“Hi,” says Scott, water lapping at his ears.
The boy’s expression is flat, serious.
“Hi,” he says back.
“Are we rested?” Scott asks.
The boy nods.
“Okay,” says Scott, turning over. “Let’s go home.”
He rights himself and starts to swim, certain that at any moment he will feel a strike from below, the razor grip of a steam-shovel mouth, but it doesn’t come, and after a while he puts the shark out of his mind. He wills them forward, stroke after stroke, his legs moving behind him in figure eights, his right arm lunging and pulling, lunging and pulling. To keep his mind busy, he thinks of other liquids he would rather be swimming in; milk, soup, bourbon. An ocean of bourbon.
He considers his life, but the details seem meaningless now. His ambitions. The rent that is due every month. The woman who has left him. He thinks of his work, brushstrokes on canvas. It is the ocean he is painting tonight, stroke by stroke, like Harold and his purple crayon, drawing a balloon as he falls.
Floating in the North Atlantic, Scott realizes that he has never been more clear about who he is, his purpose. It’s so obvious. He was put on this earth to conquer this ocean, to save this boy. Fate brought him to that beach in San Francisco forty-one years ago. It delivered to him a golden god, shackled at the wrists, battling the ocean winds. Fate gave Scott the urge to swim, to join first his junior high swim team, then his high school and college crews. It pushed him to swim practice every morning at five, before the sun was up, lap after lap in the chlorinated blue, the applause of the other boys’ splashing, the kree of the coach’s whistle. Fate led him to water, but it was will that drove him to victory in three state championships, will that pushed him to a first-place medal in the men’s two-hundred-meter freestyle in high school.
He came to love the pressure in his ears when he dove down to the pool’s apple-smooth bottom. He dreamed of it at night, floating like a buoy in the blue. And when he started painting in college, blue was the first color he bought.
* * *
He is starting to get thirsty when the boy says:
“What’s that?”
Scott lifts his head from the water. The boy is pointing at something to their right. Scott looks over. In the moonlight Scott sees a hulking black wave creeping silently toward them, growing taller, gathering strength. Scott measures it instantly at twenty-five feet, a monster bearing down. Its humped head sparkles in the moonlight. A lightning bolt of panic hits him. There is no time to think. Scott turns and starts swimming toward it. He has maybe thirty seconds to close the gap. His left shoulder screams at him, but he ignores it. The boy is crying now, sensing that death is near, but there isn’t time to comfort him.
“Deep breath,” Scott yells. “Take a deep breath now.”
The wave is too big, too fast. It is on them before Scott can get a good breath himself.
He pulls the boy from the flotation device and dives.
Something in his left shoulder pops. He ignores it. The boy struggles against him, against the madman dragging him down to his death. Scott grips him tighter and kicks. He is a bullet, a cannonball streaking down through the water, diving under a wall of death. The pressure increases. His heart pounds, his lungs tick — swollen with air.
As the wave passes overhead, Scott is certain he has failed. He feels himself being sucked back up to the surface in a maelstrom of undertow. The wave will chew them up, he realizes, rip them apart. He kicks harder, holding the boy to his chest, fighting for every inch. Overhead the wave crests and topples into the sea behind them — twenty-five feet of ocean falling like a hammer, millions of gallons of angry surge — and the updraft is replaced in an instant by a churning rinse cycle.
They are spun and dragged. Down becomes up. Pressure threatens to rip them apart, man from boy, but Scott holds on. His lungs are screaming now. His eyes are burning from the salt. In his arms the boy has stopped struggling. The ocean is pure blackness, no sign of the stars or moon. Scott releases the air in his lungs and feels the bubbles cascade downward across his chin and arms. With all his strength he flips them over and kicks for the surface.
He emerges, coughing, his lungs half full of water. He screams them clear. The boy is limp in his arms, his head lying inert against Scott’s shoulder. Scott turns the boy until his back is against Scott’s chest, and then, with all his strength, compresses the boy’s lungs in rhythm until he too is coughing up salt water.
The seat cushion is gone, chewed up by the wave. Scott holds the boy with his good arm. Cold and exhaustion threaten to overwhelm him. For a time it’s all he can do just to keep them afloat.
“That was a big bad guy,” the boy says finally.
For a moment Scott doesn’t understand the words, but then it comes back to him. He told the boy that the waves were bad guys and they were the heroes.
So brave, Scott thinks, amazed.
“I could really go for a cheeseburger,” he says, in the calm between waves. “What about you?”
“Pie,” the boy says after a moment.
“What kind?”
“All of them.”
Scott laughs. He cannot believe that he is still alive. He feels giddy for a moment, his body thrumming with energy. For the second time tonight he has faced certain death and lived. He looks for the North Star.
“How much longer?” the boy wants to know.
“It’s not far,” Scott tells him, though the truth is they could still be miles from shore.
“I’m cold,” says the boy, his teeth chattering.
Scott hugs him.
“Me too. Hold on, okay?”
He maneuvers the boy onto his back, working to stay above the spray. The boy hugs Scott’s neck, his breath loud in Scott’s ear.
“Finish strong,” Scott says, as much for himself as the boy.
He gives one more look to the sky, then starts to swim. He uses a sidestroke now, scissoring his legs, one ear submerged in the salty murk. His movements are clumsier, jerky. He can’t seem to find a rhythm. Both of them are shivering, their core temperature falling with every passing second. It is just a matter of time. Soon his pulse and respiration will slow, even as his heart rate increases. Hypothermia will quicken its pace. A massive heart attack is not out of the question. The body needs warmth to operate. Without it, his major organs will start to fail.
Don’t give up.
Never give up.
He swims without pause, teeth chattering, refusing to surrender. The weight of the boy threatens to sink him, but he kicks harder with his rubbery legs. Around him the sea is bruise purple and midnight blue, the cold white of the wave caps glimmering in the moonlight. The skin of his legs has started to chafe in the spots where they rub together, the salt doing its insidious damage. His lips are cracked and dry. Above them, seagulls chatter and glide like vultures waiting for the end. They mock him with their cries, and in his mind he tells them all to go to hell. There are things in the sea that are impossibly old, astonishingly large, great undersea rivers pulling warm water up from the Gulf of Mexico. The Atlantic Ocean is a nexus of highways, of undersea flyovers and bypasses. And there, like a speck on a dot on a flea, is Scott Burroughs, shoulder screaming as he fights for his life.
After what feels like hours, the boy shouts a single word.