The wheel shook in my hands. I wasn’t steering the boat, I was wrestling it. The Kings’ Ransom beat its way across the ocean, crashing through and on the waves, bouncing and smashing. The waves were tall, the kind of sea that I would never have wanted to be out in, but it was manageable, I thought. I could feel us moving. Her engine might have been old, but the overhaul had put some extra horsepower in the Kings’ Ransom. This, I thought, was what it must feel like for a mortal to try to control Poseidon’s chariot, the hippocamps revolting at the feel of someone other than their master at the helm. And it did feel like we were galloping, like I had my own team of sea horses pulling the Kings’ Ransom. Despite Daddy lying pale at my feet, occasionally flickering open his eyes, despite the wind and the rain and the lighting dropping from the sky, I felt a sudden surge of hope: whatever magic there was in the ocean for the Kings, it was at our backs, urging us forward and on, taking us to the land. I was sure that this wasn’t how Daddy was going to die: we were going to get him to the hospital, and whatever it was that had kicked him down, a stroke, a heart attack, we’d beat it. We’d get him rested up, get him back on the water soon enough. Come the spring, Daddy would be out on the Queen Jane, bringing home a highliner’s catch of lobster, suffering no incursions upon our waters by James Harbor boys. Come the spring, he’d be standing on the dock in the sun, browning up his skin in the first warmth that followed the winter.
Fifteen more minutes to Blacks Harbour. That’s all I needed. Fifteen more minutes and we’d be hitting shore, pulling up to the docks. I couldn’t wait for the sight of those cherried lights flashing in the parking lot. Fifteen minutes. Like Daddy always said, both the history and the future of the Kings family could be found in Brumfitt’s paintings if I only looked in the right place. Surely if I looked hard enough I’d find those fifteen minutes hidden somewhere among the rocks and the waves, the seals and the selkies, fifteen minutes hidden among the dragons and the birds and the fish and the lobsters and the boats upon the water.
Rena was sitting next to Daddy’s head. I could see her lips moving, see Daddy opening his eyes here and there to look at her. She was stroking his hair and making sure the blanket stayed wrapped around him. Water misted on the fabric, and I hoped it wasn’t soaking through. I didn’t know if it mattered much if we kept him warm, but I couldn’t see any upside to getting him frozen. From the floor, Carly staggered to her feet and pushed past Stephanie and then me, and barely made it out of the cabin before vomiting on the deck. Tucker pulled himself out of his shell and grabbed her by the shoulders, tried to aim her toward the rail, but the ride was too rough for him to do more than steady her. She stumbled forward, and Tucker fell over, hitting hard on his side before struggling back to his feet against the bucking of the ship. Kenny was looking like he was thinking of joining Carly in being sick out on the deck, but Stephanie was standing strong. She’d gotten her sea legs. To me, she looked like she belonged here out on the water, more than my baby sister did; there’d be some teasing coming Carly’s way after all of this played out.
Even using the instruments, there was a part of me that was driving by feel. Despite wanting to do nothing more than drop to my knees and cradle Daddy’s head in my hands, I tried to keep my eyes forward, at the ocean in front of me. The lightning came in strobes, the waves here and then disappearing. It seemed like the thunder never stopped rolling around us, like we were a part of the storm. Then light filled everything, burning out my eyes, and the thunder was like a gunshot. The darkness came back in spots, eating through the white of the lightning. It took me a moment to realize, through the ringing in my ears, that there was a missing sound: the motor was quiet.
The lightning strike had fried the instrument panel. The running lights had gone black. I tried firing up the motor, but there was nothing. For a few seconds the Kings’ Ransom kept moving, and I had the fantasy that I’d been right, that I’d been driving Poseidon’s chariot, that there was some magic of Brumfitt’s in the ocean pushing us forward, but I was wrong. It was just our momentum, and with the motor cut out, it disappeared quickly and we started to get batted sideways. The pitch and roll sent Rena off her ass, made Daddy slide on the floor. Kenny was rooting in one of the lockers, pulling out my toolbox. In between the lightning that still carried across the sky, there was some sort of dancing orange light that spilled off the roof of the cabin. Not light, I realized. Flames.
