by Joe Denham
“Couldn’t sleep, hey Bub?” I ask him, taking a sip of his Krakus. I give Fairwin’ my very best, adult-to-adult, Thank you, and is this okay? look, to which he responds with kinder eyes than I would have expected he were capable of, and I realize again that I’ve been judging Fairwin’ on an erroneous assumption of who he is. Were I to pursue the kind of life that Fairwin’ has cultivated, the choice to do so would be based in misanthropy, that disposition in me which is tempered only by my love for my son, Ferris and my parents, and by my stubborn though dwindling belief that people are, despite it all, inherently good. So I’ve assumed Fairwin’, being a man who, as far as I know, has no children or close family, must logically be himself a deeply misanthropic person, and so consequently hardened to others. That he is again challenging my assumptions with his warmness toward my son and myself irks me, as it is just one more hand on the rope pulling down the little walls I’ve been living behind.
“I’m tired,” I say, and stand from the table, wanting to make my exit before my disharmony disrupts the friendly countenance between them. “I’m going to bed, Bub. Why don’t you finish up here and come to bed, too.” Willow looks up at me with his pleading-child eyes. He’s clearly not tired, wired on the restless energy that seems to crackle in the air on this boat like the static charge preceding the electrical storms that gather in the mountains where I was born. “When you’re ready,” I say, and tousle his hair. I thank Fairwin’ and head to our stateroom knowing I should get some sleep, but not feeling the least bit tired.
I lie awake in the dark for a while thinking about what Figgs and I talked about, about Ferris and his role in all this, and about his role in our son’s life, in my life, in our life together. I have a mind to write him another letter, but there’s too much and too little to say. I can’t seem to sort it all out, flooded as I am with the awareness of so many different things I’ve kept myself from, with my fighter’s will, and flooded too with the awareness of all the ways in which I’ve done so. How I’ve narrowed everything and everyone down to positions and players in a war, and in so doing made my life, my family’s life, one of conflict. War eliminates possibility, compassion and diversity. That’s not a sentence I’d have applied to myself, not readily, not without the qualifier that such sacrifice is the nuts and bolts of necessity and this war, this one in which I’ve enlisted myself, and so too my family, demands it. And the war is, whether one admits it or not, which is the point that always hangs up my free-fall into self-doubt.
What choice do I have? That others, Ferris included, find within themselves the ability to ignore the war only makes it all the more impossible for me to do so. But perhaps there’s a way of acknowledging that some people prefer to remain civilians; to find a different way of assessing those who continue on with life-as-usual, despite the deaths and the deep, deep damage. Ferris has surrendered to join the ranks of the disillusioned and the conscientious objectors, those who concede the war is on, but opt out of the fight. Does this have to mean I can no longer love him? Can no longer share my life with him? Perhaps turning my sights on him and on my parents and on others who have been close to me in the past is a product of the enemy’s elusiveness, of its ability to obscure itself, avoid definition or direct engagement, to hide behind its walls of wealth, litigious language and institutions. And so in my very human limitations I’ve fought against those I love and who love me, and have risked losing the very ground that needs more than any other to remain protected, undefeated. It’s what Ferris has been saying all along. If they destroy our ability to love, to laugh and feel joy with one another, they’ve won.
My son comes into the dark quietly and slips into bed. I cradle him close the way I used to when he was younger and he dissolves into me without resistance. It’s been a long time since I’ve held him like this. “Mom?” he asks in that timid voice he gets when he’s troubled and uncertain. “Is Dad going to be okay?” I’m surprised that it hasn’t come to this sooner. I have to listen deep down inside myself now to know what to say.
