Red Sea (11 page)

Thin blades of light pry under my eyelids, then a quick dance of light and dark that doesn't fit. I scramble to my feet. The genoa is flogging. “What have you done? You've changed our heading!” The wheel is still tight, the compass indicating that the wind has decreased with the dawn and changed direction. I sheet in the headsail but there is far less wind. I peel off my cap and jacket and throw them on the cockpit floor. My watch alarm goes off, and I jab at the button to silence it. Night slime coats my tongue and teeth. My shoulder is sore from where I was sleeping. I am capital
B
bitchy, and we're going nowhere fast.

“Nice work!” I yell at the wind. I estimate our boat speed at two knots, maybe two point five. If the current is with us, we'll be lucky to make five knots. That means by midday, we'll only be off-course by about fifty miles. Without a radio, we're invisible at five miles, less with the seas. They are never going to find us. I slump onto the cockpit bench.

Last night's potato bowl has crusted up nicely. Even so, my stomach growls. I say, “Some bacon and eggs, then? Or maybe a fluffy omelet? Pancakes to go with? Syrup? How about a
GPS
? Some proper medical supplies.
A radio?”
I peel off the rest of my foulies. My stink rises out of the layers of clothing.

B
ELOW
, M
OM'S FOREHEAD FEELS WARMER
than yesterday. I go through the routine of caring for her, telling myself that it's not a charade, that she's strong enough to fight the infection, that people did it all the time before the invention of antibiotics. I leave her loosely covered and open the small porthole over her berth so she gets fresh air.

Her voice startles me, then scares me with its intensity. “Duncan,” she says. “I need to see Duncan.” Her eyes are wide, bright. She's looking at me, then her eyes close, and I think she's gone back under, but no, it looks like she's closing them against pain.

I make my voice cheerful. “Hey, Mom, you're just in time for breakfast. I can make you some broth, or how about applesauce?”

“Get Duncan.”

“Let's start with some water. You need some water.” I bustle around filling a water bottle, hoping on one hand that she'll stay awake long enough to drink, on the other hand, hoping she'll fall away before she asks again for Duncan. “Maybe you could handle some Tylenol if I broke it up a bit?”

Her eyes are on me now, watching my every movement, wild eyes. I bring her the water. “Try a sip.”

She does, her eyes never leaving mine. “Now a bit of the Tylenol. It'll help with the pain and ...” I stop before mentioning the fever. She already knows she feels like hell. But when I go to place the medicine in her mouth, she moves her head away from my hand.

“Duncan.” It's a command. Her eyes are so clear, so intense right now that I have to look away. Big mistake. She becomes agitated, tries to lift her head, cries out in pain, then again, “Duncan!”

It makes me angry, her calling for him, and then I'm ashamed that I'm angry. I look her straight in the eye and the lie is out of my mouth with an ease that surprises me. “He's in the cockpit.” Technically, he is, or parts of him, anyway. “We have to hand-steer because we don't want to run down the batteries, so he can't come in right now. We took turns steering in the night. He told me stories about the book he's reading, you know, the one about the woman
pilot in Africa? I made him breakfast, and for lunch he's going to make fried rice. I like the way he makes it with hot peppers. We'll save you some for when you're feeling better. If it's not too rough this afternoon, he's going to work with me on that novel study. Maybe I'll use the book he's reading, although it isn't a novel, but the teacher won't care. She'll just be happy that I send it in, right? Ha ha.”

Mom's eyes are closed. I know she's not sleeping, I can tell from her breathing. I see tears balling up at the edges of her eyes.

I'm too loud, and even to me my words sound fake. “You must be tired. You rest, and I'll check on you in a little while.”

My mother always knows when I'm lying. It was a mistake to try. I grab what I need, my toothbrush, a clean T-shirt, hat, chart, the last of the granola bars and more water, then head back out into the cockpit. I'd like some tea, but what I want more is to get away from my mother's eyes.

I need to tell her about Duncan. She needs to know. But she's so weak right now. And if she knew that it was only me that was sailing the boat, she'd give up. Who could blame her?

