Cold Water Burning

by John Straley

  The cabin of the sailboat was a gloomy jumble. Six small ports let in very little light. The engine hatch was thrown open, and there was a strong oily smell. Books, charts, hand tools and bags of cereal were scattered on the floor. The stove was turned on high, and the old cast-iron stove top glowed cherry-red. It was, in fact, as hot as a sauna. I stripped off my wet shirt and crawled toward the forward bunk. I crawled under the table and over several thick art books flopped open on the floor. I banged my knee against a pair of bolt cutters.

  In the hot and tarry space, I clawed my way up toward the for­ward bunk and was able to hang on to the lip of the bunk and pull myself up to the mattress. After three tries, I settled into the dark berth. Clothes were scattered on the bunk and I bunched them into a pillow behind my head. I listened to the waves lapping on the other side of the cedar planking by my head. The Modern Lovers seemed more distant now, but I could still hear Jonathan’s bare feet beating a rhythm on the deck.

  In the dark I heard a soft groaning. Not an arm’s length away, on the opposite bunk, I could see a hump of what looked like duffel bags. At the far end of the bunk I saw a pale face with a pair of glasses peering over the edge of a blanket.

  “Hello, Cecil,” Todd said.

  I have never trusted good news. I always thought that if I didn’t see the cloud, there could be no silver lining. So when I heard Todd’s voice, my heart sank momentarily because I thought for certain this was evidence that Todd’s haunting had entered a new, more explicit stage. The next thing that came to my mind was that my injuries were truly as severe as I was beginning to suspect. This crunching in my skull was going to leave me with some sort of loopy, Oliver Sacks-style neurological deficit, and I was going to be the chapter in his next book about the private eye who sees ghosts of the people he has failed to save. Maybe Todd was dead. Maybe I was dead. It was conceivable that this boat was being run by a naked angel, and we were all being conveyed to heaven. It seemed a little less likely that the angel would be playing Jonathan Richman and The Modern Lovers, but who was I to judge?

  The Todd figure spoke again. “We flipped over after a big wave filled up the bow of the boat. We rolled over pretty easily. We had caught up to the sailboat. Jonathan picked me up out of the water. I wasn’t in the water a long time really. But I got cold. I’m just staying here in the bed. Do you think staying here in bed is the right thing to do, Cecil?”

  I was able to reach over and touch Todd’s toe. “Yes, Todd, I think that is a good thing to do.”

  “I had to urinate, Cecil. This boat has a bathroom but I don’t think it’s operational because I opened the door and there was stuff, you know, smelly stuff, all over. I didn’t go in.”

  “That’s okay, buddy. You can go up on deck and pee over the side.” I was lying back down with my eyes closed. There was warmth and lightness easing around my chest and moving up toward my eyes.

  “Well, I didn’t really think that would be appropriate because I didn’t want to interfere with the operation of the boat, and I didn’t know the protocol for doing such a thing.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “Well, I don’t know if this was the right thing, Cecil, because I know it’s not appropriate, but, given this seems to be an extraordi­nary situation . . . I urinated in a pot I found and then left it in the sink. You think that will be all right, don’t you, Cecil? I mean, no one will be . . . upset by that, do you think? I promise I will wash the pan when we get settled again,” he said, with real anxiety building in his voice.

  “Don’t worry, Todd. I’ll take care of the pan. I’ll wash it out for you too. You did the right thing.”

  I hadn’t let go of Todd’s toe. It was warm, and I felt that warmth running up from my hand and through my arm. My chest was heaving.

  “Are you crying because of what I did in that pan, Cecil?”

  “No, Todd, it doesn’t have anything to do with that pan. You’ve done a great job. I’m proud of you.”

  I let go of his toe and wiped the tears away from my eyes. When I looked at my hands, they were tinged red by the tears running through the blood scabbing over my face.

  “What happened to Kevin?” I asked Todd.

  “I don’t really know, Cecil.” Todd began to sit up slightly. “He got into one of those rubber suit things—”

  “I don’t suppose he helped you into one,” I interrupted stiffly.

