The Thick of Things

Linda’s been exasperated with Dad all day. She’d originally had a date to catch Empire Strikes Back at the Northpoint with her friends. The movie had just come out, and her girls were already bragging about what they’d had to trade for the tickets.

But Dad’s been drinking more and more since Mom left, and he’d begged his only child to come out fishing on the boat with him like when she was little. Linda had relented, though she’d long since fallen out of love with tormenting innocent sea creatures. She’d never admit how good it felt to see Dad smile when she’d agreed.

That day they’d anchored off Candlestick, and the pipe organ and roar of the day-game crowd had been intermittent backdrop. She hadn’t so much as pretended to bait a hook, and Dad had mainly devoted himself to drinkage. She supposes it had been more a pleasure cruise than anything else, even if neither of them evidenced said pleasure.

It’s late afternoon. Dad’s soused, she’s sunburnt and tired, and they’re on their way back to Berkeley Marina where they’re berthed. Dad’s passed out below, Linda’s at the helm, and they’re mid-way toward the East Bay shore. Brisk following breeze out of the southwest, maybe 15 knots, just enough to blow up some whitecaps. The engine’s running well enough, considering how much duct tape and baling wire held it together.

Behind them, arrogant San Francisco arcs and looms atop its myriad Hills, making a spiffy display. A few miles north on their port side, the Bay Bridge span cuts across the water, bisected midway by Treasure Island’s wart-like bulk. Distant to starboard, the San Rafael Bridge obscures points southward, but who cared about South Bay anyways?

At varying distances Linda sees other cabin cruisers and fishing boats; a couple yachts with spinnaker sails ballooned; a top-heavy container ship getting piloted out from Port of Oakland toward the Golden Gate and destinations unknown.

Dad materializes at the hatch leading from below. He takes a swill from his bottle, and pops off with the mantra he’s been spouting more and more lately: “You know I still love your Mom, right?”

Stop being so pathetic, Linda wants to shout. Dad lunged for the phone anytime Mom called. He was Mom’s slave though they were no longer man and wife. Hell, he’d even helped Mom move when she’d bailed.

“That’s peculiar,” Dad says, squinting at something to port.

Linda follows his gaze: A jet airliner in the middle distance is seemingly aimed their way. Leastways all Linda sees of it is the circular cross section of the fuselage with wings jutting to each side, engines dangling like fruit. It’s several miles distant but flying low, heading directly at them and closing.

Dad grunts. “That crew’s gotta be way off their flight plan. They’ll catch hell when they land.”

He’s in the middle of another swill when one of the jet’s engines bursts in a fire-work display of pyrotechnics. The engine shears off and commences a slow tumbling arc descending toward their boat, dead on and growing ever larger. Smoke and sputtering flames emit from the remaining engine, ceasing as its turbine strangles into uselessness. The sound of the initial explosion reaches them, several seconds after.

“Dead stick,” Dad says. “Them boys may as well be trying to pilot a brick.” His easy tone is less than convincing, as always.

The jet yaws around a bit, then seems to stand on its tail as the nose pulls up. It grows steadily larger as if a hawk silently stooping upon them, blocking the sun like a dark crucifix.

“It’s coming right at us Dad,” Linda says, louder than she’d intended. The reek of whiskey off Dad is strong enough to make her pause before throwing up her hands and relinquishing the wheel. She knows she’s safer with her Dad at the controls, drunk or not.

Dad takes the helm, the sodden maestro approaching his podium. He aims their bow at the oncoming plane. His hand is frozen on the throttle as he squints, seemingly blasé, toward their approaching destruction. The moment curdles in the back of Linda’s throat, too large to swallow. Just as it seems the plane’s belly is about to smear them into the water, Dad’s eyes flicker from side to side and he sets the throttle to full, angling starboard.

Day turns to night for a millisecond as the airliner flicks past above. The jet’s moving at least 200 MPH as it slices overhead. The plane snaps off the boat’s running light mast, which cartwheels into their wake with the velocity of a circus acrobat on an overdose of stimulants.

Linda swears she could reach up and touch the jet as it squeaks past overhead, though she’s sure it would snatch off her hand if she managed to do so. The tumbling jet engine splashes down less than ten yards to port, raising a monstrous geyser.

When the airliner bellyflops onto the water only yards behind the boat, it makes a noise Linda is never able to describe; a sound unlike anything else she’s ever to hear. It’s most like God pounding a temple gong the size of Berkeley directly under the boat.

