I was still looking for a cook or a steward who could use a little extra cash and who was smart enough–or stupid enough–to keep his mouth closed afterward, when the Callas sank.
I don’t know how or why. It was storming, but the ship seemed to be handling that well enough. Around eight o’clock on the evening of the 23rd, there was an explosion somewhere belowdecks. I was in the lounge at the time, and the Callas began to list almost immediately. To the left … do they call that “port” or “starboard”?
People were screaming and running in every direction. Bottles were falling off the backbar and shattering on the floor. A man staggered up from one of the lower levels, his shirt burned off, his skin barbecued. The loudspeker started telling people to go to the lifeboat stations they had been assigned during the drill at the beginning of the cruise. The passengers went right on running hither and yon. Very few of them had bothered to show up during the lifeboat drill. I not only showed up, I came early–I wanted to be in the front row, you see, so I would have an unobstructed view of everything. I always pay close attention when the matter concerns my own skin.
I went down to my stateroom, got the heroin bags, and put one in each of my front pockets. Then I went to Lifeboat Station 8. As I went up the stairwell to the main deck there were two more explosions and the boat began to list even more severely.
Topside, everything was confusion. I saw a screeching woman with a baby in her arms run past me, gaining speed as she sprinted down the slippery, canting deck. She hit the rail with her thighs, and flipped outward. I saw her do two midair somersaults and part of a third before I lost sight of her. There was a middle-aged man sitting in the center of the shuffleboard court and pulling his hair. Another man in cook’s whites, horribly burned about his face and hands, was stumbling from place to place and screaming, “HELP ME! CAN’T SEE! HELP ME! CAN’T SEE!”
The panic was almost total: it had run from the passengers to the crew like a disease. You must remember that the time elapsed from the first explosion to the actual sinking of the Callas was only about twenty minutes. Some of the lifeboat stations were clogged with screaming passengers, while others were absolutely empty. Mine, on the listing side of the ship, was almost deserted. There was no one there but myself and a common sailor with a pimply, pallid face.
“Let’s get this buckety-bottomed old whore in the water,” he said, his eyes rolling crazily in their seekers. “This bloody tub is going straight to the bottom.”
The lifeboat gear is simple enough to operate, but in his fumbling nervousness, he got his side of the block and tackle tangled. The boat dropped six feet and then hung up, the bow two feet lower than the stem.
I was coming around to help him when he began to scream. He’d succeeded in untangling the snarl and had gotten his hand caught at the same time. The whizzing rope smoked over his open palm, flaying off skin, and he was jerked over the side.
I tossed the rope ladder overboard, hurried down it, and unclipped the lifeboat from the lowering ropes. Then I rowed, something i had occasionally done for pleasure on trips to my friends’ summer houses, something I was now doing for my life. I knew that if I didn’t get far enough away from the dying Callas before she sank, she would pull me down with her.
Just five minutes later she went. I hadn’t escaped the suction entirely; I had to row madly just to stay in the samne place. She went under very quickly. There were still people clinging to the rail of her bow and screaming. They looked like a bunch of monkeys.
The storm worsened. I lost one oar but managed to keep the other, i spent that whole night in a kind of dream, first bailing, then grabbing the oar and paddling wildly to get the boat’s prow into the next bulking wave.