09-Twelve Mile Limit (20 page)

Endure. They had to keep struggling. They had to continue kicking, kicking, using their hands to pull them into wave after wave after wave as the sea rolled toward them. There were no other options.

It was Janet who most consistently provided encouragement and comfort. Each time they stopped to catch their breaths, or after they’d been washed by an unusually large wave, she’d remind them: “We’re going to make it. We’ll all make it. We’ve just got to stay together and keep swimming.”

Michael had regained his self-control. As an assistant junior varsity football coach of a Sarasota high school, he was accustomed to motivating people as part of his job. So was being tough and showing a tough face. He reverted to that mind-set and those skills now, and the results were unexpected: By assuming that old and familiar role, he actually did begin to feel stronger and more confident.

He would yell comments such as “Teamwork, ladies! Harder we work together, the faster we get to the tower” or “Last one to the light has to buy breakfast!”

Most heartening, though, in those first four hours adrift was that Grace Walker reassumed the personality of the woman she’d been back on land: fiercely goal-oriented and fearless. The terror and the panic she’d experienced after being dragged underwater and almost drowned by the sinking Seminole Wind had done something to her. In some inexplicable way, being so abruptly confronted with her own death had exhausted her flight response, leaving only her determination to fight. The woman was a survivor—no one who knew her ever doubted that.

With Amelia gone, they’d abandoned the human-raft technique. Janet simply wasn’t strong enough to push all three of them along with her fins. Now they swam side by side with Grace in the middle, everyone doing a slow breaststroke, riding up the front side of waves, swimming harder down the backside. They tried to keep enough distance between themselves not to bang arms but still remain close enough to be heard over the noise of the wind. For the first hour, Grace said nothing, used what energy she had left to try to keep up with the other two. But when she finally did speak, it was with the same self-assured voice people had come to expect from her: “Call me crazy, Sandman, but I think we’re getting closer to that light. I really do, man. We’re covering some ground, brother. I believe we’re gonna make it!”

Michael was so grateful to hear the confident, familiar tone, he actually shouted as he replied. “Damn right we are, Gracie! We’re kicking ass, baby, and I feel great!”

“Yeah? Well, that’s something funny ’cause I’m feeling pretty good, too. Strong, that’s the way I feel. Maybe getting stronger.”

“All of us! Lady, we’re all getting stronger. Know what? When we get back, I’ll do your laundry for a month to make this up to you. You can lay out by the pool, I’ll bring you drinks, whatever you want. We’re going to make it, sister!”

For the first time that day, Janet smiled as Grace replied, “Sandman, when we get back, the only water I want to see is in a whiskey glass. Or a fucking shower. Don’t you be mentioning water to the Princess ’till we get this shit way behind us!”

That rallied them. Kept them swimming hard for the next hour without a pause. The light was getting closer. Grace had said so. Little by little, stroke by stroke, they were fighting their way back to civilization, back into their understandable, orderly lives.

Attached to his BCD vest, Michael Sanford had a small plastic board called a navigation slate. Built into the slate was an illuminated compass. When they finally did stop to rest, Michael lifted the little board in front of his face and sighted it like a rifle toward the flashing light. Twice before that evening, he’d checked their course heading using the same simple technique. On the first sighting, the light had been at 64 degrees, which was slightly east of north. On his second sighting, the light was at 62 degrees, which meant they had drifted slightly to the south but were still making progress. Now, as he sighted the compass, he looked, then paused. He tapped the compass with his fingers as if it were not working, then took another sighting.

Janet was watching him and sensed that he was puzzled by something. She called over, “What’s wrong, Mikey?”

Sanford said, “I think this compass has gone crazy,” and aimed the slate at the light tower a third time, studied it again before he adding, “We were drifting slightly south—the current, I’m talking about. Out here there’s always some kind of ocean current. But in the last hour or so, we’re suddenly way north. The tower’s almost due east, 45 degrees. I mean we are flying.”

“The tidal current is taking us, that’s what you’re saying?”

“An ocean current, yeah. That’s what it’s gotta be. A really strong current.”

Grace said, “Is that good? Sandman, you better be telling me that’s a good thing.”

