Beach Music (75 page)

We gave up a hundred times each day and then discovered secret deposits of courage that we had not dared imagine. We told jokes, we despaired, we completed each day as we began it and our discipline held. One day after Capers had washed Mike carefully and Jordan made him take a few awkward sidestroke laps around the boat for exercise Mike screamed as I was lifting him into the boat. I thought I had hurt him accidentally, but what had caused the scream was a movement in a sea that had not moved all day. Then I saw it and Jordan, who was still in the water, saw it too. Capers’ back was turned to the fin that was coming swiftly at him from fifty yards away. That fin stood far higher in the water than either Jordan’s or Capers’ head.

“Whale,” Mike said and I wished he had been right.

Jordan reached for Capers as Capers spun around to see what Mike was pointing at.

The dark water was clear enough in the still, sun-suffused sea for Mike to make the first clear identification of the hammerhead. I remember to this day the terrible left eye of the great fish as it swooped by the boat. Mike saw the jaws open, as Capers and Jordan both came thrashing toward us screaming and absolutely frantic.

“A fucking shark,” Mike said, and even with a broken arm, he leaned over to help Capers into the boat. But Jordan suddenly stopped; he seemed unable to move or make a decision. Slowly, he began swimming away from the boat with the three of us screaming at him.

Mike was the first to spot the fin again and it was heading toward Jordan with amazing speed. The shark shot through that water like lightning slicing through a night sky and this time Mike glanced down and saw that terrible eye as it passed Jordan’s helpless, naked form.

Finally Jordan swam close enough for me to grab him by the wrist. Capers got his other arm and together we lifted him straight out of that ocean and certain horrible death in which we would have listened to Jordan’s screams as he was torn apart in the water
beneath us. The fin disappeared and then came around again, charging in full fury, and we watched in awe and terror. All of us saw the great right eye of the hammerhead count us as we cringed in what safety the boat could provide. That night, all of us wept, even Jordan, and it was good for the rest of us to see Jordan show fear at last.

We hardly moved all night. We listened to the hammerhead circle the boat and bump up against it in frustration. The stillness of the water and the brilliance of a nearly full moon turned that fin coppery as it stalked us. The shark would disappear for an hour or two, then return unbidden and without warning to see if we had made the mistake of entering the water again.

“My ass isn’t touching water again unless it’s a pool full of chlorine or a bathtub with my mother holding my pajamas standing right next to it,” Mike said.

“What were you thinking when you were swimming toward that fin?” I asked Jordan, who shivered involuntarily before he said, “My body went numb with fear. It was like paralysis, like polio. I think my body was preparing for me to die. I don’t know if I’d have felt anything if the shark had torn my leg off.”

“You’d have felt something,” Capers said. “Jesus, when I think of the teeth on that thing. I close my eyes and all I can think of is that mouth coming up to get you, Jordan.”

“It had a set of dentures,” I agreed.

“Boys, I want you to look over here at your buddy, Mike Hess,” said Mike. “Take a good look, because you’re never going to see him on a fishing trip again. You’re never going to see him eating a fish again, you’re never ever going to see him on a boat again.”

We laughed together, then the shark swept past the boat once more and its tail slapped against the side of the boat as though the fish were trying to deliver some dread message to the humans on board. We held our breaths and listened for the fish to make another pass. In our imaginations, a thousand hammerheads infested the moonlit waters beneath us. The shark was omniscient, omnipresent, insatiable. It hunted us, and only us, in all the cunning of its despised species. It had smelled our bloodstreams as it moved through the bridal veils of Portuguese man-of-wars and the ink clouds of octopuses in full flight.

For three days the hammerhead bird-dogged our boat, sometimes disappearing for a half day at a time, but always reappearing just when we thought we had seen the last of it. Then suddenly it disappeared for good as a storm rose over the Atlantic. We cheered out loud when we saw the black furious clouds forming. Our thirst was so acute by that time we had placed the subject of water off-limits again. Our tongues felt black and swollen, as though we had been staked out to dry and packed in salt, and so we obsessively watched every cloud that passed overhead praying for a thunderhead to form.

