TUGBOAT TO TRAVERSE CITY by Darrin Doyle

The red foghorn startled us all into silence. The women covered the children’s ears. The men chuckled at the women. The women laughed at each other. The first mate stepped through the cabin door and apologized for the noise. Poised five feet above us, atop the tugboat’s upper deck, he said the fog was as thick as oatmeal and that visibility was less than forty feet and likely to get worse. He assured everyone that there was no danger. We would make it to Traverse City on time. With a wave and a smile and an unexpectedly delicate click, he disappeared behind his narrow metal door once again.
The other passengers – some two dozen in all, standing in groups of four, five, six – resumed talking. Three hours ago, at the 5:00 p.m. Ludington departure, with the sun bathing our faces and well-wishers waving bon voyage from the shoreline, we were strangers to one another. The tugboat had chugged pleasantly ahead as the land shrank in its wake. Each family, each group of friends, each couple, had stood in isolation along the rail, pointing at the glistening, undulating skin of the lake, commenting privately into each other’s ears.
Then, as twilight fell and the fog grew out of the water, the crowd had divided, with ease, into clusters of like-minded. The conversations centered around the weather.
From surrounding groups we caught the words “fog” and “foggy” and “dead.” Monica rubbed her arms. Rick removed his flannel and draped it over her shoulders. Mitch continued his story about a baseball game he’d played in in high school.
“So this guy whacks a long fly ball between right and center,” he said, “and I’m hauling ass toward it, fog everywhere and getting thicker as I run. I can’t see a goddamn thing in front of me. Just as I’m reaching out my mitt where I think the ball’s gonna land” – he acted out the gesture – “Wham!” he yelled, “I trip over something, a log I’m thinking, and down I go. Boom. The ball conks me on the back of the head. I’m out,” he said, “cold.”
Nobody responded. Deep down, we were waiting for the punch line. We needed humor. Our own fog was closing in. The nervousness it inspired caused us to recall, with internal indignance, that this tugboat trip was ours. We owned it for as long as it took to reach Traverse City. We had paid for it with hard-earned money. We had refused the conventional passenger ship, the four-story S. S. Badger with its four-cylinder Skinner Unaflows and coal-fired steam engine, cushioned seats, overpriced cocktails, snack bar, and intercom voice chattering about the shoreline and the resident seagulls.
Mitch continued, “I wake up two minutes later. Everyone’s gathered around, staring down at me. They ask me if I’m all right, the coach is wiggling his fingers, asks me how many he’s holding up.” He paused to light a cigarette, inhale, exhale, watch the smoke leave his mouth. “Come to find out I tripped over a naked man. A naked man in center field.” He laughed, and looked at each of us.
Monica’s laughter triggered a bout of sneezing. We watched, amazed, as she sneezed eleven times, which made us laugh louder. Rebecca dug a packet of tissue from her purse and gave it to Monica. When our wave of hysteria settled, we looked around, teary-eyed. The other passengers were shooting unfriendly glances our way, suggesting that our level of fun was simply too high for this excursion. The solemnity of the fog’s approach seemed to agree with them, but we didn’t care.
“Strangest thing is,” Mitch resumed, “I never actually saw the naked guy. Everybody else saw him – my buddies, my folks, the coach – said he had a long beard and shaggy hair – a textbook madman, I guess. He ran away as soon as they got close. They called the cops, and the cops searched the streets for hours. Never found him.”
Gabriel spoke up. “So I guess your question is – if you trip over a naked man but never see the naked man, did you really trip over the naked man?”
Our conversation was interrupted by the foghorn. It rumbled our guts. We formed a row along the railing. We stood, like the other passengers, facing the fog, looking at it, studying it. We were completely surrounded. The air was damp and heavy. The fog had grown thicker, whiter. Wisps of it now touched the boat, delicate fingers breaking apart on the rusted railing. Mitch blew his cigarette smoke into the fog. Rebecca fanned the air, trying to clear a path, but she only managed to stir the cloud before her. Soon we were bored of playing with the fog. We wanted it to go away.
The first mate emerged again, stooping through the cabin door, which closed behind him. He descended the four-runged rope ladder to the deck. He was built like a telephone pole. He fidgeted as if trying to find a comfortable angle to position his elbows.
“So what do you all think of this fog, huh?” He broadcast a pleasant grin to his dependents.
“It sure is something,” an old man said.
“How do you tell where you’re going?” a woman asked.
