by David Jurk
Peering over the top of the cabin, I saw that the center paddler had come no closer; he had dropped to his knees behind the woman, the crossbow propped on her shoulder, pointed in my direction. I stayed low and looked for the Australian, saw him clinging weakly to his board with one hand, both drifting away from me on the tide.
I set the Winchester on the top of the cabin and set the scope on the center paddler. My hands were badly shaking; it was hard keeping the rifle steady. I took several deep breaths. It’s over, I told myself; I could easily shoot her, then him, and never put myself in harm’s way.
“Go away,” I yelled. “You’re just going to die.”
“Can’t mate,” he yelled back. “Need your bleedin’ boat.”
“You’ll never get it,” I yelled. “And it wouldn’t matter anyway. She’s sick and that makes you a dead man.”
He was quiet for a few seconds, and when he did answer, something had crept into his voice.
“Naw, mate – it’s not that way. She’ll be right in a bit.”
“She’ll be dead in a bit,” I shouted back.
The bolt, fired a second later, was much closer than I’d thought he could manage, the sound of it whistling past my head left me crouched down long after it had bored into the ocean behind me. Fucker! I kept myself well down behind the cabin, centered the scope on the board just in front of the woman, and pulled the trigger. A large dimple appeared in the foam no more than ten centimeters from her. She didn’t so much as twitch. Quickly racking in another cartridge, I again aimed carefully and shot and saw another dimple appear a few centimeters to the right of the first shot, and a chunk of foam fly free. Again, I racked in a shell, counting in my head. Five remaining before I’d have to go below and reload the clip. I aimed again.
“Bloody hell, stop, you cat’s piss,” he yelled.
“Throw the crossbow in the water and I will.”
I counted to three and then fired a third time, this time impacting the board near the edge, flaking quite a good-sized chunk of fiberglass and foam from it. The board began to list, settling lower in the water. I noisily worked another shell into the chamber.
The crossbow splashed into the bay, and I took the pistol and went forward. He sat behind the woman, arms around her, watching silently as I reached for the line holding us to the mooring cable, bent down and unclipped it.
Moving to the cockpit, I switched the motors on and played the throttles gently in reverse, silently backing away from them. I backed all the way to the end of the breakwater, keeping my eyes on him the entire time. As I’d started moving, it was as if he’d forgotten me, forgotten what he’d come for; he sat holding the woman, rocking her in his arms. It was the last I saw of them.
Swiveling Windswept to get her bows forward, I rounded the breakwater and headed west, headed out to sea. It was pure instinct; my mind didn’t seem to be focusing properly and my thoughts flitted from one thing to another without volition. I dimly realized there were things I needed to do before making any kind of a passage, gear to secure before braving the ocean. The Walmart door rose in my mind, and the image of the food cartons behind it. I shuddered. I would rather risk starvation than spend another night here. Still, I needed time. Where should I go? There was wind, the usual trades – I could sail. The seas were quite calm. I could put the autopilot on.
“Ray,” I said, “set course. Uh, easterly.”
“Right, mate, and at what speed, yeah?”
Speed? I thought it over.
“OK, make it one knot.”
“One knot. Crikey, we’ll be crawling, we will.”
A buzzing began in my head.
“Ray,” I said, “Switch to default voice.” I wasn’t entirely sure of much just then but was pretty damn sure I’d heard enough Australian accent.
“Confirmed,” said Ray, with no inflection whatever.
Over the course of the next hour I stayed busy, mindlessly busy, and by the time I finished getting the kayak pulled up and lashed back on the nets, stowed and secured everything below, and reloaded both guns, the sun was within minutes of touching the sea. I’d not eaten since morning and the adrenalin from the confrontation with the paddleboarders had long ago given way to a feeling of deep exhaustion, every motion an effort.
Did it really matter that they’d wanted my boat, that they’d obviously been more than happy to kill me to get it? Had I even tried to avoid conflict? And the question I knew was there in the center of myself; couldn’t I have just unhooked from the mooring as soon as I got back on the boat and sped away? Oh yes, but I hadn’t even considered it. The willingness I’d had – no, goddamn it – the anticipation of using those weapons; that was what condemned me now. Could I truly look into myself and not say that I’d enjoyed having such vastly superior weaponry? I was the big boy around here now, king of the mountain. The Maire Oriens had seen to that. Something in me was scathing, accusatory, relentless; you told yourself it was self-defense, you shot them to save your boat, but all along you just wanted to use those fine weapons. Here’s the answer to why you didn’t just run – you didn’t have to, you had the guns and you wanted to use them.
My mind stopped working. I was perilously low on energy; I was perilously low on a lot of things. I slowly dropped to my knees.
“Have a cup of tea,” I heard Rachel say. “Rest a bit.”
She didn’t startle me this time; I almost expected it, I surely wanted it. I didn’t answer her but looked at the empty horizon before us for a moment, rose with effort and went below. I made tea, waiting for her to say more as it brewed, but there was only the muted sound of Windswept’s hulls moving slowly through the calm ocean.
