The Passage

by David Poyer

  … He suddenly felt a surge of hope. It was barely possible that they might make it through this. Stay in the Stream; try to attract somebody’s attention, either a Coast Guard cutter or even one of the larger refugee boats.

  Then he saw the shark.

  It must have been circling them for a while, because when he first noticed it, it was quite close. It slid down the side of the skiff, the tip of its fin making a faint rippling noise. He could have reached out and seized it. Instead, he just watched, sitting on the spongy floorboards in the growing light, watching it move past and off until he could no longer see its dark long form beneath the green sea.

  Then he noticed something else. Looking down to where his weight rested on the bottom. As the boat surged, filaments of green light opened along the boards. There wasn’t anything holding the boards together, and when the frame of the boat worked, they opened up. He put his hand down and felt the cool upwelling current between them.

  “Ayúdame,” Graciela whispered.

  He crept forward on his hands and knees, trying to keep his weight on the thwarts, afraid to put his feet on the rotten bottom. The boy slept on. When he took her hands, they were icy.

  SHE lay spent, empty, melting into the blackness beneath her.

  She knew dimly that she was dying. The child was not going to be born. She’d held back a little strength, husbanding it for what she knew would come: the last, incredible, impossible task of pushing the baby out. But that time had come and gone, and the baby had not. It was locked inside her, and together they would die.

  She’d thought that if this happened, she would call on the Virgin, but she knew now that no one could help her. The life was being crushed out of her, like a dog caught beneath the wheels of an oxcart. She’d seen that once at the cooperativa. She opened her mouth to scream, but she had no breath left in her. She couldn’t see. The red mist blinded her.

  Her last conscious thought was of her own mother. So many years before …

  Then there was nothing but the mist—no thought, no body, only something that watched without self, without anything but the watching. As it gazed, the red mist slowly began to whirl. As it gathered speed, a black opening appeared at the end of it. It grew swiftly larger, with nothing beyond but the black. She hurtled toward it with incredible velocity, knowing that this was the final and utter obliteration only in the last instant before it occurred.

  WHEN he turned back her clothing again, he could see the baby. The top of its scalp showed wet and glistening, with little dark whorls of plastered-down black hair. But that was all. All these hours and it hadn’t emerged. He didn’t know how long it could stay like that and still be alive. Maybe it was dead already. Kneeling, he ran his fingers again around the taut barrier of restraining flesh. It locked the child in no matter how hard the uterine muscles shoved. He tried again to pry it apart, but he couldn’t even get his fingertip under it now. If that was all that was holding it back … Graciela was exhausted, her breathing almost invisible. Blue shadows lay under her jaw. Her wrists looked bruised and bloodless, fragile against the swollen bulk of her body. He could see she was dying. “A knife,” he muttered, rubbing one hand uncertainly against his chin-stubble. His dry lips were caked with salt. Christ, he was thirsty.

  But he didn’t have a knife. He didn’t have anything sharp at all. The baby was stuck, and it and she were going to die here, and probably all four of them when the rotten planks split apart. Their fishy friends would see to that. His hand slipped down from his chin—and stopped.

  An instant later, he was fumbling with his collar. The little nipples that held his collar insignia popped free and sank, to shine quietly brassy on the dark submerged wood.

  Two pointed pins glittered in the glowing light.

  He bent one back on the thwart, leaving the other sticking out, and gripped the silver bars firmly between thumb and forefinger. He didn’t want to do this. He was no doctor. But she’d been in labor since the night before. She was exhausted. Like what they said about tactics: When it was time, you had to act, whether what you did was right or wrong. Or you’d inevitably lose as your opponent acted and you did not.

  Now, at this moment, he knew his opponent was Death himself. A moment later, blood welled up, dripping into the water and uncoiling like falling silk. It dripped, then trickled, then gushed out.

  “Shit,” he muttered. He’d cut it and the baby still wasn’t moving. Graciela didn’t react at all. “God damn you! Don’t do this. Help us! For once—”

  The baby turned slightly under his clutching fingers.

