The Night That Finds Us All, page 16
“Jesus,” he says. “No need to be such a dick.”
“Well, you’re acting like you don’t have one.”
“Nuts,” he says. He throws up his hands and walks off. The crew returns, we stow provisions, we spend hours on a deck check. I notice another rope tied off mid-beam as though it’s trailing in the water, but it would’ve fouled the props and it seems like it’s been there a while and I hadn’t noticed, and before I can investigate, Seabees calls me to assist with putting away the bottles of fresh water for drinking and cooking. The watermaker’s production is fine, but tasteless. The crew prefers bottled. I don’t think about the timing of the request.
…
We leave in the morning, early, in processional beneath the bridge. A naval passeggiata. The boats come in, the boats go out as the tide balances on a high wire. Megayachts and trawlers and twenty-three-foot Bermuda rigs and family-owned fishing skiffs and everything in between. The great panoply of seagoing vessels. For us, next stop: São Miguel in the Azores, the verdant isle. All those who have sense to make the same trip left a month before.
For normal boats, it would take around twenty-five days to cross to the Azores, if they average over a hundred nautical miles a day. I’ve done it in twenty-three, but the weather was perfect and we surfed a high-pressure system like dogs of winter. For the Blackwatch? If we make it in a month, we’ll be lucky. There’ll be very little motor sailing. While we carry outrageous amounts of diesel, there’s nowhere near enough to get to the Azores without sailing ninety percent of the time. None of us, none of the crew, are thinking about the risks—it’s too much to bear. Hurricane season is only a few twists of the Earth away.
We motor once more into the sea. Then I shut it down and there’s a kind of desperate silence that falls over our patch of ocean. We put up sails. Not all of them, but six out of the eight ain’t too bad. It only takes an hour and then the trimming is a constant effort. The remaining Threves are old hands now and I’m kind of sorry I ever had bad thoughts about them. Everyone has shrunk. During long journeys, each of us shrinks—like coral life or a crustacean retreating into its hard shell. Or maybe, picture a body, tossed overboard and sinking, down and down to such a depth that it begins to rot along the way and even the gasses it vents cannot make it more buoyant. Pressure mounts, the temperature falls, and if it wasn’t for the titanic mounting pressure, the body might freeze; it ceases its decay. But it descends, shrinking as it goes, compressing upon itself. No bathypelagic fish feed, and the lantern-eyed fish watch silently in the abyss as the body descends and wait for it to come to rest. That is each of us, the body, the water, the abyssal fish. All under pressure falling away from the sun, into the fathomless darkness.
There’s little talk. The group dinners have ceased. Meals are taken individually, each of us finding a place on the boat where we aren’t disturbed—Hank in his spacious cabin, Seabees in hers, the remaining Threves in the salon, watching old John Wayne movies on VHS: The Quiet Man and The Searchers, True Grit and Rooster Cogburn, Rio Lobo and the truly execrable Donovan’s Reef. Loick perches in front of the large wooden dinghy, on deck, or in the library, and no one knows where Mouse disappears to; I found him seated once on the mizzen arm. Loick was right—you can get lost in the body of the Blackwatch.
The wind changes. While it’s not cyclonic, we get weather. We drop the gaff topsails and jib top and reef the jibs, and still keep up speed, such that it is. Rollo’s having problems—a stutter step—and I’m worrying about the fuel we got in Sint Maarten. So when one of the tanks empties, I begin a back-and-forth of filtering fuel from one tank to another in hopes of getting out all the schmutz in the diesel. A bilge pump begins a constant cycle of pumping and I have to take that one offline and troubleshoot and fix it and that takes two days. A janky bilge pump means that on every watch the crew has to assist with hand-pumping out the bilges to prevent the other pumps from going out due to overwork. At random moments, even in the small hours of the night, I can hear soft curses and the suck and compression of the hand-bilge as one of us cranks the pump’s lever.
