Now they beached their boat on a wrack-lined slope of bushes, tied it off on a dead tree trunk, and walked east over the brush and litter of the abandoned cemetery to where one of Mr. Hexter’s folded maps had an X on it. After some hunting around they concluded that there were few things weirder than an abandoned graveyard, in this case half brushy meadow and half dank forest, filled with downed branches and trash and row upon row of gravestones, like a miniaturized model of uptown, with the occasional larger monument looming here and there. From time to time they stopped to read some of the longer inscriptions, but then they came on one memorializing one George Spencer Millet, 1894–1909, whose inscription read:
Lost life by stab in falling on ink eraser, evading six young women trying to give him birthday kisses in office Metropolitan Life Building.
“Oh man,” Roberto said. “And in our building! That is terrible.”
“It’s like something you would do,” Stefan noted.
“No way! I’d just let them kiss me, shit. He was an idiot.”
After that they decided to quit reading inscriptions. They moved on, feeling the heavy stare of all those semilegible names and lives. There weren’t any cemeteries in lower Manhattan, and they found being in one less fun than they had expected.
But then they came on Melville. His was indeed a hefty gravestone, with a scroll carved on it. About four feet tall and almost that wide, and a foot or more thick. To each side of the carved scroll were carved leaves on vines, and Melville’s name was at the bottom, and therefore almost obscured by mud. It was a dismal place. His wife’s stone stood next to his, and on the other side were other family members, including his son Malcolm, who had died young.
“It’s big,” Stefan said.
“We should take it back to his neighborhood,” Roberto insisted. “No one comes here anymore, you can see that. He’s completely forgotten here.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You think it’s illegal?”
“I think it’s not nice. His body is here, his wife’s body, all that. People might come here looking for him and think he got vandalized.”
“Well… shit.”
“Maybe we could find someone else whose grave is underwater now.”
“Someone else who lived near us? And whose ghost Mr. Hexter saw?”
“No. It would have to be some other someone else. Or maybe we could make memorial signs to put on the buildings around the marina, or on the dock pilings. Or a map, Mr. Hexter would love that. All that stuff he’s told us about, Melville, baseball, the Statue of Liberty’s hand, all that.”
“We live in a great neighborhood.”
“It’s true.”
“But I want to pull something out of the drink! Or the forest. Something we’ve saved.”
“Me too. But maybe Hexter is right. Maybe after the Hussar it’s all downhill.”
Roberto sighed. “I hope not. We’re only twelve.”
“I’m twelve. You only think you’re twelve.”
“Whatever, it’s too soon to be going downhill.”
“We’ve got to change careers, I guess. Change our focus. You were gonna get drowned at some point anyway, so maybe it’s a good thing.”
“I guess. I liked it, though. And there are jobs down there, like what Vlade did.”
“True. But for now. Maybe we could look up rather than down. There are those peregrine falcons nesting on the sides of the Flatiron, and lots of others.”
“Birds?”
“Or animals. The otters under the docks. Or sea lions, remember the time sea lions took over the Skyline Marina and all of them got on one boat and sank it?”
“Yeah, that was cool.” Roberto rubbed his hand over Melville’s gravestone, thinking it over.
Suddenly it was darker, and cooler. A black cloud had come up from the south and was covering the sun. The air was just as steamy, maybe more so, but because of the cloud they were in shade now, and it looked like it would only get cloudier. A big black-bottomed wall of cloud, in fact, rolling in from the south.
“Thunderhead?” Stefan said. It was too much of a wall to be a thunderhead. “We better get back.”
They hustled back to their boat, untied and hopped in, and headed down the middle of the channel that split the Bronx. The wind was in their face and they slapped over wave after wave, knocking sheets of water left and right as they crashed down onto the waves’ back sides. They ducked down to give the boat a lower profile. Wind and waves both came out of the south, so they could head straight into them. That was lucky, as the tops of the waves were now tumbling forward in the wind, creating major whitecaps. It would have been difficult or impossible to run sideways across waves as high and broken as these. Even heading straight into them was making the boat bounce up hard as it crashed into the white water, and they both moved to the back of the boat and sat on each side of the tiller, watching anxiously as the short white walls came rushing at them and the boat made its improbable tilt and lift. The slushy roar was so loud they had to shout in each other’s ears to be heard. The uptilt in the bow that was built into every zodiac’s design proved their salvation time after time, but even so, waves only a few feet higher would certainly rush right over the bow onto them, or so it seemed.
Still, buoyancy was a marvelous thing, and for now they shot up over each wave in turn. And surely the waves couldn’t get much bigger, not here in the Harlem River anyway, where they had no fetch to speak of. The boys could hardly believe they were as big as they were, nor that the wind had gotten so strong so fast. Well, summer storms happened. And now they were seeing that the waves did have a bit of fetch, coming up the East River and curving into the Harlem. They were really bouncing hard.
“We should have waited it out!” Stefan shouted as one particularly big white wall tilted them almost vertically before it passed under them, and the bow then flopped down so hard they had to hold on to avoid being tossed forward.
“We can make it.”
“Maybe we should turn around.”
“I don’t know if the stern would rise as well as the bow.”
Stefan didn’t reply, but it was true.
“Maybe we should take our wristpad with us next time.”
“Maybe. We’d only ruin it though.”
“Look at that one coming!”
“I know.”
“Maybe we have to turn!”
“Maybe so. The boat will stay floating even if it’s filled with water, we know that.”
“Will the motor keep running if it gets wet?”
“I think so. Remember that time?”
“No.”
“It did one time.”
The next big wave shoved them up and back until they were vertical, and they both instinctively threw themselves forward against the bottom to help knock the boat forward. Even so they hung there upright for a long sweeping moment, hoping that the wave wouldn’t capsize them backward and dump them in the roil. Instead the boat flopped forward again and slid fast down the back side of the wave. But more were coming, big white walls, and the wind was howling.
“Okay, maybe we should come about. We don’t want to capsize.”
“No.”
“Okay, so…”
Roberto was staring ahead, round-eyed. Seeing his look, Stefan grew afraid. All the waves were about the same distance apart, just as always with waves. They had seven or eight seconds between each impact. It wasn’t a lot of time to turn around, but they couldn’t afford to get caught crossways.