Not a Lifesaving Device

Dad packed the raft in the station wagon as he did every year for our beach vacations, folding it with exquisite care as if it were a flag at a military funeral. When we arrived at the cottage, he unloaded everything from the car for us to carry inside, then began the annual ritual of inflating the raft with an old electric pump that rattled like a steam engine and took nearly half an hour to raise it from a puddle of rubber into a taut craft. Its scuffed blue underbelly and faded yellow cockpit, like an armada of others, was stenciled with the words “Not a Lifesaving Device.”

Every day he carried the raft over the dunes and launched himself onto the water and beyond the breakers. He floated out of reach with his gangly legs hanging over the side, scowling toward the beach as if daring either of us boys to ask whether we could have a ride. Instead, we remained on the sand, browning on towels in the hot sun, taking advantage of this chance to cover up our bruises before the start of the school year—the burnt sienna erasing the yellow and green blotches but not the pain applied during drunken discipline.

Michael kept his eyes on Dad constantly. The day that a big wave flipped Dad out and washed the raft onto the shore empty, he raced to the water’s edge, grabbed the raft and held it until Dad emerged from the surf and reclaimed it without offering thanks for his dutiful service and certainly without gathering Michael up, tossing him into the raft and floating him out onto the water the way my brother desperately longed he would. At night as we talked in our room after the lights were out, I begged Michael, who was three years younger and small for a ten-year-old, to stop acting like a dog that licks its master’s hand after a whipping.

Michael never stopped talking about the raft. At the dinner table he surprised me by speaking straight to Dad, even though our father had several glasses of vodka and cans of beer in him and was therefore better handled as if he were nitroglycerin. “What’s it like out there past the waves?” Michael asked. “Is it scary?” He persisted, even as I kicked him under the table. “I bet there are sharks and killer whales.”

Dad drained his beer and chuckled. “The only whale I’ve ever seen out there is Mrs. Ellis from next door.” Michael laughed loudly and a tight smile formed on Ma’s lips. I allowed myself to relax slightly as Dad launched into a story about inadvertently witnessing Mrs. Ellis’s naked sprint from the outdoor shower behind her cottage to her kitchen door. “She nearly blacked her own eyes with those flopping tits,” he said. Michael’s eyebrows shot up at the use of a forbidden word at the dinner table, while Ma’s forehead furrowed in disapproval.

Just as I began to believe we might be capable of having dinner like a normal family, Dad retrieved another beer from the fridge. Ma stared at him as he returned to the table. “What are you looking at?” he asked, posing the question that had started a rough evening at our house more times than I could count.

The air around us seemed to solidify, and the hairs rose on the back of my neck. I gobbled the rest of my food, grabbed my plate, and put it in the sink. Michael began to follow my lead, even though he still had a few bites of meatloaf left on his plate. I knew what was coming before it happened: Dad’s hand shot out and gripped Michael’s arm. “Don’t throw that away,” he said through gritted teeth. “I paid for that, and you’re damn well going to eat it.”

Michael returned to his chair carrying his plate in one hand, the other hand gripping his crotch as he struggled to keep from peeing himself, something he was prone to do when frightened. The last time that had happened, Dad had dubbed him “Pissbaby,” a nickname he now used whenever Michael displayed any timidity or hesitation. Michael stuffed the meatloaf into his mouth and ran to the sink with his plate as the stain grew on the front of his shorts. I stood where I could block Dad’s view of him and then followed closely behind as Michael ran to the bathroom. I brought him a change of underwear and clean shorts and rinsed his clothes in the sink. I put his wet clothes at the bottom of the hamper under the other clothing and hoped they wouldn’t be discovered until we could take care of them. 

That night, Michael rolled around in the lower bunk until after midnight, sleeping fitfully if at all. “Are you awake?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Why is he the way he is?”

Although I had a hundred theories that I’d turned over in my mind on a hundred sleepless nights of my own, I had no good answer for him. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Doesn’t he love us?”

I’d thought about that question plenty of times, too, and had nothing to say that would bring him comfort. “I don’t know,” I said again.

*     *     *     

I thought of a day from the previous fall. Michael and I had been assigned the job of raking the yard. I had let him use the new rake, hoping its novelty would interest him and that he’d work harder than usual. Instead, he’d spent most of his time burying it under leaves and pretending it was a trap that would be triggered when an unsuspecting person walked past and stepped on it, like something out of a Road Runner cartoon. We finished the first day of raking at dusk, our noses running freely and our breath clouding the cold air. I stowed my rake on the back porch and went inside to await Ma’s call to dinner.

