As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth (18 page)

O
ne hundred thirty-eight miles from the telephone in Waupatoneka, Lloyd sat in a cabin in the woods, near a lake, playing poker with Betty and her sister. Betty thought it would be good exercise for his brain. Create new neural pathways, that sort of thing.

And then, down one of her own neural pathways came the recollection that she had forgotten to call any of the neighbors about the dogs.

“Oh, dear,” she said.

“What?” said Ruth.

Betty didn’t want to worry Lloyd. She had promised she would call, but there was the reunion, the long night in the woods, the trip to the hospital—she just forgot.

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “I remembered something I
said I would do tomorrow.” She hoped Ruth wouldn’t ask her what.

“Lloyd,” she said. “We’ll have to drive back to Waupatoneka first thing in the morning, if that’s okay.” She would tell him when they got there and could do something. Look around. Go to the pound. Whatever you did about dogs.

“Suits me,” he said.

A
seagull flight (a long seagull flight) from where Ry sat watching Bart and Apu, his mother and father sat talking.

“I think the minute we get our stuff, we should sail this boat back to Annalee, get on a plane, and go home,” said his mother. “I’m just not in the mood for this vacation anymore. And it really bothers me that Dad’s not answering the phone. What if something happened to him?”

“He never answers the phone,” said his dad. “Listen. I know we’ve had some setbacks. But the odds are with us now. Let’s just give it one more chance. Howsabout, when we get all our cards and papers, Monday, we hope, we sail to Saint Jeroen’s? It’s only two miles away. A really easy sail. We’ll do everything easy. Easy, easy, easy.”

“I’ll think about it,” said his mom.

T
he sea was magnificent. But then there was the deepness and the vastness of it, and the itsy-bitsyness of their boat. It wasn’t seasickness Ry felt. This was more akin to panic. He had an intense longing to be on shore, any shore. He would like to be moving from the shore toward the center of a substantial continent. Just think of it like an Imax movie, he said to himself. An Imax movie times four or five or six, a screen in every direction. It didn’t help.

He found that he was okay when he concentrated on following Del’s instructions. He was okay when he looked at Del, who seemed, as he was in any situation that required physical strength and agility plus mechanical aptitude and that also included unlikely odds, perfectly at ease. Ry was okay when he focused on the sails, the
ropes, the varnished wood, the striped cushions that were cheery, though dingy. Anything nearby and a solid.

Eating was calming, too, so he parceled out bites of the sandwiches Yulia had packed, holding each one in his mouth until it had melted to mush and he had to swallow it. He looked at Del, the sails, ropes, wood, cushions, sandwich.

There are people who do this all the time, he told himself.

People drown all the time, too, his self thought to mention.

“Shut up,” he said. He said it aloud, and Del, who hadn’t said anything, glanced over his shoulder questioningly. Ry shook his head.

Hours went by. Perhaps days, weeks, a lifetime. He began to get a feel for how what they were doing with the sails connected up to how the boat acted with the wind and the watery moguls. In the same way that Pavlov’s dogs had gotten a feel for what happened with bells and food. From time to time, he would ask Del a question, or venture a guess as to what their next move would be. He still wasn’t letting himself look too far away from the boat, but he settled (relaxed would be too strong a word) into his self-circumscribed sailing experience. Now and
again he began to glance outward at the nearest swells, able to see how beautiful they would look from, say, the firmness of a beach.

A seabird of some type floated calmly up and over the rolling foothills of water and down into the valleys. It was a small creature, way smaller than he was himself, yet it was unconcerned with the immensity of what was under it and in every direction for great distances. It was, of course, adapted to this environment. It could float and fly and retrieve meals. Even so, Ry couldn’t help admiring what looked like bravado.

He thought of how he had learned to calm his fears on roller coasters by yelling at the top of his lungs. Maybe that explained sea chanties. He tried to think of one. Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum. Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to sea we go. Ho, ho, ho, who wouldn’t go. Other songs with “ho.” Or, It was sad when the great ship went down. That one was about the
Titanic
. Not good to think of now.

In the first part of the sail, they had moved between islands, some closer, some farther off. Del sailed the boat by knowing what islands they were. He knew all of their names and sometimes stories or interesting facts.

