Anchors

Anchors
He stumbled past a strip of concrete shacks on some island in the South Pacific. The shacks were all built in the same style and shape with tin roofs and bars on the windows, the nicer ones were painted yellow with blue doors for the sake of looking tropical. Across the street were a few cane-shaped street lights, placed on a sidewalk that lay against the beach – one side of the poles was painted white, the other was sand blasted raw from the oceanic winds. He was trying to find the dock, trying to get back to his boat, and trying not to drown himself, whether by accident or on purpose.
         This particular beach wrapped along the island for miles before turning into swampland. He planned on following the beach all the way around if he had to, which, although it wasn’t possible, he very well might. The island was only seven miles across, but, interestingly enough, the density of the place made it very easy for a drunk to get lost there. It had happened before, and the locals knew to look after his type – white men who walk around the beach at six in the morning, designer sunglasses on their head, carrying a half-empty bottle of rum.
         He walked next to the water, very careful to not get his feet wet. There wasn’t a real reason for this, just one of those drunken superstitions. He was dragging them through the sand, as his type tends to do, when he tripped on a protruding conch shell and fell to his knees. He couldn’t tell through his poisoned vision what it was that made him trip, all he could make out was some shiny white next to the grainy white. Collapsing onto his back, into a supine position, he laid still and closed his eyes for a long time. Eventually, the seawater started to rush over his feet, causing the man to sweep his arms and legs back and forth – making a tropical snow angel.
         “Can it even snow here?” he thought. The weight of his body caused him to sink further and further in the damp sand. Aided by the alcohol and his memories of home, he actually felt freezing cold for a moment and shivered. He saw himself from above, laying in the snow next to Amy, his wife, and Oscar, his son. He imagined the three of them being buried there, next to each other, side to side to side. He tried to catch a snowflake on his tongue. The smell of month-old morning breath and booze festered openly in the salt air. He turned over to vomit, covered the sludge with sand and decided to stand back up. Dawn was cracking, but he wasn’t sure whether the sun was coming or going. He knew that he was leaving though, if he could only find his boat.
Walking again, looking down the beach like an outfielder looks at a fly ball in questionable sunlight, he started to feel a bit more sober. He reached into the pocket of his sand-covered sand-colored khaki pants to pull out his cell phone. It was dead. He left his charger at home, now he remembered. He looked up and saw the dock, less than two hundred yards from the bar he’d been kicked out of earlier that night. There was his boat: a mid-level motorized cruising yacht, solid white and clunky. Oscar had once said that it looked like a big orthopedic shoe; Amy had tossed his hair and everyone had laughed.
Now, walking along the wood dock and jostling the boat keys in his pocket, the man looked side-eyed for any sort of official, customs or Port Authority, but there were none. Security wasn’t a priority on this small South Pacific outpost. Anyway, the only other boat in the port was a single engine light blue bay skimmer; if someone did come by, they could figure out who had left.
He slid the gold-rimmed Ray Bans onto his eyes and climbed into the yacht. He went to the bathroom in the cabin below deck, and then moved to the bridge where he sat down in the captain’s chair, checked the gas level, started the engines, put the boat into gear, and headed out to sea. He placed the bottle of rum in the seat next to him. As he left, the palm trees seemed to be waving goodbye, but, in reality, they were probably just waving hello to the sun.

He steered the boat for an about an hour, switching over to autopilot once he was in open sea. He set the course straight west. Maybe he’d hit Australia, maybe he’d miss it all together. He left the bridge with the bottle of rum in hand, and made his way down to the cabin, his bedroom at sea, well lit with rectangular aquarium style windows. The bed was unmade and pieces of clothes were strewn about.
There was a closet with a duffle bag protruding from the sliding door. He walked over to it, kicked aside the bag of clothes (his luggage), and opened the door. Inside, thirty black and white hangers hovered over a stack of folded towels, three tennis rackets, some scuba equipment, and an old board game box. He reached in and grabbed the tattered board game, placing it carefully on the bed. The box was held together with two large rubber bands covering each dimension. It was a very old version of Chutes and Ladders. He had paid $20 for it an antique store in California, and given to Oscar for his fourth birthday.
