Free Dancing After Hours by Andre Dubus

two floating jackets out to the deck and saw Rusty and her family, and he was looking at her face when he waved his arm toward the boat’s port side and either said or mouthed: “Go.” Cal picked up the jackets andgave them to Gina and Ryan, then took her arm and led her to the side. As he lifted her to the gunwale, she heard the captain’s voice repeating MAYDAY and the digits of their location and she looked over her shoulder at him before she jumped. Then all of them were in the water, swimming away from the boat, Zack pushing the preservers in front of him, holding his jacket’s strap in his teeth, a coil of line around one shoulder; and the captain rising in the water to throw jackets ahead of her and Cal.
    Holding a preserver while Zack lashed them, she watched the boat sinking, then looked past Zack at the captain’s profile and saw what his first knowledge had been, what she had heard in his voice when he spoke to them on the boat: not of drowning; they were floating and already help was coming from everywhere within range of his radio. He had known why they were sinking, and she knew it was something he had done or had not done, and it should not have happened, should not have been allowed to happen, and she was about to accuse him but could not, for his face was like that of landed codfish, resigned to sunlight and air and death, as if they accepted that they had destroyed themselves, feeding on the dark bottom, taking the clam and the barb with it, and that was why they fought so little, if at all, while she reeled them up, why they were simply weight on the end of her line. The captain’s name was Lenny Walters. Watching his face with its look of being caught in a trap that he had set, she forgave him. He looked at his boat until it was gone, and still he stared at the water where it had been as if the gentle waves were a chorus, their peaceful sound of moving water coming to his ears as hue and cry. In thewater beside her, Gina and Ryan, twenty-five and twenty-three then, were building a bridge of jokes and laughter over their fear. Cal was asking Zack, but quietly, what the Goddamn hell had happened. Zack was silently tying together the preservers. Rusty looked at his face lowered over the knot, but lowered as well from Cal’s voice and eyes. So he knew, too. She looked up at the sky for respite, then pushed her arms through the holes in her life jacket and looked down to buckle the straps, and Zack screamed.
    “We can never know for sure,” the Coast Guard lieutenant had said. “But that’s the only thing that makes sense. I’ve got four intelligent adults here. And they tell me you were all a lot calmer than people ought to have to be. With what you went through. No panic. Working together in the water, even this fellow”—he nodded toward Cal, smoking in a chair near a window—“going back in to help the captain up when he got it. So I believe the boat didn’t hit anything. So I’m going to report that, in my professional opinion, that’s exactly what it was. And I want to thank all of you for your time and your courtesy. There’s not one thousandth of one percent of the whole human race that’s been through what you good people did.” He paused. “Not on a fishing trip, anyway. It was probably the first shark that brought the rest, got them feeding. And most times that first shark wouldn’t have hit, either. By and large, they’re just big fish that leave people alone. So you had a whole lot of bad luck, and a whole lot of good luck to get out of it alive. If there’s anything I can do—” But Rusty said: “It wasn’t bad luck.”
    He turned to her, placed his arms on the desk, and leaned over them.
    “Beg pardon?” he said. He was a tall man, not broad, and his stomach was widening, would in years to come grow round in front and sag over his khaki belt. Lenny Walters was a very large man, not tall and not fat, but strong; she had only noticed his size when she watched Cal