Caught (25 page)

Then the mast tipped all the way down and a wave bared its white teeth at Slaney’s backside, hanging now over the water, his arms and legs wrapped around the mast. The wave below him was licking its chops, snarling, snapping, and then Slaney was swallowed whole.

It was roaring below the surface, roil and gush, foaming spume, and he wondered how far down he was and if he would ever see the surface again and his lungs were ready to explode. He drew in water and it burned like fire.

Then he felt himself lifted skyward in a great rush and the mast broke free of the fist of the wave and was upright again and Slaney gasped and gasped and slid down and was back on the deck and he untied the ropes around his waist and he couldn’t see Carter.

Maybe Carter had gone below. The crack rang out like a shot canon and the mainsail, soaking wet, was ripped to shreds. Wet ribbons of sail draped themselves over the deck and Slaney waited for the next wave to wash over and pass away and then he slid over the deck to the hatch and was down below.

Where is he? Ada screamed.

Isn’t he down here with you? Slaney shouted, but he was already heading back up to the deck and he saw Carter halfway over the gunwale as if he were trying to make a break for it.

Slaney staggered over the deck and grabbed Carter by the back of his shirt and they rolled together like lovers over the tipping boat and as the boat righted itself they both made it back to the hatch and Carter yelled
You first
and Slaney went first because he didn’t want to argue and it took Carter a long time to follow. Then he half fell down the hatch.

The drinking had a purpose, Slaney thought. The drinking had called forth Carter’s best self. A lifetime of being loaded had made him composed and stoic in the face of the hurricane. Slaney watched as Carter drew in a deep breath through his nostrils and slowly let it out. They battened down the hatch and went to their cabins to wait it out.

During the night Ada bawled out Slaney’s name. Or he thought she did.

Go to your bunk, Slaney shouted back. Maybe she didn’t want him to be alone. Carter yelled too. It sounded like they were fighting. He thought one of them had thrown something at the other.

The storm hadn’t built; there was no arrival. They say the eye, and now Slaney knew what they were saying.

The eye of the storm.

The eye gave them a good hard look, then the eye lost interest. A roving eye.

The sailboat rose up and seemed to teeter on the crest of what felt like a thirty-foot wave and then it crashed down. It was a motion that entered each of Slaney’s cells and undid all the rhythms in his blood and his inner ear and he felt upside down when he was right side up.

His blood had been touched by the same fingers that had stirred up the sea out near the horizon. For a long time he had the feeling that if he could just drink a glass of water everything would be put right.

There was lots of time to think about how wrong it all was. How funny it felt. Carter saying, You first. Slaney lay in his cot and listened to the vessel groan. A litany of splintering complaint.

The storm went on for thirty-six hours. Slaney didn’t sleep because he kept being jerked awake. Then he was struck by sleep. It came like a blow. It took a fitful dream to draw him back to the surface. Slaney dreamed his way back.

When he woke, his neck was stiff, or it was the only part of him that wasn’t stiff and it felt funny by comparison. The storm was over.

Slaney had dreamt a forest in Norway. He’d never been to Norway nor thought anything about it. In the dream he’d walked by himself through a spare wood of birch, the snow creaked underfoot, and there was someone walking behind him.

Slaney crawled out of his room and found that Ada and Carter were already on deck.

There was a rainbow.

The sun was shearing through the clouds, tacky looking, a velvet painting with religious tones.

There’s land over there, Ada said.

The sails are destroyed, Carter said.

They were near
a shoreline. A long, white beach with a few demolished huts, destroyed fishing boats, hulls smashed out. The palm trees were taking a nap, all lying down next to each other on the beach.

The first thing I’m going to do, Carter said. I’m going to call my kids. My oldest girl does ballet. There’ll probably be a concert. They’ve started school now.

I did ballet, Ada said. They offered it at school. You could do sewing or you could do ballet. I did tennis and ballet, but then I just played piano.

I’d have gone for the sewing, Slaney said. Ada leaned over the railing and vomited. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

Can you read music, Slaney? she asked. I’ve been wondering about that.