“Fire!” I yelled, and I grabbed the fire extinguisher I kept clamped under the console, knocking hard past Carly, who was wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and coming back under the protection of the cabin.
Tucker had already seen it, and he’d grabbed a bucket and was leaning over the rail to fill it. With the motor dead, we’d turned completely broadside to the waves. His side of the boat was tilted up out of the water, the starboard side pushed down so that I had to lean at a hard angle. The fire on the roof from the lighting strike was small still, but it had a ferocity that made me think that, rain or not, it wouldn’t go out on its own. I pulled the pin from the fire extinguisher and set my feet, and that’s when the wave washed over us.
It happens all the time in rough weather. The best analogy I can think of is two people dancing. One partner is the boat, the other is the waves, and together they keep the beat, but sometimes the boat misses the beat, holds it too long, or the wave is dancing with too much energy and comes in high and fast. When a boat is rolled up high on one side, like the Kings’ Ransom was, just as an outsized wave comes, the water will break over the deck, sweeping across just as the boat rolls back the other way. It’s not the sort of thing that will normally sink a boat, not a wall of water thirteen stories high like they’d have you believe from the movies. You don’t need a rogue wave. The amount of water that swept across the deck didn’t seem like that much—it was only calf-high—but the force it brought with it, combined with having the Kings’ Ransom rolling back to port, was like being hit with a sledgehammer.
My feet swept out from me and I smashed into the deck. I felt something hard strike me in the mouth—the fire extinguisher, I realized, torn from my hands—and a tooth turned jagged and sliced into my lip. The water came through Kenny’s jacket, soaking me, and flung me spinning across the deck. I hit knees then elbows into the side, a sharp flare of pain from my wrist, my head banging against something hard and unforgiving. As I struggled to sit up I had to stop to throw up. I don’t think I lost consciousness, but when I wiped the puke from my mouth and the water out of my eyes I saw both Carly and Rena getting on their knees, straightening Daddy out, and pulling him away from the wall. Stephanie was on her ass, pulling herself to her feet on the captain’s chair. Kenny seemed to have kept his balance, and was trying to get the motor to start. On top of the cabin, the flames had died, but there was still a smouldering, greasy smoke that needed to be killed completely. The wave had either caught the fire or Tucker had gotten there with his bucket.
Tucker.
Tucker was gone.
It’s not a painting that people talk about. Like every famous painter, Brumfitt has a half dozen or so works that are considered iconic, pieces that people who aren’t into art will still recognize. But even for people who love Brumfitt’s work, it’s not a painting that garners much attention. It’s from the middle part of his life, and it looks, uncharacteristically for Brumfitt, as if it were rushed. I’d go so far as to say that he never bothered finishing it, and technically, it’s unimpressive. Even somebody who is a hack like me could paint it. There’s not much to the scene: a calm sea with an empty fishing boat floating on the water. There is nothing magical about it, and yet, I’d argue that for most fishermen it would rank as one of Brumfitt’s most terrifying paintings. He doesn’t need any monsters to make the painting terrifying; it’s enough to have a calm sea, an empty boat, and a single word on the back of the canvas, the title of the painting: Gone.
I started trying to pull myself up. At first I couldn’t even hold on to the rail. I was dizzy, and my
left hand didn’t seem to be working. Even once I got a grip, it took me three tries to get to my feet. When I finally did stand up, I wasn’t sure if it was the pitch and the yaw of the boat or getting my head and my face smashed that made me stumble my way to the cabin wall. I was coughing on vomit and blood, and when I tried to wipe the water that was streaming over my left eye, it came back sticky red. My left wrist felt like it had been crushed in a vise, and I wondered if it was broken. With my good hand, I grabbed the life ring from the wall.
“Man overboard!” I yelled. The words came out of my mouth jumbled by blood, and Rena and Carly didn’t look up from where they were tending to Daddy. Stephanie looked at me, but even with the ring in my hand, she didn’t seem to comprehend. It was Kenny who stared at me, saw what I was holding, and started hollering.
