The She (2 page)

"West Hook. I'm here. Over."

"Emmett, shut the south-face window in the living room before you turn in. Your dad forgot. Rain coming. Over."

"It's here, Mom. Where are you? Over."

"Coming into the canyon. Got off course a little bit. Somehow. Over."

"What do you mean, 'somehow'? Over." He thinks them getting off course makes no sense, which it doesn't. The
Goliath
is more than three hundred feet long, and the pilothouse has every finder known to man on it. Depth finder current chaser; wind reader automatic navigator weather fax.

"Uh ... don't know. Loran receiver says we're well into the canyon, but we're not. We've only got depth of twelve hundred yards. We misplaced a few hundred somewhere. Over."

"You see any swells break when you crossed? Over."

He's asking because sometimes the swells break into waves right at the edge of the shelf. I'm always asking Dad if I can drive through them.

"Uh..." I hear Mom laughing. "There's a lot of white stuff winking at me right now, Emmett. Hard to say. Looks sort of like ... black-bean soup, coming to a boil in a pot. Weird water tonight. Why? You worried?" Her laughter rings through, and she says, "Over."

"No. Over."

I know he is. If not worried just ... itchy, antsy. I can tell things like that about the people in my family. They can't tell about each other; but I can tell about them, and Emmett is itchy.

"Good. In case you start to worry, think of the ninety steel girders we've got down in the hold. You know how much that weighs? We're not going to wander too far off course, functioning computer or nonfunctioning computer Over."

"Yeah, I know. I just ... I don't know. Where's Dad? Over."

"He just went to spit over the stern. He's coming in ... Let me put him on..."

Spit over the stern is something Barrett sea captains always do in a storm, because it mixes their body with the sea so they can "reach an agreement" with her if they have to. I don't like that Dad is deciding to spit.

"Barrett here. Over." My dad's voice rings through.

"It's just me, Dad. Mom says you're off course. Over."

"We're over the pit of the canyon. I'm sure of it. Never underestimate a captain's intuition. It's this fancy-schmancy new depth finden You know how I hate technology, but, hey, it was Mary Ellen's boat before it was mine, and if she wants to use up her trust fund loading it up with contraptions, well, God bless her. How's Evan? Over."

"Playing with his army men."

It's a real say-nothing answer but I don't miss the little click in his voice. It tells me I've been making him nervous. He's been thinking about The She and blaming it on me. I can tell he's stalling about getting off the ship-to-shore.

"Dad, what's it look like from the stern? Over."

I don't like my dad's laugh. It's his dinner table laugh, from when he was trying to laugh off the superstition about a husband-wife team bringing bad luck to a voyage.

"Weird, I have to say. Your mother's describing it ... Yeah. Black-bean soup being stirred in a boiling pot. Over."

They're all laughing now. I can hear Mom in the background. I rush up to the doorway of the office to stare at Emmett. There's a warning barreling up my throat. But I know it will sound like baby shit in a diaper. Still, the image of a stirring pot fills my head, some giant, invisible she-devil finger spinning the waves slowly, then fasten and fasten and faster.

He has his back to me, and he's leaning on Dad's desk, staring out at the rain and sleet beating against the black window, hearing the sounds of the angry ocean.

"Black-bean soup, huh?" He's stalling, stalling ... doesn't want to be alone with me. "Don't let the DEA hear you say that. They'll be going through your hold with a toothpick, and you'll never make it to Jamaica without paying that late penalty. Over."

Some boats run drugs when cargo is short. One boat tried to fake a disappearance and sent a Mayday saying The She was after him. He got caught, but I could have told the Coast Guard he was a liar; because I didn't hear The She when he was supposed to be getting his boat eaten.

Dad's talking again, and I don't like the sound of it. They're talking about the water, and cracking jokes about the Bermuda Triangle, and they're sort of laughing, but still.... "Emmett, here's the weirdest thing. The wind. Can you hear that wind whipping? Over"

"Plainly, yeah. Over."

"Well, when you go out on the stern, you can't feel it. You can hear it, all right. It's like it's coming from everywhere ... and nowhere. Over."

Emmett gets silent for a long moment. "You ever see anything like that before? Over."

