No Good Brother

by Tyler Keevil

  I turned on the radio and twisted the analogue dial. It whined and crackled until I found the Coast Guard radio. The lady spoke in a low monotone, very calm and soothing. She talked first about Georgia Strait and then Haro Strait and eventually got round to the forecast for Juan de Fuca. The afternoon and early evening were supposed to be fine, but later that night a weather warning would come into effect: westerly winds of twenty knots, rising to thirty around midnight, and continuing through the next day. Rain, too, and a likelihood of thunderstorms. I stood and listened to that, with my ear right near the speaker. Even after she stopped talking about Juan de Fuca I still stood there, listening.

  Our intercom crackled. Jake, hailing me from the galley.

  ‘Lefty to Poncho. You up there, Poncho?’

  I picked up the mouthpiece. ‘Poncho here.’

  ‘Why are we stopped?’

  ‘Just checking the forecast for our crossing. How’s our girl?’

  ‘You better come see.’

  Normally I wouldn’t have left the wheelhouse unattended, but I heard something in his tone. I hustled on down, and when I got to the galley Jake was sitting on the bench seat with his elbows on his knees and a beer can in his hand. The horse lay flat on her side next to the bowl of oats, still untouched. The air in there stank like an outhouse, and she didn’t react to my arrival at all.

  ‘She sick?’ I asked.

  ‘She ain’t well.’

  I stood over her for a minute. Her breaths were rapid and shallow and a wet sheen covered her coat. Jake reached down and laid his hand on her neck.

  ‘She feels hot to me. She feel hot to you?’

  I touched her skin. It seemed feverish, all right.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s eaten a bunch of cardboard and a damned cushion. Could be colic.’

  ‘Is that serious?’

  ‘If it’s not seen to.’

  ‘Maybe she’s just seasick.’

  ‘Either way, the sooner we get her on dry land the better.’

  I explained about the forecast: the winds, the rain, the impending storm. Jake asked me how long it would take to cross, and I had to calculate. I figured it would be four hours, in good weather, going full-bore.

  He said, ‘We might beat the storm.’

  ‘Or we might get stuck in it.’

  Jake took a pull of his beer. ‘Better that than stuck here for days, waiting for the weather to turn.’

  ‘I know. Damn.’

  I went back outside to stand on deck. I peered into the dusk, studying the strait. On the far side lay a thin strip of land, dotted by twinkling lights. Between it and us, the surface didn’t look too choppy. But off to starboard I could see the storm front moving in like a big black wave, an extension of the sea. Long tendrils of rain hung beneath it. A hell of a sight.

  Jake stepped out beside me, and I shook my head.

  ‘We can’t risk it.’

  ‘We got to,’ he said. ‘We got to.’

  I told him he only felt that way because he was beered up, and he said his drunkenness had nothing to do with it. We argued like that for a minute or two, as we often do.

  Jake said, ‘I just got this hunch.’

  ‘You and your hunches. I’m the one navigating.’

  ‘I ain’t contesting that. But you need some gumption, Cap. You need a little moxie, as sis used to say. You remember that, right?’

  ‘Don’t bring her into this.’

  ‘We can’t wait it out. Not with our horse in that condition.’

  I stood, feeling the deck rock beneath me. Back and forth.

  ‘If we go,’ I said, ‘we got to go now.’

  ‘What do you need from me?’

  I’d already reached for the ladder. As I scaled it I called back to him: ‘Batten the hatches, and clear the decks of gear, anything loose – tie-lines, fenders, crab traps, anything. Then fasten the latches on the cupboards and drawers in the galley.’ At the top I stopped and pointed at the can in his hand. ‘And stop drinking that fucking beer, goddammit Jake!’

