Blue Water Read online

  After a week of stillness, we began to grow uneasy. We ran our refrigerator thirty minutes a day, just enough to keep things cool. Ice, of course, was impossible. We were out of fresh fruit and vegetables. We were down to six eggs, a stick of butter, a half block of hard cheese. Plenty of rice yet, thank goodness. Plenty of chickpeas, black beans, kidney beans. I knew, exactly, what we had left, balances ticking inside my head. The last of our bread had sprouted an extraordinary halo of bright, blue mold, and though I’d brought along flour and yeast, it was too hot to think about baking fresh loaves. Besides, operating the stove—like running the refrigerator—drained power from Chelone’s batteries. Charging the batteries required running the engine. Running the engine required fuel. Already, we’d used roughly half of the one hundred gallons we’d brought on board, we agreed it was best to conserve what remained. We started using hand pumps to empty the bilge, the toilet. We switched from DC lights to kerosene.

  Still, every afternoon, we turned on the single sideband radio. I’d discovered, by accident, a call-in show for offshore vessels, run by a slightly impatient-sounding man who called himself Southbound Two. One by one, captains across the Atlantic radioed in their lats and longs, then stood by, waiting for Southbound Two to advise them about potential storm systems, wind patterns, fluctuating currents. Despite repeated hailings, we were never able to make contact ourselves, but we overheard other vessels in our vicinity, all of them becalmed, all of them asking pretty much the same question: when can we expect wind? Southbound Two’s response was not encouraging. We’d been caught within a sprawling high pressure system. Calm, clear skies reigned for over two hundred nautical miles. Rex marked our locations on the master chart with a lightly penciled X and, as the days passed, we kept track of everybody’s progress—or, lack thereof. In a strange way, the people aboard these boats became our friends, though we knew them simply as disembodied voices, identified them only by the names of their vessels: Reflections, We Did It, Clear Sailing, Easy Street. We talked about them obsessively. We gave them nicknames, invented personal histories. We listened hard for background noises that suggested the slightest details about their lives.

  One afternoon, a new vessel, Rubicon, hailed Southbound Two with lats and longs that were nearly identical to our own. The man’s voice was distinctive, rough. “Popeye the Sailor!” Rex said, looking up from the chart. That morning, he’d been back in the medical kit, rummaging about for more codeine. Now, his pupils were huge.

  Popeye hailed again, crisp and clear, as if he were sitting between us. A series of high-pitched squeals rose and fell behind his words.

  “They’ve got a dog aboard,” I said, emptying a can of chickpeas into the three bean salad I was making.

  “Either that, or it’s Olive Oyl,” Rex said, and he laughed at his joke a little too hard.

  “I wish we could contact them, let them know they’ve got neighbors.”

  “I’ll try hailing after the broadcast. You never know, maybe we’ll get through.” Rex scratched another faint X, representing Rubicon, onto the master chart. “Seriously, that guy sounds like Popeye. Remember that show? And the one with the moose. Bullwinkle. Did you ever see Bullwinkle?”

  Codeine made Rex chatty, nostalgic, the same way he got whenever he drank scotch whiskey. Which he’d been drinking a lot of, lately, after his evening watch was done. It helped the codeine, he said. It soothed his shoulder so he could sleep.

  I covered the three bean salad, wiped down the counter with salt water. “Do you think,” I asked, “we could see them if we climbed the mast?”

  “I’m in no condition to go up the stick.”

  “Well, I am.” I grabbed the binoculars from their hook, slung them around my neck.

  “You?” Rex said. “You get dizzy going up a stepladder.”

  His offhand laughter annoyed me all the more.

  “Good thing this isn’t a stepladder, then.”

  “Meg,” he began, but I hurried up into the cockpit, worked my feet into my salt-stiffened shoes. I could hear Rex clambering after me, but I’d already scrambled forward, mounting the first of the narrow mast steps, trying not to consider what would happen if I slipped. Three-quarters of the way up, I stopped, raised the binoculars. There was no one else out there, nothing else, aside from our shadow like a dark slick of oil, floating lightly on the water.

