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Overboard

Hank Searls

Dedication

To my first and last mate.

Part I - Day

PART I

Day

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

She had vanished while he slept, sometime before dawn, one infinitesimal speck detaching itself from another under unseeing stars. And now as the sun rose astern, the southeast trades began to die so that his speed slackened and his search slowed.

He sagged nude at the helm, shivering in panic, alone with a cat 40 miles from the nearest island. In early apricot light, he was still backtracking. He forced himself to look at his watch. It was 5:15 A.M. Papeete time.

The ketch had been pounding southeast, steered by a wind-vane, bound from Bora Bora to Tahiti, now seventy miles away. In darkness at 3:12 A.M., he had discovered that she was gone. At that time he had been, roughly, fifty miles from Moorea upwind, with Raiatea forty miles to leeward.

When the first instant of paralysis had passed and he found that he could function, he had dropped the man-overboard flag, tied to a lifebuoy and a floating strobe light. He had acted instinctively, but perhaps prematurely. There was no reason to think that she was anywhere near. The strobe had begun to wink in his wake.

He had found himself whimpering in fear but capable of elementary calculations. He had reversed course instantly and set the wind-vane to steer the new heading. He avoided chaos, by force of will, long enough to plot a dead-reckoning position. And he searched for their logbook, hoping to find her last entry because it would help to pinpoint the time when she had gone. He could not find the book.

Uselessly, he had tried to call Papeete Radio, in halting French, and then English. There was no reply. He climbed to the spreader halfway up the mast.

First he had searched from aloft, letting the wind-vane steer. He had clung to ratlines under the yardarm for two hours, scanning by starlight the path they had sailed, straining against the dark and listening. The gibbous, lopsided moon sinking to the west was useless. It was not darkness, anyway, that would hide her when he drew near; it was the unceasing swells rolling in from the east. Even from twenty-five feet up the mast, the blinking strobe had been lost within minutes, astern among mountainous seas.

It was three days before Christmas, high summer and le mauvais temps in the Societies. He faced a day of simmering heat and squalls. Naked and tall in the rigging, eyeballs wind-dried and stinging, he had clung to the shrouds as the sun rose. His hands and feet were already raw from the teak ratline rungs, for the roll continually pressed him against the rough wood and then flung him abeam. His skin smelled sourly of terror. Already he was oozing sweat.

He had hung on past sunrise as Irwin, their stainless-steel wind-vane, steered him back over the track they had come. A few minutes after dawn the breeze fell off so sharply that the boat began to wander, groping for the wind. So he had swung down, lurched aft to the cockpit, and released the steering-vane. He took the wheel.

Now he was too low to see well. For a while, he slatted along at two knots, not covering nearly enough ocean, trapped at deck-level. He had no choice: if he lashed the helm and started the engine and climbed the shrouds again he’d drift from the path they had sailed.

To fend off despair, he considered once more a hope that had helped him through the hours aloft. If she had been wearing her jacket, there was a plastic police-whistle tied to the zipper, just for this, very loud and shrill. The jacket itself, being floatable, might keep her up all day.

He moved toward the hatch, intending finally to duck below to check the foul-weather locker for the coat. Hand on the hatch-top, he stopped. He was afraid to face her bright orange jacket hanging in the locker. It was better to assume that she was in it, floating somewhere ahead.

He glanced back at the rising sun, shafting through a squall line. She could be watching it too.

“Now look,” he muttered to no one, “I haven’t asked a fucking thing until now...”

He found his eyes filling with tears, so that he could not search. Astonished, he massaged them with his fingers until he could see. When his vision cleared, he grabbed a mizzen shroud near the wheel. To raise his eye-level, he balanced with one bare foot on the cockpit coaming. He steered with the other, as he did when they entered an unknown pass and she perched in the crosstrees to help. He craned ahead, sweeping the horizon. Standing this way, until fatigue overtook him, he would be able to see almost as well as if he were on the bottom rung of the ratlines.

He glanced at a squall line to windward. He saw one of her cloud-people, a perfect matador wearing a scarlet-fringed hat, taunting him with a swirling cape of rain. He almost called her topside, realized she was gone, pulled back just in time from the edge of self-pity and panic and tears that would blind him. He regarded instead the threat of a squall.

The usual morning revival of the trades, which would help him cover the ocean faster, would also bring the matador sweeping down on him. She could be hidden under the bullfighter’s mantle if the rain moved across his path. And meanwhile, without the trades, the boat was simply marking time, while she struggled somewhere ahead.