Michael paused too long, thinking about whether he should tell the truth, wondering if he even knew the truth, before he spoke. “It doesn’t matter either way. We still have to swim to the tower. That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

That was at a little after 10 P.M. For two more hours, they battered their way eastward, and each time Michael stopped to check his compass, the tower was farther to the south. Their rest stops became longer, the time they spent swimming became shorter and shorter. Hobbyist runners train for months to do a first 26.2-mile marathon, and many run the distance in between four to five hours. The three of them had now been swimming for more than five hours, their own terrible marathon of survival, and one by one, their bodies began to fail them.

They were dehydrated, though did not yet feel the terrible thirst, and their muscles began to cramp. Because Janet was wearing fins, her calves and thighs began to cramp first. For Michael, it was his jaw and neck if he yawned with fatigue or nervousness, and then his legs began to cramp, too.

It was Grace who finally said what they had all come to realize but not yet admitted. “Know what I think, ladies and gentleman? I think we’re better off saving our energy and just drifting ’til morning. Planes, boats, there’s gonna be all kinds of stuff out here tomorrow morning looking for us. Probably helicopters, too.” There was still strength in her voice, some confidence, as well, when she added, “Let the bastards come to us. What do we care if they find us in the water or on that damn light tower?”

They were all chilled, and the black wind felt colder now, after midnight. Once again, they locked their bodies together to form a tiny human raft. Floating on his back, Michael spooned Grace into his arms, as Janet slid in behind Michael and held them both close to her breast.

The three of them drifted. They dozed. Once, they even laughed when Grace told them, “I just peed in my own wet suit, and man, it feels warm.” Their teeth started to chatter, and, finally, the slowest sunrise of their lives began to form on the eastern horizon: a radiant blackness over the Everglades, then a smear of gray, of white, of tangerine.

They stared at the horizon, anticipating the gaseous bloom of light, anticipating its heat, when Michael jerked his head around abruptly to the south. “Jesus Christ!” he yelled. “Do you see it? My God, it’s a boat! You see the boat?”

It was almost upon them, a ghostly figure of rust and steel, net booms swung high, rolling out of the morning sea spume, the heavy wind shielding the noise of its engines. Janet had spent enough time around marinas to recognize it as some kind of trawler—maybe a steel shrimper, but it had a foreign look and she wasn’t certain. Its hull was black, wrinkled with blistered paint, rust, grease. Some kind of workboat, filthy.

The boat was already so close they could see that its high, beige wheelhouse was covered with people, that there were men and women, children, too, jammed tight and standing on the vessel’s long stern deck. Dozens of people, maybe a hundred, their faces sickly, African faces, brown faces, a confederation of misery bound by something terrible: seasickness, exhaustion, fear, or some other dark, nameless thing. Then the vessel was close enough that air molecules from the boat began to mix heavily with the wind, and the stench of the boat drifted down on them, a terrible odor, so inhuman that it could only be human, the stink of feces and vomit, of disease and dying, diesel fumes mixed in, the density of oil floating it all, causing it to linger above the sea.

Janet whispered, “Am I dreaming this? Please don’t let me be dreaming this.”

It was a bizarre vision: three desperate people now looking into a herd of desperate faces; faces that created a hundred dark, ocular vacancies staring back at them, a man and two women in the water adrift, shouting at the vessel to stop, screaming at the mirrored windows of the wheelhouse as dark faces began to yell back, the mass of them sprouting bony arms and hands that pointed at them in reply.

Michael shouted, “They see us!” and Grace began to weep, saying, “Thank you, God. Oh thank you, dear God!” watching the vessel slow, then turn in the heavy seas, wallowing in the troughs of waves, hammering geysers of wake as its bow swung toward them.

Janet, Michael, and Grace were all waving their arms wildly as the vessel came about, and they watched the door of the wheelhouse slide open. A huge, very fat brown man came through the door—a man so wide that he could only fit through the opening sideways. He was followed by a tall, cadaverous man who had a shockingly white face shaved smooth, his flour-pale skin covering sinew linked by bone. Draped over his head, as if to shield him from the heat, he wore a dirty-looking rectangular cloth that was folded diagonally and held in place with a headband.