  He panted, set the pin again, and bit his lips as he cut deeper. Then he stopped, horrified as the split suddenly widened of itself. A fresh burst of blood came from the tearing flesh. Jesus, he hadn’t meant to do that … . But the head moved again. It was turning, as if the baby was trying to burrow its way out. He adjusted her legs, moving them as far apart as they’d go, and lifted her hips.

  Suddenly, the baby’s entire head slid out amid the blood and mucus. It was blue. Little eyes bulged beneath closed lids. Graciela groaned and threw her head back. Lenson dropped the pin and seized the little shoulders, eased them to the left.

  With another gush of fluid and blood, the baby squirted out onto his lap, all at once, in a tumbling rush. It was very small and an astonishing shade of blue-green, with a pointed large head and tiny closed eyelids. It slid off his leg and into the water, slick as a fish. He grabbed desperately and got it, then dropped it again from clumsy numb hands. Finally, he captured the small body across his lap. One tiny froglike leg was tangled in the cord. He unlooped it, then stared down at perfect little fingers, a flat nose, tiny lips. It was a boy. And it didn’t move. Shreds of dark tissue and streaks of blood, a bluish discoloration on the neck. He glanced at Graciela, but she looked dead. Blood trickled from between her legs. He stared at the flow, trying to think of some way to stop it. Blood in the water, leaking through the bottom, all those fucking sharks … But nothing came to mind.

  He opened the baby’s lips and cleaned the mouth out gently with his little finger. There was material in the nostrils and he got that out, too. Then he fitted his mouth over its face. The taste of salt and blood. Blow in. Just a puff or he’d rupture the tiny lungs. The little chest rose under his hands. Let go. The little ribs sank. I waited too long, he thought savagely. If only I’d thought of that, the pin, hours ago.

  The little boy shuddered under his lips, struggled to suck in a breath.

  A thin catlike meow, a piping, querulous cry pierced the rush of wind.

  36

  WHEN the sun rose at last, it looked down on a great wrinkled canvas of emerald and turquoise and indigo. The seas drifted across it, and seabirds dipped along their crests. Only the occasional shadow of a high cloud obscured the surface.

  Below its searching rays, a half-sunken boat drifted in silence, tossing slowly, like the torn fragments of sargasso weed that marked the wake of the storm. Its occupants didn’t move. They lay in motionless bundles as the light grew steadily brighter.

  Dan woke to the baby’s cry, thin and piercing as a seagull’s. For a long time, he just left his eyes where they were when they opened: on the sky. How marvelous it was, clear and so pale it looked as if it had been scrubbed with abrasive cleanser.

  Later, he lowered his eyes to the waves. He examined their shape and counted the seconds between the passage of two crests. Down to four feet, he thought. A good long period. And judging by the wind, they’d drop a lot more this morning.

  The storm was over.

  A pilot flame of hope ignited. He sat up, testing the balance of the half-submerged skiff, then cautiously stood. When he had his balance, he pivoted slowly, searching all around the horizon. The added height of eye gave him a horizon of about three miles, though of course he’d see anything that projected above the surface, such as a ship’s upperworks, at a much greater distance. But to his disappointment, his eye snagged on only a single sail far to the west. To th
e south, clouds, and below them a flat smudge that could only be the Cuban coast.

  Sitting down again, he did a little dead reckoning in his head. He came out with a position somewhere in the Nicholas Channel.

  He didn’t see any sign of Barrett, or of the whaleboat, or of anything else that looked like help.

  That was the bad news.

  The good news lay snuggled in the woman’s arms, covered with her drawn-up skirt. The baby’s eyes were closed. One tiny hand was curled knuckles and all into its mouth, and its cheeks worked slowly. Beneath it, he noted with pride the slow rise and fall of Graciela’s chest.

  She opened her eyes as if feeling his. They looked at each other across the length of the boat. Then she smiled faintly and her lids sank slowly closed again.

