And the deep blue sea

Dacron, and by the time he could push himself groggily to his feet he could hear it banging against the hull. He groped inside the hatch for the flashlight, but in his haste he knocked it out of its clips on the bulkhead and it fell to the cabin sole. The Shoshone was rolling violently now, dead in the water, and there was another crash as the mast swung into her side.

He plunged down the ladder, lost his balance, and was thrown to his hands and knees against the chart table. The flashlight rolled into him. He grabbed at it, but it went clattering away in the darkness. He tried to calm himself; he was losing his head in a situation where wasted minutes could mean disaster. He pushed himself to his feet, switched on the cabin light, and scooped up the flashlight. It was broken. But there was another in one of the drawers of the chart table. He grabbed it out and ran on deck.

He’d already swung the beam of light in a wide arc across the darkness and the piled and breaking sea astern, searching futilely for what he’d hit, before the idiocy of it finally got his attention. What was he after—a license number, witnesses? He shot the light into the churning mess along the starboard side. The mast and the two sails were still fast to the hull by the forestay, the starboard shrouds, and tangle of halyards and sheets, so he wasn’t in any danger of losing them, but the sails were full of water and would have to be lowered before he could even start to get the spars back aboard. They were still banging against the hull with every roll, but the mast itself was hollow and the boom too light to do any immediate damage to the planking. It would have to wait. He turned and plunged down the ladder again, and even as his eyes came below the level of the hatch he felt the icy tingle of gooseflesh between his shoulder blades. A tiny rivulet of water had rolled out of the bilge and was spreading across the cabin sole that had been dry less than a minute ago.

At the forward end of the cabin, beyond the foot of the mast, was the narrow passage into the forepeak, flanked on one side by the enclosed head and on the other by a locker. He shot through it, switched on the light, and looked, expecting to see the whole bow caved in. There was no visible evidence of damage. But everything he could see was above the waterline. The cabin sole extended into this small triangular space in the bows, and on both sides were benches with lockers beneath, the whole area piled with sailbags, spare rope, extra water cans, unopened cases of food, a sea anchor, and a bundled pneumatic raft. Somewhere under all this, the Shoshone was badly holed below the waterline.

He cleared the compartment by the simple expedient of hurling everything behind him into the cabin, banging water cans, sailbags, and cases of canned goods that burst open and scattered when they hit. As he threw the last of it out of the way, he looked behind him and saw there was now at least an inch of water sweeping back and forth across the cabin sole through this confusion of gear.

In the center of the compartment there was a two-by-two-foot hatch in the floorboards. He grasped the recessed ring-bolt and yanked it out. Water rolled up through the opening and went running aft—ominously clear water, fresh from the sea. A small river of it was flowing in somewhere just forward of him. With the light overhead he could see the frames and planking directly below the hatch. They were unbroken. He grabbed the flashlight and lay flat, training the beam forward under the edge of the hatch. Still no damage. But he couldn’t see far enough; the angle was too sharp, unless he put the flashlight in the water.

He was assailed by a savage compulsion to hurry, and realized he had been cursing ceaselessly and monotonously under his breath. He seemed to be moving forever through a nightmare in slow motion. What the hell difference did it make whether he could see the damage from here or not? He knew it was there, and seeing it wasn’t going to do any good until he could get at it to try to repair it. He sprang up and attacked the lockers.

The chain locker first. It was at the apex of the triangle, right in the bow. The two anchors with their lengths of chain went flying back to land on the cabin sole, and then as he grabbed out the big coil of anchor warp, he saw it—or rather, he saw the upper part of it. Two frames on the starboard side were broken and pushed inward, and water poured in through a shattered plank. But the real damage was still below the bottom of the locker.

The next contained tools. He threw it open, grabbed out the small handax, and began smashing at the side of the locker. He had to tear it out of the way before he could get at the floor beneath it. It was marine plywood, fastened with bronze screws, and there was little room to swing the ax. Before he had half of it hacked away, he looked down and saw with horror that he was already standing in several inches of water. He’d never get to it in time, not from here. He had to shove something in the hole from outside to slow the flood enough to hold it with the bilge pump, at least until daybreak. Grabbing up the flashlight, he ran back through the cabin, picking up one of the sailbags on the fly, and hurried on deck.

