For three days the hammerhead bird-dogged our boat, sometimes disappearing for a half day at a time, but always reappearing just when we thought we had seen the last of it. Then suddenly it disappeared for good as a storm rose over the Atlantic. We cheered out loud when we saw the black furious clouds forming. Our thirst was so acute by that time we had placed the subject of water off-limits again. Our tongues felt black and swollen, as though we had been staked out to dry and packed in salt, and so we obsessively watched every cloud that passed overhead praying for a thunderhead to form.
When the shark disappeared for the last time, heading north, there was lightning in the eastern sky. Normally, we would have feared lightning in an open boat, but now there were cries of joy at the rain it portended. We unfolded the tarp that had been stowed under a seat and took the lid off the pathetically dried-out ice chest. None of us took our eyes off the clouds as the storm gathered slowly. We watched the clouds begin to spiral upward in great cumulus bursts as though shaped by magnificent, unseen hands, and we waited, our mouths dry, praying for the abundance of water they would bring to save us.
The wind rose, then the waves began to rise as the tide began its surge and run. Thunder that was miles away was suddenly upon us, and lightning carved its name above us before the rain came in sheets that stung our sunburned faces. Great drops moistened our lips and tongues and we wept in sheer relief.
Jordan screamed for us to keep our discipline and we held the tarpaulin loosely as rain filled its sagging middle with gallons of water. Together, we moved as one and made a funnel, then poured the streaming water into the ice chest. Again, Jordan called for us to catch more rainwater but the three of us had thrown ourselves at the ice chest and were filling Dixie cups and drinking ravenously. Then Jordan, too, lost control and joined us in that feast of fresh water. Its bright elixir brought our voices back as we drank our fill and rejoiced with the thunder. When we had drunk all we had collected, once more we spread the tarp to catch the precious water, filling the ice chest again to its capacity. As the storm worsened and the winds rose, a new fear began to fray the edges of our consciousness. Though we had prayed for rain and storm, we had said nothing of wind, nor even thought of it.
There was no moon or stars and as waves began to crash over the sides of the boat, we secured the ice chest and went to our appointed places. The waves began to build, looming above us, then dropping out from under the boat like hills dropped into the sea. Though the craft was seaworthy, we could not steer it into the waves and had to ride out the storm bobbing like a pelican between the enormous troughs. As the weight of one wave crashed over us I was almost carried overboard. It caught me holding tightly to the stern of the boat and carried me choking on seawater into the gunwale.
Another wave broke the ice chest loose and sent it overboard with a tackle box that had not been tied down after its last use. At Jordan’s command we tightened the circles of our life jackets as he handed each of us lengths of rope so we could tie ourselves into the boat. We heard Mike get tossed head over heels and Jordan reached out and grabbed his bathing suit as Mike somersaulted backward and broke his arm again against the steering wheel.
The water of the great waves broke over us and lightning flashed to the west now as the storm moved on. Nature could answer one’s prayer far too well as our boat, fragile as a leaf, floated in the utter blackness of thirty-foot seas and the night made us afraid to pray for rain with too much conviction.
In the morning, we woke to a foundering boat more than half-filled with water. Jordan and I spent that morning bailing out water with our hands—almost everything else had been washed overboard. Mike was moaning and barely conscious and we were afraid to touch the newly broken arm. Soon infection would begin to set in and there was nothing any of us could do about it. Capers had endured another blow to his head and a flap of his scalp opened up to reveal the whiteness of his skull. He was unconscious. Jordan and I had broken ribs during the night and it hurt both of us to breathe.
We cleared the boat of water until exhaustion overtook us, and we slept a deep sleep of both pain and despair. Another night passed and another day, then another night. Then day again and the sun began its work in earnest and we were too weak to hide from it. Now, the terrible burning started and somewhere in the middle of the next day we began to die. Our feet swelled and blisters began to form on our hands and faces.
We lost all sense of time or space or sense of where we might be on the planet, and the thought of death was not unpleasant to me. Jordan had become feverish and one night reached out his hand to me.
“Hey, Tonto,” Jordan said. “It looks like the bad guys win.”
“We gave it a hell of a run, kemo sabe,” I whispered.
“To tell the truth,” said Jordan, “I wish I hadn’t come on this fishing trip.”
I laughed, but even laughter hurt.
“Jack, can you hear me?”
“Yeh.”
“Are we the only ones alive?”
“We’re the only ones conscious,” I said. “I envy those guys.”
“The two Catholic boys,” said Jordan. “Yeh, lucky us.”
“Let’s say the rosary,” Jordan said. “Let’s put our lives in the hands of the Virgin Mary.”
“I’ll put my life in the hands of Zeus if it’ll help.”
“If it works, Jack, we’ll owe our whole lives to her.”
“I’m the only one in this boat who isn’t crazy,” I whispered to myself.
“Promise you’ll dedicate your life to the Virgin Mary and to her son, Jesus, if we survive this?” Jordan asked.
“Have you lost your mind?” I asked.
I remember hearing Jordan begin the Apostles’ Creed, then the sun again, then stars, then nothing, then stars again, then nothing, then nothing …
Then fog and movement.
