Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  It was time to go topsides once again. He didn’t realize how peaceful the cabin had been until he was in the cockpit. The hove-to yawl seemed to follow a cycle. At the bottom of the troughs there was a kind of peace. This created a leeward eddy that moderated some of the more fearsome violence. At the same time, the troughs were so deep they actually protected him from the wind. Once the yawl rose to the crests again, the full force of the wind and its attendant shrieks could be felt.

  It was with welcome detachment that he observed the behavior of his boat and concluded that there was no more he could do for her; she had managed thus far, and to be ready to cope with any great change in conditions he would have to sleep. He hoped that the cooler sea temperatures outside the stream would restrain the storm, but there was as yet no sign of that. He went below once again and secured himself in his bunk, feeling, as he fastened the weather cloths that kept him from rolling out, an odd coziness that he guessed came from his now-rapt gaze upon his Madonna. It was not that he possessed a single religious conviction, but knowing millions worshipped her was consoling. He wished to be among the millions, and this was a start. If he lived till daybreak, he would address his gratitude to Allah as well as Our Lady, and to their millions of worshippers, his fellow humans.

  First, he asked her forgiveness for not helping Raymond back into the boat. True, he had not pushed Raymond overboard. The ocean had done that: the jib boom had come adrift and was beating a hole in the deck; Raymond had gone forward without his lifeline; the bow buried in a green sea, and when it came up, in a white cloud of spindrift, Raymond was no longer there. He floundered alongside the passing hull, reaching toward Errol. The split second of ambivalence—as though Raymond were being swept to New Orleans with Natalya—was all it took, and Raymond was gone. Natalya had had her fling with pirates and was careful the next time to latch on to someone with a future and an office.

  He asked to be forgiven. Natalya was raising beautiful children in the Garden District, driving them to their swimming lessons from her home on Audubon Street, and Raymond, who had not known homeownership, was at the bottom of the sea. Errol understood that he was being shriven by the same sea and held the statuette in his fist, praying for forgiveness. Expecting his boat to crack open at any time and release him to his fate, he believed his request was legitimate. Certainly he’d never felt anything quite like it before. Such sobbing pleas were something he’d never heard from himself, as though he were being disemboweled by his own voice. His grief was possession and infancy, far more urgent than the storm and something of a deafening joyride. At one odd moment, he burst into laughter.

  He wished to live. He stared into the face of the little statue, absorbed by her high Latin coloring and carmine lips; she was devouring him with her eyes. He felt himself sink farther into his bunk supinely awaiting her kiss. “You gorgeous bitch,” he murmured.

  * * *

  —

  If he could tell by the weight in his limbs, he had awakened from a long sleep. He moved his eyes and took in his surroundings warily. It required some time for him to understand what had changed so completely: the boat was still. As the cabin was sealed against breaking seas, he could not see outside, and the air within had become sultry and fetid. He untied the weather cloths and swung his feet out onto the sole, glancing at the gimbaled lamps that had swung so violently in the night. They were motionless, though their oil was splashed around underneath him, indicating to his relief that he had not imagined the storm. He reached a hand gratefully to the cedar planks of the hull, still cool, still fragrant, perhaps still trees. Pines and oaks and cedars had carried him safely.

  He was always given one more chance: it was frightening. The sight of the Madonna, moreover, gave him a queasy feeling. It reminded him of awakening in the bed of a woman who clearly didn’t remember meeting him. But the Madonna didn’t say a word. He got to his feet, startled that he was wearing no clothes; he looked around and discovered them tossed on the opposite bunk. He pulled on his shorts and went topsides.

  “The Dawn of Creation,” he thought, with a giddy impresario’s flourish: the sea, ultramarine and pierced by sunlight, was still in every direction, no birds, no fish, no clouds, just the blue of heaven as it awaited completion. It crossed Errol’s mind that by existing he intruded upon all this vacant magnificence. He preferred this more solemn view of so heroic and empty a vista. He considered his pill-gobbling episode in Key West with shame as trivializing the question posed by this empty sea, where eternity had stored the materials for a fresh start.

  Errol went below and directed his optimism toward feeding himself. He had a beautiful round McIntosh apple, which he sliced carefully on the galley sideboard, and a piece of Canadian cheddar. He disguised the staleness of a hunk of Cuban bread by toasting it over the alcohol flame of his stove and basting it with tinned butter. The coffee soon bubbled in the percolator and filled the cabin with its wonderful smell. As he pictured Raymond sweeping past the hull, he could nearly imagine forgiving himself. But when he speculated on how many miles astern Raymond might have been before he drowned, he failed to add relief or prospects for forgiveness to his detachment.

  His mood didn’t last as he discovered how wide ranging his hunger was. He gazed about at his breakfast and inventoried the other things he might eat. The tea cake, in the cabinet under the sink, excited him, as did the small tinned ham whose container he vowed to respect as long as necessary. The cornucopia of food that he had stowed here and there—even the pineapples under the floorboards!—unconsidered during the storm, began to re-form in his mind.