Big seas and big weather. Gusts up to thirty knots. Everyone wears PFDs and clips on to safety lines from stem to stern even at high noon, all wishing we had brought kneepads for crawling about on deck as the Blackwatch bucks and rolls like a horse wild with strangles. Loick looks gray even in the half-light of day. Everyone is tired. It has been two months since this voyage began. And change. With two of the crew gone, watches are that much more exhausting. They come quicker and seem to last longer. I can’t sleep and I spend my off-watch time looking at the papers the old woman gave me and scratching my head. She could’ve, she should’ve, been clearer. How do you make sense from the senseless? All the talk of “ritual” as though this was liturgy in a Catholic church, with naval priests and crewmen acolytes. I revisit poor, wonderful Abigail. I consider borrowing Hank’s Garmin phone to search the internet on how to separate gummy journal pages. How I would love to read more on the lady of the Blackwatch giving her husband a knuckle sandwich.
I hear tapping and whispers one night after my watch, and sit up. Loick is in his bunk.
“You hear that, Loick?” I say, loud enough to wake him. I don’t care at this point. I don’t care. He can think what he wants. I know I’m not imagining it.
“What? Huh?”
Tap tap, tap tap.
“That!” I say. “You hear it?” At this point we’re well into the Atlantic in the long haul to the Azores. Sails are up, winds are steady and mild.
I hop down from the bunk and pull on my raincoat. Loick sits up and rubs sleep from his eyes. “Yeah, I do.”
Abruptly, everything in our berth—the hanging clothes, our device-charging cables, towels—shifts and tilts away from the wall and then there’s an overwhelming sense of vertigo as the world, and our sense of it, shifts forty-five degrees. The center of gravity has changed. The Blackwatch is heeling over. Something like this only happens with rogue waves or some sort of impact. But we’d have heard and felt a crash, and if it was a wave we would’ve righted ourself eventually, unless—I don’t know. I can’t even guess at what might be making us shift this way. As it stands, we are just heeled. Heeled hard.
“Get up,” Loick says. As he does, the thrum of Rollo sputters and dies. Abruptly, silence is triumphant. The Blackwatch’s ambient creaks and moans are suddenly in the forefront. Distantly, I hear calls from above. At a quick guess, I imagine that the angle we’re at has shifted the fuel so that it’s away from the intake and Rollo is starved. I hope. Hell, I even pray this is the case.
Rising is difficult. Imagine that your house suddenly canted forty-five degrees. How would you get out? I’ll tell you. You’d walk the corners, where wall meets floor. You’d grip handholds and fiddles and knobs and anything and go hand to hand like orangutans on rope swings at the zoo.
I manage to grab my red-light headlamp—red to preserve night vision—and Loick does the same. It’s the little rituals—that word again—that keep you safe on a boat, at night. In strange circumstances. Loick grabs the doorframe of our berth and pulls himself into the passage and extends a hand to me. I reach out from my foothold against our bunks and he pulls me to him. “There’s no water coming in,” he says. We move aft, toward the salon. We encounter Seabees there. She looks at us, surprised, bracing herself against the wall. “What’s going on?”
“Obviously we’re heeled over,” I say.
In the air, a keening sound begins. It sounds like the memory of a siren, the ghost of an air-raid alert.
“What the fuck is that?” Loick says.
“Can’t be a ball bearing burning out,” I say. “Rollo’s down.”
“It’s coming from the deck,” Seabees says, standing by the PFD locker. She grabs some of the vests and tosses them to us. We put them on, and it’s a struggle at this angle. Everything is a struggle at this angle. Finally, when Loick and I have them on, we take the companionway steps up, half-crawling, bracing ourselves against the port wall as we go for stability. Threve One appears from the crew cabins, struggling to navigate the tilted space. Seabees follows us up, the small clicks from her PFD being fastened drowned out as we move forward, replaced by the sounds of wind, water. The faint high-pitched keening. There is something about that sound that’s so—discomposing. It has an urgency and intention. It feels organic, not produced by a speaker or siren. Like a banshee’s wail, if there were such things as banshees. Are there? Here I am, believing in the supernatural now, and that kicks down the doors of belief for all sorts of things. I guess fairies and the Devil and Sasquatch and the Boggy Creek Monster all exist, too. My mind skitters around like drops of water on a smoking-hot pan. The Blackwatch groans. The old girl doesn’t like being held in this position so long. Panic is slowly rising in the back of my throat, like a scream. I swallow it back down. Is this a gale? Has the wind changed?
