Fogbound

by Joseph T. Klempner

  It was a crisp, clear morning, with a steady offshore breeze, and although the lighthouse barometer indicated the pressure was beginning to fall ever so slightly, Jorgensen figured whatever weak low front was causing the drop wouldn’t reach the coast till evening. Ray Gilbert and his fellow tutors weren’t scheduled to arrive until tomorrow. In fact, if a storm did come through, they’d be delayed or, worse yet, forced to stay over. By the time the weather had cleared up (and they’d cleared out), it would be the weekend, and Jorgensen would be busy getting ready for the trip up to Washington. If there was still going to be a Washington trip, that was.

  What all of that meant was that if he was going to get any sailing in this week, now was the time to do it. Jake seemed to agree, jumping into the dinghy as soon as Jorgensen had turned it over, even before he’d dragged it down to the water’s edge.

  There was always something about the first sail of spring. You learned to become a landlubber over winter, and the sea was reduced to a picture, something to watch. A beautiful picture, to be sure, constantly changing in color, texture, and disposition. The winter ocean was a schizophrenic creature, wildly bipolar in her dramatic mood swings. She could be almost catatonically calm one moment, only to suddenly cloud up and darken into blackest depression the next. Gentle swells that promised to continue for days could suddenly crest and erupt without warning into ferociously violent storms.

  But come the spring, almost as if medicated, she became a gentler, more predictable being. With cold weather gales having departed for the more northern reaches of the Atlantic, and tropical depressions still months away from brewing down in the Caribbean and forming the hurricanes of late summer and early fall, the sea turned manageable, dependable. You could count on her, trust her, without having to worry too much that she’d turn on you.

  And yet, the first sail of spring was always an adventure, always something special, the way the first ski run of winter had been in Jorgensen’s childhood, or the first day of bonefishing, or the first time back on a horse or bike after a long layoff. There was the initial uncertainty, the wondering if you still could do it, gradually giving way to the tentative rediscovery of an old love, and finally maturing into the comfortable sense that you’d never been away from it.

  He caught the breeze on the starboard side and took up the slack in the sheet, signaling Jake to drop the mooring line, and they were off. The old catboat, her hull newly scraped, sanded and painted, heeled sharply and began picking up speed. The big sail filled smartly, without luffing. The smooth, worn wood of the tiller felt good in Jorgensen’s right hand, the coils of the nylon sheet wrapped securely around his left. Jake took up a spot high on the port rail, where - whether by instinct or design - his weight helped trim the boat and decrease her angle of heel, permitting her to show more canvas to the wind. Jorgensen closed his eyes and listened, heard only wind and water. God, it was good to be alive!

  “ALIVE.”

  The word Boyd Davies had mouthed, had come tantalizingly close to saying out loud. He could still talk - he would talk again, Jorgensen knew - if only they didn’t kill him first.

  “They’ll kill me,” Kurt Meisner had told Jorgensen the last time he’d seen him, words so ominous they’d come back and haunted Jorgensen in his dream. And now Meisner had conveniently disappeared.

  “Coming about!” Jorgensen called, pushing the tiller hard away from him, and ducking low an instant later, as the boom swung overhead. As her bow crossed the wind, the catboat slowed only momentarily, as if to catch her breath before continuing on. Then, as captain and mate shifted their weight over to the port side, she picked up speed, pulling away from the shore, away from Kurt Meisner, away from Boyd Davies, too.

  It was a weekday, which meant a workday for the rest of the world, and there was little in the way of traffic on the water. A couple of fishing trawlers worked the outer banks, and in the distance, a container carrier, riding low in the water, steamed north, just beyond where the blue-greens of the continental shelf fell off and gave way to the deeper blue of the ocean. South of them, a cabin cruiser of some sort idled in the water, its pilot checking them out with binoculars. Well, they probably were a sight, a white-haired man and a seafaring dog, looking as though they had every intention of crossing the Atlantic in an old wooden bathtub.

