“Yeah, that was cool.” Roberto rubbed his hand over Melville’s gravestone, thinking it over.
Suddenly it was darker, and cooler. A black cloud had come up from the south and was covering the sun. The air was just as steamy, maybe more so, but because of the cloud they were in shade now, and it looked like it would only get cloudier. A big black-bottomed wall of cloud, in fact, rolling in from the south.
“Thunderhead?” Stefan said. It was too much of a wall to be a thunderhead. “We better get back.”
They hustled back to their boat, untied and hopped in, and headed down the middle of the channel that split the Bronx. The wind was in their face and they slapped over wave after wave, knocking sheets of water left and right as they crashed down onto the waves’ back sides. They ducked down to give the boat a lower profile. Wind and waves both came out of the south, so they could head straight into them. That was lucky, as the tops of the waves were now tumbling forward in the wind, creating major whitecaps. It would have been difficult or impossible to run sideways across waves as high and broken as these. Even heading straight into them was making the boat bounce up hard as it crashed into the white water, and they both moved to the back of the boat and sat on each side of the tiller, watching anxiously as the short white walls came rushing at them and the boat made its improbable tilt and lift. The slushy roar was so loud they had to shout in each other’s ears to be heard. The uptilt in the bow that was built into every zodiac’s design proved their salvation time after time, but even so, waves only a few feet higher would certainly rush right over the bow onto them, or so it seemed.
Still, buoyancy was a marvelous thing, and for now they shot up over each wave in turn. And surely the waves couldn’t get much bigger, not here in the Harlem River anyway, where they had no fetch to speak of. The boys could hardly believe they were as big as they were, nor that the wind had gotten so strong so fast. Well, summer storms happened. And now they were seeing that the waves did have a bit of fetch, coming up the East River and curving into the Harlem. They were really bouncing hard.
“We should have waited it out!” Stefan shouted as one particularly big white wall tilted them almost vertically before it passed under them, and the bow then flopped down so hard they had to hold on to avoid being tossed forward.
“We can make it.”
“Maybe we should turn around.”
“I don’t know if the stern would rise as well as the bow.”
Stefan didn’t reply, but it was true.
“Maybe we should take our wristpad with us next time.”
“Maybe. We’d only ruin it though.”
“Look at that one coming!”
“I know.”
“Maybe we have to turn!”
“Maybe so. The boat will stay floating even if it’s filled with water, we know that.”
“Will the motor keep running if it gets wet?”
“I think so. Remember that time?”
“No.”
“It did one time.”
The next big wave shoved them up and back until they were vertical, and they both instinctively threw themselves forward against the bottom to help knock the boat forward. Even so they hung there upright for a long sweeping moment, hoping that the wave wouldn’t capsize them backward and dump them in the roil. Instead the boat flopped forward again and slid fast down the back side of the wave. But more were coming, big white walls, and the wind was howling.
“Okay, maybe we should come about. We don’t want to capsize.”
“No.”
“Okay, so …”
Roberto was staring ahead, round-eyed. Seeing his look, Stefan grew afraid. All the waves were about the same distance apart, just as always with waves. They had seven or eight seconds between each impact. It wasn’t a lot of time to turn around, but they couldn’t afford to get caught crossways.
“Next one,” Roberto said. “I’ll start the turn as soon as the crest is under us. Toward you.”
“Okay.”
The next wave was about the same size as all the others. Not a monster, but close enough. It lifted them, the boat tilted nearly upright, they threw themselves forward. As the bow dropped forward under the impact of their bodies, Roberto twisted the tiller toward Stefan, and as the boat slid down the back side of the wave he gunned the motor to its max. The boat turned sharply, it was impressively tight, but not super fast, and the next wave was coming. Nothing to do but watch the disaster unfold.
The broken wall of water hit when they were about three quarters turned to it, and Roberto pulled on the tiller so that as the boat skidded forward it straightened in orientation to the wave, the stern rising slower than the bow had, they were in the broken foam and it seemed they would be swamped, but aside from a splashing they were spared, as the boat was buoyant and the wave orderly. The boat rode this wave for a while, and then the wave passed under them and they were motoring back toward the Bronx at full speed, pushed by the wind and shoved time after time by the broken waves, which passed just barely under them, splashing them but not swamping them, the waves moving somewhat faster than the boat. But they weren’t getting swamped, and the Bronx shallows, with all their cluttered broken buildings and rooftops, were quickly approaching. It was a field of waves and bubbles and black roof reefs and white lines of foam, and looked horrible. But they could dart in some gap, then quickly get into the lee of something protruding from the water. And the waves would quickly dampen as they moved into the wreckage of the borough.
“We’re going to make it,” Roberto declared. It was the first thing he had said since they came about, many waves ago.
“Looks like it,” Stefan agreed. “But what then?”
“We wait it out.”
PART SEVEN
THE MORE THE MERRIER
One invests affection in places where it will be safe when the winds blow.
observed Mencken
a) Vlade
As part of his job Vlade kept the NOAA weather page for New York up on one of his screens, in a box next to the tide screen. In fact it was the weather’s effect on the tides that interested him, because tides mattered to the building. Beyond that he didn’t really care what the weather was doing.