He was a blotch of yellow in a world stripped of color, there one moment and gone the next, a big breaching wave flinging him back against the cabin door and pouring half an ocean into the rictus of the engine well. Till snatched a look at her then, his face drained and hopeless. Warren, the figure of Warren, flailing limbs and gasping mouth, slammed at the window and rose impossibly out of the foam, the slicker twisted back from his shoulders—inadequate, ridiculous, a child’s jacket, a doll’s—and then he was down again and awash. In the next instant Till sprang to his feet, twisting up and away from the controls, the wheel swinging wildly, lights blinking across the console, the scuppers inundated, the bilge pump choking on its own infirmity. He took hold of her wrist, jerking her up out of her seat, and suddenly they were through the door and into the fury of the weather, the wind tearing the breath out of her lungs, the next wave rearing up to knock her to her knees with a fierce icy slap, and she wasn’t sick anymore and she wasn’t tired or worn or dulled. Everything in her, everything she was, howled at its highest pitch. They were going to drown, all three of them, she could see that now. Drown and die and wash up for the crabs.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Warren, unsteady, hair painted to his face, made to seize Till’s arms as if he meant to dance with him, even as Till shrugged him off and bent to release the skiff.
“It’s our only chance!” Till roared into the wind, his legs tangled and rotating out of sync like a drunken man’s. He flailed at the shell of the skiff, jerked the lines in a fury.
“You’re nuts!” Warren shouted. “Out of your fucking mind!” He was staggering too, fighting for balance, and so was she, helpless, the waves driving at her. The boat heaved, dead beneath their feet. “We won’t last five minutes in this sea!”
But here was the skiff, released and free and riding high, and they were in it, Warren leaping to the oars, no thought of the life jackets because the life jackets, for all their newness and viability and their promise to keep men and women and children afloat indefinitely even in the biggest seas, were tucked neatly beneath that bench in the stern of the Beverly B. and the Beverly B. was swamped. Stalled. Going down.
Heavily, like a waterlogged post in a swollen river, the boat shifted away from them. They’d painted her hull white to contrast with the natural wood of the cabin—a cold pure unblemished white, the white of sheets and carnations—and that whiteness shone now like the ghost image on a negative of a photograph that would never be developed. Unimpeded, the waves crashed at the windows of the cabin and then the glass was gone and the Beverly B. shifted wearily and dropped down and came back up again. The decks were below water now, only the cabin’s top showing pale against the dimness of the early morning and the spray that rode the wind like a shroud.
Beverly was there to witness it, huddled wet and shivering in the bow of the skiff, Till beside her, but she wasn’t clinging to him, not clinging at all because she was too rigid with the need to get out of this, to get away, to get to land. No regrets. Let the sea have the boat and all the time and money they’d lavished on her, so long as it spared them, so long as the island was out there in the gloom and it came to them in a rush of foam and black bleeding rock. They rode up over two waves, three, and they were on a wild ride now, wilder than anything the amusement park would ever dare offer, and all at once they were in a deep pit lined with walls of aquamarine glass, everything held suspended for a single shimmering moment before the walls collapsed on them. She felt the plunge, the force of it, and all of a sudden she was swimming free, the chill riveting her, and it was instinct that drove her away from the skiff and back to the Beverly B. for something to hold fast to—and there, there it was, rising up and plunging down, and she with it. The wind tore at her eyes. The salt blistered her throat.
She didn’t see Warren, didn’t see where he was, but then she’d got turned around and he could be anywhere. And Till—she remembered him coming toward her, his good arm cutting the black sheet of the water, until he wasn’t coming anymore. Where was he? The waves threw up ramparts and she couldn’t see. He was calling her, she was sure of it, in the thinnest distant echo of a cracked and winnowed voice, Till’s voice, sucked away on the wind until it was gone. “Where are you?” she called. “Till? Till?”