She could feel the impact as well, rippling up through the hull and making the entire boat frame cry out with crackles and snaps as hydrostatic shock buffets their craft. The vibration makes her teeth clatter, hard enough she tastes blood and realizes she’s broken a tooth. Linda envisions the beater boat shuddering into a cloud of toothpicks with her and Dad suspended lifeless in the brine amidst the wreckage. But the gimcrack old cabin cruiser holds.

The following impact swell is vertically steep, and immediate. It kicks up their boat’s stern so that they’re standing on their nose with the following waters threatening to push them ass over teakettle.

Linda is sure they’ll either break deep and plummet like a rocket to the yucky bottom, or else capsize and go belly up. She clutches the railing as if that will help any.

Dad spins the wheel. The boat scoots hard to the right and levels out, like it’s nothing at all: angled off the face of the bulging killer wave like a world class surfer dueling a maverick curler.

Dad crows triumph but his voice is brassy: “Dirty Boats! On time, on target, never quit!”

They outrun the swell and hit level water. Their stern is too low and they both whip necks to look behind them, simultaneous as two peas in a pod. The back deck is badly awash.

“Take the helm,” Dad says. He grabs the bailing bucket and goes to town slinging water. “Circle back little girl. We’re going in.”

Linda can’t believe her ears. “There’s too much chop. If we bump hard enough it’ll peel off the hull and drag us down.”

Dad gets irate, which is outstanding. These days, that’s pretty much the only time he gets things done. “Wait until the seas smooth out? Maybe leave and come back a few hours from now? None of those folks can walk on water.”

Linda turns the boat about and circles warily wide back toward the jet. By the time she’s on final approach, Dad’s finished bailing and joins her at the flying bridge.

“Throttle back baby,” Dad says, and she cuts it to Half. Now that their rate of approach is a bit statelier, father and daughter have a clearer view of circumstances on the jet:

The airliner’s broadside to prevailing seas and wallowing sloppily. The plane’s stern hunches low in the water, as if the jet’s a wormy mutt fixing to scoot its bottom along a living room rug. The emergency exit leads to a dim interior, with acrid smoke billowing forth. The windows toward the rear of the fuselage are filled with sullen flickering flames.

Linda can’t see the other side of the plane but there are already a bunch of people on this wing, with more crawling or gimping out to join them. Most of the passengers are bloody, many with clothes in rags; several sport burns of varying severity. The small crowd pulses and wavers as if an amorphous blob of a creature, rather than a group of individuals.

Linda sees a few people fall off the wing and disappear beneath the waves without resurfacing. She refuses to look at any of the bodies bobbing around face down in the water.

As the boat reaches up-close-and-personal range, suitcases and dead fish swirl in the chop, bouncing off their hull. Hands yearn toward them from the people on the wing, like in a zombie movie. An unseen baby is shrieking somewhere in the depths of the crowd, but the survivors are otherwise eerily silent. The reek of jet fuel, smoke, and terror overlays all.

More than the stench, it’s these people’s eyes that bug Linda: some glow bright with the kind of gleam suggesting they’d do whatever they had to, to survive. Many were flat and dull: lights on, nobody home. All these eyes had something in common though; some glint or dull realization which Linda hopes she will never have to see again.

Linda twitches the bow over and slides in sideways, parallel to the wing. She loses herself in keeping the boat pointed head-on into the swells while people come aboard with Dad’s assistance. She continually gooses the throttle and massages the wheel like a surgeon so as not to grind against the wing.

The plane resembles a slumbering dragon attempting to look harmless, looming over them as it wallows in the swells. Linda is not fooled: She avoids bumping the plane as assiduously as if the boat were her hand and the plane an unpredictable bitey old dog.

Linda knows this is the best boat driving she will ever do. Still, she envisions pulping somebody down between the boat and the wing, knowing she’d feel it through the hull just like when she ran over that cat in her MG last year. And what if it’s Dad she kills?

Linda watches Dad dragging people off the airliner’s wing and into their boat to join the bloody people in the stern. She’s embarrassed that Dad’s weeping as he works, just like whenever he drank in the night staring at Mom’s picture. She’s glad none of her friends are there to see it. Doubly glad that Mom is not around.

Some of the passengers manage to semi-leap, grabbing Dad’s hand to be swung around to the deck. Others pretty much topple aboard, a couple of them face planting to lay motionless. Following survivors do their best not to land on the bodies, with varying degrees of success.

One woman wavers her way to the edge of the wing, other survivors pulling away as if repelled by the dreaming eyes in her haggard blackened face. The woman extends a charred arm toward Dad, who grasps her hand and makes to pull her aboard.

