by Jack Gantos
July 31: For the last week the wind has been unusually calm, and in order to make any time at all we have lowered the sails and used the engine. Soon, we speculate, we will run out of fuel. About midday I saw in the distance what I first thought was an oil derrick. I pointed it out to Hamilton. “Let’s take a look,” he said.
We coursed toward it. Oddly, we couldn’t seem to hold our bearing and the rig kept moving from our port side to starboard.
“Is something wrong with our rudder?” I asked. I was worried because the great German battleship Bismarck had been hit in the rudder and was doomed to going in circles until she was sunk by the British. If Hamilton and I were stuck going in circles, we’d soon try to kill each other—and I’d be the one getting torpedoed.
Hamilton fiddled with the wheel. “No, we’re fine,” he replied.
Then, as we got closer, we figured it out. It wasn’t an oil derrick but an enormous Japanese fishing trawler with two tall cranes for hauling up their vast nets. Hamilton had seen one before. “They stay out for a year at a time,” he said. “They catch the fish, then process and can them right on board. It’s a floating factory.”
I went up to the bow and began to wave to them. I could see that they were trying to avoid us because they didn’t want us to foul their nets, and now the large cranes were hauling them up. A few fish flopped around trying to get back to the sea.
“Ahoy!” I shouted through my cupped hands. “Do you speak English?”
The rail was lined with ragged Japanese sailors waving down at me. The deck must have been thirty feet up. After a few minutes they found a sailor who knew English.
“We’re low on fuel,” I hollered. “Do you have extra?”
“Yes,” he hollered back. In a moment a rope ladder was lowered.
“Put some pants on,” I said to Hamilton.
“Mind your own business, sailor,” he replied.
I dove overboard and swam to the ladder and climbed up.
The captain greeted me. Through the interpreter he ordered several men to fetch the fuel. They brought back fivegallon cans and lowered them down to Hamilton, who had pulled in close. He filled our tank.
I said thank you and climbed down the ladder. When I got on our deck Hamilton gave me a bottle of rum to take back up as a thank-you gift. I climbed the ladder and presented the bottle to the captain. He took it, bowed politely, then fired off some orders. A man went running to the bridge and in a moment returned with a giant bottle of sake. It was as tall and round as decorative bottles they use in liquor store displays and I had to use both hands to carry it. I bowed low to the captain, then looked down the ladder. I didn’t think I could climb it without using my hands. Hamilton had drifted off about twenty yards so I just backed up a few steps, held the bottle up over my head and screamed as I ran and jumped.
The ship was a lot higher than I figured. As I hugged the bottle against my chest I tilted forward. And when I hit the water the bottle knocked the wind clear out of me. I couldn’t breathe, and I kept sinking. I could see the bottom of the ship and the small fish swimming alongside the bilge drains. I thought of Martin Eden sinking lower and lower, forcing himself deeper and deeper. I thought of Jack London not putting a final period on the last sentence of the book as Martin lost consciousness and drifted into death. But I didn’t want to die. I held the neck of the bottle with my left hand and began to swim toward the surface. My lungs were burning. I bit down on my lip to keep from taking in a mouthful of water. I kept kicking and stroking my arm overhead until I broke the surface and sucked in a lungful of air. I was almost dead, and now I was alive again. It was glorious. I turned onto my back and floated with the sake on my belly. The Japanese cheered from the deck and I rolled over and with one arm dog-paddled my way to the Beaver, where I grabbed the towline and held on. Hamilton reeled me in and I held up the sake. “This is mine,” I said.
He took it from me. “You earned it, sailor,” he said. Then he reached out and gave me a hand getting up over the stern.
“I thought you were dead,” he remarked, finally smiling at me.
“Me, too. It was great.”
I waved to the Japanese, then unscrewed the cap and took a big swig and poured it over my face. They roared their approval. Hamilton started the engine and we motored west, looking for land.
August 1: Now that we have fuel we have been going all out and our spirits are high. We are both looking forward to land. After a day of smooth sailing the water has turned choppy and looks to get worse. The sky is low and pressing down on us. The temperature has dropped. Hamilton put on pants and a shirt. The weather has been easy so we might be getting close to Cape Hatteras (we think), where there is always rough weather. But we don’t know our exact position. We have no ship-to-shore radio. The sextant is broken because I was playing with it and snapped off a piece. I didn’t tell Hamilton. We have no radio directional finder, just the compass. All along we have been headed roughly north by northwest and figure once we hit land we’ll just follow the coast up.
August 2: By this morning the wind picked up and the waves broke over the bow and swept across the deck, over the cabin, and all the way back to the stern, where either Hamilton or I was tethered to the wheel with a rope around our chest. The constant pounding of the waves is so exhausting we have to change shifts every hour. Tonight it is pitch-black except for the light from the cabin windows. We have the sails tightly reefed and tied down. If it weren’t for the extra fuel the Japanese gave us, we’d be trying to steady ourselves with the jib—which seems impossible. I think we would be swamped by now.
August 3 and 4: Storm.
August 5: After three full days and nights of the storm we are exhausted and have no idea of our position.
I was on watch this morning when a Coast Guard turboprop passed low overhead and circled around and dipped low over us again.