He was impelled to move faster. He started the engine. He jammed it full ahead without warming it up, ignoring the clattering uproar. It settled finally into its normal rumble, but its sound frightened him. His main chance was to hear her, not to see her. When he was down in the troughs, he could see nothing but dark-blue hills heaving around him. With the engine drumming at his feet he could miss her if she were screaming and shrilling in a valley fifty yards away.

He considered the odds that they might both be borne aloft at the same instant that he was looking in her direction. Most of the time he was sinking or rising on the slope of a sapphire knoll. He couldn’t attentively sweep the whole 360 degrees of the skyline at one time, so he was taking it one semicircle per wave, ducking under the main boom to see to leeward before he sank into the next trough. His chances of seeing her seemed infinitely small.

But her chance of spotting him was very much greater. The mainmast towered above the wave peaks forty feet. It would be she who discovered him. He had better be ready to hear her when she did.

He cut the engine, conceding the race to the squall. Suddenly he heard only the creak of the boom on the gooseneck, the flutter of the main at the leech. A steering cable squeaked behind him and slow-moving water gurgled under the stern.

Now, in the silence, the boat’s crawling pace chilled him. He envisioned for the first time her body somewhere ahead, trailing strands of burnished bronze, spiraling downward into water turning midnight blue. The vision overcame his fear of the unanswered question of her jacket below. He took a final sweep of the horizon, bobbed through the hatch, and stumbled down the companionway ladder. He grasped the latch on the foul-weather locker and swung it open.

Her jacket was gone. He sagged with relief. Only his windbreaker, the identical orange color but immensely bigger, with a wine stain down its front, rocked on its hanger. Having her jacket, she had the whistle too.

He caught her scent from a plastic bottle of Sea & Ski, teetering on the shelf. It was a good omen, all around.

Incredibly, hypocritically, he found himself on his knees, head bowed in thanks. Feeling suddenly foolish, he got up, slammed the locker door, and sprung topside.

The breeze freshened, speeding the squall. From below he heard the bulkhead clock strike three bells: 5:30. His euphoria trickled away. Now he became convinced that he had passed her soon after his panicky turn, in the black hours before dawn.

Everything suddenly pulled at him to reverse course and retrace his track. He was wrenched by a gut-feeling that she was astern. The steering cable behind him began to squeal "behind, behind, behind"; the mainsail stuttered: "back-back-back-back.”

He fought the impulse to play the hunch.

She could be just as easily bobbing in the next five miles as in the last ten.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

She was swept to the crest of a swell. It broke in her face. Her eyes stung with the foam. She squeezed them shut, lying back in her float-jacket, always clinging to the plastic jug she had torn from the trailing line.

The morning sun was hot on her forehead. She felt feverish and let her head sink to cool it. If he didn’t find her soon, she’d boil like a lobster.

She guessed from the height of the sun that it was six or seven in the morning. Her guaranteed 300-foot waterproof watch had stopped precisely at dawn. She estimated that she had been in the water for three or four hours.

Her lips were cracked and stinging. Until daybreak she had been freezing. She still shivered momentarily, but now she could not tell if she suffered more from heat or cold. In twelve months in the tropics, she had never bothered to ask him how much the water heated up by day. Maybe by noon she would be warm. But of course he would find her before then.

The floating jacket that was saving her life was the worst of her discomforts. It kept slithering up her nude body and chafing her armpits. The coarse nylon safety belt was rubbing her belly raw too. She kept it on anyway. She had some vague idea that it might help him drag her aboard; already she was too tired to be much help herself. Besides, it was proof that she had semi-followed their rules, even if she had obviously not kept it clipped to a lifeline topside.

She rubbed cautiously under the belt. Doing that, she let the plastic container slip away. The wind caught it and scooted it up the face of a swell. She expended too much energy in a fast little sprint to catch it.

She gripped it firmly, like a baby, then shifted to carry it like a football in the crook of her arm. For hours she had shifted it back and forth. When water would trickle in through its broken hollow handle, she would hold it aloft to drain it. She would plug it for a while with her finger. Then she would forget and it would fill again and she would empty it.

She valued the jug for its buoyancy, afraid that her jacket might turn soggy and that she would have to jettison it. And the jug was a link with the boat.

The whole nightmare was past belief. Safe in her bunk at 3 A.M., she had been deep in the New York subway system, reading The Taking of the Pelham One-Two-Three, in paperback. Fifteen minutes later she had been thrashing idiotically in their wake.

