68 Knots (7 page)

“Gross!” she said. Arthur grabbed a plastic shopping bag, and Dawn dropped the offending ham inside. They proceeded to sort through the other cans, boxes, jars, and bottles in the galley, until at last, everything that was allowed to remain was relatively fresh and harmless.

Meanwhile, Joy was in the captain's quarters, tinkering with the radio. She listened carefully to one channel after another and finally settled on Channel 13, which seemed to have the most traffic on it. She heard fishermen reporting their catches to fisheries on shore. She heard ship captains reporting fog banks and floating debris. And she heard an announcement that made her dash up to the deck and gather everyone around the wheel.

“It's a whale,” she said. “It's tangled in a fishing net off Ragged Island. The fisherman says he can't get the net back, so he's going back to shore. He said that the whale will probably
drown by sundown, so he was warning the other boats to make sure they don't run into the body. He called it a navigation hazard.”

“Don't run into the body!” Dawn said, her freckled face flashing with anger. “How sentimental. It's okay if the poor thing drowns, just don't get blood on your bow. What kind of monsters are these guys?”

“They're people who work hard to make a living from the sea,” Arthur said. “And getting a whale caught in your net can threaten your whole career.”

“Well, leaving it to drown doesn't seem very nice,” Dawn said. “That's a living creature with a mind and a soul, just like us.”

“This is the ocean, girl,” Crystal said. “There's no room for ‘nice' out here.”

“But there is room for action,” Arthur said. “The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

There was a pause.

“
Us
?” Marietta said. “You want us to go yell at that fisherman and tell him he's being mean? I don't think so.”

“No,” Arthur said. “I think we should go rescue the whale.” He smiled. He saw the plan unfolding beautifully. The
Dreadnought
crew would set off to find the whale, and they would rescue it with skillful maneuvers and clever thinking. The crew would be elated, and his position as the leader of the group would be strengthened. He would be a hero.

Dawn nodded. “Ragged Island isn't far from here,” she said. “We could get there in an hour or two.”

Crystal looked around at the crew, her short blond hair reflecting the sun's light. “I think this is fucked, but I'm willing to go along with it for laughs,” she said.

“This is a stupid idea,” Marietta said. “I mean, the fisherman said the whale would drown soon, so what are we going to do about it? We're going to go chasing off after some stupid fish and risk our lives trying to get it out of a net? I think it's none of our business.”

Crystal glared at her.

“Arthur is the captain, and he wants to go,” Crystal growled. “I'm at the helm, and I want to go. So we're going.”

Arthur nodded. “We'll change course and head for Ragged Island. Logan, you and Jesse raise more sails. I want to get over there as fast as we can.”

Ragged Island had passed on the port side, and everyone on the
Dreadnought
was looking for the whale.

“The easiest way to spot whales is by their plume,” Dawn said. “When they surface, they blow air out the nose on top of their heads, and that sends spray into the air. It doesn't look like a jet of water, like in the cartoons. It looks more like a gust of spray.”

Crystal looked at her. “How do you
know
all this stuff?”

Dawn smiled. “The Goddess Earth gives us a lot of gifts,” she said. “Animals, weather, plants—everything. Even books. I've been reading about the Earth since I was a kid. Reading is an act of worship.”

Crystal rolled her eyes and turned back to scan the sea.

No sign of the whale. Fifteen minutes passed, with all eyes searching across the waves. Sometimes the wind caught the top of a wave and sent some spray flying, causing shouts and excitement on board the ship, but again and again the plumes dissipated
into false alarms. Half an hour passed, then an hour. Crystal kept the ship moving in large, slow circles, hovering around the area Joy had described. Arthur felt a bit deflated; the daring rescue he had foreseen wasn't working out.

The wind scattered another wave top, and everyone pointed and called out. Crystal turned the boat toward it, certain it would be another mirage. Then, about twenty yards off the port side of the boat, the whale surfaced and blew a misty gust into the wind.

Logan saw it first. “There it is! Wooooo-wooooo! Right here close to the side! Right over there!” he shouted.

The whale took a breath and dove, but Logan got a good look at it.

“I don't think the net's, like, stuck on the bottom or anything,” he said. “I think it's just wrapped around the whale—ssssssp!—like a straightjacket. It looked like a lot of it's caught in her mouth, and the rest is totally tangled across her back and around her tail.”

The crew watched closely for the whale to surface again. Five long minutes went by.

“Off to starboard!” Dawn called out. “A long way off!”

Crystal turned the boat to the right, and Logan confirmed the sighting. The whale dove again, but it surfaced just a minute later—another half of a mile out to sea.

“Come on, whale,” Dawn whispered. “We can't help you if we can't catch up with you.”

The
Dreadnought
made good time across the water, and the distance between the ship and the whale dwindled. The crew could see the black marks on the underside of its tail when it dove. “Look at that beautiful tail!” Dawn exclaimed. “Those marks look like an ibis beak. Come on, Ibis! Help us out!”

Ibis was swimming hard, but the net seemed to slow her down considerably. It also seemed to tire the whale; the time between surfacings was getting smaller.

Then Ibis swerved; she headed straight toward the islands off the mainland. Crystal shouted, “I'm turning the boat!” and spun the wheel hard to port. The ship veered to the left, and the sails crashed from one side to the other. Crystal heard something snap high above, and she saw the sails on the forward mast tangle in their own rigging.

