Change of Course

by Joseph T. Klempner

  Jack scaled the fish and cleaned it, what was left of it, for the shark had done a pretty good job of gutting it. That night, Jack cooked it for dinner and swore it was better even than the flying fish. He called it “mahi,” Carib, he explained, for “half a mahi mahi.” Me? I couldn’t even bring myself to look at it as it lay on my plate. By that time, all it meant to me was death: sudden, wrenching, violent death. An hour before, it had been something majestic, full of color and spirit and will. Now, all of that was gone, forever. All that remained, quite literally, was dead flesh and bones, a terrible image of life reduced to its most basic: an instant spent along the food chain.

  That night, as I lay on my bunk, knowing full well that sleep would not come, all I could think of was my only brother being ripped in half and devoured by sharks.

  Day Three began somewhat later for me than had the several that preceded it. I’d finally fallen asleep sometime before dawn, and when I awoke, it was light outside. My eyes had difficulty adjusting to the brightness. My head ached, and my entire body felt sore. I had all the trappings of a hangover, though I’d had absolutely nothing to drink the night before.

  As I climbed up the companionway, I saw Jack, his eyes meeting my own, an index finger raised and pressed against his pursed lips.

  I got the message. I hadn’t been about to say anything anyway, my head hurt too much for speech. I tiptoed the rest of the way up, to whatever extent a forty-three-year-old man can tiptoe at sea, feeling hungover. I looked again at Jack, whose finger had now evolved into a pointer. I swiveled around to follow its point.

  If it did nothing else for me, the sight of a huge bird perched atop our cabin, not five feet from my head, certainly woke me up. I say huge not only because it seemed so big due to its closeness; I say huge because it was, in fact, huge. It was positively gigantic.

  The bird seemed every bit as startled as I was. But even as I froze, it acted: It turned into the wind, extended its giant wings, flapped them once, and lifted off, leaving me standing there, clutching my heart.

  Jack and I watched the bird as it took flight. It was snow white, with a wingspan that must have been over ten feet, and it rode the air currents effortlessly. I was sure I’d frightened it away for good, and that we’d seen the last of it. But as it turned out, I was wrong. The bird made three full circles overhead, each one tighter and lower than the one before it. Then it angled its giant wings forward and glided toward us, all but stopping in midair, before landing perfectly on our transom, within arm’s length of Jack, but a safe distance from me.

  “What is it?” I asked Jack.

  “I think it’s an emu,” he said. “Or maybe an elephant bird.”

  “Seriously.” I wasn’t too sure about emus, but I knew elephant birds were extinct.

  “Some kind of albatross, I guess. Or a gull with a major thyroid problem?”

  “Aren’t albatrosses supposed to be bad luck?” Hadn’t that been one of the study guide questions following The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?

  “Only if they’re dead, I think.”

  Right then, the bird made a loud gawk noise.

  “Careful,” Jack said. “You’ve gone and hurt his feelings.”

  “His? Looks like a her to me.”

  “You’ve just been at sea too long,” said Jack.

  We settled on him after Jack began calling him Gawk, it seemed far too harsh a name for a lady bird. He was clearly partial to Jack and never fully warmed to me (nor I to him, in all fairness). In time, he learned to move about the boat as though it were his, balancing alternately on the transom, the cabin roof, the horseshoe buoy, or the bowsprit - wherever he could be closest to Jack.

  I admit to a certain amount of jealousy over this display of favoritism, and more than once I accused Jack of having snuck the bird something to eat before I’d ever set eyes upon him, thereby assuring that the two of them would develop a bond while I’d always be perceived as something of a threat. But the truth was, ever since I could remember, animals and small children had always been drawn to Jack. He was the one who was forever bringing home stray cats, orphaned bunnies, and robins with broken wings. As we grew older, I would sit among the adults at family gatherings, trying to impress them with my social skills, Jack would invariably find himself surrounded by our younger cousins, who would beg him to join them in their games. And as it turned out, I don’t think he minded a bit: He seemed more comfortable with animals than with people, and with children than grown-ups. Simple creatures seemed to show no fear of Jack; they somehow found him non-threatening. One of his earliest friends was a badly crippled boy named Cody, who lived down the block. People in the neighborhood referred to him as a “spastic”; we tended to shy away from him, and he from us. But he positively worshiped Jack and was forever following him around and clinging to him. If Jack minded the attention, he didn’t once complain about it, and while I’m certain he noticed the boy’s deformities along with the rest of us, he never spoke of them; to him, his friend was simply Cody.

