He'd hit the water hard, then awkwardly side-stroked to the nearest boat. There wasn't any alternative; the ship was going down. He had to make some space between himself and the listing vessel, which leaked burning oil. People were screaming, drowning, and he heard creaking, groaning, hard metal joints breaking apart, from the ship. He couldn't be swamped by the suction of the sinking vessel. That would drown him, guaranteed, especially since he was trying to swim with one arm. He kicked his legs furiously, and his face, with the hat still hanging off below his chin, gasped at the ocean's choppy surface.
He made one of the rubber rafts and threw his one arm over the side. Two crewmen, an Asian man and a woman, pulled him the rest of the way on. He fell onto the floor of the raft, grateful once more to be alive.
He was cold and wet, but the sun warmed him, and the floor of the raft kept him out of the sea breeze. He felt that he would have gotten hypothermia otherwise. They passed around a kind of hard tack, and emergency water. His shoulder killed him. The people on the raft chatted in Mandarin. After things had settled down a bit, he said, "What happened to the ship?"
The men ignored him. The woman gazed at him, as if forming the correct answer. Then she said, "The ship was sabotaged." She had carefully pronounced English, conscious of it.
"By who?"
"We don't know."
"What about all those innocent people?"
"This is a very dangerous place," she said. "We're doing the best we can."
After a moment, she looked at him again and asked, "What were you doing on the boat?"
"Trying to find my daughter."
"Oh," she seemed to reply in a whisper, and turned away.
He looked around. The storm had passed. The horizon was empty again. It was the perfect placid blue he'd first seen.
They floated on the empty sea, and the men were paddling. You could see the coastline, about four miles off. He judged that it was 5 p.m., given the location of the sun towards the Pacific horizon. The men chattered amongst themselves endlessly, discussing survival, he figured. There wasn't a whole lot of potable water. At one point, one of the crewmen gestured toward him, with spite in his tone. He figured they might try to throw him overboard. That would be his last stand, he thought. He still had his knife, and the bow. He'd signal to them that he would knife holes in the raft, if they tried to kill him.
It might be a good idea to show them he had a knife, he thought. At least the woman. She seemed more humane; she also seemed to have a higher rank than the others. She spoke to them in remonstrative tones. He might have thought her pretty, in another context, with her long dark hair and pale, calm face. He took out his knife and said, "Maybe we should fish…"
"Yes, maybe," she said. One of the men looked at his knife with hostility, then he spat, "No fish! No knife!" Then the woman said something to the man in Mandarin, something like "Calm down." Wade pulled himself into the corner of the raft and kept the knife out. The sun felt good, like salvation.
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A fishing boat found them and attached a tow line to the raft. They were brought to shore just when the dark settled in. Sullenly, a couple of the sailors had given him a pad to sleep on in a kind of barracks one block off the docks. He saw the lady walk away and he smiled at her; she nodded, then turned around. Maybe she noticed something in my eyes, he thought, because he otherwise looked terrible. Or was it that comment about looking for Kara. He got depressed thinking about Kara, wherever she was, and tried to get some rest.
He went to sleep, exhausted, but he woke up in the dark. Soon, the sun came up over some hills. The light filled the window in the barracks. He'd heard snoring during the night, morning. He got up before the others and went outside. He stood on a bluff above the water; the coastline was pretty and silent. People began to gather outside the barracks, then he smelled cooking. He spoke to another ragged man–they were like two homeless bums. The man said that the beach was part of Carpinteria, and that he'd heard the ship had gone down near the Catalina Islands.
"You were on it? No kidding?" he said incredulously.
"Yes."
Bodies had washed up on the beach. Thank God Kara hadn't been on the ship, he thought.
He walked back toward the barracks, and he saw the Chinese woman from the raft the day before. She seemed to give an order to a man, then she caught his eye and gestured him over.
"This man will show you where you can wash up, clean up, you know, have a shave," she said in a clipped tone. "Then you can have some food. Do you need a doctor?"
