“You’re right. We should listen to your music. What do you want to hear?”
Zack turns to him and shakes his head. “I’m just kidding, Dad. You know I don’t care about music.”
Don wonders if Zack cares about anything. He was apathetic when he was at home with his girlfriend, surrounded by friends. Here on the boat it seems to be even worse.
“Maybe we should start playing Salsa or music like that,” Don says. “I was thinking we could eventually dock in Rio. You could go dancing with some Brazilian girls.” He smiles, hoping it doesn’t seem forced.
Zack looks at his phone and then shakes his head. “Play whatever you like, Dad.”
“Well, if Salsa dancing isn’t your thing, what else would you like to do when we get back to civilization? Where would you like to live? That kind of thing.” When Zack doesn’t reply, Don adds, “It’s good to think about the future.”
“I’ll think about it when I have one.” Zack turns away and looks toward the horizon, the sun is bright, and the sky is blue.
They are South of the Sargasso Sea and approaching Barbados, searching for better fishing. The trouble is that after the asteroid impact, South American countries had set up heavily armed coast guards to keep undocumented refugees out. The orders were shoot to kill, and the only thing that saved Don on a few occasions was that the patrol boats were relatively small and stayed near the coast. He and Zack had been fired upon several times, and each time Don turned back out to the Atlantic and pursuit ended quickly.
Zack grabs the binoculars from the shelf under the dash and pulls them up to his eyes. His finger adjusts the focus. “Trouble.”
Don takes the binoculars from his son, and focuses on the horizon. It’s a small boat approaching fast. “Shit.” Don doesn’t need a closer look to know that it’s a performance speedboat. The rich kids in the fast boats were the worst. Heavily armed, they weren’t guarding the coast so much as hunting Americans. “What’s it doing this far out?” Don mutters as he hands the binoculars to Zack and adjusts the tack for them to sail dead East and back out to open ocean. “Speedboat,” Zack notes from behind the binoculars, “Two or three on board. Hard to tell with them bouncing over the waves.”
Don nods. “Reef the sails. We can’t outrun them, so I’ll have to scare them.”
“Why don’t I close haul, and beat us East?”
“No. We can’t outrun them. Just keep her steady.”
Zack slams his fist on his thigh. “If we make progress they may just leave. If we just float here we’re sitting ducks!” Before Don can reply, he adds, “Wait, you don’t think I can beat this, do you?”
Don stands up, and pauses before replying. He had been waiting weeks for his son to express any hope, and here it is, only expressed through desperation. He grabs Zack’s arm. “Listen. I know you can sail this boat, but I need us to appear like we’re not afraid. So just keep us steady. If it doesn’t work, you’ll know, and I trust you that you can beat us East.”
Zack nods, lips pursed. Don grabs the rifle and heads out to the stern.
The wind is strong, and the sea is choppy, but soon the boat is floating in relative calm. Zack is doing a good job working the sail. Supporting himself against the transom, Don lifts the rifle and hopes that the rich kids don’t expect them to be armed. Surprise is what he needs.
The yacht crests a wave, and the pursuing boat is much closer than he had expected. Damn, that’s a fast boat. There are three young men sitting behind a glass windshield. The boat drops over a crest, and Don thinks he can see weapons in the hands of two of them.
Wrapping the sling around his forearm, Don lifts the rifle and waits for a clear shot. He is good with a rifle, having spent nearly every summer hunting in South Texas with his grandfather. He is fairly certain he could take out at least one of the men before they consider the sailboat a threat.
Another crest, and he has his shot. The young men are close enough together that hitting one of them was possible even if his aim was off to the left or right.
Sudden inspiration hits, and Don fires to the right of the three men, shattering the windshield but not hitting anyone. Hitting the wide windshield is not only an easier shot, he hopes that the reality of shattered glass in their faces from an armed opponent would scare them without inciting any desire for revenge, the kind of revenge that would burn if he had killed one of them.
Don peers down the barrel, thankful for his Marksmanship merit badge. He looks for the boat. It takes a moment, and there it is. It breaks starboard and turns away from them.
Don stands, slings the rifle over his shoulder, and yells back to the cabin. “Time to close haul, Zack!”
As he steps down into the cabin, Zack asks, “Did you shoot one? They peeled off and turned away.”
Collapsing onto the padded bench, Don lets out a deep breath and lets his son work the controls. “Don’t let up. You’re doing good. We need to get out of here.”
Zack glances over his shoulder at his dad. “So you killed one?” His voice is shaky, and Don fears it’s from excitement.
“No,” he says. “Enough people have died already.”
Don is thirty-five. There are no longer bikini-clad women dancing in his dream. He had married and divorced Maria by then. He doesn’t know what went wrong, but it doesn’t matter — his dream has no room for the instability of relationships.
He traded the sway of tanned bodies on the beach for the gentle rocking of the Southern Cross, moored in a virgin bay, white sand nearly surrounding the boat. The water is so clear he can see manta rays gliding along the seabed.
With age comes comfortable familiarity. The following no longer changes: He gets up early and watches the Milky Way slowly fade from the sky as he sits at the bow of the boat. The sun climbs slowly in the distance, spreading a glittering carpet of diamonds across the caps of tiny waves. His son is there, asleep below.
Don closes his eyes and smells the salt water and listens as jazz music harmonizes with the sound of gulls, canvas sails, and lapping waves.
The Milky Way is gone, buried under a shroud of gray ash. Still, Don spends each morning on the deck of the Southern Cross hoping to catch the sunrise. He glances at his watch. Daybreak was thirty minutes earlier, and the horizon is charcoal rather than black. He squints, but there is no sun. The only difference between day and night is the shade of the oppressive gray draped from horizon to horizon. Shards of black glass surround the boat, an angry sea that hasn’t been calm or blue in months. He rubs his face with his right hand and stands up, bracing himself against chaotic waves. He heads below deck to wake up Zack. It’s another day. One no brighter, no clearer, no better than the one before.
The first storm comes when the asteroid hits. It’s as if the Earth shudders in pain. As the harsh winds blow and the seas thrash, Don is convinced that the yacht will be dashed to pieces. But after hours of being hurled up, down, and sideways, the seas quiet, and he and Zack nurse their cuts and bruises and take stock of the damage.
The winds blew out the windows, which they repair with plywood pried up from the bilge flooring, and Don repairs the jib without much difficulty. The biggest loss was their rainwater-catching basin, which was ripped free and blown out to sea. They replace it with one of their plastic storage bins.
They are better prepared for the next few storms, but the two of them emerge from each one injured and bruised, the boat battered. The worst is when Don dislocates his shoulder. He does his best not to scare Zack, but he is wracked with pain for hours after a loose flogging line rips his arm out of its socket, with each crashing wave grinding his dislocated arm against the surrounding bone.