When the tea was ready, I took it on deck and sat on the floor of the cockpit, cupping it in both hands, sipping slowly. I’d used the last of the cream powder. The late afternoon sun cast a deep violet hue across the sea. I found it hard to care where I was or where I was going.
“Rachel, I killed people,” I said out loud.
“Yes,” she said casually, as if agreeing that the weather was quite fine for sailing. I felt monstrous, unclean. The images played themselves over and over in my head.
“I wanted to shoot them,” I told her.
“I suppose you did,” she answered after a moment with not a trace of accusation. “What did you expect?”
I was silent a while.
“What do you mean?” I asked her. “I could’ve avoided the whole thing. I didn’t have to kill anyone.”
“Maybe,” she replied. “Or, maybe as you were bending to unhook from the mooring, one of them would’ve shot you in the back with an arrow.”
I thought about it, considered it. All right, maybe.
“Was it worth their lives not to have tried it, though?” I asked.
“Was it worth yours?” she answered softly. We were quiet for a while, the only sound the slight slap-slap of the halyards against the mast.
“Owen,” she said. “The world has changed, love. And you’ve already begun to change with it. There are new, hard rules that determine whether you survive or not.”
“Maybe it’s not worth it,” I said stubbornly.
“You know you don’t believe that.” I thought about it.
“No,” I said reluctantly, “I suppose I don’t.”
Again, we waited in silence. Then she startled me.
“Macbeth,” she stated abruptly. Her voice was oddly playful.
“What?” I said. “What did you say?”
“Was the hope drunk Wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since? And wakes it now, to look so green and pale At what it did so freely? From this time Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard To be the same in thine own act and valor As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life, And live a coward in thine own esteem, Letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would.’”
“That’s good, Raich; throw Shakespeare at me.” I said after a long silence, but something had lifted w
ithin me. And suddenly as I knew it had been in Colorado, I knew again that it was her, inside me, making whole what had been rending in two all afternoon.
She said nothing more and after a long while I stood up with a groan, cold and shivering, and took the cup below, found a sweater and pulled it on. I had no energy, no strength. Climbing the few hatchway steps took all I had. I stood watching the GPS map for a moment.
The wind was freshening, blowing fifteen steady, a bit more in gusts. There was nothing to be done for it. I had to go somewhere, had to set the boat right. I was a sailor and I had responsibilities.
I sighed.
“Ray, terminate auto.”
“Autopilot is disengaged.”
I turned us into the wind, rolled out half the jib and raised the main, tying in a first reef out of caution. We caught the breeze and accelerated, and I swung onto a downwind heading, thinking I’d work southward.
I cleared Kawai Point, and once past it, held her parallel to the coast, staying roughly two kilometers out. Soon though, we were in the wind shadow of the island and our speed dropped. With no notion whatever of where I was going, it hardly seemed to matter. But I knew well enough that destination would matter – it would matter when weather came, and it would matter when there was nothing more to eat. I needed to think and envision a plan, not just for the next few days or weeks, but in a very real sense, for the life left to me.
But none of that seemed remotely as pressing as my desire to sleep. The day spun through my mind, a rolling montage of images I would rather not see, images I would erase forever if I could. I had to find a place to anchor where I could sleep without fear and begin to gain some distance from the horrors of this day.
But where? With aching eyes, I searched every inch of the coastline chart; there were almost no options. The entire south coast of Kauai was a nightmare of cliffs and rocks and bays completely open to the sea; to try to anchor somewhere along the shore – even if I could find holding ground at a reachable depth – was not even worth thinking about. Looking further to the southwest I saw Hanapepe Bay with its breakwater and small boat docks and there was something about it that struck me immediately, that appealed to me. Even if Windswept would not fit in any of the slips, I could find shelter inside the breakwater; enough to allow a night’s sleep.
Still, caution rose in me; it was close enough and sheltered, all right, but still near land, potentially near people; virtually on the doorstep of the neighboring villages of Eleele and Hanapepe. To get the complete benefit of the breakwater, I’d need to stay toward the eastern end of the harbor, putting us close to shore, and close to shore meant being vulnerable.
The choice, though, was stark – risk the dangers of Hawaiian waters, at night, on autopilot, and try to take some quick naps – or, see what Hanapepe Bay offered. I’d not mind the option of heading straight out to sea, but two things stopped me; first, I was just plain low on food, which made a crossing of even modest distance out of the question. And second, where would I go? I needed time to rest and think.
As for the risks of Hanapepe Bay – for whatever reason, I felt all right about it. Why that was so, I had no idea. It could have been that the two villages combined were still far smaller than Lihue, or maybe anyplace other than where I was coming from sounded fine just then.
I furled the jib and dropped the main; we drifted forward, slowly losing headway.
“Ray,” I said tiredly, “set radar proximity alarm on.”
“Alarm on.”
