Chapter Twelve
Piecing it together as best he could, Felix had landed not just in tepid water but in netting or rope—some kind of tendril-y substance—that held him and bound his legs, tugging him down.
He grappled and spiraled, trying to get free, and went below the surface over and over, the surrounding cries muffled by the water and louder each time he came up, gasping.
At last, he kicked free of whatever was entangling him and used his good arm to turn himself all the way around.
Had Augie made it off the ship? The sea was white and churning—not from the Teague, which at that moment was settling on its side at the bottom of the sea, but from what seemed to be a thousand flailing bodies around him.
Men who had kapoks, men who didn’t and had nothing to hold on to.
Felix kicked and one-arm scooped his way toward a life raft—yellow, glistening, one of a half dozen or so that had appeared on the surface.
He was halfway to it when someone took hold of him from behind, and in the next instant he was dragged below the surface once again.
He struggled, shot through with pain, came up coughing and felt an arm around his neck, a cheek pressed against his.
Augie, he thought. Somehow.
But after breaking the hold enough to turn around, he saw it wasn’t Augie but the purser, a big guy named Baxter from Monterey.
No kapok. Blood flowing from his mouth and a hungry look in his eyes as he grabbed for Felix again.
He was trying to steal the kapok, Felix thought—or trying to use Felix as a flotation device.
Either way, he was out of his mind and was going to drown them both.
Felix hollered for him to stop, hollered that there were rafts they could get to.
Baxter wasn’t listening. He knocked at Felix’s good arm—the one trying to hold him at bay—and, in doing so, landed his fist against the side of Felix’s head.
In the next moment, he was around Felix like an octopus, squeezing, bringing Felix’s head back under the surface.
Felix twisted and fought and managed to get a handful of Baxter’s shirt and use that as leverage to push with his legs.
When he broke free, he kicked hard to put distance between them.
Baxter lunged, and the sole of Felix’s shoe—the only one he still had on, it turned out—landed flat against Baxter’s face.
Baxter let go, and Felix grabbed at the water to get away from him.
When he looked back several moments later, Baxter was floating face down.
To the west, the bottom half of the sky popped yellow and orange against the deep blue.
Some thirty feet away, a man was attempting to climb into one of the rafts.
The raft flipped over on top of him. Felix tried to swim toward the raft and realized he could hardly move.
This is how you’ll die, he thought. Even in a kapok, it was possible.
But eventually he reached the raft, and as he tried to lift it the man underneath shoved, and the raft flipped back over.
Felix held on to steady it, and the man—Durst, from the engine room—used the rope skirt to crawl in.
Durst held out his hand for Felix. But where was Augie?
There were men still flailing and hollering in the water, there were rafts and lifeboats scattered among the debris, Augie might be in one of those.
“Get in!” Durst shouted, but Felix hesitated, scanning the water.
The man reached over and grabbed the fat collar of Felix’s kapok, and a moment later Felix was being lifted out of the water and sliding down into the raft.
An ancient sound rose out of him. A deep, hollow wail.
Durst pulled paddles out of the webbing in the raft’s floor and tossed one to Felix, who picked it up and did his best to paddle on his side.
They made their way toward the nearest men in the water.
Flare after flare went up into the night.
By dawn, they’d managed to tie themselves to two other rafts, seventeen men splayed across rubber and canvas.
Only two of the Teague’s four lifeboats had made it into the water; they could each hold twenty-five, but one had nine men in it and the other had six.
Thirty-two, then, out of seventy-six. The surface was blotched with oil and dotted with desks and chairs and crates and pallets and boxes and shirts and pants and shoes and blankets and books and bundles of letters, and among those things the slumped heads of men who had drowned—with or without kapoks—but were still afloat.
The death and detritus elongated with the current.
Just after dawn, a PBY Catalina, one of several sent to look for survivors of the attack, spotted them. Within an hour, the USS Rigdon arrived, its massive putty-colored hull towering over them, and Felix would have cried at the sight of that ship if there’d been any moisture left in him.
