The Great Wide Sea

by M. H. Herlong

Gerry shrugged.

  Dad patted him on the head. “Well, it works to keep off the sun. Come on, boys. Let’s go.” He pulled Blankie off Gerry’s head and dropped it in his lap. As he was turning to walk back, he stopped and looked at Gerry again. “You’re not wet,” he said.

  Gerry didn’t answer.

  “Don’t you ever play in the water?”

  Gerry shrugged again.

  Dad looked at Gerry a moment, then sighed. “We’ll have to change that,” he said. “Soon.” Then he turned and walked back through the trees.

  Gerry took a long breath and looked at Dylan and me. “Did you know I can see you right through Blankie?” he asked. He rolled Blankie into a ball to hold at his stomach. “Don’t tell Dad.”

  We walked back to the dinghy and climbed aboard. When I was shoving off the pier, my arm touched Dad’s shoulder. I shuddered.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  AFTER WE LEFT Bimini, we went from place to place for several weeks, slowly sailing south. I wanted to tie up at a marina, but Dad said no, we were cruisers now and we didn’t need a marina. I said I’d been on a boat for over a month and wanted a hot shower. He said I’d have to get used to it. I said I couldn’t. He said shut up. And so on.

  The truth was I couldn’t get used to any of it—not being in the Bahamas, not living on a boat, not being so close together all the time. The Bahamas were nothing but a world of water with occasional dots of land so flat they were invisible from only a few miles away. The trees were twisted and small, and everything else that grew there stuck you. The sun glared, or it rained. There was no shade and no shadows, and living on a boat, we had no place to go. We were always together. We were never alone. It was just too different from home, where there were hills and trees and freshwater, where there were always other people and other rooms.

  At home, I knew what the world would look like when I walked out. I knew what the weather would do, what people would say, what was going to happen in my own head. I would feel tired when I woke up. I would yell at Gerry for picking apart my models. I would get mad at Dylan for moving my car magazines to set up his telescope. When I rode my bike to the lake just before dark and listened to the crickets and watched the fireflies, I would be happy. I just knew that, and it felt good to know those things. But here I never knew from one day—or hour—to the next how things would look or what people would do or how I would feel. It was like constantly falling down. It was always a surprise. It wore me out.

  I didn’t tell Dad, of course. What was the use? He hadn’t listened to me before. He wouldn’t listen to me now. We just kept sailing from place to place to place until one day he said we’d stay longer at the next stop, Gun Cay. He said there were other things we needed to learn besides sailing.

  We anchored just before lunch and then sat in the cockpit eating in silence until Gerry finally asked why this island was named Gun Cay. Dad had no idea. Dylan thought it was because of its shape. I said that made no sense because it was named before people flew over and saw its shape. Dad said they didn’t have to fly over. Cartographers figured out the shapes of islands when they drew the maps. Dad and I got mad at each other and yelled. I started for the dinghy.

  “Wait,” Dad said. “We’ll all go.”

  “Then I’ll stay,” I said.

  “No,” Dad said. “We’ll all go. I need to learn to use the speargun. And there’s a wreck here. You boys will like that.”

  So we loaded the dinghy and cast off. The waves were barely ripples on the shore. Dad tilted up the motor with perfect timing as we slid onto the beach. We heaved the dinghy high onto the sand, then walked closer to the wrecked boat.

  It was a sad sight. The port side of the hull had been crushed against a coral head. The boat had slowly filled with water and now only the forward half still showed, a moldy gray lump rising above the waves. The mast was broken off with only a stub still intact. The rest must have sunk or washed away.

  The sun was shining, but looking at the wreck made me feel cold.

  “Okay,” Dad said suddenly. “I’m going hunting.” He took the dinghy out to stalk some fish and told the three of us to stay put on the beach.

  Which we did, of course, since there was nowhere to go and no way to get there. At first we sat and watched Dad’s head pop up occasionally while he practiced free diving just holding his gun. Before long, Gerry started dragging his fingers in the sand and digging a little hole. Dylan wandered off to the edge of the brush and started picking up dead leaves and sticks.