  He must have slipped away again then himself, because the next thing he knew, the boy was shaking him. The sun was in his face and very hot. The baby was crying, and Graciela was rocking and humming to it. He grunted, sat up, and checked the horizon again. Nothing at all this time; the sail had sunk into the west.

  “Bail?” The boy made a motion with the hard hat.

  “Yeah, go ahead, buddy. Hey, what’s your name, anyway?”

  When he got across what he meant, the kid said his name was Miguel. Dan told him his. That about exhausted the conversation. He swallowed, realizing again how thirsty he was. He eyed the water that swirled around his feet. Clear as it looked, it was salt.

  When he turned back to Graciela, he saw she’d unbuttoned her dress and was nursing. The baby’s head was small and still pointed, covered with swirls of dark hair. It reminded him of Nan just after she’d been born. He swallowed again on the sharpness of memory, remembering her learning to crawl … to speak … the way she hugged him in the morning on the rare days he’d been home. Maybe it would have worked out if he’d just been around more … .

  He had to put that aside. He’d screwed it up, or maybe Susan had, or maybe it was just accident or fate and no one’s fault, but whatever it was, he couldn’t alter it now. At least if he didn’t make it back, they were taken care of. His serviceman’s life insurance was still made out to Susan, and she’d get his pay and allowances. So Nan would be taken care of. That was the important thing.

  From aft came the regular splash as the boy bailed. Jesus, it was actually getting calm. The wind just kept dropping. He watched the water roll within the confines of the gunwales. He put a boot cautiously on the floorboards and saw clearly now how the boards separated under the weight. The only thing keeping them afloat was the residual buoyancy of the wood. But wood didn’t float forever. It got waterlogged, and by the looks of it, that wasn’t far away. He toyed for a while with various schemes for making it watertight again, but he couldn’t think of anything that didn’t require stuff they didn’t have, plastic sheeting, or fiberglass, or canvas.

  God, it was quiet. The waves made lapping sounds as they struck the boat. The muffled sucking snorts of the baby made his cracked lips curve. Then he licked them. It had rained last night, but he’d been too busy to think about collecting it.

  “How are you doing?” he asked Graciela.

  SHE understood what he asked, not the words, but what he meant. So she didn’t try to answer in words, just smiled. The child tugged on her breast, and she shifted, making it more comfortable.

  She’d been thinking again about Armando. Right after they’d met, she’d been so jealous. He was older and had been married before. That woman was white and attractive, so people said. She’d gone away; no one knew where, just that one day she was gone. Armando might have known why, but he always said he didn’t.

  They’d met at the dance, and matters had progressed from there. But she’d been jealous, maybe because he’d been married before, or more likely just because she was so much in love, she wasn’t thinking right. Yes, you didn’t always think straight when you were young. Afterward, you saw that, but by then it was too late to make things right again.

  Anyway, she remembered a few months after the ceremony at the registro civil, he’d said he would be out till very late, and she’d thought instantly, El tiene otra mujer. She knew who, too: the telephone operator, the new girl sent from Havana when the man who ran the phones had left for the north—“el Norte revuelto y brutal,” as the propaganda called it. And suddenly, rage had possessed her. She’d gone to his mother’s and taken down the machete from the wall, the one his grandfather had used when he fought to free Cuba from the Spanish. It was old but still sharp, and she hid in the reeds along the road Armando would have to take to come home that night. She’d waited, trembling with rage, imagining how he would come walking along with her and she’d kill them both, hit them both so hard that blood would flow like a red river.

  She’d been so angry that when she saw the shadow moving along the road, even though it was just one person, she’d leapt out and screamed at him. A terrible thing—she did not like to think now what it was she had screamed. Then she’d rushed at him, swinging the machete, trying to kill him. She would have, too, only he took it from her somehow, right out of her hand, and then ran. Yes, he had run from her, silently, without speaking, without explaining, along the dark road, until she became exhausted and had sunk down into the dirt, weeping in frustration and rage.

