Shipwreck, Page 2

  “You’re lucky. It’s midnight in L.A. right now. I doubt your father would be thrilled to hear from you.” Rapaport took a deep breath. “Listen, J.J., when you brought a case of champagne to the eighth-grade dance, I worked hard to keep it out of the papers. When you sold the video of your father’s pool party to Entertainment Tonight, I covered for you. When you did all that upscale shoplifting on Rodeo Drive, it was me who arranged for your father to make that donation to the Policeman’s Brotherhood Fund. But when you took your father’s Harley and drove it through the plate-glass window of that art gallery — that’s when it became time to get out of town for a while.”

  “Out of town means Santa Barbara — maybe even Tahoe. Not Mars!”

  “You’re a flake, J.J.,” said Rapaport, “but you’re not an idiot. Even you can see that these little happenings of yours are getting worse and worse. You’re going to kill somebody one of these days — maybe even yourself.”

  The boy wrinkled his nose. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  A wide grin split Rapaport’s face. “Oh, yeah.” He noticed the CNC logo on the hat of the man striding across the tarmac toward them. “This must be Mr. Radford now.” He turned to the sailor and held out his hand. “I’m Dan Rapaport from Jonathan Lane’s office.”

  Radford brushed right past him and took the duffel bag from J.J. “Okay, Richie Rich. We sail in an hour.”

  Totally ignored, Rapaport withdrew his hand. For a brief instant, he looked like he wanted to rescue J.J. from his fate. Then he remembered the art gallery window and the Picasso with the tire treads on it. He got back in the Learjet and pulled the door shut behind him.

  “Heave!” bellowed Mr. Radford, untying the lines and pitching them onto the Phoenix.

  Luke, Charla, and Lyssa stood on the edge of the deck, poles in hand, pushing against the dock to move the schooner away from its mooring.

  “Put some back into it!” howled the mate.

  Luke strained until he felt his spine was about to snap. Water opened up between dock and boat. Radford jumped on board. He cupped his hands to his mouth.

  “Clear!”

  In the cockpit, Captain Cascadden engaged the engine. The Phoenix began to pick her way delicately out of the harbor.

  Luke watched the multicolored sails of the other boats go by as the deck thrummed under his feet. Sure, he would have given his right arm to be almost anywhere else. But there was a certain majesty to gliding across the water — definitely a feeling you couldn’t get in Williston Juvenile Detention Facility. He could see that his fellow crew members felt it too — all except one.

  “Captain, my father is a powerful man in Hollywood,” said J.J. smoothly. “I know he’d make it worth your while if you put me on a plane back to the States.”

  The captain’s eyes never wavered from the course he was steering. “This is the States, crewman.”

  “You know — the real States. L.A.”

  “Coast Guard cutter off the starboard bow, three hundred yards!” warned Radford from his perch on the ratlines.

  “Your father,” said the captain, “paid good money for you to be on this trip. I saw the check, crewman.”

  “It’s a misunderstanding,” J.J. insisted. “He signed me up for the boat thing, just not this boat thing. I mean, no offense, but you’ve got four people sleeping in a closet! And the bathroom is a phone booth! I can’t even — ”

  HONK!!

  Will clamped himself onto a bulwark and held on until the earsplitting blast of the air horn died away. His racing heart slowed. What was he doing here? How had his life come to this — on the wrong side of the globe, setting sail on a wooden cracker box?

  If I get out of this, he made a deal with the sky, I swear I’ll never cheat on another math test.

  The Phoenix didn’t put on the brakes and turn around. Instead, the schooner eased through the mouth of the harbor.

  So he sweetened the pot. I swear I’ll floss from now on. Every night!

  Rough hands grabbed him by the collar. “Off your butt, Archie! This is a working ship!” Radford cupped his hands to his mouth. “Ready on the mainsail, Skipper!”

  “Haul!” bellowed the captain.

  Will and Charla began yanking away at the halyard, hand over hand. With a creak of the rigging, the mainsail began to rise.

  Ahead of them, Luke and Ian were hauling up the foresail, their faces taut with concentration.

