Rabbit at rest (19 page)

He is not quite decisive enough in pushing the tiller away from
him, and for too many seconds, with Judy crouched in a little
acrobatic ball though the boom has already passed over her head,
they head lamely into the wind, in a stillness wherein the slapping
of water sounds idle and he feels they are being carried backward.
But then an inertia not quite squandered by his timidity swings the
bow past the line of the wind and the sail stops impatiently
luffing and bellies with a sulky ripple in the direction of the
horizon and goes tight, and Judy stops looking worried and laughs
as she feels the boat tug forward again, over the choppy, opaque
waves. He pulls in sail and they move at right angles to the wind,
parallel to the color-flecked shore. In their moment of
arrested motion the vastness all around had transfixed them as if
with arrows from every empty shining corner of air and sea, but by
moving they escape and turn space to their use; the Gulf, the boat,
the wind, the sun burning the exposed tips of their ears and drying
the spray from the erect pale body hairs on their goosebumped arms
all make together a little enclosed climate, a burrow of precise
circumstance that Harry gradually adjusts to. He begins to know
where the wind is coming from without squinting up at the faded
telltale at the top of the mast, and to feel instinctively the
planes of force his hands control, just as on a fast break after a
steal or rebound of the basketball in the old days he would picture
without thinking the passing pattern, this teammate to that, and
the ball skidding off the backboard into the hoop on the layup.
Growing more confident, he comes about again and heads toward a
distant green island tipped with a pink house, a mansion probably
but a squat but from this distance, and pulls in the sail, and does
not flinch when the boat heels on this new tack.

Like a good grandfather, he explains his actions to Judy as they
go along, the theory and the practice, and both of them become
infected by confidence, by the ease with which this toy supporting
them can be made to trace an angled path back and forth, teasing
the wind and the water by stealing a fraction of their glinting
great magnitudes.

Judy announces, "I want to steer."

"You don't
steer
it, sweetie, like you steer a bicycle.
You can't just point it where you want to go. You have to keep the
wind in mind, what direction it's coming from. But yeah, O.K.,
scrootch your, like, backside back toward me and take hold of the
tiller. Keep the boat pointed at that little island with the pink
house out there. That's right. That's good. Now you're slipping off
a little. Pull it a bit toward you to make it come left. That's
called port. Left is port, starboard is right. Now I'm letting out
the sail a little, and when I say `Ready about,' you push the
tiller toward me as hard as you can and hold it. Don't panic, it
takes a second to react. Ready? Ready, Judy? O.K. Ready about, hard
alee."

He helps her push through the last part of the arc, her little
arm doesn't quite reach. The sail slackens and flaps. The boom
swings nervously back and forth. The aluminum mast squeaks in its
Fiberglas socket. A far freighter sits on the horizon like a nickel
on a high tabletop. A bent-winged tern hangs motionless
against the wind and cocks its head to eye them as if to ask what
they are doing so far out of their element. And then the sail
fills; Harry tugs it in; his hand on top of Judy's little one sets
the angle of the tiller for this tack. Their two weights toward the
stern lift the bow and make the Sunfish slightly wallow. The patter
of waves on the hull has settled into his ears as a kind of
deafness. She tacks a few more times and, seeing that's all there
is to it, grows bored. Her girlish yawn is a flower of flawless
teeth (the chemicals they put in toothpaste now, these kids will
never know the agony he did in dental chairs) and plush arched
tongue. Some man some day will use that tongue.

"You kind of lose track of time out here," Harry tells her. "But
from the way the sun is it must be near noon. We should head back
in. That's going to take some time, since the wind's coming out
against us. We don't want your mother to get worried."

"That man said he'd send a launch out."

Harry laughs, to release the tension of the tenderness he feels
toward this perfect female child, all coppery and bright and as yet
unmarred. "That was just for an emergency. The only emergency we
have is our noses are getting sunburned. We can sail in, it's
called beating against the wind. You work as close to the wind as
you can. Here, I'll pull in the sail and you try to keep us pointed
toward that hotel. Not the hotel at the very far right. The one
next to it, the one like a pyramid."

