by Todd Lewan
Then he grabbed Bob Doyle’s arm. “How about some buoys?” he said. “We can tie them off to us. They’ll help keep us afloat.”
“Good idea.”
Bob Doyle climbed the steel ladder to the top of the pilothouse and, grabbing the railing and hoisting himself up, swinging one leg over the bar, then the other, he dropped down into a crouch on the tar roof. He crouched low on one knee, never having felt so small, never having felt so fragile, the wind moaning like a prehistoric animal in his ears, sweat sliding down his flanks, and went to work on the knots that secured the buoy balls to the railing.
Now, for the first time Bob Doyle saw the storm in all its fury, ugliness and beauty: the towering, dark mountains of water, merging, pulling apart, bursting against one another; the tormented, black sky, an incessant discharge of electric hair, flashing like artillery; the speed-hardened wind, scooping out craters in the ocean, tearing the crests off the waves and carrying them into oblivion. He also saw the La Conte in all of her vulnerability: how she keeled in the troughs, her mast flailing, her rigging taking on a ghostly white coating from the geysers of spray that spouted off her port bow. And yet not a deck light had gone out. Even the searchlight was on.
The ship was taking knockdown punches, rolling and twisting under the combers, as though in agony, but refusing to go under. She’s some boat, Bob Doyle thought to himself. But she won’t last much longer. Ten minutes, if that.
He had the first knot undone and had started working to free up the second buoy.
Just be smart, he said to himself. Don’t lose your cool and do something stupid. And be careful. This boat is lurching a lot. Don’t relax and fall over and break something and wind up in the water alone.
There was a thickening lump in his throat and he tried to swallow but he could not. He kept working on the knot. Goddamn these mittens. How are you supposed to take apart a rope wearing a three-fingered, Gumby mitten? And goddamn this wind, too. All right. Relax, he told himself. Relax. I wonder if Sitka will send a bird out here? How long ago did Mark set off that 121? More than ten minutes. And now they had just triggered the 406. Just look at that strobe go. I guess we should have headed in earlier. I guess it was nuts all right to be fishing with something this bad coming at you. We shouldn’t have tried it. Then again, look at all the money we caught. Shame we’re going to lose it. I wonder how much our take would have been? Jesus, I want a drink. I guess I should have stuck to ordering supplies for ships. Blankets and chewing gum and cigarettes. That was a lot easier than this. Fuck boats. There’s no money on boats anymore, anyway. Not for us little guys. Only for the big boat owners and their fucking fish permits. If this damned boat would only stop lurching I could get this knot. Christ. I should have got that job in the auto-supply store. Oh, sure. Order car parts for a living. Who drives in Alaska? Wouldn’t hold it anyway. I’d drink myself out of it. Only place I don’t drink is out here. I ought to live on the ocean. Why not? I’m going to die on it. Christ. Don’t you ever get tired of self-pity? There. I got it. Two buoy balls coming right down.
Just then he heard a scream. He looked down over the railing. Someone was stretched out on the deck, writhing. He scrambled down the ladder, careful not to lose his grip on the lines attached to the buoys, and nearly threw his knee out landing on the heaving deck. He crawled over to Mike DeCapua.
DeCapua was clutching his crotch and upper thigh. A wave had ripped the lid of the hatch off and he had stepped into the hole. His leg had gone in all the way.
“It’s me,” Bob Doyle told him. “How bad is it?”
“Christ!”
“Hold still.”
“Son of a bitch!”
Bob Doyle was checking DeCapua’s suit for rips.
“Can you sit up?”
“Yeah.”
He had not broken anything. The suit appeared to be all right. Bob Doyle looked at the wheelhouse.
He saw the strobe 121.5 EPIRB, still flashing in its holster inside the pilothouse. “I’m going to get that other EPIRB!” he shouted. “Get everyone tied together!”
