Текст книги "Cross Current"

Автор книги: Christine Kling

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II

I lowered the binoculars and spoke aloud—“What the …” —and squinted at the object, trying to verify what I had seen, as though perhaps the glasses had been playing tricks on me. I sighted the speck on the horizon easily now with bare eyes, thanks to the circling birds. Several seconds ticked by as my mind flipped through possibilities: a sinking, a fall overboard, a rental dinghy blown out to sea. Another look through the glasses and now it was difficult to see the child in the round, dark object. The head was down, face almost in the water, no longer moving.

I dashed back into the wheelhouse and took a bearing. After pushing the throttle up to max RPM and adjusting the helm to aim just to the right of her, I reached for the mike, then paused, my arm hanging in midair.

I knew the rules: You sight a vessel or a person in distress at sea, you call the Coast Guard. But the rules about what would happen next were really lousy. I knew for sure that if it was a six-year-old Cuban boy, he might end up a celebrity. They’d take him to Disney World, give him a puppy. My guess was this one would get, at best, a trip to the airport. I decided to wait a bit. The required call to the Coast Guard could be made after I knew for certain what this was all about.

I circled around and began slowing the tug several hundred yards out, preparing to pull alongside. I could see now that it was a wooden boat, about fourteen feet long, probably an island fishing boat, but full of water, the gunwales just awash, rising only a few inches above the calm sea. Even full of water, wooden boats will float. The water inside the hull looked dirty and filled with debris. A large pile of bright-colored clothing was mounded up in the stern, and sloshing around in the water were rusty cans, bits of paper, and white plastic water jugs, now empty. Where the hell had they come from? This was not a boat meant to cross oceans—no sail, no outboard, not even oars that I could see. I didn’t think it was possible they had come up from down island in this boat. But if not from there, then where?

The child was sitting at the bow of the swamped boat, arms wrapped around a wood post. When I came closer, I saw that her hair was plaited in several short black braids. I realized that it was a little girl, maybe eight or nine years old.

She’d heard the sound of my engine and looked up once, lifted her hand a few inches and waved, then lowered her head again to rest against the post. She was wearing a white dress—or what had once been a white dress. From her chest down, where the fabric had been immersed in water for God only knew how long and the fabric floated off her legs in the garbage-filled water, the dress was stained a dirty rust-brown.

When I was about fifty feet off the boat and had put Gorda's engine into reverse to bring her to a complete stop, I saw that it wasn’t just a lumpy pile of bright-colored clothing floating amid the debris inside the boat.

“Oh, shit,” I said aloud. It was a dress and the fabric was stretched tight. I could now see the other side of that mound, and I could make out the head. The bloated body of a woman was floating facedown next to the child.

I’ve never been seasick in my life, but for just a few seconds I thought I was going to lose it. The birds had been at work on her already, and the bloodless flesh on the side of her head was peeled back, the pink bone showing.

“Hello,” I tried, but my voice sounded strangled. I didn’t want to scare the girl any worse. “Hello. Hey, kid, are you okay?” Whatever island she came from, she probably didn’t speak any English, but I had to say something, to try to get her to raise her head again, to pay attention.

Gorda was now dead in the water, and the child was about twenty feet off the port side, her head still down. She had shifted her position a bit so that her large brown eyes were staring up at me. I expected to see some measure of excitement in her face, a realization that rescue was at hand, her ordeal over, but she simply stared, her eyelids starting to droop, as though she hadn’t even enough strength left for hope.

At the sound of my voice, Abaco got to her feet and padded over. She jumped up and saw the girl over the top of the bulwark and began to bark. The girl’s eyes snapped open, fear causing her to use what little energy she had. I grabbed the dog’s collar, dragged her into the wheelhouse and down to the head.

“Sorry, girl,” I said as I closed the door and locked it. “Let me get her aboard first. Then you can meet her.”

Gorda was up current, to the south of the swamped boat. The relentless Gulf Stream would eventually close the gap between us, but I might need the girl to help me, to take a line. If necessary, I’d go in the water myself, but that would be a last resort.

“Hey, what’s your name?”

She lifted her head and opened her mouth, but no sound came out—at least nothing that I could hear over the sound of Gorda's idling engine. She was clearly in bad shape, and the exposure to heat and salt and no fresh water had robbed her of her voice.

