Authors: Thomas Mcguane
“Anyway, you said you’d go along with me on this,” said Errol.
“To a point,” said the cracker. “There’s a limit to everything.” All he remembered was walking through the door of the Bull and Whistle Saloon and not much of that. He had sufficiently conquered disgust to realize he was in the Gulf Stream, the sun just rising, and he felt a bleak pride that he could manage the yawl in his present condition. He sank and rose among the ultramarine troughs and saw golden strands of sargasso weed at eye level. Flying fish skittered off breaking wave edges, and the three that landed on deck he gutted and laid in the sink. By the end of the ten days promised him by the cracker, the mestizos would be gone and jobless. The oranges would fall and fruit wasps would rise in a cloud. He couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t let himself put words to his dismal pride in belonging to the manager class, but he clung to it nonetheless.
Wherever it was going, the little yawl was sailing well. Errol stood on the deck hanging onto the backstay and looked down into the Gulf Stream and the almost purplish depths. The rudder made a long trailing seam at the surface; he could see all the way to the end of the blade as it vibrated under the force of the boat’s progress. The sun had dried the decks, and only the leeward side remained dark with sea spray.
Errol started to search out details of the previous night but nothing came. He had a good many of these blanks now, trailing into the past. Sometimes they unexpectedly came to life, filled with detail. He called them “sleeping beauties” in an attempt to assign some value amid what he realized was simple creeping oblivion. He even knew that his current behavior—indifference to where he might be headed—was customary following a blackout, and not unrelated to his frivolous attempt to do away with himself; the feeling would soon give way to extreme concern for his situation and all-round fearfulness. As strength returned he would be amused by these comical swings, even a bit jubilant, and the cycle would begin again, its force undiminished by familiarity. His excuse was that life was repetitious anyway, without quite realizing that the source of despair’s enduring power was that it was always brand-spanking-new.
The yawl climbed each swell toward its breaking crest with steady progress, its thin wake like a crack in glass, until a moment when the view from the helm was blue sky and the whitest sea clouds; then hissing down the back slope into the trough to begin the climb again. In one ascent, he saw in the thinnest part of the rising wave a big iridescent fish that vanished as the sea swelled around it.
He merely wondered where he was going.
By afternoon, he more than wondered. The pleasant breeze from the southeast had gone round to the southwest and picked up considerably. Moreover, his spirits had sunk and he began to picture his restive mestizos, the towering cracker unfurling from his Mercedes to shout dismay at the ground covered with rotting oranges. But there was still time before all that happened, before the mestizos dispersed to the work camps at Okeechobee and their cramped prospects. He hadn’t really been their friend but he spoke their language and they shared his whiskey, and that was enough, relatively speaking.
The blue of the sea was still reflected by the clouds, but instead of gliding down the backs of waves, the yawl seemed now to push its way down them, the wind driving the bow deeper and deeper until only inches remained before seawater came aboard. It was time to reef.
Errol turned the yawl into the wind and she stopped, wallowing in the rolling ocean, the boom jumping from side to side until he sheeted the mizzen in and she held quietly, nose to wind. With eagerness and relief, Errol went from thinking to doing this work: releasing the main halyard to lower the mainsail, securing the first reef at the luff cringle, and then drawing down the leech until the sail was a third smaller. By tying in each of the fifteen reef points, he secured the loose stretch of decommissioned sail hanging below the boom in a tight, efficient bunt. The main halyard was raised until it hardened; he eased the mizzen, trimmed the jib and main, and the yawl resumed her course for an unknown destination, once again gliding down the waves with her nose up and her decks dry.
Back at the tiller, he regarded the sweat pouring off his body as a result of his exertions and knew it carried poison away. He first thought it behooved him never to land, but awareness of his limited stores made him reject this foolishness. As misery approached, the romance of annihilation seemed to recede, and he wondered why his bouts of self-destruction always occurred on a rising tide of self-love. He knew that the worse he felt the harder he would try to get somewhere and survive. First he had to find out where he was. He had missed his chance at a noon shot of the sun with the sextant and would have to wait for the stars.
