalks me like a mumbling crocodile.
July 17: Started reading Heart of Darkness. Already thinking that Kurtz is waiting for me in New York along with his gang of savages—and a deep mystery about the evil in the soul of man that I can’t solve until I get there.
July 18: Woke up to gunshots. Carefully stuck my head above the deck hatch and saw Hamilton firing his pistol at cans he tossed into the air. He missed them all. I knew he had a pistol because I’d poked around the cabin and found it under his mattress. When he saw me he made me put a can on the end of a yardstick and stand up on the bow while he shot at it from the stern. He missed each time, which was not a relief. I heard the bullets whiz by. William Tell was a good shot and put an arrow through an apple on his son’s head. William Burroughs was a terrible shot. He put a glass of water on his wife’s head and shot her just above the eye. The Mexican police called her death an accident. If Hamilton hit me I’d just drop into the water and sink like a stone. Nobody would know the difference—not even him.
July 19: I’ve missed talking to another human. Last night, after Hamilton came to relieve me of my shift, instead of heading down to the main cabin to sleep, I stayed put. I remained as mute as Friday to Crusoe, hoping that he’d break the ice. But he didn’t. He held his hot tea to his lips, and patted delicately at his beard, his fingers slowly adjusting the symmetry after his nap.
“Have you ever thought about what might happen to us if we get caught?”
Hamilton’s laugh came out of him like a coiled spring jigging up and down. He had to set down his teacup.
“You are afraid,” he finally said. “Afraid of the punishment. You can’t be afraid of what we are doing, because we’re doing nothing wrong.”
My fear amused him. He began a new round of wild laughter. The compass light illuminated his face so that he looked like a carved pumpkin. If I had any hope of reaching shore, I’d jump overboard.
I stood up and went downstairs. But I didn’t sleep. Hamilton had read my mind—I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m just afraid of the punishment.
July 20: The sea is like unrolled velvet under the half moon. Fell asleep at my watch. Tilted forward and hit the edge of the compass with my chin. Blood streamed down my neck and chest. Thought I had severed my carotid artery. When Hamilton saw me he shook his head. After he had a cup of tea he cleaned out the gash and put a bandage on it. I should be fine. Had a headache all day.
July 21: No birds. No music. No noise. No clouds. No wind. Hamilton pacing in circles like an angry clock. In the sky the jet streams crisscross from east to west and west to east like ICBMs. Perhaps when we reach New York it won’t be there. No city. No country. No people. We’ll just travel around the globe like the navy in Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, searching for survivors and waiting for the radiation cloud to cook us.
July 22: Ate too much hash. Stared up at the full moon’s blemished face. Thought of men walking on the moon. During the first moon walk I was watching television at a friend’s house in Florida when a car ran off the road and hit the side of the house. Scared the crap out of us. The man had been driving with his head sticking out the window, staring up at the moon, looking to see the spaceship.
July 23: Not well.
July 24: Same as yesterday.
July 25: I was sitting at the cabin table eating some dried prunes when Hamilton looked over at me from the kitchen. “I haven’t seen you take a shit yet,” he remarked.
“So?” I replied. My face reddened. Taking a shit was private business.
“Just curious,” he said. “It’s a small boat. If you don’t shit in the crapper I can only hope you’re not doing it like a sneaky cat behind the hash.”
“Well, I’m not shitting in the fo’c’sle, if that’s what you mean.”
“Where then?” he asked, raising his nose like a shit detective and sniffing loudly.
“Overboard,” I said. “Like the old-time sailors.”
“Those old-timers had seats out under the bowsprit. What do you do? Just hang off the bowsprit and shit down the back of your legs?”
“No. I jump into the water and hang on to the towrope and shit in the ocean.”
“Bloody hell!” he cried out.
“Bloody hell!” I cried back, mocking him.
“You know what can happen to your ass if you shit in the sea?”
“Get arrested by Jacques Cousteau?”
“No. Worse. You can get your ass bit off. Sharks will chum your links and bite your arse down to the bone.”
