The Last Run (21 page)

“Hey, take it easy, Giggy.”

“I hear any more out of you, you fuck, and I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you right here and now.”

“Take it easy.”

“Bastard,” Mork said. His eyes were wild. DeCapua looked away from them. Mork turned to Bob Doyle.

“Stow all that gear under there. Tie it up good. And get all those hooks and snaps down off the wall.”

He stormed out.

They checked the scuppers and dogged down the aft hatches, fuel jugs, lockboxes, gaffs, batteries, hydraulic hoses, clamps, pallets and pumps. They shined a flash in the bilges. The water was up almost two feet and was sloshing just six inches below the base of the engine. Even with the two bilge pumps and the backup generator running at full tilt, it took them more than ten minutes to get the water out.

Mark Morley found them sitting around the galley table, resting. He had come down from the wheelhouse to give them their watch assignments.

“From now on, I want someone checking those bilges every half hour,” Morley said. “And don’t forget, when it’s your turn to go below, first you tell us you’re going and you don’t go without your partner. Understood?”

They all nodded.

“Mike, I want you to take first bilge watch.”

“I’ll do a double,” DeCapua said.

“All right,” Morley said. “Then you’ll be on until four o’clock. Bob, Dave, you guys work out between you who goes next. But I want somebody down there checking those bilges every thirty minutes. If you see something wrong, come get me or Gig.”

They nodded.

“Mike, come on down with me. I want to show you some things down in the engine room.”

When they left Hanlon looked at Bob Doyle. “You look tired, Bob. I’ll take the second shift.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah. Where’s the coffee?”

“The grinds are in that cabinet, there.”

Just as David Hanlon stood up a wave hit and the galley tilted sideways. The cabinet doors flew open and plastic cups and books tumbled off the shelves and slid across the galley floor. Bob Doyle grabbed the dinner table to keep from being lifted out of his seat. He looked up and saw his partner in a heap on the floor.

“Hey,” he said. “You okay?”

Hanlon stood up.

“Fine,” he said.

H
e felt a hand on his shoulder. It was David Hanlon and he said, “Time to get up.”

Bob Doyle opened his eyes but the rest of him was still asleep.

“Time to get up.”

“All right.”

He wanted to move but he felt so heavy. Hanlon shook him again.

“All
right,”
Bob Doyle snapped. The heaviness had not gone away but he was able to pull his legs out of the sleeping bag. Hanlon watched him for a moment and went out.

The room kept tilting way over to one side, then to the other. Slipping a foot into his boot Bob Doyle felt a force pull him backward and he banged his head on the bulkhead.

Mike DeCapua came in. He was wet to the skin and dripping.

“What’s wrong?”

DeCapua grunted and climbed into his rack. “We’re taking on a bunch of water. Pumping every half hour ain’t gonna be enough.”

“No?”

“Just make sure you get down there and run that fucker every twenty minutes. We can’t lose that generator pump. That’s the only pump worth a shit that we got.”

“Right.”

Hanlon was bundling himself up in the galley. He looked pretty bad. He hadn’t looked good since the seas kicked up during that second set; but he looked pretty bad now.

“Hey, Giggy,” Bob Doyle called up the companionway. “Me and Dave are going out now.”

“Go!”

He nodded to Hanlon and reached for the door.

The gust cuffed his face as soon as he stepped outside. He felt his cheek. It stung. Some wind, Bob Doyle thought. He slid the door shut and tried to latch it. But his hands were shaking.

“It’s still open,” David Hanlon said.

A swell toppled just short of the railing and threw up a column of white water. Then there was one they did not hear coming until the whooshing cough. They both went flat against the door and with the bump and burst of a wave on the foredeck heard the rattle of falling clods of spray. Bob Doyle took a step back and tried the latch again.

“Hurry.”

“I got it,” he muttered.

Just then he heard above him a heavy breath like a hiss, then a rushing thunder —then there was the shock, as if a gaff had come down on his skull, and the unbelievable heaviness and Bob Doyle knew the wave had him. He tried to breathe but his breath did not come and he felt himself going flat and everything around him darkly cold and heavy and he had a thought that he would never move again. He gave up fighting the weight and let himself go, knowing that he was going overboard and feeling as though he was inside nothing at all, but instead of sliding away and floating he felt his cheek pressing hard on a rubber pad and he realized that he lay sprawled on the foredeck. He tried to move his legs and they moved a little, and then he felt something grabbing him by the armpits and lifting him.

