The Great Wide Sea (7 page)

“What kind of fish? A shark?” Gerry was peering into the water now, desperately ignoring Dad's command.

“A flounder, probably. Dog-paddle!”

“What kind of flounder?”

“I didn't see it. A peacock. Swim, Gerry. Put your head under and swim.”

“Does it bite? Can you eat it?”

“Gerry. Shut up and go under.”

“I can't.”

“You can.”

Dylan and I were standing now on the beach. Dylan was so close, I heard his quiet breathing. Dad really meant to make Gerry go under.

“Put your head under now,” Dad said quietly.

“I can't.”

Dad's hand, with the fingers spread out, covered the whole top of Gerry's head. His fingers almost reached from ear to ear. He pushed down, but Gerry wouldn't go under. He twisted out from under Dad's hand. He was screaming, but there was no one on the beach to hear him.

I realized then that I was standing there waiting for Mom to come—for her to step in and change everything. I was waiting, but she would never come.

Gerry was flailing out at Dad now, but Dad's grip on his arm was tight. “I said, ‘Now!' ” Dad said. Then he took Gerry by the shoulders and pushed him under the water.

I guess there are moments in your life when reality shifts and you enter some parallel universe where time is different and the things you do don't connect with who you were one second before. Just under the water I saw Gerry's blond hair waving and his hand stretched out and tense. I watched for what felt like hours. I felt myself go ice cold over my ears and down my spine. Then I raced into the water and jumped on Dad.

His shoulder rammed into my chest and my nose smacked against his head. My arms wrapped around him, and I felt the rough elastic at the waist of his shorts and the rise of muscle on his chest as he let go of Gerry and turned his grasp toward me.

“Stop holding him down,” I was screaming.

Dad threw me off and I fell backwards into the water. He stood there just looking at me as I struggled to stand. “What is wrong with you?” he said.

Dylan was leading Gerry to shore.

“Don't hold him down,” I shouted, and turned toward shore.

“I was holding him up,” Dad said to my back, but I pretended I couldn't hear him and slogged through the water to the beach.

When I caught up with Dylan and Gerry, Gerry was holding one of the coconut boats. I squatted down in front of Gerry and looked him in the eye. I couldn't tell if the water on his face was ocean or tears. “Which was scarier, Gerry—the fish or Dad?”

Gerry shrugged and looked off toward the trees.

“Next time,” I said, “don't just stand there. Kill him. We'll eat him for supper.”

“The fish?” Gerry asked.

I paused. “No,” I said. “Dad.” I looked up and there he was, standing at the edge of the water and watching us.

He was still my dad but now I hated him.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THREE DAYS LATER, we woke up to rain. While it rained, we sat in the cabin with everything closed tight, everybody knocking bones and sweating on each other. Trapped in the boat, the air got hotter and stuffier every minute. The portholes fogged over. The settee cushions got damp with the drips from the overhead hatches. Dad pondered charts at the chart table. Dylan and Gerry tried to see outside through the portholes. I crawled back into my tunnel and closed my eyes.

I planned my car, the one I intended to get as soon as I turned sixteen—the color, the interior, the paint trim, the factory extras, the things I would add. Then I took it for a drive. I drove down a long straight road. I propped one elbow in the open window. I draped one wrist over the steering wheel. I felt the wind in my hair. Then a long deep curve. I held the accelerator steady. The wheels gripped the road. We leaned into it. And when the road straightened out again, I yelled and the wind sucked the sound away. I turned to the girl beside me and she smiled. I didn't wonder who she was or how she got there. I didn't wonder where I was going or where I was coming from. I just drove, the car's engine humming and the wind rushing in my ears. Like my blood.

“Wake up,” Dad said. He shook my foot. “The rain's stopped.”

I opened my eyes. “I wasn't sleeping,” I said, and eased myself out of my bunk. The hatches were open. A slight breeze filled the cabin. Dylan and Dad were at the chart table. Gerry lay topsides in the cockpit, curled on his side with his eyes closed. I was halfway up the ladder to join him when Dad stopped me.

