I tried holding the phone as high as I could with my right hand, hoping it would somehow catch a signal and dial through or show our coordinates, whatever. Still nothing. “I thought 9-1-1 was supposed to work anywhere!” I said again. I guess I was wrong. It didn’t work in a storm seventy miles out in the Gulf.
Sometimes I would hold Corey’s iPhone up and hope the light from the dial would let me see the front of the boat. It didn’t. I continued to ask Will if it was getting lower. I must have asked him a dozen times. It was a constant fight now, the boat rocking, trying to hold on and protect the phone. If you let yourself relax for more than ten or fifteen seconds, you would be in the water.
If we hadn’t worked so well together, getting the life jackets from under the boat, holding on to Marquis on the hull, helping one another back onto the stern and hull when we fell in, chances are one of us would have been swept away real quick.
Once, between waves, Corey said again in a determined voice, “There ain’t no way I’m going out like this!”
But a grim resignation was starting to set in as we clung to the boat and the Gulf battered us. There were a lot of “Oh my Gods.” At first it was, “Oh my God, is this really happening?” Now it was, “Oh my God, is this it?”
About midnight, Corey interrupted our silence, shouting, “I can’t believe the four of us can’t flip this boat!” He seemed angry and discouraged. Then he said, “There’s gotta be a way. What haven’t we tried? We gotta try again.”
Will and I reminded him, “Dude, there’s no leverage. It’s not possible.”
Maybe if it were a ten-foot boat in five-foot seas it would have been possible. Not out here.
“Think how hard it was just to get the cooler out of the water,” Will said. It had taken two of us just to get the water out and flip it onto the boat.
It got quiet. We were all freezing and exhausted. We began to huddle together, cuddling almost, trying to stay warm as the night went on. From the stern, I leaned forward until my ear and cheek were on Marquis’s back as he rested on the hull. Will also leaned forward, placing his chest on my back. Corey, too, leaned in from the stern, our three heads gathering in front of the motor, on Marquis’s torso. I thought for a moment that it was weird, four grown men clustered together like puppies or kittens, but it was necessary if we were going to maintain any body heat. I could feel everybody shivering and hear their teeth chattering.
Once, when it was quiet, knowing how desperate our situation was, I said, “I love you guys.” I just wanted to let them know how I felt. No one said anything back. It was a little awkward, but I knew from their reactions that everyone was thinking the same thing.
Bunched up there like that, we talked sporadically, sometimes about our families, sometimes about the things we would do different with our lives. Different paths we might have chosen. In the middle of the Gulf, with our boat overturned and the four of us getting tossed about by waves in a storm, our priorities seemed to straighten. Little crap didn’t matter. Being stranded, facing the possibility that we would all die, left us almost with a guilty feeling about things we had left undone. Marquis and Corey talked about their hometowns, their parents, college football, playing in the NFL. Marquis, of course, mentioned his love for Rebekah and Goose. Corey, who wasn’t married, reflected on his mother and what she meant to him. At one point, he said, “The things I would change.” He didn’t say anything specific, but there was regret in his voice.
Will said he wished he had been closer to his older brother, Blake. I had never met him. Will was single, a ladies’ man, an athlete. Blake had a steady girlfriend and would be married in eight months. Will lived in Tampa and had worked in finance until the economy went bad and his firm closed its office. Lately he had been splitting his time between Tampa and Crystal River, his hometown, where he and Blake helped out their parents at the family tire and auto shop that they had run for three decades. I think Will wished he had given a little more effort with his brother.
I thought about my mom, Marcia, and how much I loved her and how upset she got when something happened to me or my sister, Kristen. She always put herself second—or third or fourth—so that Kristen and I could have a good life. My parents had had a rough marriage. The details are private, no one’s business but their own. My mom stuck it out until I had just about finished my senior year of high school. They would argue and she would always try to be the peacemaker. “Don’t worry, I’m fine,” she would always tell us. I know it was hard on her, but she always seemed more concerned about how we were doing.
After I graduated, she took us on a vacation to Cancun. She was always doing something for me. When I was in elementary school in Ohio, she volunteered, helping take attendance, selling magazines for fund-raisers, chaperoning us on field trips. At night, I would lay on her lap to watch TV and when she told me to go to bed, I’d say, “No, I’m just going to rest my eyes.”
Nick Butt, she called me.
In high school, she never missed one of my games. She kept stats and a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about my basketball and football careers. After she and my father split, she worked as a paralegal and took out loans so that I could attend Kent State my freshman and sophomore years. When I moved to Florida in 2005, and worked painting jobs for my dad’s business, my mother put her foot down and said she couldn’t help support me; she told me to go back to school, that it was the right thing to do. When I applied to USF and was too nervous to call the admissions office, she called for me to find out whether I had been accepted. While I was in school, she let me charge food on her credit card.
Eventually, she moved to Florida to be near my sister and me. I played flag football on Saturday mornings, and she drove up two hours from Fort Myers to Tampa to watch my games. Sometimes she cooked or cleaned my house. She bought the orange jacket I was wearing out here in the cold water.