Later, when Michael and I lay in our beds talking in the dark, Dad climbed the stairs. My chest tightened as his shadow filled our doorway. He came into the room and exhaled an ethanol fog over us. After a very long minute he spoke, his speech slurred and hard-edged in the way that always meant violence would follow: “Where’s the good rake, the one I just bought? It’s not on the porch with the other one.” I lay as still as possible, waiting for Michael to talk. 

“I couldn’t find it,” Michael said. “It was too dark.”

Dad snatched him by a leg and pulled him onto the floor in one swift motion. “Go get the belt,” Dad ordered him.

I knew from experience that the agonizing walk to retrieve the belt was a greater punishment than the whipping that followed. I cautiously got out of my bed and edged toward the door when Michael returned and handed over the belt. Dad might whip just Michael, or he might whip us both; it was impossible to predict. So I darted into the hall, leaving him to face his fate alone. At the first slap of leather against skin, shame washed over me and I resolved to go back into the room. Instead, I cowered where I was. To my surprise, Michael did not cry out, which earned him several gratuitous lashes to teach him a lesson he had already learned.

A week later I awakened to a creaking on the stairs. Michael wasn’t in his bed, so I went downstairs and nearly ran into him in the dark. He jumped with surprise and hid something behind his back. I took hold of his arm and turned him slightly. He held Dad’s claw hammer in his hand. “What are you doing with that?” I asked.

“I don’t think I can take it anymore,” he said. I held out my hand and, after a few moments, he gave me the hammer. “I wouldn’t have actually done it,” he said.

“No,” I replied, and I knew he wouldn’t—couldn’t—follow through on something like that because, unlike me, he still harbored hope that Dad could change. Even so, for the next month I slept fitfully, listening for a creak on the stairs. I considered hiding the hammer, but Dad had so many other tools that could be just as lethal.

*     *     *     

We lay quietly as the night sound of the surf pounding the beach drifted in the window. When we were sure our parents had fallen asleep, we put Michael’s soiled clothing into the washing machine and climbed into the top bunk together to wait for the load to finish. If he fell asleep, I nudged him awake because if I was going to stay awake to move his clothes from the washer to the dryer, the least he could do was to stay awake with me.

The washer at the beach house was much louder than the one at home, so we held our breath and listened to Dad’s snoring through the wall, perversely relieved that the vodka and beer kept him out of commission for our overnight laundry chores. We got Michael’s clothes out of the dryer as the sky shifted from black to violet. I slept for an hour or two before the sun topped the horizon and its first rays illuminated us like a searchlight exposing our guilt. 

Michael got up and said nothing as he pulled on a swimsuit and a T-shirt, his face hardened with purpose. I followed him as he went to the garage, took out the raft, and tugged it along by its rope. “Are you sure you want to do that?” I asked. “If he comes looking for it, God knows what he’ll do to you.”

“I don’t care anymore,” Michael said, and I thought I understood: The next beating was never a long time in coming anyway; we might as well enjoy ourselves while we could.

We crested the dunes and stepped over the line of driftwood, kelp, and shells that the ocean had deposited during the night. Sandpipers dodged incoming waves, and families getting an early start staked their claims to squares of sand. On this section of the shore the county apportioned no lifeguards, instead flying a red warning flag on days when the surf was rough. Today’s flag was green and snapped briskly in the strong seaward wind.

Michael ran down to the water and tossed the raft in. He jumped into it and looked back to see whether I was watching. “Be careful,” I yelled. I stood ready to dive in if he drifted too far from shore. He grinned and paddled with his hands out to where the waves broke over a sandbar. He struggled but managed to cross over the breakers and into the calmer water on the other side.

The action of the waves kept him close, to my relief. After more than an hour he turned and paddled furiously toward shore. He caught a big wave, which propelled the raft nearly all the way to the sand, where it flipped and dumped him on his head in shallow water. I ran to him and dragged him up onto the sand, where he smiled broadly despite the fresh abrasions on his nose and chin.