  Closer to the bow, J.J. and Lyssa worked on the smaller staysail.

  Didn’t it figure? They gave Lyssa the easy sail. It had been like that from the beginning. She was always the sweet little baby, while Will was the older one who should know better. People loved Lyssa. The good looks in the family were all hers; he got stuck with freckles. She was a straight-A student; he struggled.

  “I should have been an only child,” he grunted through the strain of his effort.

  Charla looked down at him like he was crazy — Lyssa’s fault as usual.

  When the wind caught the half-open mainsail, its force pulled the halyard right out of Will’s hand, delivering a painful rope burn. Charla held on, but with the sail taut, the line was difficult to budge. Will clamped himself on again, and both leaned into it with all their might. Up went the sail, flapping full.

  “You’ll earn your dinner tonight!” roared Radford. The mate had joined Luke and Ian. Soon the foresail was up.

  Last came the jibs, two small sails extended from the head of the foremast to the bowsprit — the long thin spar that stretched forward from the bow.

  The crew fell back, exhausted.

  Will looked down at his hands, which were blistered and bleeding. You’d think they’d figure out a way to put up sails without taking off all your skin!

  He caught sight of his sister. She was smiling! Smiling!

  If this is over really fast, Will promised, I swear I’ll get in shape! I’ll jog every day! I’ll lift weights! I’ll —

  “Don’t get comfortable!” bawled Radford. “This is the mainsheet! It’s not a sheet off your bed; it’s a line. And these pulleys are called blocks. Watch what happens when I ease up on the mainsheet.”

  Expertly, the mate undid the knot and gave the rope some slack. He turned to Luke. “Hey, Archie — ”

  Luke turned. “Yeah?”

  A gust of wind took the sail and swung it out over their heads at right angles to the boat.

  Bang! The block swept around and smacked Luke full in the face, knocking him off his feet.

  Radford laughed out loud. “I was going to warn you, but never mind.”

  When the foresail was aligned, Captain Cascadden cut power and let the schooner run with the wind. The crisp ocean breeze blew away the stifling Guam humidity in an instant.

  “Now you’re sailing!” rumbled the captain behind the wheel. “There’s no feeling quite like it!”

  Lyssa hopped up on the engine housing, threw her arms wide, and let her long hair whip in the wind. “Feel that breeze!”

  “Where I come from,” Charla told her, “a wind like this would knock you right off the fire escape!”

  Will burned. Lyssa was making friends here like she did everywhere. By the time this trip was over, she was going to be voted Miss Congeniality on this tub. This would be like a vacation for her while he suffered.

  It was so unfair. If it wasn’t for Lyssa, they wouldn’t even be on this dumb trip! Sure, he got in her face a lot. She deserved it. Besides, when they were fighting, it was always Lyssa who went ballistic.

  Involuntarily, his mind jumped to the incident that his parents had come to call The Last Straw. The argument started out small — two Halloween parties, who would get dropped off first, something like that. No big deal.

  He remembered Mom in the background, screaming for them to calm down. And then the marble rolling pin from Lyssa’s chef’s costume was hurtling toward his face. He heard, rather than felt, his nose break. The blood poured like somebody had busted a hydrant. He couldn’t
even recall fighting back. He must have, though. Because when he woke up in the hospital, Lyssa was in the next bed with a concussion. Both of them were so beaten up that the cops had to file a special report to rule out child abuse.

  “Take my word for it,” the officer assured the Greenfield parents. “If you don’t do something about these two, they’re going to kill each other.”

  And — just their luck! — the admitting nurse happened to have a third cousin whose juvenile delinquent son had been sent on a boat trip called Charting a New Course.

  Tears stung Will’s eyes as Guam became smaller and smaller. Oh, great! Now he was going to be ship’s crybaby too!

  He ran for the companionway to the main cabin, determined that no one should see him.

  There he came face-to-face with Luke, who was holding a cold towel to his rapidly swelling eye.

  “You’re my witness!” Luke seethed. “You saw that lousy Rat-face! He did it on purpose!”