  “Oh no, Cecil, he did. He gave me a suit, but I was . . . rather confused. I wasn’t able to put it on. He tried to make me put the suit on, but I was afraid he was mad at me. He kept screaming about getting to the sailboat. He said he wasn’t going to jail. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know the protocol. I just held on. So Kevin got extremely angry, and he was pulling something on the side of a white plastic barrel that was on top of the boat when the wave dumped on us. I never saw him after that. The boat filled up with water and then it rolled. We were close to this sailboat. Kevin had been yelling at Jonathan, but I doubt they could hear each other. The boat filled up with water and then . . . capsized. I didn’t see him after that.”

  Todd reported the facts as if he were in a booth watching a soundless movie on the other side of the glass. I closed my eyes.

  “Cecil?” I heard him say a few seconds later.

  “What is it, buddy?”

  “Are you sure it will be okay about the pan in the sink?” he said.

  “I’m sure of it. You did the right thing,” I said with my eyes closed. As the Naked Horse pushed through the swells, I could feel the rise and fall of her hull. I could hear the water pushing past me and the warm air licked me all over. I dreamed of Jane Marie, and I dreamed that there was a thread rising up out of my throat, floating around and around the cabin of the boat until it rose up out of the stovepipe and into the air above the boat. There were miles and miles of this thread tangled in the air. It twisted and knotted throughout the northern Pacific sky. My thread had pack­aged the clouds and was entangling seabirds in flight. Finally I could feel a tugging, and I knew that somehow Jane Marie had hold of the other end of that thread. I could feel her tugging on it, pulling her way toward me, slowly and patiently.

  The hatch bumped open and Jonathan bounded down into the cabin. I could see him in the gloom, which had brightened a little now that the hatch was open.

  He was shaking and trembling but smiling nonetheless. He was still naked except for the scarf and belt. His eyes found mine and locked down on them, and when he did, everything seemed so still we could have become detached from time, just frozen in the mo­ment when he saw me and held me in his gaze.

  “You know, Cecil, I am in love with the modern world!” Then he hooted and danced near the stove. I could see now that he was wearing a pair of the athletic shoes he had netted out of the sea. He was incorporating his shivering into his strange spasmodic dance. He stood so near the stove his bare legs brushed against the red-hot top. He jerked away and added that into his dance. The cabin was stifling hot now. I was stripped down to my damp underwear and T-shirt, but sweat beaded off me. I wiggled my toes and was able to pick up my legs and swing them over the edge of the bunk. I could just barely support my own weight. I found a small plastic bottle of apple juice rolling on the floor. I undid the lid and drank it down in several long gulps.

  I threw the empty bottle on the bunk. I could see that Jonathan was exhausted. He had been keeping himself cold in order to stay awake, but even his clouded mind knew he was starting to wear down. He clutched at his face and pinched his cheeks. His hair was matted down and twisted in damp tendrils. His legs were begin­ning to give out, and I saw him slump down on the floor by the stove. The cabin began to fill with the sour odor of singed hair.

  I walked unsteadily toward him and pushed him away from the stove and he jerked awake.

  “I’m on watch!” he blurted. “I’m on watch!” His eyes were barely open. The heat s
eemed to be melting his resolution to stay wide awake and in love with the modern world.

  “I think I can handle the boat, Jonathan. Get some rest.”

  “No!” His arms frantically waved around him as if birds were caught in his hair. “Can’t sleep,” he croaked. He slumped naked on the floor, the knife still in place on his belt. His body was giving out, and the expression “cracking up” came to my mind; for the first time it seemed strangely accurate to me, for it appeared as if his exhaustion was squeezing the consciousness out of his body.

  Jonathan pinched at his face with dirty trembling hands. His hands scraped open the scabs so blood began to mark his face like some kind of tribal paint.

  “No sleep. Must not sleep.” His voice was quavering. His eyes were closed.

  “Where is your lithium, Jonathan? I’ll get it for you.”

  He opened his eyes and looked at me as if I were about to attack him. His hand went to the handle of his sheath knife and his eyes flared at me as if he were the lion in Rousseau’s painting The Dream.

  He wanted to kill me. I could feel it like the rage of the storm. I suppose he wanted to kill me because I wanted to wake him out of the ecstasy of his nakedness. He knew I wanted to make him reality’s prisoner, all bundled up and anesthetized.