Suddenly, the boat pitched violently to one side, and the box threatened to slip off onto the floor. The man reached out and nudged the game into the middle of the bed with one hand, the other wavering in the air for balance - he fell anyway, unaccustomed sea legs and the effects of alcohol still very present. He lay there, feeling nauseous, until the boat pitched back the other way, forcing the man to his feet and catapulting him onto the bed right next to the game. He laughed. Unpacking the contents, he relished each piece of the game: the yellow and white checkered board; the old instruction sheet; two dirty dice; the cardboard cutout children jumping, or maybe dancing. He put two of the figures down at the start and picked up the dice.
Player one rolled a one, immediately climbs ladder to fourth row. Player two rolls a six, empty space. Player one rolls a three, on to fifth row, the tile has the image of young boy flexing jovially for the audience. Player two roles a three, empty space. Player one rolls a three, lands on a chute, tumbles all the way to the bottom. Player two lifts the dice; the boat heaves violently; player two drops dice; dice roll into the corner; player two sighs and drops his head. Player one slips off the board completely.
He sat there for a moment and thought about Oscar. The boat pitched again: side to side to side and up to side and down to side and up and down to side to side. He needed to throw up again. Forgetting about the nearby bathroom, he climbed up the cabin stairs to topside. Covering his mouth, he tried to make it to side of the yacht, to do his business in the ocean, but he couldn’t hold it – eventually spilling over into his hands and then some pink bucket filled with seashells. He tossed the bucket into the ocean, and wiped the residue onto his pants.
He regained whatever sense of composure he had left, ran fingers through his hair and looked out. There was a strong tailwind from the East, but the ocean was still very manageable even for him. He wondered if the boat had maintained the course west. Trying to use the sun as a reference, as he’d been taught in his marine training, he looked up but quickly became disoriented. All he could tell was that the sun was about halfway between the horizon and midday. The man was still present enough to realize this meant it was about nine in the morning.
In search of the closest chair, he stumbled back into the yacht’s bridge. He grabbed the bottle of rum and had another drink, then fell back into the captain’s position, swinging his feet up onto the dashboard. It wasn’t a royal or victorious pose though, as it would usually seem to be. He sat there, squirming in that chair, throwing his legs about in all directions in a desperate search for comfort – not the kind of comfort you need after a long day’s work, but the kind you need when you can’t escape from thinking about the death of your wife and only kid; the kind of comfort you see lunatics seeking when they run from corner to corner of their padded cell, searching for that one place that their memories can’t lick its long tongue into.
He leaned back, crossed one leg over the other, and took another drink, out of habit. He closed his eyes and fantasized about the ship sinking into a giant whirlpool with no way out, or being sucked up into a waterspout and twisted around until all the molecules and atoms dispersed into nothingness.
He started to smell something. It was tropical, but not in a nice way. It was a kind of dense and musky body odor, salty, but not like the ocean, less pure than that, sweet at first but then overbearing, like boiled shellfish. He put his nose to the spout of the rum to see if it’d gone bad, but it just smelt of coconuts. Then he heard something very faint, like thunder on the other side of the world. He focused on the sound and tightened the muscles in his face. Leaning forward, feet now on the ground, he noticed two blurry and translucent smudges on the front window. He put his hand on it and realized it was a reflection – a reflection of two small boys, sitting on the floor in the back corner of the room.
He swiveled around in the padded luxury chair. The chair squeaked. The two boys looked up at the drunk sailor. The boys bit in their bottom lips and raised their eyebrows, then they simultaneously imitated the high-pitched whine. He was staring at them, but they just looked back down. They were playing dice, and were more interested in the random numbers than the man they’d been observing all morning. Everything was silent except for the ivory dings on the carpeted floor, until he finally made a noise. It was some kind of a drawn out question word, what you hear in a movie theatre when something very unexpected happens. He stood up, his arms were limp and rum spilt onto the floor.  “Who the hell are you?” he said.
