Caught (24 page)

Ada screamed for Slaney and he found that Carter had fallen out of the bed. He was wearing a Stones T-shirt and nothing else. His grey pubic hair a shock.

He sees rats, Ada said. The three of them stared at the bedsheets.

They were all over me, Carter said. The T-shirt was soaked through and Slaney helped him take it off and then he was cold and shivering. He collapsed, banging his head against the wooden bed rail, opening a gash on his cheekbone.

But he kept drinking. Carter believed the alcohol would kill whatever bug he had. He called out for whisky and Ada gave it to him. He slept deeply and sometimes they couldn’t shake him awake. Slaney and Ada had to sail the boat by themselves and nurse Carter. She was determined and waxen from lack of sleep.

He’d started muttering to himself. Sometimes he looked straight through them and spoke about a teapot with a crack. He asked them to bring him a particular teapot and grew agitated when he saw it wasn’t the one he wanted. He called out to his wife through the night.

We’ve got to get him to a doctor, Ada said. I am frightened out of my wits. She had her fists in her hair near her temples and she slid her back down the wall until she was hunched in the corner.

Please, David, she said. A fever like that could kill him. That’s how my mother died. It was so fast. Please.

We’ll get caught, Slaney said. They were off the coast of Nicaragua. He could go in there and try to find a doctor, but they would get caught. She looked up at him from the floor, her eyes glassed over with tears, her nose pink at the tip. She was pitiable and commanding.

Or brain damage, she said.

Okay, I’ll bring him in, Slaney said. I’ll get him to a hospital or clinic or whatever they have. First thing in the morning.

Oh, David, she said, and she rested her forehead against her wrist and sobbed.

The dread that coursed through him straightened his posture. He stood upright and rigid. He must have looked like he had been called to attention.

Why are you with him? he asked.

That doesn’t matter now, she said.

But the fever broke the next morning and Carter became docile and grateful. He drank broth, cupping the bowl with both hands, slopping it all over the sheets. He looked like a mendicant or he looked cursed, munching the soda crackers Ada handed him one by one.

He stayed in bed except to go to the toilet. He hardly spoke to them. After three days Carter was up again, on the deck. Two days later he had fully recovered. By then they were sailing past Mexico. One beautiful morning Slaney found them necking in the galley. Ada had a frying pan on the stove and a pat of butter slid across the black surface, sizzling.

Darling, it’s beautiful on deck, Ada told Carter. Go up and get some sunshine, I’ll call you down when the pancakes are done.

She picked up the chrome bowl with the batter and the whisk chimed against the sides. She had been restored. The haggard fortitude that she’d called on to keep Carter alive had disappeared. She was girlish again.

I feel kind of light-headed, Ada said. Slaney wedged himself into the bench at the table. Ada swivelled more butter over the hot frying pan and put it down on the gimballed stove and poured the batter in and the smell filled up the galley.

I had a flying dream last night, she said. Ever had one of those, David?

I slept the sleep of the dead, he said.

Watch this, Ada said. Are you watching? She jerked the frying pan and the pancake flew up and flipped in the air and she caught it.

Did you see that? Ada asked. She turned to him holding out the pan. Her face was lit up.

You’re making me hungry, Slaney said. She tried to open the bottle of honey, hitting the metal lid with a butter knife, holding the jar between her knees.

Give it here, Slaney said.

No.

Pass it over. He got up to wrestle it away from her but she turned her back and they were roughhousing over the honey and he had her pinned against the counter, but she was curled around the jar with her back to him.

I can do it, she said, and she was laughing. They were both laughing. Then the lid gave and they were embarrassed. They both blushed and Slaney stepped back and she poured out the honey and twisted the jar. A line of it wiggled over her knuckles and she licked it.

I am grateful, she said. I know what getting a doctor would have meant.

They were looking at each other, and her strange eyes, blue and hazel, and what the hell was she doing, she was only nineteen and she seemed without guile.

Slaney thought there was something true in her. He could not understand how she had come to be there with an old drunk. They were overtaken by stillness. The sea was still and there wasn’t a breath of wind.

