By Roger Owens
Louise Dedge was in heaven. The New Year’s Eve Ball was a huge success, in spite of the storm. Not just the students but their parents, the teachers, and even some grandparents were still swirling about the polished wood floor to the music of a band that were in no hurry to load up their instruments in a pouring rain. Mr. Thompson had come, hovering near the punch bowl everyone knew had tropical rum in it. And to top things off, Ernest Hemingway had given the dance a pass. Chalk one up for Captain Niko. Louise had danced the entire evening with Jim, already a graceful and accomplished footsman, without a single interruption. Quite a few other Navy fellows were there, but they all had their own sweethearts and were not interested in cutting in. And no high school boy would have dared risk his life by horning in on a military man’s date. The one man she had noticed other than James Donald Owens had been, of all people, Horace Ball, who danced with any girl he could coax onto the floor and turned out to be astonishingly good. When the music played, Horse Balls lost his stoop, his hesitant nature vanished, and he became smooth as ice cream, gliding across the hardwood floors wearing an outdated brown suit and vest like an actor from Hollywood.
Rain pounded the roof until the band could hardly be heard. They finally gave up, and were rewarded with applause that lasted for several minutes. The high windows around the gymnasium rattled in the winds driving from the southeast as folks began gathering their things to depart. Some time after the band began packing their gear, the first window shattered, with a crash. Along with the flying glass came a huge coconut, which plunged to the floor like a spent cannonball, bouncing twice before smashing into the head of Mr. Pelletier, the choir director, killing him instantly. A brilliant spray of blood and teeth flew from his mangled face as screams arose on all sides from the women and girls. Mrs. Pelletier, the Spanish teacher, had been holding his hand and was splashed with gore as his body was jerked away from her to lie flailing on the gleaming tan floorboards. She stood frozen in horror as the blood trailed down her cheeks and over her gorgeous white lace dress. The crowd panicked and ran for the doors, which were to the southeast.
Jim grabbed Louise by the arm and snatched her away from those doors. She was screaming along with the rest, male and female, as he hauled her to the opposite end of the building. More broken glass cascaded upon the crowd of revelers now cramming the windward end of the basketball court. Louise put her hands over her head and ran blindly, trusting Jim to guide her to safety. It was a good decision. When she looked again she saw a few other couples running with them and noticed that most of the men wore Navy blue. It seemed they knew when to retreat from a storm, regardless of where the main door might be. There was one man in brown, dragging an adorable little Cubana brunette in a short skirt. It was Horse Balls. He wasn’t having to drag her very hard. A gigantic surge of wind swept through the gym and sparks exploded from the high light fixtures, which swung wildly, like church bells in an earthquake. The power failed and the hall fell instantly dark. Silence held for a heartbeat, then a young girl cried out in fear.
It was like pouring gas on a fire. The frightened New Year’s Eve dancers now became a shrieking mob, clawing and trampling each other trying to reach the doors. The instant those doors were unlatched they were blasted inward as a one-hundred mile-per-hour wind struck the fleeing crowd. Those in front were slammed back against the crowd behind, killing seven people on the spot. This created an impassable barrier against which dozens more were crushed by the panicked crowd trying to escape. The survivors tried to crawl over the dead, some their own parents or children, their own students or teachers.
When we took that Cuban in tow, at first I thought we were heroes. Then I thought about all the Greek heroes I’d read about, and all the Roman ones, and I realized none of the classical heroes were rescuers. It was World War II that seemed to have made saving others into a truly noble act, and, if it was only myself, then I, Jackson Lee Davis, was still proud. That did not change the fact that, according to Lester Clayton, we had no way like enough diesel to make it back to Key West. The weather was going straight to hell, as my Grandpa Lee of the frilly dresses might have said – in a handbasket no less, although exactly what kind of basket that might be I was never sure. We were in a bad way, Blackie said grimly, while Joe Hook said we were in a “pickle.” That he spoke at all was a disturbing sign. LC and I agreed that we were, in fact, up shit creek without a paddle.
I spent a few bad years that rainy afternoon wrestling with the trawling booms with LC and Joe Hook, before and after we hooked up the Santa Inez. After, we could see the Cubanos wrestling with theirs, and one fellow was whipped by a loose steel cable. He went flying, bright blood fanning out in the glaring arc lights, into the black, tumultuous waves. Later Blackie told me the Santa Inez never called on the radio, never suggested they might return to try to rescue the man. To try to turn, to go sideways to those waves with the other boat in tow, would have been suicide, without a chance of success. Also, in the thirty minutes it would take to return, the man could never have survived. I told Blackie I didn’t think that poor bastard even made it to the water. I believe he was killed by that cable, I thought so then and I think so now. It seemed to relieve Blackie a little, but I didn’t feel so much like a hero then.
When we saw the cutter, I thought we were saved. Blackie had been calling on the radio since we’d hooked up the Cuban and I wasn’t sure why they hadn’t answered sooner. Miss Lottie didn’t waste time, she grabbed the microphone herself and shouted fit to be heard back in Virginia, about where-all ya been, nice to run into you, and could we get some gas? The cutter, clearly coastguard, took a long time to respond. When it came, it was not hardly what we expected from the Coasties, who Blackie praised to the skies. He would say, “You may pray to Jesus when you are in trouble on the sea, but it is the Coast Guard who will come and rescue you.” It was no time before this happy prognostication proved false, because for once, the Coasties turned tail. It was about like thinking I was a hero had been – right at first. The exhilaration turned to despair, reality doused hope like a bright candle swamped by a giant wave over the rail.