The doctor in the Manila hospital listened to this recounting in a chair next to Felix’s bed, then leaned close to Felix and said gently, “My advice? When they ask you again what happened on the Teague, don’t tell that part about the purser. To anyone, ever.”
—
Felix was on morphine. His pain wound around him like barbed wire, was pulled tight by an invisible hand and let loose over and over.
The doctor who’d told him to bury the story about Baxter was long and thin and looked like a praying mantis.
The room was cavernous and gray, a hangar with beds all around.
The doctor showed up to speak with Felix twice a day, as far as Felix could tell.
There were no clocks, no partitions, no change of light.
They went over where Felix was when, and what he remembered, until Felix began to wonder if this was an attempt to pin the sinking on him. The opposite was true.
“Do you feel responsible for the forty-four men who died in the sinking?” the doctor asked.
That number. All around them were bandaged men attached to IV bags. Most from the Teague, Felix assumed. He asked how many men in the ward were from the Teague, and the doctor looked around and said, “I don’t think any of these men are from your ship.”
“Why do you want to know if I feel responsible?”
“Because you told us, and kept telling us, that it was your watch. But it wasn’t. Your watch had ended.”
His dose was wearing off. The barbed wire was being pulled tight again.
The doctor flipped a page on his clipboard. “Should we talk about Seaman Varick?”
Augie. Was there news? Felix made to sit up and winced. “Why?”
“You’ve been asking about him. Urgently.”
So what if he had? A lot of people had died. “I still don’t see why we need to talk about him.”
“You asked us three times to confirm that he wasn’t among the men picked up by one of the other ships, or among the dead that were recovered.”
Once. As far as Felix knew, he’d asked them to confirm both those things once.
—
That was Manila. In and out of pain, he floated as much as he could in the opiate slack and answered questions and was told he wasn’t responsible.
At one point, he was asked if he wished he’d gone down with the ship, and, thinking in that moment only of Augie, he said yes.
That’s when they decided to send him to San Francisco before letting him go home.
He called Margaret on his last night in Manila. He went to sleep with a general dull ache but floating an inch above the mattress.
Men screamed at all hours. It was a very disturbing thing to wake up to. That last night in Manila, he was awakened once again by a scream and was thinking about how much he was looking forward to getting out of there when the man in the bed next to him said, “Buddy. Hey, buddy.”
Felix looked over.
“Shut up,” the man said.
—
They lowered his pain medication so he could travel, told him it was okay to sit upright on the plane, but it was a cargo plane and the only place to sit was on a bench of stretched canvas.
His arm was in a sling to reduce his shoulder’s mobility, his forearm was in a cast, and whether he tried sitting up or lying down, the motion of the plane sent spikes into his shoulder and his chest.
The doctors and nurses who inspected his injuries in the San Francisco hospital were so friendly that he kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.
The psychologist was around sixty and had white hair and black-framed glasses and a weariness in his face that Felix trusted.
They met a half dozen times in the pale-green examination room that doubled as his office, Felix resting almost comfortably in a drawn metal chair while the doctor sat behind his desk in a creaking Windsor.
He told Felix in their first conversation that he wasn’t looking to drag this out any longer than necessary, that he wanted to get Felix on his way home as soon as possible.
Felix had no idea what was a reasonable amount of time to spend in the hospital after your ship got torpedoed out from under you, but it had been over two weeks since the Teague had gone down, and he was starting to get a little concerned about his diagnosis.
Were his discharge papers being delayed? Were they in limbo?
“Understand,” the doctor said, “it’s our job to make sure our boys are in sound shape in every way before they reenter civilian life. It’s what we do.”
Felix appreciated that, but he also knew that these doctors sometimes stamped NP on your record.
Neuropsychiatric. He’d heard stories about that over the past three years.
An NP never went away, once it was in your file.
It was there every time you went to a doctor at a VA hospital, there if you ever applied for a government job.
An NP could be denied his honorable discharge and his benefits.
An NP, Felix had heard, could be held in medical facilities indefinitely.