Carter yelled for Slaney to get up on deck and she had the open jar of honey and they were both self-conscious. Slaney sat down at the table and picked up his knife and fork. He held them upright in his fists.

There, she said. She put the plate in front of him.

Fluffy, Slaney said.

Timing is the thing, she said.

Slaney, Carter yelled. I need you up here. He sounded sober and amazed.

Caroline

Hello, Staff-Sergeant Patterson,
O’Neill’s secretary said. She stood up from the desk and left the telephone, lit up and ringing, to lead Patterson down the corridor to the screening room. He’d been following the sailboat’s progress over the weeks and he’d heard about the hurricane on the news.

Superintendent O’Neill is grateful you could come in on such short notice.

That’s my job, Patterson said.

And how’s Mrs. Patterson? the secretary asked. She was trotting down the corridor and Patterson had to rush to keep up. His wife would be making crayon shavings with a cheese grater. The children put the shavings between sheets of wax paper and his wife ironed them, melting the crayon, and they cut out autumn leaves to decorate the classroom.

Mrs. Patterson is fine, thank you.

Still reading her poetry, I guess? she asked. The secretary spoke as if she and Patterson were in collusion about how to deal with his fey and capricious wife.

Patterson had driven Delores through the New England states last year to see the fall colours. She was fond of Emily Dickinson and they’d visited the poet’s cottage.

Oh look, her inkwell, Delores had cried out, startling the other people crowded together in the little rooms on the tour.

The guide had said, Don’t touch. Delores spun around and her hand flew to her cheek as if she’d been slapped.

No, no, I wouldn’t, she blurted. But she held up the inkwell before her like a weapon.

He’d been married for just over twenty years and it was a solid and narrowly focused marriage. Delores taught kindergarten and had kept her figure doing calisthenics and he could trust her to cook meals he loved; or he had grown to love the meals she cooked. She had lots of girlfriends, a rich social life with which he had very little to do.

The poetry mattered to her and she wrote it and went off to meetings and came back tipsy and raw. He didn’t know what went on there but when she returned from a meeting she was distracted and amorous, or obscurely hurt and closed off.

He loved that there were things he didn’t know about her. He couldn’t say what made her tick or why she stayed with him but he felt lucky to live in her orbit.

The soap and candles and chocolates she brought home when kindergarten was over for the year.

The ardent and unformed love the school children had for her — he’d once witnessed a mobbing, each child hugging her waist, digging in against one another for a handful of his wife, and Delores on tiptoe with a box of Popsicles raised over her head.

Their son, Basil, was a cadet in the RCMP, and Patterson would not brag. He would not boast, but it was an effort. And their daughter had broken his heart.

The secretary knocked on a door at the end of the hall and listened and opened it.

Superintendent O’Neill, Staff-Sergeant Patterson has arrived, she said.

He’d been called into the office and there were men with white shirts and ties standing in the dark room and they were facing the screen.

Patterson, O’Neill said. The men all turned to look at him. Come in, Patterson.

O’Neill and Simmonds and Tony Belmont were there and they had called in a few guys Patterson hadn’t met before and O’Neill introduced him. Patterson looked them in the eyes as he shook their hands. He repeated their names, Greenwood, Capardi, Bennett, and Hughes, but he felt the magnetic pull of the screen.

It was a juddering picture full of snow. Washes of emptiness. Grit. There was nothing to see.

We think they’re gone, O’Neill said. They may be lost at sea. We’ve lost them. The screen turned to sand and reconfigured. The picture swished away and came back and the whole image vibrated like the pelt of a frightened animal.

What’s wrong with the signal? Patterson asked.

They hit Hurricane Caroline and we’ve lost the picture, Greenwood said. They are right in the middle of that thing. It’s very doubtful a vessel of that size will get through it.

The device must have been damaged, Bennett said.

There’s no signal, O’Neill said. There’s been a lot of wreckage along the Pacific coast, they’ve got flooding, fires, twenty-four people injured, twelve deaths reported since September 4, the count is rising. Fishing boats crushed. Cattle. Crops destroyed. We’ve got calls out all over the coast. But they haven’t turned up. We think they must have been hit by the storm early this morning.

