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down through a white haze that dazzled the eyes. I ducked under the boat and pretended to take an interest in the condition of the keel. It wascool there in the shadows. I leaned back, my head resting against one of the propeller blades, and closed my eyes.
    I slept for a while. When I woke I felt heavy and dull, but I couldn’t go back to sleep. In this muzzy state I heard someone stop beside me, then walk to the stern. I opened my eyes and saw a pair of bell-bottom pant legs ascending the ladder. Boards creaked overhead. My nap was done.
    I sat up and shook my head, waited for clarity, was still sitting there when a great roar went up behind me. I looked back and saw the propeller I’d just had my head on spinning in a silver blur. I scuttled out from under the boat, got to my feet, and looked up at the mechanic, who was watching me from the gunwale of the runabout. Neither of us said a word. I knew I should go after him, even if it meant taking a beating. But he was ready to kill me. This was a new consideration, and one that gave me pause, excessive pause. I stood there and let him face me down until he decided to turn away.
    I didn’t know what to do. He’d given me no evidence for a complaint to the captain. If I accused him, the mechanic would say it was an accident, and then the captain would ask me what the hell I was doing down there anyway, lying against a propeller. It
was
pretty stupid. That’s what my shipmates told me, the two of them I trusted enough to talk things over with. But they believed me, they said, and promised to keep an eye on him. This sounded good, at first. Then I understood that it meant nothing. He would choose the time and place, not them. I was on my own.
    The ship put in a few days later to take on suppliesfor a trip to the Azores. The weekend before our departure, I went to Virginia Beach with another man and ended up on the first dark hours of Monday morning propped against the seawall, trying to make myself get up and walk the half mile to the motel where my shipmate was waiting for me. In an hour or so he’d have to begin the drive back to Norfolk or risk having the ship weigh anchor without him. I sat there in the chilly blow, trembling with cold and sunburn, and hugged my knees and waited for the sun to rise. Everything was cloaked in uncongenial grayness, not only the sky but also the water and the beach, where gulls walked to and fro with their heads pulled down between their wings. A band of red light appeared on the horizon.
    This was not the unfolding of any plan. I’d never intended to miss my ship, not once, not for a moment. It was the first cruise to foreign waters since I’d been on board, and I wanted to go. In the Azores, according to a book I’d read, they still harpooned whales from open boats. I had already made up my mind to get in on one of these hunts, no matter what. All my shipmates had the bug, even the old tars who should’ve known better. When they said “Azores” their voices cradled the word. They were still subject to magic, still able at the sound of a name—
Recife, Dakar, Marseilles
—to see themselves not as galley slaves but as adventurers to whom the world was longing to offer itself up.
    I didn’t want to miss my ship. Forget about far-off places, the open sea; the ship was my job, and I had no prospects for another. I didn’t even have a high school diploma. The prep school I’d finagled my wayinto had tolerated my lousy grades and fatuous contempt for its rules until, in my senior year, having pissed away my second and third and fourth chances, I was stripped of my scholarship and launched upon the tide of affairs, to sink or swim. I appeared to be sinking.
    Where to turn? My mother lived in one small room in Washington, D.C., where she worked as a secretary by day, by night as a restaurant hostess. She had just begun to accord me, with touching eagerness, the signs of respect due a man who pulled his own weight in the world.