Spartina (35 page)

Dick signed for the fuel and stowed the survival raft in a locker in the wheelhouse. He backed
Spartina
’s stern away from the pier and made a turn toward the breakwater. He felt her squat down with the push, then come up. He’d keep her light for a bit. When the sea kicked up some, he’d take on sea water in the lobster wells.

Beyond the breakwater the sea was calm. There was a slight swell, the troughs so wide it was almost imperceptible.

He suddenly felt exuberant.
Spartina
was only a few knots slower than the
Lydia
, and maybe two hours behind. It was true that in a day they’d be a hundred miles apart, but Captain Texeira would have figured on at least that as a margin of safety.

In another hour Dick had left Block Island off
Spartina
’s starboard quarter. He could see
Spartina
’s bow shadow racing across the water. Behind him the sunlight was shot with red. The long mare’s tails overhead were soft pink ribbons. He’d be okay, they’d do fine—so long as the engine kept at it. Sounded fine.

So he’d burn a full tank. An expense with no return. Small dues, especially if he’d be one of the few boats still able afterward.

He fastened the wheel, made a mug of soup, put two Hershey bars in his pocket, and came back to the wheel. He decided to save his thermos of coffee for the long night. It was darkening in the wheelhouse, though the surface of the sea still shone. He could just make out Elsie’s picture on the thermos. His mood was still up. So he’d laid up for a week or two in Elsie’s bed. What man would have said no? For the first time in quite a while he thought of her
with pure, dumb pleasure. The light through the trees falling across the room. Her compact body magnified by her energy. Who landed who? She’d wanted him, and he now felt the flattery of her wish. Why not?

She wasn’t helpless, she knew what she wanted. She
liked
him, for God’s sakes. He let that in too, not just flattery, some comfort. She was a tough cookie, abrupt and full of quick turns. And curious as a seal. But she’d been good to him, nice to him, coaxed him right into the middle of her life. Why stand off from her? She wasn’t going to cling, that was clear, she was one to take care of herself.

Dick switched on the chart light and got a loran reading. Good enough, rolling right along.

By midnight he was getting a little tired. The swells, still farther apart than any he’d ever run into, were bigger now. He couldn’t see them very well, but he felt them as
Spartina
took them on her starboard bow, chugged up them slowly and then slid over the top with a little pitch and roll.

After an hour he checked his position again. The swell had slowed
Spartina
considerably.

He called the
Lydia P.
, got Captain Texeira’s nephew. Their position was well east of
Spartina
’s. The hurricane had grown.
Lydia
’s satellite picture showed that the two systems had linked up and had picked up some speed. The storm center was more than two hundred miles off Cape Hatteras and moving due north at about thirty-five knots, maybe more. If she didn’t curve, she would plow into New England somewhere between Old Lyme and the middle of Cape Cod. The Rhode Island shore was the bull’s eye between those two points.

It looked as though Captain Texeira had made a good guess and a good move. Dick saw that
Spartina
wasn’t in quite as good a position. The diameter of the hurricane was now almost four hundred miles. If she hit dead on the mouth of Narragansett Bay,
Spartina
would have to be at least two hundred miles to the east. Since midnight
Spartina
’s progress eastward was down to six knots. There was no wind to speak of but cutting across the swell was like mountain climbing. If the forward edge of the hurricane was now pushing past Hatteras at thirty-five to forty knots, it would reach
Spartina
in ten or eleven hours.
Spartina
would be, at best, 120 miles east of the eye. She’d get caught. Not in the fiercest winds—those were tucked in tight swirls around the center. But even halfway out to the edge, according to the reports that the
Lydia P.
had, the winds were full hurricane force, and since
Spartina
was going to be in the eastern sector of the storm, where the counterclockwise swirl was blowing in the same general direction as the overall movement of the hurricane, he could add those forty knots to the force of the wind.

