“Good.”
“Not good.” He shook his head. “Besides—I suspect your companions may have swimmed to shore. Otherwise we would have found them.”
I remembered the dinghy we had been pulling, and thought a prayer.
“I must have an answer, please. You come from San Diego?”
I shook my head. “Newport Beach.”
“Ah.” He wrote on his paper. “But you were returning from San Diego?”
As long as I lied, it was okay to tell him things. “We were on our way to San Clemente and missed it in the fog.”
“Missed San Clemente? Come now, we are several miles south of that town.”
“I told you, we missed it.”
“But you had been headed north for some time.”
“We knew we had gone too far, and we were headed back. It’s hard to tell where you are in the fog.”
“In that case, why were you at sea?”
“Why do you think?”
“Ah—to avoid our patrols, you mean. Yet we don’t interfere with coastal traffic. What was your business in San Clemente?”
I thought fast, looking down so the captain wouldn’t see me doing it. “Well … we were taking some Japanese down there to hike in and look at the old mission.”
“Japanese don’t land on the mainland,” the captain said sharply.
So I had startled him! “Of course they do,” I said. “You say that because it’s your job to see that they don’t. But they do it all the time, and you know it.”
He stared at me, then conferred with his officers in Japanese. For the first time I took notice of that fact that I was hearing someone talk in a foreign tongue. It was peculiar. It sounded like they were repeating four or five sounds over and over again, too fast to actually be saying anything. But obviously they were, for the officers gestured and nodded agreement, the captain gave orders, all in a rapid gibberish. More than their skin or their eyelids, their meaningless speech brought it to me that I was dealing with men from the other side of the world—men a lot different from me than the San Diegans had been. When the captain turned and spoke to me in English it sounded unreal, as if he were just making sounds he didn’t understand.
Scribbling on the page clipped to the board, he said, “How old are you?”
“I don’t know. My pa can’t remember.”
“Your mother can’t remember?”
“My father.”
This struck him as odd, I could see. “No one else knows?”
“Tom guesses I’m sixteen or seventeen.” Tom …
“How many people were on your boat?”
“Ten.”
“How many people live in your community?”
“Sixty.”
“Sixty people in Newport Beach?” he said, surprised.
“Hundred and sixty, I mean.”
“How many people live in your house or dwelling?”
“Ten.”
His nose wrinkled, and he lowered the board. “Can you describe the Japanese you met in Newport Beach?”
“They looked just like you,” I said truculently.
He pursed his lips. “And they were with you tonight on the boat we sank?”
“That’s right. And they came over here on a ship as big as this one, so why didn’t you stop them? Isn’t that your job?”
He waved a hand impatiently. “Not all landings can be stopped.”
“Especially when you’re paid not to try, eh?”
He pursed his lips again into that bad-taste look.
Shaking more and more, I cried, “You say you’re here to guard the coast, but all you really do is bomb our tracks and kill us when we’re just sailing—when we’re just sailing home—” and all of a sudden I was crying again, bawling and crying. I couldn’t help it. I was cold, and Tom was dead, and my head hurt something fierce, and I couldn’t stand up to this stranger and his questions any longer.
“Your head is still painful?” I was holding my head between my arms. “Here, stretch out on this bench and rest. We need to get you to hospital.” His hands took me by the shoulders, and helped me lie out against the curving metal of the ship’s tall gunwale. The officers lifted my legs up and wrapped them in the blankets, moving the clipboard from where the captain had put it down. I was too dispirited to kick them. The captain’s hands were small and strong; they reminded me of Carmen Eggloff’s hands, strangely enough, and I was about to burst into sobs again, when I noticed the ring on the captain’s left ring finger. It was a big darkened gold ring that held a cut red jewel in the top of it. Letters were carved into the gold around the jewel, curving around the stone so they were hard to read. But the hand wearing the ring stilled for a moment right before my nose, and I could make out the words. Anaheim High School 1976.