The burned skin peels off her arm in one piece like a formal glove, leaving an almost skeletal crimson limb resembling a tree branch in winter, painted red. The woman doesn’t seem to notice her missing hide. Dad seats the woman under the stern railing and hands the woman her sloughed arm skin, in what’s almost a gallant gesture.

They have a dozen extra passengers aboard the tiny boat, which is way pushing capacity. Linda has a crazy foreboding they might get a ticket from Harbor Patrol for insufficient life jackets.

She catches herself, repressing her trademark snarly laugh. Although she doesn’t know it yet, that laugh inspires every one of her classmates to an instant crush the first time they heard it.

The back of the jet is hella lower in the water now, and Linda’s concerned it’s going to slide butt-first beneath the waves at any moment. If it starts actively sinking, she’s decided to instantly pull away at full speed without consulting Dad. No way is she going to let them get sucked under with it, survivors or no.

More passengers are trying to slop around Dad and scrabble their ways aboard. Dad’s forced to stiff arm a couple onto their butts to stop them. “No more! We’ll swamp if any more come aboard!”

Dad points past the crowd, to where another cabin cruiser is grinding up against the trailing aileron of the wing. “Behind you! Another boat!”

As the more responsive survivors turn to look, Dad twirls his finger and Linda lets the bow fall away, setting the throttle to full as soon as they were semi-clear. She’s so relieved to be leaving that she feels a pang of guilt. This whole loading operation has lasted less than ten or fifteen seconds, tops.

The boat is way low in the water from the extra passengers. Dad checks the stern to make sure they’re not going to swamp again, and then joins Linda on the flying bridge.

He grabs his whiskey bottle as if to take another swig to maintain his (by now) haggard buzz. Instead he tosses the half-full liquor bottle over his shoulder to bob away in their wake. He looks to Linda as if for response; she pretends not to have noticed.

His hands obviously itch to take over the wheel, but he looks totally spent. After a moment Dad rests his hand on her shoulder and gives it a squeeze. His grip is tired, and she realizes he’s getting older.

“Take us in little girl,” he says all quiet, his breath still resembling a distillery. He turns away to tend to their passengers, pasting on his trademark fake smile. And Linda remembers with a jolt just how much she loves him.

Linda steals a look over her shoulder at the receding jet, floundering in the swells and already lower in the water than she remembers. Even though the plane is sinking, three other small craft are battened on like remoras and taking passengers while half a dozen more craft of various sizes await their turn. She can’t help critiquing their form, bouncing around against the wing like that, as if they wanted to founder.

Sure enough two of the boats collide with each other, creating a noise like a roomful of splintering furniture. Despite the cries of dismay pursuing them across the water, Linda can’t restrain a smile: They were a bunch of ‘Also Rans;’ her and Dad are A-Number-One!

The waters around the jet have already become a crowded dance floor full of incoming boats. Linda’s forced to alter course numerous times to avoid collisions with other craft.

Linda wonders if all this dodging and weaving and near misses is what it feels like to be in one of those big Star Wars space battles. She wonders what her friends will think when they find out.

When she’s brawled the boat clear of the initial scrum, she scans for their best landing. Pier 52 Boat Launch, toward Mission Bay on the Peninsula, is the nearest landing from here. The flashing lights of emergency vehicles are already congregating there so she lays course in that direction.

With destination set and no imminent collisions, Linda allows her focus to descend to middle distance. What looks like every boat in the San Francisco Bay basin is heading their way at flank speed. Horns and sirens from all directions sound, like a howling mob. A Coast Guard cutter bulls its way around the end of Island Alameda, horn whooping. At least a dozen helicopters are converging on them.

She sneaks another glance at Dad. He’s squatting next to the woman with the skinless arm, reaching out to touch her awkwardly.

The enormity of the past couple minutes slams down upon Linda, as if awe possessed physical weight. She shakes like a leaf in delayed reaction.

She envisions being an old lady on her deathbed surrounded by multiple generations of loved ones, warming her hands on this crazy memory as she faces her own personal darkness.

No, no, young Linda thinks. I’ve still time.

Her hands firm up on the wheel again as she brings them home, continuing to weigh variables and probabilities as always:

Yes, she thinks. Dad’s going to dial Mom as soon as he can snag a pay phone. Linda knows this like she knows the sun will come up tomorrow.

Linda pictures Dad standing sheepish at the phone, trying to convince Mom he’s regained some sense of pride in his own humanity. Linda imagines the words Dad will say to his ex-wife, attempting to describe what it had been like to be in the thick of things, in the middle of it all with their daughter.

Will Mom hear anything Dad stammers? Linda hasn’t a clue.