Eddie managed to work his bowie knife from his pocket, intending to cut Farmingdale’s throat. The second mate wrested the knife from his hand and flung it into the sea. Then he hefted his bulk on top of Eddie, immobilizing him so Eddie saw nothing, felt nothing but the sodden, foul-smelling mass of the larger man pushing him down. Roger roused himself and tried to pull Farmingdale off. When at last the second mate rolled away with a groan, Eddie could hardly see the lifeboat. He began to weep, sobs of rage and frustration at the knowledge that his compatriots were lost to him; that the log of days—his record of incidents and occurrences—was lost, too. He threw back his head and opened his mouth, letting rain wet his throat for several minutes. Then he looked again. He could still see the lifeboat—see, or thought he saw, the men’s eyes fixed upon him. Eddie told himself that the boat was reachable. He could swim that far, even in the confused sea—perhaps even carrying Roger. It was possible. But the very passage of this thought through his mind seemed to awaken the second mate’s nervous attention, his horror of being left behind. Eddie understood then that his only hope was to dive in alone, faster than Farmingdale could catch him. He would have to leave the cadet. No one would question such a move; it was a matter of survival. But his mind veered away. He couldn’t leave Roger to Farmingdale.
As he strained to see through the dark, Eddie noticed what appeared to be a swimmer. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. No. Yes. A lone head bobbing among the swells like a cork. Bogues? Who else would have the strength and guts to do it? And why? Roger noticed, too, stared and pointed as the shape grew closer. When at last the swimmer reached the raft, Eddie was stunned to see that it was the bosun. He and Roger pulled him aboard. The bosun spent a moment recovering himself and then rose to his feet, somehow managing to balance on the pitching raft. He unhooked a lifeboat ax attached to his belt by a lanyard, lifted it over his head, and brought the ax down through Farmingdale’s skull, which cleaved and broke like a dropped plate, spilling brains and blood on the raft’s timbers. The bosun took Farmingdale’s pocketknife from his belt and shoved his body over the side of the raft, where it disappeared into the waves. A swell washed away the pulpy smears.
All of this transpired in under a minute. Eddie would have thought it a hallucination except for the fact—the immeasurable relief—that Farmingdale was no longer with them on the raft. Within an hour, the rain had stopped and it was entirely dark, the sky clear and moonless. In the distance Eddie saw a smudge of light: the lifeboat’s lantern. The raft hadn’t oars, nor any way to signal to the boat. They had stripped it of everything of value: food, water, compass, anything else that might have helped to keep a man alive.
It had rained hard and long enough that the water in their clothing was only brackish. They squeezed every drop into each other’s mouths and tried to sleep. Eddie woke often, awaiting first light in hopes of spotting the lifeboat. When dawn came at last, the boat was not in sight. They stared at the empty ocean. Eddie was sick with fright but did his best to behave as if their dire circumstances were merely a setback.
The bosun touched his throat and shook his head miserably.
“I know,” Eddie said. “I miss those beautiful sentences.”
The bosun cocked his head, indicating disbelief.
“I mean it,” Eddie said. “Now that they’re gone, I want them back.”
The bosun gestured at himself. “Luke.”
“No. To me you’re the same bosun you ever were. Isn’t that right, Roger?” But Roger just stared at the sea.
The bosun opened the rations hold and found the boat cover stuffed inside it; they had been using it for a sun shield the day before. He pulled the broken painter from the water and began working the two together to some purpose.
“He’s making a sea anchor,” Eddie explained to Roger, trying to engage the cadet. His cheek had swelled grotesquely, shutting his right eye. The wound was deep and red. “We’re better off fixing ourselves to the current,” Eddie went on. “Until there’s a wind in our favor, it’s more likely to bring us to land. Good thinking, Bosun.”
The bosun cut him with a sharp, familiar glance that roused in Eddie a cavalcade of words: “I know, it’s an outrage that an ignoramus like me should dare to compliment a vastly superior seaman like yourself, Bosun, especially on your thoughts, for God’s sake, but you’re speaking pig latin over there, so I’ve no choice but to try to read your mind—vastly unequal to that task though I surely am.”
The bosun gawked at him. Even Roger looked up. Never in Eddie’s life had he spoken this way; he felt as if the words were being routed from the bosun’s mind directly through his own throat. He loved the tumbling rush of language coming easily, the unfamiliar pleasure of sheer utterance.
The bosun grinned for the first time since they’d pulled him from the sea. Eddie had always felt too much the victim of that smile to acknowledge the crescent beauty of its perfect white teeth.
He used Farmingdale’s knife to begin a new log of days on the raft’s edge. He began at day one, for already their time aboard the lifeboat seemed unreal and full of ghosts. In their new life, the wind was high, the water heavy and black. There was no buffer from the elements—wind, sun, and rain groped and clawed them at will. The stars and moon seemed proximate and unguarded, like bits of shell or sparkling rock that Eddie could crawl among when he chose. They saw night rainbows. By day, Eddie and the bosun scanned the horizon for ships and for their own lost lifeboat. On the second day, two flying fish landed on the raft, which the three of them shared, sucking every fiber of meat from the soft bones, then grinding the bones between their teeth. On the third day, another squall eased their thirst, but they had nothing in which to store the rain.
Since he’d hit his head on the lifeboat, Roger had grown dim and confused. The eye on the injured side of his face remained shut, and the swelling increased. Eddie tore off a strip of his shirt, soaked it in seawater, and pressed it to the wound. There was nothing more he could do. The gash began to fester, its red aureole spreading over more of Roger’s face. At night he shivered wretchedly, and Eddie and the bosun locked their arms around him from both sides to try to warm him. Each sunset, Eddie made another notch in the edge of the raft: four days; five days. Roger whispered about his Welsh corgi pup; about the eighteen dollars he’d saved from his paper route; about a girl named Annabelle whose breast he’d touched through her Easter sweater. He called for his mother. Eddie pressed his parched lips to the boy’s face and whispered, “We love you, my darling; everything will be fine.” He would do anything to bring the boy peace. He’d witnessed such love for a child somewhere, but he couldn’t recall where or when.
On the sixth night, Roger lay livid with fever, huffing shallow, frantic breaths. Eddie and the bosun twined their arms around him from both sides. At last the boy let out a long gasp and went still. They held him until all the warmth had left him. When the sun rose, they gently rolled his body into the sea. But Eddie refused to believe he was gone, and kept reaching for him.