8
The boat slid down a large wave. The mast was attached to a bracket that would only allow it to come down to the rear of the boat. As soon as the tip of the O’day was pointing down he unhooked the bow cable that kept it from falling backwards. Oh hell.
“Hold on!” he shouted.
I noticed Forest wrapping the end of the cable around his right hand.
“Dude,” but before I could say another word, the O’day started to climb the next wave. I didn’t even see the mast come down it happened so fast. The cable immediately ripped out of my hand and I saw Forest’s flip flops flying through the air.
The mast broke through the stern rail and created a hole where the outboard motor used to be.
“Forest!” Becca screamed.
“Oh shit!” I yelled. It was like he just disappeared. Becca frantically looked over both sides.
“No, no, no!”
I raced to the back, looking for the cable that was connected to the bow while I scanned the water. Movement caught my eye.
There was splashing about twenty yards behind the O’Day. Becca quickly dove in where Forest surfaced. The cable was still wrapped around his wrist, and I started pulling him in.
“No!” shouted Forest as he waved at me with his left hand.
“What?!”
“My arm is jacked! Don’t pull it!”
Becca could swim really well. She helped him get the cable off his right hand and gave me a thumbs up. I slowly dragged them both back to the O’Day.
They came on board and we all collapsed amidst a tangled mess of ropes and cables. We were at the edge of the storm now, and the rain was starting to come down hard. Then it dawned on me. We had lost all ability to control the boat in the waves. We were just bobbing around like a coke bottle. I wasn’t positive, but it made sense to me that we would likely take on too much water and could even sink.
“Damn,” I whispered, while staring up at the dark sky occasionally lit up by strong flashes of lightning. We were all soaked. Them a bit more than me, and we didn’t have a single towel on board. My teeth were starting to chatter, which made me wonder how much of an issue the cold would be at night.
“Come on,” I said. “We need to go into the cabin.”
I opened the hatch and Forest and Becca followed. He stumbled in holding his right arm stiff. Thunder rolled, and the boat rocked wildly back and forth. It felt like a shady ride at a local carnival with no seatbelts. I sat on the fiberglass bench in the center of the cabin. Forest and Becca crawled to the bow where there was a large raised platform in the shape of a V.
“How’s your arm?” I asked.
“Dislocated my shoulder.” Forest leaned back and pushed out his stomach. He moved his upper body to the left and slowly leaned forward to push it back into place. It looked painful as hell.
“Man when you unhooked that cable. A second later you just vanished,” I motioned with my fingers. “Like poof.”
Becca held onto a latch on the cabin ceiling to brace herself. Amazingly none of us were getting seasick.
“I sure as hell didn’t disappear. Shit, I flew like superman,” said Forest.
“Rain,” said Becca. We both looked at her a little confused.
“We need to catch it,” she said.
“Oh yeah.”
We quickly crawled around the boat looking for something that would hold water. A plastic bag, container, anything. What must have been a sizeable wave hit us broad sided and the boat almost turned completely on its side.
“Can a sailboat flip over?” asked Becca.
I shook my head. “Sam said it’s rare. They have like a thousand pounds of weight in the bottom so when it leans over it should right itself.”
“Can it sink?” asked Becca.
“Psh. Like a rock,” I replied.
I poked my head through an opening in the back of the boat and found a large storage compartment.
“A sail,” I shouted.
I pulled out the old sail. It smelled like twenty year old mildew, but we were lucky as hell to have it.
“I bet this holds water. We can cut a big piece out of it and set it up on deck,” I said.
“Don’t cut it,” replied Becca. “We may need it.”
I agreed. “Yeah good point. We need to hang it somewhere on deck.”
Forest pointed, “Right in the back where it dips down.”
“That’s where we walk though,” I said.
“Under the seats,” said Becca. “Open the lid and lay the sail inside, like a liner. It will catch water.”
“Yeah, that’s good,” I replied. I noticed Becca starting to shiver.
Forest and I opened the cabin hatch and crawled onto the deck.
Outside it was a total downpour with heavy winds and zero visibility. The wind blew salt spray into my eyes while I struggled not to slip. There were ropes and cables everywhere. It was impossible to see them. We could only feel around for them like blind men. Thunder exploded, followed by flashes that gave us temporary vision. I grabbed the stern rail and held on. Forest opened the right bench seat, and we laid the sail inside of it.
“That’s good!” I shouted.
Thunder roared as I followed Forest back into the cabin and closed the hatch. The chaotic sounds were quickly muted. “Did it work?” asked Becca. We could hear her teeth chattering.
“Yes. You’re cold,” said Forest. He took an old shirt out of his backpack.
“Take your shirt off and put this one on,” said Forest. I immediately turned my back toward Becca. Forest handed me a glob of cafeteria rolls and Becca went to the front to change her shirt. The unsightly mass of dough was pretty good, but damn near impossible to swallow with my dry mouth. I chewed slowly and watched one of the cabin windows blink from the flashes of lightning. Becca hung up her wet shirt and bra near the window.
The boat rocked like hell, and it took constant effort not to roll all over the cabin floor. The continual sound of Becca’s teeth chattering unnerved me more than the sound of the rain, thunder, and waves. She was muscular, but small and needed more fat.
