Easy in the Islands

by Bob Shacochis

  I went back down to the cabin and tried to work out the position again. I was doing the best I could. By sundown the radio was broadcasting storm warnings. Davis seemed to look forward to the bad weather gathering out there in front of us, invisible only to our sense of sight. He was hungry so I cooked him spaghetti for his supper, throwing up into a bucket after five minutes of smelling the sauce heating on the stove.

  On my first watch of the night the clouds absorbed the range of stars above us. Davis came up at midnight to take the helm. Nothing had changed, but I was so keyed up I thought I could hear the forces gathering out there in the darkness ahead, like armies beyond the next rise. Exhausted, I went below and collapsed on the bunk, pulling the quilt over my head. I don’t know how long I slept but I was awakened violently, thrown out of bed across the beam of the boat, shanghaied and suddenly at war. From very far away Davis was shouting at me to come on deck. Impetuous was experiencing a bucking and pitching that didn’t make sense to my body. I had to crawl to where Davis was. The boat had heeled severely in the wind; the oceanic floodwaters churned over half the deck. The rain and blackness were impossible to see through, the noise horrendous, a ripping apart of the soft world that floated us. I had to take the tiller while Davis reefed the mainsail and dropped the jib. I remember this—the terror blooming in my throat, making me a blind animal; the pain as the storm raced through the sky and ocean, transferred to the boat and centered, like electricity, into the tiller as I fought against it; and the extreme loneliness again, as if the universe could offer no truer moment than this, ever.

  Davis screamed at me hysterically: “You stupid-ass bitch, get her into the wind, goddammit, put her up into it. Dumb fucking cunt.” It was no time to be sensitive, I suppose.

  We lost the jib. It blew out, its clean geometrical precision exploding into tatters before I could command the boat to come about. He seemed to blame me for that. “We almost lost the boat,” he said. “No boat—no more me, no more you. You have to react quicker, you have to be on top of it, you have to be ten times stronger than you think you are. When you think you’ve reached your limit, that’s when you really have to start pushing ahead.”

  I didn’t want to hear it. “You bastard, Davis,” I told him. “I’m not tough. I know you want me to be. I’m trying, I honestly am, but I’m not tough. I’m just afraid.”

  The rest of the night I refused to leave his side. The seas were huge, invisible until they crashed down onto us. The boat shuddered continuously with their impact, lurching as the water swept across the deck. The cement hull made an eerie humming sound. Even with Dramamine I kept puking. To comfort me, Davis tied a rope between us, from waist to waist. I could not tolerate the thought of being separated from him, being alone in the sea, struggling for however long it took me to give in. Davis ate amphetamines and battled against the weather. Eyes blazing, he seemed well suited for the horror of it. By morning the wind was not as renegade. The waves still held their size though, each one a rushing continent about to bury Impetuous.

  “Davis, let’s head into port somewhere and wait until this passes,” I pleaded. “I can’t take it.”

  “There’s nothing nearby but Cuba and we can’t go there and there’s no need to run away,” he said. “This isn’t something we can walk away from. Boats teach you to stick with your trouble until it’s over.”

  “Please don’t lecture me,” I said quietly, my one courageous moment. Mostly I was so fundamentally shocked—by the power of the water, by Davis, by the taste I had of my life’s end—that I just closed up completely.

  “We’re beating it,” Davis said, surveying the slab of purple clouds overhead. “The worst has passed.”

  He was right about the weather—we would not have to go through a night like that again. But the worst was not over for me. The cloud cover remained for six days; a front had stalled on top of us. There would be occasional rents of blue sky, progressively bigger and longer as the days went by, but for six days I could not get a satisfactory noontime fix on the sun.

  “Davis,” I said hopelessly, “I don’t know where we are. You’ve got to help me navigate.”

  “That’s your responsibility, isn’t it?”

  “But I don’t know where we are,” I said. I couldn’t keep my tears back anymore.

  “Find out,” he said without emotion.

  “Why, Davis, why won’t you help me?”

