The Starboard Sea: A Novel (5 page)

I was not a cause for celebration. Accidents are always the captain’s fault. It was my fault we were going so fast and my fault that we tacked too soon. True, I had saved Race’s life, but my carelessness, my inattention, had almost killed him. Everyone at Bellingham would know me, know who I was, by dinner. Would they consider me the hero or the fuckup? All I had wanted was to be anonymous.

Coach Tripp and I hauled Race up onto the launch. Race had never lost consciousness, but he had red burn marks around his neck and was coughing furiously, spitting water. On our way up to the surface, he elbowed me in the gut and tried to punch me. A reflex of fear and confusion. “Let’s rush him to the infirmary.” Coach Tripp wrapped a brown wool blanket around Race’s shoulders. “Christ, kid,” he said to me, “too much drama. What are you going to do for an encore?” He handed me an identical Army-issue blanket, the wool scratchy in my wet hands. My dry suit had kept me warm underwater, had enabled me to perform valiantly.

I held the dangerous necklace of rope in one hand, the Swiss Army knife in the other. Someone would need to tow our Fireball back to shore. The knife was the real hero. Later that night, I would give it to Coach Tripp to give to Race. I heard Race ask, “Coach Tripp, what happened?”

I had failed spectacularly, and in doing so I’d protected myself from ever having to fail again. I didn’t want to sail with Race, or anyone who wasn’t Cal. Glancing around the water one last time, I made a decision to remove myself from the world of teams. I would stop choosing sides and holding allegiances. I was through playing.

THREE

You never sail with one wind. Always with three. The true, the created, and the apparent wind; the father, son, and Holy Ghost. The true wind is the one that can’t be trusted. The true wind comes in strong from one direction, but then the boat cuts through the air and creates her own headwind in turn. The apparent wind is the sum of these two forces. A combination of natural gusts and the forward movement of the boat. The sails create their own airflow, constantly forcing a skipper to reevaluate the angle of travel. Handling the apparent wind requires finesse. Imagine carrying a candle and walking through a house after a storm. The electricity is down, the only light shines from the flame, and the wick will blow out if unprotected. Every move creates a wind. Every move brings the risk of extinguishing the candle. A sailor knows how to create shelter, cupping his hand in front of the melting wax, so that the flame will stay straight and lit.

I didn’t establish an apparent wind. Not at Bellingham. Didn’t disrupt or engage the social clime. The accident with Race shook my confidence. Convinced me that I was a danger, a failure. Through my carelessness, my recklessness, I’d nearly killed my crewmate, and I couldn’t blame Race for his dislike or mistrust. A few days after the accident, someone sneaked into my room and left a noose of rope dangling from a hanger in my closet. Though I was startled, I understood how Race would want to send me a message. “Be careful, Prosper. Watch your back.” Those first weeks, I left my room only for meals and classes. Skulking across campus while my former teammates sailed. Locking myself in dead air. I avoided social contact, then felt disappointed and lonely when nobody noticed my absence.

The tedium of boarding school life set in and took hold of my imagination. Two or three hours would pass unaccounted for daily, while I stretched sideways on my bed or sat at my desk staring at the empty spaces on my Princeton application. I’d already filled in the name and address. The only thing left to complete was the essay section: “What has been the most significant event to influence your life?” A good question, one with an obvious answer.

I found Cal’s body hanging from a hot-water pipe that ran up the back wall and along the ceiling in the room we shared at Kensington. It was a Sunday in April. A week before Easter. Cal looked as though he was in the pro cess of dressing for church. He wore a white collarless shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, and tan pants. His feet bare. His eyes still open. A chair, my chair, on its side underneath him. We kept some lines of rope around as practice tools. We’d challenge each other to invent new sailor’s knots.

“That’s a triple lather snake bend.” Cal tossed me a tangled mess. “Figure it out.”
“Looks like you twisted your grandma’s underwear.” I untied the jumble and designed my own hitch. “Now that’s a royal thunder wench rig.”
“Looks more like a royal pain in the ass.”
We could go back and forth like that for hours. Pausing in between knots for conversation.
“I’m glad we got to choose each other,” Cal once said.
“Choose what?” I asked.
“Being friends.” Resting his elbows on his knees, he stretched his arms flat and open in front of me. Veins tightened and flexed from his wrist to his biceps. Solid muscle. “If you were my brother, I’d still like you, but it wouldn’t mean as much.”
“I know what you’re saying.” Sometimes when I looked at Cal, I felt myself blur and fall into the weight of his arms. “It’s weird,” I said, “but if it ever came down between you or my brother, Riegel. Like a life jacket question?”
“You’d throw it to me?” Cal asked. “Without a doubt.” I nodded. “Don’t tell Riegel.”