  After a while, Dad started really trying to shoot a fish. I could see him reeling in the line after a miss. A lot of misses, actually. I wondered what fish were still hanging around waiting to get shot.

  Dylan made a boat from a coconut shell and sea-grape leaf and set it to float in Gerry’s hole. The clouds passed over us, darkening the beach in spots and casting shadows on the distant sea. It was cooler, but only for a second.

  Then Dad climbed in the dinghy and came back to us. “No luck,” he muttered. “Couldn’t really expect it on my first try.”

  “May I try?” I asked.

  “Later,” he said, and set the gun on a nearby log.

  “I could do it,” I said.

  “Not today, Ben. Later.”

  He turned and walked away down the beach. I lifted the gun and aimed at a shell. “Pow,” I said, then put it back on the log and sat down with Gerry and Dylan.

  They had made a mess in the sand and had put together a pretty good little flotilla, but not a single ship would stay upright in the water. They were struggling to figure out how to fix them, and I had just picked up a boat to help when Dad walked up.

  “Time for a family swim,” he said. “Everybody in!” Then he looked at Gerry. “Everybody,” he said.

  “I don’t want to, Daddy,” Gerry said. He dug his hole deeper and refused to look at Dad.

  “Gerry,” Dad urged. “It’s time you learned to swim. You can’t sit out by yourself for a whole year.”

  “He said he doesn’t want to,” I said. “Come on. Let’s make these boats float.”

  Dylan handed me a boat and Gerry jammed a stick sideways into the shore of his hole. “This is the dock,” he said.

  Dad stepped up and grabbed Gerry’s arm, pulling him to stand. Gerry refused to walk. Dad bent, scooped Gerry up, and carried him into the water. Dylan and I were stuck there holding the coconut boats.

  Then Dad dropped Gerry in, feetfirst, straight down.

  Gerry’s feet hit the bottom, his knees collapsed, and he went under for half a second before he popped back up screaming and grabbing on to Dad as if he wanted to climb him. “I stepped on something!”

  Dad grabbed Gerry’s chin and snapped his face up to look him in the eye, but Gerry’s eyes were tight shut and he was hopping from one foot to the other, squealing and sobbing, water still running down his face.

  “Don’t be silly,” Dad said. “Swim.”

  “But it wiggled, Daddy. It was alive.”

  “It was a fish. Do the dog paddle first.”

  “What kind of fish? A shark?” Gerry was peering into the water now, desperately ignoring Dad’s command.

  “A flounder, probably. Dog-paddle!”

  “What kind of flounder?”

  “I didn’t see it. A peacock. Swim, Gerry. Put your head under and swim.”

  “Does it bite? Can you eat it?”

  “Gerry. Shut up and go under.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can.”

  Dylan and I were standing now on the beach. Dylan was so close, I heard his quiet breathing. Dad really meant to make Gerry go under.

  “Put your head under now,” Dad said quietly.

  “I can’t.”

  Dad’s hand, with the fingers spread out, covered the whole top of Gerry’s head. His fingers almost reached from ear to ear. He pushed down, but Gerry wouldn’t go under. He twisted out from under Dad’s hand. He was screaming, but there was no one on the beach to hear him.<
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  I realized then that I was standing there waiting for Mom to come—for her to step in and change everything. I was waiting, but she would never come.

  Gerry was flailing out at Dad now, but Dad’s grip on his arm was tight. “I said, ‘Now!’ ” Dad said. Then he took Gerry by the shoulders and pushed him under the water.

  I guess there are moments in your life when reality shifts and you enter some parallel universe where time is different and the things you do don’t connect with who you were one second before. Just under the water I saw Gerry’s blond hair waving and his hand stretched out and tense. I watched for what felt like hours. I felt myself go ice cold over my ears and down my spine. Then I raced into the water and jumped on Dad.

  His shoulder rammed into my chest and my nose smacked against his head. My arms wrapped around him, and I felt the rough elastic at the waist of his shorts and the rise of muscle on his chest as he let go of Gerry and turned his grasp toward me.

