by Andre Dubus
She felt the pill in her legs now, and in her fingers as she lit her last cigarette before the walk she would have to control to the bedroom. Near the shore in front of the house a mallard swam. In the still air the lake was as calm as the Caribbean on Bastille Day when they fished for marlin. As they headed out to sea in the thirty-two-foot wooden boat, Gina had said: “Let them eat hooks.” Rusty killed fish every summer and sometimes, with Cal, pheasants in the fall; the birds were harder to find and she and Cal hunted some seasons without seeing one, save those they refused to shoot on their land; but she loved anyway walking alertly in the cool air and sunlight. When she did shoot a pheasant, she ran before its sun-brightened green hit the earth, ran with her thumb pressing the shotgun’s safety button, silently telling the bird: Don’t just be wounded and crawl off to hide and die. She had given up trying to explain to her friends who did not hunt, both women and men, the thrill of the flushing bird and her gun coming to her shoulder and its muzzle and bead sight swinging up to the shape and colors, the thrill of firing only once and seeing it fall, and her fear as she ran to it, and, above all, the third feeling: sacredness, a joy subdued by sorrow not for the dead bird, or even for her killing it, but for something she knew in her heart yet could not name, something universal and as old as the earth and the first breath of plants. Those same friends who did not understand her hunting were puzzled when she told them that catching even a mackerel, small and plentiful as they were, or a cod that she reeled up from the bottom of the sea onto boats they chartered in New Hampshire, gave her that same feeling when she unhooked them and placed them in the ice chest. She never mentioned to these friends what she felt when she caught a bluefish. It fought as if it were a heavy cod with the vigor of a mackerel, and the fish’s struggle for life wearied her right arm and shot through her body, which she leaned backward, then moved forward as she reeled. When she brought it alongside and Cal or Gina or Ryan gaffed it and lifted it onto the deck, she put on thick cotton working gloves and pushed one hand into a gill while with pliers in the other she pulled and twisted and worked out the hook, watching the eye looking at hers and telling her as clearly as if it were human: I’m going to bite off your finger, you bitch. She had never shot any game but pheasants or an occasional rabbit, had never caught anything larger than a blue-fish; cod had been longer and heavier, but their dead weight on her line, their easy giving up of the hook so she used neither gloves nor pliers, diminished by pounds and inches their size, and kept the fierce blue-fish larger in her heart. She did not know whether or not she wanted to catch a marlin; she did not know whether she wanted any of her family to. So when Gina made the joke about hooks, Rusty had quickly turned to her, a scolding sentence taking shape; but she said nothing. For Gina, seeing Rusty’s face, had blushed and said: “I just remembered what day it is. That’s all.” Ryan stepped beside Gina at the gunwale and kissed her cheek and said: “Aristocrat. Or maybe a royal asshole.” Cal said: “Did somebody call?”
An hour or two later, some time before noon, the boat sank. It struck nothing. The engine stopped, but there was no sound of wooden bow or hull hitting a reef or upturned sunken boat or a whale. There was no shock, no force to make them fall to the deck or to lurch and reach for one another’s bodies for balance. There was only the captain’s voice: not even a cry, but a low, clear sentence so weighted with the absolute knowledge of what had happened that to Rusty it was more frightening than a scream, and she saw her long red hair wavering like flame above her as she sank beneath her last bubbles of air: “We have to go overboard; she’s sinking.” Then he said to the mate, Zack Chaffee, dark and small and muscular, already running forward the few strides from stern to forecastle, and minutes away from his own death: “Get the preservers and jackets.” Rusty went forward, too, and felt her family behind and beside her as she halted midway to the forecastle and looked at the water rising in it, covering the bunks. A cushion and two life jackets floated. Chaffee went down the ladder and was in water to his waist. He tossed the two floating jackets out to the deck and saw Rusty and her family, and he was looking at her face when he waved his arm toward the boat’s port side and either said or mouthed: “Go.” Cal picked up the jackets and gave them to Gina and Ryan, then took her arm and led her to the side. As he lifted her to the gunwale, she heard the captain’s voice repeating MAYDAY and the digits of their location and she looked over her shoulder at him before she jumped. Then all of them were in the water, swimming away from the boat, Zack pushing the preservers in front of him, holding his jacket’s strap in his teeth, a coil of line around one shoulder; and the captain rising in the water to throw jackets ahead of her and Cal.