I jerked back and bumped my head against the gunwale. “Be peaceful, young sir. Don’t agitate yourself. We’ll talk further of these things in Avalon.”
He was wearing an American ring. A class ring, like those the scavengers wore during the evenings at the swap meets, to show which of the ruins they came from. I quivered in the scratchy blankets as I thought about what that meant. If the captain of the ship assigned to keep foreigners from coming to our coast was himself visiting Orange County—visiting it regularly, and wearing a ring that a scavenger must have given him—then no one was guarding the coast in earnest. It was all a sham, this quarantine—a sham that had gotten Tom killed. Tears pooled in my eyes, and I squeezed them back, furious at the injustice, the corruption of it—furious and confused. It seemed just moments ago I had been dozing, eyes shut, in the San Diegans’ sloop. And now—what had he said?—“We’ll talk further of these things in Avalon.”
I sat up. They were taking me to Catalina to be questioned. Tortured, maybe. Thrown in prison, or made a slave—kept away from Onofre for the rest of my life. The more I thought of it the more frightened I became. Up to that point I hadn’t stopped to think what they were going to do with me—I was confused, and that’s a fact—but now it was obvious I should have; they weren’t going to take me up the Onofre river and drop me off. They were going to take me with them. The idea made my heart thump so hard I thought my ribs would bust. My breathing was so quick and choppy I thought I might faint. Catalina! I would never see home again! Though it was selfish of me, I felt worse about that than I had about Tom’s death.
The captain and his officers stood under the little red light over the door in the back wall. Salt crusts marred the dim red reflections of them in the big windows. The reflection of the captain’s face was looking at me, which meant, I decided, he was watching my reflection. He was keeping an eye on me.
Out on the bow deck a couple of sailors still stood by the searchlight. It looked like they were fixing it. Otherwise, the deck was empty. Fog swept over us, cold and white. The ship vibrated ever so slightly, but we still hadn’t gone anywhere.
They had taken every stitch of clothing off of me, to get me dry. All the better.
The captain walked back to me. “Are you feeling better?”
“Yes. I’m getting sleepy, though.”
“Ah. We will take you into one of the berths.”
“No! Not yet. I’d be sick if I had to move. I just want to rest here a minute more.” I slumped down and did my best to look exhausted.
The captain watched me. “You said something about tracks being bombed?”
“Who, me? I never said anything about tracks.”
He nodded doubtfully.
“Why do you do it?” I asked despite myself. “Why do you come halfway around the world to patrol here?”
“We have been given the responsibility by the United Nations. I don’t believe you would understand all the details of the matter.”
So it was true, what they had told us in San Diego. Part of it, anyway. “I know about the United Nations,” I said. “But there isn’t a person from America there to tell our side. Everything they do is illegal.” I spoke drowsily, to put him off his
guard. I shouldn’t have spoken at all, but my curiosity got the better of me.
“They’re all we’ve got, young sir. Without them, perhaps war and devastation would come to us all.”
“So you hurt us to help yourselves.”
“Perhaps.” He stared at me, as if surprised I could argue at all. “But it may be that it is the best policy for you as well.”
“It isn’t. I live there. I know. You are holding us back.”
He nodded briefly. “But from what? That is the part that you have not experienced, my brave young friend.”
I feigned sleep, and he walked back to his officers under the red light. He said something to them and they laughed.
Up and down the room pitched, up and down, up and down, smooth and gentle. I jumped out of the blankets and ran toward the open doorway to the bow. The captain had been watching for me to make such a move: “Ha!” He yelled, leaping after me. But he had miscalculated. I just caught the astonished look on his face as I flashed out the door ahead of him—I was too fast for him. Once outside I raced for the gunwale, and dove past the startled sailors into the fog.