It was Hanlon.

“Move!”

His legs felt watery. He tried to plant them firmly but they only bent and wobbled as Hanlon lugged him along the companionway. The next thing he knew he was sitting inside the bait shed, up to his butt in frigid water, his back against coils of line. He gasped for air.

“Breathe,” Hanlon said.

He nodded.

“Breathe.”

They opened the door a crack. The waves were coming every fifteen seconds. They burst white and flew in glittering fragments. Water was swirling and backing up around the scuppers.

They counted to three and dashed over to the hatch. It was open. They scuttled down the stairs. Steam and diesel exhaust stung their eyes. They heard the
chug-chug-chug-chug
of the engine, the jangling of tools and the panicky clatter of cans and tubes and chests. It was hot. Then Bob Doyle heard the sloshing. He put the beam of the flashlight between a gap in the floor planks.

Water was gathering below the engine.

Hanlon pulled open his slicker and collapsed on the bench behind the galley table.

“Take it easy,” Bob Doyle told him. “I’ll go tell Gig.”

Gig Mork was at the helm, with the same stance and grip on the wheel that he had used to carry the steel anchors. His knuckles were white. The muscles in his jaw twitched.

“How is it down there?”

“All right, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“We pumped out the bilges.”

Sleet, hail and rain were coming in thick, steely braids, and curlers were pummeling the hull to port. Hills of water sneaked up on them from behind and arched and landed with such force that it felt as though a giant spike were being driven into the aft deck. When they could see such a wave breaking it seemed as though the
La Conte
was exploding.

“It’s like a monsoon,” Bob Doyle said.

“I been in worse storms in smaller boats,” Mork said. “It’ll be better once we get in closer to shore. We just got to keep jogging.”

“How fast you jogging her?”

“Two knots.”

“Where’s Mark?”

“Asleep. How’s Dave doing?”

“Not good.”

They steamed up a steep, snarling swell. At the top the
La Conte
hesitated, then tipped forward into a void and plunged down its back side, down, down, down, bumping and slewing wildly as she went. It was as if they were strapped to a mare that was racing downhill into an unknown territory —a wasteland of dark, barren hills with no horizon in sight.

At the galley table David Hanlon sat with his head in his folded arms.

“How’s the stomach?” Bob Doyle asked him. Hanlon didn’t move. “There’s Dramamine if you want it.”

“No,” Hanlon said. “That doesn’t work for me.”

A wave hit the bow. Bob Doyle took a step back, as though an invisible hand had shoved him.

“I don’t want to be here,” Hanlon said. “I wish I never came out.” He lifted his head. His skin was white as an oyster. “It doesn’t make any sense being out here in this.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“I can’t help it. I’ve had a bad feeling all along about this. God, I wish I wasn’t here.”

“We’re heading in now.”

There was a noise like a gas tank exploding and the walls and floor shook again. The galley went a long way over and came slowly back. Hanlon peered at Bob Doyle, his eyes as empty as holes in a mask.

“I’m sorry I ever came out.” He let out a thin, whisper of a sigh. “I shouldn’t have come out.”

“You’ve seen weather like this.”

“Not like this.”

“You’re just tired. We’re all tired.”

“Never again. I’ll never do this again.”

“Well,” Bob Doyle started to say, and all he could think of to add was, “That’s good.”

He reached up and opened a cabinet door. The cabinet was a mess inside. He rummaged around and found a can.

“Feel like some coffee?”

“No.”

There was a filter in the drawer. Bob Doyle tossed out the old grinds and placed a filter into the coffeemaker. The galley tilted far over and dishes and pots rattled in the cupboards. A book slid off the shelf above the porthole.

“Sure you don’t want some?” he asked Hanlon.

“No.”

He spooned out fresh grounds and had picked the glass carafe up with his right hand when he heard a thudding burst and felt a great shudder and saw the door over him. He was lying on his back, covered in tins, plates, cups and loaves of bread. Before he could open his mouth he heard a loud yawn of wood and felt the boat tilting back and he tumbled end over end until his head hit something. He sat up. Plastic cups were floating around him. His head hurt. The carafe was still in his hand.

