We spent two months sailing around the Great Lakes, shaking down the boat and the crew, seeing the sights. I was in a strange, empty mood, and spent a lot of time alone in my cabin. The double catastrophe that had befallen me at the very moment of triumph still had me hollow, empty and numb. No one asked me to stand a watch or help with the boat, and I never volunteered. I took to drinking pretty heavily, alone, until Adam came in one day, silently picked up my case of scotch and threw it over the side, a gift for some future aquatic archaeologist.
Every now and then, one of the single girls would come in and let it be known pretty plainly that if I wanted a little company, well, so did she, but Helen had messed me up so bad inside that I didn't want to trust another woman, not even for a one-night stand.
Everybody else seemed to be having a marvelous time. We had fifty-three people on board. Thirty-one of these were me and my former employees. I'd had quite a few husband and wife teams working for me. Five were spouses of employees, eleven were children, two were boyfriends of two of the girls, and four girls had been sort of communally invited aboard by nine of our male bachelors. None of my business, so I never said anything. That and there were two dogs and a cat. The cat went missing on the second night out and I felt a little better. I never could stand cats.
At first, I took my meals in the galley along with everybody else. We were so crowded that we were eating in shifts when the weather was bad and you couldn't eat on deck. But my presence seemed to throw a wet sleeping bag over any group I was with, and after a bit I took to eating alone in my room.
We hit a major storm on Lake Michigan. There was plenty of warning, not only from the weather services but also off a fax machine that was hooked directly to a satellite. Adam had furnished us up proud, communications-wise. Besides the satellite hookup and two fax machines, there were six separate radios and radio telephones. I mean, we could be in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and place a collect phone call to somebody in Fiji, if we didn't care about getting the people there up in the middle of the night.
For me, the storm was just a lot of banging around in my cabin. It never occurred to me that I might drown, but if it had, I still wouldn't have much cared. For some of the other people, well, the storm got to them right where they lived. Shirley was the first person to tell me that she was leaving. She and her husband said that thinking about sailing for three years was wonderful, but the actual doing of it was more than they were cut out for. I really missed them.
We took down the mast and motored through a canal in Chicago, which put us on a tributary of the Mississippi River, and then spent six weeks playing Tom Sawyer heading south. I suppose that there were lots of pretty sights along the way, but inside I was still a dead man.
We lost six more couples, a single parent and all the kids and dogs at St. Louis. They had planned it that way all along. Summer was over, and the kids had to get back to school. They all promised to rejoin the crew next summer once school was out, but somehow none of them did. At least now there was enough room on board so you could turn around without rubbing someone's back.
Everybody loved New Orleans except me. I saw it as just an overrated, overpriced, and overheated place where all you could do is sit listening to octogenarians playing music that nobody else would want to listen to at all under normal circumstances. The swamps just south of that city are nice, though, and Cajuns are more fun than people. Eventually, gorged on shrimp, crawdads, and hot sauce, we raised the mast and headed into the Gulf of Mexico. Yet even these infrequent moments of pleasure were just a surface ripple over my inner feelings of nothingness.
For me, the Caribbean Islands were a mixture of overpriced tourist traps and pitiful black children living in shacks that would be condemned back home if they were used to house chickens. The water itself wasn't bad though, once you got away from the people. Adam finally got me out of my cabin and into a SCUBA rig, and that was beautiful. Fresh-caught lobster is the food of the gods, and even picking up some sort of infection from a coral I brushed against didn't blacken my mood all that much. For a little while I felt better, and then suddenly I was farther down than ever in the depths of depression. Adam bought a case of St. John's Wort, and made me start taking it, but I didn't feel any difference.
Sea sickness got to some people, and nine more of our crew left the boat at San Juan. We took on four thirty-gallon barrels of rum there, since rum sold for less than Coke, and Adam let me resume drinking, as long as I did it in public.
Slowly, I was starting to become a human being once more. As the winter passed, I even started noticing girls again. I wasn't quite to the point where I wanted to get involved with one, but I was noticing. Especially since most of them were in bathing suits, and the island fashions that year provided about the same coverage as two Band-Aids and a cork.
I got to noticing Dawn in particular. Now that the kids and older folks were gone, she let the exhibitionist side of her personality come out. Any time we got out of port, she got out of her bikini, which a guy just naturally couldn't help noticing. That, and it seemed as if every time I caught sight of her out of the corner of my eye, she was looking at me, and grinning. I figured her for a tease, albeit a pleasant one. Then one of the mechanical designers told me that it wasn't a tease at all. She was ready, and what was I doing, ignoring a nice girl like that? But Dawn was young enough to be my daughter, if I had one, and anyway, I wasn't quite ready for another woman yet.
Then we hit a hurricane, or vice versa. Normally, a storm isn't much of a problem with a good sailboat, as long as you have plenty of sea room, and we did. You just take in all the sails, hang a bit of sturdy canvas to the backstay, tie off the wheel, seal up all the hatches, and try your best to ignore it. The boat just automatically puts its nose into the wind and you do five or ten knots, backwards. Adam had a surplus parachute rigged to one of the anchor lines, as a sea anchor. If we ever got close to shore, he could throw it out and stop us dead in the water, but we never needed it. We were even going in the direction that we wanted. Toward Panama, and the Canal.