  He dropped the can. It landed on deck and began to roll, spluttering foam.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Night crept on as San Juan Island and Cattle Point Lighthouse fell away behind us. In the growing dark, for a time, I lost sight of that storm front: it simply blended into the sky, which gave me the false notion that we had made the right decision, and could possibly outrun it. Initially, the waves held steady. We were still near the Saanich Peninsula, on Vancouver Island, which afforded some protection from the open ocean. The wind swung around further and started blowing southwesterly, at a solid fifteen knots. Ahead of us lay a void. Piloting a boat at night, you may as well be blindfolded. I only had about five feet of visibility off the bow, and used the GPS to keep us on course. Due to the ominous weather forecast, no other small crafts were running the strait (it being such a foolhardy idea). Our radar picked up a cruise ship way out to the west, and also an oil tanker coming north out of Puget Sound. Nothing else.

  Every so often I checked the readings from the buoy at Hein Bank. Hein Bank is a shoal in the middle of the strait, where the depth drops to thirty feet. The buoy constantly broadcasts weather updates and tidal information and on that night it served its purpose. The readings didn’t bode well. In the centre of the strait, conditions had worsened. The storm wasn’t catching up to us, but cutting us off, coming in from the west. Over in that direction, I could see roots of lightning sprouting from the clouds.

  I used the intercom to hail Jake in the galley.

  ‘How you doing down there?’

  ‘She’s getting a bit lively. I had to toss a rope on her, to keep her under control.’

  ‘At least she’s on her feet, now.’

  ‘That’s for sure.’

  ‘Just wanted to warn you – in half an hour we’re gonna hit a bad patch.’

  ‘This isn’t the bad patch?’

  ‘This isn’t anything.’

  ‘How will I know?’

  ‘You’ll know.’

  When the storm arrived, it arrived all at once. The wind picked up around us, rising to thirty knots: an actual gale that screeched around the cabin and buffeted the wheelhouse like a colony of rabid bats. And with the wind came the rain, and the waves: big fifteen-footers. During the fisheries, I had run waves of that size before, but these had a peculiar and damnable nature that made them particularly treacherous to navigate.

  When running waves upwind, normally what you do is steer sideways into the trough, then turn to face the crest as you go up and break it. I had seen Albert do that, and I had done it myself. But because of the tidal rip and the currents in the strait, the waves didn’t come at us from one direction. They seemed to rise up on all sides: these big black phantoms that flung themselves at our boat with fury and purpose, as if trying to claw their way aboard. The crests crashed across the foredeck and the spray blasted right up to the wheelhouse, smearing the windscreen. I felt each impact judder up through the frame of the boat.

  But the Western Lady could take it. Albert had spoken often about the strength and quality of her carvel hull – those solid oak beams and cedar strakes. He fervently believed wooden boats handled better in the water, and withstood punishment better, than the newer steel or aluminium seiners. No-account tin cans, Albert called them. He’d explained that to me, many times, but I hadn’t fully appreciated it until facing that storm without him.

  Ten minutes after we’d tumbled into the guts of the storm, Jake hailed me on the intercom. I grabbed the receiver and answered while gripping the wheel one-handed.

  ‘How you holding up?’ I asked.

  ‘The horse is spewing all over.’

  ‘As in puking?’

  ‘I think she’s seasick.’

  ‘Can you give her some of that Xylazine?’

  ‘I did. She’s too juiced up, though. Hold on.’ He signed off for a minute. Then, just when I was beginning to worry, he came back on. ‘D
amn – I just hurled, too.’

  ‘You’re both hurling?’

  ‘It’s a mess down here.’

  ‘Try to ride it out, man. Hopefully we’ll push through soon.’

  It was an obvious lie, but I didn’t know what else to say. After signing off, I tuned in the Coast Guard radio again. The Strait of San Juan now had a small-craft warning in effect: gale-force winds, high seas, torrential rain. Even though we’d already entered the very storm they were warning everybody away from, hearing the voice gave me a kind of comfort. I listened to it and watched the darkness. Every so often distant lightning strikes lit up the seascape, and each time that happened I would catch an eerie glimpse of the waves: an endless series of black peaks stretching into the distance, like a mountain range.