“Come look at the charts with us,” he said.

I moved over and sat on the port settee. I picked up the logbook and opened it. Dad had already recorded the storm.

“This is the Great Bahama Bank,” he was saying, his finger moving back and forth across the chart.

I looked at the date in the logbook. I'd already missed the first week of school. My name was already lined out in every roll book.

“Ben,” Dad said. “I'm talking to you.”

I looked up.

“I've decided,” Dad said. “It's time to cross the Bank, and I think we're ready.”

I put down the logbook. “Cross the Bank?” I said.

“Yes,” Dad answered, spreading his fingers across the chart.

The Great Bahama Bank is a wide, flat underwater plateau. The Biminis and the Cat Cays where we had been sailing so far all lie along its western edge. The Berry Islands and Andros lie to the east. Between the two fringes of islands the ocean is shallow, twenty feet of water or less, with coral heads scattered around in certain areas.

“It's too shallow,” I said.

When you first start out on a boat, being on the deep ocean makes you nervous. You're always imagining falling off the boat, and somehow the fact that the water is so deep makes it seem more dangerous. But after a while, you change. After a while, you realize that it's the boat that's keeping you out of the water, and you want the boat to be safe. Then you get nervous when you can see the sand sliding by under your keel.

“It's plenty deep,” Dad said. “
Chrysalis
only draws five and a half feet. She could sail in six feet of water if she had to. Twenty will be more than enough.”

“I still don't like it.”

“I'm not asking you to like it. People cross the Bank all the time.”

“But why do
we
have to cross the Bank?”

“To get to the rest of the Bahamas,” Dad answered.

“You said we'd stay here awhile. We like it here.”

“I changed my mind. The weather's good for crossing. We'll stay longer at the next place. We'll sail tomorrow night.”

“At night!” I said. “We have to do another night passage?”

“We can't make it all the way across in one day, and the tide is right tomorrow night.”

“I don't want to sail all night.”

“It's just one night.”

“I don't want—”

Dad suddenly slapped the chart with both hands. “I am the captain. I have decided. We're leaving tomorrow night.”

“I'm not going,” I said quietly, and turned to climb the companionway ladder.

Dad's hand flashed out and grabbed my arm. “Yes, you are,” he said.

“No, I'm not.”

“Ben!” He shook my arm. “You're turning this trip into a nightmare.”

“
Turning
it into a nightmare?” I tried to pull away. “It was a nightmare to start with. We didn't want—”

“Shut up.”

“Make me.”

He dropped my arm and looked at me. “Just leave,” he said quietly, turning away. “Just go. Get out.”

I climbed into the cockpit where Gerry was now sitting up, his eyes big and Blankie pressed against his mouth. I stepped to the edge of the boat.

“What are you doing, Ben?” he asked.

“Leaving,” I said, and dove into the water.

I swam underwater as far as my breath would take me, then surfaced and turned back to look at the boat. They were all standing in a row along the side looking at me.

“Ben!” Dad screamed. “Get back on the boat!”

I turned and swam toward the island, but my stroke felt weak and wobbly.

“James Benjamin Byron,” he yelled. “Come back here now.”

I paused, treaded water, and turned again to look at him.

“Go to hell,” I screamed. “Go to hell—all of you!”

I turned again and swam toward shore. This time my stroke was stronger and my breathing much, much easier.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

WHEN MY FEET touched bottom, I stood and waded to shore without looking behind me. Then I immediately turned left and started walking south. If they were watching, they would see that I didn't look back, that I knew where I was going, that I had a plan.

The plan was simple. Dad had said I was ruining the trip. He didn't want me there. He had told me to leave. Well then, I would just stay on Gun Cay. Another sailboat would come. I would bum a ride to a nearby town. I would lie about my age, and in a day or two I'd have a job somewhere and I'd be gone for good. He would never see me again.

After the storm, the wind was light and the surf was still. Seagulls squawked and scattered as I approached, but everything else was quiet. Even
Chrysalis
. They weren't calling out to me. They had not launched the dinghy to come get me.