I threw the ring over the port side, flinging it as far as I could into the darkness, praying that, if I had it anywhere near Tucker, I wouldn’t have the kind of asshole luck to nail him in the head and knock him out. Kenny dropped a handful of life preservers at my feet, and ran back to the cabin. There were a couple more below, I knew. At least four of those old-fashioned squares that really just served as cushions, maybe a dozen lobster buoys that could be split into two or three groups and would serve to help keep Tucker afloat. Stephanie had my handheld spotlight and was playing it across the water, sweeping it back and forth. I picked up one of the life preservers that Kenny had dropped at my feet and was about to pitch it into the water when Rena grabbed my left wrist.
Her grip felt like a lobster claw bearing down, and I thought I could feel bones grinding together underneath my skin. I tried to scream, but with the scrum of blood and vomit and drool that half filled my mouth, I ended up coughing and gagging.
“Where is he? Do you see him?” she yelled, and then let go of my wrist to take hold of the rail. “Tucker!” she shouted. “Tucker! We’re here, Tucker! Tucker!” Another wave caught us, and she banged into the rail.
Next to Rena, Stephanie slipped and fell to the deck, the spotlight torn out of her hand, its beam of light spinning around on the deck. A wave broke over the edge of the opposite rail and sent a thin wash of water across the deck, sweeping the spotlight back toward Stephanie. I chucked the life preserver out into the water. It was an act of faith to do it, but it was all I could do. If Tucker hadn’t been knocked out or hadn’t already swallowed too much water, and if he was swimming, I could only hope that he’d come across one of the floats. Even if he found one, unless we could get him on board, it didn’t matter. He wouldn’t last long, float or no float, with the cold of the water. I felt Stephanie’s hand on my leg, and then she popped to her feet beside me, the spotlight in her hand again.
“Tucker!” Rena bellowed. “Tucker!” The name was a plea.
I threw another life jacket as Kenny came back with the four orange squares in his hands.
“That’s it,” he said.
I spit on the deck, clearing out my mouth, and then wiped the back of my sleeve against my lips. “What about the—”
“No,” he said, cutting me off. “We’ve only got the one buoy on board. I’m going to tie it to a line. Figured it could be a sort of throw line if we … when we find him. Not like a buoy is going to hold much weight anyway.”
I threw another life jacket in the water and then glanced at Kenny as I picked the last one up off the deck. That left me with those four orange square floating cushions, and then all we would have was a rope tied to a lobster buoy and the impossible hope of finding Tucker in the water. In a storm like this it would be a miracle, but with a dead motor, no lights other than what the lightning and the handheld spotlight offered, I thought Kenny might as well save his energy instead of getting a throw line ready.
And then there was a miracle: as I pulled my arm back to throw the last of the life jackets, Stephanie’s light caught something in the water.
“There,” I yelled. I grabbed her arm and pointed. “Out there. Maybe twenty, thirty metres. Farther.” Stephanie swung the light back, but she was looking too close to the boat. “Farther,” I said again.
The light moved across the water in gulping jerks, a combination of the waves rocking the boat and Stephanie being frantic.
“Farther,” I yelled. “Farther. Twenty, thirty metres.”
“I don’t know the fucking metric system,” Stephanie screamed, and despite the situation, it was actually kind of funny, and I found myself smiling when I said, “Yards, twenty, thirty yards. Same thing. Eighty or ninety feet.”
Next to me, Rena grasped the rail hard enough that it had to hurt. Her knuckles bulged, and she leaned out as if that effort could make the boat move on its own. I held the life jacket at the ready and watched the dot of light travel across the surface of the ocean.
“There!” I screamed, at the same time that Rena yelled Tucker’s name.
Even with the rain gusting curtains across the waves, it was clearly Tucker bobbing out on the water. He’d never been a strong swimmer, but he was trying to get to us. His arms were moving jerkily, and he already seemed like he was farther away than he’d been a few seconds earlier, when I’d first seen him. As the light hit him, he waved frantically at us, and the pause backed him away from the boat another metre or two. His head ducked below the water once, and then again. I threw the life jacket as far as I could, but it caught the wind and fluttered out barely a body length off the boat. I reached for one of the cushions, but Kenny was already there, plucking it out of my hands.