“Oh, shit!” she shouted. “I'm turning it back! Damn it!”

She spun the wheel hard to starboard, and the sails swung violently across the decks again. This time, the forward boom hit Logan in the chest, knocking him far over the railing and into the sea.

“Logan fell overboard!” Marietta screamed. “Stop the boat!”

“How the fuck do you stop a sailboat?” Crystal cried out. The crew could see Logan's head above the waves, getting smaller as the
Dreadnought
whirled away.

All hell broke loose on the deck. Some of the crew pulled hard on lines, thinking they would make the boat go faster. Others let lines out, thinking the same thing. Arthur shouted instructions, but no one heard him. Crystal turned the boat dead into the wind, causing the sails to luff and flap wildly. By the time someone thought to throw a life jacket overboard for Logan, the ship was already half a mile away from him.

Then Crystal turned the ship off the wind, and the
Dreadnought
began to gain speed. It was aimed directly at Logan. The crew could see him swimming awkwardly in the frigid water, his red hair bobbing just above the waves, and nearly everyone on board shouted instructions to him in an incomprehensible babble of voices. When Logan was just a
few dozen yards off the port side, thrashing and scared, Crystal turned the wheel sharply, hoping to point the bow upwind again and bring the ship to a stop. Instead, the
Dreadnought
cut a wide arc through the waves, leaving Logan behind once again.

Except this time, someone had thought clearly. While the ship was bearing down on Logan, Dawn had pulled the dinghy alongside and climbed down the ladder. Just before Crystal spun the wheel, Dawn cast off and rowed toward Logan's desperate splashing. As the dinghy drew close, Logan lunged and grabbed the side. His light-brown eyes, now bloodshot, were wide and panicked. He panted and whined as he hooked one pale leg over the edge of the boat and tried to lift his pudgy body inside. Dawn stowed the oars and grabbed his shirt. A moment later, gasping for air, Logan lay in the bottom of the dinghy. His T-shirt was torn, and his belly was scratched and bleeding from its scrape over the side of the boat. Dawn sat quietly as Logan struggled to regain his composure.

After Logan's breathing began to return to normal, Dawn asked, “Are you all right?”

“No,” Logan said, his voice trembling. He rolled over awkwardly and pulled himself onto one of the dinghy's coarse plank seats. “But I'll be okay. Thanks for coming for me. I don't know how long I could have lasted.”

Dawn picked up the oars and began rowing back toward the ship. Crystal had aimed the
Dreadnought
into the wind again, letting it coast to a stop, but it still took two hours for the crew to bring the ship and the dinghy together again. Logan received a warm welcome and a mug of hot soup, and Dawn was cheered for making the rescue. Only Arthur seemed angry over the whole incident. He sat off to one side, staring out to sea.

This was supposed to be a dramatic rescue, he said to himself. This was supposed to make the crew feel great. Instead, we almost got Logan killed. We sailed like idiots, and no one listened to me. Some leadership. Instead of me being a hero for saving the whale, Dawn's a hero for saving Logan. Shit. I'm the captain. I'm going to have to take charge even more.

Once the emotions of Logan's mishap had settled down, the crew turned its attention back to the missing whale.

Ibis was nowhere to be seen. The
Dreadnought
circled for the rest of the day, but the only spray they saw proved to be annoying false alarms. As sundown approached, Crystal pointed the ship toward a cove, and the crew dropped anchor.

Over dinner that night—a delicious tuna-and-pasta salad with olive oil and herbs, courtesy of Joy—the conversation centered on the day's misadventures.

“This is why we should call the Coast Guard and quit,” Marietta said. “This whole idea is stupid and dangerous. We don't know what we're doing out here, and we're going to get somebody killed.”

“Look, things got a little fucked out there,” Crystal said. “I've never steered a big ship before, and I didn't know what to do. But I'll be damned if . . .”

“None of us is experienced at sailing,” Arthur said in what he hoped was a reassuring and commanding tone, “but we had better become experienced in a hurry if we're going to stay out here. I think we should do some kind of drill every day—a sailor-overboard drill, a swamped-dinghy drill, things like that. There are books in the captain's quarters that will help us get started. We need to practice at this so we get good at it quickly. It's the only way we're going to survive out here. In the meantime, I think we should just forget about blaming each
other or feeling guilty about today. Mistakes just mean we need to get better.”

There was a long pause as people thought about Arthur's words.

“What about the whale?” Joy asked.

“Either she's still out there,” Arthur offered, “or she got too tired to swim and she drowned. Since we don't know what happened to her, let's keep our eyes open for the next few days.”

That night, in the captain's quarters, Arthur cut a rope into ten sections, each about three feet long. He tied knots into each line, and then nailed one end of each to the wooden wall alongside the bunk. The knotted lines dangled along the wall and swayed with the rocking of the boat.

Sixty-eight knots. Each knot, a day. Each day, a chance at freedom and control. Arthur had counted the days until their parents would arrive on the dock in Rockland Harbor, ready to shake McKinley's hand and take their children home. Each knot, a chance to prove himself. He hoped things would turn out all right.

With a sigh, he untied the bottom knot of the first line and crawled into bed.

For the next several days, Arthur ran the crew of the
Dreadnought
through a series of drills. They lashed grimy vinyl mats together to serve as a dummy, and three or four times a day, without warning, someone would hurl it overboard.