The waves took her breath away. Her bones ached. Her teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. A period of time elapsed—she couldn’t have said how long—and nothing changed. She clung to the heaving corpse of the Beverly B. because the Beverly B. was the only thing there was. At some point, because they were binding her feet, she ducked her head beneath the surface to tear off her tennis sneakers and release them into the void. Then she loosed her blue jeans, the cuffs as heavy as lead weights.
When finally the Beverly B. cocked herself up on a wave as big as a continent and then sank down out of sight, she fought away from the vortex it left in its wake and found herself treading water. The waves lifted and released her, lifted and released her. She was alone. Deserted. The ship gone, Till gone, Warren. She could feel something flapping inside her like a set of wings, her own panic, the panic that whipped her into a sudden slashing breaststroke and as quickly subsided, and then she was treading water again and she went on treading water for some portion of eternity until there was nothing left in her arms. Till’s sweater dragged at her. It was too much, too heavy, and it gave her nothing, not warmth, not comfort, not Till or the feel or smell of him. She shrugged out of it, snatched a breath, and let it drift down and away from her like the exoskeleton of a creature new-made, born of water and salt and the penetrant chill.
She tried floating on her back but the wind drove the sea up her nose and into her mouth so that she came up coughing and spewing. Had she drifted off? Was she drowning? Giving up? She fought the rising fear with her spent arms and the feeble wash of her spent legs. After a time, she lost all feeling in her limbs and she went down with a lungful of air and the air brought her back up, once, twice, again. She thrashed for a handhold, for anything, for substance, but there was no solid thing in all that transient medium where the dolphins grinned and the flying fish flew and the sharks came and went as they pleased.
And Till? Where was Till? He could have been right there, ten feet away, and she wouldn’t have known it. She closed her eyes, snatched a breath, let herself drift down and let herself come back again. Once more. Could she do it once more? She’d never known despair, but it was in her now, colder than the water, creeping numbly up from her feet and into her ankles and legs and torso, overwhelming her, claiming her degree by degree. Water, water every where. Just as she was about to surrender, to open herself up, open wide and let the harsh insistent unforgiving current flow through her and tug her down to where the waves couldn’t touch her ever again, the ocean gave her something back: it was a chest, an ice chest, floating low in the water under the weight of its burden. A silver thing, silver as the belly of her fish. Sears, Roebuck. Guaranteed for life. She claimed it as her own, and though she couldn’t get atop it, it was there and it sustained her as the wind bit and the sun rose up out of the gloom to parch her lips and scorch the taut white mask of her upturned face.
Rattus Rattus
She had never been so thirsty in all her life. Had never known what it was, what it truly meant, when she read in the magazines of the Bedouin tumbling from their camels and their camels dying beneath them or the G.I.’s stalking the rumor of Rommel’s Panzers across the dunes of North Africa and water only a mirage, because she’d lived in a house with a tap in a place where the grass was wet with dew in the morning and you could get a Coca-Cola at any lunch counter or in the machine at the service station around the corner. If she was thirsty, she drank. That was all.
Now she knew. Now she knew what it was like to go without, to feel the talons clawing at your throat, the tongue furred and bloating in the tomb of your mouth, barely able to swallow, to breathe. There was ice in the chest—and beer, chilled beer, the bottles clinking and chirping with the rhythm
of the waves—but she didn’t dare crack the lid, even for an instant. It was the air inside that kept her afloat and if she lifted the lid the air would rush out and where would she be then? The bottles clinked. Her throat swelled. The sun beat at her face. But this was a special brand of torture, reserved just for her, worse than anything devised by the most sadistic Jap commandant, and she kept wondering what she’d done to deserve it—the ice right there, the beer, the sweet cold sparkling pale golden liquid in the bottle that would shine with condensation just inches away, and she dying of thirst.