“He’s going to be okay,” I finally answer, and I have the sense I’m speaking the truth, I do, though right as the words pass from my lips I feel the strangle-hold of my helplessness in this situation. Ferris is a needle in a haystack, somewhere out here, and I haven’t the slightest clue how we’re going to find him. I wonder if Vericombe does, if he has some sort of method or plan, and I decide I’m going to find out. Fuck him. This is the father of my child—this warm and fragile little boy in my arms—we’re looking for, and from now on I’m going to be up there in the wheelhouse helping, because who’s to say it won’t be the very intuition I’m feeling now that will lead us to Ferris? Who’s to say that’s not worth a million times more than all his radars and radios and satellite phones and faxes?
I stroke the hair on my son’s head and he quickly falls asleep, his skinny body relaxing beside me while I lie awake and smell the scent of his father on him, just faintly, and listen to the wash of the ocean along the hull over the steady hum of Figgs’s well-tuned diesels. I’m thankful at least for his capability and kindness, quietly keeping us going along, just as Ferris would. Which is all I’m relying upon now, more than ever, on Ferris’s ability to keep it together no matter what the weather, to keep himself from sinking no matter how bad the storm.
•
I leave Willow out on deck with Figgs. It’s a sunny, calm day offshore of Hawaii, and Figgs lets my son sit in the cockpit of the helicopter while he does routine maintenance, “readying her for flight,” as he puts it. Vericombe accepts me invitingly up into the wheelhouse. He must have known it was only a matter of time before I would defy his order because he’s ready with answers and a task for me as soon as I come up. “This is where we’re at with things,” he explains. “We’re going to return to shore in two hours to pick up Smith. He’s been up to my house above Hilo, the Sunimoto house, and found nothing. It’s all blown apart and shot up with bullets, but other than that the fellows who did the shooting did a good job of cleaning up after themselves. We know Ferris and Miriam escaped, and we know their boat is not docked or moored anywhere within reasonable range of Hilo. Smith has checked into all that. So now all we can do is follow the most likely scenario, which is as follows. They got back to the boat, they refuelled somewhere, then they headed north for the return trip to Canada.”
“Doesn’t really give us much to work with, does it?”
“No it doesn’t, but this does,” he says, and hands me a stack of papers three inches thick. “That’s a list of all the EPIRB signals picked up by Cospas-Sarsat in the past two weeks within a thousand-mile radius of Hilo.” I haven’t the slightest clue what an EPIRB is, so I ask. “Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon,” Vericombe replies. I look at him quizzically still, so he asks me to follow him and leads me out on to the small upper deck off the back of the wheelhouse. “This,” he says, pointing to what looks like a plastic torch mounted to the wheelhouse wall. “In the event of an emergency, this device sends a signal out that can be detected by a network of dedicated satellites orbiting the earth.”
“Meaning what, Arnault? What sets it off?” I ask, trying not to let the implications of this thing he’s talking about cause me to panic at the thought of Ferris being in the trouble I’ve feared all this time.
“It can be done manually, like this,” he answers, and takes the torch from its harness. He flips the clear plastic cover off the top and points to a switch. “It also has a sea-switch. It’s designed to deploy from its harness and float to the surface if the boat sinks. There’s a little filament inside the switch that erodes from the salt water and sets the signal off.” This he tells me in a very matter-of-fact way, but I don’t take it so easily.
“Okay. So you’re telling me that what we have to feel hopeful about is a stack of papers which may or may not tell us where Ferris sank? Fuck, Arnault, what the fuck are we doing out here?”
“It’s not that simple, Anna. What we’re looking for is an in
dication. For all we know they could be broken down right now out there waiting for their rescue.” Without scoffing at this, as I’m inclined to, I point out to him the obvious, that they’re on a sailboat and don’t need power. “But if they left Hawaii a couple of weeks ago now, like we suspect, they could be stranded a thousand miles north of here in the middle of the subtropical high, and there’s no wind there. Say they panicked when leaving Hawaii and didn’t refuel before setting out. It’s not out of the question. Miriam and your husband might be sitting out on deck in the sun drinking gin and tonics for all we know. The boat they’re on is as seaworthy as they come, and they’ve got provisions for months of sailing, so there’s an awful good chance they’re still out there. We’re just covering our bases before we start flying around over the open ocean checking every vessel that comes within radar range.”