I woke up having no idea if I was alive or dead.
“Get up, Jack,” I heard Jordan say, “I need you. Get up now.”
I rose, staggering. In the back of the boat I saw Jordan with a broken paddle digging at the water, grimacing every time the boat moved even a little bit.
“Do you hear something?”
I stepped over the bodies of our two friends. They were still breathing but both looked dead. The fog was another form of blindness. I felt submerged in a river of milk. It was bright with false morning light and I could see nothing except my hand in front of me.
“Get on the bow,” Jordan urged. “Do you hear it? Tell me if you hear it too.”
I closed my eyes and concentrated on the sheer astonishment of being alive and being asked to listen. For a moment, I wondered if we were all dead and fog was the natural landscape when the last breath had been drawn.
“I hear it,” I said suddenly. “I hear it. It’s surf. The sound of waves crashing on the beach.”
“Not that,” Jordan said, “There’s something in the water. Something alive.”
Then I heard the other sound, the unworldly sound that had no connection to where we were or to the ocean. It sounded like an engine or a bellows or something hissing and exhausted somewhere near us in the fog. The sound grew closer until I thought it was a man dying in the water just beyond my reach. But then I realized it was not human and I drew back thinking of the migration of humpback whales along the coast, feeling vulnerable as I lay on the bow, my arms extended over it. My ribs were afire and the thing in the water made me afraid, yet I was more fearful of letting Jordan down … The sound of surf I suddenly realized was the sound of rescue and salvation.
Then I saw it coming directly toward me, as disoriented as I myself was, as displaced, as drawn away from his own element as I, but I reached out toward him and touched something that connected me solidly and completely to my own history, to my boyhood in the marshes and fields of the Carolinas. A white-tailed buck, as large and powerful as any I had ever seen, was swimming to a new home between islands. I had seen a buck do it once before in my life, and I grabbe
d hold of the left antler and felt my fingers lock around it. The buck’s great muscled neck tried to loose itself from my grip, but I held that spiked bone tightly and I felt the boat turn with the rhythm of the swimming deer. The buck was in the deep water of a channel and the tide was going in. The deer finally gave up its own direction and just swam to save itself and took us with him.
From the stern, Jordan paddled as hard as he could trying to help the deer. I was crying with pain as I held my grip on the antler. The deer’s breathing was labored and angry, yet the boat moved with him and the fog. Jordan was still saying a rosary that had no beginning or end when the boat hit land and the deer dragged me off the bow of the boat and deposited me into the black earth of the marsh, and spartina.
We had landed on Cumberland Island, Georgia, after fifteen days at sea. Jordan Elliott dragged himself out of the marsh and flagged down a forest ranger in a Jeep who called the Coast Guard; and we were flown by helicopter to Savannah, Georgia. The doctors said that both Capers and Mike would have died sometime in the next twenty-four hours and that it was a miracle that any of us survived the ordeal.
On the second night in the hospital, Jordan walked over to my bed, carrying his IV with him.
“A riddle, Jack?”
“I don’t feel like playing any more games,” I said.
“This one has great implications. Cosmic ones,” said Jordan.
“Is it a joke?”
“No, it’s the most serious thing in the world,” Jordan said.
“Go ahead. I can’t stop you.”
“Where did we encounter God out there, Jack? Which one was God?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “Get away from me.”
“Was it the blue marlin? Or the manta ray? Or was he in the fish we caught to survive like the loaves and the fishes? Or was it the hammerhead? The storm? Or the white-tailed buck?”
“Do I get to choose ‘none of the above’?” I asked, disturbed.
“God was all of them,” Jordan explained. “He came to us in different forms. He loved us and wanted to look out for us.”
“He did a piss-poor job,” I said.
“A great job,” Jordan said. “We’re all alive.”
“How do you know this? About God, I mean. Appearing as those animals.”
“I asked Mary, his mother,” Jordan said. “You always have to go to the source.”
Part V
Chapter Thirty-two
Through no preference or selection of our own, the graduating class of 1966, in high schools all over America, found ourselves cast like dice across the velvet-covered gambling tables of history. There were no signposts or catechisms or rules of the road to help us navigate through the weary mazes of the sixties. We were shot out indiscriminately into the trickery of the slippery, rampaging decade, and the best we could do was cover our eyes and ears and genitalia like pangolins or armadillos and make sure that our soft underbellies were not exposed for either inspection or slaughter.
The Class of 1966 was entering an America that was newly hallucinatory and disfigured. The whole country seemed to have turned inward upon itself and all the old certainties seemed marginal and hollow, and that tangy confidence of a nation accustomed to strutting turned hesitant almost overnight. As our footsteps echoed across the stage, this class entered a country that was traveling incognito even to itself. We would become part of the first American generation of this century to wage war on each other. The Vietnam War would be the only foreign war ever fought on American soil. All were free to choose sides. Bystanders were ridiculed and not tolerated. There were no survivors in the sixties, only casualties and prisoners of war and veterans who cried out in the dark.