It was almost noon already, the sun was hot, and I didn't have a hat. Still I didn't slow down. I kept walking until the beach curved. When I finally paused to look back,
Chrysalis
was out of sight. I stopped. I could hear the casuarinas quietly sweeping the breeze with their long blue-green needles. I could hear the surf roll gently in, fold over, and slip away. I had not been completely alone since we left home.

I looked out at the ocean. That turquoise water. That pale sand. That emptiness. I wondered if a person could ever get used to it.

I waded into the perfectly clear water. I swam out and floated, facedown, all alone in the sea.

Looking down was like looking through a clarifying lens. The bottom was in sharper focus than the sand at my feet when I walked on the beach. I drifted over the waving grass and dirty gray shells, over fish that swam into my shadow then turned in a split second and swam away.

I turned over and lay spread-eagled on my back on top of the waves. The sun warmed my chest and face. My ears filled with the sound of the water. I opened my eyes on the sky and floated effortlessly over the sea. I wanted to feel clean and empty, like an open dinghy drifting free. I wanted to be blank and invisible.

But I was not. I was a boy floating in the ocean getting sunburned and hungry.

I wondered if Dad would leave without me. I wondered if Dylan and Gerry would let him.

Suddenly the sea felt cold even though the sun was hot. I swam back to shore and stretched out on my stomach on the sand. I lay resting my forehead on my crossed forearms, my nose a quarter inch from the sand. It was dark in the cave my arms made.

I was tired. I was hungry. I hadn't spoken a word since my last words to them.

I could still feel the way my mouth had moved as I shouted. I could still see the way they had stood there along the deck of the boat as the words hit them.

I rolled over on my back again and lay faceup to the sun. I knew what Mom would say. “That's not worthy of you, Ben,” she would say. “You're better than that.”

But she was wrong. I was not better than that. I was clotted and swollen. I was dirty and crusted. And Dad. Dad was not the person she thought he was, either.

After a while on the beach, I went up to the trees and sat in the shade. I was thirsty and getting hungrier. I looked around for berries or nuts. I thought of trying to find a spring, but I couldn't go far into the trees with no shoes or shirt. Empty coconut hulls lay on the beach, but none of the palms had coconuts in them. And I couldn't have climbed a palm tree anyway without ripping my skin to shreds. I wondered how long I would have to wait for another sailboat. I wondered how people had ever managed to live on these islands.

When evening came, the air cooled and a slight cloud cover drifted across the stars. What would Dylan do tonight without stars to watch? I wondered if it was lonely for Dylan up there among the stars? Did he like it empty? Was all that emptiness like the good part of being dead? The part where you aren't angry anymore, where you never feel scared?

In the dark, I walked slowly back up the beach until
Chrysalis
came into view. I sat on a log at the brush line so they couldn't see me. I could hear muffled voices. Light shone out the cabin windows and reflected on the water. Someone came on deck and went forward. I knew it was Dad checking the anchor. Someone else joined him. Dylan, I was sure. They stood together on the bow for a moment. Then I saw white flashing in the cockpit and knew it was Blankie. “Dad,” Gerry called. “Where are you?” The pair at the bow returned to the cockpit, and in a moment all the lights were gone. The boat was a shadow floating on the waves and I was alone on the beach.

For my birthday last year, Mom had asked me if I wanted a party. I told her no. I told her I wanted to take the boat out, just Andrew and me, and camp out at one of the coves on the lake. She said she would make a basket of food. Dad made sure I knew how to operate the radio. In the end, I didn't invite Andrew. I decided I wanted to go by myself. Mom was worried, but Dad said I was old enough to go alone.

I left late in the afternoon and sailed as far as I could before evening came. I anchored in a cove where a stream came down out of the hills and made a marshy mess in one corner. Across the cove from the stream lay a wide pebble beach littered with dried sticks and small logs. Beyond the beach, the forest floor was already soft with newly fallen leaves.