Hamilton heard it and stuck his head out of the main hatch.
“What’s he up to?” I asked.
“They’re just scanning the water after the storm,” Hamilton said. “Making sure there’s no trouble. Must mean we’re close to land.”
With the next pass of the turboprop it was so low we could feel the prop wash. I waved to the captain, he waved back, then curled to the west.
“Follow that plane,” Hamilton ordered. “I bet he’s heading back to the base.”
We got a compass reading on the plane before it disappeared. That night we spotted lights on the coast, but still didn’t know our exact location. We stayed offshore, following the lights north, and figured in the morning we’d locate an inlet where we might find a marina and rest up for a few days.
August 6: This morning the weather was hazy with low visibility. We could hear more activity across the water than what we could see, so we knew we were close to something. Then as the haze lifted we saw a sign announcing that we were in restricted military waters.
“Bloody hell,” Hamilton cursed. “Let’s just push on until someone tells us to turn around.”
“Can’t we just turn around now?” I asked. “Why invite trouble?”
“Just do as you’re told,” he snapped. “Take the bow and keep a look out for shallow water.”
I did. The water was all slate gray on the surface and I couldn’t tell if it was twenty feet deep or two. Suddenly I heard a motorboat coming our way, and as it pulled close enough I could see it was a small Coast Guard launch. Hamilton saw it, too.
“What do we do?” I asked.
“Wave nicely,” he said. I could see the outline of the gun in his pocket.
Don’t do anything stupid, I thought, as I waved and smiled. They kept getting closer. Finally they pulled up within five feet of our port side.
“You have entered restricted waters,” shouted a cadet through a bullhorn. “Turn starboard and we’ll escort you out.”
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Cape May, New Jersey,” the cadet shouted. “Home of the Coast Guard training base.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” I muttered. “We’re dead.”
I must have gone pale. The cadet laughed through the bullhorn, which made him seem as sinister as Poseidon was with Odysseus when he kept foiling his attempts to get home to Ithaca.
Hamilton turned north and we followed them across the inlet. The entire time I was waiting for them to pull us over and do a customs check. Hamilton insisted on flying the British Union Jack. He thought it made us look friendly and less suspicious, but in doing so it left us open for a customs check by any military and police patrol boat.
Before long we began to spot signs for gas stations and boating supplies, and along the shore there were white mooring buoys. We were back in civilian waters when suddenly we came to an abrupt stop and I toppled onto the deck. We had run aground again.
“Are you okay?” the cadet called over as I hopped to my feet. “Need a tow out?”
“No,” I shouted back. “We’re just going to stop here for a while. We’ll be fine.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, waved, and the launch turned and sped away. My heart was pounding.
“That was a close call,” I said.
“The worst thing about you is you always look so guilty. If you want to be any good at this business you’ve got to learn to relax. Now, throw out the anchor and get the dinghy ready,” Hamilton ordered. “We’re going to shore.”
When we got off in Cape May it was the first time in three weeks I had been on land, and I had sea legs. I walked like a drunken elephant stumping from side to side. We found a burger place and bought hot food and cold drinks. Better yet, I went into the bathroom. I hadn’t had a freshwater bath in three weeks and was glistening with caked salt like a stick of rock crystal candy. I splashed cold, fresh water on my face. It felt so good.
All day we tried to reach Rik. He is staying at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. They have him registered, but haven’t seen him in days. I asked Hamilton where he met Rik. “At a smugglers’ convention,” he said sarcastically.
There is nothing left to do but push on.
4 / I love new york
Everyone in prison has a story about how they were caught, Sitting on the edge of a man’s bunk while telling and listening to stories about how people got busted is about the same as being in the Boy Scouts and sitting around a campfire telling ghost stories. Being scared together created a great bond among boys, and being scared of each other created a great bond in prison. Most of the time individuality was measured by how violent you could be, and this kept everyone on edge. But what we all had in common, and what everyone liked to share, is how we got caught.
I loved those getting-caught stories, and they were among the first ones I wrote down in my secret prison journal. They had what every story should have: action running like a fleeing suspect across the surface shadowed step for step by big risks and big emotions. Of course they always ended about the same. Guys either turned themselves in, were taken by surprise, or were taken by force. But every one of them felt it differently, and did their time their own way—everything from “hard” time to “standing on their head.”
Since about half of the guys in prison were in for bank robbery, I heard a lot of their stories. I met an ex-Green Beret who robbed banks. He was running around with another man’s wife and she got tired of him. So to get rid of him she had him rob a string of banks and hide the money with her. Then she called the FBI and turned him in. There was a Chinese man who didn’t speak much English and couldn’t read it. He was in for bank robbery, too. His claim was that he was waiting for a bus when a man pulled up in a car and offered him twenty bucks to run into the corner bank and hand a teller a note, then return with the package. He did what he was told. It was a stick-up note. The teller gave the Chinese guy a bag of cash, he gave it to the guy in the car, and soon after he was arrested while still waiting for his bus. One guy claimed he was narcoleptic. He handed the teller the stick-up note, and then became so tense he passed out and woke up in custody. And then there were the usual ones—drug addicts who robbed banks to keep up their habits and were finally caught in the act. They didn’t wear masks, they didn’t even own cars, they didn’t get but a few thousand dollars each time—they were just playing a game of cops and robbers until they were caught. A lot of those guys had more friends and relatives in prison than out. Then there were the ones who shot bystanders and cops, their partner, or, by accident, themselves. A guy named Moon had dropped his gun and shot himself in the eye. I took his X-ray, and the .22 slug was clear as day in his frontal lobe. Another guy shot himself in the leg. The bone never healed properly. An infection spiked up and he was rushed to the emergency room downtown where a two-inch section of his tibia and fibula was removed.