“She’s too cold, man,” I said. Forest didn’t reply, neither did she.
“We can sandwich her between us. My back facing her,” I said.
“Okay. Yeah, cmon’,” said Forest.
I stumbled to the front V berth and crawled in next to them. Becca was curled up into a ball and had her arms, face and knees inside Forest’s shirt. Forest had his arm around her. I laid down on the other side of Becca with my back pressed tightly against hers.
Within a few minutes the chattering lessened, and we were left with only the sounds of a creaking old boat, rain, and occasional thunder.
Nobody was sleeping. It was pretty much like lying down on a table. We were wet and salty, with no pillows or blankets. We were fine though. It seemed stupid, but hope kept us warm. The thought that we might actually sail that old boat all the way to the Bahamas and never have to put on that uniform again, file in and file out again, live with creeps again. It kept us going. I hoped we could get that mast back up. Otherwise it was game over. It was a good thing that rail was there. It seemed to absorb a lot of the impact, and the hole in the boat was only about six inches deep up top.
“How far will we drift off course?” asked Becca softly. It was strange hearing her voice so close to my ears. She was something else. I hadn’t even thought about that.
“I’m not sure,” I answered. “There’s a current offshore called the Gulf Stream. Sam said it pushes north at three or four miles per hour. But I don’t know if we have made it to that current yet or not. The wind was out of the north west. Worst case is we get pushed thirty miles north by daylight. I think.”
“Did you guys think we would make it this far?” she asked.
“Yeah,” said Forest in an unusually soft voice that was void of confrontation.
“Of course not,” I whispered. For some reason Becca laughed at my answer.
“Hey, we’ve obviously
got this sailing shit figured out, man,” said Forest. Becca cracked up, and I did too. Truthfully, I liked Forest. There were still a few hard feelings because of that jacked up fight and the sucky squiggly lines that strolled into my vision, but he was cool.
“We’re alive,” I said. “And dude, you just rode the slingshot from hell.”
Just then, amidst our laughter, the boat slid down a large wave and I nearly rolled on top of them.
“At least none of us gets seasick,” I said.
“I didn’t think we would,” replied Forest. “We were on the ocean all the time when we were little.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, our dad ran product from Cuba to Miami. Fast boats,” said Forest.
“What kind of product?”
“Drugs,” said Forest.
“I didn’t know you knew your Dad. You knew your mom too?” I asked.
“No, she was a prostitute,” said Becca.
“We don’t know that for sure,” said Forest.
“What happened to your dad?”
“Arrested. Killed in prison,” said Forest.
“How old were you?”
“I was six, she was four.”
“And he took you on drug runs?”
“Yeah, but we were also going to visit our grandparents. I don’t remember much. I remember when they took him away, he told me it was my job now to take care of my little sister. Not much else.”
“I don’t remember him at all,” said Becca.
“How many foster homes?” I asked.
“Seven,” said Forest.
“That rumor about you shooting one of your foster parents when you were ten. All bullshit?” I asked.
The two of them went quiet. “I don’t even know how that got around,” said Forest.
“Is it true?” I asked.
“I was nine. He used to touch Becca. Shot him in the face while he was watching football. They still don’t know who did it. Don’t bring it up again.”
“Alright.”
“How about you?” asked Becca.
“How many foster homes?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Only four,” I answered. “They said they couldn't place me again.”
“Same with us,” said Becca. “What’d you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Really what?” she asked.
The boat turned to its side for a moment as a wave hit us broadside. The rain continued to pour but the thunder was turning to a low distant rumble.
“What?” asked Becca.
“I was at that house for three years. There was a kid there named Timothy. My best friend.”
“How old?” asked Becca.
“Timothy? Now he would be ten.”
“You’re fifteen?” she asked.
“No sixteen.”
“So he was five and you were eleven. And he was your best friend?” asked Becca.
“Yeah, we looked out for each other,” I replied. “Anyway, long story short. They were fighting in the kitchen. Timothy tried to stop the man from hitting the woman. I didn’t care until the man went after Timothy. All I did was hold my hands up and stay in between them. That’s it.”
“Why’d you get kicked out?” she asked.
“The next morning they told the state I was inappropriately touching Timothy. They picked me up same day.”
“That sucks,” said Forest.
“Yeah.”
“Parents?” asked Becca.
“Never knew them. The state picked me up from a meth lab when I was a baby.”
We rocked back and forth, and I wondered when the boat would capsize. Inside the cabin felt like a safe cocoon from the chaos outside. I liked it. The platform we slept on was rock hard, old fiberglass. I tried to use my arm as a pillow, but that caused it to fall asleep and go numb every ten minutes or so. A cushion would have been awesome, but I had slept in worse places before. My clothes were starting to dry and my eyes grew heavy.
“Are you still cold?” I asked.
“No, I’m fine,” said Becca.
Forest began to snore. It was a sound that I was very familiar with in foster homes and in the dorm at Havana. The sporadic sound had the opposite effect on me that it seemed to have on most people. Within minutes I was asleep.
The Less Fortunates Page 8
