Red Sea

by Diane Tullson

  They don’t. With the impact of the bullets, my mother spins, her arms splayed back in an almost graceful arch. Red goo shoots from one pant leg. I see the soles of her boots, and then she crashes facedown onto the floor of the cockpit.

  In one agonizing sound Duncan calls for my mother and cries out as the bullets catch him in midair and his left shoulder shatters. He rolls with the impact, flying now, his feet no longer in contact with the boat. More gunfire, and his skull lifts away like a red and gray cap. I close my eyes and when I open them, he’s gone, clear over the side of the boat. Then the gunfire stops.

  The first boat accelerates toward our bow. As it passes I see the men gathering what looks like a fishing net from the bottom of their boat. Mustn’t run into a fishing net. Fishing nets will foul your propeller and stop you dead. I can’t see them throw the net in front of our boat, but with a strangling sound, our engine dies. In the sudden silence, I’m aware that I’m screaming. The second boat comes to a shuddering stop against our hull. The first boat pulls up against our transom and men from both boats board Mistaya.

  My legs give out and I crumple onto the top step of the companionway. I can see Mom lifting her head, struggling with the radio. The man with the gun steps over her, glances at me, then he shouts in anger. He cracks the butt of the gun into the back of my mother’s head. She looks up, then her eyes roll back and her head drops limply onto the cockpit floor. The screams stop in my throat.

  Waving the gun, the gunman motions two of the men to our cabin roof. Pulling large knives out of their belts, the men leap onto the cockpit seats, their legs just inches away from my face. Grunting, they lower our rolled-up inflatable dinghy off the cabin roof into one of their boats. Other men proceed to strip the outside of our boat.

  I clamp my hand over my mouth, willing myself to be quiet. The men are shouting at each other. All of them have knives. Two of them burst down the companionway stairs, one pushing me out of his way, the other shoving me ahead of him down into the boat. The gunman follows. With his elbow he knocks me against the cabin wall. I can practically feel the cold of the gun so close to my face. One man seems to check the sleeping cabins, says something to the gunman, and the gunman nods. Abruptly, he turns his back on me. At the chart table the gunman rips open drawers. In one he finds a wallet, Duncan’s wallet. Duncan said once that if you make some things easy to find, then maybe a thief would be happy with that and leave. The gunman thumbs through the wallet and pockets the cash, then he shakes it in my face, shouting. The wallet doesn’t seem to be enough.

  The other two men cut the wires to the electronics and rip out our radio and navigation equipment. Then they start tearing open lockers. One opens the fridge, grabs one of the plastic food containers and peels back the lid. His lip curls, but he scoops his dirty fingers into the cold lasagna and eats it. Then he throws the container across the cabin, spewing lasagna trails.

  I can feel my heart thudding through my jacket. I press my back against the cabin wall, trying to disappear into the wood grain.

  Five men are packed into the boat so close I can smell them. They’re wearing long-sleeved shirts and work pants. Some are barefoot; some are wearing cheap rubber flip-flops I recognize from the bazaars of Djibouti. But bazaars everywhere sell cheap rubber flip-flops. All I can see of the men is their eyes and mouths and their hands. Some are dark. All are the lined hands of working men. All are dirty.

  One lifts the floorboards of the boat and hoots when he finds Duncan’s stash of booze. He lobs a bottle of single-malt scotch to the gunman and opens another for himself. He pours the alcohol down his throat, then smears his mouth with the back of his hand.

  The man at the fridge finds the eggs. Laughing, he strews the carton so that a dozen eggs are missiles in the cabin. An egg explodes on the wall beside me and the broken shell peppers my cheek. My hands are useless to wipe it away, my limbs useless to even move, like everything in me is liquid. The egg slime splatters, then slumps down the wall.

  Now the men from outside jam themselves below, jostling for the booze bottles as they rip apart our sleeping cabins. I hear drawers being yanked out and dumped on the floor. In my cabin, they must be shoveling my school texts off the shelf because loose-leaf paper sails across the cabin. In front of me, one of the men uses his knife to slit open my pillow, then tosses it back into my cabin.

  The gunman is screaming at one of the men who seems to be admiring a Timex watch he took from my cabin. The gunman strikes the man’s hand and the watch flies to the floor. The egg man finds this funny. The gunman crushes the watch with his heel.