She swallowed involuntarily at the thought of it, the lining of her throat as raw as when she’d had tonsillitis as a girl and twisted in agony with the blinds closed and the starched rigid sheets biting into her till her mother came like an angel of mercy with ginger ale in a tall cold glass, with sherbet, Jell-O, ice cubes made of Welch’s grape juice to suck and roll over her tongue and clench between her teeth till all the moisture was gone. Her mother’s hand reached out to her, she saw it, saw it right there framed against the waves, and her mother’s face and the dripping glass poised in her hand. It was too much to bear. She gave in and wet her lips with seawater, though she knew she shouldn’t, knew it was wrong and would only make things worse, and yet she couldn’t help herself, her tongue probing and lapping as if it weren’t attached to her at all. The relief was instantaneous, flooding her like a drug—water, there was water inside her. But then, almost immediately, her throat swelled shut and her cracked lips began to bleed.
To bleed. That was the secondary problem: blood. Both her elbows were scraped and raw and there was a deep irregular gash on the back of her left hand, the one the scalding coffee hadn’t touched. How it had got there, she couldn’t say, and she was so numb from the cold she couldn’t feel the sting of it, though clearly it would need stitches to close the wound and there’d be a scar, and for some time now she’d been idly examining the torn flesh there, thinking she’d have to see a doctor when they got back and already making up a little speech for him, how she’d want a really top-notch man because she just couldn’t stomach having her skin spoiled, not at her age. But she was bleeding in the here and now, each wave washing the gash anew and extracting from it a pale tincture of pinkish liquid that dissolved instantly and was gone. That liquid was blood. And blood attracted sharks.
Again the flap of panic. Her legs trailed behind her like lures, like a provocation, like bait, and she couldn’t see them, could barely feel them. If the sharks came—when they came—she’d have no defense. She was trapped in a childhood nightmare, a vestigial dream of the time before there was land, when all the creatures there were floated free amidst the flotilla of shining jaws that would swallow them. She tried to hold her hand up out of the water. Tried not to think about what was beneath her, behind her, rising even now from the lazy depths like a balloon trailing across the sky at dusk. But she had to think. Had to terrify herself just to stay alive.
For as long as the ice chest had been there she’d maneuvered around it, straddling it like an equestrian as it rode beneath the clamp of her thighs, pushing it all the way down to tamp it with her feet and perch tentatively atop the tenuous wavering shelf of it, lying flat with its lid tucked between her abdomen and breasts so that her back was arched and her legs could spread wide for balance. Now she tried to huddle atop it, to kneel beneath the full weight of her limbs and torso as if she were praying—and she was praying, she was—struggling to hold her gashed hand clear of the water and balance there like an acrobat stalled on the high wire, but the waves wouldn’t allow it. She kept slipping down while the cooler bobbed up and away from her so that she had to swim free and snatch it back in a single searing beat of white-hot terror, thinking only of a mute streaking shape lunging out of the depths to snatch her up in its basket of teeth.
She’d seen a shark only once in her life. It was on the Santa Monica pier, just after Till had come home from overseas. They’d walked on the beach for hours and then promenaded all the way to the end of the pier, her arm in his, the stripped pale boards rocking gently beneath their feet and the sea air deliciously cool against their skin. She was so alive in that moment, so attuned to Till and his transformation from the recollected to the actual, to the flesh, to the arm round her waist and the voice murmuring in her ear, that the smallest things thrilled her with their novelty, as if no one had ever conceived of them before. A paper cone of cotton candy, so intensely pink it was otherworldly, seemed as strange to her as if it had been delivered there by Martians from outer space. Ditto the tattooed man exhibiting himself in his bathing trunks in the hope of spare change and the eighty-year-old beauty queen in the two-piece—even the taste of the burger with chopped raw onions and plenty of ketchup they ate standing under the sunstruck awning of the stand at the foot of the pier was like that of no other burger she’d ever had. Her feet weren’t even on the ground. They were there in the flesh, both of them, she and Till, strolling along like any normal couple who could go home to bed anytime the urge took them, day or night, or go get a highball and listen to the jukebox in the corner of some dark roadhouse or drive slow and sweet along Ocean Boulevard with the windows down and the breeze fanning their hair. It was her dream made concrete. But then, right there in the middle of that dream, was the shark.
