Shipwreck
Jim Parks
December 2005
December 2005
A steady pull, that’s what one needs in these circumstances. Just pull along in the water, don’t fight the tide, just rest between strokes, change positions from side to back to breast stroke and relax.
He knew his position. The hell of the thing was the tide was falling off the Little Bahama Bank to the Tongue of the Ocean, that one mile deep, one hundred twenty-five mile long, twenty-five mile wide trench between New Providence and Andros, and it was hard on him.
It was just a matter of controlling one’s fear. He knew that in his rational mind, but in the primordial mind, the one he couldn’t control, he knew the danger of appearing weak, a prey for the bull and Mako sharks that prowl the banks when the tides rush out.
Overhead, jetliners made their whistling descent to the airport. He could see the amber lights of Golding Point power station and the lighthouse above the golf course.
Oh, he knew where he was, okay. Just beyond, the cricket fields and the split in the road that took one over the hill, either to Bay Street and downtown or to the local fellas’ neighborhood and Fox Hill beyond.
She had flipped just before dark fell like a curtain and the pink sky turned to a blaze of bright orange in the northwest, then to a greenish flash just above the horizon that spread upward and outward to that deep, inky blue above the ocean.
Snotty weather, too snotty for Lady Patricia he discovered when he left Fresh Creek inlet on Andros. But friends are friends and after they "passed good time," people looked at their watches and made their goodbyes. After the lobster and conch were eaten and rum drained from the bottles, he had napped a little and made all secure to go back to Nassau town.
His heart had been heavy when Patricia got on the plane for Miami. She and he, the boat and the waves and wind, beat against the northeast and he started a long reach for that magical place.
Now, in the water, the chop, he gazed up at the airplanes and sensed they were mocking him.
"Watch it, old man. That’s no way to be thinking. It’s only been a few hours of swimming. Just keep pulling along steady."
She went down in a hurry. Her iron ballast in the bilges, window weights from sashes, shifted when he came about and a plank had sprung. Her ribs had taken all the pounding they could handle. He missed his grab for the bag with his fins and mask and snorkle, and as she went down, he went up her mast hand over hand, careful not to get tangled in the shrouds or the lacings for her main sail.
"Shit, shit, shit, shit!" he shouted. It would have been comical if he had seen it on a movie screen or in a television program.
He started to swim, crying, "God, help me. I will survive if you allow it."
A piece of plywood from the deck in her cockpit popped up beside him and her tiller, a piece he had made from laminated red oak gleaned from the abandoned dunnage on the docks at Man O’ War Cay, floated to surface just behind it.
He grabbed them and crawled aboard, starting to make his pull for the power station that was just peeping over the horizon with its amber lights blazing.
What about the sharks?
If they hit me, there’s nothing I can do about it. If they don’t, then I will have been worrying about nothing in particular.
He knew his capabilities, how far he could swim.
But how far would that be? His course made good, over the ground below him a mile deep, would be one thing. His course through the water was another matter, what with the bulldozer force of the tide. The board and the tiller’s buoyant qualities were helping him. He wasn’t completely immersed.
His course. He adjusted it. He constantly made for a point just about ten degrees above the lighthouse because he knew his aspect in the water was not very efficient and he would be pulled across the inlet and out to sea, into the shallows of the Exumas chain if he didn’t.
The trick was to keep his wits about him, not to thrash and panic, to control his fear. He had the image of two great boxers circling each other, feinting jabs and landing hooks, looking for that chance to land an uppercut with a lot of stuff in it.
Like that, it was all in the stance, the footwork, the timing, and the insouciant lack of trepidation.
He laughed out loud, a bellow that astonished him. Rough going.
"Get rough with it, sailor man!"
It was going to be an all-nighter. Already, two hours had passed and the prospect of New Providence was getting higher on the horizon. His chronometer strapped to his wrist told him the tide would go slack in another couple of hours.
Well, will we dance and sing all night? Yes, we will, yes, we will.
Eat up everything in sight? Yes, we will, yes, we will.
Everybody, drink, drink this toast...Drink this wedding toast.
Drink, oh, drink this toast...To the two we love the most.
They sat in the afternoon sunshine, avoiding the oil stain in the driveway, leaning up against the rear wheel of his dad’s massive old Oldsmobile, the one he had given his mom when he got the new one. It was a wheezing rattle trap just good enough to get her from the job to the grocery store to the dentist’s office to the post office to the bank and back to the grocery store, thence to the laundromat.
Patricia’s golden hair and deep tan contrasted with her obviously fair complexion. She smiled and passed him the joint.
"I got this from Tillie. She met this dude hitchhiking and he can get it for ten dollars a lid, man. It’s some bad shit."
Her English accented with the native Dutch was charming. Her dad, a petroleum engineer with a lot of experience in offshore operations in the North Sea, had relocated to the boom town to be nearer the corporate office. He could hardly believe his good fortune. He had scored an exotic, a European girl, because he made her laugh. It was that simple.
He inhaled deeply and felt the glow, the slight pressure inside his head, just behind his eyes, the little thrill from his balls up his spine to his neck and the roots of his hair.
He stared at her long, bare toes in her flip flops and followed the elegant lines of her shins to her knees and heavily muscled thighs. She wore one of his cowboy shirts knotted above her midriff.
Oh, she was a keeper. She wore a little ring he had gotten at the flea market, an Indian ring made of multicolored beads and wire that she twisted and turned on her elegant finger. Around her neck, she had a shark’s tooth he had gotten on an expedition to California to try to learn to surf.
She wiggled, giggling and starting to say something and he made a gesture with his hand, palm down, grabbing hers and handing her the joint with the other hand.
"Baby, don’t. Just feel the vibe. Just feel it."
She sighed.
"You’re such a moody fuck, Jimmy."
"I know it, honey, but, hey, I’m all yours."
They harmonized a capella on Billie Holliday’s "Lover Man, Where Are You?"
He grabbed his harmonica from a shirt pocket.
"No, baby, here’s where it changes. This is where the change comes. Dig?"
He gave her the chord.
She sang it perfect pitch.
It was a moment, but it sustained him now in the fifth hour of the swim.
He was a heartbreaking couple of hundred yards from the little harbor at the power station where they dock the tankers delivering diesel. The rip of the tide kept sweeping him out and away from the place where he wanted to be. Then the surge would carry him too far when he tried to correct back to the northeast. He knew he couldn’t make it there. Too much sharp coral. Cliffs too high.
He had been vomiting sea water and the diarrhea was starting to bother him. With every stroke, he felt it squirt out inside his shorts, just warm water really, but it was steadily dehydrating him. There was no way to keep the stuff out of his mouth.
He thought of a large glass of iced tea, a milk shake, a freshly cut cantaloupe, a squirting, ripened peach.
He thought of Patricia’s exquisite ass when he thought of the peach, of her posing with one foot planted flat and the other pointed with the toes resting on the gunwale of the boat, shouting "Yoo hoo, beautiful people."
He could have all that if he just didn’t give up.
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