My dad, Stu, busted his ass with his painting business when we were all in Ohio. When I was a kid, we had a vacation home in Orlando. Every Christmas break, we’d hook up our thirty-foot camper and drive to Disney World. On other holidays, we would go to Myrtle Beach or Virginia Beach. In the winter, we skied in Vermont, in Killington. I got anything I wanted. I was spoiled. Four-wheelers, Jet Skis.
Being in the water made me think about an accident that happened in my junior year of high school. I was sixteen, and I begged and begged to get a motorcycle. Let’s go look, my dad said. I ended up getting a Suzuki GSX-R600. A crotch rocket. My best friend and I went to watch a football game and had some people over to my house afterward. During the party, I took him out real quick through a dark neighborhood around a bass lake. We weren’t drinking, but we were speeding. The street looked like a straightaway, but it happened to have a turn. We went down. I must have skidded thirty yards, bouncing on my hands across the pavement. I was bruised and scratched up but I didn’t hit my head or get badly hurt. I ran over to my friend, Daniel Turner. I didn’t have a phone on me. I began screaming for help. He was unconscious, bleeding from both ears. When the ambulance showed up, Dan had awakened and was freaking out. He was swearing and throwing punches at the emergency people. He had a concussion and they put him in a neck brace. If he hadn’t been wearing a helmet, he would have died.
He had two emergency brain surgeries to relieve the pressure and the swelling. When we got to the hospital, I knew his parents were there, and I didn’t know if he would live or die. Up to this point, it was the most scared I’d ever been in my life. I didn’t know if his dad was going to hug me or attack me. Dan was in the hospital more than a month doing rehab. As scared as I was then, though, being stranded in the Gulf now was a lot worse. It was kind of like it was in God’s hands. At least then, there was help to be found. Out here there was nothing. Whoever came to look for us would be looking for a needle in a haystack.
I knew my dad would worry about me. He had moved to Florida, to Tarpon Springs. He still had his painting business, but he had been through some hard times—divorce,
financial issues. I thought about that. I thought, If I don’t get out of this, it’s going to make his life that much harder. I knew he was proud of me. I knew both of my parents were proud of me. They thought I always did what I wanted, whether it was good or bad. I think they respected me for that. They knew once I made my mind up about something, the only person who could keep me from doing it was myself, whether it was me not doing my homework or trying to make the USF football team.
My mom used to say to me when I was younger, “Nick if you apply yourself in school, you’ll do well. You are smart, if you’d just apply yourself.” I didn’t like school. I applied myself to sports and having a good time. I didn’t like school at all. I hated school. I got a communications degree from USF in 2008, but I thought it was just one step above “undecided.” I just went because my mom wanted me to and I knew it was expected. I had a diploma, but I didn’t have a plan to use my degree. At the same time, being a personal trainer was something I worked hard at and loved and made a decent living at.
My sister used to tell me I got the looks, she got the brains—not that she’s bad-looking. Kristen was twenty-seven, three years older than me. We’ve always been pretty close. She was an athlete. She is tall, 5 feet 9 inches, with light brown hair and a strong, athletic build. She played shortstop and the outfield in fast-pitch softball in high school. Once, she played in a tournament in Lyon, France. She had scholarship offers to places like Ohio State, but she wanted to go to school in Florida, at USF. When I was younger, I wanted to be like her. She was my idol. She was cool and popular and hung out with the jocks. She could always kick my ass. She’d hold me down and threaten to spit in my face. My parents spoiled her in ways different from me. She had a car and big parties, a hundred-plus people. When she went to school at USF, they had a house built for her in Tampa.
We differed in a big way as far as schooling went. She looked forward to school and liked it. It came natural to her. She was always studying. In high school, she was already taking courses at community college. She graduated from college at twenty. She went back to Ohio and finished her undergraduate degree at Kent State. She always had a job, even when she didn’t necessarily need one. Then she got her MBA at Cleveland State when she was twenty-three.
Now she worked as a rep for a company that distributed dental supplies. She and my mom were living together in Fort Myers. Kristen is so driven. That’s what I love about her. I always used to say, “It sucks, here I am, twenty-three and I just finished college, and my sister had her master’s when she was twenty-three.”
The other important woman in my life, Paula Oliveira, was nonstop in the back of my head all night. I knew she would be worried. When I left in the morning, I popped my head in the bedroom and said, “Babe, I gotta go. Love you.” She said, “No, I need a kiss,” so I walked in and kissed her.
Paula was five years older, a dance teacher at a performing arts middle school and at a studio in Tampa. She is a brunette, in as good a shape as I was in. Strong as hell. Her family was from Sao Paulo, Brazil. When I moved to Tampa in 2005, I only knew a few people in town. Paula was already out of school, in her first year of teaching, and I met her about six months after I got to town. She went to USF—she and my sister actually lived for a brief time in the same dorm; and while they weren’t friends, they had mutual friends. I met her while a group of us were out for drinks. After that night, I kept calling Paula and texting, but she gave me the run-around. I was twenty, she was twenty-four or twenty-five. I couldn’t even drink in a bar yet. Not legally. Her friends would tell me, “She thinks you’re too young.”