As I inspected his face the wind caught the raft and blew it out into the incoming waves. A gust lifted it off the water, and it tumbled end-over-end as the wind got under it and propelled it away from us. Michael leapt up from the sand and ran into the water. I watched him, annoyed at his habitual carelessness and vaguely thinking that a swim out to retrieve the raft would teach him a lesson. But as his bony arms flailed at the water, he made no headway in getting closer to it. My annoyance quickly escalated to anger when I realized I would need to save him from yet another bad decision—for what seemed like the hundredth time. I also knew that Dad’s punishment would be severe and would include me prominently if we didn’t get the raft back to shore.

I sighed, dove in, and swam after Michael as fast as I could. When I caught up to him, I saw that he was far more fatigued than I had realized. I turned him onto his back and treaded water as I supported him so he could rest. He shivered violently and his purple lips drew taut across his teeth as he sobbed and repeated over and over: “The raft. The raft. The raft.”

“Can you get back to the shore?” I asked him after a few minutes.

“Yes.”

“Good.” I released him and turned toward the ocean. 

“Hey! Where are you going?” he asked. I nodded out toward the open sea. We both knew what would happen if we came home without the raft. “Okay, but promise you’ll turn around if you get tired,” he said.

I smiled to reassure him and resumed swimming. The outgoing wind knocked the waves down but continued pushing the raft further from shore. I got into a rhythm of four strokes and a breath and stopped to see whether Michael was on the beach. He stood on the sand, a hand shielding his eyes as he peered out into the water. Bathers played in the shallows and families clustered under umbrellas, oblivious to our agony. I continued doggedly, pausing about every fifty breaths to make course corrections.

After twenty minutes of swimming, I had closed in on the raft, but only slightly. The water had turned a darker green, an indication that I was well past the sandbar and into deeper water. I had been on long swims before, at swim team practice and at the lake where I’d earned the Mile Swim award at Boy Scout camp earlier that summer. But swimming in those conditions never left me far from a buoy or an adult.

This time when I looked back, I couldn’t pick out Michael on the beach, which had shrunk to a thin tan-colored line at the horizon. I wondered at what distance it would be impossible for a swimmer to see the shore. No surfers or boaters were out and not even a plane flew overhead, compounding my feeling of isolation.

I rested for a minute and, just as I resumed swimming, the water beneath me seemed to surge upward as a dark shape slid past. I shivered violently and felt my teeth clench together in alarm. A cloud moved across the sun and its shadow raced over the water. Was this what I had seen before—just a shadow and not something lethal from the depths? I stopped and waited for the shape to approach again, helpless to get away and knowing that if something pulled me under, I would simply disappear, and the mystery of my death would start this day. I tried to stay calm and breathe evenly, but felt the panic well up in me. It seemed manifestly unfair that my life could end this way, out here just trying to be the big brother that Michael needed.

The dark shape rushed past again. I stared down, afraid to see what it was, but afraid not to know. The raft floated perhaps two hundred yards away. I swam hard for it and began to realize how tired I was. If I swam much further from shore, I would need to get into the raft, if only to rest long enough to ensure I could swim all the way back. And if I got into the raft, maybe its blue underside would render me invisible to whatever was patrolling below. I tried not to think about how the dark shape was built for the sea, how it could swim faster than me and attack whenever it decided it had had enough of watching me struggle through the water.

Soon I was less than fifty yards away and swam harder to close the gap. The raft appeared directly in front of me, looking larger than I remembered. I grasped the nylon rope that encircled it and tried to pull myself up and over the side, but my limbs felt like rubber. I twisted the line around my arm so I wouldn’t accidentally let go as I rested, and tried not to think about the shadow. My rasping breath echoed against the side of the raft. The space immediately in front of me seemed close, despite the endless water all around. I let my legs go limp and remained still, hoping not to draw attention to myself.

My heart thudded in my chest as the raft tugged me further out to sea as if pulled by a giant invisible hand—a hand I only half-wished would scoop me out of the water and deposit me on the sand. By now Dad would long since have come down to the beach looking for the raft. I wondered whether he had dared to raise his hand—or his fists—to Michael in public. But I knew that even if a reprieve had been granted, it would soon end. 

The shape did not approach. I chided myself for the stupidity of my misguided quest and for my hesitance now. After all, predators don’t strike because we deserve it; monsters are indifferent to our fate. I untangled my arm from the rope, pushed the raft away, and began the long swim to the beach.

JOHN BENNER

John Benner’s short stories have appeared in the Delmarva Review, Tower Journal, Penmen Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly and The Raven Review. His essays and articles have been published in The Washington Post and newspapers across the U.S., on subjects ranging from the cruelty of Christmas to why birds live inside Home Depot.