  “Learn to depend on yourself.” I couldn’t stand the holy, self-satisfied look on his face when he said that. “If something happens to me you should be able to take over. Otherwise you shouldn’t be here.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t be here.”

  He didn’t reply and I hated him. I had to rely on dead reckoning, which is a system of estimating where you’re going based on where you’ve just been. It’s primarily guesswork, especially if as the days go by you’re less and less certain where you’ve been. I studied and studied the chart, worked it all out over and over again, but kept arriving at different answers. By the seventh day I couldn’t think straight.

  “Davis,” I begged, “I still don’t know where we are. Please, let’s just head due south. We should be able to sight the coast of Haiti by nightfall. I think so, anyway. If not, we’re in a lot of trouble.”

  None of this made the impression I expected. “No,” he said. “Get us to Puerto Rico.”

  I became paralyzed with my own inability to change things, hardly speaking to Davis over the next two days. On the tenth day I told him I wanted to get off the boat. He laughed at me. “Where you gonna go?” he said.

  “I can’t stand it anymore. I’m out of Dramamine and sick all the time. I’m fed up with everything always moving, moving, moving. Every inch of my body is black and blue. I can’t even brush my teeth.”

  “I told you not to leave anything lying around on deck. This isn’t the Chesapeake Bay. There’s no margin of error here. Stop acting like it’s my fault we can’t brush our teeth.”

  At breakfast on the eleventh day I said, “Davis, let’s just stop for a day or two. We’ve got to be pretty close to the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic. I need a rest from all this. Then we can go on.”

  “Find Puerto Rico,” he said, again pointing to the scope of the horizon. “Find the Mona Passage. Get us into the Caribbean.”

  I was too battered to implore or argue any longer. The following day, at midafternoon, I commanded with very little confidence, “Steer due east. We’ll mark the west coast of the island and take it down and around to Ponce.” As the sun set behind us we still sailed forward into an empty seascape.

  “It’s not there,” I told Davis sadly. “We should have crashed into it by now. I knew it wouldn’t be there. You’re letting me kill the two of us, Davis. And I don’t understand why.”

  I could not go on watch that night, I felt so utterly defeated. I resigned myself to hell and Davis knew that but didn’t do a damn thing to comfort me. At sunrise I came up on deck and stared blankly at him. His face seemed raw and worn out. He had eaten a bagful of amphetamines during the past four days to keep going—the Navy’s secret weapon, he called them.

  “I’m sorry I can’t do anything,” I said. “I’m sorry for everything.”

  “You can,” he answered. “Take the tiller while I wash up.”

  He disappeared for five minutes and then was back up, letting the boom swing out over the starboard gunwale.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him. My shorts were damp and itchy. All of a sudden I couldn’t sit still.

  “What does it look like? Change your course to one-sixty.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t ask me why, just do it. Stop feeling so sorry for yourself and take a look around.”

  Sargasso weed was scattered everywhere in gold lines along the surface. The blueness had become subtly richer, less opaque, less threatening. It appeared to be, despite my gloom, a gorgeous day. I could see other boats, a fishing fleet, trawlers stiffly waving their tall
arms, on the horizon in front of us. After a minute all this information sank in.

  “My God, are we near land?”

  “Can’t you smell it?” Once he said it I could. It smelled like newly broken soil, fresh and safe.

  “Where’s Puerto Rico?”

  “Stand up and look.”

  I popped up but had to turn around before I could find what it was I needed to see—a hazy gray smudge, and below it green hills, the white and red lines of rooftops. I didn’t understand.

  “Davis, how can that be it?”

  “That’s it all right. We passed it during the night.”

  I started to shriek—not at Davis, but at myself. How could that be? The island was on the wrong side of the boat; it should have been off our port stern. I looked back at Davis, a crazy woman, my voice shaky.

  “We’re supposed to stop. Why aren’t we stopping?”

  “It’s too late. We missed our turn.”

  “Don’t joke with me, Davis. I’m too upset. Just tell me what’s going on.”