         The boys looked up, then at each other, and then back at the dice. “Hey kids, answer me. Who are you? How the hell did you get on here?”
         The boys rolled the dice again. The dice settled, and the kids looked up at the man. “Onze!” they shouted.
         He was flummoxed and took another swig of rum. He walked over to the boys, squatted down, and prodded them skeptically. They had dark skin, exotic looking with close-cropped hair, possibly twins – both of them were shirtless, wearing shabby blue swim trunks and necklaces of dried grass. They were boys from the island he assumed, probably only seven years old. They had stocky legs and rough calloused hands. “How’d you get here?” he asked again.
         They looked at him but said nothing. The man’s analysis made them uncomfortable, so they slid further into the corner. One of them jostled the dice in a fist, keeping eye contact with the man, and dropped the dice down. “Douze.” The other boy said and grabbed the dice to roll again. “Huit!” they cheered.
The man sighed and jokingly offered his bottle of rum to the boys. One of the boys pushed the bottle aside and grunted, then he pointed towards the back of the yacht. The man stood up, opened the bridge door and looked out, but saw nothing. “You two from the island?”
They stood up, but made no sound.
“Alright. Guess I better get you two home then,” he said and walked over to the steering wheel. He took a wide loop with the boat, turning it around. “I’m not much of a sailor,” he told them and reset the course due east. “Good thing I don’t have to be.”
When he turned around, the boys had run outside. They were jumping up and down, shouting : “Huit! Huit! Huit!” The man had another drink from the bottle and then hurried out the bridge door. The boys were pointing up into the cloudless sky when a white bird appeared from nowhere. It was a great albatross. The boys started to laugh, still continuing their cheer.
The bird arched high in the sky, almost stalling before making a sharp turn, diving headfirst at the water. It tucked in its wings just as it plunged into the ocean. The boys stopped chanting, and looked over the railing of the boat anxiously. A few seconds passed before the bird reemerged with a silver fish floundering between its beak. The boys cheered again, and the man laughed and started to applaud, putting his fingers to his mouth for a loud standing-ovation whistle. The playful albatross circled the boat once and then flew off, the white body blending into the pale blue expanse. The boys ran back inside the bridge, sitting back down in the corner to roll the dice again.
“What’s with the dice?” the man asked, standing over the distracted boys. They didn’t answer. They made little noises when certain numbers appeared, sometimes a grunt or sigh and sometimes a giggle. The man watched them for a bit, trying to gain their attention. He felt completely ignored.
“Well, you two sure know how to entertain yourselves. Got to admire that I guess.” The two boys kept rolling. He took another swig of rum, and waited until the dice settled on the floor, then he kicked them away with his right foot. The dice rolled to the opposite corner. He watched the boys’ reaction, expecting a barrage of screams and shouts. Instead, they just looked up at him, giving him the attention he needed. He had a brief moment of satisfaction, but soon became a bit disturbed by the way the boys looked at him. Their lips tightened and their eyebrows raised; he perceived it as a look of amused superiority. Just then, a large wave pitched the boat up on one side and the dice rolled back into the silent duo’s corner. They giggled, but other than that made no signs of celebration, just picked up the dice and started to roll again.
The man laughed. “I guess I can’t win.” He walked over to the helm and sat down at the chair. He took another drink and wondered how much he’d had. He didn’t eat breakfast this morning or dinner the previous night, and he had been drinking for almost an entire day. There were other factors influencing his mind too.
“What are the chances?” he thought. He drifted further into the cushion of his chair. He’d been thinking about chance a lot recently – the chance of two native kids wandering onto his boat in the middle of the night, the chance of landing on an island with no purposeful navigation or course, the chance that’d he be on this voyage at all - that this was the strange way he had reacted after an avalanche took the life of his wife and kid while on vacation in Wyoming. It did make sense though, even if he was too involved to sort it all out. He wanted to escape from the reminders, from the family and loved ones who’d ask him how he was doing, from cold weather, from the clothes and toys and pictures and smell of home, he wanted to get out on the sea, craving the isolation. He watched the boys roll their dice in the glass reflection.