  Jack did feed Gawk, scraps of this and hits of that, but - despite our worries - Gawk never became dependent upon us for his meals. Whenever the spirit moved him, he’d lift off, climb to some optimal altitude long ago coded into his genetically transmitted survival skills and drilled into his memory by some attentive parent, and execute a perfect dive, breaking the water cleanly at the crest of a wave. More often than not, when he lifted off again, he’d have a fish in his beak, tossing it in midair so that he could swallow it headfirst, while still airborne, before landing back on the boat. So extraordinary were these displays of hunting skills that Jack and I came to believe they were only partly induced by hunger, and primarily motivated by a sheer love of performing. Whatever the truth, we provided him with a most appreciative audience, rating each dive on a scale from one to ten and wildly applauding the best of them.

  But Gawk’s presence had its own bitter edge for me, and though I never mentioned it aloud, I suspect the thought that occurred to me must have occurred to Jack, as well. Dead or alive, good luck or bad, the arrival of a bird could mean only one thing: We were drawing closer and closer to land. Which meant we were nearing the longitude of the Bermudas, that imaginary vertical band that, when followed due south on our chart, led to a tiny dot of black ink marked “Walker Island.”

  “Do you believe in God?” I asked Jack that afternoon.

  “No,” he said. “Not in the usual sense, anyway. You?”

  “I sometimes think there’s got to be some sort of order to things,” I said. “I’m aware that I pray for things sometimes, sort of. You know, like for bad things not to happen, or for people I love to be safe. So I guess I must believe in something.”

  Jack smiled wryly. “Is there by any chance a message in this for me?” he asked.

  “Why? Just because every major religion considers suicide a sin that lands you in hell?” I might have been on shaky ground here, taking a bit of license with the facts, but then I figured Jack wasn’t much of a theology student.

  “How much of a sin could it be,” Jack asked, “if it’s not a deadly sin? If it didn’t even make the top seven?”

  “Tell that to the Pope, why don’t you. Or the head rabbi.”

  “Anyway, what’s a sin?” Jack asked. “Sins are really nothing more than stuff some culture decides is socially unproductive. Ages ago, when everyone lived on farms, there were never enough hands to work the fields. Masturbating became a sin because it didn’t produce little baby hoers and weeders. Suicide was a sin because it took away a planter or a goatherd. These days, we’ve got fewer farms, and high-tech machines to do all the work. And too many mouths to feed. We’ve got more than enough people.”

  “Not me,” I told him. “You die, there’ll never be enough people for me.”

  “Come on, Joe. You’ve got your wife, you’ve got three kids, and you’ve got all sorts of friends You’re surrounded by people.”

  I shook my head slowly. I could feel the tears begin to
well up, not too far beneath the surface, but I wasn’t ready for them, not yet. “It’s not the same,” I tried to explain. “Even my wife knows that. She gave up competing with you long ago. Said she realized she’d never have a chance.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” I said. “Not too long ago, she told me that one of the first things that drew her to me was seeing how deeply you and I loved each other. She said she’d never quite seen anything like it between two men.”

  I looked directly at Jack, and I could see from a tiny quiver barely visible in his lower lip that I’d moved him with this. I said nothing further. I reminded myself I still had two days left to work on the quiver. It was going to work, I told myself. It was going to work.

