The Great Wide Sea (10 page)

Dylan secured the oars and gas can under the seat.

“Get anything?” Dad said.

“No. Clouds,” I answered, and pointed west.

“Too bad,” Dad said, turning back to the books. “Okay. My turn again.” He pulled his poetry book from under Gerry's stack of little-kid books and started reading in his poetry voice, kind of dreamy and heavy. “ ‘Pain—has an Element of Blank—' ” he read. “ ‘It cannot recollect when it begun—or if there were a time when it was not—' ”

I handed the speargun to Dylan.

“‘It has no Future—but itself—'” his voice read. “‘Its Infinite contain its Past—enlightened to perceive New Periods—of Pain.' ”

When Dad was quiet, I looked up. He was reading the poem again silently to himself. “That was a real cheerful poem,” I said.

“But true,” Dad answered.

Gerry sat quietly, holding Blankie's silky corner against his leg and slowly rubbing it up and down.

“I didn't like that one,” Gerry said. “Let's read this.” He handed Dad
Where the Wild Things Are
.

As Dylan and I climbed into the cockpit, Dad looked up at me. “I must have read this book to you a thousand times, Ben.”

Dylan sat down beside Gerry, and Dad's real voice began to read about Max making mischief in his wolf suit.

I lay down on the cockpit cushions and closed my eyes.

Dad turned a page. “Look at that monster,” he said.

I heard Dad's hand smoothing down the page and the shift as he and Gerry adjusted positions.

Pigeon Cay was not the best anchorage. The boat rocked a bit in the freshening breeze and the halyards clanged against the mast when the wake from a Bahamian fishing boat caught us. But now all that felt normal. When you live on a boat, your muscles are constantly adjusting to the moving ocean, but you never think about it. Not the moving or the noise—the pings and taps along the hull when you're lying in your bunk, the knocks and slaps and gurgles when you're in the cabin. You get used to it. I moved on the seat and felt the slight grit of sand and the stickiness of salt. Even that was normal now. I hardly noticed any of it anymore.

Dad's voice went on. The pages rustled as he and Gerry looked quietly at the pictures. I remembered stories. After dinner, Dad gave me a soldier bath—a wet washcloth and a crazy story about hardship in the desert. He dressed me in my Batman pajamas and we climbed onto my bed. I leaned against the muscle of his arm, which smelled a little like sweat and Dylan's baby powder. When Dad read stories from a book, he pointed at the pictures. When he made up his own stories, he didn't finish them.

“Once upon a time, a boy named Ben had a boat and he sailed away.”

“Where to?”

“I don't know. That's your part of the story.”

Sitting in the shade of the bimini on
Chrysalis
, he paused at the end of a page.

“The monsters are mean,” Gerry said.

“You think so?” Dad asked.

Then Max said good-bye to the wild things, and they threatened to eat him up.

“We love you,” they said, and I laughed again.

Max stepped onto his private boat and we all came sailing home with him, through a year and “in and out of weeks,” and when I opened my eyes, it was still hot. Hot and about to rain. Gerry hopped down below with the books. Dylan and I piled the cockpit cushions under the bimini. The rain lasted only ten minutes, then Dad had us doing the end-of-storm routine. We opened all the hatches, dried the cockpit seats, set out the cushions, and hung the drying towel on the line. The rigging kept raining on us for a while. Big, fat, heavy drops fell—
plop
—right in the middle of the top of my head.

“Ben.”

I turned and saw Gerry standing just behind me, Blankie draped around his neck and his hands hidden behind his back. He handed me a wadded-up piece of drawing paper.

“What's this?”

“Open it.”

The paper was a little damp and tore as I pulled it open. Inside was one of Gerry's cars.

“Happy birthday,” Gerry said.

“Surprise,” Dylan said.

“Oh,” Dad said. “I forgot.”