The boys, with their lack of human acknowledgment, their single motivation to roll dice over and over again, reminded him of the other equipment on the boat– the engine provides propulsion, the GPS does navigation, the boys roll dice. His thoughts were interrupted when, unexpectedly, the sound of rolling dice stopped. He sat there for a moment in the silence. Then the boys let out a low, incomprehensible murmur. The slight sound grew louder, into a heavy spoken sigh and then a jarring howl. “Cinq! Cinq! Cinq!” they said, their voices were nottogether as usual, but in sharp discordant barks.
         He turned around. The boys stood up and looked at him. “Now you want something?” he said. They pointed at him. “What?”
         “Cinq,” they called out. But to him the foreign word sounded like “son.”
         “Son?”
         “Cinq,” they pointed at him again, or maybe past him.
         “Yeah, I had a son.”
         “Cinq! Cinq!” they shouted, with some demand in their voice.
         “Yeah, son. I told you, I had one.”
         “Cinq! Cinq!” they said again, pointing desperately, not at the man but at the front window.
         “Look, I don’t know what you want or what you’re even saying. Stop shouting, just go sit back down.”
         “Cinq!” again and again they chanted. Finally walking over to the man, putting their hands on the glass of the window and directing his attention towards the ocean. He looked out and saw that a dark and rumbling cloud line had appeared on the horizon. The distant sounds of thunder rippled through the water and high-altitude lightning cracked and cut the once crisp blue sky. If there had been any signs of a looming storm, the drunk and inexperienced sailor was unaware. The storm was headed for the boat; the boat was headed for the storm. The man’s expectations made the sea instantly feel rough and choppy. The boys moaned “Cinq” one last time, then returned to their corner.
         He looked at a few instruments on the control panel, unsure what most of them really meant. He stumbled past the children, silent and distracted and indifferent once more, and through the bridge door. He licked his finger and stuck it into the air. He took one more drink and the bottle was finished; he tossed it overboard. Although the boat was still under clear skies, the approaching storm draped the entire world in twilight. He watched the bottle float away, climbing up a wave and sliding down the backside like a kid on a sled in a snowstorm– over and over and over again.
         He walked back inside and stood over the kids. “What should I do?” he asked them. “You live that way,” he pointed towards the window, “and the storm is coming from that way.” They looked at him, their expression of amused superiority returned. The man sighed. “Fine. That’s fine.”
         He sat down next to the boys, closed his eyes, and laughed. He’d never been in a rough storm at sea, he had gone hundreds of miles out of his way to avoid them in the past, but now, he was destined to face it. The kids looked up at him, but they didn’t understand. One of the boys picked up the dice and jostled them in his hand. Then, instead of throwing them down, he grabbed the man’s arm and tugged on it. The man looked up, looked at the kid, and shrugged his shoulders. The kid opened his palm, revealing the dice, and offered them to the man. He smiled, took the dice, and tousled the young boy’s hair.
He looked into his hand for a moment, analyzing every groove and divot in the dice - even though they were foreign, they felt very familiar to him. He nodded at the boys, as if to say thank you, and let them roll out of his hand. The boys squinted and focused on the dice, trying to influence the roll until the dice finally froze.
         “Trois!” they shouted. “Trois! Trois!”
         The man laughed. “Is that good?”
         “Trois! Trois! Trois!” they chanted. The boys smiled and clapped and chirped and peeped and patted the man on the back. They stood up and started to bounce up and down around the man in a moment of pure delight. The man joined in, throwing his arms into the air and moving his body to the rhythm of an island song.
         “Trois!” he shouted, and instantly realized that he knew what this meant. It was French for the number three. “Three!” he told the boys. “Trois!”
         The boys joined hands and spun around the man like he was a campfire, until, as suddenly and strangely as it had all began, they stopped. The two boys turned toward the front of the bridge and pointed out the window. The storm was nearly upon them. The yacht climbed one wave and slammed into the trough of another. The three of them fell to their feet; the dice tumbled around the room, stuck in a constant roll.