Maybe the reason that bad weather and such never bothered me was because, deep down, I still didn't much care if I was alive or not. It bothered most of the other people a whole lot. As soon as we docked at Colón, ten more of our crew left the ship. They'd had all the sailing they wanted to do, thank you, and Bay City was actually a very nice place to live. We tried to talk them out of leaving, but they were adamant. This left us with a controls designer, a Bridgeport operator, Adam and myself. And all four of the bachelorettes that had joined up for kicks back home. None of us were married, and it looked like it could become a nicely balanced little group.
In fact, Adam bought some decent lumber in the port of Colón, and the rest of them were busily converting the dormitory into two big staterooms, as we motored our way through the Canal.
I was taking my turn at the wheel, now that we were getting shorthanded, and naturally, given the pairing off that was going on, Dawn was getting more flirtatious than ever. I got to thinking that maybe I should stop being such a grump, and come out of my shell a little bit. She was twenty-four and I was forty-two, but maybe that wouldn't be an insurmountable problem. She was certainly a fine-looking young woman. She was down to the buff, lying on the glass top of the solar still nine inches in front of my windshield, and pretending not to notice me. A pleasant sight, but probably against the law in Panama. I mean, she was also ignoring the people on other, taller ships, though they weren't doing the same with her. Then I got a radio phone call from a passing freighter, thanking me for the scenery, but telling me that Panama being a staunchly Catholic country, the fines for doing what she was doing were huge.
"Get up!" I yelled to her, "Put some clothes on or you'll get us a ticket!"
She gave me an "Aw, shucks!" look, stood up, and her head exploded.
We were in Panama for three weeks while the police tried to get things sorted out. It seems that Dawn was hit by a .30 caliber hunting bullet.
The bullet was descending at a fifty degree angle when it struck her, and from the direction it had to have come from, there was no land higher than the boat from which it could have been fired. No ship or aircraft had been in the right position at the time. The only conclusion that anybody could come to was that somewhere off in the jungle, somebody had just fired a shot into the air. A weird accident, and a totally senseless death.
We humans like to think that we are somehow important in the great scheme of things, that in some way, our lives and our deaths have meaning. A certain rational part of us tells us that this isn't true, that the universe is a vast place, and quite indifferent to us, but we don't like to listen to that annoying little voice very often. And then something like the way Dawn died throws it in our faces.
I was back in the bottom of my black mental hole again, and now each of the other six people was also living in his or her own private place of darkness.
When the police finally gave us permission to leave, everyone but Adam and me decided to accompany Dawn's body home, and each of them said that they wouldn't be coming back. Adam tried hard to persuade them to stay, but Dawn's death just took the wind out of the expedition.
I think that the only reason I stayed on was because I was too numb to do anything else, or maybe because, without Helen and my factory, Bay City wasn't home any more.
I'm sure that it was his sense of duty that kept Adam on board, though I don't know if it was his duty to me or to the boat. After we saw the others off at the airport, Adam looked at me and said, "`And the weal of the crew was reduced down to two.'"
"That's from some sort of a song, isn't it?"
"Yah. Some sort."
"Adam, what are we going to do?"
"We're going to sail. Come on."
EIGHT
We topped off our two thousand-gallon fuel tanks, picked up a few bags of fresh food, and left. We didn't need anything else. There was enough canned and dried food to last us for three years, even if we didn't do any fishing. That didn't count the "emergency" supplies, a ton of dried beans, Bay City being the Bean Capitol of the world. The solar still built into the deck produced ten gallons of pure water a day, and the osmotic water maker could pump out another hundred, at the price of running the generator set. We were as free as any human beings possibly could be, and yet I was living in my own private hell.
I had hardly known Dawn, yet somehow her death and the manner of it weighed on me more than my divorce and bankruptcy had done. It wasn't that I was berating myself with "if onlys," although it was true that if I'd just let her lie there, and not acted like a penny-pinching prude, she would still be alive. It was that an uncaring universe had blotted her out with no more concern than a truck driver has for a bug hitting the windshield.
The new cabins had been completed while we were in Panama, and Adam and I moved into them as soon as we were at sea. They were much larger than the other two, and being near the center of the ship, they bounced around less in the waves.
The rule on board had always been that at least one person had to be awake and in charge at all times. The boat could sail itself once it was away from port, but someone was still needed to keep an eye on things. There were Coast Guard regulations about having somebody there to answer the radio, and assist if someone else got into trouble. Then too, neither of us, being engineers, fully trusted anything automatic. We flipped a coin, and I got the noon-to-midnight shift. It wasn't as though we each had to work twelve hours straight, we just had to be awake in case anything came up. The schedule had the effect that each of us was alone most of the time, and having little to do but look out at the sea has a hypnotic effect that sneaks up on you.
The next stop on the itinerary was the Galapagos Islands. We got there, saw a turtle, and bought a basket of fresh fruit. We had a drink in the bar of another visiting boat, and left before sundown.
We headed out, sailing west.