  I held my hands apart and stood helpless in front of him. “I’m telling you the truth,” I said apologetically. “You need your medi­cine. You will still love this world. I’m telling you the truth.”

  Tears tracked down his face and mingled with blood in the stubble of beard. He stared at me, then slumped over and pointed to a zippered bag laced onto a cord above the sink. He pointed to it in defeat as if I had beat it out of him.

  “Oh, Cecil,” he said, “don’t you know that honesty is the last costume we wear?”

  I found yellow pills and white pills. I even found little blue ones which I thought I recognized as tranquilizers I used to abuse. The pills were lying around loose in his zippered shaving kit. Seeing them there like ripe little berries and breath mints, I was tempted to take them all myself. But I didn’t. The teakettle was off the stove. I poured some of the tepid water into a cup with a broken handle and gave him a handful of assorted colors. There had to be some lithium in there.

  He looked down at the pills, looked around the boat as if saying good-bye, then popped the pills into his mouth and swallowed. I got him some clothes, washed his cuts, and then helped him into a bunk. As I headed up the ladder to the cockpit, Todd reminded me to dump out the pot in the sink and clean it. I turned around, gave him a thumbs-up, and as I looked back I saw Jonathan curled like a child on the bunk next to Todd, whose emotional vacancy seemed a blessing to me now. I waved and went on deck, and the first thing I did was dump Todd’s pot over the side.

  There were flat-bottomed cumulus clouds to the west. The sun lit the tops of them so they appeared like gigantic battleships floating in the sky. The sea was a flinty blue, rolling like a bil­lowing sheet in all directions. Jonathan had lashed the tiller in place. There was a lot of leeway in this rig because the winds were relatively light and we were carrying a tiny bit of sail. We were headed slowly on a quartering downwind course to the southeast­ward, 180 degrees from the direction the storm had blown us out to sea.

  I had found pants and a dry coat down in my bunk and I zipped it up to my chin. I searched through the dozens of shoes lying on the deck and found a left and a right that would fit on my feet even though they were different sizes. None of the electronics on the Naked Horse were in working order. The antenna for the radio had been lost, but worse, it must have come unbolted from its station because I had tripped over the broken casing while moving toward the ladder. The running lights and most of the bowsprit had been stripped away.

  To the south of us I had seen helicopters transiting back and forth. I supposed they were dealing with the container ship. The helicopters were flashing their lights and flying straight, pur­poseful routes. They weren’t looking for us. The Naked Horse limped along on the gentle wind.

  I held the tiller for what seemed like several hours, but after dis­covering that the sunset was in fact dawn, my internal clock was broken. I tried to triangulate our location by lining up three dis­tant mountain peaks and trying to spot a rough position, but it was promising to be a long trip because by my calculations the Naked Horse was standing absolutely still.

  Soon Todd came on deck wrapped up in his warm, damp clothes. He didn’t say anything to me but sat slump-shouldered in the cockpit and stared out to the mountains. He sat as if praying for almost an hour before he asked, “When do you estimate we will be home?”

  “I have no idea, buddy,” I said truthfully. “But we are safe for now.”

  The gulls seemed to have gone back about their business after the storm and a group of them were feeding to the west of us. A few gulls wheeled behind us, taking long angular dives back and forth across our tiny wake. Some sat on the water and by paddling hard were almost able to keep up.

  Jonathan came back on deck. I estimated he had been below some five hours.

  He said nothing to me as he lifted himself out of the house and into the cramped cockpit. “How are you, Todd?” he said, as he stepped over Todd’s legs so he could flop down opposite him. Todd just nodded hi, not knowing how to answer the question politely.

  “Well, I ruined my boat, didn’t I?” Jonathan said.

  “She’s battered, but we’re floating and under way. I’d say you did a hell of a job,” I said, sounding a little Pollyanna-ish. Jonathan didn’t respond. He kept rubbing his face with the flat of his hands. When he took his hands away I could see his eyes were deeply bloodshot and his hands were shaking badly. He was wearing a baggy fisherman’s sweater and an old pair of woolen hunting pants. He had no shoes on, but judging by the condition of his feet, that was probably normal for him on board.

