Lying back, Errol watched the mast move against the sky, a repeated crossed loop, the infinity sign. He had begun to feel sick. It started as pain just behind his forehead and spread down his spine; as the pain moved into his limbs over the next several hours, he began to tremble. By sundown his entire body was shaking and he began dragging things from the cabin—sail bags, an army blanket, the canvas cockpit cover—covering himself with these to the height of the coaming so that only his face showed and the arm that connected him to the tiller. These too were shaking, and unless he kept them locked his teeth rattled audibly. His course was taking him to some part of the vast world of rum, and his mind traced a path between this universe and a wallet still fat with banknotes. This wallet, pressed uncomfortably against his buttock, could have been left in the cabin, but the prospect of misplacing it on arrival in the land of rum was such that he wished to verify its whereabouts continuously by the discomfort it produced. Sunken eyed and desolate, he watched the stars rise from the sea, and he knew he was meant to find out where he was. But the sextant in the far end of the cabin with the sight tables might as well have been on the moon; he knew he couldn’t hold it steady enough to take a fix. Instead, he made a crude estimate in his mind of where he might be. The wind was in the first part of the southwest shift; hence the building seas after the quiet of the prevailing southeasterly. He knew he sailed on a starboard tack perhaps ten or fifteen degrees east of the wind, which meant only that he was headed for islands of various sizes, histories, and languages and not the open Atlantic. Beyond that he couldn’t say how far he’d gone since he’d departed from a hole in time somewhere behind him.
He vomited the flying fish onto the sole of the cockpit and moaned as malodorous drool poured from the corner of his mouth. His hand on the tiller was a claw by now and the shaking had grown sufficiently violent that he heard himself thump against the cockpit seat, where he stretched out under the heap of things he’d brought from the cabin. He recognized that he wouldn’t be able to steer much longer and wished that, while he’d had the strength, he’d heaved to and stopped the boat until a better hour. It was too late now. He lashed the tiller in place and let the wind pick his course out of a hat. The one advantage of this much misery was that he could quit caring, a welcome detachment from his suffering, suffering that would end in the Isles of Rum. At this point, he heard a bitter laugh fly from his mouth, a raspy bray that produced another just like it, then another as they fed off one another, and finally a picture of himself braying at a colossal rum bottle, which inspired bleak masturbation on the cockpit floor. After that, he could only hold his head up by resting his teeth on the seat.
A calming spell of defeat overtook him as he lay on his back looking up at the sail as it passed the stars. Though he recognized them all, he was somewhat absorbed as they flowed in one side of the sail and out the other with a purpose—though not his, of course; he had no purpose. He was not purpose, he was pulp. He cast about for consolation, grimly congratulating himself for being childless. But he remembered that his mestizos trusted him. Of course, they were grateful to anyone who learned their language in this coldhearted nation. But more. He worked beside them, made sure they were paid, while the cracker often inclined to contrive withholdings. The mestizos knew Errol was not so devious, and a working alcoholic appealed to their sense of shared desperation and defensible self-destruction. Indeed, they shook their heads in sympathy when he came to the groves sick, picked things up when he dropped them, carried his ladder. In the depths of his misery, this was all Errol could find, but under the circumstances it seemed quite a lot. Perhaps he was beginning to turn the corner, but first there was more vomiting to be done and the last of the flying fish went over the side. Miguel, Delfin, Juan, Machado, Estevez, Antonio, were their names. Good men.
He slept, but lacked the humanity to dream.
The yawl sailed on into day without his attendance. For hours the decks shone bright with dew and then dried as the sun arose. The telltale streamed from the masthead in the freshening breeze, and the water was no longer purple, as she had crossed the stream; now she pulled her thin seam of wake across the blue water of a new sea, one that grew steadily paler until the yawl’s own speeding shadow on the bottom preceded her, then rose to meet her when she ran aground.
