“You’d row. You would row, if you were stuck on a lifeboat and the sun was going down, with no rescue in sight? You would row. That’s your plan?”
“I guess I’d have to figure something out.”
“Figure what out? What is there to figure out? How to row to another continent?”
“Jesus, Senator. I’m never going to be lost at sea in a lifeboat. I promise you.”
“Once you’re in a shipwreck,” the Senator said, “you will be rescued only by chance-if you are rescued at all. And remember, Ruthie, most shipwreck survivors are injured. It’s not as if they jumped off the edge of a boat in calm water for a little swim. Most shipwreck survivors have broken legs or ghastly cuts or burns. And what do you think it is that kills you in the end?”
Ruth knew the answer. “Exposure?” she guessed wrongly, just to keep the conversation going.
“No.”
“Sharks?”
“No. Lack of water. Thirst.”
“Is that right?” Ruth asked politely.
But now the subject of sharks had arrived, the Senator paused. Finally he said, “In the tropics, the sharks come right up into the boat. They bring their snouts into the boat, like dogs sniffing around. But barracudas are worse. Let’s say you’ve been wrecked. You’re clinging to a piece of wreckage. A barracuda comes over and sinks his teeth into you. You can rip him off, Ruthie, but his head will stay attached to you. Like a snapping turtle, Ruthie. A barracuda will hold on to you long after he’s dead. That’s right.”
“I don’t worry about barracudas too much around here, Senator. And I don’t think you should worry about barracudas, either.”
“Well, how about your bluefish, then? You don’t have to be in the tropics for bluefish, Ruthie. We’ve got packs of bluefish right out there.” Senator Simon Addams waved past the mudflats and Webster, pointing to the open Atlantic. “And bluefish hunt in packs, like wolves. And stingrays! Shipwreck survivors have said that giant rays came right up under their boat and spent the whole day there, hovering. They used to call them blanket fish. You could find rays out there bigger than your little lifeboat. They ripple along under your boat like the shadow of death.”
“That’s very vivid, Senator. Well done.”
The Senator asked, “What kind of sandwich is that, Ruthie?”
“Ham salad. Want half?”
“No, no. You need it.”
“You can have a bite.”
“What’s on there? Mustard?”
“Why don’t you have a bite, Senator?”
“No, no. You need it. I’ll tell you another thing. People lose their minds in a lifeboat. They lose their ideas about time. They might be out there in an open boat for twenty days. Then they get rescued, and they’re surprised to find that they can’t walk. Their feet are rotting from waterbite, and they have open sores from sitting in pools of saltwater; they have injuries from the wreck and burns from the sun; and they’re surprised to find, Ruthie, that they can’t walk. They never have any understanding of their situation.”
“Delirium.”
“That’s right. Delirium. Exactly. Some men in a lifeboat get a condition called ‘shared delirium.’ Let’s say there are two men in a boat. They both lose their minds the same way. One man says, ‘I’m going over to the tavern for a beer,’ and steps over the side and drowns. The second man says, ‘I’ll join you, Ed,’ and then he steps over the side and drowns, too.”
“With the sharks lurking.”
“And the bluefish. And here’s another common shared delusion, Ruthie. Say there are only two men in a lifeboat. When they do get rescued, they’ll both swear that there was a third man with them the whole time. They’ll say, ‘Where’s my friend?’ And the rescuers will tell them, ‘Your friend is in the bed right next to you. He’s safe.’ And the men will say, ‘No! Where’s my other friend? Where’s the other man?’ But there never was any other man. They won’t believe this. For the rest of their lives they’ll wonder: Where’s the other man?”
Ruth Thomas handed the Senator half of her sandwich, and he ate it quickly.
“In the Arctic, of course, they die from the cold,” he continued.
“Of course.”
“They fall asleep. People who fall asleep in lifeboats never wake up.”
“Of course they don’t.”
Other days, they talked about mapmaking. The Senator was a big fan of Ptolemy. He bragged about Ptolemy as if Ptolemy were his gifted son.
“Nobody altered Ptolemy’s maps until 1511!” he’d say proudly. “Now that’s quite a run, Ruth. Thirteen hundred years, that guy was the expert! Not bad, Ruth. Not bad at all.”
Another favorite topic of the Senator’s was the shipwreck of the Victoria and the Camperdown. This one came up time after time. It didn’t need a particular trigger. One Saturday afternoon in the middle of June, for instance, Ruth was telling the Senator about how much she’d hated the graduation ceremony at her school, and the Senator said, “Remember the wreck of the Victoria and the Camperdown, Ruthie!”
“OK,” Ruth said, agreeably, “if you insist.”
And Ruth Thomas did remember the wreck of the Victoria and the Camperdown, because the Senator had been telling her about the wreck of the Victoria and the Camperdown since she was a toddler. This wreck was even more disturbing for him than the Titanic.
The Victoria and the Camperdown were the flagships of the mighty British Navy. In 1893, they collided with each other in open daylight on calm seas because a commander issued a foolish order during maneuvers. The wreck agitated the Senator so much because it had occurred on a day when no boat should have sunk, and because the sailors were the finest in the world. Even the boats were the finest in the world, and the officers were the brightest in the British Navy, but the boats went down. The Victoria and the Camperdown collided because the fine officers-fully knowing that the order they had received was a foolish one-followed it out of a sense of duty and died for it. The Victoria and the Camperdown proved that anything can happen on the sea. No matter how calm the weather, no matter how skilled the crew, a person in a boat was never safe.
In the hours after the collision of the Victoria and the Camperdown, as the Senator had been telling Ruth Thomas for years, the sea was filled with drowning men. The propellers of the sinking ship chewed through the men horribly. They were chopped to pieces, he had always emphasized.
“They were chopped to pieces, Ruthie,” the Senator said.
She didn’t see how this related to her story about graduation, but she let it go.
“I know, Senator,” she said. “I know.”
The next week, back at Potter Beach, Ruth and the Senator got to talking again about shipwrecks.
“What about the Margaret B. Rouss?” Ruth asked, after the Senator had been quiet for a long time. “That shipwreck ended pretty well for everyone.”
She offered up this ship’s name carefully. Sometimes the name Margaret B. Rouss would calm the Senator down, but sometimes it would agitate him.
“Jesus Christ, Ruthie!” he exploded. “Jesus Christ!”
This time it agitated him.
“The Margaret B. Rouss was filled with lumber, and it took forever to sink! You know that, Ruthie. Jesus Christ! You know it was an exception. You know it’s not usually that easy to be shipwrecked. And I’ll tell you another thing. It is not pleasant to be torpedoed under any conditions, with any cargo, no matter what happened to the crew of the goddamn Margaret B. Rouss.”