I didn’t learn that way, Slaney said.

What have I done? Carter asked. What have I done? He was holding onto the rail, looking over the side. He was shaking his head. Ada and Slaney didn’t speak.

I want to hold my wife, Carter said. Little Mary is probably at her ballet class right now.

We’re messed up by this storm, Ada said. We thought we were dead. I did, anyway.

I don’t know what time it is back home, Carter said. They might be having breakfast. The first thing I’m going to do when we get off this boat is find a phone.

I think I cracked a tooth, Slaney said. He spit into his hand and held it out to Carter.

Is that part of my tooth? Slaney asked. Carter reached out a finger and touched the bit of tooth covered in saliva and it stuck to the tip of his finger and he looked at it closely and flicked it away.

I don’t know what that was, he said. That wasn’t anything. Whatever strength Carter had summoned to get them through was the last reserve. He looked old and fragile and diminished. He looked like he was going to have another nervous breakdown.

Look at that rainbow, Slaney said. They were still alive. He lowered himself to the deck because his legs were giving out. They were fucked without the sails. Hearn. He would have to phone Hearn. The authorities would come aboard the boat. It would take a couple of weeks, at least, to get the sails repaired. They would have to go ashore. They were caught. They were as good as caught.

There’s vomit all over the cabin, Ada said. I can’t go back down there yet. But I’m going to need my hairbrush.

All I need is a phone, Cyril said.

My hair is just full of tangles, Ada said. She was raking her fingers through her hair.

You can’t call your family, Slaney said. There’ll be plenty of time for your family later. You can call your wife after we’ve all said our goodbyes.

I’m not saying goodbye to anyone, Ada said. Cyril and I are in love.

Is There Something We Should Know

Slaney sat in
a wooden chair across from the immigration officer’s desk. The desk was full of papers and forms. There was a stack of white forms and a stack of pale yellow papers and there were sheets of carbon and the officer had taken Slaney’s passport.

We weren’t planning on a visit, Slaney said. The officer met Slaney’s eyes whenever he spoke. It was a calculating stare devoid of welcome.

He was broad with a clean blue uniform, the cuffs and collar frayed. The officer had a black moustache and thick curly hair and his eyebrows were heavy. His skin was light and there was a black mole high on his cheekbone. The mole gave an otherwise rugged face a feminine haughtiness.

Do you have any illegal cargo on board your vessel, Señor Knight? Any firearms or large sums of cash, illegal substances, marijuana or cocaine?

Slaney said they didn’t have anything like that.

That’s fine, the officer said. Forgive me for asking. It’s procedure, of course. I have to ask.

The officer spread Slaney’s passport open on the desk before him and let his hands fall, loosely linked, between his knees and he rocked slightly in his chair as he stared at it.

We’re heading home, Slaney said. The officer picked up the passport and brought it to the window and held it to the glass, tilting his head to look at it in the natural light. He left the room with the passport and returned empty-handed.

We will wait, Mr. Knight, the officer said. The vessel must be searched before we can let you go. The passport verified. These procedures will happen in good time.

The officer began to attend to the paperwork before him. He wrote on each page that he took from the stack on his left and when he had come to the end of a form he held it out in one hand before him, snapping it straight, and read it through. He frowned while he read and when he was satisfied he placed the completed form in a pile on his right.

The man appeared to have great stores of patience for the forms and became so absorbed in the work that he seemed to forget that Slaney was sitting opposite him.

There was a pile of smaller forms, all blue, that had been pierced with a metal spike. These he removed from the spike by the handful and he read each one and crunched it into a ball and tossed it in the wastepaper basket in front of his desk.

He used a stamp he had sitting on a red ink pad, leafing through another stack of papers in one go, the stamping a hard, fast rhythm like a tribal drum or a heart about to give out. Three hours passed.

I wonder if I could talk to my friends, Slaney said.

Your friends are taken care of, Señor Knight, the officer said. Once we’ve cleared the sailboat you can be on your way.

