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27

Arlis was on the flybridge, already motoring toward our anchor, using the automatic wench to retrieve it, while Tomlinson, Jeth, and I stripped off our gear on the stern. I felt the Island Gypsy swing her beam to the waves and knew that we were free.

“One of you boys get on the radio and raise Fort Myers Beach Coast Guard. Tell ’em to stand by. You other two, get up here. I need you as spotters. Whoa! First, pull the safety lines in, dummies! Do I gotta tell you everything?”

Arlis wasn’t old and feeble now. He was his acerbic, irritable self—taking charge, which is exactly what he was supposed to do.

When he realized that the Viking had pulled anchor and her two divers were adrift, Arlis had done something very smart. He’d reacted as only a person with his water experience would have. I had rigged a backup dive system—tank, regulator, and BC vest—and clipped it to a safety line. The safety line was tied to a red mooring-sized rubber buoy. If one of us had gotten tangled in rubble below, an emergency air supply was ready.

Because the Viking was drifting faster than Augie and Oswald could swim, Arlis expected the two to turn toward our boat. Maybe they did—he wasn’t sure. He lost sight of them within seconds. When the two men didn’t reappear swimming toward our vessel, he realized the waves and current had taken them. They were adrift.

Immediately, Arlis inflated the spare BC and tossed the backup dive system overboard. It was still attached to forty feet of rope and a rubber buoy. When the two divers realized they were in trouble, it was likely that they would inflate their BC vests. Their drift pattern would be similar to that of the backup air system. The red buoy gave us something visible to follow.

We were following it now.

“I’ll give you the wheel, if you want.”

Jeth shook his head, and told Arlis, “You’re doing just fine.” He spoke without turning his head to look at the old man because he didn’t want to take his eyes off the water.

Arlis nodded. “You made the right decision.” Sure of himself; his ego coming back to life out here in big water.

That was fine with me. I liked his confidence. We needed it.

We’d already divvied up search quadrants: I was on Arlis’s left, scanning the area ahead, and abeam the trawler’s port side. Jeth was to Arlis’s right, responsible for the right side. All three of us kept track of the red buoy ahead as it bucked from wave to wave.

With each set of breakers, though, it seemed less and less likely that we would find the two men.

I’d checked my watch when I felt us break free of our anchor: 4:27 P.M. By 4:40, I was losing hope. It seemed improbable that we hadn’t caught up with them in ten minutes. By 4:50, I was beginning to second-guess: Was following the buoy still the smartest thing to do? Augie and his partner would’ve stopped chasing the Viking after only a few minutes. They would have then turned into the waves and tried to swim in the direction where they hoped our trawler was anchored.

Neither of them looked like long-distance swimmers. They would have soon tired. They had no other choice but to inflate their vests and resign themselves to the hope that someone would come searching for them.

Their maneuvers would have changed the course of their drift. If our course was off by only a few yards, we’d already passed them. We needed to turn back and make another try.

Below, Tomlinson was on the VHF with Fort Myers Beach Coast Guard. He’d stuck his head above the ladder long enough to tell us that a search-and-rescue helicopter was being scrambled at the St. Petersburg base, seventy miles north. I’d tried to get him to change places with me—his eyesight is perfect; I wear glasses—but he insisted that he stay below.

“Maybe I’ll see something down there that you can’t see from the flybridge.”

In a search that seemed increasingly futile and random, it made as much sense as anything else.

We had closed on the Viking. It drifted beam to the sea, only a few hundred yards away now. I entertained the mild hope that the two men had somehow caught up with their boat. Perhaps they were drifting with it, hanging onto the anchor line.

Unlikely, but we’d soon find out.

To my left was a thin charcoal smudge that I knew was Sanibel Island. Ahead, it was raining over Fort Myers Beach. I could see squall clouds dragging tendrils of rain across the water, sunlight oscillating through rain mist, the streaming light interrupted by clouds.

I checked my watch: 5:03 P.M. We’d been searching for half an hour. The wind had a silver edge to it, blowing steadily from the southwest. It glazed the waves with icy light. I looked at Jeth, who simultaneously looked at me. Arlis remained steadfast at the wheel—still wearing his Bing Crosby hat; the orange life jacket we’d forced on him, an absurd touch.

Jeth’s expression said, This is hopeless.

I nodded. Hopeless.

I knew Augie only well enough to dislike him. The other guy, Oswald, we had never exchanged a word. But to be adrift, alone, in a wind-glazed sea…night coming soon, and death soon after—I didn’t wish that hell on anyone…

From below, I heard a unexpected banging sound.

“Hey! Why’s he doing that?”

Then we heard it again: a panicked banging on the pilothouse roof, Tomlinson signaling from below. Arlis backed the throttles and shifted to neutral, all of us turning as one. We heard the cabin door slam, then Tomlinson’s voice. “Stop! Turn around. They’re behind us!”

He came charging up the flybridge ladder, still wearing the pirate’s bandanna that he always wore when diving. He turned and pointed, yelling, “See them, they’re right there! Don’t take your eye off them. Nobody take your eye off them.”

Off what? I saw nothing but rolling waves.

“Arlis! Give her some throttle, I’m losing them. Here—” Arlis stepped aside as Tomlinson jumped to the wheel. He popped the throttles forward and the trawler lunged into the next wave.

Then I saw it: one of the six-foot-long Styrofoam noodles that had drifted slowly away from our wreck site because it was weighted with only half a cement block.

How had I missed it? We’d passed it on our port side. My side.

Clinging to the orange buoy were Augie and Oswald, waving frantically. They were wearing black wet suits and black BC vests—Tomlinson would’ve never seen them if it weren’t for the orange marker.