From Gorda's foredeck I picked up the fifty-foot length of nylon line I had been preparing to toss to Outta the Blue and tied a quick bowline in the end, then pulled a loop of line through, fashioning a lasso of sorts. I’m no cowboy, though, so I used the boat hook, and as the gap between the boats had closed to about ten feet, it was easy to reach over with the looped line hanging off the end of the pole.

“Sit up, will you? Get away from that wood post.”

She didn’t move.

“Hey, kid.” I motioned with my free hand. “Move. Move over. Sit up. I want to tie your boat to mine.”

Finally, she seemed to understand what I wanted her to do, but she looked from me to the body in the back of the boat and then back at me. Her expression did not change, but she scooted closer to that misshapen thing.

The line dropped neatly over the four-by-four post, and I pulled it tight. Keeping the tension on the line, I rigged my aluminum ladder over the gunwale, down into the water, then began to pull the water-logged fishing boat over to Gorda. It was not easy, not like pulling a boat sitting on top of the water that glides smoothly across the surface. This one had to push aside the displaced water, but slowly I brought in the line. The submerged hull came alongside and thumped against Gorda's aluminum hull.

After tying off the line, I lay on my belly across the gunwale and reached out to the child. “Here, take my hand.”

She didn’t need to understand my words; my outstretched hand had a universal meaning. She stretched her arm out slowly, and I realized for the first time just how thin she was. I saw the bones of her wrist and elbow protruding beneath the dark skin. There was no return grip in that small hand, but I pulled her up and toward the boat. She reached out with her other hand and attempted to grasp the side of the aluminum ladder, but she didn’t have enough strength in her fingers.

It wasn’t a pretty rescue. When it became clear that her legs could not support her and the ladder was useless, I dragged her light frame out of the water and across the ladder. She landed on the deck like a boated fish, dripping and breathing hard, wide-eyed and twitching.

I grabbed a towel off the bunk in the back of the wheel– house and approached her slowly. “It’s okay. I won’t hurt you. Let’s get this towel around you.”

"Gorda, Gorda, this is Outta the Blue, over.” The radio sounded much louder with the engine down to an idle. The girl’s deep-sunk eyes barely registered my presence, and she didn’t resist when I wrapped the towel around her shoulders. “It’s okay. I’ll be right back.”

In the wheelhouse, I grabbed the mike and we switched to a working channel. I stood in the doorway where I could keep an eye on the girl.

“Listen, Mike, I’ve got a little problem.”

“Hey, Seychelle, we wondered what was going on. We been watching you through the binoculars, and it looks like you’re stopped dead. You got engine trouble?”

“No, it’s not that.” For some reason that wasn’t fully formed in my mind, I was not yet ready to announce over the airwaves to all the bored fishermen and yachtsmen who were eavesdropping on our conversation exactly what was now tied alongside Gorda. “I’ve found something here. It’s a partially sunk boat and a hazard to navigation. I think I’d better tow it in first.”

“Break, break. Gorda, Gorda, this is Little Bitt.”

I blew a lung full of air out through rounded lips and tapped the radio microphone against my forehead. Damn. I keyed the mike and said, “Hey, Perry, should’ve known you wouldn’t have anything better to do than sit around drinking and listening in on my frequency.”

Perry Greene was the owner of Little Bitt, a twenty-eight-foot open tow boat that looked like a floating junkyard, piled high with gas cans, rusting engine parts, and greasy fenders, but she had an engine that ran like a watch. I had to grant that Perry was a hell of a mechanic, but I just wished he’d keep his chewing-tobacco-stained teeth and greasy fingernails as far from me as possible. Since the big corporate giants like SEATOW had come into town in the last couple of years and begun eating up the pleasure-boat-towing market, Perry and I were just about the only two independent operators left in the towing business in Fort Lauderdale, and he had taken to visiting me, perched on Gorda's bulwarks, Bud in hand. To make matters worse, he always wore these cut-off jeans that were cut way too short, and he apparently did not own any underwear. I had seen way more of Perry Greene than I ever wanted to.