Unavailing curses poured from the companionway as Errol emerged to view his misfortune. The jib, the main, and the mizzen displayed their same wind-filled curves and emphasized the sheer peculiarity of the boat’s lack of motion. Looking in every direction, he could see only more bars and the dark shapes of coral heads, any one of which would have sunk the boat. Noon was rapidly approaching, and he dug out his sextant to take a sight of the sun, though he mirthlessly noted the irony of having two pieces of information, latitude and the proximity of the bottom.
The sight reduction from his battered book of tables gave him to conclude that he was somewhere in the western Bahamas. He should pride himself on his effortless crossing of the stream, he thought sardonically. Once he’d accepted that he was immobile, he felt an unexpected wave of security at the calm translucent waters around him, the coral gardens that were pretty shadows beneath them, and he marveled at having sailed so far into this gallery before going aground on forgiving sand. The full moon was a few days away. If he was not too surely embedded on this bar, he had an excellent chance of floating free on a spring tide. He had enough food and seemed to exult in this absence of choices; he explored the idea that he was content to be stuck.
* * *
—
The days began to pass, each more peaceful than the last. He had begun to think of his boat as an island, and in fact he could walk all around it or swim among the coral heads where clouds of pretty reef fish rose and fell with him in the gentle wash. He caught lobsters and boiled them in salt water while Radio Havana played from the cabin. He stretched out in the cockpit and read Frantz Fanon, experiencing pleasant indignation. After the first night, he had dragged a mattress from atop the quarter berth into the cockpit, and he slept there, watching expectantly as the moon grew full to bring the big tides that would float him off. Then, for better or worse, his life would resume. The boat had begun to float tentatively, lifting slightly at the bow only to ground again when the tide fell, but release would come soon.
The last day Errol knew that at high tide, a few hours from now, the yawl would float, free to sail away. He took the opportunity to give the bottom a good scrubbing, breaking down the new barnacles with the back of his brush and then sweeping them off. Down tide, hundreds of tiny fish gathered in a silver cloud to eat the particles of barnacle. With the full moon, the weather changed and dark clouds gathered against the western sky. He would have to look for shelter as soon as he was under way, or at least find enough seaway to heave to. A storm was coming.
He waited in the cockpit into the afternoon, and around three, with a light grinding sound, the yawl lifted off and turned into the wind. The anchor line, which had hung slack when he’d walked the anchor out into the shallows, rose and grew taut. If this were a safe anchorage, he would wait out the storm, but the anchor wouldn’t have to slip much under the force of the wind to put him atop the coral. He reduced the mainsail before ever departing, taking the sail down at the second reef to a cleat on the mast. The line leading to a cringle on the leech he wrapped onto the reefing winch and drew that down until the main was little more than a storm trysail. He brought the anchor aboard, hand over hand, the rode dropping into the anchor locker until the anchor was at the stemhead, streaming turtle grass and small snapping creatures; there he secured it and returned to the mast to raise sail before the yawl could make much sternway.
Once sail was up, the yawl began to move obediently. Errol stood at the tiller, carefully conning his way through the dark coral heads in their white circles of sand. The shadow of the boat scurried alongside him on the rippled bottom. Gradually the shadow shrank, then vanished, as he found blue water. With a rising thrill, Errol set s
ail for the unknown. He knew that any piece of land at all was on the trail to hell, and that this ocean road put a good face on oblivion. A bad storm was coming; he meant to embrace it. The first passage would be fear, but the other side—if he could get there—was what interested him as being the country of death or freedom, unless it turned out they were the same thing.
It was the season of equinoctial storms, and the halo around the sun made Errol see in this something of a larger plan for him. Still, the little yawl was indifferent to such things, a thought whose absurdity he recognized without quite believing. Like most sailors, he did not regard his ship as inanimate and extended his senses out to all her parts the better to understand the whims of the sea. This impulse came of a great desire to survive that he was not sure he owned. Nevertheless, he believed his ship wished to live, and perhaps he would defer to her out of respect for the adage that a good ship is one which, when her master can no longer take care of her, takes care of her master.