I
FOLD OPEN THE CHART
and try to figure out where we might be by now. “Distance equals speed multiplied by time. Speed I can estimate, time I know. So distance is a whopping thirty-five miles from the last
X
.” I mark the chart. I follow my finger toward the magic place, Duncan's original plot line, still hours and hours away. I shake off a sense of him watching over my shoulder.

At midday I get a pouch of tuna and a bruised apple. I eat the tuna first, then all of the apple, even the brown spots and the core, then I open the foil tuna package and lick out all the seams and creases.

I hope they're enjoying the corned beef, the bastards. Or maybe they've sold all our stuff and are wolfing down a twenty-dollar brunch at a white-cloth café. Wherever they came from, I wouldn't know. Except for a few words, I didn't recognize their language, and it seemed that they spoke more than one. In Djibouti, people from all over crammed the seaport: Somalia, Ethiopia, Yemen and the residual French population from when it was a French colony. On the main streets, the ones with wrought iron railings and American hotels, I heard French being spoken, and English, of course. English is spoken wherever there's a buck to be made from travelers. But on the back streets of the city among the poor, and there were so many of them, everyone spoke a different dialect. Whatever money there is in decaying Djibouti, the poor see none of it.

The pirates might have been from Djibouti or any of the Red Sea countries: Somalia, Yemen, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt. It's not like they flew their nation's flag on the stern of their boats. The boats were almost certainly fishing boats. Maybe, like Duncan said that night before we left, we turned up with them in the same square of sea, a floating buffet of unspeakable wealth. Ty ripped off Cokes from the 7-Eleven all the time. Said 7-Eleven was a “friggin' empire” and could afford it. “It's just a Coke.”

Maybe they didn't intend to hurt us, they were just after our stuff. Maybe. They had their faces covered as they fired the warning shots; they didn't want to be identified. So they knew they were acting as criminals. What difference does it
make that they have a day job? What kind of man blows the head off another, just to get his stuff?

The summer I was twelve I worked with Jesse's church group on a housing project on the lower eastside, in a neighborhood where no one was from where we were, geographically or socially or any way at all. Jesse signed up because she liked the pastor's son, and I signed up because she did. We spent two weeks pulling nails out of old lumber so it could be re-used. At the end of the first day, even though we had gloves, our palms were pebbled with blisters. We had water and juice and packed lunches, money for chips and Coke; we had everything we needed.

A little kid from the neighborhood used to hang around us while we were working, maybe five years old. His older sister kept an eye on him occasionally from the balcony of their apartment, like that would stop him from falling into a construction hole or wandering into the path of a cement truck. One day, Jesse gave him her Coke, and he vanished, reappearing on his balcony with his older sister and a horde of siblings, all clamoring for the Coke. The older sister took a good long swallow, then another, watching us all the time. Then she handed it to another kid. By the time it got back to the little boy Jesse had given it to, there would have been a few drops left. He didn't get mad though; he looked happy enough to get the small amount that was left.

The pastor told us that in one country he went to, if you brought supplies to a village to build a new well, the bricks and mortar might end up in one family's possession if the village deemed that the one family needed the supplies more
than the village as a whole. The village is happy for the one family. In that country, the people have a different concept of need. It's not wrong, the pastor said, just different.

Apparently, the pirates too have a different concept of need.

Jesse and I hated the kid's older sister. And Jesse never did hook up with the pastor's son. I thought it was the hardest two weeks of my life.

Not anymore.

“My problem,” I say, “is that I don't know where I am, and so I don't know where I'm going.” I look behind me at the sea. “And I'm going too slow. I need the engine. With the engine, Mom and I have half a chance.”

For the engine, I need to clear the propeller. I have to. It's that simple.

I attach the tethers. I open the knife. I put the ladder down. I spit in the mask, which I remember Mac doing, I have no idea why. “Hey Mac, wish you were here.” Then I slip into the water.

With the boat moving, however slowly, there's an unpleasant sensation of the tether being tugged. I visualize myself hacking off the net in one superhuman swipe of the knife. Okay, maybe two.

When I put my face in, the salt of the water feels abrasive. I ignore it. I dive.

