“Never mind,” he said, trying to suppress his habitual need to find the guilty party. Double-ender lifeboats were commodious, and there was more than enough room for everyone in the two remaining. Directly across, on the port side, Farmingdale’s boat was being lowered into heavy seas, a gaggle of men preparing to scramble down the falls once she was waterborne. Boat one, the captain’s, was about to be lowered. Eddie stood in the driving rain. He experienced a strange reluctance to leave the Elizabeth Seaman. Through the soles of his feet, he felt underwater explosions as seawater poured down her passageways and struck the hot boiler. In occasional gusts of live ash from her stack, he made out the deck cargo they’d worked so hard to load and secure: the Shermans, the jeeps. So much effort and worry and expense. It seemed like not enough to emerge with just their lives.
A thought came to him: Sparks. The radioman was assigned to boat one, the captain’s, but when Eddie scanned the crowd of men waiting to slide down the falls, he didn’t see him. He ducked back inside the midship house, now tilting at a crazy angle, and climbed to the bridge deck. He found Sparks in his chair, inert as his radio, and yanked him onto his feet.
“Leave me the fuck alone,” Sparks said weakly.
“Come on, you gimpy little shit.” Enraged, Eddie slung Sparks onto his back and hauled him slowly down the ladder to the boat deck.
“Interfering bastard,” Sparks muttered.
All four lifeboats had gone, and the boat deck was empty. Through the downpour, Eddie saw the stern of the Elizabeth Seaman submerged halfway to her mizzenmast, waves breaking over her rear gun tub. On the lee side, a pontoon raft had released automatically from its slide rack and now floated by the deck. Still carrying the radioman on his back, metal leg brace cracking his heels, Eddie fumbled down a ladder to the main deck and began stepping sideways down a grade worthy of San Francisco, taking care not to slip on the slick iron deck. He carried Sparks to where the raft floated, pulled it toward him by its painter rope, and half rolled, half threw Sparks over the gunwale onto its wood lattice. As Eddie was vaulting over the rail onto the raft, he heard a thundering disturbance overhead: cargo was tearing loose from the ship’s nearly vertical bow deck. Tanks and jeeps snapped their chains and tumbled end over end like boulders, crushing booms and masts, caroming over the midship house and smashing onto the after deck in explosions of metal parts, before flinging themselves into the sea. Eddie tried to cut the painter holding the raft to the ship, certain he and Sparks would be crushed by the onslaught. But it was wire rope, and even his bowie knife couldn’t hack through it. The Elizabeth Seaman shrieked and shivered in an agony of tormented steel as Eddie scrambled to retrieve the ax that was secured to each raft. But before he could chop again at the painter, the ship’s doomed bulk discharged an aching, burpy, primordial groan and slid under the sea, pulling their raft down with her. Eddie and Sparks were left in the water. He seized the radioman around the chest and braced himself for the vortex, a body memory of holding boys at Rockaway Beach coming to him suddenly. “Hold your breath,” he shouted to Sparks. But no vortex came. The sea bubbled and frothed where the ship had been, pushing Eddie and Sparks away.
Eddie peered around wildly for the lifeboats, but in rain and darkness and high swells, he couldn’t see any. He made out a cluster of red lights from Mae Wests: another raft, possibly, crowded with men. Holding Sparks around the chest, Eddie lay on his back and kicked to propel them toward it. The radioman was so slight, a birdlike assemblage of bones and flesh without even a coat, much less a life vest. Eddie felt the sea convulsing underneath them as the ship plunged. The surface was covered with oil—he tasted it, felt it in his eyes and nostrils. He kicked and paddled, checking occasionally to see that he was still moving in the right direction. Eventually, someone hauled him out, still clutching Sparks. Eddie lay on the raft, unsure whether Sparks was alive. When at last he opened his eyes, he saw Bogues, a navy gunner, beside him. “You’re a hell of a swimmer,” Bogues said.
Eddie began to retch onto the raft’s latticework timbers. Sparks was retching, too, which presumably meant he’d survived. Even as Eddie heaved up oil-smelling vomit into the oil-smelling sea, his mind was straining, sifting: Bogues had been on Farmingdale’s boat, number three. Why was he on a raft? Had three gone down? The raft was composed of identical nine-by-twelve-foot wood-timbered lattices with steel flotation drums sandwiched in between. Eddie hooked his arm around a timber and held on. The swells were enormous, but the ship’s oil slick kept them from breaking and allowed the raft to slide over their crests. Eddie kept raising his head to look for the ship, but nothing marked the spot where seven thousand tons of welded steel loaded with nine thousand tons of cargo had floated thirty minutes before—not a depression, not even a patch of effervescence, to recall the magical girl who’d carried them halfway ’round the world.
From Bogues, who lay beside him, Eddie gleaned that lifeboat three had been broken against the side of the ship by the swells. Everyone had made it to the raft except the injured engineer, who had disappeared in the waves. “Ochylski went under?” Eddie said in alarm. But the gunner didn’t know his name, and Eddie refused to believe it was Ochylski. He pictured the third engineer holding a bight of lifeline that ran around the perimeter of the raft, smiling sardonically at their predicament. With Eddie and Sparks, there were twenty-nine of them aboard, Bogues said—four more than the raft was built to hold.
Now the storm set upon them in earnest, trying to suck them from the raft as if they were bits of food caught between its teeth. In flashes of lightning, Eddie counted bodies with the cringing hope of a gambler after a roll—four sevens—yes, plus himself: twenty-nine. The raft scaled swells so mountainous that he feared it would be pitched backward end over end, flinging men away and drowning Sparks, whom he’d lashed to the timbers with his belt. Each time, the raft managed to slide over the crest and skid down into the trough to begin another climb. After a while, Eddie stopped counting men and felt for Sparks’s leg brace with his foot. The arm he’d fastened around the planks stiffened as if in rigor mortis. He no longer could tell up from down. At times a tense, fragmentary sleep overcame him. Luminescence flared from the sea: plankton, Eddie knew, having encountered this phenomenon in the Pacific. Now their glow seemed an emanation from the ocean floor: the Elizabeth Seaman and other lost ships, hundreds over centuries, signaling up from the deep.
Morning brought a dirty light on a high confused sea. The worst of the storm had passed. Six of their number had vanished: the first cook; the AB called Red; a gunner; a wiper; a messman; and Pelemonde, a dreamy ordinary who had been a favorite with the deck crew. Bogues was still there, along with Farmingdale, the two cadets, and a mix of naval guardsmen, ordinaries, firemen, and Sparks, who had been fixed in place by Eddie’s belt. Pugh, the old salt, had somehow held on. Iron men in wooden boats. For a long time the group hardly spoke, absorbing the loss of their shipmates. For Eddie that included Ochylski, who was nowhere to be found.