by Susannah Pitmann
There was no time for tears when your bilge pumps failed. Somewhere about two hundred miles off Cape Hatteras, where the HMS Bounty sank and left its captain drowned. You tried not to think of him, swallowed up in those same waters. All you should have been thinking about was keeping your heading, two hundred-five degrees, with some variance to take the ocean swell on the boat’s quarter.
There was no time for tears when the entire crew, save yourself and your captain, were so seasick that they couldn’t make it onto deck for their watch. The swell reached fourteen feet in the gale force wind that night. You cordoned them off in the salon and brought them water and saltines when you could, but you were more worried about the boat’s hydration.
You were taking buckets to the bilge. You rigged a little twelve volt pump (your tertiary system that’s weaker than a toilet) to keep the water from pooling at your ankles while you went back to steering. The coffee pot shattered across the wall. You stopped checking the engine on the top of the hour after your head hit the companionway and the captain told you to stop before you broke something else. Blood pooled over your temple and collected on your brow, mixing with salt and starlight.
You knew that you probably needed stitches but the medic was busy throwing up her dramamine so you stopped the bleeding yourself, applied superglue to the edges of the gash, pushed the skin together while it dried, and slapped a bandage on your head. Call it sailor stitches. You bailed out the bilges again and went back to the helm.
You clipped your harness to the ship’s wheel and sat on the wheelhouse—which you’re never supposed to do—steering with your feet because you couldn’t turn the helm with your arms in that wind. Your daddy taught you that you never sit on watch, but you gave yourself a pass this time since the boat was trying to buck you off. He always knew you would be a sailor. He named you “Lake” for Christ’s sake.
He taught you to steer by the stars, aligning the ship’s compass with one of those freckles on the horizon that you cannot name, but come to know well. You always preferred to steer this way. Looking at a binnacle distracts you from feeling water rush against your rudder and the wind against your ears. But tonight the sky rolled into the sea and they blurred together so you couldn’t tell them apart. Tonight you thought of him and kept your eyes fixed on the compass, following your heading to a new corner of earth.
You found yourself thinking of the races out to the mooring. Your daddy would count down from three and you’d dive off the dock together and race out to the boat chained to the river floor. He didn’t believe in letting you win. As the years went on, he only got weaker and you only got stronger. When you won your first mooring race against him, he was so proud; he cried on the swim platform with his feet dangling into the river. That was the first and last time you ever saw him cry. A few years after that, you were swimming to his boat alone.
...
The captain came back on deck and told you that the eye of the storm was encroaching from the east, and to avoid the worst of it, you’d have to head further offshore, about fifty to seventy miles. You’d catch the wisps of the low pressure system, but avoid the eye. Your wrinkled brow split the glue on your forehead. You knew you were still on the edge of the Coast Guard’s domain, head any further out and they couldn’t save you. There would be no salvation from this sea.
Your eyes were desperate, pleading, but you waited for him to speak first.
“Maybe we won’t need an evac. Maybe not. But we can’t stay here. In this wind, they probably can’t come get us anyways.” He had no expression, but you knew he meant that you would sink if you kept your course.
You nodded, and with the heel of your boot you bared off the wind, as blood slid down your temple, trickled over your cheekbone, rounding your chin. You weren’t really scared though. Not in the way you’d expected. This life has taught you to fear dying, but not death.
You didn’t want to die gasping, grasping, as breath leaves the body behind, like a fish splayed on a dock, eyes open, petrified of what’s beyond the light. You’ve seen this futile attempt to catch life as it slinks away, and you didn’t want to go like this. So you decided that if a sneaker-wave came up and plucked you from the deck, so be it, it was her will for you to go. You would have let her hold you while you tumbled til you saw black and then nothing. And if that night never broke, you would have just kept sailing until she decided it was your time.