The Shoshone still lay in the trough, rolling heavily, but there was already a different feel to her, a reluctance to come back each time with the inertia of the water inside her. He threw the light into the surging mess of spars and cordage and Dacron along the starboard side and knew it would be suicide to go under it or between it and the hull. The plunging hull itself was dangerous enough without the broken mast battering into it. There was no time to fool with turnbuckles and shackles, working one-handed on a lurching deck while he tried to hold a light. He ran below again for the handax. The steel forestay was tough, and the ax only buried it in the wood, so it took a half dozen swings before he severed it. With nothing holding it forward of the shrouds, he was able to haul the whole mess aft along the hull and secure it back out of the way. The sailbag he’d brought up held a storm jib. He pulled it out of the bag and went over the side with it.

The dark mass of the bow heaved up and plunged down on him. He pushed clear, waiting, and when it steadied for a moment, came in against it. He groped, felt the jagged ends of broken planking and the water pouring through, and tried to stuff the jib into it. There was no clearly defined hole, only a great area of split and shattered planks and pushed-in frames, nowhere enough of an opening to get the cloth in far enough to hold. The Shoshone lurched to starboard and came down on him with stunning force, pushing him under the surface. He kicked backward and got clear, and when she steadied again the sail was gone. He threshed around with his hands, groping for it; they encountered nothing. The Shoshone rolled down again and hung there, wallowing sluggishly. He grabbed the rail and climbed back aboard. Just as he reached the companion hatch the cabin lights went out. Water had covered the batteries. There was no longer any hope. She was filling too fast for anything to save her.

The next half hour was never very clear in his mind. He had no precise recollection of how he had got the raft out of the cabin, found the pump, and inflated it—nor even why he had done it, except that the survival instinct was apparently basic and not to be denied by trifles like logic and realistic appraisals of the situation. It wasn’t even supposed to be a life raft; he had it aboard only for skin-diving forays along the reefs of the South Pacific which he would never reach now. There were no oars, no sail, and no food or water, but somewhere in the confusion he had grabbed up the Jack Daniels bottle he kept in the cockpit so he wouldn’t have to go below for water during long spells at the tiller. Each time the doughnut capsized and threw him he righted it and dragged himself back aboard, still clutching the neck of the bottle. After an eternity of this it was dawn, and he secured it to the oarlock tab with the lanyard cut from his shirt tail. At the same time he scooped from his pocket the sodden pulp which was all that remained of a pack of cigarettes and threw it overboard, thinking of the old gags about fighter pilots and lung cancer.

The sun rose. The glare began, eye-searing and brutal, broken only intermittently by the tilting planes of the swell. His skin itched and chafed inside his salt-saturated clothing, and as his face and arms began to dry they felt as though they were encased in a crust that would shatter when he moved. The only relief, which was temporary and merely an illusion, was to plunge overboard and wash it away with water that would leave its own accumulation. The swell was smaller now than it had been last night, and if it died out completely the sea would become the polished metal sheet of a reflector oven.

He searched the horizon again, and lay back, an arm across his closed eyes to shield them from the glare. He thought of mountain streams he had fished where the water was cold enough to make his teeth hurt when he drank it, and after a while he found himself remembering beer—beer in foaming steins and cold bottles beaded with moisture. Tuborg and Dos Equis and Budweiser and Lowenbrau, the gaseous and ecstatic sighs of punched cans, beer in waterfront dives and yacht club bars, in sidewalk cafes in Paris and the parlors of Texas whorehouses and the cockpits of sports fishermen off Cape San Lucas and Bimini.

There was the place in Tampico a long time ago, so cool and dim after the incandescent whiteness of the street, where draft beer was served in frosted earthen steins and there were saucers of olives on the polished mahogany bar with sliced limes to squeeze over them. That was on the other Shoshone, the first one, when he’d run away from home and shipped as ordinary seaman, and afterward he’d gone out to La Union, where the girls sat beside the doorways of their cribs, and he’d got into a fight with the second mate of a Sinclair tanker over something he couldn’t even remember now, and the second mate had beaten hell out of him. He