If the two storm centers hadn’t linked up, he’d have been in dandy shape. Neither storm by herself had been bigger than 150 miles in diameter, and
Spartina
would have been forty to fifty miles east of the eastern edge. Sure—rough seas, some gale-force wind, but nothing to worry about. But now that the hurricane had doubled up, the eastern edge was reaching out for
Spartina
like a big paw.

Another problem Dick foresaw was that, if he was pushed too far north by the southeast wind, he’d end up over Georges Bank. It was almost as bad as a lee shore. The waves, as they felt the tug of the rising bottom of Georges Bank, would bunch up, grow steeper, break.

Dick had been at the wheel of a Coast Guard vessel in ’59, winds at just hurricane force. At half-power, bow into the wind, she’d still been moving backward. If everything the
Lydia P.
reported was correct,
Spartina
was in for winds some forty knots harder. Dick couldn’t calculate the force exactly. He’d read that the
force
of the wind increased not just with the velocity of the wind, but with the
square
of the velocity. So a sixty-knot wind pushed at about fifteen
pounds a square foot, but a 120-knot wind pushed not at thirty pounds but at almost eighty pounds a square foot.

If
Spartina
caught a wind like that broadside, it would be like being pushed by a tugboat the same size as her.

Dick looked at the chart. It was easy, on paper, just looking at numbers and lines.
Spartina
laboring eastward at six knots. The hurricane boiling northward at forty knots—right along 71°30’, as though it was a rail. He could hope the storm would slow down. If she slowed to thirty knots, he’d get out almost to her eastern edge. If she slowed to twenty knots, he’d be able to slip beyond her reach. Right out there with Captain Texeira’s lucky ships, even now the
Bom Sonho
headed toward the Azores, the stars shining on her.

Dick checked with the
Lydia P.
every couple of hours. The hurricane was still coming at full speed, straight as an express train. The distance between the
Lydia P.
and
Spartina
was now greater than could be accounted for by their different hull speeds. It was the size of the swells that was cutting
Spartina
’s way.

At what should have been sunrise, light began to ooze through the cloud cover, an amber glow with tinges of green. The swell, now visible, was enormous. Every time
Spartina
reached a rounded crest, Dick could see three or four crests to the south. The swell seemed almost stationary, foothills of a mountain range.

At ten o’clock he checked the barometer. Twenty-eight. He was about to call the
Lydia P.
once more when he looked to the south. He didn’t need to call. He could see the abrupt line where the amber glow of the cloud cover and round swell gave way to darkness. And yet in the darkness there was a flickering. At first he thought it might be lightning, then he thought it might be whitecaps catching the last light. Before he got close enough to decide, his visibility dropped.

He was scared, but his fear seemed remote from his body. He
drank a Coke and ate a Hershey bar. He took out another Hershey bar but left it in its white inner wrapper in his jacket pocket. He turned on the pump and put some more sea water in the lobster wells. He hooked the door to the wheelhouse open and ran a twist of wire around the hook and eye. One thing he didn’t need was to pop the windows out when the pressure dropped.

When the first wind hit, he watched the needle on the dial of the anemometer. It spurted up to seventy and then fell off as
Spartina
slid into a trough. He eased back on the throttle. The seas were steeper than the swell had been, but not as high. The peaks were blown flat by the wind. He caught the anemometer dial out of the corner of his eye. The needle flung itself all the way to the right.
Spartina
moved nicely into the next trough, and Dick eased up even more on the throttle. He couldn’t see anything beyond the bow except water. He had no sense of its movement, whether it was coming at him or whether it was rising or falling. He felt
Spartina
rise. He watched the needle spurt to the right and then fall back. He was puzzled for an instant, but then felt
Spartina
nosing down into the dark of the next trough.

From the noise of the wind and the quick scribblings of spray across the glass in front of him it seemed he was engulfed in speed, but the one true sense he had—hearing and sight conveying no meaning—was of slow motion.

He caught a glimpse of the anemometer needle slack at zero. He realized the cups had blown off.

He checked her depth. Plenty of water under her.

He broke off a bit of chocolate every half-hour. Then he realized he was making time drag on him by checking his watch. He saved the last bit of chocolate for a lull.