Holding a preserver while Zack lashed them, she watched the boat sinking, then looked past Zack at the captain’s profile and saw what his first knowledge had been, what she had heard in his voice when he spoke to them on the boat: not of drowning; they were floating and already help was coming from everywhere within range of his radio. He had known why they were sinking, and she knew it was something he had done or had not done, and it should not have happened, should not have been allowed to happen, and she was about to accuse him but could not, for his face was like that of landed codfish, resigned to sunlight and air and death, as if they accepted that they had destroyed themselves, feeding on the dark bottom, taking the clam and the barb with it, and that was why they fought so little, if at all, while she reeled them up, why they were simply weight on the end of her line. The captain’s name was Lenny Walters. Watching his face with its look of being caught in a trap that he had set, she forgave him. He looked at his boat until it was gone, and still he stared at the water where it had been as if the gentle waves were a chorus, their peaceful sound of moving water coming to his ears as hue and cry. In the water beside her, Gina and Ryan, twenty-five and twenty-three then, were building a bridge of jokes and laughter over their fear. Cal was asking Zack, but quietly, what the Goddamn hell had happened. Zack was silently tying together the preservers. Rusty looked at his face lowered over the knot, but lowered as well from Cal’s voice and eyes. So he knew, too. She looked up at the sky for respite, then pushed her arms through the holes in her life jacket and looked down to buckle the straps, and Zack screamed.
“We can never know for sure,” the Coast Guard lieutenant had said. “But that’s the only thing that makes sense. I’ve got four intelligent adults here. And they tell me you were all a lot calmer than people ought to have to be. With what you went through. No panic. Working together in the water, even this fellow”—he nodded toward Cal, smoking in a chair near a window—“going back in to help the captain up when he got it. So I believe the boat didn’t hit anything. So I’m going to report that, in my professional opinion, that’s exactly what it was. And I want to thank all of you for your time and your courtesy. There’s not one thousandth of one percent of the whole human race that’s been through what you good people did.” He paused. “Not on a fishing trip, anyway. It was probably the first shark that brought the rest, got them feeding. And most times that first shark wouldn’t have hit, either. By and large, they’re just big fish that leave people alone. So you had a whole lot of bad luck, and a whole lot of good luck to get out of it alive. If there’s anything I can do—” But Rusty said: “It wasn’t bad luck.”
He turned to her, placed his arms on the desk, and leaned over them.
“Beg pardon?” he said. He was a tall man, not broad, and his stomach was widening, would in years to come grow round in front and sag over his khaki belt. Lenny Walters was a very large man, not tall and not fat, but strong; she had only noticed his size when she watched Cal pushing him up the ladder and holding him on it and then the crewman climbing against the pull of the rope around his waist, and at the end when she had gripped Lenny Walters’s belt and thrown herself backward onto the deck. Cal was five feet eight inches tall and weighed a hundred and sixty-five pounds, three inches taller and thirty pounds heavier than she, yet for thirty-five years she had seen him as bigge
r and stronger than everything she feared. Maybe she had not seen the two hundred-odd pounds of Lenny Walters until he was dying on the ladder, because there was something about him that was small, indolent.
“It wasn’t bad luck,” she said. “The sharks, yes. But not the boat sinking. It wasn’t an accident, either. Accidents happen to you. Maybe the first shark was an accident. Maybe he didn’t even want Zack. Maybe he wanted something better.”
The lieutenant’s blue eyes did not move from hers, and they were not distracted, and they were not amused by the unpredictable and mysterious world that so many men believed only women inhabited; they looked at her as one sailor’s eyes to another, curious, interested, ready to receive a truth about the unpredictable and mysterious sea they shared. She said: “It was—what’s the word?”
“Electrolysis.”
“Yes. Of the seacock. He knew. He knew he hadn’t done his maintenance. It was in his voice. When he told us we had to go overboard. I can still hear him. It was in his voice: there was no surprise, you see. Not even excitement. It was like something had been on his mind for a while—”
“A good while,” the lieutenant said. “Excuse me.”
“—so that brass fitting snapped off and the boat filled under the waterline and he still didn’t know it. Then the water burst through the bulkhead into the fo’c’sle and what he had been putting off doing came in on him. And he knew it. It was in his voice, and it was in his face when he was watching his boat go down. It was in Zack’s face, too, right up to the moment the shark came.”
The lieutenant nodded.
“I believe you,” he said. He looked at Cal across the room from Rusty. Cal was watching her. The red in his cheeks deepened. He said: “Maybe that’s why he was so good in the water. He was a Goddamned captain in that water. He put Gina up the ladder first. I don’t believe he was thinking women and children first, either. He knew there was just us four in the family. I think he picked her first because she can still have babies.” Cal’s eyes did not shift to Gina, or to Ryan when he said: “Then Ryan. Same reason, I suppose. He can’t have them, but he can get them started. Then the mother. Then the old bastard that’s paid his dues and his insurance premiums, too. Then the poor son of a bitch paid all his dues at once.”