  With the arrival of Gawk, Jack’s fishing came to an end. Each time he’d reel in his line, the bird would lift off and make a dive at whatever was on the end of it, whether it was an incoming fish, a slab of bait, or a lure with its gang hooks exposed. After several close calls, Jack was forced to put away his rod and reel for good.

  The cancelation of one of the day’s regular activities left us with an afternoon of little to do. We were still moving almost due east, making about eight knots on steady winds out of the southwest, and Sea Legs was pretty much sailing herself.

  I controlled myself for the better part of an hour, trying to enjoy the day, limiting my remarks to small talk. But eventually, I succumbed to the sheer absurdity of avoiding the one topic that consumed my thoughts, and I broke my self-imposed vow of silence on the subject.

  “Did you ever think they might come up with a cure?” I asked Jack, pretty much out of the blue.

  He gave me a look, as if to say he thought we weren’t going to talk about it again so soon. But then he looked away, and he seemed to be considering my question. “Even if they do,” he said after a while, “it’d be too late for me.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Suppose instead they come up with a treatment. Suppose a month from today, there’s a breakthrough, and they discover a drug - or some combination of drugs - that really works, that stops the disease in its tracks. So it’d be like an indefinite remission.”

  Jack seemed to think about that for a moment, too. “Then I’ll have blown it, I guess,” he admitted. “But when it comes right down to it, what are the odds of that, really? They’ve been trying for years, a lot of smart people with all sorts of money. I’m not going to pin my hopes on some magical cure or sudden breakthrough. I don’t believe in miracles. Not that sort, anyway.”

  “Oh? And what sort of miracles do you believe in?”

  “The miracle of having lived,” he said. “Of having been lucky enough to have had this time with you. Of having come through that storm in one piece. Of knowing we did it.”

  I said nothing.

  “Anyway,” Jack said, smiling, “I’ll never know. But then again, I’ll also never know if my decision is going to deprive me of seeing world peace in our lifetime, or UFOs landing, or the Sox winning the World Series. I could wait, hoping for all of those things to happen in the meantime. Hey, I can think of a thousand reasons to delay. The problem is, after a while, delaying becomes a decision all its own. It has its possibilities, sure, but it also has its price. I guess all I’m saying is, I’m not willing to pay the price required to keep those possibilities open. They’re simply too remote. So the way I see it, now becomes the right time.

  “If Jack refused to waver in his decision, at least I began to notice that his tone was becoming a little less strident. Expressions like “the way I see it” and “it seems to me” had begun to find their way into his vocabulary. And each time I’d hear him use such a phrase, I’d take heart. Was my desperation so great that I was simply grasping at straws, or was I, in fact, picking up some signal that, as we drew nearer and nearer to our destination, Jack’s resolve was weakening just a bit, his shell of stubbornness beginning to show the first signs of cracking?

  I dared to hope.

  A new sight greeted us the following morning. Far to the southwest, a pair of ships were headed more or less our way, on a bearing that would intersect ours as they continued east-northeast. It had been weeks since we’d seen another vessel; now, all of a sudden, we’d spotted two.

  Jack peered at them through high-powered binoculars before announcing, “Cruise ships.”

  My initial wave of excitement gave way to a sobering thought. They could be headed only to Bermuda, I knew, out of Charleston or Savannah or some other port farther down the coast. The fact that they were passing us here meant they were less than a day from their destination, and that we, even sailing at a fraction of their speed, couldn’t be too far from ours.

  I took a shot of the sun with my sextant and found our coordinates from the conversion tables. For some reason, I still took comfort in the ritual of dead reckoning. It was like going back to a place I’d visited so often as a child that I knew the way by heart, or coming to the familiar refrain of a favorite song. I marked our position on the chart, did some rough calculations, and reassured myself that we still had a full day’s sailing ahead of us.

  Although, at first, the ships appeared to be close to each other, as they approached, we could see that they were actually far apart, perhaps as much as several miles. One would cross well behind our wake, it appeared, but the second would pass quite near us.