"No," he said.
"Come!" the man said, in a too loud voice. Wade began to follow him, then turned back and said, "Wait. What's your name?"
The woman laughed, in a sophisticated way as if it was funny to introduce such informality. "Biyu," she said, and walked away.
At first he thought she said, "Bye you." He followed the man to an outdoor shower, and using one hand, rubbed soap all over his body and hair. He hacked away at his beard with a much-used metal razor that lay in a soap dish. Then another soldier with a towel wrapped around his waist screamed at him in Mandarin, and he left the shower. He toweled off, and put his grungy clothes back on. He caught a look at his face in the mirror and ran his good hand over the remaining stubble. "Isn't half bad," he murmured to himself.
Then he went to breakfast, where he was able to eat a lot of boney fish, rice, bread. He drank several mugs of tea, and that with the shower and food, greatly revived him.
CHAPTER 54
He went down to the beach at Carpinteria afterward and scanned the area for refugee settlements. He didn't see any, nor did he see any sign of Ironcloud and Kara, although the chances of that seemed slim. There were only fishermen in small boats just offshore, and two trucks with crews collecting bodies that had washed up on the beach. He didn't see any groups of people gathered to stay there on a permanent or semi-permanent basis.
Feeling better, he walked up the road north. Everything was burned on the collapsed hillsides to the east, off his right shoulder. Then, strangely, at least in his regard, he reached a point where the giant burn and ash mark on the hills stopped. The bare hills gave way to beautiful slopes of greenery, even a copse of woods, sunny and untouched by the fires. They must have leapt them, like wildfires will.
To the west, the ocean was still and sunlit, a desert plain of rippled blue that hid the previous day's tragic events. Sand and ash had blown over parts of the road, which was otherwise busy, including with troop trucks and the occasional wagon. He studied the wagons and people that went by, hopefully.
He came upon a bus idling by the side of the road. He'd only walked about one mile and a half. He asked the driver where he was going. The man had enough fuel to make the coast near Monterey, but he didn't have any empty seats. He was leaving in an hour–Chinese soldiers took up at least two-thirds of the seats, and that's the only way he was able to negotiate for gas. Wade told him his story–how he'd journeyed at least a thousand miles through desolate, perilous lands. The man said he could sit in the aisle, if there was room and no one objected.
Wade was grateful; he thought of Ironcloud, the people who'd patched him up back at Tonto Basin; Wiley and the Santiagos, all the people who'd helped him along the way. They'd given up something of themselves, sometimes in return for nothing. Basic humanity survives amongst the squalor, he mumbled to himself.
###
Kara could see Ironcloud sitting in the sun on a grassy bluff, watching the ocean. He was one of those men who didn't ask for help, but she was helping with whatever she could; setting up camp on the beach, washing clothes, cooking food. They had some rice, Ironcloud had caught a fish, and Kara collected crabs amongst the rocks. She'd got a couple of new outfits from people she met in their caravan, including an old jacket that Ironcloud could wear at night. She asked nicely, and people would share things and not make demands in return. She'd slept well on the beach. She hadn't had any seizures the whole time out of the desert, to the coast.
They'd stay awhile, Ironcloud said, on San Luis Obispo, where an ad hoc community was cropping up. But she knew he wanted to get going; he wanted to get back to his own girlfriend in Arizona. Sometimes she wondered where his loyalty sprung from, as in the beginning they were perfect strangers. At times of stillness by a fire or the ocean, she thought of her father. She felt sadness, remorse, mixed with hope.
Then she saw Ironcloud stand up on the bluff in the sunshine. A smile broke across a face that she thought of as serious, handsome. He waved. She looked down the beach, and she could see a man striding quickly along the water, where the sea slid back into the waves. She got up and ran, bare feet on muddy sand, the Saint Michael medal around her neck glinting in the sunshine.
THE END
Journey By Fire, Part 2: Escape From Tonto Basin Page 9