The Coast Guard cutter was the “Aristides Agramonte,” and their captain declared himself to be Ashburn J. Lindy, 1st Battalion, 16th Infantry, deployed 1918 in France. How that Army dog ever got to be captain of a Coast Guard cutter I’ll never know. He informed the two troubled shrimpers – that is, the terrified human beings aboard the Honoria B. and the Santa Inez, whom he had taken an oath to save and sustain – that he was utterly incapable of rendering assistance; his crew was in danger and it was his job to protect them at all costs or exigencies. Lottie held the microphone like a weapon and I cringe when I think what she might have done with it had Captain Asshole been standing before her, subject to the Empress in Her righteous wrath. I feel certain the only chance he would have had was if we had found the heavy coil of microphone cable somewhere over his rainbow and used it to pull the microphone out, because I knew she would have shoved it so far up his ass you could have seen it from Richmond.
Blackie cursed the Aristides Agramonte out of sight, shouting into the microphone that they were a disgrace to the Coast Guard. He said Aristides Agramonte was turning over in his grave, and then told us that the man was a famous Cuban doctor who, along with the US Army doctor Walter Reed, had discovered that mosquitos carried yellow fever. The captain of the Santa Inez broke in several times in his growling Cubano Spanish and he was calling them everything but sons of God, that’s for sure and for certain. Blackie looked as grim as an undertaker. Joe Hook stood by the wheelhouse door, soaked in the rain, shaking his head. We were headed over the Florida Sand Reef, where the Gulf of Mexico rose from over ten thousand feet deep to less than eight hundred. We all understood the waves would be building over the shallows. If we ran out of fuel and couldn’t keep the Horny B.’s bow into those waves, she would turn sideways and roll over like a fat old dog.
For the next hour or so we plunged ahead, the wind tearing at the wheelhouse and rigging, the waves staggering around us like drunken giants, careless of any tiny humans they trod on. The captain of the Santa Inez kept up a constant chatter on the radio, thanking us every few minutes for saving their lives. After a while Blackie quit answering and just stared blankly ahead into the storm. There was nothing to see, just one white-topped wave after another, no horizon, no lights. I heard Blackie muttering something to himself as he glared ahead, as if willing us to make it. “Despacio,” he said, and again, “despacio.”
I felt the tugging almost as soon as we went over the reef and the waves increased. The Horny B. would lurch forward, as if untied from the burden behind her, then be dragged up short, like a dog on the end of his rope. Joe Hook and I went aft and he pointed out the problem. With the waves obstructing the Honoria B., the Santa Inez would catch up enough for the tow line to drop into the churning ocean, and the Honoria would surge ahead. The line would then fly up from the surface, flinging water, and snap tight as a steel bar, snatching us back to almost dead stop. We grabbed on to the rail as it occurred before our eyes, to keep from being thrown forward like rag dolls.
Joe put his mouth by my ear and spoke quietly. “Don’t think it can last much longer.” It didn’t. Before we could make our way back to the wheelhouse, the Santa Inez loomed large behind us. They had caught up so far in the darkness I thought they would ram us. But then the Honoria B. leaped ahead, and we were slammed against the railing so hard it like to have broken my ribs. I think it did break some of old Joe’s, but he would never complain. The next time we were drawn up short it was only for a second, and I heard the heavy towline snap like a tree trunk in a tornado. All I could think of was that Cuban fellow getting it from a cable, and I fell over on Joe and pushed him down. Sure enough, that line came ripping back at us, all shredded on the end and cracking like a bullwhip. The railing saved us. The towline smacked into it like a freight train, then fell down behind us to be dragged in our wake. I didn’t say nothin’, just got up off little Joe and went and unhooked that line from the windlass, and, coil by massive coil, my heart dragging me down more than the sea-soaked hawser, I threw it over the stern so it wouldn’t foul our propellers. When the weight overboard was greater than what was left, it slithered down into the night and was gone.
Lester Clayton Tottenmann had been in the engine room since he’d dropped the towline to the Cuban. In the storm he had one job, to keep the engines running. If they lost power, he knew they would all drown, and he had never thought much of drowning as a way to die. Not that he was the snooty type or anything, but it just seemed undignified somehow, sloshing around all white and dead like that. He sat in the corner of a beam and the hull and held on as the waves became worse and the ship bucked like a cantankerous mule. He wasn’t seasick, and he figured if he wasn’t now he never would be. Lester was not afraid, not for himself. His only fear was that he would die and leave Porcelain, with the baby, to face the hard, cold world alone. Later, he would think he should have been more imaginative as to just how hard and cold the world could really be. For now, he only worried about his own, and the ship’s, survival.
The Horny B. pulled up short, then leaped forward, tossing Lester around the engine room like a football. His head smacked the beam he’d been leaning on and then the floor came up and kicked him for a field goal. Blood poured from his lacerated forehead and he was sure he had at least one broken rib. He coughed out a big clot of blood and the pain lanced into his side. Through his agony he heard a strange thumping noise at the stern, he thought madly, the stern of the boat. He had no idea it was the remnant of the tow rope whacking against the rear rail and then falling into the churning waves behind them. After that commotion, the Horny B. seemed to regain her footing, and he stayed at his station, seeing to it those engines kept running. He had no idea that the Cubans were once again at the mercy of the storm.
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[Editor’s Note: The novella of which this installment is a part can be ordered from Amazon.]
| Copyright © 2017 by Roger Owens |
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