“Matter of fact, Seychelle, I just dropped a boat off at Lighthouse Point Marina, and I was on my way out to see how you was doing with that sunk Haitian boat, and it turns out you ain’t even there.”

Much as I hated to ask, I didn’t see that I had any other choice. “Perry, I was on my way out to tow in Outta the Blue, but something’s come up. Could you go pick Mike up for me? He’s on this same frequency,” I said, as if Perry didn’t know. “Mike, you there?” I called.

“I’m here.” I could hear in his voice how he felt about this. Mike had about as much fondness for Perry as I did, and in just those two words I could tell that he was furious at my handing him off like this.

“Okay, you guys work out the details, and this is Gorda clear and going back to one six.”

I felt bad about it, but I had a problem that was going to take most of the rest of my afternoon. I’d be lucky to make it back to Hillsboro Inlet in time. After I set my radio back to the emergency frequency, my hand paused as I was about to hang the mike on the side of the receiver. By law, I was required to call the Coast Guard right about now. I looked at the skinny kid collapsed on my deck. I watched her chest rising and falling under the white cotton as she took short, shallow breaths. Reading the papers about boatloads of immigrants getting sent back home via Coast Guard cutter had always irked me, but never enough to do anything about it. But this was different. This was personal. I’d found her, and somehow that made her my responsibility.

I grabbed a bottle of water out of the ice chest on the wheelhouse floor.

She appeared to be closer to ten years old when I examined her up close. I offered her the sport bottle. She looked at the top but didn’t move to accept it. I leaned my head back and squirted the water into my mouth, showing her how, and the first little light appeared in her eyes. She took the bottle and drank eagerly, the water dribbling out the sides of her mouth as she gulped at the stream. Her arms gave out after about five seconds of holding the bottle aloft. The plastic bottle bounced to the deck, and I grabbed it and righted it before too much spilled.

“That’s okay,” I said. It didn’t matter if she couldn’t understand what I was saying. I was talking mostly just to soothe her. “You’re not supposed to drink too much anyway. You have to go slow. We’ll see if you keep it down.”

During my seven years as a Fort Lauderdale lifeguard, I had treated many drowning victims, but never an exposure victim as severe as this child. I had been trained as an EMT, and I knew the victim needed to rehydrate slowly. The girl’s large brown eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, and the skin on her forearms was a dark reddish mahogany. Her upper arms showed a distinct tan line, with the skin peeking out from under her sleeves a much lighter shade of brown. She probably had second-degree bums over a good twenty percent of her body and was suffering from heat exhaustion. I couldn’t see any blistering. Her legs were shriveled and bleached-looking from the long-term immersion in salt water, and that might have contributed to keeping her overall body temperature down.

I tried to remember some phrases from my two years of high school French. “Comment tu t'appelles? You know, your name? Ton nom. What’s your name?”

She pointed to the water bottle, and I squeezed another squirt into her mouth. After she swallowed, she licked her lips and whispered something. I couldn’t understand her at first.

“What was that?”

“Solange.” Her voice was a little stronger and, from the name and the pronunciation, I’d clearly guessed right in trying French first.

“Solange?” I asked with my voice if I had pronounced it correctly, and she nodded, again that faint smile flickering in her eyes.

I patted my own chest. “Seychelle. Je m’appelle Seychelle.”

Her lips moved, shaping the word, but no sound came out.

At that point I’d about exhausted what little I could remember from two years with Mademoiselle Goldberg. I pointed at her. “You, Solange, Haiti?”

She nodded and said, “Haiti,” her voice louder now and pronouncing the name Hi-yee-tee, as though correcting me.

The next question was awkward, but I had to know. I had been about her age when I saw my mother’s body on the beach after she had drowned, and I had only recently started to come to terms with that event in my life. And I hadn’t had to spend days in a boat with the body. But I had to know. I pointed to the woman in the boat. “Ta maman? "

She shook her head and reached for the water bottle. I let her drink a little more but stopped her after a couple of mouthfuls.

The dress she wore had been hand-hemmed with tiny little stitches, and the lace around the collar had been added by hand as well. But either she had lost weight during her time at sea, or the dress had been made for a much larger child. I wondered if it had been her First Communion dress. The thin fabric fell in folds off her shoulders and the skirt nearly ripped as I began to wring out the dirty water. The waistline of the dress could have enclosed two little bodies her size.