Her purposeful obedience let Errol work his way through the coral heads to the dark blue of deeper water. Once she had way on, she never hesitated in stays—unless the man at the tiller was entirely lacking in skill—and moved from tack to tack like one of the domino players at the Cuban-American Hall in Key West. She’d been built forty years ago by a tidal creek in St. Michaels, Maryland, with a bottom of yellow pine from a church made by slaves, the marks of whose axes could still be found inside a hull so thick and hard that screws had to be drilled first; the topsides were single-length planks of Atlantic white cedar, frames of sawn white oak, the deck of native pine and canvas, Sitka spruce spars that had come on a train from Oregon a long time ago. When he reviewed her various attributes, as he often did, Errol began to feel responsible for her, and he recognized its absurdity without believing it. Whatever juju he believed her to possess was not mitigated by the fact that her previous owner was shot in a card game and she had sunk into desuetude at Garrison Bight until Errol rescued her for past-due dock fees and a modest bribe to the city council. He’d never find another boat with the marks of slaves’ axes in her timbers. She went up on jack stands at Stock Island, neglected sculpture among the shrimp boats, slowly returned to life by Errol and friends until launching day, when in an alcoholic crisis he sailed her away to the Dry Tortugas, anchoring in Mooney Harbor under the shadow of Fort Jefferson, to await a new day. His gratitude toward his little ship was evident in his belief that she had treated him like a cherished dependent and hung on her anchor, keeping a fresh breeze across his bunk until such time as he could return to the tiller like a man. When that day came, he sailed right past Key West and all his previous sins and fetched up at Cortez, his current berth, where he met the cracker at a party on the latter’s sixty-foot Hatteras; and there he began his apprenticeship in the orange groves, where his command of Spanish was put to service exploiting the cracker’s laborers. Errol suffered no more than most over the plight of his fellow man, yet this was a bit of a problem. Some of the men were refugees from violence, and their children, though occasionally visited by well-meaning social workers from the State of Florida, clearly expected massacres at any time and so avoided anyone who was not obviously a mestizo peasant. One way or another, the oranges continued to head for the juice plant at Arcadia, and Errol came to be trusted by these lost souls, who forgave his being a perro enfermo or perhaps even liked him because of it.
The job now was to get to deeper water and plenty of it before getting knocked around by the storm. He had no destination other than the knowledge that in this ocean you could not go far before striking some community or another, a bit of shelter, perhaps some refreshments. The problem was that his slowly clearing mind wasn’t sure it wished to arrive. The gradual illumination—cramps, headaches, and diarrhea notwithstanding—was a substantial reward in itself, and the reattachment to reality bore a religious quality, or at least rootless excitement. He imagined the storm as a cascade of invigorating challenges.
A set of line squalls formed across the horizon, driving columns of seabirds before it, a thunder-filled cross-winded trough of weather. He traversed five miles of broken sea to sail right into them, lightning jumping around over the spar, an uprush of fragrant supercharged sea in omnidirectional winds. Each cell had its own weather and light, from near darkness and pandemonium to a fluorescent stillness walled by rain. Thus far, a pleasant exercise, for he sailed right through the squalls for a better view of the gray sky beyond, scudding clouds and building seas where a barometric trench made the rules.
Foresight suggested that he feed himself in the time available. He lashed the tiller and went below to light the alcohol stove, dumping a can of chicken noodle soup into a pot. The yawl’s steady progress had acquired a kind of leaping motion, and he stirred the soup impatiently, as though that would shorten the time it took to heat it. He raised and lashed the weather cloths beside the bunks and stowed the few loose objects in their Pullman nets: a bottle of aspirin, a notepad, the Frantz Fanon book, a Key West telephone directory, spare winch handle, and flashlight. When he returned to the stove, a wisp of steam rose from the soup, but there was no time to enjoy it as the yawl was knocked onto her beam ends by the crush of wind, imprisoned in a bad angle by the lashing on her tiller. When Errol looked up through the companionway, a graybeard arose in the dim light, its top blowing off into spume, and subsided. It was a grim black-and-white movie, Down to the Sea in Ships, Clara Bow the It Girl and dying whales. This sort of respite from reality had previously been his accommodation; but for better or for worse, reality would be back, plowing irony before it.