“Ferris doesn’t drink,” I say to this, stupidly, then ask the obvious. “What about the people who shot up your house, what if they sank the boat?”
“They wouldn’t have. They’d have no reason to.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they got the float, Anna, which is all they wanted.”
“Did they? How can you be so certain?”
“Because a major earthquake just occurred in New Delhi, which is where the man who stole it lives, that’s how.”
“And you’re absolutely certain of that are you?”
“We wouldn’t be here on this boat if I wasn’t. I’m so certain that I’ve paid a group of men a very large sum of money to go and retrieve it for me, with great risk, but all that is beside the point and none of your business.”
“None of my business? Vericombe, I wouldn’t be out here on this boat if it weren’t my business, and neither would my son. You’ve got my husband and my son caught in the middle of some war you’re having, and whether I like it or not, right now protecting them from you and whatever other lunatics are involved is my only business.” I’m yelling at him now and he reacts to my hostility by quite calmly walking away, back into the cabin. Shit. I don’t want him to shut me out again, so I take a deep breath, collect myself, and follow after him.
“Wouldn’t they already have been rescued then, if their EPIRB had gone off in the past couple of weeks? Isn’t that the idea?”
“At least ninety-five percent of EPIRB signals are false alarms,” he answers, not turning from the window he’s looking out of, keeping his back rigidly to me. “The US Coast Guard spends over five million dollars a year sending search and rescue crews out to idiots who have accidentally set off their EPIRB, or even worse, pranksters who think it’s good party fun to have the boys in red show up to the yacht. So no, if their EPIRB has been set off, it may not yet have come to the point where a rescue has been launched to find them. It depends on the timing. They’ll first go through the registered contact numbers, and they’ll try to get any boats in the area to respond with whatever information they might have. That can take hours, even longer, and for all we know you might find a transmission in there that’s more recent than that. I imagine too with the eruptions here and tsunamis in the southeast, the Coast Guard are stretched fairly thin. From what our contact at the Rescue Coordination Center in Honolulu tells us, there are an excessive amount of distress signals listed on that stack of paper. They’re swamped. It was all she could do to fax us that information. It could be they don’t have the manpower to attempt a rescue that far north of here. So it’s up to us to sort through those papers and do what we can.”
He still doesn’t turn his back, but his tone is growing more and more aggravated. “What am I looking for then?” I ask, as I sit down at the table behind him, the stack of paper before me. “Princess Belle. Belle with two Es. That’s the name of the boat they’re on. Find that somewhere in there and we may be one step closer to getting your son’s father back and getting you all away from this little war,” he says, not turning from the window, and I realize that he must be watching Willow with Figgs out on the deck below. Maybe he’s been watching out for Willow more than I know. I look him up and down and for the first time notice the extreme tension in his shoulders and posture not as some rigid uptightness, but as a bearing of stress. Such is my nature, I’m coming to see, that I have not given him the credit that may be his due. So I say nothing more and put my head down to the work he’s given me, resolved to do what I can to help this man find my husband.
•
Halfway through scanning the pages I find it. Distress Signal Received: 11:38:53. 06/14/10. Coordinates: 32°58'30.83"N. 158°3'49.21"W. Hex #90356D83659DE381XX47 9553225712. Registered Vessel: Princess Belle. Status: Distress Signal Discontinued: 20:14:52. 06/14/10. Brimming as I am with both excitement and fear I carry the page forward to Vericombe and hand it to him.
“Okay,” he says. “Now we’ve got something to go on.” His eyes are instantly alight with what I can only think of as the wilds of adventure, and it makes me uneasy. He’s like a little kid who has just found out where the candy is hidden. “Couldn’t be better timing,” he continues. “We’ll pick up Smith and be off.” He puts the boat in gear and throttles up, at the same time setting a track to the EPIRB coordinates on his GPS computer. “Nine hundred and thirty-eight miles. We should be there within three days.”
