The Last Run (22 page)

Bob Doyle, who had just taken a full bucket of water from DeCapua and emptied it over the railing, said, “He’s up here.”

“Doing what?”

“Barfing his guts up.”

Morley came running along the side of the boat. He threw himself down on the rolling deck. He’d been on the radio, putting out a Mayday.

“Any luck?”

“Who knows?” Morley answered. “I couldn’t hear anybody.” He lowered his voice. “I did set off the EPIRB, though.”

“Which one?”

They had, Bob Doyle remembered, two Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons: one was a 406-megahertz model, the other a 121.5. The 121.5 sat in a holster in the wheelhouse. It was attached to a fifty-foot line. The 406 was a handheld beacon. If he remembered right, each EPIRB had a manual switch and a saltwater trigger, but the 406 emitted a stronger, more precise satellite signal. If anything is going to work in this, he thought, it will be the 406.

“The 121.”

“What did you do with the 406?”

“Right here.” Morley pulled it out of his rain jacket. It was the size and shape of a bowling pin.

“How long you think it’ll take the Coast Guard to get here with a pump?”

So he thinks he can still save this thing? Bob Doyle thought. A pump. Oh sure. A C-130 might do a flyby, but the way this boat is rocking in these seas there is no way anyone’s lowering a pump. Just getting a plane out here is asking a lot.

“It’ll take them an hour.”

“That long?”

“At least.”

The boat was broadside to the waves now and taking wave punches up and down her portside. She was filling fast with water; each time she keeled and the water rolled in her belly she lost more of her center of gravity.

“Bob!” Mork called out. “Switch places with me.”

“Coming down.”

He bailed and bailed until he could feel his joints crack. The engine went right on thrumming. It was a powerful engine and hammered in perfect time. This boat isn’t quitting easy, Bob Doyle thought. She is pretending none of this is happening. I wonder if it’s correct to think of an engine as a she. Why not? She beats almost like a woman’s heart. Feel the rhythm of her. I wish to Christ we could figure out where this water is coming in. It’s cold as a son of a bitch.

He took an empty bucket from DeCapua and was dipping it again when he heard a sickening, gurgling gag.

He wheeled around and gazed at the engine.

“Holy Mary.”

“Fuck me,” DeCapua said.

They could only stand there, the two of them. The boat’s heartbeat had stopped. The engine was dead. All they heard now was the maddening, high-pitched moan of wind in the rigging outside. To Bob Doyle it was as hollow a sound as a guttering candle being snuffed out.

By the time Bob Doyle retrieved his survival suit from his bunk and ran back to the bait shed, the others were already dressing up.

He yanked open the pouch and pulled off his boots. He didn’t want the boots weighing him down in the water. He shoved his legs in the trouser legs, stood up, put his arms in the sleeves and zipped up the chest. Then he looked around.

“Where’s Mark?”

“We thought he was with you,” Gig Mork said. He was double-checking Mike DeCapua’s zipper and lining, looking for holes or defects in the suit.

“He wasn’t with me,” Bob Doyle said.

David Hanlon was struggling to pull his zipper up. It was sticking just below the neck.

“Let me help you with that,” Bob Doyle said.

“Do your own first,” Hanlon said.

“Quiet. Let me help you.”

“It’s too tight,” Hanlon said. “I can’t get this zipper all the way up.”

A wave slammed the stern and they collapsed like toothpicks. From his knees Bob Doyle saw the bait-shed door swing open. It was Morley. He was already wearing his survival suit. He had the 406 EPIRB strapped to his arm.

“Listen up!”

He told them they were going to bail again. They were also going to try one last time to figure out how water was getting in. If need be, they would dry out the generator pump. Mike DeCapua shook his head.

“What’s your problem?” Mork asked him.

“That pump’s gone,” DeCapua said. “It ain’t going to start.”

“Maybe it will.”

“It ain’t working unless we take it apart and let it dry.”

“Shut up, Mike!”

“Cut it out!” Morley snapped. “We ain’t got time for that. Now let’s get down to the engine room.” He turned to Hanlon, who was still wrestling with his zipper, and handed him the 406 EPIRB.

“You hang on to this,” Morley told him. “Hit the switch, right here, if anything goes wrong. But don’t let go of it.”

DeCapua just rolled his eyes.