  The sun was high, but still slightly to the southeast, telling Jorgensen that it wasn’t yet noon. They could continue tacking out for another two hours or more, safe in the knowledge that the same breeze they were fighting now would carry them back on a single, effortless broad reach, in half the time.

  “You okay, mate?” he asked.

  The mate responded with a quick glance and a wag of the tail. Then he returned his gaze to the horizon ahead of them, his mouth open, his nostrils flared, his tongue drinking in the wind.

  On a day like this, it was easy for a man to leave his troubles back on the mainland, easy to forget Boyd Davies and Kurt Meisner and Jessica Woodruff for a few hours. It was easy, too, to fail to detect a decided warming of the air and a somewhat more subtle drop in the breeze.

  The intercom buzzer startled Jessica. She’d been daydreaming, daydreaming at her desk about arguing before the Supreme Court.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Professor Gilbert on line one.”

  “Thanks,” she said, “I’ll take it.”

  A moment later, Ray Gilbert was saying hello. “So,” he wanted to know, “do you still want me to go ahead and get together with Judge Jorgensen?”

  Interesting question, thought Jessica. “When’s that supposed to be?” she asked, buying time.

  “Day after tomorrow.”

  She thought a moment. She couldn’t very well call the tutoring session off, could she? Not without tipping her hand. And the fewer people there were that knew, the better for everyone. “Sure,” she said. “Meet with him, get him ready for prime time.”

  “You trust him?” Gilbert wanted to know.

  “Brandon does.”

  “I asked about you.”

  “And the last I checked,” said Jessica, “I work for Brandon Davidson, and he calls the shots around here. In case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “A little touchy today, aren’t we?”

  “I guess so,” said Jessica. “Sorry, this whole thing’s getting me nervous.”

  “Tell you what. I’ll be seeing the old guy Wednesday. Why don’t you let me feel him out, see which side of the street he’s standing on. I’ll give you a call Wednesday night, Thursday at the latest.”

  “That’d be good, Ray. Take care.”

  “You, too.”

  She hung up the phone and returned to her daydream. Maybe Brandon was right. He certainly was right about her knowing the case as well as anybody. In a way, it would be a blast, getting up and arguing in front of the Supremes. There was still time for Trial TV to run three or four days of promotions on how one of their own was willing to step up at the last moment, to try to save a condemned man’s life. And so what if she lost the case, as she surely would. That might momentarily lower her star in the eyes of some, but think of the bounce she’d get later on, when she discovered the tape, the smoking gun that would force the nation to admit an innocent man had been executed. That would be more than enough to redeem her, to catapult her right to the top.

  It was too bad she couldn’t have it both ways. Wouldn’t it be something if she could slip something into her argument suggesting she had doubts about her client’s guilt? You know, just an aside, a footnote of sorts. That way, in hindsight, she’d come to be seen as an absolute visionary, the only one who’d ever believed in Boyd Davies’s innocence.

  The problem was, you didn’t want to play up this doubt angle too much. If you weren’t careful, The New York Times might pick it up, others would jump on the bandwagon, and before you knew it, the governor would be under pressure to commute the sentence or declare some sort of a moratorium on executions. All the studies showed that a majority of the public
still endorsed capital punishment, but tended to get uncomfortable at the prospect of an innocent man’s being put to death. It was that very discomfort, of course, that Jessica would ultimately exploit in order to bring down the whole system. So maybe it was better to keep her personal doubts to herself at this point, or at least confine them to a segment they’d tape, but not air until afterward.

  The last thing she needed, after all, was a premature exoneration.

  They’d tacked a dozen times, and put a good five nautical miles between themselves and the shoreline, before Jorgensen realized that the wind was dropping. The first thing he noticed was that they weren’t pointing as well, were having increasing difficulty sailing close to the direction the breeze was coming from. At first, he attributed it to the catboat’s single-sail design: Boats rigged with foresails to complement their mains were generally better at sailing upwind (upwind being a relative term, of course, since no boat could sail directly into the wind). But soon enough, there was a significant drop-off in their speed, as well as the course they could maintain. That was followed by a gradual flattening of the waves, accompanied by a rise in the air temperature.