I want to contain my dissent, but I can’t believe what I’m seeing and hearing from him, and it gets the better of me. “Three days! Vericombe, how out of it are you? This signal was detected a fucking week ago. What good does that do? They could be another thousand miles from there by now.” Or long since drowned at the bottom of the ocean, I’m thinking, though I can’t bring myself to say it, not right off, and when I do try it stifles my voice, cracking it in two, and I have to choke back the sobs as the tears start.
I don’t cry much, so when I do it always comes in a torrent, and I’m bawling right now in front of Vericombe. Veritably bawling. I surrender to this tall, skinny Frenchman’s arms, sobbing into his linen collar, and though it’s beyond awkward when I finally release myself from him, it’s a necessary awkwardness, an acknowledgement between us, each of the other, of our mutual human vulnerability out here. Whether out of compassion or hope or despair I’m not sure, Vericombe has the streak of one tear down his cheek, too. I understand for the first time how similar he and I actually are, and I think he does, too. The two of us fighters in our little private wars. We tell ourselves we’re fighting for the survival of all, and mostly we believe it, mostly it’s true. But then there are these moments, clusters of days even, when that reasoning comes into question, and we’re left as though suddenly stranded in a no man’s land, wondering what it’s all worth, what it’s all really been for. We question the casualties and the damage, all the energy given over, before we come back to ourselves—where else is there to go?—and continue on with our waging, despite everything and everyone’s doubts and admonishments, because if we don’t who then will in our place?
“Okay,” I say, looking up into his glass-obscured eyes. “Okay, Captain. Let’s go find them.” I straighten his crinkled collar for him and smile as kindly as I can, and I hope he sees in it that I understand and appreciate what he’s doing, and hope too that I can remember to do so in the coming days when things are bound to push the boundaries of what I can bear.
•
Figgs is unbolting and unstrapping the helicopter. Lack of sleep finally got the better of me and I’ve been in bed most of the past two days, drifting in and out of dream and anxiety, trusting Willow mostly to the care of Fairwin’ and Figgs. I suppose it’s taken me all this time to feel comfortable enough to sleep; to let my guard down on this boat with these men I don’t know. It’s amazing what a couple days of solid rest will do, though. I’ve had a shower, washed and brushed my hair, and right now I’m feeling a million years from the vulnerability that overwhelmed me with Vericombe. “You going for a little whirl?” I ask Figgs, sauntering up to him with my hands in my jean pockets.
“Not me. I hate these
things. She’s Arnault’s, and only he flies her.” Figgs slides a steel bar into a slotted handle and leans over on it, torquing the last of the tie-downs free. “Why has he waited until now to use that?” I ask, considering for the first time the usefulness of this machine given the vastness of the ocean we must search to find Ferris.
“We’ve got a lot of fuel on this boat Anna, but most of it is diesel. Jet A fuel is expensive, not that that should be any reason for Arnault not to have as much as he wants. You want to know the truth, I think he hates the thing, too.” Figgs winks at me when he says this, then climbs up into the cockpit of the helicopter. “You ever flown in one?” he asks, grinning from above me. I shrug my shoulders in response, meaning no. “Get in,” he says, a flare of mischief in his eyes.
“No fucking way,” I say, but I don’t mean it. It’s like the me of a couple of days past, exhausted and caution-prone, is doing the talking, while the me of the present is walking around the front of the bird, opening the door and climbing in beside him.
I’ve never even sat in one of these things before and the thought of lifting off this deck into the sky sends a shiver straight through me. “We’re not flying,” Figgs says as I start to put my arms into the seat belt straps. “I meant it, I hate these things. If you want to go for a ride you’ll have to convince Arnault to take you. But I need to tell you something.” With this Figgs turns serious, almost grave. He closes the door beside him. “Anna, this thing that we’re doing out here, looking for your husband. I know it’s all the hope you’ve got, but I don’t want to see you crash and burn, so I have to say this. The chances are slim. They’re next to nothing.”