There was an island that had been used for bombing practice and there was still live ordnance, so there were
places on it that people weren’t allowed to go. Oddly enough, that had allowed sea turtles to start to thrive there.

Del pointed at some rocks rising up from the water and told Ry how Sir Francis Drake’s men had used them as target practice because the rocks looked to them like the sails of a French warship.

There was an island where they harvested salt.

There was an island called Dead Chest, where the pirate Blackbeard had left fifteen of his men with just a bottle of rum and a sword to punish them. When they tried to swim to the next island, they all drowned. That’s where Robert Louis Stevenson got the idea for “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest,/Yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum.”

A lot of the stories were about war or pirates. Or war and pirates. There was the salt one, and a place where giant boulders were strewn along the beach like a child’s toys. But those weren’t stories, really.

Now they were in a stretch with no islands in sight. They were sailing by the compass and by charts. Which meant maps. No GPS; Del had no use for GPS. Besides, Yulia’s boat was old and didn’t have it. But Del would get them there. It was exactly the kind of thing he was good at.

The boat rocked and rolled. Ry was getting used to the movement. He slid a wrench out of his way that he had awkwardly avoided in some of his quick scrambles along the edge of the boat, and felt he had significantly lessened his chances of flying over the edge. He was wearing a harness that would inflate if he went into the water, but still, he didn’t relish the idea of bobbing like a crouton in the sharky broth.

The sun was high now, and the air balmy. Ry attempted to remove his sweatshirt without taking off his harness. He felt foolish, and he didn’t like how his hands were trapped inside, unavailable for grabbing. So he took the harness off, pulled off the sweatshirt and flung it quickly behind him, and put the harness back on as fast as he could. Just in time for one of those stretches where it seemed that only the paltry one-hundred-forty pounds of his body, leaning as far back as he dared, was keeping the sailboat from capsizing as it bounded over the water. If this was docile and forgiving, he was glad they weren’t sailing a boat that was high-spirited or spiteful.

Del checked the compass, they moved the sails (“Ready about”), and there he was, doing it again, but now on the other side. The place where he had been sitting a moment before was in a steeply diagonal relationship
to where he sat now, and unnervingly close to the water. Don’t think, he told himself. Think but then don’t think.

And so it went. Back and forth, side to side, tilt this way, tilt that way. The deep tilting was called “heeling.” Having a name other than “tipping over” made it seem less dangerous, more like a normal thing that happened all the time, that was okay if it happened. It would be fun in a medium-sized lake. A nice-sized lake with a visible fringe of trees in every direction. A lake where you had to watch out for all the other boats. Where the sound of voices, and the fragrance of grilling and barbecue, sometimes, floated out from the shore.

Del was at the compass again. Ry watched his back, waiting for the “Ready about.” But this time Del turned without speaking, and Ry saw on his face an expression that is unnerving to see on your captain’s face when you are in such a small sailboat on an immense body of water. It was an expression of bafflement.

Del gazed past Ry into the middle distance, at some hologramic projection of his thoughts. Then it turned out that he was not gazing at spectral thoughts, but at an actual physical presence.

“I wonder what that island is,” he said then,
thoughtful, speculative. He looked down at the chart and said, “It’s not supposed to be there.”

Following Del’s gaze, Ry saw a small island in the near distance. It rose, rocky and vegetated, from the sea, and he thought it might be the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Though he wished it was bigger. He didn’t like it that he could see both ends of it at once without moving his head.

A candy-striped lighthouse perched on a rocky ledge. A solitary birthday candle, left in a billion-year-old piece of cake.

“I think we better go see what it is,” said Del. “We must have gotten off course. Though I can’t think how.”

As they drew closer, they saw a man standing on a ledge. He appeared to be watching them. Then he was not there, but it was time to find a place to park the boat. “Park” probably wasn’t the right word for it. Land the boat? Beach it?

They sailed along the perimeter, just outside of the breaking waves, searching for an ideal spot. Or an adequate spot. Or a spot that offered the ghost of a prayer of making it ashore in one piece. The slanting light of late afternoon lent a golden glory-glory-hallelujah radiance to flowering trees and bushes, to tantalizing grassy
hummocks, to the continuous vertical rock face where the island plunged below the surface to the depths. To be so close, but not able to land…what would they do if night fell and they were still circling?