A few weeks later, we hit another storm. The bouncing around wasn't as bad as it had been on our previous romps with nature. For one thing, we had a few square feet of the jib showing, and this put our tail to the wind. We were running with it, and in The Brick Royal, it made for a smoother ride. Sleeping near the boat's center of gravity helped out a lot, too. Adam had rigged up some hammocks that let you stay put while the boat rocked around you. They were slung fore and aft, which canceled the rolling of the boat, and ropes at the ends of the hammock went through pulleys at each bulkhead, near the ceiling, and connected together above you. This let the boat pitch while you stayed almost stationary. Adam said he was going to patent it, next time he got a chance.
In any event, Adam was in the cockpit and I was sound asleep when trouble happened. My first indication that something was wrong came when I was slammed awake. The hammock let the boat bounce around quite a bit without you noticing it, but when she rolled completely over on her side, I smashed into the ceiling.
The mast was built into the wall separating the two big staterooms. The noise was deafening, and I felt another strange bump. The emergency lights came on in time for me to see the mast pull loose from its socket, and then wrench sideways, shattering the new wooden wall into sharp splinters.
I was tangled up in the hammock, trying to get free when the boat suddenly righted itself, which naturally swung me into the swordlike remains of the wall. I managed to twist around so that I was looking where I'd been, and only a dozen or so sharp wooden shards got through the thick canvas and bedding and into my back. Painful.
The carbon-fiber mast, despite the stainless-steel shrouds and stays that held it in position, had somehow been pulled three feet above the lower deck. It slammed back down like a crossbow bolt, going through the deck, through four feet of assorted stores, and then right through the ferrocrete bottom of the boat.
A spray of wet lima beans blasted into me as I renewed my struggle to get out of the hammock. The boat went over again on its side, reacquainting me forcibly with the ceiling. The mast then pulled itself out of the hole it had made, and the next time the boat righted itself, the mast stayed horizontal. It cracked the upper deck, then pulled itself entirely free of the boat, snagging in the process the rope that connected the ends of my hammock. The hammock was thus pulled straight like the string of a discharging crossbow, and I was bounced off the ceiling yet a third time, this time catching it on the face and stomach.
The lights went out, either electrically or because of the way I lost consciousness. I awoke to find the cabin half full of water and Adam leaning over me.
"You okay?" he shouted.
"I respectfully request sick leave," I said.
"Request denied. We got work to do. Can you move at all?"
"I guess I have to, don't I. What the hell happened to us?" It was hard to talk in the wet, noise, and confusion of the dim emergency light, the slapping water, and the floating junk.
"We must have hit something. I don't know what. The boat broke. I don't know why. Get up."
"Help me up. Maybe we can get a mattress over that hole in the bottom. Unless you know of something worse that's happened to us."
Adam said, "You're bleeding from twenty places, but that shouldn't bother a determined engineer. The spars and rigging are dragging beside us, so we're in the trough of the waves. The engine won't start, so we can't use the big pumps, and the electrical pumps will run down the batteries in a few hours. But what the heck. You're the boss, so we'll fix the hole in the bottom first."
He was talking slowly, but moving fast, throwing foodstuffs out of the hold to clear the area around the hole. He had completely lost his accent, so I knew that he must be in pretty bad shape.
"That's Christian of you," I said while making my way to the forward cabin where we had stored the bunk beds when the boat was converted.
"Hey! Watch it! Coming from an Atheist like you, those are swear words, and now would not be a good time to have God mad at us."
With three mattresses, several dismembered bunk beds, ropes, bed s
heets, and some hose clamps, we managed a lash-up that seemed to be holding. No mean feat considering the way we were waist deep in saltwater, with a few more feet of plastic garbage bags containing who knew what floating on top of it. The way everything was sloshing around, and slapping against the ceiling, didn't help any, either.
"The water is getting deeper," I said. "We'd better see about getting the engine started."
"You see what you can do about the engine. I'm going to go do something about the rigging," he said with a crescent wrench in one hand and a fire axe in the other.
"So much for the joys of a unified command. Okay. See you later."
After blundering around a bit in the engine compartment, I found the reason the engine hadn't started when Adam first tried it. The problem was that I had turned the fuel off at the stopcock a few weeks earlier. I hadn't figured that we'd be needing it until we got to the islands, and the fumes had been annoying. Now, however, the engine couldn't be started because the air intake was under water, as was most of the rest of the engine. The same was true with the genset, which was farther underwater than the big engine. I did manage to engage the manual clutch that started the prop-shaft generator turning. It couldn't put out enough power by itself to keep the electric pumps going, but it would stretch the time before the batteries went dead.
There was little more that I could accomplish down on the lower deck, so I went on deck to see if Adam needed some help. The wind topside during that gale was actually refreshing after slopping around in the chest-deep mess below. The boat, which had been broadside to the waves, was coming around with her stern pointed to the wind. Adam was coming back with the axe, his wrench having apparently gone adrift.
"Need any help?" I shouted.
"Nah. The shrouds parted company right from the beginning, and the forestay yielded to a little gentle persuasion," he shouted, gesturing to the axe. "Everything is now dangling from the backstay, and it's acting like a sea anchor."
The Fata Morgana Page 5