One of the men crossed in front of the projector and his shirt turned blue and grainy. The light from the projector was full of cigarette smoke. The secretary who had shown Patterson in knocked and opened the door again and she said she had Señor Vasquez from the Mexican Bureau of Immigration on the line for Superintendent O’Neill.

Excuse me, boys, O’Neill said.

Our guys are talking to their guys where we can, but the lines are down, Capardi said. We’re trying to see if they turn anything up. But I’d guess we’re the least of their worries.

The white screen flashed whiter and went grey.

What was that? Simmonds asked.

The projector blew a bulb, Capardi said.

Patterson sat on one of the chairs they had arranged in a row in front of the screen and somebody asked him if he took sugar.

For the first time Patterson felt complicit. He broke a sweat all over.

Carter. Carter had made his choices.

But David Slaney was just a kid.

And the girl was even younger than Patterson’s own daughter. He thought about Ada playing the piano. Patterson had tracked down her father. Sebastian Anderson. He was a widower, a doctor in Toronto. A former medical officer in the navy, held prisoner in a detention camp in Italy. A decorated man, a war hero, probably wrecked by his feckless, wild child.

If something had happened to the girl Patterson would have to contact her father. He thought about the call. He would have to admit he’d met her, heard her at the piano, knew she was talented and strange, and that he’d let her go off with that filthy old goat of a man. Let her get embroiled in illegal activity. He had not taken her aside as he hoped somebody might do, another father, for his own daughter.

Patterson could have put a stop to it. He thought of shaking Slaney’s hand. The boy had been earnest and, Patterson thought, intelligent and desperate. Audacious. The raw will in his eyes. That would be destroyed by another round in prison.

How much of this had to do with Patterson’s promotion? He let himself ponder that question. What if they died out there?

What are they, he asked Simmonds, three weeks from home? Yes, I take sugar.

Upside Down

The sky dropped
her fingers into the warm sea and leisurely trailed them along. The hurricane seemed to be a long way off but they could see the sky trailing in the waves.

Carter was charged up. He’d developed the thrusting walk of a man looking for a fight. He saw the storm swish and sway and turn to look over her shoulder at him.

Come and get me, he whispered. He gripped the rail and was transfixed.

Everything dead still, the water smooth and flat. Slaney saw a large glassy patch on the surface near the starboard side, the footprint of a diving whale, and he saw the long black shadow of it, gliding far, far below the surface.

Lower the mainsail, Carter said. I’ll get the rest. The whisper of the canvas
flumping
, the creak of the boom, the rigging skittering, and they looked up and saw the lines were tangled at the masthead.

I’ll go, Slaney said. He strapped himself to the mast with two loops of rope and climbed the mast steps. He held tight with one arm while he worked up the lines that secured him, lifting them a foot or two up the pole with each step he took.

Then it was upon them. Such instant force and power, seemingly out of nowhere. They were lashed with it, coils of snapping rain and the wind. It seemed to come because Carter had asked for it.

The mast was dipping down near the surface and swinging back up and down again and Slaney was yelling but he didn’t know what he was saying. A wall of plowing white surf bore down on the boat, high as a house.

Slaney lost his footing on the mast steps and clung with all his might, bicycling his feet until he found purchase and he reached out as far as he could, the tangled lines just inches from his fingers.

Get down, David, Carter called out.

We can’t afford to lose the sail, Carter, Slaney said.

Get down, Carter called. And he called David’s name over and over.

I almost got it, Slaney screamed back.

David, Carter said. And Slaney saw the wave billowing over the side and Carter was lifted off his feet and buried by white foam, and the boat disappeared in the avalanche and Slaney was on a pole with the sky swatting him and there was nothing below. Then the prow pointed out of the curdled foam and the boat peeled itself out of the water, the deck emerged, and Slaney saw that Carter lay on his back, rammed against the gunwale. He was still and Slaney thought he might have been knocked unconscious and called to him because another wave was coming as malevolent and full of white mist and crumbling concrete as the last, and Carter got to his hands and knees and shook his head as if he disagreed with the way it was going down and he was rammed hard against the gunwale again.