10
After a long fall my arms and face smacked the sea, and my body walloped them home. When I felt the water’s chill I thought Oh, no. The air had been knocked out of me, and ten feet under I had to breathe something awful. When I popped back to the surface to suck in air a swelltop rolled over me and I breathed water instead. I was certain my hacking and gasping would give me away to the Japanese, who shouted after me. Undoubtedly they were lowering boats to search for me. The water was freezing, it made my whole body cry out for air.
I struck out swimming away from the shouts and the dim glow of the searchlight, and was rammed by an approaching swell. Damned if I hadn’t jumped off the seaward side of the ship. I would have to swim around it. And I had been sure I was leaping off the landward side. How had I gotten so turned around? My confidence in my sense of direction disappeared, and for a minute I panicked, afraid I wouldn’t be able to find my way to shore. I sure wasn’t going to see it. But the swell was a reliable guide, as I quickly realized when it shoved me time after time in the same direction. It was coming a bit out of the south, I had noted in the sloop, and I only had to swim in with it, maybe angling a bit to the right as it propelled me, and I would be on the straightest course to shore.
So that was all right. But the cold shocked me. The water might still have been from that warm current we had enjoyed the previous week, but now, with the storm wind whipping across the surface and chilling my head and arms, it didn’t feel warm in any way. I almost shouted to the Japanese to come to my rescue. But I didn’t do it. I didn’t want to face the captain again. I could imagine his face as I explained, yes, sir, I did want to escape, but, you see, the water was too cold. It wouldn’t do. If they were to haul me out, that was fine—part of me hoped they would, and soon, too. But if they didn’t, I was stuck with it.
To combat the cold I swam as hard as I could, trusting that I was around the bow of the ship and putting distance between us. It would be a nasty shock to clang into its hull unexpectedly, and it still seemed possible, because in the fog I couldn’t see ten feet. As swell after swell passed under me, however, it became less likely. Too bad, part of me thought. You’re in for it now. The rest of me got down to the business of getting to shore, the sooner the better. I settled into a rhythm and began working.
Only once did I see or hear the ship again, and it was soon after I had made the final decision to swim for it. Usually the fog does not convey sound better than the open air, no matter what some folks will have you believe. It tends to dampen sound as it limits sight, though not as drastically. But it is funny stuff, and sometimes, caught fishing by a fog bank, Steve and I have heard the voices of other fishermen talking in low tones and sounding as if they were about to collide with us, when they were half a mile away. Tom could never explain it, nor Rafael neither.
It happened again on this night. The voices were behind me, and far enough above me that I guessed they came from the ship. I groaned, thinking that I had been confused in my swimming, and that I was still in the vicinity of the ship; but then a cold swirl of wind caught their voices midsentence, and blew them away for good. It was just me and the fog and the ocean, and the cold.
I only know three ways to swim. Or call it four. Crawl, backstroke, sidestroke, and a frog kick. Crawl was the fastest by far, and did the most to keep me warm, so I put my face in the brine—which scared me somehow, but keeping my head up was too tiring—and swam for it. I could feel the swells pick me up feet first, give a welcome shove, and pass under, leaving me floundering in the trough. Other than that, all I felt was the wind cutting into my arms as I stroked. The cutting got so bad that I switched to the frog kick just to keep my arms under water. The water was still cold, but I had gotten used to it a little, and it was better than my wet arms in the wind. Working hard was the best solution, so after a few frog strokes I went back to the crawl and swam hard. When I got tired or my arms got too cold, I switched to frog kick or sidestroke, and let kicking and the swell carry me along. It was a matter of shifting the discomforts from spot to spot, and then bearing them for as long as I could.
The thing about swimming is it leaves you a lot of time to think. In fact there is little to do but think, unlike when hiking through the woods, for instance, when there are rocks to look out for, and the path of least effort to be found. In the sea all paths are the same, and at night in the fog there’s not much to look at. This is what I could see: the black swells rising and sinking under me; the white fog, which was becoming low clouds again as the wind unfortunately picked up; and my own body. And even these things were only visible when I had my head up and my eyes open, which wasn’t very often. So I had nothing to do but worry about my swimming. Mostly I swam with my head in the brine and my eyes closed, feeling my muscles tire and my joints ache with cold, and though my thoughts raced wildly they never got too far from this vital feeling, which determined the stroke I used from moment to moment.