It struck him as odd that his legs got tired before his arms did. And as his calves and thighs began to bother him with twinges, his confidence weakened. He felt tired and stupid and unlucky.

There came a lull. For a terrible moment he feared it was the eye. The eye would be a disaster. It would mean the storm had curved out to sea toward him. It would mean that the winds yet to come would be violently opposed to how the sea was running,
Spartina
would be caught in confused seas, freak waves. But it was just a lull. The wind still southeast as far as he could tell,
Spartina
tucked into the lee of the mountainous seas. In his momentary panic he’d forgotten to eat the rest of his Hershey bar. In the next trough he mashed it into his mouth and got both hands back on the wheel. When
Spartina
was deep in the trough, the windshield wasn’t lashed with spray. He could make out just enough of the hole he was in to see
Spartina
as a bug in a toilet bowl.

He tried to calculate how long before the storm would blow by. If
Spartina
didn’t get pushed north, and the storm kept moving at forty knots, it would be less than ten hours. He’d have to wait for another lull to check the loran against the chart, to see if
Spartina
was making any headway.

Eventually the wind would move from southeast to south, and then around to southwest. By the time he’d be leaving the storm at the bottom of the cyclonic movement, the wind would be all the way around to the northwest, maybe down from hurricane force to gale force. The thought of coming out the bottom cheered him up. So far
Spartina
was taking it. Still tight as a tick, still coming up nicely.

The weak point was him. He began to swear at himself. He swore out loud, calling himself a stupid son of a bitch, a dumb asshole. He was trying to numb some sharper thought of what he really was. Stupid was just making a mistake. There was something in him that had done worse than that, that had prepared him for deliberate harm to himself.
Spartina
was fine. Captain Texeira was right about her lines, she gave no flat argument to the force of the seas. He’d done that part fine. But he’d left some bad part of his
effort inside himself. Perhaps it was the part he’d thought was tough bitterness, but now, washed once with a terror that he might give in, it turned out flawed. Worse than flawed—rotten. Worse than rotten—rotting, spreading rot.

He ran out of cursing. He shook his head. He was afraid he was getting a little dingo, as though he’d got dizzy from too much sun.

He held on. He felt thick and dull but okay. Maybe he should have taken a nap while
Spartina
was steaming east, before the swell got too big. He spent a long time deciding whether to drink another Coke or to crack the thermos of coffee. He leaned over to pick a can of Coke out of the cooler in the locker. As he stood back up,
Spartina
suddenly slid forward as though she was greased. She stuck her nose into a wave. He felt her held down, caught, then lifted by the bow and spun sideways. He leaned against the spokes of the wheel. No effect. She fell back on her beam. He clung to the wheel post with one hand to keep from falling over. For a long moment he had no idea where she was or which way was up. Then she came back on her own. He felt her stern wag, but he couldn’t tell whether it was her answering the helm—still hard over—or a lucky push of the sea. And then she was nestled in the next trough as though nothing had happened. The inner rasp of adrenaline smoothed out. The taste of zinc left his mouth.

He felt a slow roiling of his sense of
Spartina.
He’d made her. He’d made her, but now she was the good one. She was better than him. It wasn’t alarming to hear this news, it was deeply, thickly soothing. She was lightened of a dangerous disabling weight. She wasn’t him. She’d become separate from him, and yet she was staying with him.

He feared he was getting dingo again. But at least his nerves had pricked him awake. No need for the can of Coke. He glanced around his feet but couldn’t find it. The thermos was still stuck in its bracket over the locker.

He willed himself to keep attentive to
Spartina
’s motion, but some of his thoughts began to wander. He found himself thinking of the books Miss Perry gave the boys. He couldn’t get the one he disliked most out of his head. A Christmas book, not a birthday book. He could see the pretty fluffy drawings of curly-headed boys and girls, the boys in sailor suits, the girls in billowed dresses under pretty fluffy summer clouds. Everything puffed—the children’s hair and cheeks and clothes, the pretty cloud above the pretty children.
A Child’s Garden of Verses.