The erasure of the previous night left him with no information about his departure; all he knew for certain was that he was in the Gulf Stream, heading for either Cuba or the Bahamas. At this rate, he would reach one or the other during the night, and he really ought to find out which one it was.
He lashed the tiller and went below to cook the flying fish on the alcohol stove, frying them until they were crunchy and taking them back to the cockpit on a tin plate, where he watched the white top of each wave racing along a blue edge before turning into white spume and blowing away. Terns hunted fish overhead and sometimes rained down onto baitfish pushed to the surface by predators beneath, mostly unseen but sometimes showing a dark fin slicing through the turbulence.
Lying back, Errol watched the mast move against the sky, a repeated crossed loop, the infinity sign. He had begun to feel sick. It started as pain just behind his forehead and spread down his spine; as the pain moved into his limbs over the next several hours he began to tremble. By sundown his entire body was shaking and he began dragging things from the cabin—sail bags, an army blanket, the canvas cockpit cover—covering himself with these to the height of the coaming so that only his face showed and the arm that connected him to the tiller. These too were shaking, and unless he kept them locked his teeth rattled audibly. His course was taking him to some part of the vast world of rum and his mind traced a path between this universe and a wallet still fat with banknotes. This wallet, pressed uncomfortably against his buttock, could have been left in the cabin, but the prospect of misplacing it on arrival in the land of rum was such that he wished to verify its whereabouts continuously by the discomfort it produced. Sunken-eyed and desolate, he watched the stars rise from the sea, and he knew he was meant to find out where he was. But the sextant in the far end of the cabin with the sight tables might as well have been on the moon; he knew he couldn’t hold it steady enough to take a fix. Instead, he made a crude estimate in his mind of where he might be. The wind was in the first part of the southwest shift; hence the building seas after the quiet of the prevailing southeasterly. He knew he sailed on a starboard tack perhaps ten or fifteen degrees east of the wind, which meant only that he was headed for islands of various sizes, histories, and languages and not the open Atlantic. Beyond that he couldn’t say how far he’d gone since he’d departed from a hole in time somewhere behind him.
He vomited the flying fish onto the sole of the cockpit and moaned as malodorous drool poured from the corner of his mouth. His hand on the tiller was a claw by now and the shaking had grown sufficiently violent that he heard himself thump against the cockpit seat, where he stretched out under the heap of things he’d brought from the cabin. He recognized that he wouldn’t be able to steer much longer and wished that, while he’d had the strength, he’d heaved to and stopped the boat until a better hour. It was too late now. He lashed the tiller in place and let the wind pick his course out of a hat. The one advantage of this much misery was that he could quit caring, a welcome detachment from his suffering, suffering that would end in the Isles of Rum. At this point, he heard a bitter laugh fly from his mouth, a raspy bray that produced another just like it, then another as they fed off each other, and finally a picture of himself braying at a colossal rum bottle, which inspired bleak masturbation on the cockpit floor. After that, he could only hold his head up by resting his teeth on the seat.
A calming spell of defeat overtook him as he lay on his back looking up at the sail as it passed the stars. Though he recognized them all, he was somewhat absorbed as they flowed in one side of the sail and out the other with a purpose—though not his, of course; he had no purpose. He was not purpose, he was pulp. He cast about for consolation, grimly congratulating himself for being childless. But he remembered that his mestizos trusted him. Of course, they were grateful to anyone who learned their language in this coldhearted nation. But more. He worked beside them, made sure they were paid, while the cracker often inclined to contrive withholdings. The mestizos knew Errol was not so devious, and a working alcoholic appealed to their sense of shared desperation and defensible self-destruction. Indeed, they shook their heads in sympathy when he came to the groves sick, picked things up when he dropped them, carried his ladder. In the depths of his misery, this was all Errol could find, but under the circumstances it seemed quite a lot. Perhaps he was beginning to turn the corner, but first there was more vomiting to be done and the last of the flying fish went over the side. Miguel, Delfin, Juan, Machado, Estevez, Antonio, were their names. Good men.