  “Anything?” Rex called. Looking down, I saw he was cupping his right elbow, relieving his shoulder from the weight of his arm. For the past few nights, despite his extra nightcap, he’d moved uncomfortably from the cockpit to the V-berth, from the V-berth to the settee, from the settee to the double berth. Suddenly dizzy, I pressed my cheek to the mast, hugged the firm bulk of it against my chest. I was worried about Rex’s shoulder, what was clearly a constant, grueling pain. I was worried about the weather. I was worried that, along with Rubicon and all the other vessels, we were doomed to remain exactly where we were, drifting for the next hundred years in a kind of Twilight Zone. We were, after all, on the edge of the horse latitudes, the Atlantic’s notorious dead zone. Named in the days before steam, when becalmed sailing ships ran low on supplies and jettisoned their cargo of horses, cattle, whipping them up out of the holds, driving them into the sea. Farther south, the slave ships languished, generations of Africans dying of hunger, thirst, disease. Suddenly, I imagined all those skeletons below, an entire lost civilization: women rocking babies, men building shelters, livestock moving in slow, deliberate herds, picking their way across the ocean floor.

  “Meg?”

  I forced myself to scan the horizon one more time, careful not to squint, keeping both eyes open. The edge of the sea blended seamlessly into the edge of the sky, leaving no sense of where one ended, the other began.

  “Nothing,” I said, and I started climbing down.

  “You sure?”

  I stopped. “I know how to look.”

  “Sorry,” Rex said, in a tone of voice that told me he wasn’t.

  I wished we had a crow’s nest. I wished I could climb into it, curl up in a ball, out of sight. I wished I didn’t have to continue my descent, which, of course, I did, one reluctant step after another.

  This was the hardest part of each day: the hours of light remaining after we’d shut down the single sideband, after Rex had attempted, in vain, to hail any one of the half-dozen vessels all around us. The sudden silence—augmented by heat, confinement, monotony—left us irritable, snappish. We picked at each other, sulked, avoided each other’s gaze. Below, in the cabin, the temperature rose past one hundred degrees; topside, the teak decks licked our heels like flames through the thin, rubber soles of our deck shoes. There was nothing to do but wait for dusk beneath the thin shade of the cockpit bimini, sipping tepid bottles of powdered Gatorade, sopping ourselves with seawater. Later, in the relative coolness of evening, we’d emerge, hunched and stiff, like bears from a cave. We’d apologize wearily, sheepishly. We’d put on our nightshirts, nibble trail mix and dried fruit. We’d nose through the galley lockers, the salon bookshelves, looking for an unopened package of crackers, a fresh magazine, the least thing we might have missed.

  “Are you happy?” Rex asked, surprising me one night. “Happier, I mean?”

  The truth was this: I was thirsty. My tongue lay thick in my mouth. Hours often passed during which I didn’t think of Evan even once.

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  Rex bit his lip. “I don’t miss him as much, out here.”

  Had I wanted to weep, it wouldn’t have mattered. My dry, burning eyes were incapable of tears.

  In college, I took a public speaking seminar in which we studied mnemonic devices used by the Greeks. How had the great orators been able to remember long histories and speeches, seemingly endless panegyrics, without writing anything down? The professor explained that, instead of composing pages of words, the speaker created an architectural structure within his mind, then walked through the rooms and corridors, placing key points he wished
to remember in windows and doorways, on ledges and hearths. Later, while giving his speech, he’d simply retrace his steps, collecting each item from its place, until he’d reclaimed them all.

  Even at the time, this made sense to me. If I wanted to remember my tenth birthday party, I simply returned, within my mind’s glassy eye, to Ooster’s Restaurant and Ribs, inhaling its odor of popcorn and barbecue, peering into the display case with its assortment of sweet, frosted cakes. If I wanted to remember my grandmother, I imagined myself at St. Clare’s, settled into the pew beneath the statue of St. Augustine, the place where she’d always sat. I’d kept Evan alive in the overstuffed chair where we’d read bedtime stories; in a spatter of stains on the living room carpet, where he’d managed to open a pen; in the garden, where he’d knelt to pat damp earth around the roots of trembling seedlings. Melons sprouted in eggshells. Pepper and tomato plants purchased from Wassink’s Nursery. Marigolds to ward off rabbits and gophers and deer.

