ABOUT    START    CONTENTS

Page 34.

Several of the men were wounded. One died as Tim arrived—just closed his eyes, sort of let go, and disappeared under the waves. Desperately, others grasped at the rope around the dinghy. Tim smelled wet wool, old tobacco, and fresh metallic blood. There was a smell these open wounds had, like gutted fish with the salt water in them. The wounded were too weak to scream as the chemicals and oils from the ship filled their gashes; they just emitted a low moan at best and hung on. One shivered violently, so that his blackened lips flapped and threw off a spray of oil; imminent death was written in his eyes, and when Tim looked away at the blinding sun, and back, the man had disappeared as if he’d never been. How much of this was all a dazed illusion, Tim wondered, wishing he could clear his head.

The ship was gone. So was the U-boot.

There was a brief conversation amid gasps for air and wet sputters. Tim calculated that Sturmer had not had a chance to get a signal off. With luck, someone would come looking for them. It was midday, and that meant probably a good twenty-four hours bobbing through the night, maybe a day or two, if searchers came at all. It was a huge stretch of ocean, full of hostile U-boots and not enough Allied traffic to do a proper search.

Soon it was just three of them, Tim and red-haired Harvey and another sailor. All the other men were gone. Drowned. That, even though the sun was warm and the sea sparkled like gold.

They clung to the rubber dinghy until it began to deflate, becoming just another bit of debris.

Tim drifted in and out of consciousness. He expected he was at death’s door like the others. Some had perished quickly from terrible wounds and burns. He and the other two would gradually weaken from thirst, hunger, despair, and exhaustion, and drift off to eternity and nothingness. Or would there be angels with trumpets? For some odd reason, the golden-red glow of the sea reminded Tim of quiet Sunday afternoons in New Haven, during Indian Summer when the rich trees were still green, and the air retained a lingering ripeness of summer, but weakly so; underneath it all something was changing, some powerful body chemistry signaled that autumn was roiling up, and the leaves were dying inwardly. One felt the very elements of one’s body and blood transforming themselves in a rhythm as grand as the movement of the world around its sun and the Newtonian tick-tock of machinery in a Copernican universe.

“There’s land over there,” Harvey said, bringing Tim out of his reverie, and they began swimming.

“If there are sharks, we’re done for,” said the other.

“We’d be long done if it wasn’t for the oil in the sea,” said Harvey.

“Let’s stick together,” Tim ordered. Instinctively, he towed the dinghy along, and it offered just a tiny bit of buoyancy. In it, he knew, were first aid and other emergency supplies. He was most hoping for matches.

The sound of crashing water grew louder.

“A beach!” the other man said.

“Surf,” Harvey said, looking pale through his freckles.

Tim stopped and looked, feeling the water surging around him. He was tired now. They’d been shocked and in the water for a good two hours already. “Breakwater!” he shouted.

“Tired,” Harvey said with a groan, closing his eyes. Tim noticed now that his friend had a wound in his side. He took Harvey by the chin and began swimming slowly and methodically toward the sound of crashing water, which could not be too far from land.

Then raging water took hold of them, spinning them in foamy, bumpy gyres.

Tim watched mutely as the other sailor was ripped away, flying down and around a barnacle-crusted rock that rose like a mushroom out of the continental shelf. The tide must be in full movement, Tim thought. Best to stay back until it crested or troughed, rather than get battered to pieces here. He heard Harvey scream and felt him torn from his grasp. Helplessly, he watched as his friend was sucked away into the maelstrom. Tim let himself go limp, lying sideways and kicking weakly. He let go and just prayed to live from one moment to the next.

Again he felt that golden glow, that presence of death, and he saw again the gleaming little New England church roofs and neo-Gothic Yale towers around his hometown. He saw himself again with his girlfriend, Sally Levesque. Maybe they were driving home from a football game, with autumn leaves rustling in the streets a foot deep in places, and they had between them the afterglow of heavy petting, maybe even of the occasional guilty sex. And yet he felt so desperate to escape, to scream, to struggle to the surface like just now. Sally Levesque almost seemed to be sitting in a convertible in the ocean, sinking while he rose, and he could sense the quiet accusation radiating from her eyes. It wasn’t her fault, he realized. She was too shallow, God forgive him, too lacking in courage to escape the monotony of a life lived from crib to cemetery amid that same somber brick Colonial architecture. She was born and raised to be a good woman in that atmosphere, and he was the bad one, he was the one who should feel guilty, for throwing it all away. It was over between them now, anyway. She had been unable to handle his departure for Navy duty, and had taken up with a boy from West Haven who shared her tightly knitted French-Canadian Catholic universe, who had been rejected from active duty because of flat feet and was now a police lieutenant guarding the Green from vagrants and South Street beach from enemy submarines.

Tim cried out and raised a hand into the sky, but an undertow took him down, twirled him around so that the fine sand at the bottom polished him like a jeweler’s rag on a lens. Tim gave in to his wrongs, confessed his shortcomings, and prepared to die; but it wasn’t his time yet.

He did not have long to struggle. The undertow took him out another hundred feet. Then the undertow vanished, leaving him in steadily rising and falling swells. He stood treading water and gasping for breath. He had lost his shoes and clothes by now, but shreds of his shirt still clung to his shoulders along with the life jacket, shielding him from the blazing sun. He lay back and concentrated on just keeping his face out of the water, which the design of the life jacket helped him do.

He became detached, feeling as though he were floating in air rather than water. It was a curious sort of air, soapy green, but piss-yellow when the sun shone through it, and full of kelp shadows. He floated motionlessly. He was free of Sally Levesque, free of New Haven, free of the clock factory, free of whatever it might have been. The mighty summer ocean off the southern coast of Africa had cleansed him, and then put him within sight of land almost like Jonah being belched out by his whale.

Dreamlike, without being part of the scene, he watched three razor-sharp sharks tearing Harvey’s body apart, the legs one way, the arms another, the russet-gold head and the torso floating downward out of sight until another shark did a magnificent hooking dive and disappeared with it.

Tim floated motionlessly amid the kelp, knowing he would not die here. Slowly, the incoming tide brought him around so that the back of his head rested on the firm sand.