  “Stop holding him down,” I was screaming.

  Dad threw me off and I fell backwards into the water. He stood there just looking at me as I struggled to stand. “What is wrong with you?” he said.

  Dylan was leading Gerry to shore.

  “Don’t hold him down,” I shouted, and turned toward shore.

  “I was holding him up,” Dad said to my back, but I pretended I couldn’t hear him and slogged through the water to the beach.

  When I caught up with Dylan and Gerry, Gerry was holding one of the coconut boats. I squatted down in front of Gerry and looked him in the eye. I couldn’t tell if the water on his face was ocean or tears. “Which was scarier, Gerry—the fish or Dad?”

  Gerry shrugged and looked off toward the trees.

  “Next time,” I said, “don’t just stand there. Kill him. We’ll eat him for supper.”

  “The fish?” Gerry asked.

  I paused. “No,” I said. “Dad.” I looked up and there he was, standing at the edge of the water and watching us.

  He was still my dad but now I hated him.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THREE DAYS LATER, we woke up to rain. While it rained, we sat in the cabin with everything closed tight, everybody knocking bones and sweating on each other. Trapped in the boat, the air got hotter and stuffier every minute. The portholes fogged over. The settee cushions got damp with the drips from the overhead hatches. Dad pondered charts at the chart table. Dylan and Gerry tried to see outside through the portholes. I crawled back into my tunnel and closed my eyes.

  I planned my car, the one I intended to get as soon as I turned sixteen—the color, the interior, the paint trim, the factory extras, the things I would add. Then I took it for a drive. I drove down a long straight road. I propped one elbow in the open window. I draped one wrist over the steering wheel. I felt the wind in my hair. Then a long deep curve. I held the accelerator steady. The wheels gripped the road. We leaned into it. And when the road straightened out again, I yelled and the wind sucked the sound away. I turned to the girl beside me and she smiled. I didn’t wonder who she was or how she got there. I didn’t wonder where I was going or where I was coming from. I just drove, the car’s engine humming and the wind rushing in my ears. Like my blood.

  “Wake up,” Dad said. He shook my foot. “The rain’s stopped.”

  I opened my eyes. “I wasn’t sleeping,” I said, and eased myself out of my bunk. The hatches were open. A slight breeze filled the cabin. Dylan and Dad were at the chart table. Gerry lay topsides in the cockpit, curled on his side with his eyes closed. I was halfway up the ladder to join him when Dad stopped me.

  “Come look at the charts with us,” he said.

  I moved over and sat on the port settee. I picked up the logbook and opened it. Dad had already recorded the storm.

  “This is the Great Bahama Bank,” he was saying, his finger moving back and forth across the chart.

  I looked at the date in the logbook. I’d already missed the first week of school. My name was already lined out in every roll book.

  “Ben,” Dad said. “I’m talking to you.”

  I looked up.

  “I’ve decided,” Dad said. “It’s time to cross the Bank, and I think we’re ready.”

  I put down the logbook. “Cross the Bank?” I said.

  “Yes,” Dad answered, spreading his fingers across the chart.

  The Great Bahama Bank is a wide, flat underwater plateau. The Biminis and the Cat Cays where we had been sailing so far all lie along its western edge. The Berry Islands and Andros lie to the east. Between the two fringes of islands the ocean is shallow, twenty feet of water or less, with coral heads scattered around in certain areas.

  “It’s too shallow,” I said.

  When you first start out on a boat, being on the deep ocean makes you nervous. You’re always imagining falling off the boat, and somehow the fact that the water is so deep makes it seem more dangerous. But after a while, you change. After a while, you realize that it’s the boat that’s keeping you out of the water, and you want the boat to be safe. Then you get nervous when you can see the sand sliding by under your keel.

  “It’s plenty deep,” Dad said. “Chrysalis only draws five and a half feet. She could sail in six feet of water if she had to. Twenty will be more than enough.”

  “I still don’t like it.”

  “I’m not asking you to like it. People cross the Bank all the time.”

  “But why do we have to cross the Bank?”

  “To get to the rest of the Bahamas,” Dad answered.