“I did too,” I said. I was sixteen now. “Thank you, Gerry,” I said. I looked at the rusty little car sitting in the torn paper and closed my fist around the toy.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

WE LEFT ANDROS for Nassau in December. We came into the harbor from the west, threading our way through a cacophony of marine traffic—freighters, fishing boats, a sand dredge, private yachts, buzzing Jet Skis. We passed Prince George Wharf, which was wall-to-wall cruise ships, then sailed under the bridges and tied up at a marina just beyond Potters Cay. It was the first time
Chrysalis
had been in a slip since we left Marathon, and none of us liked it very much.

We hadn't finished tying off the lines when two little kids came running up with tiny straw baskets in their hands asking us to buy. When we said no and turned away, they just kept asking. We had to go down below before they would leave. Dad was writing a grocery list. He pulled some money from his wallet and handed it to me. “Take this list and find a grocery. All three of you. Go.”

We hated Nassau. The crowds were too thick. The straw market was too fake. The cruise ships were too big. The casinos were too pink. Their palm trees were too perfect. The workers' smiles were too big. Everyone wanted to braid our hair or get us a cab—for a fee, of course. One guy tried to hustle me some marijuana. Gerry wouldn't let go of my hand. Dylan said it was time to find the grocery.

The sun glared off the buildings as we walked back in the noontime heat carrying the heavy bags. The breeze from the harbor was blocked until we walked by the fish market where we caught the sudden, powerful smell of dead fish. Fishermen stood in the sterns of their boats and hawked the piles of fish lying at their feet while the women sorted or bagged or cleaned them.

One guy had conch rolling around in the bottom of his boat. He picked up a conch and used the claw end of a hammer to whack a hole in the whorls at the top. He flashed a knife inside the hole and then grabbed the conch's crawling claw, yanking the animal out of its shell in one slimy gray blob. The whole process took about five seconds. He handed the flat, palm-size, alien-looking creature to the waiting customer, picked up another shell, and did it all over again in another five seconds flat. They exchanged money, the fisherman sucked on a beer, and another customer came up.

“That is the grossest thing I ever saw,” I said.

“I'd like to try it,” Dylan said.

“Is it dead when he pulls it out?” Gerry asked. “Or do you kill it afterward?”

“You guys are weird,” I said, and we moved on.

When we got back, we noticed the oil slick on the marina water. Our own boat felt sticky and dirty. We were ready to leave and we hadn't been there six hours.

But like everything else, we started to get used to Nassau too. Dad was busy with boat repairs. He didn't like a noise the rudder was making, and he was worried our water tanks might be leaking. The radio was doing something funny again, and he had decided to replace the mainsail. The marina needed hands to scrape and paint boat bottoms, so Dad and I helped out. It paid our slip fee and grocery bills. Dylan and Gerry spent more time on schoolwork and wrote long letters to Aunt Sue and their friends at home. Dad said I should write too, maybe even to Andrew, but when I sat down with the paper, I couldn't think of anything to say. Everything would have been like speaking a foreign language.

In our downtime, Dad shopped for spare parts and canned goods, and we wandered the streets on our own. Right around the harbor, people weren't very friendly, but on the back streets, it was better. Ladies were always rubbing Gerry's hair because it was so white, but nobody noticed Dylan or me. We blended in pretty well. Our skin was as tanned as it could get and our hair was long. I had started wearing a bandanna to keep mine out of my face. Gerry said I looked like a pirate. Dylan said I looked like a rock star. Mainly we looked like boat bums, so nobody in Nassau noticed us.

Christmas came and Nassau had its own celebration the day after. They called it Junkanoo. We wanted to go, but Dad said no, the crowds would be too much. Then he changed his mind for the second Junkanoo parade on New Year's Day. When we arrived in the early morning, it was going strong. Costumes and dancing and music. Drums. Cowbells. Blowing on conch shells. A man did handstands down the street. A little boy sold conch fritters. Dad kept yelling at us to stay together.

I was beating my hand against my leg to the goombay rhythm and watching the girls running down the street, screaming and laughing and slapping each other, when a woman in a bikini top and a long skirt came dancing over to Dad and rubbed up against him. Dad gently pushed her away. She laughed and came dancing back. “Smile, man,” she said. “It's a party.” Dad turned away and she laughed again. “Are you afraid of me?” she asked. She put her arms around his waist and danced against him. “It's okay, man,” she said. “Your wife's not here.” Dad went rigid, then twisted out of her arms, and scooped up Gerry. He grabbed Dylan's arm and shouted at me to follow. We pushed our way back through the crowds and noise to the marina.