It is harder than yesterday, I'm not imagining it. I'm almost out of breath when I reach the propeller, barely able to attack the net before I have to return to the surface. But I'm not afraid. Today, I won't be afraid.

I dive again and again. There's water in my ears. My right shoulder is especially painful, so I switch the knife to my left hand and hack away.

The first time I feel it, I think it is strands of the net wafting around my legs. The second time I feel it, I know it's not the net. I push off from the net ball so hard that I crack my head on the bottom of the boat. A dorsal fin has brushed the back of my legs.

S
CREAMING UNDERWATER IS USELESS
. The ensuing gulp of seawater explodes out of my nose, loosens the mask, which fills and burns my eyes as I claw myself to the surface. My foot slips on the ladder, which rakes open the sore on my shin; my arms bleat with weakness as I try to climb the ladder; but I only feel any of this instantaneously because all I'm really thinking about is that fin.

I hear it behind me in the water, a sound I've heard before. It's a popping sound mixed with a whoosh, a sound a dolphin makes as it breathes. Dolphins! I haul myself onto the swim platform and turn to see them just as they dive under the boat.

There are four dolphins, then a set of three and another; they're so fast it's hard to count them. They are gray with a white banner flash on their sides, and some tip a little on their sides for a better look at me before scooting under the boat.

We first saw dolphins in the Indian Ocean. Mom was on watch and she called to Duncan and me to come see. There was a pod of about twenty, diving in threes and fours over our bow wave, under the stern, then back to the bow. They stayed with our boat for close to an hour and almost all that time I leaned over the rail, entranced. Duncan too. We marveled at their synchronized jumps, their sleek bodies breaking the waves at the exact same time, leaping eight, ten feet in the air, then back under the water, like at Marineland but so much better because these dolphins were doing it just for themselves.

I wanted to go forward on the bow to watch them. We have jack lines rigged all the way to the bow so we can attach a tether if we have to go forward, like how people sometimes clip a dog leash on the clothesline so the dog can run the length of the yard and not get away. Duncan said no, that there was no reason to go forward, and why take a chance on going overboard? Even with the tether, it would endanger everyone to get me out of the water.

It pissed me off and I'm sure I told him so; there are a few words in my vocabulary I used only on Duncan. So I stomped off and went below. I was glad when the dolphins left us that day because it meant none of us was seeing them. I imagined that they left out of solidarity for me, although it took them a while.

On one of my afternoon watches when I was alone in the cockpit, I heard a dolphin make that pip noise behind me. It was just one dolphin that I saw, and he dove under the boat and disappeared. I think he saw me and said hello, but I guess he could have been saying, “Get out of my way!”

Today, crouched on the swim platform as I am, these dolphins are so close I can smell fish on their exhaled breath. They shoot under the water like gray arrows, their dorsal fins knifing the water into ribbons, shooting back under the swim platform so that I could touch them if I leaned out.

In the Indian Ocean, that time with Mom and Duncan, one dolphin kept pace with us, tipped onto his side to watch our faces as we leaned over the rail. I outstretched my hand, and he veered away, then dove out of sight. I'd crossed some line of non-verbal communication and had broken the spell.

But today when I was under the boat, one touched me. It must have meant to swim so close to me that it touched me. It wouldn't have been accidental. Which one? I study the dolphins as they circuit the boat. I imagine the youngsters discussing it. “You touch her.” “No, you.”

How long did they swim with me before making their presence known? Did Mom hear their pips and squeaks through the hull of the boat, through her deep deep sleep? Did she hear what I, wide-awake, couldn't?

The sun is hot and except for my braid dripping water down my back, I'm already dry. Part of me nags about having to work on the net. Right now I'm content to watch the dolphins.

It doesn't bother me so much now, the thought of diving under the boat. The dolphins seem like company. Not that I'll jump in with them. For one thing, it'll spook them and they'll disappear. Then there's that urban myth about dolphins and drowning swimmers, the one in which the swimmer is rescued by dolphins that push him in to shore. As Emma might point out, we only hear about the rescued; we'd never hear from the swimmer who got pushed further out to sea.