The deeper color was still in his cheeks and she saw in his eyes the dampness of tears he would contain, but his hands did not rise to them, either; he let them glisten there, for her. To her left, Gina sniffled. Still watching Cal, her face warmed by his, she reached to Gina, who with two hands took hers and tightened and stroked and squeezed and stroked, and Rusty saw those lovely brown legs in the blue water. Had a shark’s jaws opened for one, she would have triumphantly thrust her own leg into its mouth. Yet Cal, without even a pause to look for another way to get Lenny Walters onto the ladder, had leaped backward into the sea, among the sharks whose number they would never know. Looking at him across the small room, she felt no shame or envy. She saw only Cal, and in his face she saw only herself, and though she felt the chair she sat in, and Gina’s hands moving on hers, she felt bodiless, too, out of the room, as though her spirit and Cal’s had left their bodies and were moving side by side, above time, above mortality. Then she was in her body again, in the room and the cool of the trade winds coming through the window behind Cal, and she was aware again of the tall lieutenant. She looked at him, then at Ryan, then at Gina. They were all watching her, as they might if she had beautifully sung an aria, and they could not yet speak, suspended in that instant of purity before their hands would move to clap and their legs would push them out of their chairs to their feet.
On the porch swing she carefully lowered the glass with its melting ice to the floor. She had a few minutes still to sit and watch the lake, time even for another cigarette, though her fingers were slow and heavy with it, and her mind was moving back through the house, into bed and sleep, its path cluttered with images it tried to skirt: a large codfish staring straight ahead at air as she gently removed the hook; a bluefish pressed down by her knee, flopping and twisting against her gloved hand in its gill, biting the shank of the hook and glaring at her; the strange eyes of sharks driven from feeding by kicking feet. But the pill neither distorted nor quieted her heart. Its beat was not as rapid as when it woke her; but it was strong, so eager now for the day that she was glad she had taken the pill, for excitement would have kept her awake as it does a child.
She saw motion to her right: not a thing or a creature, but only its movement. She sat very still, moved her eyes toward it, and saw a doe drinking at the lake: she stood on earth darkened by pines in the twilight, her graceful and exposed neck lowered to the water. She was no more than a hundred feet away. Then Rusty saw motion again, and behind the doe, at the edge of the woods, the antlers and head and shoulders of a buck seemed to separate themselves from the trees. Then it stopped. Quietly Rusty breathed the smell of pines and water. The chains of the swing creaked and seemed very loud to her, as the beating of her heart seemed audible to the ears beneath the antlers. But the buck did not move, and the doe lapped water, and Rusty wanted to hear that sound but could not. The buck lifted its head. Then he stepped forward once, swung his head in an arc that started up the lake and ended with her. She stared at his nose and eyes and antlers, and did not move. He looked at the doe backing away from the water, raising her head; then Rusty saw the length of his body emerge from the woods, as if it were growing out of the trees, just fast enough for her to see. At the lake he stopped, his head up, listening. Then he drank. Rusty tossed her cigarette to the lawn and watched him drinking, and the doe turning back to the woods, then disappearing into it. She waited until the buck finished drinking and vanished, too.
She pushed herself up from the swing and at the sound of its chains she stopped and listened for the running deer, but heard only water lapping at the shore. She had not been drunk for over ten years, and in her sleepy happiness she smiled at her walk through the cabin, no more than two steps in a straight line before she swerved, slowly and heavily, and in the hall to the bedroom she kept her palms on both walls till she reached the door and Cal’s breathing. She stood in the doorway, aiming herself at the bed and her side of it, the far side. Then she moved, weaving, her arms up and out for balance. Like dancing, she thought, and felt like twirling but knew she would fall. When she turned the corner of the foot of the bed, she did fall: she simply let go all control of herself and landed on the mattress and laughed with a sound as soft as Cal’s breath. He rolled toward her, then opened his eyes. They were calm, like Gina’s and Ryan’s were when they quietly woke in their cradles, then cribs on mornings when they were neither hungry nor uncomfortably wet, only awake. She kissed both of his eyes shut and with her thickened tongue said: “I took a pill. But wake me up anyway. With coffee. Okay?”
“A pill,” he said as sleep drew him away from her. Then he opened his eyes. “Why?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“I know. But why?”
“Today.”
Her eyes closed and she was asleep but trying to return, and she forced open her lids.
“I was on the porch. Remembering all of it. You.” She laid her hand on his side, pressed his ribs. “It was the worst day our family’s ever had.”
“It was the worst day most families have ever had.”
Her eyes closed.
“But it was the best, too,” she said, her voice detached from her body, coming from a throat somewhere above her. She felt his voice close to her face, but she heard one word at a time, then it drifted away from her, and the next word and the next were alone, and meant nothing.
“Do you understand?” she said.
Then his mouth was at her ear, and she heard: “I said yes.”
“Good. Make the coffee strong.”
His hand was smoothing her hair back from her forehead; he was talking, and his voice was gentle. She heard only her name, then was asleep.
Sunday Morning