The merged bodies on the beach have lost to the distance their
flecks of color, the tints of their bathing suits, and seem a long
gray string vibrating along the Bay for miles. The water out here
is an uglier color, a pale green on top of a sunken bile green,
than it seems from the shore.

"Grandpa, are you cold?"

"Getting there," he admits, "now that you ask. It's chilly, this
far out."

"I'll say."

"Isn't your life jacket keeping you warm?"

"It's slimy and awful. I want to take it off."

"Don't."

Time slips by, the waves idly slap, the curious tern keeps
watch, but the shore doesn't seem to be drawing closer, and the
spot where Roy and Pru wait seems far behind them. "Let's come
about," he says, and this time, what with the child's growing
boredom and his own desire to get in and conclude this adventure,
he tries to trim the wind too closely. A puff comes from an
unexpected direction, from the low pirate islands instead of
directly offshore, and instead of the Sunfish settling at a fixed
heel in a straight line at a narrow angle to the direction they
have been moving in, it heels and won't stop heeling, it loses its
grip on the water, on the blue air. The mast passes a certain point
up under the sun and as unstoppably as if pushed by a giant
malevolent hand topples sideways into the Gulf. Rabbit feels his
big body together with Judy's little lithe one pitch downward
feet-first into the abyss of water, his fist still gripping
the line in a panic and his shin scraped again, by an edge of
Fiberglas. A murderous dense cold element encloses his head in an
unbreathable dark green that clamps shut his mouth and eyes and
then pales and releases him to air, to sun, and to the eerie
silence of halted motion.

His brain catches up to what has happened. He remembers how
Cindy that time stood on the centerboard and the Sunfish came
upright again, its mast hurling arcs of droplets against the sky.
So there is no great problem. But something feels odd,
heartsuckingly wrong. Judy. Where is she? "Judy?" he calls, his
voice not his out here between horizons, nothing solid under him
and waves slapping his face with a teasing malice and the hull of
the Sunfish resting towering on its edge casting a narrow shade and
the striped sail spread flat on the water like a many-colored
scum.
`Judy!" Now
his voice belongs entirely to the hollow
air, to the heights of terror; he shouts so loud he swallows water,
his immersed body offering no platform for him to shout from; a
bitter molten lead pours instead of breath into his throat and his
heart's pumping merges with the tugs and swellings of the sea. He
coughs and coughs and his eyes take on tears. She is not here.
There are only the dirty-green waves, kicking water, jade
where the sun shines through, layered over bile. And clouds thin
and slanting in the west, forecasting a change in the weather. And
the hollow mute hull of the Sunfish hulking beside him. His bladder
begs him to pee and perhaps he does.

The other side. She must be there. He and the boat and sail
exist in a few square yards yet enormous distances feel ranged
against him. He must dive under the hull, quickly. Every second is
sinking everything. The life jacket buoys him but impedes. Currents
in the water push against him. He has never been a natural swimmer.
Air, light, water, silence all clash inside his head in a
thunderous demonstration of mercilessness. Even in this instant of
perfectly dense illumination there is space for his lifelong animal
distaste for putting his head underwater, and for the thought that
another second of doing nothing might miraculously bring it all
right; the child's smiling face will surface with saltwater
sparkling in her eyelashes. But the noon sun says now or never and
something holy in him screams that all can be retrieved and he
opens his mouth and sucks down panicked breath through a sieve of
pain in his chest and tries to burrow through a resistant opacity
where he cannot see or breathe. His head is pressed upward against
something hard while his hands sluggishly grope for a snagged body
and find not even a protuberance where a body could snag. He tries
to surface. Fiberglas presses on his back like sharkskin and then
the tiller's hinged wood, dangling down dripping, scrapes his
face.

"Judy!" This third time he calls her name he is burbling;
gobbets of water make rainbow circles in his vision as he faces
straight up into the sun; in these seconds the boat is slowly
twirling and its relation to the sun, the shadow it casts on the
water, is changing.