         The man told the boys to get down into the cabin. They didn’t understand. One of them chased after the dice and grabbed them as they slammed into a wall. The man picked up one of the boys and took the other by the hand, dragging them out the door and down the stairs into the cabin. He showed them to the closet and had them sit next to the stack of towels. He left the room, closed the door behind him, and returned to the bridge.
         The storm threw thirty-foot waves at the boat from all sides. The yacht was in a perpetual crash, sprays of water dashed across the bow and sheets slammed into the bridge window. He switched off the autopilot and grabbed the helm. He tried to turn the boat around so that he’d be sailing with the waves and not against them. But to him, there seemed to be no decipherable direction of the storm. Waves were swirling around him, a pulse of lightning lit the ocean in all directions and the hum of thunder seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once.
Without realizing it, the man’s tactics had doomed the boat. He was now sideways to the breaking waves. They rushed over the stern, water flooded into every room. He cried out, hoping the kids might hear him. The movement of a rising wave caused the boat to tip – when the wave broke, the ship flipped onto its side, nearly capsizing. The sudden shift in gravity threw the man against the back wall, which was now the floor. Water rushed into the bridge door until the yacht was able to right itself again.
The man climbed back to the helm and looked out the window. The storm had locked the ocean in a fog, but the man could just make out a dark something jutting out of the water. Another wave broke, the boat heaved forward. He let go of the helm, and let out a deep breath as he recognized the dark something as the peak of a coral head. The metal hull scrapped against the rock and let out a dull Titan’s scream. The boat ran aground.
The man abandoned his spot and tried to make it down to the cabin. A set of waves crashed into the boat, flipping it onto its side against the reef. The current pulled the boat back into the ocean, now completely capsized. The man hung onto railing of the upside-down bow. The approaching waves slammed the boat back into the rocks. He let go and swam to the surface. The yacht was being churched in the water, pulled away from the rocks and then thrown into them again. The sinking boat fell deeper and deeper into the water, turning over and over on itself but unable to float. It was being ripped apart, large chunks of debris floated to the surface.
The man dived under the water, swimming in a dangerous churn of splintered metal and wood. The boat was sinking faster as each room filled with water. It was sinking too fast for the man to catch up. He resurfaced, calling out for the boys, spinning around for any sign of life – there was nothing. The man swam away from the wreckage and climbed onto the rocks. He collapsed there on his back and closed his eyes for a long time.
When he finally looked up again, the violent front of the storm passed. It was just raining slightly, almost taunting him. The harsh crashing waves had gradually turned back into the normal tide that rushed over his feet. The fog lifted. It was almost ten in the morning.
He got up, remembered what had happened, and started running up and down the rocky landscape frantically, calling out for the children, shouting “Trois! Trois! Trois!” There was no response. Suddenly, his eyes picked up some movement within a pile of split wood a few feet away. He ran over and shoved away the debris, only to find it was a large hermit crab looking for its shell. The man picked up the hermit crab, held it in his hand for a moment, and then threw it back into the ocean.
He looked back down and kicked aside a splintered plank. Some of the pile shifted, and the man heard a hollow tumbling sound. He squatted down and pushed aside the smaller pieces, and there, lodged between two dark rocks, was the dirty pair of dice. He couldn’t believe it. He turned them over and over in his hand like a gyroscope; he smelt them; he even tasted them, trying to make sense of it. He cried at first, but after awhile, he couldn’t help but smile - they were just reminders of his son, nothing more.
He walked away from the wreckage, bent down and washed off his crusty face in a little tide pool where a blue Sea Anemone waved back and forth. He stood back up and reached into his pocket, the cell phone was gone, and in its place he had put the dice. He jostled them in his hand, moving them from finger to finger; Oscar used to put them in his mouth. He looked out across the ocean and saw that less than two hundred yards away was the mainland. “What are the chances?” he thought, “that’s swimming distance.”