The engine-room floor was under four feet of water but the lights were still on. Mork and Morley went back and forth along the bulkheads, feeling around for a hole, a loose plank, while Bob Doyle and the others bailed furiously.

In his survival suit, Bob Doyle was finding it difficult to keep his footing; the neoprene suits were buoyant and the water was rising fast. The more he bailed the more he felt the cold creeping up his chest. He handed a bucket to DeCapua and looked at the narrowing space between the water and the ceiling and was very afraid. Please, God, he thought. Get me out of here. He knew, however, that he would frighten the others if he said anything, so he kept his mouth shut and went on bailing.

Morley was ranting and swearing and pawing along the bulkheads. Mork took a deep breath and ducked under the water to check the floor for leaks. But he couldn’t stay under long. The suit pulled him up.

“Find anything?”

“No.”

“We gotta find it!”

“Mark,” Mork said.

“We got to find where it’s coming in.” “Mark?”

Morley turned around. Mork gave him a hard, long look. Morley sighed and lowered his head. “All right,” he said.

They regrouped on the foredeck in the lee of the pilothouse. The ship was lurching, listing so hard to starboard that at times the mast dipped into the waves. Through the drenching darkness Bob Doyle saw the waves rise darkly and break green and white in the rigging and each time the tumbling, boiling flood of whitewater cleared the deck, he noticed that several deck planks were missing. They crouched in three-point stances.

“Dave,” DeCapua shouted. “Where’s that fucking line?” Hanlon held up a roll of three-quarter-inch rope he’d grabbed from the bait shed.

“Give me that.”

Bob Doyle leaned close to Morley and said, “Trigger that other EPIRB.”

“Think so?”

“Do it now.”

“Hey!” Morley shouted to Hanlon. “You got that EPIRB? Give it to me.”

Morley took the 406 from Hanlon and held it up. Bob Doyle felt for the switch and pulled it. As soon as he released his hand, a powerful white flash blinded them.

“That’s a helluva strobe!” Bob Doyle shouted at him. “Now they’ll know nobody’s out here kidding around.”

A wave, this one straight up and down, rose high over the bow and hit the deck with such force that an anchor jumped out of one of the rollers. In the swirl of the water it flopped about like a speared halibut.

Just then a pallet ripped loose from the netting on the deck and came cartwheeling at them.

“Gi
ggy!”

Before Mork could move the pallet clobbered him and he collapsed on his stomach. DeCapua crawled over to him. Mork was groaning and grabbing his head.

“You okay?”

“No,
I ain’t!”

DeCapua helped him sit up. Then he crawled back over and wrapped the rope around Hanlon’s waist. He made a loop at the belt and tied a cat’s-paw backed by a half-inch knot.

Then he grabbed Bob Doyle’s arm. “How about some buoys?” he said. “We can tie them off to us. They’ll help keep us afloat.”

“Good idea.”

Bob Doyle climbed the steel ladder to the top of the pilothouse and, grabbing the railing and hoisting himself up, swinging one leg over the bar, then the other, he dropped down into a crouch on the tar roof. He crouched low on one knee, never having felt so small, never having felt so fragile, the wind moaning like a prehistoric animal in his ears, sweat sliding down his flanks, and went to work on the knots that secured the buoy balls to the railing.

Now, for the first time Bob Doyle saw the storm in all its fury, ugliness and beauty: the towering, dark mountains of water, merging, pulling apart, bursting against one another; the tormented, black sky, an incessant discharge of electric hair, flashing like artillery; the speed-hardened wind, scooping out craters in the ocean, tearing the crests off the waves and carrying them into oblivion. He also saw the
La Conte
in all of her vulnerability: how she keeled in the troughs, her mast flailing, her rigging taking on a ghostly white coating from the geysers of spray that spouted off her port bow. And yet not a deck light had gone out. Even the searchlight was on.

The ship was taking knockdown punches, rolling and twisting under the combers, as though in agony, but refusing to go under. She’s some boat, Bob Doyle thought to himself. But she won’t last much longer. Ten minutes, if that.

He had the first knot undone and had started working to free up the second buoy.

Just be smart, he said to himself. Don’t lose your cool and do something stupid. And be careful. This boat is lurching a lot. Don’t relax and fall over and break something and wind up in the water alone.