He slept, but lacked the humanity to dream.
The yawl sailed on into day without his attendance. For hours the decks shone bright with dew and then dried as the sun arose. The telltale streamed from the masthead in the freshening breeze and the water was no longer purple as she had crossed the stream; now she pulled her thin seam of wake across the blue water of a new sea, one that grew steadily paler until the yawl’s own speeding shadow on the bottom preceded her, then rose to meet her when she ran aground.
Unavailing curses poured from the companionway as Errol emerged to view his misfortune. The jib, the main, and the mizzen displayed their same wind-filled curves and emphasized the sheer peculiarity of the boat’s lack of motion. Looking in every direction, he could see only more bars and the dark shapes of coral heads, any one of which would have sunk the boat. Noon was rapidly approaching, and he dug out his sextant to take a sight of the sun, though he mirthlessly noted the irony of having two pieces of information, latitude and the proximity of the bottom.
The sight reduction from his battered book of tables gave him to conclude that he was somewhere in the western Bahamas. He should pride himself on his effortless crossing of the stream, he thought sardonically. Once he’d accepted that he was immobile, he felt an unexpected wave of security at the calm translucent waters around him, the coral gardens that were pretty shadows beneath them, and he marveled at having sailed so far into this gallery before going aground on forgiving sand. The full moon was a few days away. If he was not too surely embedded on this bar, he had an excellent chance of floating free on a spring tide. He had enough food and seemed to exult in this absence of choices; he explored the idea that he was content to be stuck.
The days began to pass, each more peaceful than the last. He had begun to think of his boat as an island, and in fact he could walk all around it or swim among the coral heads where clouds of pretty reef fish rose and fell with him in the gentle wash. He caught lobsters and boiled them in salt water while Radio Havana played from the cabin. He stretched out in the cockpit and read Frantz Fanon, experiencing pleasant indignation. After the first night, he had dragged a mattress from atop the quarter berth into the cockpit, and he slept there, watching expectantly as the moon grew full to bring the big tides that would float him off. Then, for better or worse, his life would resume. The boat had begun to float tentatively, lifting slightly at the bow only to ground again when the tide fell, but release would come soon.
The last day Errol knew that at high tide, a few hours from now, the yawl would float, free to sail away. He took the opportunity to give the bottom a good scrubbing, breaking down the new barnacles with the back of his brush and then sweeping them off. Down tide, hundreds of tiny fish gathered in a silver cloud to eat the particles of barnacle. With the full moon, the weather changed and dark clouds gathered against the western sky. He would have to look for shelter as soon as he was under way, or at least find enough seaway to heave to. A storm was coming.
He waited in the cockpit into the afternoon, and around three, with a light grinding sound, the yawl lifted off and turned into the wind. The anchor line, which had hung slack when he’d walked the anchor out into the shallows, rose and grew taut. If this were a safe anchorage, he would wait out the storm, but the anchor wouldn’t have to slip much under the force of the wind to put him atop the coral. He reduced the mainsail before ever departing, taking the sail down at the second reef to a cleat on the mast. The line leading to a cringle on the leech he wrapped onto the reefing winch and drew that down until the main was little more than a storm trysail. He brought the anchor aboard, hand over hand, the rode dropping into the anchor locker until the anchor was at the stemhead, streaming turtle grass and small snapping creatures; there he secured it and returned to the mast to raise sail before the yawl could make much sternway.
Once sail was up, the yawl began to move obediently. Errol stood at the tiller, carefully conning his way through the dark coral heads in their white circles of sand. The shadow of the boat scurried alongside him on the rippled bottom. Gradually the shadow shrank, then vanished, as he found blue water. With a rising thrill, Errol set sail for the unknown. He knew that any piece of land at all was on the trail to hell, and that this ocean road put a good face on oblivion. A bad storm was coming; he meant to embrace it. The first passage would be fear, but the other side—if he could get there—was what interested him as being the country of death or freedom, unless it turned out they were the same thing.