But you made it. Slowly, that night gave way and the sea calmed somewhere around Cape Lookout and you couldn’t bring yourself to cry but you wanted to. We cry to our mommas or behind bunk curtains, but not to our captains. You were awake for twenty-three hours straight. You figured you wouldn’t sleep again til you hit the dock in a few hundred miles. You don’t remember much from the days that followed besides cleaning the coffee off the wall. Your hair was so matted from twisting in the wind that you had to cut out a section at the nape of your neck. You couldn’t find scissors so you used your rigging knife and cried as you threw the chunks into the Atlantic.
Gulls screamed, and the smell of low tide greeted you as you made your way into Georgia’s Golden Isles. Beer bellied men in dock lawn-chairs watched as your boat crept into the slip. You never understood why people love to watch boats dock. You don’t know why but you like to, too. You wondered what the hell they were doing drinking Busch Light at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday. When your boat slid alongside the dock and you heaved your line to the marina guy, a sharp pang emanated from your side and grew to a dull throb around your chest. Your whole side fucking killed now that your adrenaline was spent. You lifted your shirt to find a galaxy of bruises splashed across your ribs. The captain called a water taxi to take you to the hospital. The doc looked at you like you were crazy when you told her that you didn’t remember how you broke your rib, that you didn’t find the bruise for a few days because you were sleeping in your clothes. She called in a social worker.
You called home but you didn’t tell your mom that you nearly sank because she would have lost it. You told her about how the galaxies opened up for you on that trip, about the shooting stars you found in your periphery, and how you wished for her. You told her about how you swear you saw a North Atlantic Right Whale, with its V-shaped blow, even though it’s nearly impossible, and about the dolphins under your feet in the headrig. You told her how gorgeous St. Simons was and she made you promise that you wouldn’t swim in the marsh because of the gators, but you had your fingers crossed and you totally did anyway. You told her that you trawled for Maui for an entire day but didn’t catch a thing. You told her that your captain didn’t seem to like you much, but he seemed to respect you, reluctantly, and that was enough. You didn’t tell her about the rib.
The crew all got tattoos, a lighthouse to commemorate rounding Hatteras, but you didn’t because you’re afraid of needles. They told the story like you all scaled the swell and spit in death’s face, but that’s not how you remember it.
You weren’t sleeping much. You read some but couldn’t bring yourself to write. You hung out at the divey marsh-bar with fishermen and crabbers. Until you noticed the bartender’s skinhead tattoo.
A boy with a Georgian accent needed a pool partner and asked you to play. You scratched but he didn’t mind. You bought him a drink as an apology. He asked you how you ended up in this town during the off-season. You talked until far too late and he asked to walk you home to the marina, down the finger docks and up to your gangway. He asked if he could take you fishing.
He took you out in the marsh on the Whaler that he chartered out to tourists during the season. It desperately needed bottom paint. You learned that he came from four generations of fisherman in the Golden Isles, there long before the Spanish brought with them the moss that’s slowly choking the native live oaks.
You never cared much for fishing but you drank and tanned and swam in the reeds with the gators when it was just the two of you. And later, when you tagged along for charter trips you’d mimic your daddy’s accent and clean fish and wash snapper blood from the deck. You’d leech tourist cash. He tried to pay you after every charter but you always snuck the tips back into his wallet.
He liked Willie Nelson and he was permanently sunburned. He didn’t sleep much and always walked you home. When you showed him the section of hair you’d hacked off with a rig knife, he brought his buzzer and gave you an undercut on the dock.
When it was time for you to pack up and sail on down the coast, you thought about staying with him, here in the Golden Isles. You could save up and get your own charter boat, live in the reeds, amongst the gators and sea dogs. But you knew you had to go. You always had to go. You didn’t make any empty promises; he knew you wouldn’t stay and you knew he would never leave. His roots ran deep and your’s were cast wide and shallow. You left St. Simons by the purple light of dawn. He shooed the dock hand away and cast you off himself. You liked him because he never tried to keep you.