An albino person, Janet realized.

Michael called up to them, “Drop a ladder down! Our boat sank and we’ve been adrift all night!”

The albino and the fat man stood holding on to the steel railing, looking down at them, and they seemed to be conferring, talking back and forth.

Michael shouted, “If you don’t have a ladder, throw us a rope. We can climb up!”

Still, the two men did not react, continuing to talk among themselves—a disturbing hesitation. They seemed indifferent.

“We need help! Please. We’ll pay you. We’ll pay you whatever you want!”

Then Janet said, “What’s he doing? What’s he going to do with that?” as the albino ducked into the wheelhouse and came out holding a rifle.

Because she’d been worrying about it all night but had not allowed herself to mention it, Grace now said what was in her mind. “Maybe we have sharks around us. Maybe that’s it. Probably got it to keep sharks away, don’t you think, Sandman?”

Then all three watched, weary beyond shock, as the albino snugged the rifle against his cheek and shoulder, then swung the barrel seaward, taking aim at Michael Sandford.

We were dropping down, down through the diatom gloom of the Gulf of Mexico—Amelia, Tomlinson, and me—descending onto the wreck of the Baja California, when the shark materialized. A tiger shark, probably ten, maybe eleven, feet long.

The short, pointed snout of a tiger is distinctive. So are the requiem shark’s unusual recurved teeth if you are lucky enough—or unlucky enough—to get close enough to see them.

Tiger sharks are a tropical species, and the young have characteristic bars on their backs and upper sides, thus the name. The mature animals, though, lose the camouflage decoratives because they are not needed. A fully grown tiger shark has few enemies in the sea.

This one was a mature female, probably weighed close to a thousand pounds: a half-ton illustration of adaptation and natural selection in battleship colors, gray on bronze.

Amelia was above me; Tomlinson was above her, his long blond hair, normally scraggly, now undulating like seaweed in the current. We all stopped, holding on to the anchored descent line we’d dropped upon arrival. Our heads turned as one as we watched the shark cruise by.

I did a quick survey of facial expressions. Through his face mask, Tomlinson’s eyes were childlike: He was delighted to see the big tiger. Amelia appeared worried, but she relaxed noticeably when I put thumb and index finger together and signaled, telling her everything was okay, nothing to worry about.

With the exception of certain specifics of physiology concerning the bull shark, Carcharhinus leucas, I don’t consider myself a shark expert. I know too many real experts to indulge in that pretense. I am, however, a great admirer of these extraordinary animals.

I have dived with great white sharks off South Africa and Tasmania and with bulls and tigers and hammerheads all around the world. One thing I have noticed is that the really big sharks always appear in the same surprising way.

This large female tiger was no different. At first, on some primary level of perception, I was aware of motion in the distance where there had been no movement before. Then I noticed two unexpected black vacancies in the green murk, strange voids not instantly identified by my brain. The voids were horizontal, consistently spaced, swinging slowly back and forth, growing larger, vectoring.

Strange. What trick of light was this?

Then the black holes were skewered by a conical nose, beneath which was a grinning apparition. It was a fixed, fanatical grin, as meaningless as the grill of a car, yet it lent an impression of all that is mindless and unsympathetic and inevitable. A million years of energy were distilled right there in front of me: wind, water, light, current.

The huge tiger glided toward us, then banked slightly, black eyes passing us without interest or expression. The impression given by her indifference was probably accurate: The animal knew all there was to know about us, and there was nothing to be known. We were meaningless; we were irrelevant because we were not prey. We were a gathering of protoplasm, healthy seals or fish or manatee. Perhaps something would occur to change that. We might be wounded, show distress, or the shark’s own precise feeding instincts would reclassify us because of hunger.

It was an indifferent process. A biologist from Sanibel? An unreformed hipster who lived on a sailboat, who believed in God, who crossed his 7s, read his horoscope, and was a devotee of reincarnation?

Such things did not exist. Water, light, tide: all else was delusion. We were wind in the void. We were matter without purpose. It made no difference who we were, what we had accomplished, who we loved. Our fast hearts had a silly, finite number of beats remaining. There was always other prey.