She let her mind drift back, looking for some excuse. She had been soft and snug with the cat in the forward cabin, under the bunk light. The kitchen timer had croaked from its niche above a deck beam, telling her that it was time for her half-hour survey of the horizon. She spilled M. le Chat from her bare belly, snapped off her light to save the main battery, and groped with her feet for the varnished cabin flooring.

The cabin sole, when the boat was hard on the wind, sloped almost thirty degrees. Automatically, she swung herself aft in the dark from bulkhead to handhold to shelf, making no move without a hold on something. She was as familiar with her environment as a gibbon in the jungle, alternately light and heavy as the boat pitched wildly in its normal battle with the head-seas.

She sidled past the trunk of the mast, feeling a trickle of water down its varnished face: the canvas mast-boot topside was leaking, as usual, and Mitch kept forgetting to tape it down.

That was her current bitch. And the stupid chirping from the steering cable under the lazarette, which was making a neurotic out of the cat. Tomorrow she would get him to squirt it with WD-40.

In the main cabin, by the moonglow through the skylight, she could make out his bare form, tangled with his pareu on the leeward side of his bunk. His massive shoulders and the line of his butt, after almost twenty-two years of marriage, were still sexy to her.

Maybe it would all work out once they got the hell back.

She left the lights off, not wanting to hurt her night-vision or to wake Mitch. She groped for her jacket in the foul-weather locker and put it on. She picked her safety belt from the hook under the canvas dodger and cinched it on too. She drew a flashlight from a rack by the hatch, took the logbook from its niche above the chart table, and climbed to the cockpit.

The night was warm but the wind whipped her hair to leeward. Its ends stung her cheeks. She snapped her safety belt to the gooseneck on the mizzenmast, with slack enough to move around the cockpit but leasing her from straying much further.

She stepped to the coaming to increase her height, clinging to a shroud for balance. A three-quarter moon sagged lugubriously to the west. Carefully, keeping her eyes just above the dark horizon as he had taught her, she scanned the whole 360 degrees, stooping to see to starboard under the drumming sail. She checked for the glow of the port and starboard running lights; both OK. The sternlight had been out since Bora Bora: another little job for him.

She shielded her flashlight and shone it on the Sumlog dial by the wheel. She logged the speed—5.1 knots—and the mileage. She switched on the binnacle light and checked the compass course. SSE, right on. She checked her watch: 0304. She logged that too, as 0300, then turned off the binnacle and shone her light on Irwin.

He was steering them tirelessly, but something in the slant of the mizzen sheet behind him puzzled her. She saw that it was fouled on the useless sternlight.

She was supposed to awaken Mitch if she left the cockpit, but for so trivial a problem it seemed silly. She tried first to reach the line with her foot, straining at the length of her tether. She could not quite touch it, so she stuffed the logbook under the cockpit seat to protect it from spray and unclipped the safety belt hook from the gooseneck. She should have snapped it to a stanchion on the stern before she stretched out her leg again to kick loose the sheet. It seemed so close that she did not.

She was balanced on the lazarette, on one leg, clinging to a shroud and reaching out her toes for the sheet, when a wave smacked the port bow, sending a sheet of spray aft to soak her and the whole stern. The boat lurched to starboard under the impact, then rolled to port. It threw her off balance.

She lost her grip on the shroud and pirouetted wildly on the slickened hatch. For a moment she tottered. She grabbed at another shroud, only tipped the wire cable with her finger. Her flashlight dropped overboard. Her butt hit the cap-rail and for an instant she balanced there, flailing for a handhold. She screamed his name, once.

Then she was in the warm rushing sea, fighting instantly to find the safety hawser they trailed, just for this impossibility. She groped and swalloped water. She felt the rope brush her leg, then her arm. It was slimy with sea-growth. She grabbed it, and lost it. At the last moment she glimpsed the crazy empty plastic jug bounding at its tail.

She caught the jug but it snapped off in her hands. The hawser whipped away, streaming phosphorescence. She found her breath and shrieked for Mitch while the dark hull pulled off. She remembered her whistle. She fumbled for its string tied to her jacket zipper, jammed it into her mouth and began wetly to shrill.

She continued to blow long after the boat was lost in the heaving dark swells. She saw the moon, tipping precariously. It was blotted out by a wave, no worse than the one that had spilled her overboard, but monstrous from her angle. She rode up its face like a cork, glimpsed the top of the mainsail, distant against the stars. She whistled again, and listened.