In the last semester of our junior year, Cal used a coil of nylon eightplait rope to tie a noose. Taking our game one step further.

When I found Cal dead, I didn’t go for help. I captured and understood the entire scene in the frame of an opened door that I quickly closed in front of me. Calmly, I went to the library, the chemistry lab, and the lake. I was lying flat on the bottom of a canoe in the Boathouse when ambulance sirens interrupted the quiet spring campus. I waited for someone to search me out and messenger the news. No one came. I shifted my weight and rocked the canoe, hoping to draw attention to my hiding place. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that I was unimportant. That Cal, dead and gone, mattered more than me, stretched and cradled in a canoe. I stood up in time to look out a window and catch the sight of his body being carried on a stretcher. Hidden under a long white sheet. Later, I would be told that an underclassman had knocked on our door, looking to play a game of roof Frisbee. I would listen as this boy, this finder whom I did not know, recounted to a group of mourners that he’d only opened the door because he’d thought he’d heard a voice call out to him.

I wonder about that voice. A few days before his death, I stopped speaking to Cal. We’d done things. Touched each other. At night, alone in our room, we’d pretend to wrestle. Rolling and bracing our chests and legs in tight formation. Cal would pin me to the floor. He’d bite my neck, scratch his teeth against my chin. He’d mask his palm over my eyes. Bring his open mouth onto mine. Wet blackness deeper than I’d ever given or received. He’d shift his hands down my thighs and, because our bodies were so much the same, Cal knew just how to apply the right grip of pressure and quickness. Exactly what I would have used on myself. That familiarity made everything stronger. I knew instinctively how to touch Cal, and I felt affirmed and confident. For months, we slept together on his single twin mattress. In the morning, we’d leave the bed and say nothing. I’d think about him during the day, waiting for classes and sports and then dinner to end. Looking for any excuse to go to bed early. I made myself sick with eagerness. One night Cal noticed me undressing and said, “You’re so giddy.” I flung my copy of
O Pioneers!
at his head and left for the bathroom. Brushing my teeth and brooding. “Enough,” I thought, but I didn’t hold out, not for long. The physical closeness seemed like the most natural extension of our friendship. Then, one Saturday morning, my father, arriving on time to take me for a driving exam, discovered his son, nude as far as he could ascertain, in bed with another boy.

He yelled, “Get up,” pitching a plastic binder and a small desk globe at the wall above us. My father kicked a floor lamp and left the room, slamming the door.

“Did you know he was coming?” Cal asked.

“I guess so.” I was amazed that Cal could speak, and more amazed that I was capable of a response.
Cal stood up from his bed and put on a pair of shorts.
“He didn’t see anything,” Cal said. “There was nothing to see.”
I got up, picked a towel off the floor, and wrapped it around my waist.
“I need to take a shower,” I said.
“We were tired and fell asleep talking.” Cal stripped the sheets off of his bed and tossed them in a pile at his feet. “Tell him that.”
“He won’t say anything.” I looked at Cal.
He folded his arms like the wings of a bird and turned his back to me.
When I returned from my shower, Cal had left and taken the sheets with him.
In the weeks between my father’s visit and Cal’s death, I hurt my friend in ways that frightened me. I thought of writing down these scenes, submitting them to Princeton. But, as it was, there didn’t seem to be any chance for acceptance.

My accident with Race left me uneasy around Tazewell and Kriffo. I didn’t avoid them, but they didn’t exactly seek me out either. Both guys kept busy with afternoon practices and away games. In the dining hall, I’d see them eating with the soccer team or strategizing with football jocks. I felt like an afterthought.

