Cross Current

by Christine Kling

  I watched Solange disappear into the cabin, and all I could think of was that I hadn’t said good-bye.

  Gil said, “Just let her get in a raft. She probably won’t make it. Boss, she’s Red’s kid.”

  “I don’t give a fuck whose kid she is.”

  “Cartagena, Joe. Remember? I owe him.”

  “You crazy son of a bitch. The only person you owe a damn bit of loyalty to is me. I own you. You’d be rotting in some federal cell right now if it weren’t for me. And now when I tell you to do something, you’re talking back to me about some piddly-ass tugboat captain?”

  Gil was still holding the gun, but it was lowered, hanging at his side now. He turned to me. “Look, I’d been drinking and whoring down there. On my way back to the boat, a bunch of locals tried to rob me. They knifed me in the gut, left me for dead. Your daddy found me, woke up some local doc, saved my life.”

  “Shut up, Gil,” Joe said, “nobody cares about that old story. It’s all a fabrication from that burnt-out brain of yours.”

  Gil continued as though he hadn’t heard Joe. “I wanted to send your daddy back to the States—didn’t want him involved, but it turned out I’d cut one of them Colombians, too, and the Federales come looking for me. Joe told the Federales a pack of lies, and we sailed out of there that night, straight shot back to Florida. We never told Red what was under the floorboards. Red was such a straight shooter, he woulda turned hisself in if he knew—and us in the process.”

  “Gil, shut your mouth and take care of business.”

  Gil turned from me and raised the gun, his hand shaking, pointing it at Joe. “I ain’t gonna shoot her, Joe,” he said.

  “Shit. First I lose Malheur, and you try to tell me he fell off the balcony, busted his head.” Joe’s voice remained steady, even calming, as though he were talking about taking out the trash.

  Gil’s mustache started to twitch again, and his lips were bulging over his teeth, the hand holding the gun shaking wildly.

  “And now you’re turning on me. Telling drug-induced lies about something that never even took place. I think you’ve finally gone off the deep end, Gil.”

  When Joe made his move, it happened so fast, I didn’t realize what had gone down until I heard the shot. Joe had spun around, come up alongside Gil, and taken the gun from his hand. Then he’d stepped back in front of Gil, raised it to the man’s forehead, and fired. A spray of red spewed across the stern cushions seconds before Gil’s body fell backward onto the vinyl.

  Joe squatted, lifted the man’s legs, and said, “The very deep end.” He slid the body into the water, then rubbed his hands on his pants. “Shoulda done that years ago,” he said, standing and surveying the blood-spattered stem. “Shit, what a mess. Sullivan, get a bucket out of that deck box and clean up my boat.”

  A part of me wanted to scream and give in to the horror of what I’d just witnessed, but at the same time I felt numb to it. This whole thing couldn’t really be happening. I wasn’t really about to die.

  I found the bucket and a scrub brush and dipped the bucket full of seawater. As I poured the water over the racing boat’s padded stem, I watched the red turn pink when the blood mixed with the sea. My arm was moving across the plastic, but I wasn’t aware of being in charge of that arm. It was as though I were watching someone else scrub away the streaks of Gil’s blood.

  They had chased us out here, and now both Malheur and Gil were dead—and all for this little girl, Joe’s daughter. I remembered him shaking Solange, her head bouncing around on her shoulders. I had to know. “Joe, what do you really want with her?”

  He waved the gun, motioning me to keep working while he sat down on the helmsman’s seat. “You’re as much of a pain in the ass as your old man was,” he said. “Maybe more. At least Red knew when to look the other way. Didn’t go butting into other people’s business, trying to save the fucking world.”

  With the barrel of the gun, he pointed at a spot I’d missed. “The world’s a fucked-up place, Sullivan,” he continued, “and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. This was all supposed to be so simple. All I asked Malheur to do was to bring this kid into the States on one of our boats. I mean, shit, this is what we do for a living. No big deal, right? Ninety percent of our runs slip straight through, no problems. It’s not like I was gonna go to the embassy and claim the little shit and do the paperwork to try to get her in legally. Right, and wait years? Then some bitch on the boat gets Malheur pissed, he whacks her in the head, and when he’s not looking, the fuckin’ Haitians stick the two of them, my kid and the bitch, in their tender. Malheur doesn’t even realize the kid’s gone until the boat is off Hillsboro, ready to go in. He looks around for the dinghy and the kid—both are gone.” Joe spread his hands wide, still holding Gil’s gun. “I got nothing but fuck-ups working for me.”

