Superior Storm (Lake Superior Mysteries) (25 page)

“I love you too,” I said, and climbed out of the shelter of the cockpit.

It was worse on deck.
I had been wrong about the dodger offering no protection.
As soon as I stood up, the wind slammed me forward and I sprawled onto my knees, my hands scrabbling for something to hold onto.
I slid to the starboard edge, and grabbed the
life
line
.
Here, higher up on the boat, the pitching, corkscrewing motion was like that of a roller coaster designed by an unimaginably manic personality.
The wind battered at me and the spray felt like bullet
s
of ice pelting me all over.
I could feel the tension on
the rope around my body
as Leyla
slowly gave me slack.
Reluctantly, I let go of the
cable lifeline
and felt for the jib-sheet – the rope
we needed,
that
was jammed somewhere
. Inching forward on hands and knees, I felt along the line for tangles and obstructions. After
roughly
ten feet
,
the sheet ran through a line organizer that routed
about
a half dozen ropes around the deck.
My fingers were numb and the moments jarred by in agony as I tried to make sure that the obstruction wasn’t
in the organizer
. I spent another twenty seconds trying to make sure that I followed the correct rope out of the
forward side of the organizer; twenty seconds of lashing wind and freezing water and pitching blind through the darkness.

At last I was reasonably sure I had the right rope
, and I continued forward. A few feet further on, I found that the wind had tangled the jib sheet with another rope, I couldn’
t tell which one. I held on to the
lifeline
with my right hand, while with my left I plucked at the knot. I could barely feel it through the numbness of my fingers.
I was closer to the bow now, and waves regular
ly swept up over the deck here.
I felt like I was sitting at the edge of the tide at the beach, except that the shore was heaving and jostling like a crazed water-buffalo.

I was making no progress on the knot.
There was a little lip at the very edge of the deck, maybe an inch or two high.
I think I had heard Leyla call it a toe-rail.
I turned my back to the
lifelines
, kneeling down and bracing my toes against the
toe-rail
. Now I could use two
hands on the knot. Another wave
swept over the deck, covering my thighs. It lifted my feet from their brace as the deck canted down behind me, and I slid q
uickly and easily over the edge, underneath the lifelines.

I caught myself on the
toe-rail
.
Holding on with my left hand, I flung my right upwards and grabbed onto the
lifeline
. The cold metal bit into the palm of my hands as it took my weight. My chest was at deck level, while the rest of me hung there, my feet dragging
in
the water below. A second later, I was submerged all the way above my waist as the starboard forward quarter dipped down and a wave foamed across the deck from the port side to splash into my face.
The cold was like physical blow striking my entire body at once.
Abruptly
,
I was heaved up and out of the water again, only to be dipped
once more
like a grotesque fondue item in a feast of
the
storm-gods.
Only
,
instead of cooking me, the fondue was slowly freezing me.

Twice, three times, I was submerged to my chest and then hauled back out. My hands were so numb
,
I couldn’t tell if my grip was firm or not.
I was panting for breath that was repeatedly stolen by the cold.
On the fourth roll, as the water came up
around
me, I took advantage of my suddenly lightened body
-w
eight to swing my right leg up over the
toe-rail
. In my numbness
I missed clumsily, merely kicking the side of the boat with my toes. As the boat rolled back to port
,
my body fell back down with a cruel jerk against my arms. It was getting hard
er
and harder to clench my hands. The next time I went into the water
,
I was motivated by desperation. I drove my right leg high and forward like a peripatetic roundhouse kick. I pulled my heel back to meet the
toe-rail
, and found I had thrown my leg all the way over the bottom cable of the
lifeline
. I wrapped my leg around and held on. The roll to port lifted me out of the water, and I
tumbled
back inside the
lifelines
, on deck once more.

I sat for a moment, holding on to the
lifelines
, panting hard. Finally, s
crabbling in the dark with numb hands, I found the tangle. It was near the skylight hatch that was over the forward cabin. I could see the light from the main cabin filtering faintly
through
the closed door and then up to the skylight. I knelt with my legs on either side of the skylight and gripped hard with my thighs. Working feverishly
with
the last remnants of feeling in my fingers, I finally freed the loops and twists that held the jib sheet. I pulled on it twice to signal Leyla and felt in return when she pulled it tight to keep the rope free of further
encumbrances
.

Feeling old and lame, I found the
lifelines
and crawled back to the cockpit. I slithered in face first and lay on the floor, breathing hard.

“Jonah!” said Leyla, kneeling next to me. “What happened?”

“Almost went overboard,” I said. “I’m OK, just tired and cold and wet.”

“Can you help with the jib?”

I pushed to my feet, and cranked the line while Leyla held the wheel.

“That’s enough!” she order
ed
sharply.
“We aren’t going to use the whole sail. We’ll keep most of it furled.”