About a month later—this would have been November 2005—we started hanging out. One night we went out and she said she realized that she liked me. She likes to say that it was the happiest night of my life. When we first started dating, I was working out to try to make the USF football team. I had all these motivational quotes in my bedroom, all around my computer: Push yourself to the limit. Shut up and train. Squat ’til you puke. On my twenty-first birthday, she bought me an ice-cream cake. Most people turn twenty-one, they go out and drink twenty-one shots. I was training hard, on a strict diet. I had dedicated myself to the diet and to making the team.
When I saw what she had brought me, I felt bad. “Thank you so much,” I told her, “but I can’t eat that cake.”
“Are you serious?” she said.
I trained her for a while in the gym, and there were times when she felt she couldn’t lift a pound, and I’d say, “Bullshit, you know you have it,” and she could always do two or three more reps. I made her nervous at first when I worked out. I was so intense, I would be bench-pressing and when she thought I couldn’t lift any more, I’d yell, “light weight, light weight,” and I’d lift it up. I think she was afraid I would drop the weight on my neck. But if she thought I was crazy, I guess she thought it was a good crazy.
She reminded me of my mom. Paula would always go the extra mile to make you happy and take care of you and make the little things bigger, whether it was breakfast in bed or cleaning the house. “Don’t do that,” she would say. “Don’t worry about cleaning the dishes. I’ll do it.” No bickering or fighting.
We had three dogs, and I wondered if they would miss me. Chloe was Paula’s, a boxer, four years old, fifty-three pounds. A momma’s girl, a big baby. The other two were Jack Russells. Kelli, twelve, was Miss Independent, smart, always bringing home frogs and lizards, a bird, a snake. She got a rabbit once, too. Tori, nine, was a wild child. She ran the house, nipping at everyone’s ankles. She’d bite you one minute and lick you the next. I thought she was bipolar. When visitors came, she went under the stairs outside and dug a hole. I had no idea why. At night, we all had our spots on the bed. Chloe was at the foot. Tori was usually between Paula’s legs or against her. Kelli would get between us or on my left side. Would they notice that I was gone? Could they sense that something was wrong?
For a long period that first night, there wasn’t much else to do but try to stay on the boat and think. I wished I hadn’t been so selfish, hurting girls’ feelings, being mean to family members over stupid things. I remembered my first Thanksgiving in Tampa, in 2005. I had spent it alone. My roommates were gone. I remember being sad and upset. If I got out of this, I would never let myself feel that way again—distant and selfish.
I thought about football. How I should have played my final two years in high school. What’s two years now? How I should have sat out the 2006 season at USF and played in 2007. I kept thinking about getting rescued and making it to those games to see Marquis and Corey play. I kept thinking about what a good story this was going to be to tell once we got out of this. And then, at times, I thought there was no way in hell we were going to get out of it.
I don’t know if it was the trainer in me or what, but about every half hour I would remind the guys, “Make sure you move your toes a lot, move your feet, flex your chest, shrug your shoulders, get your blood flowing.” I think they did—at first, anyway.
As the night went on, Will, Corey, and I did the most of the talking. Marquis seemed to get quieter and quieter.
“Coop, you good?” we would ask. “You all right?”
“I’m all right,” he would say.
Then we didn’t hear from him for a while. Marquis had been on the hull on his hands and knees, holding on to the cooler in case the boat sank, wearing only his swim trunks and his life jacket. With the boat bucking and rolling, he had fallen off so many times, he seemed exhausted.
“Coop?” we called out. “Coop?”
His responses became slower and slower. At first, he would answer right when we called his name. Now we’d call out four or five times before he said anything. Sometimes we had to shake him on the hull.
He started to slur and ramble a little. Maybe it was around two thirty. The water was still rough, crashing in. Marquis had taken in so much salt water and had done a lot of gagging. Then he began to dry heave. His teeth were chattering constantly.
For a few moments, I could only see Will. Marquis and Corey had disappeared, and I started freaking out until I spotted them again. I was knocked a good ten feet from the boat a couple times in a row. I started screaming out.
What light there was seemed to come from the whiteness of the hull. When you were at the stern, or in the water facing the boat, you could see the hull and the outline of people’s bodies. Sometimes, if they were close enough, you could see their eyes and teeth and maybe their life jackets. But if you faced away from the boat, into the black, you could hardly see your hand in front of your face. Sometimes when you went in the water and got disoriented, you just had to swim toward peoples’ voices.
WILL REACHED AND grabbed me and pulled me to the boat. Then Will lost his grip, and I grabbed him; and then we both grabbed Corey. Marquis kept falling off, and we grabbed his leg or his arm. It was all adrenaline—there was no time to think.
Marquis was getting into bad shape. He would take longer and longer to respond—and when he did, he was mumbling. He slid off the hull to the back of the boat, to the left of the motor, near Corey. Then he started trying to move around the left side of the boat, trying to go somewhere, trying to get something. “What are you doing?” I asked him.
I don’t know if he thought, I’ve got to do something now, or what. It wasn’t him, not the Marquis I knew. He was an incredibly fit athlete, but I guess hypothermia was taking control of him. He was mumbling, “I need to get the anchor. I’ve got to get under the boat.”
Not Without Hope Page 5