  Not that any of these developments - or even all of them, combined - were cause for alarm. August Jorgensen was an experienced sailor, and Jake was, if anything, more comfortable at sea than he was on land. Jorgensen simply swung the boat around and set a course for home. When home was a lighthouse, that was a pretty easy thing to do. The only thing they needed now was enough of a breeze to push them home.

  Downwind sailing will never inspire an amusement park ride. Without lateral forces being exerted against the sail, there’s none of the excitement that comes from heeling over. Instead of the bow knifing through oncoming waves (or at times even planing over them), the craft feels as though it’s plowing ahead, pushed by the swells behind it. And because the boat is moving in the same direction as the surface water, even though the actual speed may increase, the perceived speed diminishes greatly. You may get there twice as fast, but you’re only going to have half the fun.

  Except that it didn’t take too long before the catboat not only wasn’t getting there twice as fast, it wasn’t getting there at all. Within an hour - less, within forty-five minutes - the breeze had all but disappeared. The big sail luffed, and the boom swung lazily from side to side. Overhead, the early afternoon sun beat down through a thin haze, prompting Jorgensen to reach for the bailing can, and use it to pour water over Jake. It wasn’t a good time to be thick-coated and black.

  But it wasn’t Jake’s body temperature that concerned Jorgensen; the same coat that insulated the dog against cold would serve him against heat. Nor was it the fact of their being becalmed: Sooner or later, the breeze would pick up, and one way or another, they’d be able to ride it in.

  No, what concerned Jorgensen was that haze. If you shielded your eyes and looked up at the sun - for that was the way to tell, early on - you could see that the haze was actually a cloud, made up of thinner and thicker layers. And the cloud appeared to be moving, though slowly, to be sure; in the calm, nothing moved fast. But the appearance of movement was bad. It meant the cloud was nearby, close overhead. And if it was overhead, it was all around them. Which meant it wasn’t really a cloud at all. It was a closely related weather phenomenon, but one that went by another name altogether.

  Fog.

  In fall, dry, cooler air hovering above water still warm from summer produced condensation. Now, in spring, Jorgensen knew he was witnessing the opposite effect: moist, warmer air drawing up water still cold from winter. While the phenomena were the mirror image of each other, the results were the same.

  One moment you were sailing under clear skies, into a fresh breeze. The next you were dead in the water, watching helplessly as first the horizon blurred, then nearby boats vanished, the sun disappeared from view, until you found yourself the center of a clearing around you, a perfect circle maybe fifty feet across, beyond which you could see absolutely nothing.

  A hole in the fog.

  This was the situation Jorgensen knew he was heading for in short order. And still he didn’t panic, felt no need for alarm. With the sail now catching no breeze at all, he lowered it, letting its wooden hoops pile up at the base, and tying it loosely to the boom. Then, rummaging through one of the catboat’s storage compartments, he found the pieces to his radar reflector. It consisted of four aluminum semicircles, which he interlocked to produce a three-dimensional object, not very different from one of those decorative snowflakes you see in department stores at Christmas time. He snapped a halyard onto its ring and ran it up the mast, where - no matter what direction it was approached from - it would present a target sufficient to translate into a visible image on another vessel’s radar screen.

  To a small wooden boat like Jorgensen’s - powerless to move or maneuver, reduced to the status of a bobbing piece of cork, and all but invisible to other craft - the most dangerous thing about fog was being run into. Pilots of powerboats, from the smallest outboard dinghies to giant supertankers the size of mountains, continue moving ahead in fog, albeit more slowly. Unable to see Jorgensen in the fog, or hear him over the noise of their own engines, they’d literally be on top of him before they could do anything about it. The radar reflector was therefore the catboat’s first and only line of defense, its one chance of being seen. To Jorgensen’s way of thinking, that was a quality that made it nothing but a blessing.