  I dropped the bucket into the ocean and pulled up another load of clean seawater, then sloshed it across the vinyl. I wanted to keep him talking, but I also really wanted to understand the how and the why of all this business. “Joe, she’s your daughter.”

  He waved his arms in the air. “Don’t talk to me about daughters. When a daughter won’t let her old man see his own grandson because of some half-breed kid down on a shithole of an island, you know the world is fucked up. I never should have told her about the kid in the first place. But there it is. I don’t get to see my grandson, my one and only male heir, until I can prove that the kid is in America, living with a family. Ha!” he said. “I’ll place her with a family all right.”

  “A restavek. You plan to make your own daughter a child slave, in the States?”

  “Beautiful, right? Get paid coming and going. Plus, I get my grandson. Best gig I ever come up with. Used to be my guys took a boat south and bought the product—coke—now the product pays them! Best part is the kids take up less room on the boats. And the market in the States ... you would not believe it. No wages, no Social Security, and they work twice as hard as any Yank kids would. We’ve had a waiting list from the very start.”

  I was scrubbing the last of the blood off the vinyl, and I sat up on my heels when Joe said, “You about done there? Good.” One minute I was sitting on top of the engine housing on the back of this ocean racer, getting ready to climb down into the cockpit, and then I saw Joe slide the throttles forward as he shouted, “So long, Sullivan.”

  The boat leaped into motion like a panther after her prey, and I tumbled in a backward somersault off the transom, back into the sea.

  I came up sputtering, having swallowed a mouthful of seawater in my surprise. I heard the engine roar through both the water and the air. As the distance between the boat and me grew, a wave lifted me, and I saw Joe at the helm. He didn’t even bother looking back. When I crested the next swell, I could no longer find him. The boat must be in a trough, I thought. He couldn’t have disappeared that quickly.

  Or could he? I stopped dog paddling for a few seconds to listen, and the weight of my shoes and clothes pulled me down so that a wind wave broke over my head, and I went under. I pushed back up to the surface and sucked in a breath of air so violently that it hurt. It seemed to scrape the back of my throat and stretch the limits of my chest. I clawed at the surface of the water, thrashing, trying desperately to keep my head from going under again. Finally, I recognized what I was feeling: panic. I’d seen it in a hundred near drowning victims but had never expected to experience it myself. I kicked off my shoes while I blew some air into my buoyancy compensator, then I rolled onto my back and floated, slowing my breathing and my heart rate.

  Too bad I couldn’t slow my mind as well. Thoughts kept tumbling in this chaotic montage. When people talked about that cliché of your life flash before your eyes, I always thought it would be like a feature film played on super-fast-forward, and you would watch yourself grow up and then old, like in time-lapse photography. But that wasn’t what I was seeing at all. One minute I was trying to calculate how long we had been traveling in Rusty’s
boat, and at what speed, in order to figure out how far we’d made it across the current, and then, bam! My mind jumped to an image of my mother laughing and tickling Pit, and then, bam! An image of her cold and wet and blue on the beach, and then, bam! I’d see a seventeen-year-old girl I once pulled from the sea, her hair dry, still wearing her life jacket, no water in her lungs, dead from hypothermia three days after her family’s fishing boat sank out in the Gulf Stream.

  Images flitted in and out of my brain as though I had lost control of my own mind. I saw Gil’s face again when the gun was pressed to his forehead, his eyes showing something that looked almost like relief. His body was here in the water with me, floating somewhere, possibly not far off, leaking blood and attracting . . . what? I lifted my arm out of the water and looked at the puckered white skin around the wound in my own arm. At least there was no more blood there. Straight beneath me, thousands of feet down, was an unexplored world. Humans had never walked down there, and no one really knew much about those depths or what lived down there. Sharks? I saw myself then from beneath, floating at the surface, as though I had stepped outside my body, swum underneath, and looked up, and then I realized I was just replaying a scene from the movie Jaws. My mind pictured whales and sea monsters, even Nemo’s giant squid. None of that frightened me.