“We were hoping you could tell us the way,” the first mate said with a wink. A few people chuckled. One of them was the first mate.
“How much farther is it?” a different woman asked. Her tone was not cordial. She was the mother of a sick boy, maybe four or five years old, who slept at her feet.
In the yellow lantern light (we had paid for this crudity), visible only as a tangled mop of hair beneath a red wool blanket, the sick boy resembled a sea creature pulled from the bottom of the lake.
“Two hours in good weather,” the first mate admitted, wiping a film of mist from his forehead with a handkerchief. “Maybe three or four tonight. We’ve just reached the tip of the pinky” – he held forth the palm of his right hand, forming a crude Michigan map, and pointed to the inner tip of his ring finger. “Traverse City, as you probably know, is in this area. We’ll get you there as soon as humanly possible.”
He tried to lift spirits by sharing an old lake-faring tale about a fur trader by the name of Gabe “Lurker” Ludlow, who in 1894 set off for Michigan from Chicago. Breaking the cardinal rule of long-distance water travel, Ludlow had attempted the journey alone. After eight hours he got caught in a terrible fog, worse even than tonight’s. We all looked around and wondered how it could be worse.
“Back then,” the first mate continued, “they didn’t have high-tech guidance and radars and such.” His chest inflated with pride. “Old Lurker can’t find his way, ends up going due north, just like we are, right up the center of Lake Michigan, out here on 22,000 square miles of water! He’s lost for three weeks, eats all his food, resorts to fishing. Eats perch raw right out of the lake.”
The foghorn ripped a hole in the air. People visibly jumped. The sick boy woke in a panic and began crying for his mother, who knelt and caressed his head. The boy’s face was the color of a marshmallow. A tongue emerged from his mouth and began swabbing his cracked lips.
“So anyway, this story’s got a happy ending,” the first mate interjected. He was uncomfortable now; his elbows flapped impotently, like chicken wings. “Ludlow winds up on the shores of the U. P., all the way at the top of the lake, just about where Manistique is nowadays. A nice Indian tribe takes him in, and a few weeks later Ludlow trades his watch for enough gold to live as a wealthy man. Never gets in another boat for the rest of his life. Ha ha. Walks back to Chicago. Ha ha.”
The sick boy’s mother announced that she needed flu medicine. The first mate chimed in eagerly, saying there was Dramamine in the cabin.
“You told me that an hour after we left,” the mother said with measured annoyance, “and every hour since then. He needs flu medicine.”
The child, who had been moaning, now began hyperventilating. Possibly he was delirious. In a thick voice he proclaimed to the sky that something bad was going to happen. He’d seen it in his dream. Something terrible was about to happen. His eyes were open, large and round, glazed over by the doppelganger alertness of a sleepwalker; he was certain of what he was saying but not a participant in our world as he said it. He tried to sit up, but his mother held him in place against the deck. Still breathing heavily, he closed his eyes. Soon he was sleeping again.
Rick and Mitch circulated the flask. We took nips to fight the chill. We attracted the attention of a woman in a cinched trenchcoat, who sniffed in contempt before leaning to whisper this contempt into her husband’s ear. The husband muttered a derisive comment that none of us could hear because the foghorn bellowed out another rib-shattering note. The lake beneath us swelled and dipped, which sent some people stumbling. Our little group, however, rallied together, drunk as we were, and grabbed hold of one another’s arms for balance. If one of us fell overboard, we were all going.
The lake swell ceased. We were stable again. While detaching, we looked at one another’s arms, surprised that such frail things had kept us upright. The mother of the sick boy staggered to the railing and vomited into the water. At this unplanned prompt a cluster of well-wishers gathered around her. They formed a semicircle behind the queasy mother, reaching out to rub and pat her back. To us – to our group, who watched – the backdrop of the white, gathering wall of fog gave the deck the appearance of a stage set. From the touch-happy crowd of actors rose words like “sweetie” and “poor thing.”
“People are too fucking nosy,” Mitch whispered. We had formed our own circle to pass the flask without scrutiny and protect our faces from the cold mist.
“Every little thing that happens . . .” Monica whispered.
“If you stop and tie your shoe, somebody’s gotta comment on it,” Rick whispered.
“Why don’t they get a life so they don’t have to live everyone else’s?” Rebecca whispered.
All these good points went unremarked upon because at that moment the sick boy rose from his sleep. He sat up beneath his blanket, eyes wide with alarm or horror. He stood, unsteadily. His hair resembled two atrophied hands pasted atop his head. He took a step forward, though what was “forward” out here?
