I circled around and began slowing the tug several hundred yards out, preparing to pull alongside. I could see now that it was a wooden boat, about fourteen feet long, probably an island fishing boat, but full of water, the gunwales just awash, rising only a few inches above the calm sea. Even full of water, wooden boats will float. The water inside the hull looked dirty and filled with debris. A large pile of bright-colored clothing was mounded up in the stern, and sloshing around in the water were rusty cans, bits of paper, and white plastic water jugs, now empty. Where the hell had they come from? This was not a boat meant to cross oceans—no sail, no outboard, not even oars that I could see. I didn’t think it was possible they had come up from down island in this boat. But if not from there, then where?
The child was sitting at the bow of the swamped boat, arms wrapped around a wood post. When I came closer, I saw that her hair was plaited in several short black braids. I realized that it was a little girl, maybe eight or nine years old.
She’d heard the sound of my engine and looked up once, lifted her hand a few inches and waved, then lowered her head again to rest against the post. She was wearing a white dress—or what had once been a white dress. From her chest down, where the fabric had been immersed in water for God only knew how long and the fabric floated off her legs in the garbage-filled water, the dress was stained a dirty rust-brown.
When I was about fifty feet off the boat and had put Gorda's engine into reverse to bring her to a complete stop, I saw that it wasn’t just a lumpy pile of bright-colored clothing floating amid the debris inside the boat.
“Oh, shit,” I said aloud. It was a dress and the fabric was stretched tight. I could now see the other side of that mound, and I could make out the head. The bloated body of a woman was floating facedown next to the child.
I’ve never been seasick in my life, but for just a few seconds I thought I was going to lose it. The birds had been at work on her already, and the bloodless flesh on the side of her head was peeled back, the pink bone showing.
“Hello,” I tried, but my voice sounded strangled. I didn’t want to scare the girl any worse. “Hello. Hey, kid, are you okay?” Whatever island she came from, she probably didn’t speak any English, but I had to say something, to try to get her to raise her head again, to pay attention.
Gorda was now dead in the water, and the child was about twenty feet off the port side, her head still down. She had shifted her position a bit so that her large brown eyes were staring up at me. I expected to see some measure of excitement in her face, a realization that rescue was at hand, her ordeal over, but she simply stared, her eyelids starting to droop, as though she hadn’t even enough strength left for hope.
At the sound of my voice, Abaco got to her feet and padded over. She jumped up and saw the girl over the top of the bulwark and began to bark. The girl’s eyes snapped open, fear causing her to use what little energy she had. I grabbed the dog’s collar, dragged her into the wheelhouse and down to the head.
“Sorry, girl,” I said as I closed the door and locked it. “Let me get her aboard first. Then you can meet her.”
Gorda was up current, to the south of the swamped boat. The relentless Gulf Stream would eventually close the gap between us, but I might need the girl to help me, to take a line. If necessary, I’d go in the water myself, but that would be a last resort.
“Hey, what’s your name?”
She lifted her head and opened her mouth, but no sound came out—at least nothing that I could hear over the sound of Gorda's idling engine. She was clearly in bad shape, and the exposure to heat and salt and no fresh water had robbed her of her voice.
From Gorda's foredeck I picked up the fifty-foot length of nylon line I had been preparing to toss to Outta the Blue and tied a quick bowline in the end, then pulled a loop of line through, fashioning a lasso of sorts. I’m no cowboy, though, so I used the boat hook, and as the gap between the boats had closed to about ten feet, it was easy to reach over with the looped line hanging off the end of the pole.
“Sit up, will you? Get away from that wood post.”
She didn’t move.
“Hey, kid.” I motioned with my free hand. “Move. Move over. Sit up. I want to tie your boat to mine.”
Finally, she seemed to understand what I wanted her to do, but she looked from me to the body in the back of the boat and then back at me. Her expression did not change, but she scooted closer to that misshapen thing.
The line dropped neatly over the four-by-four post, and I pulled it tight. Keeping the tension on the line, I rigged my aluminum ladder over the gunwale, down into the water, then began to pull the water-logged fishing boat over to Gorda. It was not easy, not like pulling a boat sitting on top of the water that glides smoothly across the surface. This one had to push aside the displaced water, but slowly I brought in the line. The submerged hull came alongside and thumped against Gorda's aluminum hull.
After tying off the line, I lay on my belly across the gunwale and reached out to the child. “Here, take my hand.”
She didn’t need to understand my words; my outstretched hand had a universal meaning. She stretched her arm out slowly, and I realized for the first time just how thin she was. I saw the bones of her wrist and elbow protruding beneath the dark skin. There was no return grip in that small hand, but I pulled her up and toward the boat. She reached out with her other hand and attempted to grasp the side of the aluminum ladder, but she didn’t have enough strength in her fingers.
It wasn’t a pretty rescue. When it became clear that her legs could not support her and the ladder was useless, I dragged her light frame out of the water and across the ladder. She landed on the deck like a boated fish, dripping and breathing hard, wide-eyed and twitching.
I grabbed a towel off the bunk in the back of the wheel- house and approached her slowly. “It’s okay. I won’t hurt you. Let’s get this towel around you.”
"Gorda, Gorda, this is Outta the Blue, over.” The radio sounded much louder with the engine down to an idle. The girl’s deep-sunk eyes barely registered my presence, and she didn’t resist when I wrapped the towel around her shoulders. “It’s okay. I’ll be right back.”
In the wheelhouse, I grabbed the mike and we switched to a working channel. I stood in the doorway where I could keep an eye on the girl.
“Listen, Mike, I’ve got a little problem.”
“Hey, Seychelle, we wondered what was going on. We been watching you through the binoculars, and it looks like you’re stopped dead. You got engine trouble?”
“No, it’s not that.” For some reason that wasn’t fully formed in my mind, I was not yet ready to announce over the airwaves to all the bored fishermen and yachtsmen who were eavesdropping on our conversation exactly what was now tied alongside Gorda. “I’ve found something here. It’s a partially sunk boat and a hazard to navigation. I think I’d better tow it in first.”
“Break, break. Gorda, Gorda, this is Little Bitt.”
I blew a lung full of air out through rounded lips and tapped the radio microphone against my forehead. Damn. I keyed the mike and said, “Hey, Perry, should’ve known you wouldn’t have anything better to do than sit around drinking and listening in on my frequency.”
Perry Greene was the owner of Little Bitt, a twenty-eight-foot open tow boat that looked like a floating junkyard, piled high with gas cans, rusting engine parts, and greasy fenders, but she had an engine that ran like a watch. I had to grant that Perry was a hell of a mechanic, but I just wished he’d keep his chewing-tobacco-stained teeth and greasy fingernails as far from me as possible. Since the big corporate giants like SEATOW had come into town in the last couple of years and begun eating up the pleasure-boat-towing market, Perry and I were just about the only two independent operators left in the towing business in Fort Lauderdale, and he had taken to visiting me, perched on Gorda's bulwarks, Bud in hand. To make matters worse, he always wore these cut-off jeans that were cut way too short, and he apparently did not own any underwear. I had seen way more of Perry Greene than I ever wanted to.