“No, but I have looked on it and I have found it to be good.”
“Just another piece of amazing Westronese technology. I hope we have a sample of whatever it is in the crates the chief gardener sent us,” Adam said, hunkering down on the floorboards and getting as comfortable as things permitted. “Your last statement was almost biblical. Could it be that this storm is finally leading you to religion?”
“Not a chance. If I’ve got to die, I’d rather do it as an honest man, not as a wimp groveling on my knees in front of a spook.”
Adam just shook his head, unwilling to open up on an argument we’d been through a dozen times.
I said, “I have read the Bible, though, something that you Catholics never do. At least it was something I never did until I quit being a Christian, and then only because I needed all the ammunition that I could get.”
“Right,” Adam said. “In grade school, I asked a nun, one of my teachers, about the Bible, and she said that I shouldn’t read it. She said that it was dirty, so, being basically a good kid, I left it alone.”
“Reasonable. It really is a dirty book. Look at what Abraham did to poor Hagar.”
“I don’t want to hear about them.”
The storm showed no signs of lightening up, so I crawled forward, dug out the sleeping bags and air mattresses, and tried to make us as comfortable as possible for the duration.
THIRTY-FIVE
Three days later, I awoke bleary eyed in what I was sure was early morning. Adam was still asleep. There wasn’t anything that we could do except wait for the storm to go away. There hadn’t seemed to be much sense in keeping one man awake, on watch, since we had already done what little there was to do. Everything that could be tied down, sealed up, or otherwise secured already was. If the sea and storm were going to kill us, they would do so without our permission whether we were asleep or not.
Lying awake there, I suddenly realized that something was strange. The incessant, joint-wrenching pitching of the waves had stopped, but the noise of the storm, which we were sure by then was a full-blown hurricane, was as loud as ever. But the weirdest thing was the way that the bow of the boat was at least five feet lower than the stern. I reached over and shook Adam awake.
“Yeah? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know, but I think maybe we’re sinking. The bow is low in the water.”
Adam was nearest to the tiller, and he started undoing the lacing that held the boat cover in place.
“Treet, wiggle your way forward and see how much water we’ve taken on.”
“Right.”
It made sense. Small people are better at crawling through tight places than big people. I slithered downward on my belly, headfirst over lashed down crates and barrels, all the way down to the bow to find that everything there was still reasonably dry. I could feel the boat moving. We weren’t on shore and hung up on something. Mystified, I crawled back up to the stern.
“It’s dry!” I shouted. “Could something have grabbed us and be pulling us down?”
By this time, Adam had enough of the boat cover off to stick his head out into the air above the boat.
He pulled back his head and said, “Nope. Partner mine, we are surfing! We are on the side of one bodacious wave, and if we aren’t doing thirty miles an hour, I’m a German’s uncle!”
I had to pull him down, shove him away from the hole, and stick my head out, before I dared believe what he was telling me.
It was awesome! Not three feet behind us, the huge wave was breaking, spraying frothing white water all about us. In front, I looked down into a massive trough at least a hundred and fifty feet ahead of the bow of our little boat, and then the water heaped up, and up, I don’t know how high. The scale of things was simply beyond the range of my ordinary thinking. To left and right, the wave seemed to go off into infinity, and to do it in an almost straight line. The wind was strong in my face as I looked forward, which was the opposite of what one would ordinarily expect. I was a while thinking about how the wind pushes the waves forward, and how, just below the crest of a wave on the leeward side, there has to be a barrel rolling counterwind going. It was a while before I finally brought my head back in, to let Adam have another look.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Adam said, his head stretching against the boat cover so he could look at the compass on the binnacle. “Even wilder is the way we’re still going northeast! I think that we oughta tell the people at Guiness about this, ’cause we must be setting a world speed record for surface travel in a tubby lifeboat! Our prayers are answered, or mine are anyway, since yours wouldn’t count. Another day or two of this, and we’ll be on the beach in sunny Acapulco!”
I was so stunned by what I had just seen that I couldn’t think of a suitably cutting rejoinder to Adam’s digs. But such is the transience of human nature that even the most incredible spectacle eventually gets boring, and in a few hours we laced the boat cover back down and broke out breakfast, cold Spam and colder creamed corn that Roxanna had once appropriated from the warehouse to her own pantry, thus saving it for our current epicurean repast.
* * *
For the last few days, we had been spending most of our time swapping old jokes, and since Adam had a better memory for such things than I did, I was forced to invent some to keep even with him.
“You heard the one about Jack and Jill?” I asked, knowing that he couldn’t have since I had just thought of it.
“Do you mean the clean poem, the dirty poem, or the children’s poem with all the gratuitous violence?”
“None of the above, but remember the dirty one for when it’s your turn. No, Jack and Jill were two young people who hired into a production shop on the same day. For a few months, everything went well for them, since they were both cheerful, energetic types, and everybody around the shop liked them.
“Then word came down to their foreman that new orders to the shop were slowing down, and that it would be necessary for him to lay off one worker. The problem was that it was a union shop, and the rules required him to lay people off by seniority, in reverse order of that in which they were hired, and regardless of their value as workers. Since Jack and Jill both had the same low seniority date, this meant that he was going to have to lay off either Jack or Jill.
“The trouble was that he didn’t want to do it. They were both very hardworking kids, and what’s more, he really liked both of them. So naturally, he procrastinated. A week went by, and then two, and he still hadn’t laid either of them off. Finally, the plant superintendent called the foreman up to the head office and chastised him for his blatant dereliction.
” `I know that you like both of those kids, but you have to lay one of them off. Which one is up to you, but either Jack or Jill has got to be laid off.’
” `You’re right,’ said the foreman. `It’s my job, and I’ll do it. I’ll tell you what. It’s lunchtime now, and they’re both out, but the first one of them to come back, well, I’ll take him or her to my office and explain the facts to ’em.’
“It turned out that Jill was the first one back, so the foreman called her to his office.
” `Jill, I’m sorry, but, you see, well, it’s come to the point where I’ve either got to lay you or Jack off.’
“And Jill said, `Well, I’m sorry too, boss, but I’ve got a headache, and so I’m afraid you’ll just have to jack off.’ ”
Adam laughed politely as we went surfing into the evening. He launched into a long and improbable tale about how his grandfather got robbed on his first day in New York City, but I can’t relate it since I fell asleep in the middle of the story.
* * *
The boat pitched and crashed, and again I woke up knowing that something was very strange. The noise outside was still loud, but different, somehow. I was surprised to find that the bow of the boat was no longer five feet lower than the stern. It was four feet higher. My first thought was that we were somehow going backward.