Swimming to Catalina

through his nose, deeper each time, packing air into his lungs. Then he was standing all alone in the stem of the boat, holding the heavy anchor, trying not to fall overboard.
    “Compliments of Onofrio Ippolito!” he heard Manny yell over the engines.
    Stone took one more deep breath, and then he felt a solid kick in the small of the back. He hung on to the breath as he fell astern, striking the cold, foaming water, and then everything went quiet except the retreating roar of the engines and the scream in his head.

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    He was sinking rapidly, head first. He had no idea how deep the water was, didn’t know when the increasing pressure would force the air from his lungs. He held on to that air with all his strength; he needed the buoyancy as much as the air.
    Twisting his wrists back and forth to gain as much slack as possible, which wasn’t much, he held the anchor and the marlin spike with one hand as he found the shackle with the other. The spike had a slot at its top, made for this very job, if not this very moment. Frantically, he got the nub of the shackle pin into the slot in the marlin spike, loosened it, then, using his fingers, quickly unscrewed the pin, yanked it out, and let go of the anchor. He stopped sinking, seeming to have achieved neutral buoyancy. Then he made an awful discovery. When he had let go of the anchor he had let go of the marlin spike, too, and there remained one shackle to defeat, the one holding the chain around his waist.

    Once, as a boy, he had been sent to a socialist summer camp by his left-wing parents, and some of the camp counselors had amused themselves by binding the boys hand and foot and tossing them into the lake, just to see how long they would last before they had to be rescued. There were no rescuers at hand now, but at least camp had given Stone some experience of swimming with his hands and feet tied. He tried once to loosen the shackle pin with his fingers, then, with his lungs exploding, began to kick and paddle as best he could toward the surface. Looking up, he could see the bright moon lighting his way, but he had no idea of how deep he had gone. The going seemed painfully slow.
    To take his mind off the struggle, he thought about how long he had been underwater. He figured he was at about one minute now, and the surface still seemed miles away. Air began to leak from his nostrils, and he fought to hang on to it, since there was nothing to replace it but seawater. He struggled on, wishing his mouth wasn’t taped so that he could scream, and still the surface eluded him.
    He thought of himself as a porpoise and tried to propel himself faster with the kick he had been taught at camp as part of the butterfly stroke. The seconds flew like hours. And then, suddenly, he could see the moon clearly, and he was expelling air and ripping at the tape over his mouth. It came free and as he broke the surface he gulped in air, shouting as he expelled it, then gulped in more.
    A minute passed before his intake of air began to catch up with his need for oxygen. He looked around and saw, in the distance, the running lights of the sports fisherman as it turned toward Catalina, then helooked for other boats. There was a fleet of them, but they were a long, long way from where he struggled to keep his head above water.
    He tried floating on his back, but the chain around his waist and the weight of his sodden clothing made that impossible. The best he could do was to continue his porpoise kick and draw his taped hands through the water. He felt for the end of the tape with his tongue, thinking to pull it off his hands with his teeth, but apparently the end was inaccessible. There was nothing to do but swim for it as best he could.
    He developed a kind of rhythm, a two-hands-together dog paddle which, combined with his porpoise kick, moved him through the water, though not very fast. His goal was the forest of lighted masts ahead of him—how far? Two hundred, three hundred, a thousand yards away? He thought about the strength he had left and wondered if it would be enough or if, finally, the chain would drag him down, short of the goal ahead. He remembered reading somewhere that drowning was an easy way to die, but he didn’t believe it. He thought of himself drifting along the bottom, being fed upon by the crabs and—oh, God—sharks. Sharks were nocturnal creatures, weren’t they? They were attracted by splashing at the surface, and he was doing a lot of splashing in his