  Admiring Natalya as she hung her bathing suit on the line behind the house on Fleming, Raymond had said, in a reflective tone, “I love ’em with that hunted look, don’t you?”

  After a moment, Errol had said, “No.”

  It came to him now: here resided one of the roots of hesitation as Raymond swept past the ketch. A boat that weighed almost fifty thousand pounds would not stop on a dime; there was that. Or turn in fewer than several of its own lengths. Even luffing up, the ketch would forereach farther than a man could swim in those seas. That knowledge could have been embedded too—couldn’t it?—the sort that produces indecision, and indecision produces hesitation, and hesitation produces unfortunate accidents as opposed to murder.

  At noon, he took a perfect sight of the sun. The boat was unmoving and the horizon a hard clean line. With the sextant to his eye, he measured the elevation and then went below to try for a signal on the radio direction finder. Haitian Baptist Radio was in its customary spot, and by combining its direction from the boat with the noon sight of the sun, he knew for the first time where he was. The information was sickening.

  When Raymond was lost over the side, Errol reported the accident to the coast guard and gave them his position. Was it not right here? He went back to the cockpit and looked around the yawl at the stillness of the sea and its plum blue depths under a quiet sky as though he would recognize the scene of many years ago. This, he knew, was absurd. Surely he had simply superimposed the two pieces of information in an unreliable mind. He pounced on the idea that the accident had happened in the stream, and clearly this was not the stream. He had the celestial fact that the stream lay to the east of his current position, information that should have protected him from the sense that he had been directed to revisit the site of the misfortune. But the Gulf Stream moves like a great blue snake and there were times when this spot on the planet was indeed in its trail. Still, he didn’t believe it.

  Recently, Errol had become more superstitious, and as he was at base a practical man he ascribed the change to two matters: alcohol and hanging around with peasants who buried things at work sites as health talismans or to ward off accidents. On occasions of birth and death, his workers tied ex-votos in the orange trees. He had twice visited a palm reader in an old strip mall on the Tamiami Trail, a service he took sufficiently seriously to pay for it. Dressed in a bronze-colored gown decorated with sequins and
designs from the horoscope, she had a snubby Scandinavian face and the flat As of Minnesota. When he pointed out that her interpretations of his Life line were diametrically different on separate occasions, that his Heart line on one visit indicated that he was devious and unreliable while on another that he was courageous in the face of impediment, she called him a motherfucker without a moment’s hesitation, then, relenting, told him his barred Sun line made him vulnerable to jealousy and that he must always exercise caution. He paid her grudgingly but thought about her remarks as he stood before the tattoo parlor next door while tourists battled for position on Route 41.

  He was prepared to consider that he was back at the scene of the accident, and only recently this would have been enough to cast him into a black hole. But his guilt was changing. His superstition had begun to be attached not to the consequences of Raymond’s being swept away but to the belief that trafficking in refugees had given rise to Raymond’s death and his own long slide toward the abyss. When he remembered the myriad plastic Madonnas in the jalopies at his groves, like little scenes of lynchings, hanging from rearview mirrors or from the branches of orange trees, and the impure thoughts aroused by the little chicas who brought food to their men in the groves as well as a tremor of excitement among them, feral gusts of flesh and spirit, he began to realize that you pay for all your sins, and if that was superstition, then so be it. It was the implied lesson of the mestizos. What he should have done for his friend no longer mattered; he was guilty of everything. The wish to be forgiven poured from him as a moan directed to the sea; he could think of no one else. Still, there was a glimmer of solace in acknowledging his superstition that every bird, every cloud, every flash of light, had a message for him, now and in eternity.

  A breeze, a zephyr, arose from the southeast, and Errol could smell some sort of vegetative fragrance, some hint of land. He untied the reef nettles and reefing lines and raised the main. Its folds were full of freshwater from the storm, and it showered down on him as the sail went up. There was just enough air to pull the boom into position, and the jib barely filled, but a serpentine eddy formed behind the transom, and the boat was moving once again.

  He sailed half the day at this slow pace and the water grew paler blue as the bottom beneath the hull came near. There were more birds now, and when the horizon thickened with the mangrove green of land, it was as he expected. He kept on in this direction, now recognizing that he couldn’t live on the open sea. He would have to make his way home to his grove workers, who would fare less well without him under the cracker and to whom he owed his last allegiance. In this, time was running out: he would reprovision, look for a hole in the weather, and sail home, determined to find there the strength to withstand evil.

  A scattering of cays lay before him, Cuban, Bahamian, it didn’t matter; both were far from empire. As he drew nearer, he was surprised to see stands of coconut palms emerge from the mangrove shoreline. These cays were more substantial than he had guessed they’d be—a better chance to take on some water, a nicety he’d overlooked during his Key West tear, a better chance of finding some helpful souls. He stopped the boat before he was much closer, as a bar arose before him bright with its reflective sand bottom. Beyond it he could see a protected turtle-grass sound but, at first, no way through to what would be a superb anchorage. Where the palms were concentrated at the shore, boats were drawn up, and after he’d tacked back and forth for an hour, unsuccessfully looking for an opening, he saw two figures at one of the boats pushing it into the water. One of the men sat in front, elbows on his knees, face in his hand, while the other sculled vigorously from the stern with a long oar.