  Jake knew the drill, and with the boat sitting still he was permitted to jump over the side and into the water, so long as he stayed close by. Jorgensen tossed him a stick (it was actually an old sail batten), and the dog’s retriever instincts took over from there. They’d repeated the game twice, and Jorgensen was about to throw the stick a third time, when he thought he heard something.

  Now thinking you’re hearing something is about as precise as it gets in fog. Fog distorts sound, either by muffling it, varying its pitch and intensity, or causing it to echo dramatically. But by far the most unsettling thing about fog is its ability to play the ventriloquist: A thick fog can take a sound that’s dead ahead of you and bounce it off some unseen wall of mist behind you, so that you’d swear what you’re hearing is astern of you.

  Pulling Jake back into the boat, Jorgensen moved to the bow, where he grasped the rail with both hands and cocked his head, trying not to be fooled, trying to identify both the nature of the sound and its origin. It was an engine, of that he was quite certain, but where it was coming from, he had no way of telling. It had to be either a boat or a plane. Let it be a plane, he thought. But a plane would come and go, he knew, and this didn’t seem to be going. He moved to the stern, cocked his head and listened again, trying to get coordinates by triangulation. But the fog was too thick, the distortion too great. And still the sound kept coming.

  “Speak!” he told Jake, and the dog barked once, twice, a third time. “Speak!” Jorgensen repeated, and Jake complied. There was a fog bell somewhere in one of the storage compartments, but no time to run it up the mast. Besides, the bark of a dog was just as good - better, in fact - because it couldn’t be mistaken for a buoy.

  He quieted Jake, to better hear the engine, but he needn’t have. It was louder than ever, and no matter where it was, it was now dangerously close.

  “Speak!” he shouted a third time, knowing it was more important for them to be heard than to hear. And Jake did his best, but it wasn’t good enough: By now the noise of the engine was drowning out the dog’s barks. It was so close he ought to be able to place it. It seemed to be off to their-

  And suddenly it was right there, to starboard, a big cabin cruiser bearing down on them, heading directly for their beam. Jorgensen waved frantically, but it kept coming. It was twenty feet away, fifteen, its sharply pointed bow now looming overhead. There was a man at the wheel, with a pair of binoculars hanging from his neck, and a-

  “JUMP!” Jorgensen yelled, but as he himself leapt clear from the stern, he had no way of knowing i
f Jake had heard him or responded. He hit the water hard, face first, and went under, the sudden cold of it forcing him to hold his breath. He thought he heard an explosion, decided his eardrums had blown. He felt himself tumbling, had no idea which way up was, tried exhaling to see the direction the bubbles would rise, saw only greens and blues and whites, all churning and colliding and mixing together, as though in some giant blender. Then blackness.

  Nothing but blackness.

  Jessica Woodruff sat at her desk on the forty-ninth floor, reading the article for the fourth time.

  AUGUST JORGENSEN,

  FORMER JUDGE, FEARED

  LOST IN SAILING MISHAP

  CHARLESTON, S. C., April 3 - August Lars Jorgensen, a highly-regarded former federal judge who sat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, was missing and presumed dead today after his seventeen-foot wooden sailboat was struck by a larger vessel in dense fog off the coast of South Carolina.

  Judge Jorgensen, eighty-two, was an experienced sailor, and had made the barrier islands his home since his retirement in 1990. He was a lifelong opponent of the death penalty, who stated at the time he stepped down from the bench that he could no longer abide the increased number of executions being carried out by the various states, or the fact that poverty, race, and retardation often determined who lived and who died.

  Only last month, it was reported that Judge Jorgensen had been lured out of seclusion to argue an appeal before the United States Supreme Court, on behalf of a prisoner afflicted with autism. The case, Davies v. Virginia, raises the issue of whether executing an individual who cannot make the connection between his crime and the death sentence imposed for it, constitutes a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

  In Judge Jorgensen’s absence, the case for the prisoner, Wesley Boyd Davies (whom legal scholars give little chance of success), is expected to be argued by Jessica Woodruff of New York. Ms. Woodruff is a former prosecutor who currently serves as a director and occasional anchorwoman for the Trial TV network.