Surface Tension - Kling Christine - Страница 44

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I broke through the surface of the water no more than fifteen feet behind his churning outboard. The engine noise was much louder at the surface, thankfully, because I was making a hell of a lot of noise gulping down air in rasping breaths. He seemed to be moving faster, the gulf between us was broadening rapidly. I turned around to swim away from him, thinking I would be swimming back into the inlet, but I saw nothing but dark black sea and sky. The reason he had seemed to be coming from every direction at once above me was because he had been turning his boat around right over my head. Esposito was motoring back into Port Everglades. I was drifting out to sea.

XVI

I could see the lights of Hollywood Beach appearing as I drifted past the end of the breakwater. I estimated the current was running at least two knots. The water grew rougher as the outgoing tide ran into the incoming wind chop. Several waves broke over my head, and I swallowed a mouthful of seawater. My eyes and nose burned, and I still didn’t have much movement in either my left arm or my right hand. There was no way I could swim against that tide.

Lifeguards teach swimmers that if they are ever caught in a riptide to simply relax, let the current carry you out, then swim parallel to the beach and go ashore where there is no outbound current. That would not have been a problem if I had been fresh, but in the exhausted and injured state I was in, I doubted that I would make it back in to the beach. I was having enough trouble just treading water and trying to keep my head above the waves.

On the south side of the channel, I suddenly heard an explosive puff of air, followed by a deep groan. Squinting to clear the water out of my eyes, I made out the green light on a channel buoy. It was farther away than I expected. Clearly, the Gulf Stream was already carrying me north. The buoy’s air horn moaned again as it rose and fell on the waves.

I turned my eyes seaward. There should be another marker, the harbor entrance buoy. The light on that one would be red and brighter, and the buoy itself would be bigger. Maybe, big enough to crawl onto.

On the crest of a swell, I spotted the red light, but it disappeared when I dipped down into a trough between swells. On the next peak, I found the light again, and was alarmed to see how fast I was drifting. I might pass the buoy before the tide carried me out there.

I turned south and started kicking, trying to fight the Gulf Stream, that mighty current that flows with the strength of all those trade-wind seas that pile up in the Gulf of Mexico, only to spill out toward the north. The ebb tide was carrying me out to the buoy, but I had to fight the current from carrying me up the coast before I made it out there.

Trying to ignore the pain, I began to stroke with my left arm, a sidestroke and a scissors kick, trying to hold my hand steady on the wobbly wrist. Half the time I wasn’t even sure I was going in the right direction when for several waves I wouldn’t see the red eye glowing in the darkness. Then it would appear again, I’d adjust my course slightly, and kick with renewed vigor.

The cold water was numbing the pain in my shoulder, and I drank in the brilliant night sky awash in stars, the glistening lights of the coastal condos, the luminous green bursts of the phosphorescent plankton as I stroked through the sea. There was nothing frightening about this night. Some people probably believe right up to the last minute before they drown that they can save themselves, that their efforts will be enough to snatch them back from the precipice. Perhaps they never become aware that it isn’t enough. They fight to the end, and then there is nothing. And then again, there are those, like my mother, who never even try to save themselves.

The next time I saw the light I was startled to see how close it was, and I heard the bell clanging for the first time. I wondered if I had blacked out for a minute or just gone into some kind of dream state. But the buoy was right there. I was slightly to the north of it, though, the stream having pushed me even farther off course than I thought.

My arms and legs felt leaden. The water was so much warmer than the chill wind on my face. The water wrapped me, blanket-like, comfortable, appealing. I wanted to stop swimming, to rest, to sleep. Forget the damn buoy.

A wave slapped my face and drove salt water up my nostrils. The pain seemed to explode white hot and searing in my brain. No, dammit. Swim, stroke, go, go. I’m better than this, I can do it. In an all-out frenzy of flailing limbs and thrashing water I covered the last hundred feet straight up into the current.

The bell was clanging, deafening. Red flash, one-two-three, red flash. I reached up and grabbed one of the bars that supported the fight and the battery pack. The buoy was rocking and rolling in the swell. On each rise, my body was lifted out of the water to the waist, and my injured hand nearly let go. It was several minutes before I had the strength to pull myself out of the water. I was dimly aware that my forearms and belly were getting sliced up by the barnacles as I dragged my body out of the water. The wind numbed my face as I curled my body into a tight ball on the narrow platform beneath the flashing red light and clanging bell. I wrapped my arms around the bars so as not to fall off as the buoy rocked in the swells and closed my eyes. I was still alive.

Far, far off in the distance, as though down at the end of a long tunnel, I heard an outboard running at a good pace and then idling down. I had no idea how long I had been curled up on the buoy, shivering in the wind, trying to conserve body heat. I knew I should open my eyes, but I felt like the little kid who closes his eyes and thinks he is hiding. If it was Esposito, I didn’t want to know about it. There was no place I could go to escape, and back in the water meant hypothermia, death for sure.

Even with my eyes closed, the whole world suddenly seemed to turn red as a spotlight lit up the buoy and shone through my eyelids. I lifted my head and squinted toward the light.

“Hey!” a voice called. A deep voice, a male voice. “Hey, lady, are you okay?”

Stupid as it may sound, I started to laugh. What was I supposed to say? No, go on, I’m fine, thank you?

“Hey, lady?” he called again. “Jason,” he said more softly, “move in a little closer okay?”

“Dad, are you sure we oughta? She looks kinda scary. Like, do you think she might be crazy or something?”

I lifted up my head and tried to shield my eyes with my forearm. “The light,” I called out, waving my arms and pointed at their spot. The bell drowned out what I said, but apparently they understood the pantomime. The spotlight went out, leaving the world dark, but my eyes were still blinded by bright red spots.

I followed the sound of their idling engine as they drew closer. Then I heard the crunch of crushed barnacles as their boat eased alongside. Out of the darkness, a hand touched my arm and pulled me to the edge of the buoy. I went willingly, still blind.

“Thanks,” I said as someone wrapped a thick, warm beach towel around my shoulders. I began to be able to make out their faces. I didn’t think I’d ever stop shivering.

“Jason, we’d better head back in with her.” The driver turned the boat around, and we headed for the inlet. My vision was clearing rapidly now. The man who handed me a Styrofoam cup of coffee had gray hair and a beard and looked about fifty years old.

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