There was a knock on the door and a man in overalls came in with a ladder and set it up behind the immigration officer’s desk and the men shook hands, speaking in fast Spanish. Both men put their hands on their hips and stood looking up at an air-conditioning unit embedded in the wall. The repairman climbed the ladder and took down the unit bearing the weight on his shoulders and neck and the immigration officer reached up for it, one hand against the repairman’s leg for support.

It was a heavy unit and the two men struggled under the weight of it and Slaney jumped up and took a corner and together the three men moved the unit onto an empty shelf and they stood for a moment looking down into the guts of it, cylinders and coiled wire furred with lint and dust and the Mexicans spoke in Spanish.

The immigration officer noticed that Slaney was out of the chair and told him to sit back down without thanking him for his help. He returned to his desk and after a moment the repairman left the office. Two more hours passed without incident.

At one point the officer put his feet up on the desk and made a phone call and spoke for close to an hour. The conversation was leisurely and for a great deal of it the officer just listened. Slaney had the impression there was a woman on the other end. Part of the phone conversation cracked the man up. He laughed so hard he had to press the bridge of his nose between his finger and thumb to get a hold of himself. He was trembling with giggles and after he hung up he shook his head in disbelief, some story the woman had told him.

The door of the office opened and a woman came in wearing the same blue uniform as the first officer and she had a coffee and a snack for each of them. A taco with beef and guacamole.

Can I see my friends? Slaney asked. The woman told him she didn’t speak English.

Señor Knight, the male officer said. I’m asking the questions here.

After another hour had passed, his taco untouched, the officer gathered up the papers on his desk and filed them in the filing cabinet, which he locked with a key that hung from one of the drawers. He put the key in his breast pocket. He lowered the blinds and left the room.

Slaney tried the door and found it unlocked. All of the offices in the corridor were occupied by people typing and speaking on the phone. There were guards with guns in holsters at their hips. Slaney closed the door quietly and gobbled down the officer’s taco.

The officer returned and dropped Slaney’s passport and a visa on the desk and he told Slaney he was free to go. You can remain in the country for three weeks to repair your boat, he said. I believe you have incurred some damages.

We certainly have, Slaney said.

Before you go, the man said. Is there anything you think we should know?

Not that I can think of, Slaney said.

Then you are free.

What about my friends? Slaney asked.

Your friends, the man said. Of course, they are free also. I believe they are waiting outside.

Get Down There

They were picked
up by Immigration, O’Neill said. Little seaside town called Puerto Escondido.

Everybody safe? Patterson asked.

All accounted for, O’Neill said. Patterson had thought they were gone. He pushed his chair back from O’Neill’s desk and stood. He looked out the window at the city below. Then he sat back down, the chair legs squeaking on the linoleum tiles.

He could see Slaney at the party and he thought of himself talking about Clarice Connors. The print of her dress, a sailor motif, anchors and rope and brass buttons. A nest of the oily white papers she used with her hair curlers. How they fell out of her curls, how they rustled on her little vanity table when the wind blew, toppling them end over end. A particular afternoon when the affair had first begun. He hadn’t thought about Clarice in years. The gentle force she had been in his life.

He hadn’t wanted anyone to get hurt on the sailboat. But they were okay. They had survived. For days now he’d been haunted by the thought of Ada Anderson. She was just a child.

And he thought of Hearn’s girlfriend waving the vodka bottle overhead, calling for change. She’d spoken about love and peace as if she were the one who had discovered them, half-baked rhetoric and euphemisms. But when she said forgiveness Patterson had fallen open like a lock with the right key.

He had been compelled to talk against his will. He’d watched for her reaction, horrified and hungry for it, hoping to catch some glimpse of his own daughter in her face. Why things had gone wrong; how to get her back.

He thought he’d let Hearn’s girlfriend judge him and he might learn something. He had been stoned out of his trees. But he knew she suspected him. Her cool banter, the way she’d made him account for himself. So he’d made a bone of Clarice Connors, and he’d thrown the girl the bone.