While the crowd focused on his mother, the boy shuffled toward the stern, cloaked regally by the floor-length red blanket he clasped at his neck. None of us said a word or moved to stop him. He shed his covering, climbed the rail, and dropped over the edge, into the fog. We heard the thin splash.
We were frozen in place – arms crossed, hands pocketed, hands on hips, arms dangling, cigarettes dangling. We weren’t sure what we’d seen was real, and didn’t feel capable of commenting on it. We were going from here to there, A to B; that was all that mattered. Whatever happened on the journey was OK. We’d cemented an agreement, even though we’d never actually voiced it. Our common bond was that we’d read the pamphlets, read all of the pamphlets, before taking the trip. We’d read so many pamphlets we could have written our own.
The only other witness to the event, a doll-sized girl with blond pigtails, whose mouth was stained red by the cherry sucker in her mouth, apparently believed what she’d seen. She tugged at her father’s coatsleeve and, in a tone we privately wished we hadn’t lost, said, “The little boy went swimming.”
Panic ensued. The mother rushed to the stern, calling into the fog the boy’s name. She picked up his discarded blanket and cradled it. An alert gentleman climbed to the cabin and pounded furiously with his palm upon the door. The engine was cut, stopped dead. Silence, like a heavy drape, fell over us. Life preserver already in hand, the first mate sprung from the cabin. He commanded the passengers to keep calm and to “keep not talking.” He said the only way to find the child was by listening. If we could hear him, he said, we could save him. The lake slapped the boat with its sloppy tongue. With the new stillness we became more aware of the constant rise and fall of the Great Lake that was our ground. Nothing was stable. After a moment, the floorboards rumbled as the anchor was dropped.
“That anchor won’t reach the bottom!” somebody yelled. “It’s gotta be a thousand feet deep!” The rest of the crowd mumbled in agreement.
“What if he’s under the boat?” another person added.
“He’ll be dragged down with it!”
This prediction caused the mother to burst into a fresh round of hysterics.
The first mate aimed his beam over the lake. “Let’s all just keep our heads,” he said. His flashlight succeeded in staining the fog yellow. Next he hurled the life preserver, like an enormous Frisbee, out over the railing. The fog swallowed it. Everyone heard the life preserver’s splash, but they couldn’t see it. The first mate began pulling at the rope, one-handed, drawing the donut toward himself like a fisherman trolling for bass.
“He couldn’t have gone far,” the first mate said. “Can the boy swim?”
The mother said he could. He could swim. He could tread water and float on his back.
“Good. But we need to be silent,” the first mate said firmly, still pulling rope, staring wide-eyed into, and at, nothing. “We need to listen.”
The crowd was skeptical. A slim, hard-faced man stepped forward and removed his baseball cap with a flourish. “I’m going in after him,” he announced. There was a collective gasp of admiration and disbelief. The man handed his cap to his wife. She held and examined it, as her husband walked toward the stern.
“Sir, you’ll only endanger yourself,” the first mate said. One hand directing the flashlight beam, the other guiding the preserver with the rope, he resembled an orchestra conductor. His face had broken into a sweat. He shone like a waxed quarter.
The capless man demanded to be acknowledged. “Isn’t there a goddamn lifeboat on this vessel?” he screamed, searching with his eyes, grabbing at the air with two clawed hands. His voice broke against the wall of fog and fell into pieces on the deck. In the jaundiced, bandaged moonlight, his skin was the color of urine. His hair jutted and leaned willy-nilly, poking about. We imagined that on shore he was a GM executive or an Amway superstar, but here on the tugboat he might as well have been a homeless lunatic.
“If I. Don’t. Get. Some. Quiet,” the first mate hissed, “everyone on this vessel will face charges of impeding a rescue attempt.”
A silence fell over the crowd. The mother’s sobs became the only noise. Our group found a spot where we could sit, on the moist, hard deck. We arranged ourselves in an inward-facing circle, legs Indian-style. We wanted nothing to do with the present situation. Everybody else looked at us with bloodless faces.
“Now,” the first mate said in a diplomatic voice, “if we could have everyone take a position along the railing and listen for the child’s cries.”
The passengers obeyed. All except us. Just as their decisions were being determined by outside forces beyond their control or understanding, so were ours. No one in our group said a word, but it was understood, without discussion, that our course of action during this nightmare would be to pass the flask and finish the trip we had chartered. They didn’t need us.