More than anything, I was afraid that Taze and Kriffo had helped Race string that noose up in my closet.
There was no privacy in Whitehall. No locks on bedroom doors. Our parents paid thousands of dollars for housing but the school didn’t even bother to give us a room key. Anyone could come into your place while you were gone, tie all of your laundry together, tuck leaking cans of sardines into your coat pockets, fill your shoes with shaving cream.
A few nights after I found the noose, someone banged on my door and shouted, “Fire, fire!” I recognized Tazewell’s voice and straggled out of bed, half expecting to find a bag of flaming shit outside my room. But the door wouldn’t open. I didn’t smell smoke but I did hear laughter. I went back to sleep. In the morning, it was easy enough to climb down my fire escape and back into Whitehall. The guys had locked me into my room by stretching a rope between my doorknob and the knob on the broom closet across the hall. For a moment, I thought of leaving my door locked that way and spending the rest of the school year entering and exiting through the fire escape. Turning this stupid prank into the gift of privacy.
I had a genius for both tying and untying knots. It was nothing for me to pull apart the loose mess that Tazewell had left behind. But as I crouched down in my sweatpants, unraveling the jumble of cord, I felt like I’d been demoted. I wasn’t a cool untouchable upperclassman, just some friendless Frosh. It bothered me that Taze would choose Race over me, but it bugged me even more that I cared. I’d known Taze for almost as long as I’d known Cal. The three of us had been friends. Even if Tazewell was nothing more than a stoner prick, a high-class jerk, an asshole, I’d taken it for granted that we were loyal members of the same tribe of assholes.
Near the end of August, I was relieved, grateful even to return to my room, after a late evening nap in the library only to find Taze stretched out on my bed, a six-pack of Heineken sweating beside him.
“You shanked, my friend.” Tazewell kicked his sneakers over my comforter, shedding a line of sandy dust. Dressed entirely in black with a knit hat covering his blond hair, he looked like a restless eel waiting for his skin to recharge.
“Shanked how?” I asked.
“You get cut and vanish, just like that.” He took out a key chain, clicked a church key over the bottle cap, and handed me a beer.
The bottle felt cold and soothing in my hand. I worried that I was being set up for something. Hiding my fear, I took a long pull off the beer then brushed the dirt from my comforter.
“As I was never actually on the team, I couldn’t, technically, be cut.”
“I’m just capping on you, that’s all.” Taze cracked open his own beer. “Thought you might like to venture out this evening.”
“It’s twenty minutes until lights-out.” We were both being overly casual, drinking cheap imported beer, but I wasn’t sure about breaking curfew.
“What are you? A narc?” Tazewell swung his shoes off my bed. “I own this dorm. Wear something black.”
If Tazewell was setting me up for a final round of hazing, I could either take my licks or confront him. I decided to play along and see where the night took us.
“You going to brief me at least?”
“I’ve lined up a Suzy Nightlife for you,” Taze smiled.
“A what?”
“Some action. I figured it was about time you broke out of your shell.” Tazewell rummaged through my closet and took out a charcoal pullover. “Put this on and let’s jam.” He took his beer and left my room without waiting to see if I’d follow.
I threw on the sweater and opened my window, ensuring that I’d be able to sneak back inside.
It hadn’t taken me long to realize that curfew at Bellingham was more of a suggestion then a hard-and-fast rule. The school failed to employ any nighttime campus patrol and students signed in not with their house parents but with other students. On my hallway, the proctor was a senior named Yazid Yazid, an international student whose family owned the largest tractor corporation in Saudi Arabia. Yazid had a killer British accent, a closet full of bespoke Savile Row suits and a well-heeled cannabis habit. He wore his thick brown hair in a frizzy high-top, twisting his Afro into curly springs that shot out from his head like exclamation points. “I’m so nice,” Yazid Yazid would say, “they named me twice.”
Yazid had been forced out of his luxe London boarding school for smoking hash. If I’d had to guess, I’d have imagined that Yazid was probably the wealthiest kid at Bellingham. His family had purchased a giant parcel of land two towns over, converting a fallow field into an actual airport all for the convenience of flying their son home to Riyadh. Yazid held private hookah parties in his room and lectured extensively on what he termed the “hashish system of value”—his ranking of countries based on the quality of their cannabis crop. “Pakistan,” Yazid told me. “Pakistan is the shit.”
I had some interest in working out a friendship with Yazid, not just for his drugs but mostly because he seemed cool and untouchable. Like he didn’t have a care in the world. I cared too much about everything. Maybe I wanted to study Yazid and learn how to care a little less.
The one thing Yazid resented was being given the active responsibility of hall proctor. To avoid any real work, Yazid kept a fresh sheet of paper tacked to his door. We could initial the check-in list at any point during the evening. Every night before lights out, Yazid turned the paper in to Coach Tripp as proof that all of us was asleep and accounted for even if none of us was asleep or accounted for. Tazewell called Yazid “Prince Yaz” to his face and “the Assassin” behind his back. Yazid had nicknamed Tazewell “Boyat” and Kriffo “Sharmuta.” He promised that these were Arabic terms of respect, but I wasn’t so sure.
Yazid was busy wearing giant headphones and beating a pair of drumsticks against an electric drum pad. I waved, wrote my name on Yazid’s sign-in sheet, and left the dorm.