When the shark disappeared for the last time, heading north, there was lightning in the eastern sky. Normally, we would have feared lightning in an open boat, but now there were cries of joy at the rain it portended. We unfolded the tarp that had been stowed under a seat and took the lid off the pathetically dried-out ice chest. None of us took our eyes off the clouds as the storm gathered slowly. We watched the clouds begin to spiral upward in great cumulus bursts as though shaped by magnificent, unseen hands, and we waited, our mouths dry, praying for the abundance of water they would bring to save us.

The wind rose, then the waves began to rise as the tide began its surge and run. Thunder that was miles away was suddenly upon us, and lightning carved its name above us before the rain came in sheets that stung our sunburned faces. Great drops moistened our lips and tongues and we wept in sheer relief.

Jordan screamed for us to keep our discipline and we held the tarpaulin loosely as rain filled its sagging middle with gallons of water. Together, we moved as one and made a funnel, then poured the streaming water into the ice chest. Again, Jordan called for us to catch more rainwater but the three of us had thrown ourselves at the ice chest and were filling Dixie cups and drinking ravenously. Then Jordan, too, lost control and joined us in that feast of fresh water. Its bright elixir brought our voices back as we drank our fill and rejoiced with the thunder. When we had drunk all we had collected, once more we spread the tarp to catch the precious water, filling the ice chest again to its capacity. As the storm worsened and the winds rose, a new fear began to fray the edges of our consciousness.
Though we had prayed for rain and storm, we had said nothing of wind, nor even thought of it.

There was no moon or stars and as waves began to crash over the sides of the boat, we secured the ice chest and went to our appointed places. The waves began to build, looming above us, then dropping out from under the boat like hills dropped into the sea. Though the craft was seaworthy, we could not steer it into the waves and had to ride out the storm bobbing like a pelican between the enormous troughs. As the weight of one wave crashed over us I was almost carried overboard. It caught me holding tightly to the stern of the boat and carried me choking on seawater into the gunwale.

Another wave broke the ice chest loose and sent it overboard with a tackle box that had not been tied down after its last use. At Jordan’s command we tightened the circles of our life jackets as he handed each of us lengths of rope so we could tie ourselves into the boat. We heard Mike get tossed head over heels and Jordan reached out and grabbed his bathing suit as Mike somersaulted backward and broke his arm again against the steering wheel.

The water of the great waves broke over us and lightning flashed to the west now as the storm moved on. Nature could answer one’s prayer far too well as our boat, fragile as a leaf, floated in the utter blackness of thirty-foot seas and the night made us afraid to pray for rain with too much conviction.

In the morning, we woke to a foundering boat more than half-filled with water. Jordan and I spent that morning bailing out water with our hands—almost everything else had been washed overboard. Mike was moaning and barely conscious and we were afraid to touch the newly broken arm. Soon infection would begin to set in and there was nothing any of us could do about it. Capers had endured another blow to his head and a flap of his scalp opened up to reveal the whiteness of his skull. He was unconscious. Jordan and I had broken ribs during the night and it hurt both of us to breathe.

We cleared the boat of water until exhaustion overtook us, and we slept a deep sleep of both pain and despair. Another night passed and another day, then another night. Then day again and the sun began its work in earnest and we were too weak to hide from it. Now, the terrible burning started and somewhere in the middle of
the next day we began to die. Our feet swelled and blisters began to form on our hands and faces.

We lost all sense of time or space or sense of where we might be on the planet, and the thought of death was not unpleasant to me. Jordan had become feverish and one night reached out his hand to me.

“Hey, Tonto,” Jordan said. “It looks like the bad guys win.”

“We gave it a hell of a run, kemo sabe,” I whispered.

“To tell the truth,” said Jordan, “I wish I hadn’t come on this fishing trip.”

I laughed, but even laughter hurt.

“Jack, can you hear me?”

“Yeh.”

“Are we the only ones alive?”

“We’re the only ones conscious,” I said. “I envy those guys.”

“The two Catholic boys,” said Jordan. “Yeh, lucky us.”

“Let’s say the rosary,” Jordan said. “Let’s put our lives in the hands of the Virgin Mary.”