The quiet felt hollow. Dad eased himself down on the cockpit seat. Gerry stretched out beside him and picked at the threads coming out of the cushion covers. Dylan and I stood holding on to the backstay and watching Dad. He rubbed his hands up and down on his thighs. “That woman,” he finally said. “I don't like crowds. I think it's time for us to go.”

“Did you get the new sail yet?” Dylan asked.

“We don't really need it. It's too expensive anyway.”

“The radio's fixed?” I asked.

“The guy came yesterday,” he said.

We nodded. We all agreed.

So in the late morning of the first day of the new year, Dylan, Gerry, and I watched from the foredeck as the city slipped away. Gerry sat with Blankie clutched at his stomach. I coiled the dock lines. Dylan dropped the fenders into the forward hatch.

“Where are we going?” Gerry rubbed Blankie's silky corner against his cheek.

“North,” I said. “To the Berry Islands.”

He carefully wound Blankie around his hands. “Ben,” he asked quietly, “how long has it been?”

I paused and looked at him. “Since what, buddy?”

He looked up at me, his face tightening against tears, and slid Blankie over his head.

Dylan and I looked at each other, then back at him.

“I want to go home,” Gerry said, his voice quiet under Blankie.

“We're halfway there, buddy,” I said. “We're halfway home.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

HUNDREDS OF ISLANDS make up the Bahamas, and in six months we had seen only a handful. In Nassau, Dad had laid the chart out on the table. To the east were Eleuthera and Cat Island. To the south, Long Island and the Exumas. Even farther south were the last scattered specks of Bahamian territory: Crooked and Acklins islands, Mayaguana, and Great and Little Inagua. Still farther south was the little nation of Turks and Caicos. Among these last scraps of land were islands where only a few people lived, as well as those occasional cays with no people at all and no names, either. There was no natural freshwater and no way to grow food. A boater couldn't stop and provision or fill up with water or fuel because there wasn't any. We had six months left. Dad didn't want to waste time in that desert area. He decided to skip the southern Bahamas.

Instead, we sailed north to the Berrys. There's not much there. Just one island after another strung out in a slow curve for twenty-five miles from Chub Cay in the south to Great Stirrup Cay in the north. Almost nobody lives there. Just birds and lizards and conch and lobster. The Berrys are lonely and beautiful.

It was there that we had the golden day. In my memory, this day is the brightest. A day with sunshine sparkling around our eyes. With glitter in the sand and with water dancing blue and clear all around the edges. The perfect day.

The day before, we had taken our longest sail since crossing the Bank. The last two hours were in rolling seas. We wedged ourselves in the cockpit to keep in one place, but Gerry was too short. Finally I just held him in my lap. We stared over the rails and waited for it to be over.

At last we were abreast of the turn and could clearly see the rock we were supposed to beware of. Dylan was shouting degrees through the companionway and Dad was barking back, “Double-check that course, Dylan. That can't be right.” Then Dad turned on the engine to be sure it was ready when we got set to anchor, but it didn't start. So he started yelling at me and I started yelling at him. Dylan was quiet and Gerry was rolling around in the cockpit. It was really fun.

Then we turned
Chrysalis
's bow into Little Harbour.

In an instant, the rolling stopped. All those waves were blocked now by a long, low island beside us. And in the middle was a calm green pool of ocean, the edges licking gently against a circle of little islands surrounding us.

We were quiet. We glided in under jib alone. Dad didn't yell. I scrambled to the bow and laid out the anchor chain. Dylan stood on alert beside the jib halyard. Quietly Dad said, “Dylan,” and Dylan released the halyard. The jib tumbled in billows onto the deck. He gathered it neatly inside the lifelines. We were quiet again for a minute.

“Ben,” Dad said, and I let the anchor go. The chain rattled out of the anchor locker and I counted the markers going by—ten feet, twenty feet, thirty feet—

Dad said nothing.