Errol half crawled into the cockpit from the companionway and snapped on his lifeline. Once the tiller was free again, the boat rose to the gusts and relieved some of the lateral pressure that had her on her side. The pool of water in the self-bailing cockpit roared through the scuppers and emptied quickly. The frontal storms that had met his requirements for a manageable challenge were beyond him now; in their place, the wind came in an unimpeded fetch from open ocean in a scream. The incessant movement of the boat gave him the sense that they were being chased by the increasingly enormous waves, whose breaking crests gleamed unpleasantly. A cabinet burst open in the galley, discharging all his canned goods, and when Errol looked below he could see the food racing about on the floor.
The yawl rose as each great sea swept past with an uncanny hiss. His steering the boat now consisted entirely in keeping the stern presented to the waves and preventing the yawl from broaching as she sped down their backs. Thankfully, he detected a rhythm in this and, being able to feel the rise of sea without looking, made the proper adjustments through the memory of his muscles. Though reefed to a fraction of its original size, the mainsail seemed hard as iron and its leech buzzed like an electric saw. The black faces of approaching waves were so steep that Errol quit looking back; they were at the height of the spreaders and it seemed another degree or two of pitch and they must fall on him. If they did, they did: he wouldn’t watch that.
A rain began, and then a pelting rain, which after a time flattened the sea. Now the yawl whistled along, seeming to enjoy its velocity undeterred by the recent mountains of water, the speed of wind for the moment little more than an inconvenience. Errol took this opportunity to go below and confront the disorder of the cabin. It was mostly canned goods and he stowed them frantically, knowing the calming rain wouldn’t last.
When the violent motion of the ship resumed, he was reluctant to go above. He pretended the cabin was insufficiently tidy and lingered over trifles, the charts that needed rolling, the celestial tables that had somehow landed on the wrong shelf; he even renewed the paper towel on its roller. All this housekeeping betrayed a grim comedy as he was flung about performing it.
A boarding sea fell with a thud on the cabin top. He watched the water roar through the cockpit, overwhelm the scuppers, and pour over the transom and the untended helm. He felt the weight of it press against the little yawl’s buoyancy in repeated attempts
to overwhelm it. Recognizing a plausible run-up to drowning, Errol was swept by lethargy, not the same as peace but fatalist stupefaction. He was not afraid to die but very frightened of drowning, of filling his lungs with seawater and sinking to the bottom of the ocean; nothing could be more alien unless it was on another planet. That of course was just how his friend Raymond had departed, having once remarked that it would be an appropriate end for anyone who had trafficked in refugees. This thought produced in Errol an unexpected return of the heebie-jeebies. He forced himself into the cockpit, and there he saw that the great waves had begun to cascade and he was sure the end was at hand. This gave him some peace at least. He went about his business managing the ship, exercising what few options remained.
He replaced the reefed main with a storm trysail, now the only sail on the boat. He’d thought that the double-reefed main would be good enough, but it wasn’t. If it had loaded up with seawater, it would have been big enough to take out the mast. Amid gusts that sounded like gunshots, he sheeted the trysail to leeward, lashed the tiller in the opposite direction, and produced a plausible version of heaving to: the yawl drifted and forged slightly into the wind, fell off, forged, and fell off again. The sea was now covered by flying spindrift, a gruesome fuzz that extended to the glittering wave tops. Errol could bear to see no more and went below and crawled into a bunk but was soon flung onto the floor where the oozing bilge emerged between the planks. He crawled in again, lashed up his weather cloth so he was secured in the bunk, laced his fingers behind his head, and entertained himself with ideas of death while disdaining those of drowning, fish eating his flesh, descent to a lightless sea bottom, et cetera. In the Pullman net beside him was a Cuban statuette of the Madonna, the gift of a refugee physician; he turned it until it faced him. “Our Lady,” he said. He liked her face. She looked a bit Cuban, actually; he was pleased she was not so universalized as to seem inhuman. He stared into the tiny face as the senseless chaos of the sea tried to destroy his home. The face grew larger and came toward him. He was falling in love.
Cloudbursts Page 27