  In Duncan and my mother’s cabin a bottle breaks, and the smell of my mother’s perfume fills the boat. It’s not the scent of my mother that I would smell when I used to hug her, the skin and powder and perfume scent of her shoulders. It’s an explosion of smell, and I hold my breath against it.

  Now some of the men go out to the cockpit and the ones inside throw them the stuff they’ve torn from our boat. They take everything: gear, clothing, cans of food, all the booze, binoculars and electronics and gauges. They empty Duncan’s locker of spare engine parts. They take Duncan’s tools. They take my shampoo.

  On the floor, the heaps of books hurled from the shelves come up past my ankles. Glass from a shattered jar of raspberry jam is scattered in red sticky bits all over the cabin. A bag of rice, slit open, disgorges pearl pellets under my feet. Locker doors are torn off. Severed wiring looks like plastic spaghetti. Cushions have been sliced and stuffing yanked out. Long gouges on the dining table make me think of claw marks.

  One of the wooden boats’ engines starts, and I feel our boat rock as some of the men jump down into their boat. Their engine revs up. I hear their boat scrape against ours, then their engine roar as they take off.

  I’m aware that my hands are slippery with sweat. Sweat runs down my back. The remaining men toe the refuse on the floor of the cabin, sifting through the heaps for anything they might have missed. The gunman drains his bottle of whiskey. Behind the mask, his eyes are rimmed with red. He’s looking at me, then he screams at me, his mouth so close that his spit sprays my face. The other men look at him, then at me. I have no idea what he’s saying. He grabs me and shoves me toward the steps to the cockpit. When the gunman grabs my arm, his hand goes right round it. Still shouting, the gunman pushes me up the steps.

  My mother is motionless on the floor of the cockpit. Her hood covers her face. Blood is trickling from her leg, and I’m happy because that means her heart is beating, that she’s alive. But there is a lot of blood. I step toward her, but the gunman jerks me back.

  The cockpit and deck feel strangely bare. Anything of value has been taken. Even the box of flares is gone. The wind has come up and the mainsail is flapping, the wind whistling through the bullet holes. The gunman looks up at the sky. Black clouds form an inverted bowl overhead. The gunman hollers something at the men in the cabin, and they too climb up into the cockpit. Their arms are loaded with huge bundles of our stuff, which they toss down to their waiting boat. The building waves knock their boat against ours.

  I don’t want to be out here. Somehow I feel safer in the stink and mess below. One of the men nudges me, the one who had such a good time with the eggs. I don’t know if he meant to touch me. I recoil from him, which makes him laugh. The man pokes me in the ribs, intentionally now. I bat away his hand. All the men laugh. He reeks of booze. He leans in close to me, Eggman, so close that all I have to breathe is his stink of booze and my mother’s lasagna. For an endless moment he hangs in front of my face. Then he kisses me.

  It’s not so much a kiss as a crushing of lips and teeth and tongue, God, a thick, prodding mass of tongue that fills my mouth. I gag and twist my face away. Eggman grabs my chin with greasy fingers, his thumb digging deeply into the underside of my chin so that I can’t breathe. His saliva is drying on my lips and I want to wipe it off. But I leave my arms at my sides. I will myself to a blank place of not knowing, not knowing that my mother
is laying at my feet in a puddle of blood, that Duncan is blown apart on the sea, that it’s only me with these men.

  I think about a starving cat I saw in Djibouti, bones hard through its skin, and the expressionless way it gulped the bread I gave it, like it didn’t care if I killed it, that maybe death was looking pretty good. At least for Duncan, it was quick.

  Eggman licks his lips. I close my eyes. If I try, if I really focus, I can hear my own heart beating, the blood pulsing through the tiniest vessels into the deepest places of my brain. If I try, then I don’t have to know what Eggman is doing.

  Lightning bursts over the boat, so close that the light and sound erupt in the same instant. A gust hits the boat like a hammer and the deck slopes crazily. Eggman drops his hand as he struggles for footing, stumbling to his knees. I fall away from him. Even in the lee of our sailboat, waves slop over the sides of their boat. The gunman screams at the men.