We crawl on deck and immediately Loick slips to port where the bulwark is beneath water. From the mouth of the companionway, there’s a vertiginous moment of looking down into the ocean below us. Loick slides rapidly toward it on his ass. He manages to grab a line before he goes into the drink. There’s a strange illumination, a sickly greenish glow. The bizarre keening grows louder but more indistinct all at once. A cold wind whips through the rigging but seems to have no effect upon the angle of heel.
The sea is oil black and as relatively smooth as seas get. It has calmed its wild rumpus of before. I look to the pulpit, where Mouse and Threve Two are goggling at the circumstances. “Look!” Threve Two cries.
There, below us in the oil-slick water, a shape moves beneath the surface. It dwarfs Loick, who in my view is in the foreground. It dwarfs the Blackwatch. A shifting dark form, so large and foreign that my mind has trouble not just with its shape and scale, but with its very existence. For a giddy moment, it’s almost as though this shadow moving beneath the water is the apotheosis of all the mysteries offered by this journey and my mind and consciousness veer away from it. The universe keeps throwing the impossible at my teeth and I keep trying to roll with the punches, but my stamina is failing.
Loick hangs by the rope and Threve Two bellows incoherently. Then whatever is in the water rolls, showing its luminous underside—I am hesitant to call it a belly—and disappears. Abruptly the Blackwatch shifts and rocks back like a massive bobber, righting itself. The keening sound diminishes. The quality of air changes, and the vault of heaven reveals itself in its majesty, choked with stars.
“What the fuck just happened?” Loick says, rising. Panting heavily.
As a group we go through all of the possible explanations and I find myself furious, all my panic turned to anger. And I don’t know who or what to be angry with. After discussion, Mouse, Threve Two, and Loick decide it was a pod of orcas—they’ve been known to attack sailing vessels and even sink them—possibly compounded with the green flash, the mysterious atmospheric phenomenon that none of us had ever seen. Or maybe the orcas had algae on their bellies, giving them a greenish tint. This is all bullshit, no pod of orcas would be this far from shore, and even the Threves can see I’m getting pretty agitato about all the verbal wankery. Once again I find myself arguing with men about reality. And once again they defy me to give some alternate explanation and of course I cannot. Sea monsters? Jesus. But something was there and at my core I knew it wasn’t a fucking orca. It felt as though for an instant we were somewhere else. Loick looks at me with an expression as though he’s thinking, Oh here it comes, Vines and her ghosts. Seabees remains silent, allowing us lesser folk to hash it out. There’s a kind of exultant excitement to her. I’ve known sailors to get off on the promise of danger, the closeness of death. I wouldn’t put it past her to be an adrenaline junkie on top of everything else she is.
Hank Fucking Huntington appears on deck, bleary, eyes full of sleep. I’ve been keeping him in Klonopin. Samantha Vineyard, your neighborhood alcoholic and drug dealer, at your service.
“What the heck just happened?” Hank says.
Loick says, under his breath, “He slept through that? Are you shitting me?” as Mouse fills Hank in.
“Whatever it was,” Seabees says, in her precise manner. She’s a little breathless, a little flushed, after all the excitement. I awkwardly remember witnessing that once before, up close and very personal. I’m unbalanced and my mind has become rumbustious and pervy. “Blackwatch was heeled over hard and moaning. Loick and Vines, Mouse. You’re on deck check. Hank, would you be so kind as to help me trim the main and mizzens. Threve, five points to starboard.”
Hank hops to, happy to have something to do. I’ll hand it to Hank Fucking Huntington, he’s happy to follow directions, despite being the captain, and doesn’t get his dick in a bunch when the directions come from Seabees. I know a lot of guys who’d get pissy.
The Blackwatch appears undamaged, though we do find a screw on deck, which means we’ll have to search out its former home in the daylight before it can cause big trouble. The kingdom lost for want of a nail and all that.
Then: there, forward of amidships, a thick hempen line tied off.
“What’s this?” Loick asks. Seabees bends to examine it. I move to port and see another line tied off at the same spot.
“A keelhaul line?” Seabees says.
“Why the fuck would someone tie off a keelhaul line?” I say.
“To keelhaul someone?” Seabees says with a lightness in her voice. Maybe she’s forgotten she’s being a see-you-next-Tuesday to me, currently.