  Will smiled, his first of the day. “Rat-face Radford. Why didn’t I think of that? That’s funny.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Luke raged. “It’s the least funny thing on a very unfunny trip!”

  With a sigh, Will followed him back on deck. It was some small comfort that he wasn’t the only one who was miserable.

  Lyssa was hanging around the captain, schmoozing him while he explained how the boat’s motor worked.

  Will snorted in disgust. One science fair project on the internal combustion engine and Lyssa thought she was Jeff Gordon’s whole pit crew.

  He looked back to the sky. If I get out of this —

  But he wasn’t getting out of anything. Guam was barely a speck on the horizon. The best he could hope for was a sign. Something — anything — that hinted all this might turn out okay.

  An odd look came over Lyssa’s face as she stood with the captain halfway down the engine hatch. with a strangled sound, she scrambled to the side, draped herself over the lifeline, and was thoroughly, violently sick.

  Lyssa hit the water first, a cannonball that sent a splash all the way back to Captain Cascadden in the cockpit.

  “It’s warm!” she shrieked, amazed.

  Will was next, climbing carefully down the boat’s swim ladder. He submerged and bobbed like a cork. “It is warm! It’s great!”

  Luke jumped in and paddled around happily. It felt good to be cool and clean.

  “Hey, Ian,” called Will. “Come get your feet wet.”

  The younger boy averted his eyes. “I don’t think so.”

  “Come on! You’ll love it!” Lyssa promised.

  But Ian had disappeared down the companionway to the sleeping quarters.

  Luke shook his head. “Poor kid. He forgot to download his personality before they made him ship his computer home.”

  “I wonder why he got sent here,” mused Lyssa.

  “He probably wouldn’t mind his own business, just like you,” snickered Will.

  “Shut up.”

  Charla stood poised on the gunwale. She was perched only on the tips of her toes, but she didn’t move a muscle, even with the gentle rocking of the boat. Gracefully, she sailed off the side in a perfect jackknife, hitting the water with barely a splash.

  The other swimmers and even Captain Cascadden burst into cheers and applause.

  Charla broke the surface, took a few smooth powerful strokes, then flipped effortlessly to float on her back. She had always been comfortable in the water, but it was more than that. Swimming somehow seemed to relieve her pressures and tensions, and she had quite a few.

  “You’re a fish!” cried Will.

  She shrugged modestly. “I’m on the swim team at school.”

  “And the diving team?” asked Luke.

  She nodded shyly.

  “But you were talking about track and field before,” put in Lyssa.

  “Only the hundred meters and the hurdles,” said Charla, embarrassed by the attention. “I like gymnastics better, anyway.” She felt a twinge of uneasiness. Why was she talking so much? These people didn’t need to know her private business.

  “Man, what are you doing here?” exclaimed Luke. “You’re the perfect kid! What — your parents signed you up because you’re too good? Maybe you can take rotten lessons from Rat-face.”

  Charla’s smile disappeared. “I’m not so good.” In two textbook strokes, she was at the ladder and clambering back on board.

  Luke was mystified. “What’d I say?”

  “Don’t worry, Luke,” said Will. “You can accuse me of being good. I can take it.”

  Lyssa splashed him in the face. “There are a lot of words that describe you. Good isn’t one of them.”

  Charla glared down at them from the gunwale. Rich kids always acted like they knew everything. What did they have to worry about, besides deciding which mall to shop at? The other athletes she knew — the ones whose dads weren’t working three jobs — could enjoy their sports. It wasn’t their ticket.

  “It’s your ticket out, Charla…. It’s your ticket up…. Your ticket to college … Your ticket to a better life.”

  She heard those words twenty times a day from her father. “Pick one sport. You’re spreading yourself too thin. It’s your ticket to the Olympic team. Go, go, go.”

  I’m twelve, Dad. And isn’t this supposed to be fun? I don’t want a ticket. If I even hear the word again, I’m going to scream!