She licked her lips, swallowed and pointed toward the swamped boat. “Name Erzulie.” She closed her eyes after she spoke, as though the effort had depleted the last of her energy.

“The woman? That’s her name? Er-zoo-ly?” I tried to pronounce the name as she had with that musical rhythm.

She nodded. “Yes.”

I reached for her arm. “Oh my God. You speak English?”

She nodded, every movement an effort. “Papa Americain.”

A white American, I guessed. That explained the light skin.

Her thin arm reached toward me, and I thought she wanted another drink, but she wrapped her small hand around my fingers. “You help me.” The effort of saying those three words completely did her in; her eyelids drooped again, her mouth opened, her breathing came fast and shallow.

I entwined my big fingers with her tiny brown ones and squeezed softly. “Yes,” I said, my throat constricting so this time I could barely croak out the words. “I’ll help you.”

I saw a small twitch at the corner of her mouth. It was almost a smile.

III

Holding her arm, I helped Solange to her feet, but her little legs collapsed beneath her. I scooped her up and carried her toward the pilothouse. She was tiny, couldn’t have weighed more than fifty pounds. I could feel her eyes watching my face, and then she rested her head against my shoulder. Her salty braids brushed against my neck, and I touched the top of her head with my chin, cradling her tight to my chest as we passed through the door. I felt as though a fist had grabbed hold of all the organs in my chest and was holding them tight. I didn’t want to let her go.

When I got to the bunk that ran along the rear of the small compartment, I set her down and straightened her dress around her scrawny knees.

“Stay here,” I said, motioning with my hand because I wasn’t certain how much she understood. She curled up on her side and closed her eyes. I covered her with an old beach towel.

Out on deck, I fired up one of the gas pumps and drained most of the water out of the fishing dory. The hose kept picking up floating debris and clogging the filter, but I soon got out enough water that I could climb down into the boat to tie a good towline on her.

I hadn’t been able to smell anything when I’d been up on Gorda's deck, but once I was down in the boat, with the water now pumped out, the stench from the corpse struck me. It was a thick, cloying smell, almost palpable. I felt it would permeate my hair and clothes the way cigarette smoke does. The woman’s skin was discolored, turned an ashy green, and though I tried not to look at her, I found myself drawn back again and again for a quick glance at the form that had once been a woman. She wore a bright tropical-print dress with parrots and palm fronds. In other circumstances, it might have looked cheerful. I imagined this woman must have thought so when she chose it, and I envisioned her in an outdoor market in Port-au-Prince, carefully selecting the dress she would wear to America, not knowing it would be the dress she would die in.

Nothing from my lifeguard training told me how long it takes a body to swell. Had she drowned? I couldn’t tell without a closer examination, nor could I tell whether the skin on the side of her head had been broken by some blow or simply ravaged by the gulls that had been feeding on her. And I wasn’t about to roll her over. I would deliver her to the authorities as I had found her.

I tied two long nylon lines to the bow bitt and climbed back aboard Gorda. After securing the towlines at the stem, I put the tug in gear and got us on a heading for Port Everglades. In the logbook, I made my entry, noting the time and date and the exact GPS location where I had picked them up—Latitude 26° 11.67 Long 79° 58.12.

Abaco had been cooped up in the head a long time and I could hear her whining. I eased her out and introduced her to the girl. She put her paws up on the bunk, her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth, breathing dog breath all over the kid. The child’s eyes popped open and she reared back against the bulkhead. But when Abaco licked her hand, Solange’s mouth spread in a tentative toothy smile, and I knew they would be friends. I opened a bottle of Gatorade this time, gave her a little, and left them to get better acquainted.

Out on deck, I made a quick check around the horizon for boat traffic, cleaned up, coiled the lines, and checked on my tow. The fishing boat was riding well, given that the Gulf Stream was like a lake. I was glad I wasn’t towing in a following sea. The weight of the body in the back of that fishing boat was making it ride very low in the stern. I checked our progress toward the red-striped stacks of the power plant that marked the entrance to Port Everglades. We’d be in all too soon, and I knew I’d better get a hold of Jeannie so she could meet us at the dock.