Ry blocked out the image this conjured up, which was a powerful one (black, with heaving, lapping, crashing swells of immense, cold, salty ocean and the boat snapping like a toothpick against invisible-in-the-darkness boulders, and the water so cold, so endless), from his mind, and instead looked at a phalanx of happy goats that came frolicking, fearless of the precipice they danced along, so close to the edge. He might have traded his life as a human for the life of a goat at that moment, but no one made the offer.

Suddenly a shout was heard. Both Ry and Del turned their heads toward it. A man stood—was it the same man?—on an outcropping, waving both arms. When he saw that he had their attention, he pointed. At first they were confused, seeing nothing, but then an almost imperceptible break in the rock opened as they approached, and they saw that the opening led to a hidden cove.

They dropped their sails, and Del started the motor. In they went. As waves entered the narrow passage, the
water had to crowd up vertically in the air to fit all its volume in. It was like riding through a washing machine. Once they made it into the cove, though, the waves settled down and rolled in swells toward a pebbly shore.

A modest pier had been constructed there, with what looked to be a fishing boat tied up on one side of it. At Del’s instruction, Ry leaped out onto the pier and held the rope that was tossed to him while Del tied another rope to one of the posts.

Ry was giddy at their unexpected luck. He understood that they were not done sailing, but tomorrow was another day. He would have kissed the boards of the pier if he weren’t so busy doing what Del was telling him to do. He haffed the chuffs, clipped the ridings, railed the boards, highed the lows, skibed the rampets, harbed the reefs, and cleeted the forths. Which is what sailing talk sounds like if you are not a sailor.

When they had made everything fast, which meant making sure nothing would go anywhere at all, fast or slow, Del said, “Here, grab your sweatshirt. It might cool down later.”

He reached for the sweatshirt and picked it up from where Ry had tossed it some hours back. But he didn’t hand it to Ry. He clutched it in front of him and looked
intently at the place where it had been. The big wrench was lying there, the wrench that Ry had moved out of his way.

“Did you put that there?” he asked Ry.

“Yeah,” said Ry, “I kept tripping over it.”

Del’s face was unreadable. He might have been angry or amused, or puzzling out another mystery, it was hard to say. Ry watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down a few times.

He figured it was related to Del’s Reverence for Tools, and keeping them where they were supposed to be, but he didn’t see why Del had to go all Sphinx-ish on him. It wasn’t that big a deal.

“Tell me where it goes and I’ll put it away,” he said. Whoever had left the wrench where it was in the first place, which by the way wasn’t him, hadn’t put it away, either.

He climbed back down into the boat and was about to grab the wrench when Del stopped him.

“Wait,” Del said. “I just want to show you something. It’s pretty important.”

He picked up the wrench himself and extended his arm out away from his body. Then he set it back down where it had been.

“Watch the compass,” he said, and he moved the wrench away and back again. Ry watched the needle of the mounted compass spin to two o’clock. And he watched it spin back around to point to the approaching wrench. Del set the wrench down and dropped the sweatshirt on top of it.

“Tell me which way’s north,” he said.

And first, Ry grasped the simple concept that the compass was pointing at the wrench, not at north. And then he grasped the hypothetical version of the idea that they had been sailing on open water, out of sight of land, guided by a compass pointing at a wrench instead of at north. And then he comprehended the concrete, iron, and watery actualization of that idea being carried out in real life. Which had just occurred. And at the same time, he understood that he was the one who had, unwittingly, caused it to happen.

He thought he might throw up.

As his mind swirled, the simple science sank into his brain like lead shot into a whirlpool. As if that weren’t enough, he was slammed by the realization of how pissed Del must be. He didn’t want to look at him. He looked, instead, at the compass and the sweatshirt for a very long time.

He was aware that Del was moving around the boat. When he lifted his head and opened his mouth to say how sorry he was, and how stupid, what an idiot, Del was climbing out onto the rickety dock.

“Just put it in that cubby over there,” said Del.

“I’m sorry I’m such an idiot,” said Ry.

“It’s my fault as much as yours,” said Del. “I forgot to put it away. I left it where you could trip over it.”

Then Del was walking down the dock toward the island man, who was coming out onto the dock. Ry saw them meet. He picked up the villainous sweatshirt and climbed out of the boat.