Exhausted, the boy fell asleep at the table and Hernan carried him through into the tiny cabin and laid him on one of the two bunks there, tucking him in just like his mother used to before she went north across the border with his elder brother, Juan Jose. Then the ship’s cook went up on to the bridge to report, and relieved Capitan Carlos at the wheel while Pilar’s master went down on to the aft deck and relieved himself over the half-open transom, with the hot wind strong against his back, before checking the winch and the lines that stretched away into the darkness where the net flared like a banner just beneath the increasingly choppy waves of the wake.
Carlos Santiago went up to the forecastle before returning to the bridge. He stood on the forepeak, looking along the course Pilar was following, smelling the wind and straining to see into the sinister blackness ahead. The unseasonably oppressive heat, the presence of whales that ought to have been up in the Arctic feeding grounds, the constant flickering of light just below the far horizon — as though there was some unimaginable battle raging in the north with salvo after salvo of great guns spitting fire and explosive shells — all made him regret the position that fate had placed him in. And which he in consequence had placed his ship and crew in. And the boy. Most of all, he regretted the boy. Suddenly he looked away to starboard. There was nothing to see — they were far out on a benighted ocean now, in the grip of the south-flowing California current, and the land was below the horizon there. But he knew well enough where they were in relation to the Baja. If things became too dangerous, he decided, he would run for the safe haven of Puerto San Carlos. He half laughed, making a sound that was almost a cough. He’d likely end up saving them all — while ruining himself — just because he was worried about the boy.
Miguel-Angel was woken four hours later when his head hit the side of the bunk. He sat up, banging his head again with disorientating force. His whole world reeled and heaved so powerfully he thought he must be on the verge of passing out. Then the door of the cabin opened and he recognized the figure of Hernan hanging in the doorway, keeping himself erect by spread-eagling himself against the doorframe. ‘It’s getting rough out there,’ said the ship’s cook. ‘The capitan asked me to check on you.’
‘I’m fine,’ said Miguel-Angel. ‘Shall I come up on to the bridge?’
‘If you can. It’d give the old man something less to worry about.’
‘OK. Is there anything you want me to take up with me?’
‘Coffee. And try not to spill it.’
Five minutes later, Miguel-Angel was staggering up the bridge-house companionway, concentrating fiercely on the steaming black surface of a mug of coffee that was doing its best to emulate the steaming black water outside. At least the top few steps were illuminated slightly by the green glow of the instruments that filled the bridge house with eerie light.
‘I brought coffee, Capitan,’ he said.
Then he realized the capitan wasn’t going to be able to hear him, for they were seemingly in the middle of a storm. The heaving of the deck was matched by the roar of the wind, the battering blasts of rain and spray and the mercifully distant flashes of lightning and the rumbles of thunder they generated — sounds so deep and powerful that they made everything on the bridge seem to shake.
And there, unmoving in the midst of it, Capitan Carlos stood at the helm like an anthracite statue. Apparently unconcerned by what the night was throwing at him, holding Pilar on course, dead into the very jaws of the thing. Miguel-Angel staggered over towards him, fiercely focused on the lurching, slopping coffee once again. This time he waited until he was almost at the capitan’s shoulder. ‘I brought coffee, Capitan!’ he shouted. The old man looked round and nodded, then gestured with his white-stubbled chin towards the cup-holder on the console.
The boy hesitated, frozen with surprise. He had seen his capitan under every circumstance he could readily imagine, but he had never seen him like this. The angular old face seemed to have lost ten years in age. The pale brown eyes burned with exhilaration as though there was some kind of a light behind them. The usually narrow mouth was wide in a grin of fierce elation. The big white teeth were clenched, squaring the stubbled jaw. And it was only this, thought Miguel-Angel, awed, that stopped him from laughing aloud with simple, fearsome joy.
‘Come here, boy,’ ordered this strange new creature in a deep, booming voice that rode over the thunder and the wind. He lifted his left hand from the helm and spread his arm wide in invitation, taking a firm half-step back to leave room for one slim boy to go in front of him. ‘Take the helm for a moment and feel her! Feel the life in old Pilar. She was born for this! We were born for this!’
With his heart suddenly pulsing at fever pitch, half with excitement and half with terror, Miguel-Angel stepped forward into the space between the capitan and the helm. As soon as he entered it, the arm came down again and he found his left hand folded in the capitan’s, wrapped around the curve of the wheel. The old man’s right hand grabbed his and for a moment both pairs of hands were on the wheel, with Miguel-Angel feeling the disorientating thrill of the life coursing through the battling boat. Then the capitan’s right hand was gone, reaching over to push the throttles further forward still. The boy at the helm blinked as a set of waves charged in at them, each one taller than the last. Pilar threw up her head and kicked up her heels, pitching and heaving through the water like the most powerful Azteca filly jumping over hedges and arroyos at the hunt.
But then, in a heartbeat, everything changed. Pilar gave a terrible lurch. The boy and the man behind him were thrown forward so forcefully that Miguel-Angel was winded. ‘Have we collided?’ he gasped. ‘But there is nothing there! Have we run aground? Will we sink?’
‘I don’t know,’ gasped Carlos. Even before the brief conversation was done, Hernan was at the top of the companionway, hanging in the opening there as he had hung in the cabin doorway. ‘Capitan!’ he bellowed. ‘The net! The winch! You must come.’
‘Hold her steady, boy,’ ordered the capitan. ‘Head to the wind, bow to the waves and throttle at full ahead. I won’t be long!’ As he spoke, Pilar gave another lurch, as though she had been struck on the aft starboard quarter. Miguel-Angel held on to the wheel for grim death, fighting to make her forequarters behave no matter what was happening to her stern. He only released his death grip on the little wheel to reach across and push the throttle levers as far forward as they would go, which was what he believed Carlos had ordered him to do. He was so frightened that he didn’t even notice that the green light which had dully illuminated the bridge so far had changed to red.