“Set course for Hanapepe Bay. Autopilot on. Use the auxiliary only, maintain six knots.”
“Aye. On auto for Hanapepe at six.”
Over the next three hours I fell asleep twice in the cockpit, both times waking in panic, my heart pounding as I strained to see into the gathering darkness, imagining rocks ahead, bracing myself only to find nothing but the faint white iridescence of our passage. I tried to stay awake; singing, pinching myself. None of it actually helped; it was the fear of hitting something that mostly kept me awake. I’d never quite managed to have complete faith in the radar.
And it wasn’t the radar that woke me after I fell asleep for the third time, but Ray, letting me know we were closing on Hanapepe, whose harbor mouth loomed little more than a kilometer northeast of us.
I could see very little now – there was starlight but no moon and to starboard the great dark shoulder of Kauai. I took over the rudder from the autopilot and slowed to four knots, holding course entirely by the green tracing on the monitor. I wanted very much to actually see the coastline, to confirm in my heart what was only bits of light from diodes before me. But there was nothing but darkness and the myriad stars overhead.
It was the sound of land that reached me before the sight, the hiss of low waves against the breakwater intruding into the silence like cornstalks being scythed to the ground. And finally, I saw it, a low grey line on the darker sea, hardly fifty meters from us.
I took a deep breath, slowed to hardly more than drifting speed. The harbor depth should be no issue, but I pulled up the centerboard anyway; to become grounded on something in the dark, as tired as I was, would have been more than I could’ve dealt with. The motors took us silently forward and even without the centerboard the slightest movement of the rudder swung Windswept into whatever position I wanted.
The breakwater extended nearly three-quarters of the way across the harbor mouth, still leaving us an easy twenty-five meters for entrance. It should be easy – unless there was something parked there that I couldn’t see. We crept through it and I stopped the motors, letting us continue slowly drifting forward, carried by the low swells. We were close enough now that I could make out the blacks and greys of objects before us; perhaps docks, perhaps boats.
As soon as it seemed we were fully into sheltered water, I let us drift forward for a slow count of five then backed both motors against our drift and we came to a stop. This would have to be good enough. I went forward and as quietly as I could let the bow anchor drop to the seabed, trying to measure depth, estimating it at ten meters, calculating the amount of anchor rode top leave played out. Walking quickly back to the cockpit, I nudged both throttles barely enough to turn the props, pulling against the forward anchor, checking the bite. It held, and I stopped the motors and let us drift a bit, playing out more anchor rode, then set the aft anchor as a backup. That was it – we were in.
Standing in complete stillness, I listened for movement, hearing only the waves on the breakwater, and faintly, ripples against the rocks ahead of us on the peninsula. I checked both anchor lines one more time, giving them both a good yank – they seemed to be holding, and there was nothing more I could do in any case. I’d planned on putting up some additional security; small objects – silverware, tools, spare fittings - scattered on deck for intruders to stumble over or step on, but the proximity alarm was on and I just couldn’t find the will to do more. Instead, I walked slowly to the hatch and dropped down through it in a near stupor, felt my way to the bunk, and fell forward onto it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I SLEPT LATE, dangerously late; when I opened my eyes, it was to a cabin already flooded with sunlight. I lay still for a moment and just listened. There were sounds of sea birds arguing in the harbor, and the low complaint of waves somewhere in the background, but there were no sounds of people, and I was grateful for it. It was wonderful to feel rested – though with energy returning to me, so had hunger. I tried, and failed, to remember when I’d last eaten. No matter, this was a new morning, a new place; yesterday seemed as though it had occurred in the distant past. And in any case, hunger was making a poor cousin of any desire to lay there longer and contemplate it. That, and the thought of coffee.
Which roused me to movement and I climbed out of the bunk into a warm day, headed straight to the stove and got water going, and while I waited for the water to boil, climbed into the cockpit. The morning sun reflected diamonds off the water; it was a proper Hawaiian morning – warm, brilli
ant sky, the slightly alluvial fragrance of the harbor mixing with sweet air from inland.
I was immensely relieved to see that we shared the harbor with no one. I’d gotten the anchoring right last night, and we lay well secured, anchored solidly out near the breakwater. Like Nawiliwili, there was an inner harbor area here - a rock jetty protecting a small marina with no more than a dozen slips. Between where we swung at anchor in the outer harbor, and the inner jetty, a cement pier that I hadn’t noticed in the darkness protruded like a sword to the southwest. Had I drifted Windswept even ten meters further in before setting the bow anchor, we would’ve fetched up against the end of this thing, and her eggshell-thin hulls were no match for hard concrete.
Seeing the full layout of the harbor now, it was obvious to me that Windswept could easily fit alongside one of the docks in the marina, if I were inclined to move her there. But I was satisfied where we were; close enough to be sheltered without the risk of being accessible to someone on shore. If the wind changed and brought a Kona breeze up into the harbor from the southwest, our protection would suffer, but it wasn’t Kona season and I liked being out away from shore, and away from any people that might be there.