  Hypothermia. That was how I would die.

  XXVIII

  Swimming seemed pointless. The buoyancy compensator was inflated just enough so that I could float on my back. Which direction would I go? As far out into the Stream as I was, the current would be pushing me along no matter what I did.

  My thoughts bumped around my brain so haphazardly that it occurred to me that “train of thought” was grossly inaccurate. It wasn’t a straight rail in my head, but more like a traffic jam, a major snarled-up mess in a place with no roads. The ocean is like that. A place to get lost.

  I’d been dozing, floating on my back since daybreak, when the vibrations started up. I didn’t know what it was at first. I’d only heard the sound of outboards through the water before. When I realized it was an engine of some kind, I stopped floating on my back and searched the horizon. As I crested the top of the next swell, I saw a long white cruise ship three to four miles off and coming my way.

  The damn thing passed me less than a mile off. I flailed my arms and screamed, but a lot of good that did me on that rainy, overcast day. I wished like hell that I had some of the flares that went down with Rusty’s boat. Why hadn’t I tucked one or two of those in my pockets? I was laughing out loud at that thought when the ship passed at its closest point. I could even see people leaning over the rail on the upper decks. Not many, just a few loners in rain slickers, out enjoying the dark, brooding afternoon. I thought about the dry beds and hot meals and long lives that awaited them. The ship disappeared over the horizon in a matter of minutes. That was when I cried for the first time that day.

  At some point, a band of blue appeared at the horizon—I did not know whether it was east or west or whatever. The sky that had been this big gray dome slowly metamorphosed into individual clouds with depth and design and beauty. B.J. would have loved those clouds, and he would have started seeing shapes and pointing things out to me—animals, mountains, and faces, shapes that I never would have been able to see on my own. I tried to look at the clouds as B.J. would, tried to see the world and my predicament as he would see it, and thinking about him, trying to get at the essence of him like that, made me feel angry. I’m not ready to let go of him yet, I thought, not ready to say good-bye to that. . . what? What did I call what I felt for him?

  How poor our language was with this one word: love. The Polynesians had dozens of words for coconut, the Eskimos had their variations to describe snow, but we had only this one word to communicate the most important aspect of life, the multitude of ways we can connect with other beings. What I felt for my parents, my brothers, Jeannie, my dog, B.J., and now Solange—all were variations of this emotion, yet all were so different. How could that one little four-letter word encompass all that range of pain and joy and sorrow?

  I tried to focus, to slow my mind down. I felt that I was on the verge of some moment of enlightenment. Then a larger than normal wind wave slapped me on the side of my face, and I snorted seawater up my nose and swallowed a mouthful. Coughing and gagging, fighting against the burning sensation in my sinuses, I thought, I’m not ready to drown yet. I need more time, dammit.

  Time. It appeared to lose all meaning out there. The day seemed to not want to end, yet I was not looking forward to the dark. When I became aware that I was cold, I realized that I had been cold for a very long time. I began kicking and rubbing my skin, trying to warm myself up. The wind had dropped down to almost nothing, and while there was still some swell, there were no longer the little wind waves that splashed me in the face.

  Three times during the day I saw helicopters or planes pass overhead, and I waved and shouted as I had at the cruise ship, but I’d flown in an airplane over these same waters before. I knew how unlikely it was that anybody up there would be able to spot a person in the water. I wondered if all the air traffic had anything to do with me. Had Rusty reported his boat missing?

  Two large clouds parted and a column of sunlight lit up a small circle of ocean not far from me. It reminded me of those paintings of angels or Jesus, where they stood in a shaft of celestial light. Maybe this was a sign, maybe a miracle was about to take place, another boat would appear, and I would be plucked from the sea. I waited, allowing myself a tiny bit of hope. The lovely shaft of light broadened as the clouds drifted apart, and soon the whole sky was flecked with spots of blue. No boat appeared, and I beat my hands against the surface of the sea, splashing my own face, angry at myself for wanting to believe.