  Maybe if she’d had the guts to say that, she might have avoided that fateful morning when she couldn’t get out of bed because her arms and legs wouldn’t move. Charla Swann, who could twist herself into a graceful pretzel on the uneven bars, could barely walk into the emergency room. And yet there was nothing physically wrong with her.

  “Burnout. Classic burnout,” the doctor had said.

  And that had led to a ticket even her father hadn’t anticipated — the one to Guam that included a berth on the Phoenix with a bunch of spoiled rich kids.

  Well, okay, they weren’t really rich. Just richer than her, which wasn’t hard to be. Except for that hotshot from California. He was loaded. He had a pair of sunglasses that would probably sell for more than her dad’s car.

  Come to think of it, where was J.J.?

  And then a voice yelled, “Aloha!”

  A voice from above. There was J.J., high up in the mainsail rigging.

  Captain Cascadden saw him too. “Crewman — get down from there this instant!”

  J.J. waved. “Sorry, Captain! Can’t hear you!”

  “Mr. Radford!” roared the captain. “I need you on deck!”

  The mate was asleep in his berth, after taking last night’s watch. But the captain’s strident voice brought him up the companionway in a matter of seconds. He took in the scene in an instant.

  “Don’t even think about it!” he barked furiously.

  Too late. With a cry of “Geronimo!” J.J. grabbed onto a loose rope and swung himself off the mainmast, clear past the deck and out over the open sea. There he let go and dropped like a stone into the water.

  It seemed like a long time — a breathless time — before J.J. surfaced again, howling in triumph. The celebration was short-lived.

  Cursing with rage, Mr. Radford took a running leap off the side of the boat and hit the water swimming. His form was crude and untrained, but Charla had never seen anybody move that fast in water. He scooped J.J. up Red Cross style, towed him back to the swim ladder, and hauled him, still protesting, on board.

  “You miserable little muckworm, do you know what mutiny is?”

  J.J. blinked innocently. “Wasn’t that a classic movie from way back when you were — you know — still old?”

  Now Radford was screaming. “Listen, Richie Rich! When we left Guam, we left the United States! In international waters, the captain is God! And I’m assistant God! When we say come down, down is where you come!”

  He turned his fury on the three still in the water. “Okay, swimming’s over! You’ve got your friend Richie Rich to thank
for that!”

  Charla watched in sympathy as Luke, Will, and Lyssa scrambled nervously up the swim ladder. Captain Cascadden was a nice man, she reflected, but he didn’t seem to notice that his mate was more than just a gruff sailor. Mr. Radford didn’t like people, especially kids. And his bullying seemed to increase with their distance from land.

  She swallowed hard. They were going a lot farther than this….

  Luke had plenty of complaints about shipboard life, but he couldn’t say there was nothing to do. In fact, he’d never been so busy. The sails alone were a full-time career. They constantly needed raising, lowering, trimming, letting in, letting out — somehow, the state they were in was never the right one.

  When Luke and the others weren’t fussing with the boat, they were fussing with the sea around it. Science stuff, mostly. Whale watching, plankton tows, identifying schools of fish. They did math with wave heights and water temperatures and indexed it to their location, which they got from the handheld global positioning satellite system.

  It was all supposed to go in their logbooks, but Luke could never think of anything to write. He was sitting on deck, trying to describe a fish he’d seen ten hours ago, when a shadow fell across the flash-lit page.

  Captain Cascadden was unfolding his six-foot-five frame out of the companionway. “Evening, crewman.” He noticed the logbook in Luke’s hand. “Ah, keeping a log is one of the great pleasures of life at sea. As the years go by, you’ll read this over many times.”

  Right. Like he wanted to relive this lousy trip any more than he wanted to remember the arrest and trial leading up to it. But he bit his tongue and said nothing. Captain Cascadden could be annoying with his long, boring speeches about the joys of the sea. But he was a nice guy at heart. You definitely had to respect him. Not like Rat-face.

  “Here’s something that would make a fascinating entry,” the captain rambled on, pointing to the sky. “Notice the bright halo around the moon. According to legend, that tells of a coming storm. Count the stars inside the ring — one, two. That means the storm is two days away.”