  At first I think the sound is the gun, a tremendous tearing noise that makes me duck my head. The gunman glances up, and I see the mainsail, peppered with bullet holes, shred in the wind. It’s crazy, but I almost feel like laughing. The mainsail is in rags, snapping at the mast. Even without the sail, the wind is heeling us over so that the men have to hang on to stand up. I’m in the cockpit of the only world I have, in the middle of some sea half a planet away from the only world I know. I’m with a killer and his thugs. And the storm has moved right on top of our heads.

  Maybe I do laugh.

  The gunman slings his gun across his back. He kicks Eggman in the ass and Eggman lurches to his feet. The second man says something. They all laugh. I see Eggman’s hand come up, fast, and I can’t move, probably wouldn’t have moved even if I could. His fist crashes into the side of my face. White heat explodes in my jaw, in my sinus, in my temple, and my knees fold. The last thing I see is our red go-bag being tossed down into their boat.

  SIX

  I DON’T WANT TO OPEN my eyes. I’ve ignored the slamming of the boat, the crunching sound my shoulders make as I launch into one cockpit bench, then the other. It’s the waves breaking over the boat that make me attempt to move, to escape the icy green water. Each new wave flattens me to the cockpit floor.

  I raise my head and open my eyes. The sky has collapsed to black, the sun indiscernible. I can’t tell how long I’ve been laying here, but I’ve lost all feeling in my hands and feet. The wind shrieks through the rigging, flogging the remains of the mainsail as if it were a manic bass guitar. Beyond the stern, the sea is endless waves, seamless gray with the sky. Wind rips the tops from the waves in white flumes, flings the sea in horizontal blades against my face. Wind twists my hair to wire and snaps it across my cheeks and mouth.

  Farther back in the cockpit, crumpled against the wheel post, my mother is a tumble of yellow.

  “Mom.” I take a breath, then another, and struggle to my knees. Black dots dance in front of my eyes. I force myself to breathe. The dots clear. Pain knuckles me at the base of my skull, then radiates over my entire head. More black dots. Then I take a wave full in the face. I duck another wave so that it hits me in the back. My jacket hangs heavy, dripping water. My pajamas cling like wet tissue on my legs.

  I’m aware that I’m not tethered, that a rogue wave could wash me right through the open transom. The waves pitch the boat in a drunken roll that drives my hip and shoulder against the cockpit with a crack. Scrabbling from one hand-hold to the next, I pull myself to my mother.

  Her eyes are closed. Her lips are lined in blue. Behind her, the sea gapes great open jaws. “Mom?” I put one hand on her face. She’s cold, like the storm water, like my hands. Frantic, I set my cheek against her mouth. I feel a small warmth. The storm steals each tiny exhalation, but she’s breathing.

  When I was really young, if I woke up in the night, I’d stand beside my mother’s bed, watching her sleep, waiting for her to wake. Even asleep, my mother’s face was animate. Now, she doesn’t look asleep. It looks like she’s dead.

  “I need to get you down below, out of the storm.” I unclip her tether, holding on to her by the hood of her jacket. As the seas lift the stern of the boat, I cross my mother’s arms over her chest and yank her by her elbows toward the companionway. Her VHF radio still hangs on her wrist, and as I pull her it bangs on the floor of the cockpit. I’m aware of a slick of red that trails one boot, but I’m not looking at my mother’s leg. Not yet. Now I just want to get us below, away from the waves.

  I struggle to reach the handholds at the companionway. I’ll have to ease my mother down first. As the boat rolls into the trough of the waves, I fold her onto the steps, then, grasping her tether to slow her fall, I let her slither to the cabin floor. A wave follows her down the companionway.

  Over my shoulder, I look to the back of the boat. Duncan can’t still be there. That’s why we wear a tether, so that if we go overboard, we stay with the boat. He didn’t have a tether; he won’t be there.

  I have to be sure. Still on my hands and knees, and pulling myself with my hands, I inch my way to the back of the boat. Seawater pierces my eyes and I blink. For a second, I think I see him, his white head bobbing on the waves, but it’s just foam from the waves. In every direction, all I see is the storm. I know he’s gone. I just hope he died before he hit the water.

  My feet are slippery on the companionway steps as I scramble down to my mother.

  HANGING ON WITH one hand, I reach up to haul closed the hatch. Now the screaming wind doesn’t steal my breath and drill into my ears. I make my way down into the boat.

