Free Dancing After Hours by Andre Dubus Page A

pushing him up the ladder and holding him on it and then the crewman climbing against the pull of the rope around his waist, and at the end when she had gripped Lenny Walters’s belt and thrown herself backward onto the deck. Cal was five feet eight inches tall and weighed a hundred and sixty-five pounds, three inches taller and thirty pounds heavier than she, yet for thirty-five years she had seen him as bigger and stronger than everything she feared. Maybe she had not seen the two hundred-odd pounds of Lenny Walters until he was dying on the ladder, because there was something about him that was small, indolent.
    “It wasn’t bad luck,” she said. “The sharks, yes. But not the boat sinking. It wasn’t an accident, either. Accidents happen to you. Maybe the first shark was an accident. Maybe he didn’t even want Zack. Maybe he wanted something better.”
    The lieutenant’s blue eyes did not move from hers, and they were not distracted, and they were not amused by the unpredictable and mysterious world that so many men believed only women inhabited; they looked at her as one sailor’s eyes to another, curious, interested, ready to receive a truth about the unpredictable and mysterious sea they shared. She said: “It was—what’s the word?”
    “Electrolysis.”
    “Yes. Of the seacock. He knew. He knew he hadn’tdone his maintenance. It was in his voice. When he told us we had to go overboard. I can still hear him. It was in his voice: there was no surprise, you see. Not even excitement. It was like something had been on his mind for a while—”
    “A good while,” the lieutenant said. “Excuse me.”
    “—so that brass fitting snapped off and the boat filled under the waterline and he still didn’t know it. Then the water burst through the bulkhead into the fo’c’sle and what he had been putting off doing came in on him. And he knew it. It was in his voice, and it was in his face when he was watching his boat go down. It was in Zack’s face, too, right up to the moment the shark came.”
    The lieutenant nodded.
    “I believe you,” he said. He looked at Cal across the room from Rusty. Cal was watching her. The red in his cheeks deepened. He said: “Maybe that’s why he was so good in the water. He was a Goddamned captain in that water. He put Gina up the ladder first. I don’t believe he was thinking women and children first, either. He knew there was just us four in the family. I think he picked her first because she can still have babies.” Cal’s eyes did not shift to Gina, or to Ryan when he said: “Then Ryan. Same reason, I suppose. He can’t have them, but he can get them started. Then the mother. Then the old bastard that’s paid his dues and his insurance premiums, too. Then the poor son of a bitch paid all his dues at once.”
    The deeper color was still in his cheeks and she saw in his eyes the dampness of tears he would contain, but his hands did not rise to them, either; he let them glisten there, for her. To her left, Gina sniffled. Still watchingCal, her face warmed by his, she reached to Gina, who with two hands took hers and tightened and stroked and squeezed and stroked, and Rusty saw those lovely brown legs in the blue water. Had a shark’s jaws opened for one, she would have triumphantly thrust her own leg into its mouth. Yet Cal, without even a pause to look for another way to get Lenny Walters onto the ladder, had leaped backward into the sea, among the sharks whose number they would never know. Looking at him across the small room, she felt no shame or envy. She saw only Cal, and in his face she saw only herself, and though she felt the chair she sat in, and Gina’s hands moving on hers, she felt bodiless, too, out of the room, as though her spirit and Cal’s had left their bodies and were moving side by side, above time, above mortality. Then she was in her body again, in the room and the cool of the trade winds coming through the window behind Cal, and she was