The Girl of the Sea of Cortez: A Novel

  She could abandon the boat and swim for home. Absolutely, positively not. Not worth considering.

  Or, she could try to patch the pirogue here and now.

  With what? She had no wood, no canvas, no leather, no nails or tacks, no hammer. She could plug the hole with herself: She could sit on it. But then she couldn’t paddle, because every time she moved the hole would open and water would rush in. She pictured everything she had brought with her, analyzing its potential to be shaped into a plug. Her hat? No, the straw fibers were too loosely woven; water would pour through them. Her flippers? She could cut one up and fit the piece of rubber into the hole. But the rubber wouldn’t stay; it would float free. The glass faceplate of her mask? She had no way of securing it to the wood.

  Her mind evaluated every item and discarded it. And then, as she looked at the wood fibers, she saw beside them other fibers, closely woven though not as thick as the wood, and she had the answer: her dress. She could stuff her dress into the hole, and it would keep the water out. The fabric was already saturated with salt water, so no more could penetrate it. And packed tightly in a ball, the cloth fibers would bind and become nearly waterproof.

  She peeled the sodden shift up over her head, then ducked under the pirogue and, from the inside, packed the cloth into the hole. It made a tight plug—nothing that could survive a pounding in a heavy sea, but secure enough for an easy paddle on calm water.

  She ducked out again, hauled herself up onto the bottom, and reached over and grabbed the far edge. Bracing herself on one knee, she pulled, and there was a liquid sucking sound and a pop as the suction broke and the pirogue jumped free of the water and righted itself. It was still full of water, though; only an inch of freeboard stuck above the surface. Since the boat was a hollow log, it would not sink, but if Paloma were to climb aboard, her weight would drive the pirogue’s sides down flush with the surface. Every minuscule movement she made would tip the boat and allow more water to slosh aboard. She could not bail it out from inside.

  So she clung to one side with one arm, and with the other hand began methodically to splash water overboard. She forced herself not to be impatient, for she knew that this was what she was going to be doing for the next several hours, probably well into the night. And she did not hurry, for she didn’t want to tire herself and risk a cramp in an arm or leg. She could stop a cramp, but a muscle that had once gone into spasm was sure to cramp again unless it was rested for hours. Each succeeding cramp would be harder to relieve than the one before, and she did not want to be forced too early to use extreme remedies. It was said that the only way to relieve a terrible cramp was to cause worse pain elsewhere in your body, the theory being that the mind can only focus on one pain center at a time and it will concentrate on the most severe, and will thus stop sending cramp signals to the afflicted muscle.

  Everyone, Paloma included, agreed that cramps could be affected dramatically by the mind. No matter what caused the cramp initially, you made it worse if you panicked, and you relieved it, to a greater or lesser degree, by detaching yourself from it and regarding it rationally as a muscle that has contracted and must be commanded to relax. Icy calm, of course, was a prescription more easily issued than filled, especially if you were swimming and the cramp knotted you up into a ball that reduced your buoyancy to a point where you could barely stay afloat, or if you were running, being chased by somebody or something, and a cramp knocked you to the ground.

  As she continued to bail, the muscles in her upper arm began to stiffen and ache. To be free to massage that arm with her other hand, she had to release her grip on the boat. Immediately the tide caught her and dragged her away from the pirogue, but she was confident of her strength as a swimmer and was not worried.

  She was more than fifty yards away from the pirogue when she finally felt the fibers in her arm muscles relax and soften, and she stopped massaging the tissue. Unhurriedly, she began to breaststroke against the tide.

  To anything observing her from below, she appeared to be a sizable, healthy animal going about its business, emitting no signs of vulnerability, no signals of prey. After ten or fifteen minutes, it had seemed she was not moving at all; she seemed no closer to her boat than when she had started.