  “What’s going on, lady, is that your navigation has been wrong for the last six days. Ever since Cuba your course has been too slow and too high and too easterly. What’s going on is that you have passed the Antilles and are on your way to fucking Africa.”

  That is our history. That is where we have been. Why couldn’t Davis have told me, why couldn’t he have spared me the extent of my suffering? He knew all along, had been keeping our course secretly on a second chart, verifying it with a radio direction finder I didn’t even know was aboard. What did I learn, except to despise his coldheartedness and hate my own acquiescence? Hardship builds character, he was always reminding me. Well, not when the odds are bad and nobody’s lifting a finger to help. So that’s where we’ve been, and yet, knowing our tracks, I could not accurately predict where we were going. Davis had hurt me and I wanted to leave him. We reached St. Croix that night and docked at Frederiksted. He wished only to order a new jib and proceed immediately to Nevis to wait for it to be flown down. St. Croix was too American, he felt, and he didn’t want to hang around until the sail was ready. He didn’t bother to ask me what I wanted. When we got off Impetuous for the first time in twelve days I thought I had made up my mind.

  “I’m going home,” I said.

  “That’s your decision,” he answered calmly, meeting my eye without the customary arrogance the sail had given him. “But I wish you’d stay.”

  “How can you expect me to believe that! After what you did to me out there.”

  He took hold of my arm as we walked to a café. “It won’t happen again. It won’t happen because now you know how bad it can get. You have no illusions.”

  “You’re such a shit.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why can’t you lighten up on me, Davis?”

  “Stay with me until Nevis. Nevis will give you what you want.”

  “What do I want?”

  “You want everything to be beautiful and perfect and easy.”

  “What do you think I am, damn it? That’s not true. I’m just trying to survive. Can’t you see that?” Davis rolled his eyes when I said “survive” as if it were the biggest cliché. His attention was already someplace else on the busy street. But something in me couldn’t stop, was compelled to go on. I was back at sea with him the next day.

  Nevis was indeed beautiful—a perfect island, a perfect paradise, if you could relieve it of its history and its bittersweet poverty. Alexander Hamilton was born there, the son of a Scottish aristocrat. America’s saint of the well-to-do, he lost his blue blood defending the manliest of virtues, his honor, or Honor, I guess he would have said, the imprudent fellow. I can’t think of the island without seeing him lounging around as a young blade, a pretty boy who wore a sherbet-colored velvet coat and silk stockings and shoes with red wooden heels, a sword always knocking against his leg. He must have loved it. I know Davis would have. Davis, the picaroon.

  The sail over from St. Croix took thirty hours, thirty hours under flawless conditions, but I could not release myself from my paranoia to enjoy it the way I should have. I fell for the island, though. It was my reward, my redemption song. After going through what I had, I felt I deserved a place like this; I felt as if I owned Nevis. We dove in clear turquoise water, poked around the reefs like two lazy turtles, bathed naked, bathed on beaches as empty as the moon. Soaking in mineral springs, I stopped focusing on what was wrong with Davis and again saw what was good. We hiked into lush mountains to a waterfall too cold to swim in. Clouds encircled us on our way down. For a while I felt once more that dread sensation of being lost, but we were on land, sweet land, and it passed without effect. In Charlestown we sat in palm-thatched bars and yakked with the locals, drank moonshine rum, ate curried goat stew. We walked and we walked and we walked, hand in hand, sailors ashore on legs still wobbly from the sea.