  “You said we’d stay here awhile. We like it here.”

  “I changed my mind. The weather’s good for crossing. We’ll stay longer at the next place. We’ll sail tomorrow night.”

  “At night!” I said. “We have to do another night passage?”

  “We can’t make it all the way across in one day, and the tide is right tomorrow night.”

  “I don’t want to sail all night.”

  “It’s just one night.”

  “I don’t want—”

  Dad suddenly slapped the chart with both hands. “I am the captain. I have decided. We’re leaving tomorrow night.”

  “I’m not going,” I said quietly, and turned to climb the companionway ladder.

  Dad’s hand flashed out and grabbed my arm. “Yes, you are,” he said.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Ben!” He shook my arm. “You’re turning this trip into a nightmare.”

  “Turning it into a nightmare?” I tried to pull away. “It was a nightmare to start with. We didn’t want—”

  “Shut up.”

  “Make me.”

  He dropped my arm and looked at me. “Just leave,” he said quietly, turning away. “Just go. Get out.”

  I climbed into the cockpit where Gerry was now sitting up, his eyes big and Blankie pressed against his mouth. I stepped to the edge of the boat.

  “What are you doing, Ben?” he asked.

  “Leaving,” I said, and dove into the water.

  I swam underwater as far as my breath would take me, then surfaced and turned back to look at the boat. They were all standing in a row along the side looking at me.

  “Ben!” Dad screamed. “Get back on the boat!”

  I turned and swam toward the island, but my stroke felt weak and wobbly.

  “James Benjamin Byron,” he yelled. “Come back here now.”

  I paused, treaded water, and turned again to look at him.

  “Go to hell,” I screamed. “Go to hell—all of you!”

  I turned again and swam toward shore. This time my stroke was stronger and my breathing much, much easier.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  WHEN MY FEET touched bottom, I stood and waded to shore without looking behind me. Then I immediately turned left and started walking south. If they were watching, they would see that I didn’t look back, that I knew where I was going, that I had a plan.

  The plan was simple. Dad had said I was ruining the
trip. He didn’t want me there. He had told me to leave. Well then, I would just stay on Gun Cay. Another sailboat would come. I would bum a ride to a nearby town. I would lie about my age, and in a day or two I’d have a job somewhere and I’d be gone for good. He would never see me again.

  After the storm, the wind was light and the surf was still. Seagulls squawked and scattered as I approached, but everything else was quiet. Even Chrysalis. They weren’t calling out to me. They had not launched the dinghy to come get me.

  It was almost noon already, the sun was hot, and I didn’t have a hat. Still I didn’t slow down. I kept walking until the beach curved. When I finally paused to look back, Chrysalis was out of sight. I stopped. I could hear the casuarinas quietly sweeping the breeze with their long blue-green needles. I could hear the surf roll gently in, fold over, and slip away. I had not been completely alone since we left home.

  I looked out at the ocean. That turquoise water. That pale sand. That emptiness. I wondered if a person could ever get used to it.

  I waded into the perfectly clear water. I swam out and floated, facedown, all alone in the sea.

  Looking down was like looking through a clarifying lens. The bottom was in sharper focus than the sand at my feet when I walked on the beach. I drifted over the waving grass and dirty gray shells, over fish that swam into my shadow then turned in a split second and swam away.

  I turned over and lay spread-eagled on my back on top of the waves. The sun warmed my chest and face. My ears filled with the sound of the water. I opened my eyes on the sky and floated effortlessly over the sea. I wanted to feel clean and empty, like an open dinghy drifting free. I wanted to be blank and invisible.

  But I was not. I was a boy floating in the ocean getting sunburned and hungry.

  I wondered if Dad would leave without me. I wondered if Dylan and Gerry would let him.

  Suddenly the sea felt cold even though the sun was hot. I swam back to shore and stretched out on my stomach on the sand. I lay resting my forehead on my crossed forearms, my nose a quarter inch from the sand. It was dark in the cave my arms made.

  I was tired. I was hungry. I hadn’t spoken a word since my last words to them.