A long cackling came, like a spitting between the sounds of shrieking winds. Dad doesn't answer the question. His voice gets louder and clearer, like he's got his lips pressed right up to the handset, like he doesn't want Mom to hear.

"Emmett, you know what's in my desk drawee bottom, left-hand side. I know you don't like to hear about it, but ... do it for the old man, okay? Over."

I back up out of the door frame so Emmett can't see me when he turns. But I hear him open the drawee hear what sounds like a paper being shoved into his jeans pocket. I peek one eye around, and the corner of a paper is sticking out of his back pocket.

He sounds annoyed. "I don't see why you're working on scaring the shit out of me if you're saying it's just a mild rainstorm and you're completely on course. Over."

"Don't scare so easily." Dad's laugh came through. "I'm just talking to you from my intuition. If you want to drive your own vessel someday soon, you've got to learn to listen to it. All the toys in the world will not replace intuition."

"Yes sir."

Neither of them sounds too happy. And they had forgotten to say "over."

"And Emmett."

"Yes sir"

"Don't forget to take good care of your brother. Over."

I figure this is as good a point as any to make my grand entrance. "I want to talk, too."

"Hey, little buddy." Emmett puts his arm around me, which is weird. Sometimes he's pleasant enough, but he usually doesn't touch me except for an affectionate swat. Most of the time he's torturing me.

And I know my intuition, but suddenly my intuition is all gone from me. I feel lost at sea. I'm all turned around inside of myself, clicking the button and hearing them laugh. I feel like I'm dreaming.

I've used the ship-to-shore to talk to Dad many times, and so Emmett leaves after a minute or two, telling me he has to get in the shower.

I don't usually like being on the first floor by myself. The times my parents let Emmett watch me, I'm like a puppy, attached to his side. But you don't follow somebody into the shower. I cut a few more jokes with my parents, promise to brush my teeth, and I go back into the living room.

The rain-sleet is hammering at the window. I look at the clock. Nine-forty. I am usually in bed at nine-thirty, and suddenly I'm way, way tired. I pick up my navy men and start putting them back into the box. But my arms feel so heavy, I have to stop a couple of times, hold up my hand, and look at it.

I say to each sailor, "Go to sleep," which feels weird. I don't talk to my navy men usually. But I keep doing it.

"Go to sleep, go to sleep..." I glance up at the window Emmett had forgotten to close. It's too heavy and high for me to shut, though that curtain's still flapping up to the ceiling, making me cold with this wind. "Go to sleep..."

Half of me wants to go upstairs to bed, but my whole body feels chained down here, like there are weights on my feet and shoulders.

And all of a sudden, I hear her.

I drop the shoe box so I can put my fingers to my ears, but I'm stepping all over navy men and I'm heavy and my heavy arms won't reach my head. I know The She and it takes me a minute to realize this time it sounds different. It's definitely her. But she's shut up in a box or a tomb. The sound is buried, not loud and free from over the ocean. She's ... behind me. I spin.

Looking past the dark kitchen, I suddenly don't care that it's darker back there or that I'm rushing toward her voice. The closer I get to Dad's office, the louder her shrieking gets.

I stare at my dad's empty desk chair, then the radio, hearing what my intuition tells me is a dream, but I'm wide awake.

"Coast Guard, this is the vessel
Goliath
. We are approximately eighty-four miles southeast of Atlantic City. We just lost power and a valve below the waterline. We have a list. We are caught in something, a very heavy current pulling us northeast. We are being ... sucked—Mayday, Mayday. Coast Guard, this is the vessel
Goliath—
"

I grab for the handset and push down the button, which stops the shrieking, at least while I speak. "Mom? What's wrong? Over!"

The shrieking mixes with her voice while she's talking to me, to Dad, it's all mixed together. "Oh, shit, we got the baby, Wade! Evan! Tell Emmett to ... Wade! What the hell is that? Over the port stern! Look with your eyes! Mother of God!"

I want to jump through the radio to get to my mom's screaming Maydays, and I want to bolt upstairs to get Emmett. I end up backing out slowly, hearing The She until she has almost overpowered my mother's voice, which is screaming. The sound is all through me then, coming from the sky, the beach, the radio.

