Peter Geye - Safe from the Sea

“How soon did you know she was burning?” Noah said.

“Hard to say. We were probably better than halfway across the deck when it dawned on me that something smelled wrong. It was like burning hair is what it was, but there was so much other goddamn commotion that it must have been another minute or two before it hit me. We’d crossed under the hatch crane and were probably only thirty or forty feet from reaching the decking when the stink took over.

“All at once I knew what was happening, and no sooner had I put it all together than Red grabs me by the shoulder. I thought he was falling and using me for balance, so I didn’t turn around right away. But when he shook me again I turned, and he was shining his flashlight on the walkie-talkie.

“‘Boss,’ he said, hollering at the top of his goddamn lungs, ‘the captain’s calling.’

“There was so much static and interference from the noise in the background that I could barely hear what Jan was saying, but the long and short of it was that we were pretty well sunk.” He looked off into the corner for a few seconds.

“He told me we had no steerage, that the engine room was incommunicado again. That’s what I gathered from the static anyway. But then his voice came clear: ‘The Rag is burning,’ he said. It seemed absolutely impossible.” He looked down and quit talking.

“Jan must have already made the mayday, huh?”

Olaf lifted his eyes slowly. In the dim light Noah might have mistaken their glassiness for tears.

“Hand me the book,” Olaf said. “And grab my glasses off the counter.”

Noah did.

“I don’t know exactly what time it was when Jan radioed us on the deck, but it had to have been some time around quarter of eleven. Everything was happening so fast.” He had the open book under his nose in the lamplight and was scanning the page with his long, thick finger. “He made the mayday at ten thirty-three. And I’m sure he made the mayday before he signaled us.”

“You said something about all the answers being in the mayday transcript,” Noah said.

“I said as much as we’ll ever know is in here.” Olaf looked back down at the page for a second. “In the mayday,” he said, closing the book but keeping it marked with his finger, “he gives them our position — which had hardly changed from the time of the pan-pan — and tells them there’s a fire in the engine room, that he’s lost contact with the stern, that he’s got four men en route to investigate, and that he’s lost his rudder.

“We know the fuel line was leaking. We know that everyone on the stern was busy trying to contain the leak. We know that sometime between, say, ten twenty and ten thirty, the whole thing went up, and that within minutes the steerage was shot and Jan made the mayday. It’s safe to assume that there was some sort of explosion because a fire alone wouldn’t have put the rudder out of commission so fast. It’s also safe to assume there was an explosion because we never saw any of those boys alive.

“When we finally reached the stern, I sent Luke and Red down below to see what was going on while Bjorn and I went up to the boat deck to see about steering that son of a bitch.”

“What do you mean steering it?”

“At the very stern of the ship, behind the stack, up on the boat deck, there were two emergency wheels. Jan told us he’d lost the rudder, so up we went. I’ll tell you what, there couldn’t have been a more wide-open spot for heaven to piss on us than the ass end of that ship.”

Noah was trying to piece it all together. “But you didn’t have a compass, you didn’t have a radar or the charts.”

“We knew which way the wind was blowing, though. I figured if we kept it behind us, we’d be okay.”

Olaf pinched the bridge of his nose as he took off his glasses. “We were fighting it, you know? We had no idea what in the hell was going on but that we had to keep the boat pointed in the right direction.” He was shaking his head and suddenly sounded as if he were pleading to a jury. “After a while — right before we ran aground — Red and Luke came up to the boat deck. Bear in mind, we’re still right in the middle of hell. It was cold and windy and we were soaked and coated with ice and standing up on that deck with targets on our chests, just waiting to get dead. We’ve got no idea what the hell is happening below us until Luke comes back up. In the middle of all that screaming wind he tells me we’re done, that the engine room and her crew are gone, that right below us all four decks are up in flames: The fantail deck, the windlass room, the cabins — everything — poof”—he exploded his hands—“roaring away. He tells me they didn’t see anyone, that we’ve got no chance. Jesus Christ,” he said under his breath.

“And I’m thinking to myself, those goddamn boats sitting tight in Thunder Bay better damn well be on their way, and the Coast Guard better have a cutter and a few helicopters coming to search or we’re as good as dead.

“My mind was all tangled up. I was sitting on a time bomb with all the water in the world exploding around me. It’s so goddamn dark and cold and my guys are telling me that right beneath our feet half the crew is cooked.” He closed his eyes, looking, Noah thought, like he was trying to erase the picture from his mind. “I didn’t know what the hell to do, so I grabbed Red by the arm and we went back down.

“I told him to stay right with me, that we were going to slog it back into the engine room and see if there was anything we could do.”

“But they’d just been down there. They said it was impossible.”

“I had to see it for myself, I guess. As much as I trusted Luke, I knew it would haunt me forever if I got off that boat without checking on those guys.

“Jesus, it was something. We entered by way of the galley, grabbed fire extinguishers, and worked our way to the dining room and then toward the gangway that led into the crew’s quarters. I sounded the alarm, tried to make it into the cabins. But we had to stop. We couldn’t have gotten ten steps into those rooms without going up in flames ourselves.

“The strange part was that nothing in particular seemed to be on fire. It was like the air was on fire, all of the air. We were getting tossed around, of course, and each time I got thrown against the wall I could feel how goddamn hot it was. If I hadn’t been soaked through and halfway frozen, I probably would have come out of there with burns everywhere. Instead it was almost a relief if you can believe that.”

“How long were you down there?”

“Impossible to say, five, maybe ten minutes I’d guess. Once our extinguishers went empty we had no choice but to get back up on deck with Luke and Bjorn.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Why would you want to?” Olaf asked. “Why in the world would anyone want to imagine that hell?”

Noah took the question as a cue and sat there silently trying to remember what he knew about the ships that had laid up in Thunder Bay — whether it was just two or all three of them that had responded — and whether it was a search plane or helicopters that the Gunflint coast guard had dispatched when the wind weakened.

After a few minutes Olaf broke the silence again. “It had to be Canoe Rocks,” he said.

“What did?”

“Where we ran aground. The death blow.”

Olaf labored to his feet again, this time staying bowed at the waist as he took a few steps across the living room toward a wall shelf that sat behind the dining table. It was cluttered with cast-iron cookware and decorative Norwegian dishes, unused cookbooks, and antique cans of mosquito repellent. From the top of the shelf he grabbed what looked to Noah like a poster that was rolled up and tied with blue-and-white string.