  Errol watched with rising apprehension, not so much at what these two might have in mind for him but at the fact they were humans at all. In a short time, they were alongside, two tall black men, shirtless, barefoot, in a crude plank skiff with a coconut-shell bailer, a grains for gigging lobster. Errol bade them good afternoon, as the man in front reached a hand to the rail of the yawl to keep the skiff from bumping. This man replied inaudibly and Errol determined only that he’d said something in Spanish and that rather shyly. Errol decided he would not let on that he too spoke Spanish until he had a better idea of what these fellows had in mind for him. The man holding the rail, with the refined features of an Indian, kept his eyes downcast while his companion boldly boarded the yawl. The miserable detachment with which Errol had long encountered people he didn’t know had somehow disappeared—perhaps during the storm—and he greeted his uninvited guest somewhat heartily as he asked in English what he could do for him. Putting his hand on the yawl’s tiller and wiggling from side to side, the man explained in pidgin Spanish, which Errol pretended not to understand, that if he wished to land he would have to be piloted over the bar. For an instant, Errol thought of revealing his Spanish but thought better of it. Instead, he made some obtuse gestures indicating the boat, the land, the water; at which the man at the tiller—a dignified and classically African-looking man, older, Errol now saw, than he’d first thought, even maybe the father of the other man—said in exasperated Spanish to the man still in the skiff that he didn’t know what this white man wanted but that if he wanted to go to the inside anchorage, he would need their guidance. At this, with disconnected and resolute stupidity, Errol gestured around at the boat in general and then pointed to the island, where water and some of the consolations of dry land awaited him. He could stay on the boat and incur few obligations by mingling with these people.

  The two men understood, and at this the fellow in the boat secured the painter of the skiff to a stern cleat of the yawl and came aboard with a shy nod to the owner. The older man glanced about the deck of the boat to determine how the rigging ran and then drew the jib sheet in and cleated it. The yawl eased into motion once more, not much as the wind was faint, swung around, and, as the man at the tiller made several more adjustments with a smile and a shrug directed at Errol, sailed straight at the bar, tugging the skiff behind. As Errol stiffened, the helmsman shook his head and measured a distance to the floor with his hand, suggesting plenty of water, then waving into space as if to shoo all cares away. Errol could see nothing but the gathering shallows, changing color alarmingly as they sailed forward. He resigned himself that they would be aground in minutes, hoping his shipmates knew of a rising tide.

  At the moment of impact, a miraculous thread of dark green appeared in the bar, barely wider than the yawl, and the man at the helm followed it quickly and efficiently like a dog tracking game as he crossed the bar into the small basin. He continued sailing nearly to the shore and then rounded up, stopping the boat. Errol went forward and let go the anchor. Czarina dropped back slowly until the rode tightened and she hung in the light breeze. “A well-behaved vessel,” said the helmsman in Spanish. Errol gave him a puzzled smile. The three went toward shore, passing a post driven into the bottom to which was tethered a huge grouper, arriving at a long dock so decrepit it resembled part of a Möbius strip. The black men led, waving Errol along, and he followed on a path between old shell mounds and soon came to a clearing with several houses made of salvaged timbers and monkey thatch, then around those houses to a well. “Wada,” said the older man with a smile. Errol looked down the well, not more than fifteen feet deep, with a bucket on a wooden windlass contraption and various ladles, two of which were cut down Coca-Cola bottles and the others coconut shells like the bailer in the skiff. When they went back to the clearing, Errol following obediently, several people, probably family members, had appeared from the houses, two women of indeterminate age, a very old man, and a teenage boy with dreadlocks. All smiled. At this, Errol turned to his hosts and told them in Spanish that he was quite comfortable speaking Spanish. The two men laughed and pounded his back.

  “You were espying on us!” said the younger.

  On reflection, the older man seemed less pleased with this deception. “What besides water do you wish from us?” he asked rather formally.

  “I’m not sure
I even need water. I was looking for a place to rest. I’ve been in that storm, you see.”

  “Yes, that was a storm.”

  “I’m a bit tired.”

  “Of course you are tired. One hardly drifts about in such a situation. Great exertion is called for.”

  “I have to admit, I nearly lost my nerve.”

  “Evidently you didn’t, for here you are. You have a safe anchorage, and this place is good for rest if nothing else.”

  Caught up in this colloquy, Errol was reduced to a small bow.

  “You’re our only guest,” said the younger man. “We ate the others.”

  General laughter.

  “Wrong ocean,” said Errol. General appreciative laughter except from the very old man, who seemed a bit disoriented. Errol had a whorish need to include all in admiring his wit and rested his glance on the old man long enough to determine that he was blind.

  It was agreed that he would go on sleeping on the yawl and borrow the skiff for transport. One of the women, tall and Indian looking, with a bright yellow-and-black cloth tying her hair atop her head, informed him in English that when dinner was ready someone would come to the shore and make a noise. Noting his pause at her choice of language, she said, “I from Red Bays.”