Kicking hard on my back warmed my feet some, and they needed it. I could barely feel them. But kicking was slow, and effortful too. I sure wished I had a pair of Tom’s fins at that moment, the ones he lent us to body surf with. I loved those fins—old blue or green or black things that made us walk like ducks and swim like dolphins. What I wouldn’t have done for a pair of them right then and there! It almost made me cry to think of them. And once they occurred to me I couldn’t get them out of my mind. Now to my little assortment of thoughts was added, if only I had those fins. If only I had them.
I flopped back on my stomach and started the crawl again. The backs of my upper arms were getting stiff and sore. I wondered how long I had been at it, and how much longer I had to go. I tried to calculate the distance. Say the ship had been a mile offshore. That would be about half the length of our valley’s beach. If I had started swimming at Basilone Hill, then by this time I’d be about to … well, I couldn’t say. There was no way to tell. I was sure I had swum a good distance, though, from the way my arms hurt.
Stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke. Sometimes it was easy to blank the mind and just swim. I changed strokes at the count of a hundred; hundred after hundred slipped by. A lot of time passed. When I did the frog kick I noticed that the fog was lifting, becoming the low cloud bank that had rushed overhead when we were sailing north in the sloop. Perhaps that meant I was getting close to land. The clouds were very white against the black sea; probably the moon was now up. The surface of the water was a rolling obsidian plain. Swirling into it were little flurries of snow, flying forward over me as much as they were falling. When they hit the water they disappeared instantly, without a splash. The sight of them made me feel the cold more than ever, and again I almost started to cry, but couldn’t spare the effort. I was crying miserable, though. If only I had those fins.
I put my head down and doggedly crawled along, ordering myself to think of something
besides the cold. All the times I had looked out over a peaceful warm sea, for instance. I recalled a time when Steve and Tom and I were lazing up at Tom’s place, looking for Catalina. “I wonder what it would look like if the water was gone,” Steve had said. Tom had jumped on the notion with glee. “Why, we’d think we were on a giant mountain. Offshore here would be a plain tilted away from us, cut by canyons so deep we wouldn’t be able to see the bottom of them. Then the plain would drop away so steeply we wouldn’t be able to see the lowlands beyond. That’s the continental shelf I’ve told you about. The lowland would rise again to foothills around Catalina and San Clemente islands, which would be big mountains like ours.” On he had rambled, pulling up imaginary hipboots to lead us on an exploration of the new land, through mud and muck that was covered with clumps of seaweed and surprised-looking fish, in search of wrecked ships and their open treasure chests.…
It was the wrong time to remember that discussion. When I thought of how much water was underneath me, how far away the bottom was, I got scared and pulled my feet closer to the surface. All those fish, too—the ocean was teeming with fish, as I well knew, and some of them had sharp teeth and voracious appetites. And none of them went to bed at night. One of those ugly ones with its mouth crammed with teeth could swim up and bite me that very moment! Or I might blunder into a whole school of them, and feel their slick finny bodies colliding with mine—the sandy leather of a shark, or the spikes of a scorpion fish.… But worse than the fish was just being out there at all, with all that water below, down and down and colder and darker, all the way to the slimy bottom so far below. I thrashed with panic for a while, terrified at the thought of where I was, of how deep the sea was.
But several rushes of panic passed, and I was still there floundering. There was nothing I could do to change things. And more and more as time passed the real danger, the cold, reasserted itself and made me forget my fears of the imagination. It couldn’t be escaped, I couldn’t swim hard enough now to ward it off, and the water felt icy, no longer any refuge from the snowy wind. The cold would kill me soon. I could feel that in my muscles. It was more frightening than the size of the sea by far.
The Wild Shore Page 15