“You’re putting me on,” I said.
“Seen it happen,” he said. “A fellow named Guy went to fertilize the sea and after he did his duty a shark took his legs.”
“Really?”
“Believe it,” he said.
“So how do you do it?” I asked.
“The crapper,” he said. “That’s what it’s there for.”
“Are you telling the truth?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. “I still need help sailing the boat otherwise I wouldn’t give a shit about your ass.”
July 26: Started using the crapper.
July 27: All the bread is old. Furry with medallions of blue mold. Hamilton toasts it. Each time we take a bite clouds of mold spores drift across the table. We slather the bread with jam in an effort to keep the dust in place. It helps, but as soon as the bread splits open it coughs out another cloud. We have to eat it on deck with the wind to our backs to keep ourselves from gagging.
July 29: Another night without a breeze. Nothing to do. I tried to read, but instead of focusing my attention I became restless. I’m tired of just sitting. I smoked some hash and then dove overboard. I swam around the boat and on my second lap I noticed Hamilton’s porthole was open. We usually keep them closed, but with the sea so flat we aren’t worried about waves splashing through. I stopped beneath the porthole and listened for a minute. I could hear him breathing, heavily. I held on to the bottom rim of the hole and pulled myself up with one hand. With the other I reached in and grabbed his leg. He hollered, and kicked out.
I dropped under the water, but even from there I could hear the gunshot.
Oh no, I thought. I flipped him out. I swam around to the stern and pulled myself up. As soon as I got my head above the deck I saw him step up out of the main hatch and point the pistol at me. It went off. I buckled and dropped back into the water. I was so scared I didn’t know if he had shot me or not. I swam around to the port side and quietly broke the surface. I reached up and held on to the bottom of a stanchion. I could hear Hamilton back at the stern.
“You think you’re so funny? I’ll show you what scared is!” He fired into the water. And again. “You laughing yet? You failed to consider that in the British navy an officer has the right to execute a sailor who is a danger to an operation.”
I didn’t know how to calm him down so I kept quiet. I peeked up over the deck and watched him. After a few minutes he dropped the gun and began to adjust the sails.
“Here we are,” he shouted to himself, “bobbing out here like a bloody cork. It’s enough to make a man go mad and I’m stuck here with a nitwit.”
I dropped back into the water and swam around to the stern, where it was easier to pull myself up. “Can I come aboard, captain?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m tired of wanting to shoot you. I’d just like to flog you instead.” Then he turned and went back to his cabin. I retook the wheel and when my shift was up I didn’t dare go wake him. And when he finally came to relieve me, he didn’t say a wo
rd. He certainly scared me. And I think he scared himself firing blindly into the water. I didn’t like that he called me a nitwit, but I haven’t brought it up for discussion.
July 30: Of all the sea books I’ve been reading, the book that has taken me over is Jack London’s Martin Eden. Just as Holden Caulfield sees phonies everywhere, those same phonies can’t recognize Eden’s talent and they run him down. He was a man trying to create greatness, and the phonies were too ignorant to recognize anything beyond their own limitations.
On my night shift I’ve begun to act out the final scene, where Martin Eden pushes himself through a porthole and dives into the dark water and intentionally drowns himself. I don’t have a porthole to dive through, but I do have a ship to dive from. I don’t really want to kill myself so I tie the end of our yellow towline in a tight knot around my ankle before diving in. There in the darkness with the sky full of stars I lie on my back and glide through the water with the boat pulling me along. It is beautiful to look at the boat, lit only by the compass light and the moon off the sails as she glides up and over the slow swells. It is so peaceful. Martin had once seen the moon as hopeful, too, but after he was beaten down by cynics the moon was dark for him. I wondered if I could ever kill myself as he had. If that yellow towline slipped off my foot, would I sink into the sea as he had or would I swim for all my life to catch up to it? I won’t know until it happens. I do know that there is no reason for me to drown myself from sorrow since I haven’t yet tried to achieve anything great.