Our decision was not popular. We were grumbled about, scolded with glares and head-shaking and flicked ashes. One woman leaned into Rick’s ear and said we were shameful. None of us said a word in response.
“Where’s the captain during all of this?” Rebecca whispered, scratching a pebble out of its crater in her palm.
“I need to remind you people that this is a group effort,” the first mate said to us. He had materialized, quite suddenly, out of the fog behind Rebecca’s head. “We need total quiet.” He disappeared again.
A few terrible minutes passed. The boy’s mother was not the only one crying anymore. Choked sobs could be heard from all corners. Breathing for everyone was difficult; the fog was now among us, as a thin vapor settling into our laps. We listened.
“I hear him,” the capless man announced. “I hear him out there.”
There was nothing.
“Yes, I hear it too,” the woman with the cinched trenchcoat whispered.
“I’m going in,” insisted the capless man. “I can’t stand here while a child drowns.”
He flung off his shirt and leapt over the rail, like a kid hopping a fence to retrieve a baseball. His wife screamed. The men said, “Oh no, oh no,” eyes darting, searching for someone to blame. The crowd swarmed to the rail where the man had vanished. Once there, they could do nothing else. The man’s wife lost consciousness and her husband’s cap as she tipped into the arms of a nearby gentleman, who immediately fanned her with his hand. It was a general frenzy.
We – our little group – were the eye of the storm. In our circle there was peace, although a nervous peace to be sure. We were tensed up, physically and mentally. We tried to be one with the boat, with the fog, in order to be separate from the horror, but it was not easy.
“I have to go in after him!” the first mate screamed. He handed the rope and flashlight to someone else (he didn’t seem concerned with who took them – it was no one from our group). “Because he disobeyed me,” the first mate said, “I must now endanger myself.” In a matter of seconds he’d removed his boots, flannel shirt, and socks. He stepped onto the rail. Before taking the plunge, he turned and offered his last words, words with such action-hero connotations that it would have been comical if not for the circumstance: “I’ll be back.” He jumped.
Couples clutched each other; prayers for deliverance were screamed into a sky that no one could see. Muted, broken sobs filled the void left by the dormant engine. The rabble sounded like a new breed of farm animal, braying for food.
Our group maintained its silence. What could be done? It was out of our hands. This was our consensus. We had a choice: We could be mastered by the horror, or we could refuse to give it a home in our hearts.
Two male passengers, buddies of the capless man, came to their own decision. They would go into the water together. They would rescue everyone, they said. They were excellent swimmers. They kissed their wives, linked arms with each other, and jumped over the rail. Everyone seemed appeased by this heroic gesture until, a moment later, the sick child’s mother broke from the embrace of her appointed caretaker and bolted to the stern. With a shriek, she also dove into the fog.
The remaining passengers became quiet. The Great Lake sucked at the boat like a lozenge. Couples held hands. Families huddled. Then, one by one, each group walked to different areas of the railing. An exodus began. They believed that whatever lay beyond in the whiteness was better than this – this frigid damp uncertainty, this loneliness, this hole left by their departed comrades. Some of them went quietly, without ceremony, stepping onto the railing and simply leaning into the fog until gravity had its way and pulled them overboard. Others went with dramatic flair, giving primal yells and plunging headlong into the mist. The couples stepped over the edge together, frightened but pleased to be hugging each other’s bodies against the impending cold. There were tears, professions of love, nervous laughter, battle cries. The process took less than two minutes. Then everyone was gone.
We could hear them on all sides, splashing and wailing in the water. Our cigarettes were gone. A rawness crept into our throats. Many questions were on our minds, all focused on the captain: Where was he? Why was he letting this happen? Could he have saved them?
We stood. We helped one another to our feet. We brushed off one another’s backsides, as friends do. Our faces were damp; our arms, too. The fog was being absorbed into our bodies, leaving its translucent residue on our surfaces. We turned to look up at the cabin, where presumably the captain was manning his post, though from our vantage point we could not visually verify this.
“Can anybody see him?” Monica asked, or it may have been Rebecca. The fog had turned us into shadows.
“Should we go up there?” Rick said.
“Or should we just stand here and wait?”
There was a short pause. We were all trying to think, as the sounds of death swelled around us.
“I vote for standing here,” someone finally said.
Someone else agreed. Then someone else. We were all in agreement.

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Darrin Doyle’s stories have appeared in LitRag, The MacGuffin, Harpur Palate, and The Laurel Review.