It was my twelfth summer on earth, and I was drifting along the river on a raft I’d found in the lagoon. The deck was plywood with six empty oil drums tied underneath. Stretched out on my back, I listened to the water murmuring against the drums, interrupted every so often by the wet slap of a leaping fish.
Sunshine a bright whisper.
Day like an answered prayer.
Until a booming horn rattled me out of my skin. I lurched upright and, there, bearing straight for me from upriver, was a Coast Guard vessel, the deep V of the bow an iceberg against my tiny raft. A crewman stood on the bow with a bullhorn: “Catch this line!”
As the boat coasted nearer, its engines filled my chest with a diesel thrum.
“What for?” I yelled back.
Bullhorn: “You’ll find out.”
I caught the thick line in my arms and pulled the raft toward the vessel as told. Got hoisted over the gunwale like I weighed nothing.
A colorless blanket was draped around my shoulders even though I wasn’t cold.
The vessel came about while uniforms busied the deck.
I was being taken all the way back to the Coast Guard station, near where the river fed into the mouth of the bay. No one would explain to me what I’d done. I was left sitting aft like expendable ballast. At the end of the towline, not meant to withstand cruising speed, my newfound raft slowly broke apart, drums bobbing out from under the deck as I watched it splinter then collapse.
I was sound asleep on the bench by the time we docked.
Inside the redbrick station house, the Officer In Charge handed me a lecture about not wearing a life jacket, especially on a craft of sketchy seaworthiness.
“Do you know what a floater looks like when it’s been dredged from the water?” he asked. Standing there caped in the blanket, I shook my head. He showed me a pike pole with this mean hook on the end. “A body is usually bloated from expanded gases inside, and when this hook punctures it, them gases whoosh out and there’s a godawful smell.” He paused, gave me a deep stare. “It’s a smell you never forget.”
I mulled this over. “But if I’m dead, I won’t smell my own gases.”
The OIC sat me at his desk then. Dropped a photo album under my nose and paged through images of bodies being hauled from the water. Some looked to be sleeping. Others looked like swamp things. But none of this bothered me as much as the sight of Dad’s copper-orange Gran Torino through the window, tooling up the long drive to the station. They’d called my parents even though I tried to insist on walking home from here. Now, I could only picture the old man smacking me silly all the way to the car for this.
When Dad walked into the office, the OIC explained how this wasn’t a random rescue. A woman driving along the river thought I was stranded on a capsized boat, and had called the Coast Guard. Nosy old bat.
We left the office and walked the gravel drive toward the Torino. Dad silent. His shades blocked anything I might read in his eyes. The chewing out was always worse than the cuffs themselves. I waited for it. He lit a Salem.
“I was in the middle of a good James Bond movie, boy,” he said. And instead of striking me, his hand floated over and perched on my shoulder, like a bird I hoped would never fly away.
Chris J. Bahnsen is an assistant editor with Narrative Magazine. He resides on a small peninsula called Point Place, nestled along the westernmost point of Lake Erie. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian’s Air & Space Magazine, and River Teeth.
STORY IMAGE CREDIT: Christopher J. Bahnsen