  I was suddenly seized by the possibilities of the situation. Even if they hadn’t spotted us yet on their radar, there’d come a time when the crew of the second boat would have to see us. Should I try signaling them? We carried a full array of emergency flares on board, all I’d have to do would be to send up a distress signal, and they’d be forced to lower a boat to assist us.

  I created scenarios in which I persuaded the rescue party that Jack was suicidal, deranged, or sick. In my mind, I talked them into taking us both aboard, even lifting tiny Sea Legs onto their deck. Surely a ship that size would have a hoist of some sort. And it would have a lockup. I’d convince them my brother was a murderer, a fugitive from justice who needed to be put in restraints.

  Nearer and nearer the second ship drew as it bore down on us, until its hugeness rose above us and we could make out the shapes of passengers on deck. Then, just as I began to fear that she might swamp us with her giant wake, she gave us two long blasts of her horn and veered off to the north, so that she’d pass us on her starboard side, well off our stern. Jack acknowledged her signal with two blasts from our own air horn, though by that time, the roar of her engines was so loud that I’m sure our response was inaudible.

  As she passed directly behind us, early-morning risers crowded to her starboard rail to call to us and wave. We couldn’t make out what it was they were shouting, but we cheerfully returned their waves. We were even able to read the name painted in pink letters on her white hull: Endless Summer.

  At this point Gawk, who had apparently spent the night with us, suddenly lifted off and made a beeline for the ship. To the delight of her passengers, he made three perfect circles over their heads and dipped low in an aborted dive before returning to Sea Legs and resuming his perch on our transom.

  It was a good twenty minutes later, as I watched the ship and its companion vessel recede into the distance, that I realized I’d completely forgotten about my plan to send up a distress signal.

  But if I failed to follow through on my fantasy of enlisting the crew of the Endless Summer to restrain Jack, I showed him little mercy the rest of that morning. I’d just commented on Gawk’s impressive display of loyalty to us, pointing out that the bird would surely have found better roosting - not to mention bigger hand-outs - aboard the cruise ship.

  “Maybe he picked us out for some reason,” Jack suggested.

  “Oh? And what might that be?”

  “Who knows? Maybe he’s been sent to me as some sort of an escort.”

  I’d been busy with some chore at the moment. Now I wheeled around to face my brother. “What did you say?”

  �
�You heard me.”

  “I was hoping I got it wrong,” I said.

  “Sorry.” Jack shrugged.

  “Listen to yourself!” I shouted. “You’re really full of yourself, aren’t you? Now the goddamned bird has been sent here to escort you? Give me a break, man! Your problem is that you’re positively overdosing on self-pity!”

  “I’ve actually thought about that,” Jack said, “and you may be right. Hey, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what ulterior motives I may have going on here. You know, like pure cowardice? Or maybe it’s a martyrdom thing - my desperate striving for adoration, trying to carve out my niche as a family legend. I’ve even asked myself if it might not be my way of winning some ultimate competition with you, some bottom-of-the-ninth getting even.”

  “And?”

  “And,” he said, “I’ve decided it’s just not all that complicated.” Here he locked the wheel in place so that he could turn to face me without distraction. “Listen,” he said, “I know how hard you’ve been trying to get me to see things through your eyes, I really do. But I need you to spend a little time trying to see them through my eyes. I’ve thought about this more than I’ve ever thought about anything in my life, trust me. And I end up honestly believing I’m doing this for no reason other than the one I’ve given you. I’ve lived a wonderful life, Joe, I’ve had a fabulous trip, especially this last leg of it with you. I wouldn’t have given that up for anything. But I know what’s ahead, and I don’t want any part of it. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.”

  “You make it sound like it’s all so fucking simple,” I said.

  “It is, really.”

  “Then why do I feel like my guts are being ripped out of my body?”

  “I’m sorry for that,” Jack said softly.

  “No, you’re not,” I told him. “You love it. You wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  I kept up a steady barrage all that day. I was sarcastic; I was confrontational; I was accusatory. I gave up all pretense of backing off and giving Jack room to breathe.