He climbed the ladder, threw open the side door, grabbed the beacon and scuttled back down to the deck. The others were passing the rope, tying it around their waists and handing it off to the next man. Hanlon was on one end. Bob Doyle got on the other. He looped it around his own waist, knotted it, slipped the end of the line through the top ring on the buoy float, made another knot and then handed it off to DeCapua. DeCapua tied another float to Hanlon’s waist in the same manner, and then looped a second rope around their waists as a backup. Now they were a human chain; their fates were tied.
Morley grabbed Bob Doyle by the hood.
“We stay on this thing as long as we can!” he shouted. “You got that?”
Bob Doyle nodded.
“If we have to go in the water, we go off the port bow. We go up on the railing, then we jump off.”
“Okay.”
The starboard railing was now entirely underwater. Morley shouted, “Let’s move!” Like crabs, they clawed up the tilting deck to the gunwale on the port bow.
“Okay, listen up!” the skipper shouted. “We jump when I tell you guys to jump!” Then, to Bob Doyle: “Where’s that 121?”
“Right down here!”
“Where?”
Just as Bob Doyle picked the beacon up off the deck where he had put it down for a moment, a cable snapped overhead and cracked on the deck not five feet behind him. He whirled, and as he did, a wave surged over the bow and swept the EPIRB out of his hands and clean over the gunwale.
“Oh, shit!”
“What?”
“I lost it! The EPIRB!”
“Get up on the gunwale!”
“Goddammit!”
“Get on the gunwale!”
He swung a leg over the railing, then the other.
“Bob, get on the end!”
They lined up, crouching, holding fast to the railing. The boat was keeling now at a forty-five-degree angle. Half of the deck was underwater.
“Oh my God,” DeCapua was stammering, “oh my God, oh my God, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit—”
“Cool it!” Mork screamed.
Bob Doyle looked over at the pilothouse. The emergency lights were still on. He turned and saw Hanlon, clutching the other EPIRB to his chest, his eyes shut.
“Listen!” Morley shouted, holding his hands cupped. “As soon as I say ‘go,’ we all go in together!”
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh —”
“When I count three, let go of the railing, take a step backward and jump! Stay calm! The suits will hold you up. Okay? Now, on the count of three, we all go in together!”
Bob Doyle looked over his shoulder. The ocean was so dark he could not tell the difference between a wave and a trough.
“Everybody ready?”
They could fall fifteen feet or a hundred.
“One!”
They could jump in front of a breaking wave and be smashed against the hull.
“Two!”
The ship was tipping, starting to roll.
“NOW!”
Into the abyss they leaped.
TWENTY-SIX
At first, all Bob Doyle felt was the cold. Cold, cold, cold like he never wanted to experience cold. It was a hurting cold, a vicious cold that had already begun deadening his toes, working its way up into the calves of his legs and setting in under his knees; a cold that ached in his ribs, that numbed his spine, that tightened on the temples of his forehead like a vise grip.
The cold squeezed and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed and all the time there was only blackness and the sound of bubbles and the bump-bump, bump-bump of his heart. There had been a sharp pain in his elbow immediately after they had jumped off the gunwale, but now the cold had numbed it away and there was only the tightening cold on his feet and hands and eyelids and no sound at all, only blackness and the increasing pressure and then he felt his face sharply throbbing and then the throbbing passed a
nd it was all right. He felt wrapped in darkness, twirling, falling without end, and then he felt the kick. It was a light kick, a soft kick, and then he felt it again and he thought to kick back and he was kicked again and he thought perhaps one of the others was trying to communicate with him. Then he felt a heavy weight on his chest and it occurred to him that he might drown. I’ve got to get air. I’ve got to get to the surface, he thought, and then he realized he did not know which way was up and suddenly he was very afraid. He began kicking his legs and thrashing and fighting the water in a heavy-footed panic and he soon felt hollow and sick from the kicking and he thought: Where in God’s name am I? It horrified him to think he could be swimming toward the bottom of the ocean and so he stopped kicking. The pressure on his head began to lessen, which made him wonder if he was still alive, or dying, and then he reasoned that he could not be dead yet if he was worrying about it, and then he felt pressure on his neck. Something was tugging sharply at his neck. It tugged and tugged and soon he could not fight it anymore and let himself go. In that instant he burst through the surface.
