From that moment forward, Farmingdale began to follow Eddie—if one man could be said to “follow” another in their constrained circumstances. Wherever Eddie was, the courtly, snowy-haired second mate was directly beside him. It was a hostile pursuit—a surveillance—beneath which Eddie sensed Farmingdale’s fear that Eddie might turn on him and persuade others to do the same. The prospect, which hadn’t occurred to him before, began to tempt him.
That afternoon, he cut off the dangling end of his leather belt and gave it to Sparks, who had been using a rag to bait the lifeboat’s hook and line. With the leather as bait, Sparks managed to hook a small tuna just before sundown. Eddie helped him wrestle the fish alongside the lifeboat, and Bogues drove his hunting knife into its heart. Eddie leaped overboard and helped to get a line around its tail, and they dragged the fish over the gunwale onto the boat. Farmingdale sliced it into portions, which they distributed using a method whereby a man with his back turned chose the recipient of each. There was enough for each man to have two large portions, and the liquid inside the fish quenched thirst as well as hunger. Afterward, the distrust among them seemed to melt away. They lit the kerosene lamp and talked into the night about what they would do after the war. When everyone had fallen into a sleepy, sated silence, the bosun touched Eddie’s bicep, gestured at the fish carcass lying on a thwart, and spoke so softly that no one else heard. Eddie doubted it himself a moment later.
“Good,” the bosun said.
*
After three more days, windless except for the cruel, teasing zephyrs, hunger and thirst returned with redoubled viciousness. They pulled buttons from their clothing and sucked them to waken their saliva. Eddie’s tongue lay in his mouth like shoe leather; he would have liked to cut it out. On day six without wind, Hummel and Addison gulped seawater with such luxuriant bliss that Eddie had to shout at the others not to do the same. By evening both men were hallucinating, and Hummel was dead the following morning, his stomach distended. When they’d rolled him into the sea, Addison informed Eddie that Hummel had left him his rations, as a last will and testament. When Eddie replied that it was not in Hummel’s power to do so, Addison came at him with fists raised. Farmingdale was beside Eddie, as usual, but he did nothing to fend off Addison; it was the gunners who held him back. He was dead by evening. Before moving onto the raft to sleep (Farmingdale following to snore at his side), Eddie made another notch in the log of days he was keeping on the lifeboat thwart, with a special mark for each man who had died.
On the seventh day of no wind—tenth overall—Eddie lay on the raft at sunset, savoring the fragment of relief between the agony of heat and the agony of cold. He felt wind on his cheek for several seconds before the sensation registered, and even then he assumed it was another dream of wind. For days they’d moved only just enough to keep the kinks out of their knees, and all of them were slow to react. But this was unmistakably wind—a squall that had appeared so suddenly that the sluggish lookouts failed to note it. There was a collective shout of jubilation. On the lifeboat, Pugh and others pulled in the sea anchor and began preparing the sail. Already the sea was growing choppy. Bogues leaped back onto the boat and began seizing other men’s hands to pull them from the raft so it could be released. As Roger was pushing off from raft to boat, the painter connecting them snapped, and he dropped into the sea, smacking his face on the lifeboat’s gunwale as he fell. Bogues lowered an oar for the cadet to grab, but Roger seemed to panic, and flailed back toward the raft. Eddie jumped in and lifted him onto it. The cadet’s face was a garish white, cut along one cheekbone.
The raft, meanwhile, was being blown away from the boat with remarkable speed—it hadn’t any draft. Bogues tried to toss Eddie another line, but it kept falling short. They gave up when a downpour began. Farmingdale appeared immobilized. Eddie ordered the men still on the raft to swim to the boat in pairs, so those on board would have time to pull them in. To his surprise, he saw the bosun helping to lift swimmers from the waves, his first activity since they’d rescued him.
Farmingdale refused to swim. Eddie meant to go last with Roger, who lay on the raft with eyes closed, bleeding from the gash on his face. “All right, Second. I guess you’ll bring up the rear,” Eddie told him when the rest had gone. To Roger he said, “You needn’t swim, but you must help me swim. Can you?”
The cadet nodded. The distance between boat and raft was only fifty feet but widening by the second. As Eddie was about to lower himself into the rain-pocked water, Farmingdale seized his shoulders and yanked him backward into the middle of the raft. He was begging incoherently, not in his right mind. Eddie slapped his face hard to bring him around. “You can swim, Second. What’s the matter with you?” he shouted.
Farmingdale punched Eddie in the jaw, and they began to struggle on their knees, wrestling on the raft’s slick latticework in the driving rain. Eddie felt the raft skidding over waves like a child’s balsa boat. Each time he managed to glimpse the lifeboat, it was farther away. He sensed the anxious gazes of the men on board—Sparks, Wyckoff, the bosun—a skein of connection so alive that it seemed to collapse the distance between them and light the falling dark.