Nothing. She screamed his name once more.

Then she lay whimpering passively in the swells, while the enormity of it all soaked in. Once she thought she saw a faroff flash. She could not orient it well enough even to swim toward it. But if he had dropped the strobe, at least he had heard her go, and was looking for her.

She didn’t see it again. After a while she decided that she had imagined it.

When dawn came and she saw no sail instantly, she was shaken and scared, as much for him as herself. She knew that she was OK; he knew nothing.

She did not doubt that he’d find her.

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

The sun edged higher. He clutched the wheel, unable to shake the compulsion to turn back and retrace his track. The urge to turn was distracting him from his search. He would find himself staring blindly at water he had not really scanned, weighing the odds on her being ahead or behind, thinking when he should be watching every swell.

His guilt was enormous, distracting him further. He had brought her here and never really even told her why.

Three weeks ago they had sailed into the pass at Bora Bora and anchored behind a sandy motu in the lagoon, isolating themselves from the hotels and the village. They were exhausted, licking their wounds from a hurricane which had driven them to sea, licking other wounds as well. That night, as they sat in the cockpit sipping scotch, she asked him idly when their cruise had really begun.

“When we spotted the boat,” he said, too quickly.

“You’re not leveling,” she said. “And we promised.”

He had caught a quick image of himself at fourteen, a rawboned adolescent already almost six feet tall, reading in his bedroom of a penthouse on a San Francisco hill. It was a year after Pearl Harbor. The U.S. Navy had crawled back into the ring, due, from his own point of view, to his father’s suicidal participation. He was sunk in the old man’s leather chair, hauled months before from the den, where his mother sat every night in majestic masochism, listening to radio news Mitch refused anymore to hear. Weeks before, a sergeant whose leg his dad had saved at Tarawa had called from Oak Knoll Naval Hospital, across the Bay. His old man had turned down orders to take over a battle-wagon sickbay for another tour with the Second Marines.

Mitch’s gut still twisted at the thought. Great, just fucking great! Russian roulette would be quicker and a lot less painful to those who must sit and wait. Homework had become impossible. Sucking at a forbidden pipe, Mitch anesthetized himself with fiction, night after night and week after week. Esquire, Bluebook, Adventure Magazine were all too full of the war. So he turned to Melville, Sabatini, Conrad, Jack London, and Slocum. Typee, Wake of the Red Witch, Lord Jim, he sucked in with the smoke. Rationally, he knew that the islands he was adventuring were dead, or would be ruined by the war, but he saw himself among them anyway, skippering a trading schooner, with a slim Polynesian mistress, outwitting pearl-traders and rescuing heiresses.

It had all been harmless, and comforting. No South Sea island adventure between the covers of a book was half as lethal as what his old man must be facing further west. Mitch had spoken to no one of his reading tastes, not his mother, not his friends. He was isolated enough already on the hill, when half his buddies lived in shoulder-to-shoulder flats in North Beach. Who read Melville, except under duress?

That was when their cruise had really started. But he could not tell Lindy this. He had held to his South Sea fantasy through his own war in Korea and two years of college, pragmatically changing his self-image to that of a Pacific Island Schweitzer doctoring grateful natives on deck, all back-lit by the sun sinking into the golden west.

Lindy already blamed herself because twenty-two years ago he had quit premed for law. To lay the death of the adolescent dream on her too would have been cruel then, and foolish now. He wasn’t going to jab at old wounds when the object was to close them. Promises or not, on that he took the Fifth.

“I am leveling,” he said flatly. “The cruise started when we saw the boat.” He reached for her glass. “Another blast?”

She shook her head. In the light from the cabin hatch he could see her eyes holding his. She was not buying it. Uncomfortably, he went below.

The South Seas might have rested forever between the covers of Melville if it had not been for an unemployed housepainter with a paralyzed wife, and the sturdy Atkins ketch, painted red.

The housepainter had shambled into his law office four years ago, and the ketch had crossed his path two years later.

For the housepainter’s wife, Mitch had filed the largest medical malpractice suit in the history of California law. In the South Pacific, where he no longer got even the California Bar Journal, he had no way of knowing whether the ridiculous million-five judgment had been exceeded since. From his ex-partner’s letters, he thought not.

Without the judgment, he could not have retired at 43. He might not, in fact, have been uncomfortable enough about his law practice to want to.

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