I called Outta the Blue on the VHF and asked Mike to call Jeannie on his cell phone and tell her to meet us at the Lauderdale Marina fuel dock in front of the 15th Street Fisheries Restaurant. I knew I’d have to get myself a cell phone one of these days, but I was postponing the inevitable as long as possible. “Tell her it’s an emergency,” I said.

“You okay?” he asked over the party-line airwaves.

“Yeah, sure.” I tried to make my voice sound light and unconcerned. “You know Jeannie—it’s hard to get her moving unless you tell her it’s an emergency.” I laughed and held the mike open long enough for him to hear. When I turned from the radio to check on my passenger, she and the dog were curled up together in the bunk, both fast asleep.

Jeannie Black was my lawyer and best friend. Though she worked out of her home, and her six-foot height and nearly three-hundred-pound figure didn’t fit the image of the high-powered corporate lawyer, I would match Jeannie’s brains and heart against anyone’s. Legal entanglements were a given in the world of no-cure, no-pay marine towing and salvage. The client promises you anything to get his boat off the rocks, but once he’s safely hauled at the yard, he often has second thoughts about the agreed-upon terms. Just recently Jeannie had helped me settle a salvage claim that paid off my boat loans and made Gorda mine, free and clear. She’d shown me how to use the rest to set up a college fund for a young girl we’d met on that job. I knew Jeannie would figure out a way to keep Solange safe.

The rocks at the end of the harbor jetty were abeam before we passed the first pleasure boat on her way out of the harbor. The twenty-foot center console open fishing boat was bristling with dozens of rods and antennae. She was piloted by high school boys. As it was Wednesday, just past noon, they were probably skipping school. Shirtless, they looked like they were wearing white tank tops as their chests still bore the tan lines from their last time in the sun. They hooted and hollered at what they must have thought was a drunk, fat lady facedown in the skiff behind Gorda.

Once inside the harbor, I slowed the tug in the turning basin and pulled my tow alongside. With a small tarp I’d pulled out of the deck box, I covered the body enough so that when we tied up at the pier at Lauderdale Marina, the dock jocks couldn’t speculate on the contents.

The dock in front of the restaurant parallels the Intracoastal and serves as fuel dock space for most of its two– hundred-foot length. Late in the afternoon, the restaurant sends someone out with fish scraps to feed the pelicans, and hundreds of the birds flock to the dock. The nearly tame birds often hang out on the pilings, waiting for an unscheduled handout, and the antics of the greedy pelicans bring the tourists. Some days you had to elbow aside the families in matching mouse T-shirts just to tie up your dock lines. Fortunately, there were no tourists on the dock this afternoon.

No one came out to take my lines. The dock jocks recognized the boat and knew that I preferred to handle my own docking, tie off my own lines. Once the tug was close enough to the dock, I used the boat hook to drop a midships spring line over a piling cleat, then I slowly idled the engine in forward, helm hard over, until she eased in and nudged alongside the bleached-wood dock pilings. When Gorda was secure, I turned off the engine and checked on my tow. I was considering whether or not to tie a stem line on the fishing boat when I saw Jeannie hurrying through the opening between the 15th Street Fisheries Restaurant and the small bait shop. As always, she was wearing a billowing tropical-print muumuu—today’s was decorated with huge red hibiscus flowers; the voluminous straw handbag over her arm had a matching yarn flower sewn on it.

“Seychelle, we’re here!” she called, as though I could miss her. Her twin sons, Andrew and Adair, waved to me and then ran to the bait tank and leaned over to watch the fish, their identical blond heads ducking under the wood lids, rumps in the air as they pointed into the water.

I climbed up onto the dock just in time to be enveloped in a Jeannie hug.

“Are you okay? When Mike called, I was so worried! The boys stayed home from school today with the flu, so we came straight here.”

My face was pressed against a huge red blossom, and I could barely breathe. “Jeannie, let go, I’m okay.” She released me, and I took a deep breath.

“So tell me, then, what’s this emergency?”

I knew it would be hard to explain. “Do you think you can get down onto the boat?”

She eyed the three-foot drop to Gorda's deck and gave me an exasperated look. “It won’t be a pretty sight, but I can do it.”