There was a thickening lump in his throat and he tried to swallow but he could not. He kept working on the knot. Goddamn these mittens. How are you supposed to take apart a rope wearing a three-fingered, Gumby mitten? And goddamn this wind, too. All right. Relax, he told himself. Relax. I wonder if Sitka will send a bird out here? How long ago did Mark set off that 121? More than ten minutes. And now they had just triggered the 406. Just look at that strobe go. I guess we should have headed in earlier. I guess it was nuts all right to be fishing with something this bad coming at you. We shouldn’t have tried it. Then again, look at all the money we caught. Shame we’re going to lose it. I wonder how much our take would have been? Jesus, I want a drink. I guess I should have stuck to ordering supplies for ships. Blankets and chewing gum and cigarettes. That was a lot easier than this. Fuck boats. There’s no money on boats anymore, anyway. Not for us little guys. Only for the big boat owners and their fucking fish permits. If this damned boat would only stop lurching I could get this knot. Christ. I should have got that job in the auto-supply store. Oh, sure. Order car parts for a living. Who drives in Alaska? Wouldn’t hold it anyway. I’d drink myself out of it. Only place I don’t drink is out here. I ought to live on the ocean. Why not? I’m going to die on it. Christ. Don’t you
ever
get tired of self-pity? There. I got it. Two buoy balls coming right down.

Just then he heard a scream. He looked down over the railing. Someone was stretched out on the deck, writhing. He scrambled down the ladder, careful not to lose his grip on the lines attached to the buoys, and nearly threw his knee out landing on the heaving deck. He crawled over to Mike DeCapua.

DeCapua was clutching his crotch and upper thigh. A wave had ripped the lid of the hatch off and he had stepped into the hole. His leg had gone in all the way.

“It’s me,” Bob Doyle told him. “How bad is it?”

“Christ!”

“Hold still.”

“Son of a
bitch!”

Bob Doyle was checking DeCapua’s suit for rips.

“Can you sit up?”

“Yeah.”

He had not broken anything. The suit appeared to be all right. Bob Doyle looked at the wheelhouse.

He saw the strobe 121.5 EPIRB, still flashing in its holster inside the pilothouse. “I’m going to get that other EPIRB!” he shouted. “Get everyone tied together!”

He climbed the ladder, threw open the side door, grabbed the beacon and scuttled back down to the deck. The others were passing the rope, tying it around their waists and handing it off to the next man. Hanlon was on one end. Bob Doyle got on the other. He looped it around his own waist, knotted it, slipped the end of the line through the top ring on the buoy float, made another knot and then handed it off to DeCapua. DeCapua tied another float to Hanlon’s waist in the same manner, and then looped a second rope around their waists as a backup. Now they were a human chain; their fates were tied.

Morley grabbed Bob Doyle by the hood.

“We stay on this thing as long as we can!” he shouted. “You got that?”

Bob Doyle nodded.

“If we have to go in the water, we go off the port bow. We go up on the railing, then we jump off.”

“Okay.”

The starboard railing was now entirely underwater. Morley shouted, “Let’s move!” Like crabs, they clawed up the tilting deck to the gunwale on the port bow.

“Okay, listen up!” the skipper shouted. “We jump when I tell you guys to jump!” Then, to Bob Doyle: “Where’s that 121?”

“Right down here!”

“Where?”

Just as Bob Doyle picked the beacon up off the deck where he had put it down for a moment, a cable snapped overhead and cracked on the deck not five feet behind him. He whirled, and as he did, a wave surged over the bow and swept the EPIRB out of his hands and clean over the gunwale.

“Oh, shit!”

“What?”

“I lost it! The EPIRB!”

“Get up on the gunwale!”

“Goddammit!”

“Get on the gunwale!”

He swung a leg over the railing, then the other.

“Bob, get on the end!”

They lined up, crouching, holding fast to the railing. The boat was keeling now at a forty-five-degree angle. Half of the deck was underwater.

“Oh my God,” DeCapua was stammering, “oh my God, oh my God, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit—”

“Cool it!” Mork screamed.

Bob Doyle looked over at the pilothouse. The emergency lights were still on. He turned and saw Hanlon, clutching the other EPIRB to his chest, his eyes shut.

“Listen!” Morley shouted, holding his hands cupped. “As soon as I say ‘go,’ we all go in together!”

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh —”

“When I count three, let go of the railing, take a step backward and jump! Stay calm! The suits will hold you up. Okay? Now, on the count of three, we all go in together!”