Swim That Rock (2 page)

“Get the anchor line!” Captain barks as he follows me and leaps aboard.
My first official orders.

I stumble toward the bow, grab hold of the taut rope, and pull with everything I’ve got, but the last part of the anchor line is cinched tight on the cleat by the tremendous strain of the wind.

“It’s stuck!” I yell.

Captain rushes forward, a huge machete in his hand, and slashes it through the air. The line pops like a guitar string. He races back to the steering post to goose the huge twin engines, and we blast out from the dock and into the raging river.

I look over my shoulder and can see my family’s diner on the rising shoreline. The lights are on in the upstairs apartment, glowing like a lighthouse in the storm.
Everything is there, and I’m out here, in this boat, in this storm, with this nut job.

He motions for me to come behind the console as the boat jumps up and down in the swells. We pass a sunken sailboat at its mooring, bobbing and lifting, showing only her tethered bow and her mast leaning over at an odd angle. Captain punches the throttle forward, and the boat rises to the top of the five-foot waves, skipping along with the back end pounding like exploding dynamite.
This boat will definitely break in half.

“I’ve seen worse!” Captain screams above the engine noise, and somehow I can’t imagine a worse storm, but at this moment I plan on believing everything Captain says because my life is in his hands.

“Where are we going?” I ask, grabbing on to the console to get my balance.

“Strap in,” he says, nodding to the metal post I’m leaning against. I look down, and there is a safety harness attached to it; I fumble with the latch, strapping in just as we lift into the sky. The engines scream as the boat catapults from wave to wave. Captain stands, holding on to the steering wheel, while I’m strapped to the post like a pirate lashed to the mast.

We find calmer waters in the mooring field at Stanley’s Marina. The docks and boats are all jumbled in a pile. Some boats are upside down and sinking. It doesn’t even seem real. Captain is steering quickly through the flotsam, dodging boats and debris as we fly by the yacht club and into the mouth of the Barrington River.

“Slow down! No wake zone!”
Mr. Nathanson, the dockmaster, is waving his arm and yelling through a bullhorn. I can just make out his red hair and yellow rain slicks through the spray of our boat.

“He’s got to be kidding. Has he looked around?” Captain shouts. I’m a little embarrassed as we speed past, and I try to hide my face behind the console. I know Mr. Nathanson because he eats at the Riptide. When he comes in for breakfast, he’s always bragging about how athletic his kids are.
I’d like to see one of his kids out here, doing this.

We continue to move up the river, past the cement bridge and then under the wooden trestle.

“Now what?” I yell over the roar of the engines.

“Salvaging.” Captain’s eyes are darting from port to starboard, searching the shoreline.

“Salvaging what?”

“Outboard motors. Listen, there’s tons of rich kids too stupid to take their boats in when the storms hit; you’ll see them all against the seawall and in the marsh just past Findley’s Dock. We’ll make some quick cash, and I’ll have you home in a couple hours.”

What is he talking about? Is this guy a thief ?
Captain is crazy but the words “quick cash” continue to echo in my head.

The boat is running smoother now. The houses along the river are a blur, but I can see that most of their docks are all busted up. Trees and branches litter the shoreline.

The engines wind down, and I see Findley’s Dock coming up in the distance, with its boats all twisted and upside down. Captain drives right up onto the marsh, lifts his toolbox from the locked cabinet, and hands me an adjustable wrench, two screwdrivers, and some large bolt cutters.

“You get the small engines. I’ll get the big ones. Just cut the wires and don’t worry about taking off the controls.”

“You want me to steal engines?”

“It’s not stealing, kid. It’s right in the book of Maritime Salvage Law. It’s called the Law of Finds.” Captain is already disconnecting a medium-size outboard engine from the nearest boat. Pronouncing his words like a lawyer now, as though he’s rehearsed this answer a hundred times, he says, “In the case of submerged and sunken vessels, when no owner exists or can be determined, title to abandoned property is given to the person who actually finds and takes possession of the property.”

“But these boats aren’t submerged or sunk,” I say, pointing to the dozen or so boats twisted up on the marsh.

“They will be soon enough. Now hurry up!”

I look at the boats, all in a mess, and I recognize my classmate Rich Ulner’s boat. It’s a brand-new fourteen-foot Boston Whaler with a twenty-five-horsepower engine he got as a present for not getting any F’s on his report card.
What a snot.
I take my tools and slog through the marsh toward his boat. The wind and rain are whipping me. It takes all my effort to stay upright. I try to convince myself that the snot doesn’t need the engine. He hardly uses this boat. His dad owns a whole chainsaw company, so he’ll just end up getting him a new one anyway.
This is wicked wrong.

“Let’s go — get a move on!” Captain shouts.

I start fumbling with the bolts and drop my wrench into the eelgrass. I look over and Captain has already removed two forty-horsepower engines and placed them into his boat. His arms are moving frantically, pulling and cutting stuff.
He’s a nut.
As I pick up the wrench, I see a flash of light, a searchlight, shining in the distance.

“Captain!” I yell out just loud enough to pierce the whipping winds and howl of the hurricane.

“What the hell are they doing this far up the river?” Captain stares out with murder in his eyes as he watches a Department of Environmental Management boat, towing a small distressed skiff up the river. We both stand very still as they pass by no more than a hundred yards away. The DEM are kind of like the coast guard, except they mainly make life difficult for fishermen. Most of us call them clam cops because they spend their time pestering all the quahoggers that work out on the bay.

Suddenly the spotlight swings over to us. We must look like two deer caught in headlights, standing there in the eelgrass in the middle of a hurricane. Captain is straining under the weight of the outboard engine in his arms. The DEM boat angles toward us.

“Hey, you there!”
the clam cop yells through his bullhorn.