  Now here I was, adrift in a place where he’d never lived, lost within a landscape that, during his lifetime, neither one of us could have imagined. A seascape, in fact, free of ledges and doors. Without angles, definition.

  Without history.

  That night, while Rex was on watch, I wriggled my way into the V-berth with a flashlight, opened the locker where I’d stowed the small, waterproof box that contained our passports and traveler’s checks, cash, prescriptions, emergency numbers. At the bottom of the box was a plastic sleeve of photos: I slid them out, studied them deliberately, guiltily. My parents, arm in arm, on a Florida golf course. Toby at the fish store, grinning. Our house with its fieldstone walls, its watercolor views. And, finally, a single picture of Evan, taken a few weeks after Halloween, dressed up as SpongeBob SquarePants. He’d caught me out in the garage, slipping the costume into the Goodwill bag.

  “I want to wear it next year!” he howled.

  “But you’ll be too big for it by then,” I said. “And you might not even like SpongeBob SquarePants anymore.”

  In the end, we’d agreed that he could put it on one last time. I would take his picture. If, by next Halloween, he still wanted to be SpongeBob SquarePants, I would travel to the ends of the earth, if necessary, to find him a costume just like it. Now, studying his face, enclosed by a corona of bright yellow cloth, I could see everything that had always amazed me most about his character: his determination, his methodical persistence, his insistence on the justness, the validity, of his ideas. If I told him “We’ll do it tomorrow,” he’d remember. If I said “Let’s save that for next week,” he’d never forget. He would have reminded me, come October, about this photograph. He would have considered earnestly, leisurely, all sides of the question of whether or not he still wanted to be SpongeBob SquarePants.

  No photos, Rex and I had agreed before setting sail from Portland. No sentimental charms or mementos. Why subject ourselves to the inevitable questions? Why re-create, wherever we went, the same painful circumstances we’d hoped to leave behind? If anyone asked if we had children, we’d tell them the truth.

  We’d tell them no.

  On our twenty-first day becalmed, something white flashed on the horizon. Gradually, a ragged-looking motor sailer, single sail luffing, chugged into view. She was nearly twice the length of Chelone, though not much beamier, giving her the scrawny, raw-boned lines of an alley cat. Jerry cans of fuel formed a gypsy necklace around the edges of her deck. Two solar panels gleamed above the cockpit like dark, expressionless eyes.

  Rubicon.

  Rex eyed the vessel doubtfully. “Looks a little like a plague ship,” he said.

  Still, he hailed, first on the VHF and a few minutes later, when we got no response, on the single sideband radio. Nothing. Hurrying below, I found what had once been a white T-shirt. This I carried out onto the bowsprit, waving it like a flag.

  “Are you trying to surrender?” Rex asked.

  I ignored him.

  “Even if they’re looking our way, they won’t be able to see you. They’re too far off.”

  “So let’s motor after them.”

  When Rex shook his head, I wanted to throttle him. Here, less than a mile away, were real, live human beings, people other than ourselves. Maybe he didn’t care, but I certainly did. I was sick to death of talking about Bullwinkle.

  “C’mon, how much fuel can it take?”

  “It isn’t only that, Meg. What if they don’t want company?”

  “Who wouldn’t want company in the middle of the Atlantic?”

  “We’re not in the middle,” Rex said, and there was a weary edge to his voice. “Nowhere near the middle, believe me.”

  With that, our VHF began to crackle, and Chelone’s cockpit reverberated with the cartoon voice of Popeye the Sailor:

  “Chelone, Chelone, that’s one helluva name, hope I’m sayin’ it right. This is sailing vessel Rubicon, Rubicon. Come back, Chelone.”

  To my surprise, Rex lunged for the microphone, sore shoulder and all, and I realized he’d been just as eager as I was for contact.

  “Gotcha, Rubicon. You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

  “Ain’t that the truth. How you doin’ on freshwater?”

  “Fine. You in trouble?”