  With every step the floor pitches and disappears under my feet. It’s louder being inside the boat, like being inside a drum. The wind resonates in the mast, boom and rigging so that the hull vibrates with the howl of it, magnifying it. Open locker doors slam back and forth against the bulkheads. A set of enamelled plates behind one locker door lift and clatter like cymbals. Curtains at the windows sway out to vertical, then drop back against the acrylic panes. A juice glass rockets from one open locker and shatters on the opposite wall.

  Everything on the floor now swims in half a foot of sea-water. I latch down a couple of floating floorboards so that I won’t step into the bilge.

  Swinging by one arm, I fish the top boards of the dining bench out of our slough and replace them. The bench cushion is hopelessly sodden and I leave it on the floor. “Looks like you’ll have to sleep on the hard plywood.” Pulling myself hand over hand against the rolling of the boat, I find a quilt that is reasonably dry. “I’ll fold this up for you.” I position the quilt along the dining bench, then fit the canvas lee cloths that will hold Mom in like a hammock. Mom calls the dining bench a sea berth and sleeps here when we’re at sea. She says it’s the best bed in the boat because it rocks less, like being on the middle of a teeter-totter versus the ends. In a storm like this, it’s a subtle distinction.

  I think of Fanny’s basket hammock, of Emma and Mac’s snug boat. They wouldn’t have heard my mother’s mayday. We’re just too far away. I was too late getting back to the boat. My throat closes and my eyes fill, and I push the thought out of my mind.

  In all her gear my mother weighs a ton, and I can only use one arm to lift her because I have to hold on with the other. I hoist half of her onto the bench, then, anchoring her chest with my knee, I strip off her jacket. Underneath, her fleece is wet around the neck so I take this off, and her sweatshirt. Her final layer, a T-shirt, is reasonably dry and I leave it. Now for the pants. The one pant leg hangs in yellow ribbons. Gripping the waist band, I ease Mom’s pants down to her boots. The inner layers are sodden with blood. Taking a breath, I peel back what’s left of the fabric.

  From the middle of her thigh, a thin river of red runs into my mother’s boot.

  The breath stops in my chest. I grab her sweatshirt and wad it against her leg, wrapping the sleeves of the shirt around. If I had another set of hands, if I even had both of mine, I’d do all that direct pressure stuff you learn in first aid. I can barely tie a kno
t in the sleeves of the sweatshirt.

  I lower Mom’s head to the quilt. “You’ll be fine.” My voice is shaking, my hands too. I take off one boot, the good one. Seawater dumps into the cabin. The other boot spills red onto my pajamas.

  I push Mom onto her side and draw the quilt around her. The sweatshirt seems to be stemming the worst of the bleeding. I tighten the lee cloths. She’s cocooned now, just her pale face visible outside of the lee cloths. I slump down on the bench beside her. My jaw hurts where I got slugged. Every joint in my body feels like someone has driven nails into it.

  I take my mother’s jacket and untangle the radio. The battery light shows a pale yellow. “Not much battery left.” I glance around the mess that is our cabin. “Maybe I can recharge it if I can find the charging unit.”

  Looking around, I see Eggman left the fridge open. I reach over and drop the lid, then switch off the breakers on the main electrical panel. The fridge motor falls silent.

  “But right now everyone is in their own private storm. And they’re so far away they won’t hear us anyway.” I’m cold suddenly, so cold my hands shake and my teeth chatter. I need dry clothes. I set the radio in its spot at the chart table and, hanging on for every step, I slog through seawater to my cabin. It’s like being drunk, this feeling, an overwhelming need to lay down. There is less water in my cabin. I rip off my wet clothes, leaving them in a puddle on the floor, hang my jacket on a hook and ransack a pile of clothes to find a T-shirt and shorts. My hands fumble as I put on the clothes. So cold. I jam my mattress back into place and turn over my slashed pillow, then crawl into the bunk. My quilt is gone, but I find a blanket that is dry and wrap it around me. My knees are weak, everything is weak, my head feels too heavy for my neck. Using the pillow as a brace against the storm, I cram myself into a ball in the corner of my bunk. I cover my ears to block out the howling wind. I don’t close my eyes because when I do, I see Eggman, and Duncan, so I lie there and listen to the blood racing through my arteries and veins and capillaries, and wish I could stop shaking.