Captain drops the motor in the marsh and darts to his boat, trims the engines down, and motions for me to come.
I should just run up into the woods. I could just walk home.
The engine growls horrifically, and Captain points to me like he would to a dog, dragging his finger down to the deck of the boat.

“Now,”
he says. I drop the tools, run over, and get on board.

The boat leaps from the marsh, then jerks to a stop as the engines hit bottom. I imagine the two stainless-steel props busting up the ground as the boat slowly moves backward away from shore. The propellers finally catch enough water to make it jump. Captain spins the wheel around and shoves the throttle full bore. The force throws me to the stern, and I bang up against the salvaged motors like a rag doll.

“Careful with those!” Captain barks.

I crawl to the leaning post and press my back against it, lifting myself upright. We head toward the White Church Bridge. The tide is so high I doubt we are going to fit under.

“Duck!”
he barks, and I hit the deck, waiting for the boat to shatter against the bridge. Captain is laughing aloud when sparks fly from the metal bar over the console as it nicks the concrete bridge and we explode past it, out into Hundred Acre Cove.

We made it.

The rain is like cold needles piercing my face as the dark gray boat hauls butt. The DEM guys are chasing us. I can just make them out, with their lights flashing.

“Check it out, kid. We’ve got three thousand dollars’ worth of motors behind us, and you get ten percent. Hold on.”

I’m not sure what Captain is talking about, because I didn’t actually put any engines in the boat, but I quickly do the math in my head, and three hundred bucks sounds pretty great — unless I’m in jail, of course. My head throbs and I want to jump overboard.

“I’m gonna bring ’em through the Snakes. They’ll stove a hole in that piece-of-crap boat on the second turn!” Captain laughs.

The Snakes is a section of Hundred Acre Cove that connects two bodies of water through a marshy area. I used to go blue-crabbing up there, and I know about the massive rock right in the middle. It’s covered in streaks of blue where other boats have hit it, and I’m thinking this guy is going to kill these cops, but he acts like it’s a game of tag.

We hit the Snakes at fifty miles an hour. They’re behind us now and close, and he’s right; they’re going too fast. Must be some new rookie clam cop driving, because I’m pretty sure they’re not going to make the second turn. Captain slows just enough to miss the submerged rock. The sound of cracking fiberglass fills the air behind us as the DEM boat jumps out of the water and lands in the marsh. Captain throttles back as we watch the clam cops scramble out of their boat and immediately sink knee-deep in the soft mud.

“Never should have followed me that close.” Captain laughs.

We turn around Crab Island and back up the west side of the cove to stay out of gunshot range. They may not be real cops, but they do carry guns, and I’ve heard they like to use them if the opportunity comes up. My knees are shaking. I’m wet and cold, and I feel like I’m going to pass out. Captain is squinting into the pelting rain with a crooked smile as we head back upriver.

“Ready for home?” he yells, and I puke all over the front of my poncho. “I’ll take that as a yes!” He laughs.

“Is the storm over?” I ask, noticing the waves have diminished.

“We’re in the eye,” Captain says, as he brings us close to the little dock at the back side of the Riptide Diner.

“Good work, kid,” he says as he pulls out a billfold almost as thick as it is wide. I notice it’s tied closed with a rubber band; it reminds me of my own wad of cash in the cigar box under my bed. He pulls out three one-hundred-dollar bills and hands them to me. I reach out with a trembling hand, and he quickly pulls the bills back.

“We didn’t do nothing wrong, kid. Law of Finds, remember.” He hands me the cash. I don’t say a word. I shove it in my pocket and jump out of the boat and onto the dock. Without looking back, I head straight up to the Riptide Diner. I hear the engines roar into the teeth of the storm behind me.

The wind is still howling, and sheets of water make wakes across the road. I look up past the diner, and everybody has their windows all boarded up. Water Street is completely abandoned. I know that everyone’s just trying to protect their storefronts from flying branches and stuff, but the thought crosses my mind that the whole town has given up and gone to live somewhere else.

I don’t want to, but I slowly climb the wooden side stairs that lead up to our apartment. My dad built this place ten years ago. He used to be a shellfisherman, digging quahogs on the bay. He was one of the best. But working so hard on the water really screwed up his back, and when the doctor told him he had to stop digging, he decided to switch careers. Why he chose the restaurant business was always a mystery to my mom, but I know. He still wanted to be around it. He wanted to see the quahoggers off to work each morning.

We’ve been living above the Riptide Diner for almost three months now, in what used to be just a storage room and an office for my dad. When he went missing, and the bank took away our house on Wheaton Street, my mom and I moved in here. It’s tiny and smells like bacon grease, but I can see the river from my bedroom window, and I can walk, or bike, anywhere I need to go.

The flickering blue-green light of the television washes over the cramped room. My mom is asleep on the couch, and she has one of Dad’s sweaters balled up on her lap. Her rust-colored hair is coming loose from the bun on top of her head, and she’s still wearing her white waitress uniform that’s sprinkled with coffee and ketchup stains. She looks almost peaceful.

I don’t want to talk to her right now, but she stirs when I shut the door.

“Hey, Jakey, what time is it?” She drags over the words slowly as she sits up.

“It’s late,” I say.

She looks out the rattling window at the pelting rain. “Thank God you’re home. Weatherman says the hurricane is going to be a category two or maybe even three.”

“Who boarded up the windows?” I ask.

“Trax did it before he left. Everybody’s gone to the shelter at Warren High School. I think we should go too.”

“I’m not going to Warren High! I’m not leaving the Riptide.” My voice cracks. “I have to be here in case he comes home.”

“In case
who
comes home, Jakey?” Her eyebrows scrunch together with concern. “Your father?”

My jaw tightens and I look away as she circles around the couch toward me.