He knew it because of the noise. There was a high, moaning shriek all around, and through that noise a thundering, avalanching sound, as though several buildings were imploding around him at once. He threw his eyes open; they burned from salt. He tried to breathe; salt water flooded his mouth. He coughed, hacked, gagged.
And was under again.
Once more there was only the muffled sounds of bubbles and water being thrashed. It felt so calm and pleasant—except for the hot pain in his lungs and the pressure on his neck —and then he popped back into the world of shrieking blackness and swirling, stinging spray.
This time, he did not open his eyes. He gulped air, choked on salt water, gulped some more, coughed. All over his face he felt bites; he imagined he was looking straight into a sandstorm or standing in a field of famished locusts. Then he heard Mark Morley’s voice —faint, but clear.
“Sound off!”
He could not utter a sound, only gulp for air.
“Hey! Sound off! Giggy? Dave?”
“Here!”
“Mike?”
“Here!”
“Gig?”
“Here!”
“Bob?”
He tried to shout but his voice sounded tiny. “I’m here! I’m here!”
A wave threw them together. He kept his eyes open for more than a second, and in the stabbing, blinding quick-flash of the strobe, he had seen Mark Morley’s face, contorted, lips quivering, skin a bluish white. His glasses were gone; he had lost them in the jump. Without them, his eyes were wide and staring like those of a frightened child in a dark closet.
“Bob,” Morley said, “how’s my zipper?”
“Why?”
“Just check my zipper.”
Bob Doyle took hold of him by his shoulder and patted his chest until he felt the metal tab. He could feel the skipper shaking.
“Your zipper’s up.”
“Shit,” Morley said, “then my suit is ripped. I feel water getting in.”
“Where?”
“In my legs,” Morley said. “My right leg. I can feel water getting in. God, it’s cold.”
Just then a wave buried them. It was as though a dump truck had unloaded a ton of soaked, frigid towels and they went down so fast that a hot, white pain tore through Bob Doyle’s head. He was going down, down and down and nothing but down, his legs and arms tangling in the ropes as he went, his arms flailing and his heart thumping wildly, and then he thought: Where’s the rope? I don’t want it around my neck. I don’t want the rope around my neck.
Now he was sitting across from his father in the old skiff and the oars were dipping and raising silver drops from the Connecticut River. It was the day he had caught his first big perch. They drifted up to a sandbar that poked out of the river sometimes and his father took a long twig and stuck it through an empty potato chip bag and told him to plant the flag on the sandbar. He did it and together they declared the sandbar Potato Chip Island. It was their island, only theirs, and his father told him to remember it and to return to it in his mind whenever he needed time away from the world.
Later they were paddling back along the river and his father pulled in the oars, looked at him with those still, cold eyes of his and said, Bobbie, stand up, son. So he stood awkwardly in the skiff and his father looked at him darkly. So, you want to learn to swim? When he nodded his father then said, C’mere, and before he could move he felt the big, powerful hand shove him and he went in backward and sank quickly into the coolness, then cold. He fought the dark and had almost started to take a breath of water when something had him by the wrist and lifted him, dripping, into the skiff. His father was laughing. Not afraid of the water, are we? Later, sitting in the stern of the boat with the perch flat-eyed at his feet and the trees on the hills amber, he felt quite certain that he would never drown.
Spray like buckshot whipped his face. He’d come up again.
“Sound off!” It was the skipper’s voice. “Bob? Bob!”
“Here!”
Then he felt the weight on his shoulder and turned and saw Mark Morley clinging to him.
Morley said, “When will the Coast Guard be here, Bob?”
Why do you keep asking me that? Bob Doyle thought. They probably aren’t coming. But he told Morley, “They’ll send somebody for us.”
“When?”
“Within the hour.”