I'm up the stairs, throwing open the bathroom door, but the light is out, the air is dry. I tear down the hall to the big wooden door and the stairway that leads up and around to the widow's walk. I pass my mom's padlock, hanging open, and try the stairs that go up and up and round and round. But I'm still a thousand pounds and I can feel myself being sucked down ... into black, deep, dizzy, swirling black. I croak, "Emmett...," but I'm falling backward ... forever and ever falling.

"
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly,
science into superstition, and art into pedantry.
Hence University education.
"
—G
EORGE
B
ERNARD
S
HAW

I sat down in physics class two days before Thanksgiving and went through this trail of amazingly satisfying thoughts. First, it was my last physics class before a four-day holiday. Second, the view out the window almost made the class worth having. There's something about old, tall buildings and taller, new buildings, and cabs, and horns, and traffic rushing along JFK Boulevard that is almost as good as television. After Thanksgiving, Christmas lights and store windows would be a decent enough distraction to keep physics boredom from killing me.

Which brought me to my final satisfying thought: I considered it my solemn duty to amuse my friends and fellow humans in the meantime, and some fun with physics was on its way.

People were groaning because Mr. Maddox had come in with his laptop, which meant a Maddox superdeluxe-o PowerPoint presentation (super in his opinion only). I had "borrowed" a copy of his file to make it less sleep worthy, and I now was doing my straight-face relaxation exercises. All my friends say I have some genius for disrupting classes, but that's not really true—there's just one major trick involved. It is majorly important to keep a completely straight face.

Mr. Maddox lowered the lights, and up on the big-screen TV we saw,
MR. MADDOX'S SUPERDELUXE-O
PHYSICS IN MOTION, FEATURING...

People were yawning. I yawned, looked at Harley Ehrlich, and winked.

She did a double take, having seen the wink. Then she groaned and whispered, "Are we going to have pea soup dripping from the ceiling again? If so, I don't know how you expect him to see it in the dark."

I kept my bored face. She cracked up. She said once that the more bored I look, the better it is.

FEATURING ... SISTER AMOEBULAS ... THE SCIENTIFIC NUN.

And there beside Mr. Maddox's superdeluxe-o lettering was his little animated nun icon, which he had fallen in love with back in September, She zipped across all his slides, pointing at this and that with superdeluxe-o sound effects. We'd quit wondering back in September if the superdeluxe-o sound effects would have Sister Amoebulas quacking like a duck or breaking glass or honking like a car horn.

Mr. Maddox clicked to the first screen, which was supposed to explain to us the difference between the guts of a proton and the guts of an electron. Harley sat forward slowly, staring. She had noticed, though I'm not sure anyone else had yet. This nun icon was just slightly different than Sister Amoebulas. A little taller and thinner,

"You touched his nun?" Harley turned to me. "In a Catholic school? I'd have left the nun alone and had my fun with some other graphic."

But she didn't understand the whole story. The night before I had seen up on farts.com this little nun character that looked alarmingly like Sister Amoebulas, only with a whole new and different set of sound effects. I was a victim of circumstance.

"They call her Sister Mary Flatulence," I whispered. "She's ... a rip?"

Then this little cartoon nun's habit blew out in the back, and a spark cracked, and she broke this way-nasty-sounding wind. Mr. Maddox froze, and I think everyone else did, too, except Harley, who murmured, "Touching a man's software. That's got to be worth a couple of Saturday detentions."

It took most everybody a couple of more sound effects before they believed they were seeing a nun run all around the energy equations, her habit billowing backward to the sounds of yesterday's Fart of the Day.

Harley turned to me, shaking her head. "What'd you do, steal his laptop?"

"Just copied the file onto a disk. Do I look like a hood?"

Mr. Maddox was not being very smart. He kept fast-forwarding through the screens, hoping this edit job would end, but he was just giving the class more and better effects. On the sixth slide, the nun was twirling, dancing on top of a molecule, bowing to one side.
Pooooh...
She bowed to the other side, and a fatal car accident resounded instead of a fart.

"All right. Mr. Barrett, do you have my real program, please?"

People were laughing more at me, I think, than at Sister Mary Flatulence, because they could never believe I could look so totally clueless. I didn't think he'd point the first finger at me. We had a couple of big-time comedians in the class who were better computer whizzes.