  But she had marked her beginning against a set of peculiarly shaped rocks on the bottom, and she knew she was making progress—very slowly, probably no more than a couple of feet with each stroke, and half of that she was losing before she could take her next stroke; but she was gaining ground. She was not tiring; she could swim like this indefinitely, and eventually—it might be a couple of hours from now—the tide would ease and she would gain a little more with each stroke. Then it would go slack, and she would gain still more. Finally it would turn, and she would make it to her boat in a few strokes.

  Her left leg went first. She had a split-second warning, and then she felt her toes begin to roll over one another and snarl. She reached down with her hand and tried to squeeze the lower calf muscle, but it was too late. The muscle fibers had already balled into a knot the size of an orange. She rolled onto her back and used both hands to squeeze her leg. Kneading with her fingertips, she softened the knot and felt it begin to relax. Suddenly the knot dissolved and she thought the cramp was finished and she straightened out her leg and then, before she knew what was happening, with a violent, almost audible spasm an even bigger knot lashed itself into the back of her thigh. Her heel snapped back against her buttock, like the blade of a jackknife closing.

  She was drifting fast, was already much farther away from her boat. She told herself not to think about it, but to make an effort not to think about it was to think about it even harder.

  She tried to use her hands to straighten out her leg, but her arms weren’t long enough to give her adequate leverage. So she brought up her other foot and forced the toes between heel and buttock and pushed down.

  Then the other leg went, a perfect mimic of the first one. And now she felt she was like one of the beggars on the carts in La Paz, the ones whose legs had been lopped off below the knee. She had no balance, she was top-heavy, and she rolled in the water like a trussed hog.

  At first she thought she would faint from the pain. She hoped she would faint, for she was one of those people who tend to float on their backs, and as soon as she lost consciousness the cramps would disappear and she would roll onto her back with her head out of water.

  When she didn’t faint, she tried to swim toward her boat, using only her arms, but that was hopeless; she lost ground and grew quickly tired. She knew she had to attack the cramps with her mind.

  So she stopped swimming and said to herself: You’re drifting away. What is the worst thing that can happen? You’ll drift so far that you can’t get back to your boat on this tide. You won’t drown because you know how to float forever (unless a chubasco comes along, and there’s no use worrying about that now). So you’ll drift and drift, and sometime the tide will turn and take you back toward your boat. Even if you drift wide of your boat, all that will happen is that you’ll travel until either you strike land or someone picks you up. So, really, you have nothing to worry about. (Somewhere, in the far recesses of her mind, she knew she could not float forever, or even for more than a few days. She would fall victim to thirst or hunger or the sun. But her mind did not let that knowledge intrude.)

  Then she looked down through the water and saw that there was one “worst thing” she had neglected. She had drifted far off the seamount by now, and way down, in the blue shadows just before darkness, were two sharks, circling slowly. They were not the familiar hammerheads. Even from this distance she could discern the bullet shapes and the pointed snouts, and she knew they were a kind of bull shark—quick, bold, aggressive, ill-tempered, and completely unpredictable.

  Each circle brought the sharks a bit closer to the surface; each circle was a bit quicker than the one before. And Paloma knew immediately what was happening: She was sending new signals, signals that said she was no longer
a sizable, healthy animal going about its business—now she was a wounded, panicked animal that could not defend itself and might make easy prey.

  All right, she told herself: I’ve got to stop behaving like this or they’ll home in on me and tear me to pieces. As she heard the words in her brain, she felt a rush of panic, and so she tried even harder to straighten out her legs; and the harder she tried the tighter they knotted.

  What would it be like to be attacked by a big fish? Would it hurt, or would it be so quick it wouldn’t hurt so much at all? No, it would probably hurt. What kind of pain would it be? What’s the worst pain you can imagine?

  She bit her tongue. Holy Mary, how that hurt. She bit harder. Nothing could hurt worse than this. She bit still harder, and now she tasted blood in her mouth and saw little puffs of red seep from between her lips into the water. The blood might draw the sharks closer.

  But all she could focus on was the pain in her tongue. It was a blade, a flame, a needle.

  The cramps collapsed.