Under the sail. She must be under the sail. It seems vast in the
water, a long nylon pall with its diagonal seams, its stitched
numbers and sunfish silhouette. He must. His bowels burn with an
acid guilt; he again forces himself under into a kind of
dirty-green clay where his bubbles are jewels. Against the
slither of cloth on his back he tries to tunnel forward. In this
tunnel he encounters a snake, a flexible limp limb that his touch
panics so it tries to strangle him and drag him down deeper. It
claws his ear; his head rises into the sail and a strained white
light breaks upon his eyes and there is a secret damp nylon odor
but no air to breathe. His body convulsively tries to free itself
from this grave; he flounders with his eyes shut; the sail's edge
eventually nuzzles past his drowning face and he has dragged along
Judy into the light.

Her coppery wet hair gleams an inch from his eyes; her face
makes a blurred clotted impression upon him but she is writhingly
alive. She keeps trying to climb on top of him and locking her arms
around his head. Her body feels hot under its slippery glaze. Dark
water persistently rebounds into his eyes and mouth, as if a
bursting spider keeps getting between him and the sun. With his
long white arm he reaches and grasps the aluminum mast; though it
sinks to a steeper angle with the addition ofweight, the sail and
the hollow hull refuse to let it sink utterly. Harry gasps and in
two jerks pulls them higher up, where the mast is out of the water.
Joy that Judy lives crowds his heart, a gladness that tightens and
rhythmically hurts, like a hand squeezing a ball for exercise. The
space inside him has compressed, so that as he hangs there he must
force down thin wedges of breath into a painful congestion. Judy
keeps hanging around his neck and coughing, coughing up water and
fright. The rough motion of her little body wrenches twinges out of
his tender, stunned chest, where something living flutters and
aches. It is as if amidst all this seawater his chest is a beaker
of the same element holding an agitated squid.

Perhaps a minute has passed since their spill. After another
minute, she has breath enough to attempt a smile. Her eyewhites are
red from within, from the tears of her coughing. Her long little
face sparkles all over, as if sprinkled with tinsel, and then a
slow twirl of the Sunfish places their heads in the narrow clammy
band of shadow the hull casts. To his eyes she looks in her
breathless frightened pallor less like Pru than Nelson, fineboned
and white around the gills, and with shadows under her eyes as if
after a night of sleeplessness.

Though his pains continue underwater he can speak. "Hey," he
says. "Wow. What happened, exactly?"

"I don't know, Grandpa," Judy says politely. Getting these words
out sends her into another spasm of coughing. "I came up and there
was this thing over me and when I tried to swim nothing happened, I
couldn't get out from under."

He realizes that her fright has its limits; she thinks that even
out here nothing more drastic than discomfort can befall her. She
has a child's sense of immortality and he is its guardian.

"Well, it worked out," he pants. "No harm done." Besides the
pain, that will not let go and is reaching up the arm that clings
to the mast, there is a bottom to his breathing, and from lower
down a color of nausea, of seasickness it may be, and enclosing
that a feebleness, a deep need to rest. "The wind changed on us,"
he explains to Judy. "These things tip over too damn easy."

Now the grand strangeness of where they are, hundreds of yards
from shore and hundreds of feet above sea bottom, begins to grab
her. Her eyes with their perfectly spaced lashes widen and her
carefully fitted thin lips begin to loosen and blur. Her voice has
a quaver. "How do we get it back up?"

"Easy," he tells her. "I'll show you a trick." Did he remember
how? Cindy had done it so quickly, diving right under the boat, in
those glassy Caribbean waters. A line, she had to have pulled on a
line. "Stay close to me but don't hang on me any more, honey. Your
life vest will hold you up."

"It didn't before."

"Sure it did. You were just under the sail."

Their voices sound diminished out here in the Gulf, flying off
into space without lingering in the air the way words spoken in
rooms do. Treading water takes all of his breath. He mustn't black
out. He must hold the sunlit day from dropping its shutter on its
head. He thinks if he ever gets out of this he will lie down on a
firm dry stretch of grass - he can picture it, the green
blades, the thatchy gaps of rubbed earth like at the old Mt. Judge
playground -and never move. Gently he lets go of the mast and
with careful paddling motions, trying not to jar whatever is
disturbed in his chest, takes the two nylon lines floating loose
and, with an effort that by recoil action pushes his face under,
tosses them over to the other side. The waves are rough enough that
Judy clings to his shoulder though he asked her not to. He explains
to her, "O.K. Now we're going to doggie-paddle around the
boat."