“It hasn’t been here long. I checked the deck at the end of last watch and it wasn’t here,” Loick says, his expression hidden by the red glare of his headlamp. He unties the knot and coils the sheet and hooks it on the gunwale with all the others. “Prank, probably.” He looks back toward the cockpit where Mouse’s and Threve Two’s faces are illuminated from below by the lights of the Navionics. “Either of you tie off this keelhaul line?” he calls.
Threve One says, “What’s a keelhaul line?”
“No,” Mouse says. “ ’Course not.” He turns slightly toward Threve Two and explains: “A keelhaul line goes around the belly of a boat. Back in the day, the Dutch would punish mutineers by tying a sailor to it and dragging them across the bottom of a ship, barnacles and all. I’m betting very few survived.”
“This blasted boat,” Seabees says and yawns. She moves back toward the companionway and then disappears.
“At least we can agree on that,” I say, under my breath.
Loick says, “Lovers’ spat?”
“Oh, fuck you, big man. It’s none of your goddamned business,” I say and stomp off.
…
We are fifteen dawns out—the exact midpoint between Sint Maarten and Ponta Delgada in the Azores. The AIS stopped pinging regularly days ago—sometime around when we discovered the keelhaul line—and we are thousands of miles from land in all directions. An infinitesimal speck on the vast body of the Earth, but I guess we’ve always been that. The emptiness of the ocean just brings it into focus, the smallness of our lives.
I’m on watch with Threve One. It’s 3 a.m. It’s always three in the morning. It has always been three in the morning. Hank’s made the call to fire up Rollo in hopes of getting out of this weather, and it being night and a real bitch to deal with all the various sails, the captain often wants me to run the engine for a few hours to make sure everyone gets some sleep. I think it’s a wise choice but on the other hand, at some point I have to put the kibosh on it because we’re going through diesel too fast. It would be hell to get to the Azores and have no fuel to come into harbor and have to call for a tow. Meanwhile, I’m constantly scheduled for the 3 a.m. watch. It’s like Seabees—who makes the watch schedule—always wants me up at the ass-crack of dawn. Nothing has changed between me and her: her sad looks and then wicked smiles and her sadistic scheduling of watches.
Threve One’s slow to rouse but gets alert quick when I enter his berth. I’m in foulies even though it’s hot. Outside, in the wind and wet, you can get cold fast.
“Fuckin’ weird dreams, Sam,” he says, pushing himself up off the mattress. Suddenly I’m alert as I’ve ever been.
“It happens when you can’t get a solid eight hours. It’s like you’re always dreaming,” I say in a tone I hope says Hey, open up, tell me your dreams. Spill the tea. “Even when you’re awake.” I knock on the wall near the ceiling. “We’re on deck.”
“It’s like I’m hearing voices,” he says and tries to brush the sleep from his eyes. “All the carvings in this tub are whispering to me.” He shrugs and rises.
“And what are they saying to you? These dream voices,” I ask very carefully.
“Sometimes they’re reading stuff off a menu. Club sandwich, grilled ham and cheese, fish and chips, side of ranch. You know,” he says.
I relax. Standard dream gobbledygook. Then the motherfucker had to continue.
“Sometimes they’re saying, I don’t know, weird stuff. Like ‘the gutted swine, the red lash, the butterfly.’ Unconnected stuff—” He catches sight of my reaction. “You okay, Sam?”
“Yeah, I—” I’ve come around on the Threves but (and this is a big but) I haven’t come around enough to share my experiences of the Blackwatch’s strange phenomena. “Sometimes I have crazy dreams like that, too. This boat eats at you. All the old-world shit.”
“It’s a piece of work, for sure,” he says. “I’ll take my Beneteau any day.” Threve One’s reason for being here, for paying Hank for this passage, is that he’s bought a fancy-schmancy new forty-foot Beneteau yacht with his marketing or sales or engineering money and needs the hours and nautical miles at sea for a captaincy or (and this is more likely) getting the boat insured. The photos he’s shown us of the yacht’s interior make it look like the deck of the USS Enterprise. Sleek and ultramodern, full of blond woods rather than this baroque nest of dark mahogany carvings, with a suspicious lack of spectres, odd phenomena, poltergeists, and blood-vomit after falling death. Falling death on a boat. Read that one again. Every sailor I know has visualized drowning. I doubt that any have considered falling to their deaths while crewing.