  She didn’t know it until she stopped biting her tongue. As when you ease off on the throttle of an outboard motor, she expected the pain in her mouth to fade to a background, idle-speed sensation, and the pain in her legs to accelerate and take over. The pain in her mouth did fade, but nothing replaced it. She looked down and saw that her legs had unlocked themselves and the muscles in her calves were no longer twitching.

  Very tentatively, she began to swim, aiming vaguely in the direction of her boat but more to test her muscles than to accomplish much. She used her arms and shoulders and let her legs follow along in a weak scissor-kick.

  There was no pain, but there was no progress either. Her arms alone were not enough to move her body against the tide. Still, she kept swimming, to exercise the muscles and restore circulation to the tissue. She maintained a smooth and easy stroke, conveying calm and control.

  After a few minutes, she looked down again, and she searched the edge of the gloom for the circling sharks. She saw only one and only part of that one, a flicker of gray shadow, heading away. She was a healthy animal once more, and to the sharks’ perceptions a formidable foe instead of vulnerable prey.

  She swam on for more than one hour, watching her boat grow smaller and smaller against the sea. Once in a while, a small muscle would give a warning twinge, a threat of spasm, and she would stop and massage the muscle and shake it. She did not want to stop for long, though, for continual exercise kept her warm, and warmth encouraged her blood to circulate. If she allowed herself to grow cold, her circulation would drop, her muscles would be starved for oxygen and they would cramp.

  She swam without thinking, focusing on each stroke as an act of its own, independent of every other stroke and of all other acts, to be begun and completed with mechanical perfection toward an overall end that did not exist. She forced all other thoughts from her mind, for they could generate emotions that could alter her body chemistry and cause trouble—a cramp, a stitch in her side, a knot of gas in her stomach, or superhyperventilation, which could make her faint.

  The first sign she had that the tide was changing was a feeling of warm, still water on her skin. She had swum into a mid-sea current that had slackened with the tide and was lying on the surface like curdled milk on a cup of coffee. She stopped swimming and looked around. The sea, which had been merely calm, was now flat and slick. Such swells as there were were so slow and lazy that she could not perceive them.

  She saw a piece of floating weed and swam to it and threw it as hard as she could toward her faraway boat. It landed ten feet away and lay still. It didn’t move to her, away from her, or off to one side. The tide was dead slack. Now if she swam she could not lose, she could only gain, and soon the new tide would begin and would push her along. Her pirogue was anchored, so it would not move.

  With every stroke she took she imagined the boat growing infinitesimally larger. She traveled about a mile in the first hour, swimming on the slack tide. The second mile took her twenty minutes, for the tide had turned and begun to run. In another fifteen minutes she was sitting in her pirogue, working her fingertips into the soft tissue of her thighs.

  She had been frightened, but now she felt proud, too, for she had survived on her own. Every decision had been hers alone to make, and every decision had been correct. True, Jobim had taught her the skills and given her the knowledge that helped her survive, but putting it all into practice, actually doing it, felt wonderful.

  She shivered. The sun had dropped so far that the pirogue cast a sharp shadow on the sea. During the hours around midday, the sun had added heat to the water, and for a few hours more the water would retain that heat. But then the cooling air would leech the heat from the water. Paloma guessed that the temperature of the water had fallen five degrees or more since her boat had capsized.

  Kneeling in the bottom of the boat, she scooped with her hands and splashed with her paddle, and scooped some more and splashed some more. She saw the sun slide to the horizon, then seem to hesitate, then plunge beneath it, leaving a sky of richer blue dotted in the east by faint stars. She saw a light or a campfire wink on a distant island. Nearby, somewhere behind her in the twilight, a small ray jumped into the air and slapped back down with a stinging splash, and Paloma started at the knowledge that out here she was never alone, day or night.

  The boat was dry now, as dry as it would be until the sun could get at it tomorrow and evaporate the water from the wood. She had not been on the sea at night for a long time, so she double-checked the landmarks she could still see and stood up in the pirogue to search for the first lights of Santa Maria. Then she started to paddle toward home.