Though I still consider the sixties the silliest and stupidest of times, I will admit, under pressure, that some of it was wonderful, even magnificent. I felt acutely, transcendentally alive then, while none of the succeeding decades has made me feel a single thing. But I did not think I would have ever recognized the boy I had turned into back then. I was not even certain that the college boy, Jack McCall, would slow down to shake hands with the man he was required to turn into after all the smoke had cleared.
I had loved the University of South Carolina: my escape from my father’s house seemed an emancipation of spirit beyond any price or measure. My father could no longer humiliate me because I simply was unavailable, no longer inhabiting the same house. Each day my teachers forced me to pay attention to the written works of writers I had not yet heard of. I discovered to my joy that these anonymous men and women who had practiced their secret wizardry with the English language long before I was born wrote exquisitely. It surprised me when I read Chaucer in Middle English and found him to be a most hilarious writer. I had not even imagined that people laughed and kidded around in medieval England. In my innocence, I assumed that laughter itself was a modern innovation and held no place in the destinies of charwomen and longbowmen of years past. Drifting through books, I found the pleasures of discovery to be an almost daily occurrence.
My first two years of college were quiescent, exhilarating, busy. The immensity of the university, the anonymity of that unruly, self-governing city-state operating in full view of the state capitol provided me a bright glimpse of a world as rife with possibility and those prodigal chances, open-ended and acute, that a boy with nerve could run away with to the end of the earth. Ideas refreshed and overwhelmed me as though some moon within me was perpetually full and the tide always high.
While other colleges in America seethed and boiled during the nationwide debate on the Vietnam War, we students of the University of South Carolina drank. We drank bathtubs full of a ghastly concoction called “purple Jesus,” composed of unfermented grape juice and cheap vodka. Silver kegs of beer enthroned in melting pools of ice sat in royal attendance at every student event. Drunkenness was a condition of choice among a high percentage of the student body; and a studied, self-conscious sense of irony and cool was the most highly prized attitude among the males preening and fanning their tail feathers for the edification of the highly selective coeds.
The Greek system was paramount and unchallenged in its authority over all aspects of campus life when our freshman class arrived at Carolina. The only Greek that I have ever learned was in that first year, when I tried to distinguish among the bewildering array of fraternities and sororities whose names caused confusion and dissension among the ranks of freshmen. Capers confided in me during the first month that one’s choice of a fraternity was the most significant selection a man would make before his engagement to a proper young woman. He told me that five former KA’s and six former SAE’s had written flattering letters of reference for him which both chapters had received the previous summer. From Ledare, I learned that three of her mother’s sorority sisters had written letters on her behalf, but the fact that her mother herself was a Tri Delt from Carolina took much of the guesswork out of her fate. As a legacy, Ledare confessed, she was practically a shoo-in through no achievement of her own.
I attended most of the parties the fraternities gave and caught an infinitesimal glimpse of a social milieu I had heard rumor of but had never quite understood because of its subtlety. Ledare had broken up with me after high school graduation because she was coming upon her debutante season and my family and I did not quite cut the mustard among those committees that passed judgment on the desirability and entitlement of both the debutantes and their beaux. Since my father was a judge and a member of the bar and his mother was a Sinkler from Charleston, I had always assumed that my bloodline was passable, if not sublime. I never fully understood the depth of the mismatch my father had made when he had married my raw, unlettered mother. Nor could my mother help me navigate those perilous shallows. I understood neither the code nor the uniform of fraternity life and both were something that a young man needed drilled into his psyche long before rush week. Everything that was right about me in high school was wrong for the best fraternities. I
was a quick study and could take the temperature of a room like a column of mercury, so I felt my otherness instantly as I watched the painfully cordial brothers assess me from head to foot.
In early August, I had received another surprising lesson in the mysterious social ethic that my friends seemed so at ease with. I had accompanied Capers and the imperious Mrs. Middleton on a shopping expedition to Berlin’s in Charleston to purchase the proper clothing for Capers during that all-important first year.
“Remember,” Eulalia Middleton said, “the first impression is the only impression that counts and,” she said, stretching the word out for emphasis, “the only one that lasts.”
“So true. So true,” said Mr. Berlin, helping Capers into a blue blazer.
“Wrapping is what turns a common present into a treasure,” she intoned, as Capers studied himself in a black pin-striped suit.
“You should write a book, Mrs. Middleton,” Mr. Berlin said, making chalk marks on the cuffs of the rolled-up pants. “Though these things seem obvious to us, you’d be appalled by some of the things I hear in this store.”
“It’s all just common sense and,” she said, arching her eyebrows and catching my eye in the mirror, “good taste is just something one is born with or not.”
When Capers bought a tuxedo that afternoon, I learned that one could actually purchase a tuxedo and not merely rent one for the night. When Capers’ bill was added up, it came to over three thousand dollars and I whistled in amazement, then realized I had committed an unrecallable social gaffe as I saw Capers, Mrs. Middleton, and Mr. Berlin go to great pains to pretend they had not heard it. Making up figures in my head, I wondered if my parents had spent three thousand dollars on me during my entire life, and that counted food. But I was dazzled by the care that Capers and his mother took in the well-considered selection of his college wardrobe.