“I’ve got it,” I said, but Kenny pushed me to the side.
“Your arm,” he said.
“My wrist,” I said, knowing that it didn’t matter and that he was right. Even if my wrist were fine, he’d be able to get more distance than I could hope for.
He turned his body sideways and then spun the cushion. It cut through the air and carried maybe ten metres before hitting the water. “Fuck,” he said, but he was already picking up another cushion. He tucked it against his body and then threw it like a Frisbee, but it had barely cleared the rail when the wind caught it under the edge and flipped it up and away from us. The boat shook and lurched, and Stephanie tried to keep Tucker in the light, but the beam stuttered on and off him. He went under the water again, leaving a dark spot on the water, but then he came to the surface, gasping. I thought that maybe he’d gotten closer to the boat, but he still seemed impossibly far. The sky seared with simultaneous lightning and thunder again. The light hurt my eyes, and there was a metallic popping sound. I could smell a funny scent wafting over us. Burning ozone, I realized. That’s how close the lightning strike had been. I thought one of the antennas had taken the hit this time. Kenny threw the third cushion, and this one spun flat and true, caught a gust of wind, and landed half a boat length from Tucker, but he didn’t seem to see it. I picked up the last of the cushions and handed it to Kenny. He took it, and without a hesitation tried again, but it sputtered in the wind and fell badly short.
Tucker was still swimming, but he was barely keeping his head above the waves. I couldn’t see how he’d make it to us. Even if he was getting closer, it was a glacial pace. The waves or the cold would get to him soon enough. I glanced at Rena. She was still clutching the railing, still screaming Tucker’s name. Her hood had blown back, and her hair was soaked from the rain, water streaming down her face.
“Fuck,” I said, and then again for emphasis, louder, I said, “Fuck it,” and started stripping off Kenny’s jacket.
“What are you doing?” The thunder and the rain and Rena’s screaming Tucker’s name were all loud enough that Kenny had to yell.
“Cleat a line off. I’ll tie it to my waist. I’m going in.” I winced and swore as the coat snagged on my hurt wrist.
Kenny grabbed the collar of my jacket—his jacket—and started wrestling it back on. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “You can’t even get your coat off. You’re going to be useless in the water. I’ll go.”
While he shrugged off his jacke
t, kicked off his boots and slickers, I got a line ready for him. I was more or less working one-handed, but I had it ready by the time he stood there in his slacks and button-down shirt. He hadn’t taken off his tie, but with the water soaking him, beading in his hair and in the beard that he’d started trying to grow, he looked a bit like a wild man. He knotted the rope and slipped it tight around his waist. All in all, it had taken us less than a minute, and Tucker was still out there in the water, sporadically framed by Stephanie’s light, not swimming, but not sinking, either.
“Wish me luck,” Kenny said.
“You come back. You hear me?”
“You got it, Captain.” He gave a slight smile, and then, staggering with the roll of the boat, clambered up onto the rail and dove into the water.
I looked up from where Kenny had gone in and saw the spotlight jerking on the water. The waves were foaming, and Stephanie struggled to keep the light still, but as it circled and moved, I realized that I couldn’t see Tucker anymore. Kenny was a strong swimmer. He was moving quickly, swimming hard and carried by the ocean, the line playing out behind him, but there wasn’t a destination for him to swim to anymore: Tucker was gone
“Tucker!” Rena screamed his name again as I reached out to grab her arm.
“He’s under,” I said. “We’re too late.”
Stephanie was still sweeping the water with the spotlight, but Tucker wasn’t there. “I can’t find him,” Stephanie screamed. She sounded like she was crying. “He was there and now he’s gone.”
“Keep looking,” Rena yelled.
“No,” I said. I said it quietly, but Rena heard me and spun on me. She slapped me hard across the face. I was still feeling the smash of my head from when the wave washed me out minutes before, and Rena’s slap made me want to throw up again. Still, I repeated myself. “No.” And then I said it a third time, louder. “No. You can stop looking, Stephanie.”
The Lobster Kings Page 25