  “Just a minute.” There came that high-pitched barking sound, followed by a series of squeals, then the shush of a woman’s voice. “Sorry, our little guy gets excited. The membrane on our water maker’s fouled.”

  “Can’t you clean it?” Rex asked.

  Rough laughter filled the frequency. “Problem is, you need the cleaning solution to do it. Wife tidied up a few weeks ago, and now we can’t find a goddamn thing.”

  There was a mild scuffling, followed by a woman’s good-natured voice. “Not that we could find anything before. I don’t suppose you have a water maker?”

  “Plenty of cleaner, too, I believe.” Rex glanced at me to confirm this; I nodded. “Love to help you out.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Chelone.” Popeye was back on the air. “We’ve got two pounds of ground chuck we’ve been saving for a special occasion. Come aboard with that solution, and we’ll cook you up the best damn burgers you’ve ever tasted.”

  Meat that did not come out of a can! Even now, I can’t recall another invitation I’ve accepted with such eagerness, such gratitude. While Rex and Popeye (whose name, it turned out, was Eli Hale) worked out the logistics of rafting our boats together, I dug Chelone’s fenders out of stowage, and by the time I’d dragged them onto deck, Rubicon was already closing in. There’d be no time, I realized, to clean myself up, to change out of the filthy shirt I was wearing and into the less-filthy shirt I’d been saving. Dark crescents of dirt frowned beneath my nails. I glanced back at Rex, who was at the helm. He was bare-chested. The waistband of his shorts had rotted through, revealing a gray strip of elastic.

  We’re the ones, I thought, who look like a plague ship.

  But my first glimpse of the Hales put me at ease. Like Rex, Eli was standing at the helm, bare-chested. Like Rex, the shorts he wore had seen happier days. Unlike Rex, however, he was short, heavyset, with dirty blond hair twisted into a thicket of tattered dreads. His belly was spangled with tattoos. Moments later, his wife burst onto the deck in cutoffs and what looked like an old brassier. She was full-chested, freckled, with long red hair pulled back into braids. I liked her instantly. A tangle of fenders fanned out behind her; she flashed me a grin before working them free, expertly tying them along Rubicon’s hull.

  “That should do, don’t you think?” she said, eyeing my own row of fenders. Without waiting for an answer, she perched on the combing, legs extended, to fend off the impact of Chelone’s hull. “I’m Bernadette.”

  “Meg. My husband, Rex.”

  “Christ almighty,” Eli called, jutting his chin at Rex’s shoulder. “What the hell did you do to yourself?”

  Rex laughed. “Bet it didn’t hurt as much as those tattoos.”

  “Can’t tell you if they hurt or not,�
�� Eli said. “Drunk as a skunk when I got ’em.”

  Our hulls kissed. Bernadette and I traded lines. Five minutes later, I followed Rex aboard, clutching the bottle of cleaning solution like a housewarming bouquet.

  “You’re a couple of funny-looking angels,” Eli said, “but we’re awful glad to see you anyway.”

  The Hales, we learned, had been living aboard Rubicon for nine years. At the end of each summer, they headed south to the Caribbean; in spring, they made their way north again, eventually arriving in New Bern, North Carolina, where they owned some property. This year, their departure had been delayed by a medical appointment, but Bernadette was still hoping they’d make Houndfish Cay—another four hundred miles to the south—before hurricane season started in earnest. Nearly a hundred cruisers wintered there—Americans, Canadians, a smattering of South Americans and French—anchored in a series of small, sheltered bays. Together, they homeschooled their kids, organized book clubs, participated in talent shows, fishing trips, dine-arounds. There was a pageant at Christmastime, an Easter-egg hunt in April. The Hales had been lots of places, but Houndfish Cay was their favorite.

  And of course, their little guy loved it there.

  Rex and I exchanged the tolerant glances of people who don’t keep pets.

  “Where are you folks headed?” Eli asked.

  I looked at Rex; he shrugged. “Bermuda, for now. After that, we’ll see.”

  “Now that’s the cruising spirit,” Eli said. “Go where the wind decides to take you.”

  Bernadette laughed. “What wind?”

  Like farmers, the four of us stopped talking for a moment, stared reverently, beseechingly, at the sky.