Of course we had the usual list of guys in for car theft, pimping, mail theft, murder, manslaughter, assault, burglary, larceny, arson, explosives, drug possession, drug dealing. And me, in for smuggling. This is how I got caught.
After our stopover in Cape May we came right up the New Jersey coast. By that evening I could see the lights shining brightly on the Statue of Liberty. She was like a lookout waving her arm and giving us the all-clear. Behind her, the skyscrapers of New York waited for us like a crowd held back, straining, ready to pounce. But were they a crowd of buyers, or police? I stood on the bow and looked through the binoculars. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I can tell you the fear of waiting to get caught was worse than getting caught. Every boat I saw, every noise I heard, every helicopter that spanked through the air, every searchlight that spun its bright eye toward us made me jump.
Would the police be expecting us? Would they come at us with a police launch? Or would they just take their time and wait for us to start selling? I scanned the water, the coastline, and the air. I knew they were watching us. Still, there was nothing to do but go forward and hope that Rik had made arrangements to sell the hash.
“Are you worried?” Hamilton asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be worried until it’s all over.”
He laughed. “The police aren’t that smart. My greatest fear is a snitch. That’s always the weak link. The police are too stupid to catch you on their own. Every fat-assed bobby in the world depends on his snitch to do the dirty work.”
I wasn’t in the mood to hear it. I was creeped out of my skin and waiting for a cop to reach up over the stern and yell, “Gotcha!” I returned to the bow and put on a life vest. I was a strong swimmer. I figured I could dive overboard and make my way to Miss Liberty. I raised my binoculars to my eyes. If the cops were coming, I wanted to see them first.
Since we hadn’t hooked up with Rik, we didn’t have a dock space reserved for us. Hamilton figured we’d just cruise around until we found something that looked available, but as it grew darker it was difficult to spot any marina space. We went up the oil-slicked East River, under the Brooklyn Bridge and along the east side of Manhattan. Along the way sailors waved to us. I thought they had seen the British Union Jack and were friendly. In return, Hamilton gave them his royal wave as if he were the queen of England, and I waved as if I were riding a homecoming float. What I didn’t know is that the East River was closed to pleasure craft traffic, which is why we were being waved away. But no police launch pulled us over. We passed by La Guardia Airport, with the jets soaring above our heads and the hot breath of their engines rolling down over us.
We made it all the way up to Queens before spotting a lighted marina sign. Hamilton headed toward the orange bumpers at the end of the dock.
“Should I drop an anchor?” I asked, and prepared to throw one over to slow us down.
“No,” he ordered. “Just take a line and jump on the dock and catch a cleat.”
As the boat evened up with the end of the dock I jumped off and hooked a line around a cleat, but the wood was rotted and the cleat bolts ripped out of the dock. I tried to haul the boat around, but it was a losing cause and finally I had to drop the line before being pulled into the water.
“Bloody incompetent!” Hamilton cursed and drifted onward until the bowsprit speared a metal barge. The barge was empty, and from the blow it sounded as if our arrival to Flushing had been announced with a Chinese gong. It brought the marina manager out of his little shed. Hamilton reversed the engine and sputtered back to where I could leap aboard, grab the line, and leap back onto the dock, where I looped it around a solid piling head and pulled it snug.
We made arrangements to keep the boat there. It seemed pretty remote and we felt secure being so out of the way. We walked up the dark street to a pay phone and Hamilton called Rik. He was in his room and ready to start moving the hash. He had a car, and had set up a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound sale. That news cheered me up and I didn’t feel so gloomy anymore. Maybe, I thought, all that sitting around on the boat was making me paranoid. Maybe I should just relax and go with the flow.
On the way back to the boat I went into a little store and bought a case of cold beer and some food. As soon as I popped a beer open I began to feel better. We had the boat tied up. We hadn’t been caught on the way in. And now that the selling had begun, the money would be flowing. I’d be paid and on my way to picking a new college.
When we got back on board, Hamilton used an old bathroom scale to weigh out the kilos of hash. I packed them in the canvas bags. When Rik arrived we threw the hash in the trunk and took off with Hamilton driving like a madman.
“Stick with the speed limit,” Rik reminded him. “We don’t want to get pulled over.”
“Nonsense,” Hamilton said. “I used to be a professional driver in Manchester. I know what to do.”
“Hey, Rik,” I butted in. “Did you get the crate okay?”
“Yeah,” he said, unfolding a map. “No problem, except for getting the screws out.” I smiled. I had used extra-long ones.