  Miranda would be frantic. Paloma never stayed out this late, and her mother would know something had happened to her. She had drowned. Something had eaten her. She was injured and floating alone in the dark. Miranda’s imagination would be working double time, and soon she would be resigned to the fact that Paloma was dead, that fate had torn another loved one from her bosom.

  No, not fate. She would blame God, for it was God’s will that Jobim should die, and now He had taken Paloma as well. Why? she would ask. Was He testing her? What did He want her to do? Why didn’t He give her a sign? She would do anything, if only she knew what to do.

  But God would keep Miranda from becoming hysterical in her grief. Once she had worked it out in her mind that Paloma’s disappearance was divine will, there would be nothing she could do about it, including worry. After all, if God meant it to be, then to worry was implicitly to challenge God’s will, to lament was to complain about God’s will. Unthinkable.

  Jo, of course, would be no help whatever. He would feign innocence and concern and would sympathize with Miranda’s thought of the moment: If she was contemplating the mystery of God’s will, he would shake his head in wonder. If she asked what she had done to deserve so cruel a fate, he would put an arm around her and assure her that hers was like the story of Job—she would be well rewarded in the Kingdom of Heaven. They would talk about Paloma and recall nice things about her and weep together.

  The thought of the scene infuriated Paloma and made her paddle harder. But then she thought of the reception she would receive, after all this sentimental ritual, and she smiled. Miranda might even resent her return—very briefly—for she would have set her mind to martyrdom, and Paloma’s arrival would be a second shock.

  Jo would pretend to be delighted, but the pretense would be entirely for Miranda’s benefit. He would skulk around, and in his eyes there would be a warning to Paloma to keep silent about what had happened today. Still, Paloma guessed that somewhere inside Jo there would be secret relief that she had returned, for she could not believe—despite his fits of rage—that his conscience could condone murder.

  Probably Paloma would keep silent. For what would talking about today accomplish? There was no one to punish him, for even if people believed what she had to say, the offense would not seem serious. She had not been harmed. There was no way she
could convey the recklessness, the willingness to hurt, that she had seen in her brother. He could not be punished for evil thoughts.

  A three-quarter moon had risen in the black sky, and it cast a path of gold before the pirogue, a path that led Paloma home.

  Her reception was almost exactly as she had imagined it: Miranda shrieked and clutched Paloma to her breast and thanked God for answering her prayers and proclaimed a miracle. She asked what had kept Paloma, and Paloma glanced at Jo and (unable to stop her tongue) said she had been foolish enough to let herself be delayed by nothing, really nothing, a stupid little tidal maelstrom that had carried her too far from shore. She should never have let it happen and (another glance at Jo) it wouldn’t happen again.

  Once more she had misjudged him. He didn’t realize he was being teased. He viewed her explanation as another victory: He had warned her not to tell the truth, and she hadn’t. He felt he was in control—of his mates, who had to respect him, if only for his daring; and of Paloma, who must fear him.

  Jo crossed in front of Miranda and hugged Paloma—turning his head and touching her with the same affection with which he would have caressed a leper—and said he had been worried about her.

  Miranda sensed something awry between her children. She could feel a current of hostility surging back and forth, and she knew that they were communicating in a kind of code that expressed nothing directly but sparked with hints of antagonism. She was apprehensive but helpless, so she covered her anxiety with a veneer of relief that everyone was home safe and sound.

  And she was further diverted from worrying by the arrival of a few neighbors, who dropped in to chide Paloma for causing her mother concern and to tease Miranda about being so concerned. See? they said. We told you she’d be all right. Miranda interpreted that as a reprimand and responded to it by scolding Paloma for staying out so long. What she was really saying was: How could you cause me to make a fool of myself in front of my friends? Paloma knew that, and she apologized and said that yes, after all, she had been in some danger and was lucky to be back alive—thus justifying Miranda’s concern and giving her a tale to tell her friends.