“I’ll put my life in the hands of Zeus if it’ll help.”

“If it works, Jack, we’ll owe our whole lives to her.”

“I’m the only one in this boat who isn’t crazy,” I whispered to myself.

“Promise you’ll dedicate your life to the Virgin Mary and to her son, Jesus, if we survive this?” Jordan asked.

“Have you lost your mind?” I asked.

I remember hearing Jordan begin the Apostles’ Creed, then the sun again, then stars, then nothing, then stars again, then nothing, then nothing …

Then fog and movement.

I woke up having no idea if I was alive or dead.

“Get up, Jack,” I heard Jordan say, “I need you. Get up now.”

I rose, staggering. In the back of the boat I saw Jordan with a broken paddle digging at the water, grimacing every time the boat moved even a little bit.

“Do you hear something?”

I stepped over the bodies of our two friends. They were still
breathing but both looked dead. The fog was another form of blindness. I felt submerged in a river of milk. It was bright with false morning light and I could see nothing except my hand in front of me.

“Get on the bow,” Jordan urged. “Do you hear it? Tell me if you hear it too.”

I closed my eyes and concentrated on the sheer astonishment of being alive and being asked to listen. For a moment, I wondered if we were all dead and fog was the natural landscape when the last breath had been drawn.

“I hear it,” I said suddenly. “I hear it. It’s surf. The sound of waves crashing on the beach.”

“Not that,” Jordan said, “There’s something in the water. Something alive.”

Then I heard the other sound, the unworldly sound that had no connection to where we were or to the ocean. It sounded like an engine or a bellows or something hissing and exhausted somewhere near us in the fog. The sound grew closer until I thought it was a man dying in the water just beyond my reach. But then I realized it was not human and I drew back thinking of the migration of humpback whales along the coast, feeling vulnerable as I lay on the bow, my arms extended over it. My ribs were afire and the thing in the water made me afraid, yet I was more fearful of letting Jordan down … The sound of surf I suddenly realized was the sound of rescue and salvation.

Then I saw it coming directly toward me, as disoriented as I myself was, as displaced, as drawn away from his own element as I, but I reached out toward him and touched something that connected me solidly and completely to my own history, to my boyhood in the marshes and fields of the Carolinas. A white-tailed buck, as large and powerful as any I had ever seen, was swimming to a new home between islands. I had seen a buck do it once before in my life, and I grabbed hold of the left antler and felt my fingers lock around it. The buck’s great muscled neck tried to loose itself from my grip, but I held that spiked bone tightly and I felt the boat turn with the rhythm of the swimming deer. The buck was in the deep water of a channel and the tide was going in. The deer finally gave up its own direction and just swam to save itself and took us with him.

From the stern, Jordan paddled as hard as he could trying to help the deer. I was crying with pain as I held my grip on the antler. The deer’s breathing was labored and angry, yet the boat moved with him and the fog. Jordan was still saying a rosary that had no beginning or end when the boat hit land and the deer dragged me off the bow of the boat and deposited me into the black earth of the marsh, and spartina.

We had landed on Cumberland Island, Georgia, after fifteen days at sea. Jordan Elliott dragged himself out of the marsh and flagged down a forest ranger in a Jeep who called the Coast Guard; and we were flown by helicopter to Savannah, Georgia. The doctors said that both Capers and Mike would have died sometime in the next twenty-four hours and that it was a miracle that any of us survived the ordeal.

On the second night in the hospital, Jordan walked over to my bed, carrying his IV with him.

“A riddle, Jack?”

“I don’t feel like playing any more games,” I said.

“This one has great implications. Cosmic ones,” said Jordan.

“Is it a joke?”

“No, it’s the most serious thing in the world,” Jordan said.

“Go ahead. I can’t stop you.”

“Where did we encounter God out there, Jack? Which one was God?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “Get away from me.”

“Was it the blue marlin? Or the manta ray? Or was he in the fish we caught to survive like the loaves and the fishes? Or was it the hammerhead? The storm? Or the white-tailed buck?”

“Do I get to choose ‘none of the above’?” I asked, disturbed.