Читать книгу Little Ship of Fools. Sixteen Rowers, One Improbable Boat, Seven Tumultuous Weeks on the Atlantic онлайн

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Had it not gone away, Tom would, like any other crew member postmortem, have been accorded what a prospectus for the trip had called “immediate burial at sea”—preferable one assumes to less timely options, such as, say, stowage in the food locker in a hundred degrees of heat, or being trussed up in a sleeping bag in a shared bunk and thus transported through the tropics (I had a morbid cartoon fantasy of being bound up in a blanket and thrown overboard, and somehow picking up the trade winds and beating the boat to Barbados).

“How ya doin’?” I asked Tom quietly in the dark, when I had reinstalled my soaked and now frigid pants.

“There’s blood,” he whispered.

“Ya gonna make it?”

After a lengthy pause, he said, “I dunno—at least it’s calming down out there.”

Ten seconds later, as if cued to his utterance, a fifteen-foot wave exploded over the bridge, astern, and sloshed through the cabin door, which we had not yet learned to keep closed.

When the shrieking had died down and those closest to the door had rescued their skivvies from the cabin floor, Dylan looked across at me and said, “I dunno either.” And in self-mocking insolence (the last luxury available to us under the circumstances), we began to laugh.