There was a crowd gathered at the far end of the pier and they’d gone toward it casually, out of idle curiosity, people looping this way and that, little kids squirming through to the front for a closer view, and there it was, more novelty, the first shark she’d ever seen outside of a picture book. It was suspended by its tail on a thick braid of cable that held it, dripping, just above the bleached boards of the dock. The fisherman—a Negro, and that was a novelty too, a Negro fisherman on the Santa Monica pier— stood just off to the left of it while his companion, another Negro, took his photograph with a Brownie camera. “Hold steady now,” the second man said. “Less have a smile. C’mon, give us a grin.”
A woman beside her made a noise in her throat, an admixture of disgust and fascination. “What is it?” the woman said. “A swordfish?”
The first man, the fisherman, smiled wide and the camera clicked. “You see a sword?” he asked rhetorically. “I don’t see no sword.”
“It’s a dolphin,” somebody said.
“Ain’t no dolphin,” the fisherman retorted, enjoying himself immensely. “Ain’t no tunafish neither.” He bent close to the thing, to the half-moon of the gill slit and the staring eye, and then cupped a hand over the unresisting snout and tugged upward. “See them teeth?”
And there they were, suddenly revealed, a whole landscape of stacked and serrated teeth running off into the terra incognita of the dark gullet, and it came to her that this was a shark, the scourge of the sea, the one thing that preyed on all the rest, that rose up in a blanket of foam to ravage a seal or maim a surfer and ignite an inflammatory headline out of La Jolla or Redondo Beach that everybody forgot about a week later.
“What this is, what you looking at right now? This a great white shark, seven feet six inches long. As bad as it gets. And this one’s not much more than a baby. Hell, they five feet long when they come out their mother.”
The crowd pressed in. Till’s eyes were gleaming, and this was a thing he could appreciate, a man’s thing, as bad as it gets. There was only one question left to ask and she heard her own voice quaver as she asked it: “Where did you catch it?”
A pause. A smile. Another click of the camera. “Why, right here, right off the end of the dock.”
The image had stayed with her a long while. She’d asked Till about it, about how that could be, what the man had said—right off the dock, right there where she’d been swimming since she was a little girl—and he’d tried to reassure her. “They can turn up anywhere, I suppose,” he said, “but it’s rare here. Really rare.” He gave her a squeeze, pulled her to him. “Where you really find them,” and he pointed now, out into the band of mist that fell across the horizon, “is out
there. Off the islands.”
People died of shark bite. They died of thirst. Of hypothermia. She was dressed in nothing but bra and panties, naked to the water and the water sucking the heat from her minute by minute, and she clung there and shivered and felt the volition go out of her. Let the sharks come, she was thinking, dreaming, the cold lulling her now till she was like the man in that other Jack London story, the one who laid himself down and died because he couldn’t build a fire. Well, she couldn’t build a fire either because water wouldn’t burn and there was nothing in this world that wasn’t water.
She woke sputtering, choked awake, a cold fist in her throat. She was coughing—hacking, heaving, retching—and the violence of it brought her back again. Sun, sea, wind, waves. Sun. Sea. Wind. Waves. The ice chest bobbed and she bobbed with it. And then, all at once, there was something else there with her, something new, a living thing that broke the surface in a fierce boiling suddenness that annihilated her, the shark, the shark come finally to draw the shroud. She shut her eyes, averted her face. She didn’t draw up her legs because there was no point in it now, the drop was coming, the first rending shock of the jaws, sadness spreading though her like a stain in water, sadness for Till, for her parents, for what might have been . . . but the next moment slipped by and the moment after that and still she was there and still she was whole, bobbing along with the ice chest, bobbing.