“You said that before.”
Morley’s teeth were chattering. Bob Doyle could hear them. “Did I?”
“Yes, you did,” Morley said.
“Well, like I said, they’re probably on their way right now.”
“God, I can’t see anything.”
“None of us can. There’s nothing to see, anyways.”
It was true, too. Bob Doyle could barely see his hand before his face, except when the strobe flashed. And it was flashing only every twenty seconds or so.
Gig Mork began hollering.
“Look! Look!” He pointed behind Bob Doyle and kept yelling. “There! See what I see? Look! There she goes!”
Between waves and flying froth and sleet they snatched glimpses of a long, thin silhouette —the last of the La Conte’s hull. She’s a wood boat, Bob Doyle thought, and when she goes under she’s going to groan something awful. But she went down without a sound. The deck lights and portals glowed as her great bulk slipped beneath the surface and hung there in the depth of the water like a huge purple bird, and then settled slowly. They all watched her go down, getting smaller and smaller, until her lights were out of sight.
The seas would not stop jumping up and down. They clawed their way up one watery hill after another. Sometimes the wave would break down on top of them. Other times they would reach the crest and then go skidding and tumbling down the back side of the swell into a cauldron of spray and foam.
I got to stay afloat, Bob Doyle kept thinking as he slugged and kicked his way through the water. I got to stay afloat. God, I wish it was daylight. But what good would light do? You can’t see shit anyway with all this wind and water. And we got a light. We got the strobe. And what else do you need to see out here other than a helicopter?
Just keep your eyes closed, he told himself. As much as you can, anyway. Too much salt water in them and they’ll swell up and never close.
“Bob!”
Morley had been dragging behind and swallowing water. Bob Doyle spun, grabbed him by the waist and lifted the skipper up on his chest. He put a hand over Morley’s mouth to shield it from the sleet and spray.
“Breathe,” he said. “That’s the way. Breathe, man. Good. I’m here, Mark. I’m here.”
Morley coughed and hacked.
“You all right?”
“I’m cold, man. I’m so cold. Are the Coasties coming, Bob?”
“Sure,” Bob Doyle told him. “On their way.”
“I’m so cold.”
“How are your legs?”
; “Heavy. Pulling me down. I can’t hardly feel them.”
So, Bob Doyle said to himself, it has already started. And how long have we been in the water? Ten minutes? He put his arm around Morley’s broad back, pulled him up a bit and leaned back on an angle so that they floated together.
“Bob?”
“Yeah?”
“I hope those Coasties get here soon.”
“They will.”
“I hope they’re coming, Bob. I’m freezing, man.”
“A chopper’s coming.”
“I got to get on it. I got to get on that chopper.”
His teeth were chattering so hard Bob Doyle wondered if they would chip.
“We’ll get you on it.”
“I got to get on it.”
“We’ll get you on it.”
A wave swept over them and they lost each other. Bob Doyle counted to twenty before he popped through the foam. Morley came up beside him.
“Help!”
“I’m right here, Mark. I got you.”
“Where are the guys?”
Bob Doyle pulled the skipper back up on his chest. The hood of Morley’s sweatshirt was down over his face. Bob Doyle pulled it up a bit. When the strobe flashed, he saw that Mork had Hanlon by the shoulders and was supporting him the same way he was helping Morley. Hanlon was retching seawater.
He heard Mork say, “Just stay up here on my chest. I got you good.”
“I can’t keep my head up.”
“Giggy, what’s wrong with Dave?”
“His pillow didn’t inflate right,” Mork yelled. “He’s puking all over like a son of a bitch.”
“Mike! Can you see me?”
DeCapua yelled back: “I can’t see shit!”
“Okay,” Bob Doyle said. “We got Mike.”
DeCapua’s face was covered in hair. It looked as though someone had stuck a pile of seaweed to his face. All Bob Doyle could see was DeCapua’s nose poking through a mane of hair.
“Hey, Mike,” he said, “I like what you did with your face!”