She was right on both counts. Once she was down on deck, I led her to the wheelhouse, and while I went in, she stopped at the door. Abaco was still curled up with the girl, but the dog lifted her head when she saw us, and her tail thumped against the aluminum bulkhead. The girl awoke with a start and tried to pull away from us, back into the shadowy corner of the wheelhouse bunk.

“It’s okay. Shhh. It’s okay,” I said to the child. “This is Jeannie. She’s my friend.” The girl’s head dropped, chin to chest, as though the effort of holding her head up was just too much for her. I turned to Jeannie. “We’ve got to get her to a hospital. She needs IV fluids. She’s severely dehydrated.”

“Wait, wait, wait. Whoa. Time out.” She was making referee signals with her hands, and for a moment my mind flashed on the image of her billowing muumuu racing up and down the sidelines of a playing field. “Stop grinning at me.” She pointed at the girl. “Where did she come from?”

“I found her out there.”

“Oh,” she said, not bothering to hide the sarcasm. “You just found her.”

“Yeah. I saw what I thought was a half-sunk boat, adrift, and when I went to investigate I found her in it. I have no clue how long she’s been out there.”

“And apparently you haven’t called the Coasties or they’d be here by now.”

I shook my head.

“What is it with you, Seychelle? Don’t you ever learn? It’s not like they’re going to send you to jail for it, but why do you always have to start by pissing off the authorities?” She shook her head.

“She’s only half of the story, Jeannie. Come on.” I led her around the wheelhouse and pointed down at the fishing boat tied alongside.

“That’s what I found her in.”

“Okay, it’s a boat.”

“Look again, Jeannie.” In the stern, a foot was visible protruding from the tarp.

“Geez, Seychelle, what the...”

“That’s exactly what I said, Jeannie.”

“I take it that person’s in a lot worse shape than the girl?”

“You could say that. It’s a woman—was a woman. The girl says she’s no relation. I wanted you here before the cops came.”

“I guess I can understand that. So I’m here. Let’s make that call. Now.”

“Okay, okay.” I crossed the aft deck, then turned back to face her. “You understand this, don’t you, Jeannie? I mean the kid, she’s Haitian, and you know what they do with illegal Haitians.”

“I know. I know this is just you being you. This time, though, you’re up against the U.S. government—the INS. You probably don’t have a hope in hell of keeping that little girl here. Especially if we continue to delay calling the authorities.”

“But she says her father’s American.”

“You talked to her? She speaks English?”

“Yeah, she speaks a little English—maybe even more than a little. It’s hard to tell. She barely has the strength to say two words. I just don’t want her to get thrown into a foster family, even for a day or two, and then shipped back to Haiti.”

“Seychelle, I’m not an immigration attorney.”

“I know that. I just need you to get me some time, that’s all. Maybe I can find her father.” I climbed up onto the dock, carefully avoiding the dozens of white splotches of pelican poop.

“That’s pretty iffy. For all you know the guy won’t even want to claim her.”

I straightened, brushed off my hands, and paused for a minute, trying to find the right words to express the feeling I’d had ever since looking into those big brown eyes through the binoculars. “Jeannie, there’s something about finding a kid like that.” I thought about how frail and helpless she had felt when I’d lifted her in my arms and carried her to the bunk, and once again I felt the tightness in my chest. “I just can’t turn her over and walk away. I’ve got to try.” I headed up the dock.

Leaning against the side of the bait shop, the pay phone receiver to my ear, I began the second run-through of my story for the 911 dispatcher when I noticed the Coast Guard launch. The hard-bottom inflatable with a center console was piloted by what looked like two well-fed Iowa farm boys in blue coveralls. With their identical builds, Florida tans, and military-style haircuts, they looked like older versions of Jeannie’s twins, only one was blond, the other brunette. It was the blond who motioned for his buddy to back the boat closer to the wooden fishing boat. Though their launch was only eighteen feet long at best, the blond waved his right hand in the air, making concise hand signals to back up a little more, speed it up, slow down, stop, as if he thought he was docking a 747 in her berth at the airport.

When the blond reached down and pulled back the tarp, first he lost his Florida tan as the blood drained from his face, and then his barracks breakfast went when he heaved into the Intracoastal off the inflatable boat’s stern.