He got to his feet, dopily, and began picking up what had flown out of the drawers and cabinets. Then he returned the books to the shelves. The coffeemaker had not been damaged. Grounds lay scattered everywhere. Hanlon was curled up in the booth behind the table, his fingers clutching the tabletop.

“Look,” Bob Doyle said to him, “in twenty minutes you can go wake Mike and get some sleep.”

Hanlon just stared at him.

“Hey, maybe you ought to go now,” Bob Doyle told him. “Why don’t you do that? Go get some sleep.”

Just then the floor leaped up. The coffeemaker flipped off the counter. As Bob Doyle lunged for it the carafe slipped from his fingers and smashed on the floor into many pieces.

He began picking out the glass shards from the sloshing water. Hanlon mumbled something and put his head in his arms.

By six o’clock the seas were twice as high as the ship. They rose up in huge dark walls now, their faces near vertical, thin, white lines across their brows. From the wheelhouse they almost could be mistaken for moonlit clouds.

“Light one of those cigarettes for me, will you?” Gig Mork asked.

Bob Doyle was sitting beside him on the floor of the pilothouse.

“Sure.”

The boat was no longer clearing the tops of the swells; she was punching through the crests and launching out their far sides. Most of the afternoon the wind had been blowing largely in one direction, northeast, but now gusts were coming from all sides, in blasts, as if big shells were bursting around the ship.

“Dave’s gone to bed,” Bob Doyle said. “He wasn’t doing too good so I sent him down to wake up Mike.”

Mork nodded.

“As soon as butt-head is ready the two of you better go down and check on the bilges.”

“Sure.”

“Remember, nobody goes out alone.”

“I know.”

The lights dimmed, then quit. The computer screen went blank. Yellow, emergency lights flickered on.

“Shit,”
Mork said. “The fucking laptop’s out.” He turned to Bob Doyle. “We’re not getting any juice. Go down below and find out what’s doing it.”

In the galley, Mike DeCapua was pulling on his raingear.

“C’mon,” Bob Doyle said.

“What’s up?”

“The computer just went out. Gig thinks it’s the generator.”

“Glorious.”

They timed the waves battering the hull, broke from behind the door and, heads bent and legs plunging, dashed to the stern. They knelt down beside the hatch and DeCapua yanked it open. Bob Doyle took one step down the ladder, and froze.

“Oh, God.”

“What?”

“Jesus.”

“Get out of the way.”

The bottom step of the ladder was underwater, along with the generator and both bilge pumps. Water was rolling back and forth across the engine room and lapping at the motor.

“Mama mia,”
DeCapua murmured.

“Get the skipper,” Bob Doyle said, his voice cracking, “and tell him to activate the EPIRB.”

The engine was still chugging, but water was halfway up its side.

What do you do? Bob Doyle was thinking to himself. What
is
there to do? Nothing. That’s what. Don’t do anything. Just wait for the others. They’ll know what to do. But it’s hell doing nothing. Jesus, it’s hell. Let me think. There’s got to be another pump. But what good would that do? We had three going and that wasn’t enough to stop it. Where is it coming in? I can’t see anything. Shit. All right, relax. Calm yourself down or you’re going to start looking like him, up there.

He looked up the stairs. David Hanlon was staring back down at him. The whites of his eyes had devoured the irises. Stop it, Bob Doyle thought.
Stop looking at me like that.

He listened to the
glug-glug-glug-glug
of the motor and watched the steam hissing from the block.

God, I could use a drink. Just one little drink. No, a big drink. A double. A double would do it. Well, you can forget that. Do something. Why don’t you do something instead of wondering what the hell’s going to happen?

Just then he heard boots on the stairs. Gig Mork came down and waded past him and the dead generator pump and over to the engine. He squinted at the temperature gauge. The needle on the dial was dropping.

“Goddammit.”

Mark Morley stuck his head in the hatch.

“Holy Christ.”

“The pump is gone,” Mork called to him. “Forget the pump.”

“What do we do?”

They started a bucket brigade; one man in the engine room, another on the stairs, a third at the hatch on deck. Mork started on the bottom. “Give me that bucket! Hurry up! No time to fuck around now! Where the hell is Hanlon?”