  Overcoming those peaks consumed my attention. I didn’t even consider the possibility of a lightning strike. That rarely happens, in boats. Instead I worried about the time it might take to cross, seeing as we were only doing about four or five knots, in actual landspeed. I remember trying to calculate that, and not being able to (despite it being a fairly simple calculation) and grasping that such slow-mindedness most likely portended a degree of panic on my part, when the sky around us turned white: the whole windshield flared bright as a cinema screen, and a lance of burning light hit the water thirty feet off the port side. It struck so close I actually saw this bluish crackle, and heard the explosive sound of vaporization, as steam and spray shot back up into the air. It was like witnessing a damned biblical omen, an act of God. The afterglow stained my retinas for five or six seconds. I blinked it back, thinking how incredibly lucky it had been that the lightning had struck so close without being drawn to our flagpole or the top of the wheelhouse.

  I grabbed the hailer to call Jake, to ask if he’d seen it. The system didn’t come on. I fiddled with the switches, but the whole thing seemed dead. I still didn’t quite understand, until I glanced at the GPS display and saw that it, too, had stopped working: the triangular symbol representing our position was no longer moving, and the screen stayed frozen at its last reading. The same applied to the VHF radio: the Coast Guard report I’d been listening to had gone silent. I couldn’t even get static.

  The lightning had blown out all our electrical equipment.

  I stood at the wheel for a time, wrestling with those waves, before deciding, finally, that I had to abandon the wheelhouse. Albert had taught me never to do that while piloting the vessel – let alone in a storm – but I was navigating completely blind, with no landmarks to guide me. I locked the rudder (I hoped it might prevent us from spinning in circles) and pulled on my rain slicker and stepped onto the upper deck.

  Until then, I had heard the storm, and seen it, but that was the first time I really felt it. The wind ripped into me and the rain flew sideways in cold and stinging flechettes. I held onto the rail and worked my way towards the ladder. Albert had always taught us to have a hold on something with at least one hand, and preferably two, in rough seas. This was all the more important for me, with my bad right hand, which didn’t grip well. At the ladder I turned around to descend but halfway down the boat listed sharply and my legs swung off to the left, dangling, before she levelled out. I got a foothold and again scaled down to the aft deck. At the bottom I reached for the galley door – all ready to announce myself and our dire situation – but of course it didn’t open, since I’d told Jake to lock the hatch from the inside. With the boat deck rocking like a funhouse floor beneath me, I held onto the ladder and pounded at the door with the underside of my fist and hollered my brother’s name.

  I only know what happened next from Jake having told me afterwards. He said that he opened the door and saw me standing there, drenched, and that I let go of the ladder and stepped towards him and then got smashed sideways by a wave. At the time, of course, I had no real sense of what had transpired. I felt an impact, which may have been me hitting the gunnel, and I remember inhaling water, and thinking I had been washed overboard. In actuality I lay sprawled on the deck, under the remains of the wave, which drained away towards the stern, dragging me with it. The stern had a drop-down transom, which had sprung open in the storm (Jake hadn’t known to lock it, and I hadn’t thought to instruct him). I could easily have slipped right off, like a loose piece of cargo. The deck tilted as we crested the next wave and I slid with the water, feet-first, face down. Blinded by brine, I looked up and saw Jake and the horse and the galley door blurrily receding from me, getting smaller.

  Then Jake did something valiant and gutsy and, to be honest, completely foolhardy: he took hold of Shenzao’s rope and dove headfirst towards me and sort of slithered on his belly and somehow managed to get an arm around my torso without letting go of the rope, using the weight and strength of the horse to anchor us until the greenwater ran off and the boat levelled out. Amid the remaining froth and foam Jake hauled me to my feet and we floundered together towards the galley door, where Shenzao awaited, leaning back on her haunches, providing leverage as we struggled along the rope, so clumsy and so human.

  Once we reached the galley door, we had an argument, which was typical of us: a fight in a storm. My brother and I would fight in hell, given half the chance. And maybe one day we will. Jake tried to drag me inside but I wouldn’t let him and kept pulling away, obsessed with going back up the ladder. Later, he would explain that my face was covered in blood from a cut on my forehead (I didn’t know this at the time) and that I was babbling and shouting in a deranged way about things that made no sense to him whatsoever. The horse, which had been unaccountably calm and even stoic up until that point, seemed to catch hold of our panic and began to stomp the floor repeatedly with her forehooves, and also to bray wildly, donkey-like, adding to the general sense of chaos.