Ahead in the darkness
,
I could make out the white form of the sail. I felt the life in
Tiny Dancer
again as she came under way.

Leyla slowly took her around to port, headed back for the GPS waypoint, and we heeled over to starboard as the wind came more abeam of us.

“Let it out just a bit,” commanded Leyla, and I did. “Now come here.”

I went over to her. She took a hand from the bucking wheel and pointed at cluster of dials on the pedestal in front of her. “This is an auto-pilot. I used it when we were on
diesel,
and spent most of my time out of the wind, up close under the dodger.”

“Why didn’t you tell you Angela about it?” I asked. “You could have come in out of the cold.”

I felt, more than saw her shrug. “I don’t know. I was worried about what she would do if she didn’t think she needed us to keep running the boat.”

That was a sobering thought, but also a wise one.

“The auto-pilot runs on electric power. That wasn’t an issue when the engine was on, but without the engine
, it starts to drain the battery, e
specially with the work it would have to do to keep us on course during this storm.”

“So we shouldn’t use it anyway?”

“Maybe for a short time
you could turn it on, and get out of the wind for a few minutes.
”
She proceeded to show me how to use it.

“Do you want to see if Angela will let you change into dry clothes first?” she asked.

I thought about what was in my bag. Chances were that Angela would either stand and watch me get my clothes, or else get them for me.
“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

Leyla looked at me doubtfully.

“Maybe you could bring me some hot coffee
,
though.”

She smiled and kissed my cheek. “
That’s m
y Jonah. Coffee fixes all il
ls. One more thing,” she added.
“We need to keep all hatches and the companionway shut all the time. If a wave came over and started pouring into the cabin,
the weight of the keel
,
plus the water
,
would pull us under. W
e’d drop like
a
rock.
”

“Okay,” I said. I stepped behind the wheel, and Leyla went below, shutting the door behind her.

It was not peaceful. The wind screamed through the rigging, the waves battered us again and again on the forward port quarter. Spray and rain splattered noisily onto the plastic windshield of the dodger. The part of the dodger that was bent and not fitted correctly was on the port side – the side where all the wind and weather was coming from. About every five seconds
,
I was sprayed in the face by the water that
made it over and through.
At least I knew it was clean. You could take water straight out of the middle of Superior
,
put it in bottles
and sell it. Well, you could if it was legal.

The wheel jerked and shook in my hands, and I had to make constant small corrections to keep us on course, and to keep the wind from knocking us too far over. It was wild
and wet
and cold and dangerous
,
and after five minutes I realized I was singing a hymn, a fierce grin of joy on my lips.
Here, where my very life was in the balance, I felt
fully
alive and
at peace
. My heart was full of love for Leyla,
implacable
determination to stop
Angela,
Phil and
Jasmine
, and strangest of all, gratitude to God
. I shook my head in wonder as I realized that I hadn’t even had my coffee yet.

I
touched the
GPS
to check my course, and backlight illuminated the screen.
There was a graphic display that showed our course and position. It was all blank around us, reflecting the vastness of the lake. I looked carefully at the unit, not wanting to screw it up and have Angela ask me why I had done so. I touched the menu button and quickly figured out how to change the detail level on the graphic display. After I zoomed out several times
,
I could see that our course was
a long gentle curve moving from northeast to straight
north, ending in the middle of
the western arm of lake Superior,
probably
thirty-five miles from the nearest land.
We were about forty miles from the end of the path, and it would take us all night to get there. Presently
,
we looked to be about twenty-five miles off Michigan, and more than forty from Minnesota or Wisconsin. Even if I could see through the rain and dark, no land would have been visible.

I wondered why Angela wanted to go the middle of the lake. The surface of Superior is as big as South Carolina, and it drops to depths of
thirteen-hundred
feet. There
was
nothing
but huge amounts of fresh, clear
, cold
water where we were going.

I fought the wheel and
mocked the cold rain and spray,
and thought.
After a few minutes, Leyla came up with a cup of coffee in a covered travel mug, proving, as coffee always did, that there is a God in heaven, and he is good.

Leyla took the wheel from me, while I
cradled the mug with both hands
and stepp
ed forward to
shelter a little more behind the dodger.

“What do you think they want, Jonah?” asked Leyla.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “That’s what I was just asking myself.”

“Angela seems to be in charge.”

“Absolutely.”

“She seems to have issues with men. Phil acts pretty cowed.”

“I don’t normally talk about counselees, but somehow I think confidentiality is off the table,” I said. “Angela
definitely has a lot of confusion in her life about men and male figures. We didn’t get this far in
counseling, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn she was abused by a man, or several, at some point in her life.
”

“So you think she’d be more incli
ned to
listen
me?”

“I don’t know,” I
replied
. “It could be.
Probably more than me anyway, though before this
,
I thought we had developed a little bit of rapport in counseling.
”