  Only when they’d come for him and taken him away had she understood that what he’d been doing that night and all the other nights had nothing to do with lust and everything to do with love— for her and for their country. She’d had to live with that, till years later he came back so strange and silent, back covered with scars.

  The baby lost the nipple and snuffled and moved his head in little jerks, searching like a blind kitten until she guided him to what he needed. Then she lay back in the sunlight and closed her eyes, feeling its need and glad to give, yet anxious lest she not have enough. She remembered nursing Coralía like this … and then, suddenly, the pain of memory: Victoria. Victoria had had understanding from the day she was born. Graciela could speak to her and see in the baby’s eyes that she understood. The child spoke perfect Spanish when she was a year old. She could not help feeling that Victoria was watching her now with her blue eyes. Yes, blue eyes for the child. She still couldn’t believe she was dead. Because she could talk to her right now, in her heart, and Victoria replied in her perfect Spanish, Mama, el niño es muy lindo. Tengo un hermano.

  Yes, you have a brother. Your father must be proud. You know he was proud of you, but a man wants a son, just as a mother wants a daughter. It is natural; no one can blame us in this.

  She thought, Truly, what does it all mean, Victoria’s death, Armando’s, this great suffering that has come to our country? We were never rich. We always worked hard. Why had this great trial come to them, that they were imprisoned and starved, driven to trust themselves to the merciless sea? She didn’t understand it. And what lay ahead for her and the small greedy one at her breast? Death, or life? More suffering, or perhaps in America a little bit of happiness—for the government in all its might and power simply to leave them alone … .

  She was rocking and humming to the baby when she felt something jolt against the bottom of the boat, directly under her. She looked down but caught only a sliding glimpse of something dark.

  GREAT, he thought, staring over the side. Half an inch of rotten wood between us and them. He sat up carefully, so as not to disturb the boat’s precarious equilibrium, and searched the horizon again. Flat, blue, empty. Where the fuck was Barrett? Or had Leighty given him up? Decided he’d read the wrong diary, and so—no, he couldn’t believe that.

  The shark came back and bumped them again, harder. He swallowed. Something heavy had lodged in his gullet, like a sodden lump of undercooked pancake.

  The boy had stopped bailing. Dan reached over for the hard hat and set to work scooping out the clear water. Shit, it was coming in as fast as he dumped it out.

  The worst of it was that he couldn’t think of anything else to do. He couldn’t stop the l
eaks, couldn’t go anywhere. They had no sail, no motor, not even a scrap of wood to paddle with. He couldn’t signal for help; they had no matches and nothing that he could burn if they did, no mirrors, nothing. All he could do was wait and bail. And he really wasn’t sure if doing either wasn’t just a waste of time.

  When he looked back, he was surprised to see she was crying. There was no change in her expression. Not a line of the weathered face had altered. But tears made glistening tracks on her cheeks, slowly drying to white salt. He looked at her in the immense silence, the brightness dazzling off everything, so that his own eyes burned, but he didn’t think that was what was making her cry. What could he say? So much separated them. He knew nothing of her life, why she’d left Cuba on this crazy venture, in a rotten, leaking boat.

  “It’s going to be all right,” he said. Her eyes flicked to him, then dropped again.

  SHE tried again to recall where this man had come from. In a brown shirt and no trousers. An insignia of some kind on one point of his collar and another on his chest. Gustavo was gone. Julio and Aracelia were gone, too, but she remembered what had happened to them. She remembered the boat turning over, the terrible storm—though already it was fading, as if it had happened years before. She seemed to remember this man helping her, too. Hadn’t he helped her in the night?

  She thought then, Why wonder? Why not just ask? “Miguel.”

  “¿Sí, Tia?”

  “Where is Gustavo?”

  “The motorboat took him, Aunt.”

  “The motorboat … yes.” She didn’t know what boat he meant or what had happened to the old man. The baby sucked harder, and she shifted it to the other breast, hoping it was getting something. “Who’s this?” She pointed furtively.

  “That’s an American sailor.”