  I shoved Jake towards her, telling him to grab the charts. Apparently I got the point across. As he turned to go, I shouted his name and gripped the ladder and said, ‘Two hands! Two hands!’ He said that I looked demented, a madman. But somehow I got back up the ladder and into the wheelhouse, where I took the helm. I checked the compass, which still worked (Albert kept a classic magnetic model mounted on the dash), and we seemed to be heading northeast, in the opposite direction we wanted to go. The wind had turned us completely backwards. I worked the wheel, bringing the bow light around to port, so we were facing south again, into the wind. It was goddamn nerve-racking, because to the east lay Smith Island and the surrounding shallows, and somewhere nearby, I knew, a 10,000-ton oil tanker was coming up from Puget Sound. I had a vague idea where it might be, but less with each passing minute.

  I’d left the wheelhouse door open and rain lashed in, spattering the floor. Then Jake appeared, cradling a jumbled armload of charts. In a breathless stream of words, I told him that the lightning had knocked out our navigation equipment (I can’t imagine how incredible that sounded to him) and we needed the chart, the same chart we’d been looking at earlier. He remembered, or at least understood, and began unscrolling the charts, checking each and tossing it aside, until he found the one we needed.

  ‘Got it,’ he said.

  ‘Bring it here.’

  He stood by me and held it at arm’s length under the light of the wheelhouse. I tried to steer a steady course while reading the map at the same time, which wasn’t easy.

  ‘Where’s Smith Island?’ I asked. ‘I can’t see Smith Island.’

  It took about ten seconds before Jake picked it out. He hadn’t brought up the sliderule so I couldn’t calculate specifically, but I had our last reading from the GPS, frozen on the display, and assumed we’d drifted a mite north of those coordinates. I compared them with the map and set a course that would take us towards Port Townsend, on the far side of the strait, and made sure to estimate generously to the west, so that we would avoid the tanker and the shallows. I remember feeling very capable and satisfied about that. Albert’s belief in being able to navigate by the charts, in case of emergencies just like this, had apparently saved us.

/>   But I’d failed to account for something: the tanker had changed course. It was no longer cruising due north – opposite to us – but had come around, turning west like us, to head out towards the Pacific. If I had thought about it I would have concluded that the open ocean was its most likely destination. But the chaos and the fall and the crack on my skull had addled me, and I perhaps wouldn’t have had the foresight to deduce it anyway.

  A few minutes later we heard the long, low moan of the tanker’s warning blast. It was deafening, even amid the storm. It resounded inside the wheelhouse, inside our heads.

  Jake said, ‘What in the goddamn hell is that?’

  He pointed off the port bow. Out there you could see the darkness moving. The tanker. It looked as if it was right there, practically on top of us, though really it must have been about a hundred yards away, cutting across our course. I’d failed to spot the running lights on account of their height: floating way up in the air, high overhead. And higher still hovered the lights of the cabins and bridge. The ship’s vast bulk moved lazily in front of us like a leviathan or kraken – some great sea beast – with those lights its glittering eyes.

  The captain lay on his horn again, that low lament, as if to moan, ‘What the hell are you yahoos doing?’ No doubt he had been trying to hail us for a long time on the radio, not knowing that ours was dead. The big stern passed away and the white, roiling wake flooded towards us, washing over the bow and causing the Lady to bob like a toy boat in a bathtub.

  Neither Jake nor I said anything. Not then. We were beyond words. All of that, all at once, had been too much. I was still partially concussed and only semi-lucid. And Jake – he had hardly been on a boat before. He held onto the chart, all rolled up. He gripped it like a sword or baseball bat, some kind of weapon he could use to ward off whatever the storm threw at us next. A whale, maybe. Or a giant squid. All the while, the waves rhythmically thumped against the hull, the wind shrieked like a thousand violins, and the rain played percussion on the wheelhouse: the storm had crescendoed to a kind of orchestral peak.