“Okay, okay, I got ’em. I’ll steer.” Arlis was at the wheel again. “You boys find a boat hook. I’ll bring us alongside and you can pluck ’em out—and watch those two don’t piss all over you ’cause they’re gonna be happy as drowned dogs that we found them.”

I started to suggest to Arlis that the safest way to approach the swimmers was with our beam to the sea—get upwind and we might drift down and crush them. But he cut me short, saying, “When I want your advice on how to pick up contraband in a big sea, I’ll send a telegram. Until then, you just shut your hole and do what I say.”

Jesus. We’d left with Santiago, but it was Captain Bligh taking us home.

Tomlinson wasn’t empathetic. “Contraband?” he said, very interested. “Mind if I ask—”

“Mary-juana,” Arlis replied. “You know any other that pays as well? Back in the 1970s and ’80s, my pot-haulin’ business associates would drop bales from a plane and I’d fetch ’em out of the water. A’course, that was a hell of a lot harder than this. It was at night. Couldn’t use lights. More than once there was other boats out there, too, wantin’ to steal what was ours. Got so I could shoot pretty good in rough seas.”

“No kiddin’,” said Tomlinson, impressed.

The old man cackled and said, “Made enough money to buy Miami,” giddy enough to quote a fellow pirate. “Some of it really good shit, too.”

A ugie Heller and Trippe Oswald—the guy had a first name—were so grateful to be pulled from the water that they probably did pee down their own legs.

Oswald was bawling and Augie’s eyes were glassy—shock. Sledding up and down those waves, they’d gotten a glimpse of the abyss. There was something worse than death. It was a dark and random indifference. They’d given up. Been reduced by their own terror, and the two men couldn’t immediately resume their old façades.

Both were shivering as they peeled off their wet suits despite the warm storm wind blowing across the Gulf from Yucatán. We gave them blankets, bottled water, and sandwiches. Put them at the settee table inside the pilothouse, while Tomlinson canceled the Coast Guard search and Arlis swung the trawler around hoping to catch up with the red buoy and recover our backup dive system.

Oswald was a chatterbox nonstop talker: “Couldn’t swim another stroke, dude. My legs were like fucking cramping, and I even started praying, man. Promised God if He’d help me just this once that, no shit, I would like do anything He asked. Next thing I see is this beautiful fucking boat, almost on top of us…”

I tuned him out within a minute.

It was Oswald’s way of discharging fear. Humiliation, too. We were the assholes Augie had told not to dive his wreck. We were the dumbasses who knew nothing about maritime law. Bern Heller’s lawyers had warned us—the same lawyers, presumably, who’d figured out how to steal boats under the guise of admiralty salvage laws.

It is humiliating to be saved by an adversary. And we’d saved them.

Augie and Oswald were grateful—at first. Thanked us over and over; made weak, ingratiating jokes. They were in our debt because we’d saved their lives. Forever, man. Was there something they could do for us? Name it.

Forever didn’t last, nor did their gratitude. It began to erode when the two men made their first experimental stabs at manipulating the other guy’s recollection of what they’d just experienced. The gradual process of reinvention also required that they distance their association with witnesses they couldn’t manipulate: us.

Augie Heller was a man who was uneasy in anyone’s debt. Especially ours. He rallied quickly.

“Know what I think? I’m glad you found us, but we would’ve made it. How long were Trippe and I swimming, only an hour or so?”

I told him, “It probably seemed like an hour,” anticipating what was coming next.

“Okay, so we were taking a break when you came along. We would’ve rested for a little bit, then swam another hour. Rest, swim, rest, swim. And we had the vests on. No way we could drown. What do you think, Trippe?”

Oswald said eagerly, “You’re no quitter, Augie. No shit, when I started to lose it I thought you were gonna slap the crap out of me. And when you started to lose it, dude, no way was I gonna go off and leave you—”

“I never lost it,” Augie interrupted, an edge to his voice.

“Well…yeah, I guess now that I think about it…you didn’t really lose it—”

“Neither one of us lost it. We stayed pretty cool out there.”

“Yeah. I guess you’re right. We handled it pretty good.”

Augie said, “What I was asking was, how long do you think it would’ve taken us before we made it to Sanibel? Doing what we were doing: swim, then rest, then swim some more. We’d of made it around eight or nine o’clock? It would be easier at night because we could have swam toward the lights. Climb up the beach and hitch a ride. Or call Moe with his pickup truck. We’d of had a couple of hours to spare before closing time.” Augie had a nasty laugh.

I was thinking: By 9 P.M., they would have been off Fort Myers Beach, bobbing toward open ocean and the Dry Tortugas, a long hellish night to endure before tropical hypothermia provided relief. Death would have arrived not long after their last dawn.

“How drunk you think we’re gonna get tonight, Trippe? We’ll take the Viking back to the marina, hose her down, then you and me are hitting the bars, man! We’ll get Moe, too—can you imagine how that cowboy would’ve freaked if he’d been with us today? He’d of been taking shots at the damn waves.”

Shooting at the waves? The two men exchanged looks, sharing an inside joke that I didn’t get.

I sat listening as Augie switched subjects, eager to dismantle, then rebuild, the most painful facts before he had to face his uncle.

“That shitty anchor on the Viking? How many times did I say we needed a new anchor?”

“At least once, Aug. Maybe twice. That’s the way I remember—”

“Twice, my ass. I told you umpteen times. I mentioned it coming out, but you probably didn’t hear. ‘We gotta get a decent anchor for this boat.’ That’s exactly what I said…”

I was thinking: We gave up life in the trees, the ability to hang by our toes and scratch our own backs, for this?