  Each morning we would row our dinghy in from the anchorage to the public dock, busy in a slow way with stevedores and children, the dirty concrete piled with lumber and cases of glistening bottled beer, lumpy sacks of vegetables, hands of bananas, slaughtered animals, all steaming in the tropic sun. We wandered through the quayside markets and stalls, buying fruit from the hucksters and hot loaves of bread from an old woman who cooked them in a Dutch oven over an open fire. The bread was delicious, the days exalted, unlike any I had ever known. And yet Nevis questioned me, burdened my heart with its children—preschool beggars with big eyes, kids growing up on the hot streets. Most of the population was poor, but not pathetically so. Some people lived in scrap shacks, but most owned small two-room wooden houses with rusted tin roofs and no plumbing. In these latitudes that’s not as stricken as it sounds. The worst of it was they couldn’t get ahead no matter how hard they tried. In Nevis people had enough to carry on, sometimes a little more. Other than that they were stuck. Everybody but the merchants seemed terminally unemployed, although it was common for families to have a little garden or a piece of land in the hills where they could pick mangoes and grow sweet potatoes or tether a cow. Only the shop owners and civil servants could afford to dress the way they wanted; otherwise people wore clothes that were ill-fitting or torn, the zippers always busted, but rarely dirty. That’s how it was in Nevis, my first true touch of paradise. I’ve been to better places since, but mostly I’ve been to worse.

  The little kids in the countryside were shy and withdrawn, very formal when you did get them talking. They would say yes, sir, yes, missus, good day to you. In Charlestown, though, the kids begged whenever a white person appeared. Davis hated them.

  “That’s what tourism does,” he said.

  The first morning we bought bread from the old woman, a black boy—he was probably ten or eleven years old—was there. His feet were bare, as ours were, and he wore a pair of shorts cut off from shiny black pants and a white T-shirt with one of the shoulders ripped out. He watched us buy bread and then approached with his hand held out in front of him. I looked down because I thought he wanted to show us something.

  “Mistah,” he said to Davis, “please fah a dime. Me muddah dead ahnd me faddah blind.”

  Davis ignored him.

  “Can’t we give him something?” I asked.

  “No way,” Davis said. “All these people think every white person in the world is a Rockefeller. I work for my money and I don’t have enough of it, either. I’m not giving it away.”

  I dug into my pocket to find a coin for the boy. Davis grabbed my wrist. “Don’t,” he said. “If you give to him you’re going to have to give something to every kid on the road watching you right now. How can you justify giving to him and not to the others?”

  Since I didn’t have an answer for that I gave in to Davis. “Is this your son?” I asked the bread lady. She grimaced and ground her loose jaw, shook her head, scolding me. “I doan raise no rude pickahninny.”

  Each morning after that the boy was there, and each time he’d wait until after we had purchased our bre
ad and then he would say to Davis, “Mistah, please fah a dime. Me muddah dead ahnd me faddah blind.” I tried to close my eyes to it. He was such a handsome little boy though, long-lashed eyes, an elegantly boned face, brilliant teeth, sticklike arms and legs that he was striving to grow into. I wish that my perspective on him wasn’t distorted by what Davis saw. The boy was not sullen; there was a gay spirit about him that I couldn’t dismiss.

  I didn’t want to leave Nevis but I understood that Impetuous would have to leave soon if she were going to make her deadline in the Grenadines. As our time on the island shortened I felt the tension between Davis and me rekindle. I still wasn’t positive that I wanted to continue on with him. He wasn’t pressing me for an answer, at least not verbally, but the pressure was there anyway.

  On what turned out to be our final morning in Nevis we went to the bread lady to buy our breakfast. The beggar kid was there, too, but this time he had a pack of his brethren behind him. For moral support, I supposed. They were all in raggy clothes, all pretty and smooth like beach pebbles, the way black children are. Some of them just looked curious, some attempted to look very tough or serious. Davis paid for the bread. The black kid stuck out his hand. It was the longest-running show on Nevis.

  “Mistah, please fah a dime. Me muddah dead ahnd me faddah blind.”

  Maybe it was because of the audience, the knowledge that his message would be heard by many ears, or maybe it was because he already knew this would be our last day here, since the new jib had arrived, and therefore he could say good-bye to the island by bringing to a conclusion his ritual with the kid, but Davis finally conceded to talk to him.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Willessly,” the boy readily answered, pleased for the opportunity. He had a languid, musical voice that sounded like the middle range of notes on a clarinet.

  “Your mother’s dead, right?”

  “Yes, mahn.”

  “Your father’s blind?”

  “Yes.”