  When the sunlight finally reached my part of the ocean, I could feel the temperature change. I closed my eyes, pointed my face to the sun, and let the heat soak into my skin. I leaned the top of my head back, and my feet floated right to the surface. I began to feel some warmth, even in my legs.

  For a time, I actually dozed off into real sleep. That bit of late afternoon sunny warmth reenergized me, and when I woke, I remembered that I had those candy bars in my pocket. The saltwater had not penetrated the vacuum foil wrapper, so when I tore it open with my teeth, the chocolate bar inside was squished but dry. I usually complained about the chalky taste of those health food store protein bars when B.J. offered me one, but this one tasted so good, I nearly gobbled down the second as well. I pulled it out of my pocket but then stuck it back, thinking that night was coming, and it would take every bit of energy I had to survive through those long dark hours.

  Night came on as quickly as the cruise ship had passed. It seemed as though one minute there was sun, then a flamboyant red sky had melted into a million stars. The sky was not as dark as it had been the night before. Out of reach of all the mainland lights, there were so many stars there was little black sky left. I couldn’t ever remember having seen so many stars.

  No, that’s not true, I thought. There was that time, down in the Dry Tortugas with Neal, my former boyfriend. Neal, who had shown me the stars, named the constellations, and made love to me on the sand of an island that disappeared at high tide.

  Was Neal waiting for me at the Crossroads, along with my mother and Red and my dear friend Elysia and Margot and all the others I had not saved?

  The skin on my fingers had lost all sensation. When I touched my fingers to my dry cheeks, it felt like I was pressing slimy sea creatures to my skin. I put a finger in my mouth, and it was more like a cold thin pickle than a part of me.

  Sleep was the enemy, and I battled against it by singing songs I’d learned as a child, songs like “This Land Is Your Land” and “America, the Beautiful,” by gliding my hands through the water and watching the blue green contrails of bioluminescence sparking off my fingertips, by naming the stars and constellations I could remember: Orion, Betelgeuse, Altair, Sirius.

  Just in case t
here really was some kind of search-and-rescue effort happening out there, I turned on my little strobe light. It had a big pin on one side, and I had attached it to one of the straps on my buoyancy compensator. As I adjusted the straps on the BC, I felt Racine’s pouch float up under my chin. I grasped it tight in my fist and stared upward, but the bright flashes of my strobe blinded my night vision, ruining my view of the stars. I was way beyond caring what seemed rational and what did not. I called her name out loud, La Sirene, and I told her that I didn’t believe, but if she wanted to help me anyway, I wouldn’t turn down the offer. That made me smile, and I wondered if it would be the last time.

  It didn’t take long once it was dark for the cold to set in. I tried curling my body into a ball, swimming, rubbing my limbs, but nothing worked. A part of me welcomed the numbness because it stopped the aches in my body and the pain in my head. At one moment, I was sure I heard my mother’s voice, and we had quite a long conversation. She told me drowning really wasn’t so bad. “Sey, dear, when you’ve really had enough, just breathe the water. Simply put your head under and breathe.”

  “Mother,” I said as I kicked my legs, spinning my body around looking over the waves. “Mother, where are you?” She wouldn’t answer me, and I was so cold. And so sleepy. I would never do as she said, never breathe in water, but it would be nice to stop struggling and sleep for a little while. Maybe, just maybe, the darkness and cold would be gone if I could only sleep through the night. Yes, sleep.

  XXIX

  I was down in a deep, dark cave where the cold and damp got into your bones. Waiting, but for what, I wasn’t sure. Then I saw a shaft of light shining in the cave, just like the light I had seen at the surface. And she was there, crying, asking me to hurry, please. I pushed back the strands of my long black hair that were floating in the water, waving about my head as she reached out to me. Help me, I heard her say inside my head, just like that first day I’d found her. Help me. You promised. I called out to her, Where are you? I could see her, but I could not reach her. When she answered, she asked, Who are you? and I told her, La Sirene.