  “I used to fish with my uncle,” he said. “That old man was a righteous drunk. But he could catch salmon, I’m telling you . . .” Jonathan let his voice trail off. We both watched the luffing sail.

  Finally Jonathan got up to trim the rig but he kept on with his story. “We trolled all around southeastern, my uncle and me. We spent a lot of time up on the Fairweather grounds, but hell, we’d go all over. He was a good fisherman. Once he passed out in the tubs in Tenakee and I thought he was going to melt away or drown. I lugged him out of the bathhouse and loaded him into one of those garden cart things they used to have to get stuff to the ferry. I just slung him in there and took him back to the boat. My uncle loved the dream of his life, man. He loved the funky smell of his clothes, and I don’t begrudge him that, you know? I don’t be­grudge him, but I never drank a drop of alcohol, you know why?”

  Jonathan wasn’t really asking, so he tore right on. “I never drank because I thought I might end up like him. On a wreck of a boat, you know, making believe that my life was an adventure instead of a smelly old mess.”

  I gestured around at the wreckage on the deck, then said to Jonathan, “Quite an adventure, isn’t it?”

  The sun was starting to send brilliant shafts of light through the clouds, which pooled silver on the glittering sea to the west. Jonathan’s smile was a sad grimace as he looked out over the water.

  “I hate taking these drugs,” Jonathan said, and we sailed on.

  After another hour or so, Jonathan brought up cups of soup and crackers. He also found a jug of cold water. Todd, who would usu­ally drink only out of his own clean cup, swilled directly out of the jug, the excess sluicing down the sides of his mouth and onto his shirt.

  Jonathan stayed silent. He would occasionally pick up a broken piece of equipment, a cup or the radio casing, and he’d hold the broken pieces together and forlornly shake his head, then put them down carefully on some clear space on the deck and move on.

  Finally, as we were eating soup, he spoke up again.

  �
��You know, my uncle was drunk the night the Mygirl caught fire. Albert didn’t like staying on the boat with him. Albert was a . . . good boy, Cecil.”

  Jonathan’s voice drifted off, then he shook himself as if he were waking up. “We were in Kalinin Bay and had sold to the Mygirl just that night. We had been trolling on the outside and down into Salisbury Sound. We were catching lots of fish that year and the price was fine, you know. My uncle bought a gallon of whiskey and he sang ‘Boy Named Sue’ or some darn thing he always used to sing, and then he went to bed. Albert went to the scow. He hung out there because there were other kids. I took him over to the Mygirl in my uncle’s little skiff. He was going to spend the night.

  “It was later, you know, lots later, that I saw the flames come up through the windows. I was on my uncle’s boat. I think I even heard popping sounds before the flames but I could never really be sure. I was asked about it so many times I couldn’t ever really be sure. I got into the skiff and went over to see if there was any­thing I could do to help, but by the time I was within twenty yards of the Mygirl, that barge was burning so hot I couldn’t get any nearer. Glass was melting down into the inside of her steel hull. But I saw that skiff pull away from the stern. His face was lit by the fire. He yelled over at me that he was going for help, and he took off out the mouth of the bay.”

  Again Jonathan stopped and he stared out at the sea as if he half expected to see the skiff operator come into view.

  “You never fingered Richard Ewers as the skiff operator,” I said. “You knew Ewers. Even in the dark you would have recognized him. Was it Richard or not, Jonathan?”

  He didn’t speak for a moment, and once again he rubbed his eyes with his shaking hands. “I wanted to help. I wanted to stop what was happening. Really, I did.”

  He coughed. “I sat down with a book of photographs those cops put together. There were thirty photographs, maybe forty. I’d say more than half of them were of Ewers. A couple of the pictures were taken of Ewers when he was in the police station. It was a joke. I knew what the cops wanted from me. They wanted me to finger Ewers. The officer gave me the photo book and told me, ‘We’ve got our prime suspect in here. You would really be helping us if you could pick out the man you saw driving the skiff that night.’ I wasn’t going to finger Ewers. All I could do was point to one and say, ‘This one is most like the guy I saw.’ Then they would let me alone. I had to give them something.”