Sink or Swim Read online

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Author’s Note

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Steve Watkins

  Copyright

  My hands were freezing from the choppy waves in the January Atlantic Ocean. We were a mile out from Ocracoke Island off the North Carolina coast, and I had on a pair of my dad’s old work gloves. My older brother, Danny, and I were there after school to do some net fishing, and it was time to let out the drop net between our two boats.

  “Okay, Colton,” he yelled over the rumble of both of our motors. “You got your side tied on?”

  “Just about,” I yelled back. “It’s hard with these gloves on.”

  “Then take them off!” he said.

  I did, and by the time I got my end of the net tied my hands were numb.

  “Now run your skiff at the same speed as mine,” Danny said, gesturing to my boat. “Not too fast and not too slow.”

  We were trawling for trout, sea bass, bluefish, whatever we lucked into, hoping for a decent catch so we could head back to shore soon, before it got too late in the afternoon and before the wind picked up and the water got nasty. It used to be the family business, but now Danny just went out when he could to help Mama with the extra money he earned from selling whatever he caught. We needed all the extra money possible after Dad died. It was hard for Mama to pay the bills when the only money coming in was from her working at the post office and washing clothes for people.

  Danny was seventeen and I was twelve, so, of course, I did everything he told me, even though I was big for my age and nearly his same size. Sometimes strangers thought we were twins if they didn’t look at us too close—not that we saw many strangers on the island.

  It was only the third time Danny had let me come help him trawl, and there was still plenty I kept forgetting. Naturally, Danny was happy to point that out. Dad used to take Danny out on the ocean to net fish when Danny was my age, which was how he learned, but Dad passed away four years ago, before I was old enough.

  When I was little, Danny was my best friend, even though he was so much older. We were always playing games around the house, going body surfing, riding beach ponies. But after Dad died, Danny didn’t have much time for me anymore, or that was what he said. And I guess it was true, because he was always going straight from school to do whatever odd job he could find in town, or else out on the ocean fishing.

  After we lost Dad, Danny just felt like he had to make up for it somehow. Like he had to step in to help keep the roof over our heads. And that also meant no more playing with his little brother, no matter how much I begged him to.

  But in one more week, it was just going to be me doing the fishing—well, me and this kid Dean Shepherd from school who also came from a fishing family—because Danny was leaving for the navy. He’d signed up right after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor last month. Our navy had been getting kicked around in the South Pacific Ocean ever since then and now we heard the Germans had started attacking American ships up north that were crossing over to England. Danny wanted to do his part to fight back, especially now that the Germans and the Italians had also declared war on the US. Plus the navy pay would help out the family.

  “Keep your mind on what you’re doing!” Danny barked. “You’re steering too close to me.”

  I straightened my skiff. “Sorry,” I said.

  He frowned. “Sorry won’t help if you run into my boat, or run over the net and tear it up with your propeller.”

  I said sorry again, and this time tried to pay better attention to what I was doing.

  We kept nosing forward together through two-foot waves, and pretty soon I felt something pull on the net, hopefully a school of fish. Danny must have felt it, too, because he gave me a thumbs-up and grinned and that made me feel better.

  It was the middle of the afternoon, but no sun. Just sky so gray it could have been dusk already. We were used to it, though. I got out a harmonica that Mama had given me for my Christmas present. I was still learning how to play it. About the only song I sort of knew was “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” As soon as I started, Danny groaned.

  “You’re not gonna play that again, are you? I must have heard it a thousand times already. Don’t you know anything else? Besides, you’re scaring the fish.”

  “I am not,” I said. “Fish like music. I think.”

  I was about to say something else, but suddenly we heard a roaring noise from out of nowhere coming up behind us. Before we could even turn to look, a giant swell lifted our boats! He grabbed the sides. “Colton!” he yelled, but whatever he was going to say, he didn’t get to finish, because the swell passed and his boat slammed down hard in the water, sending him sprawling. Something had hold of the net and jerked us both forward, like maybe a whale had gotten caught down there.

  “Cut the net!” Danny yelled as we were dragged behind the swell, our boats bucking wildly, threatening to throw us out. I had a tight hold on the sides of my boat and was scared to let go to cut the net or do anything else.

  Danny kept yelling, pulling out his knife and slashing at where the net was tied to his gunwale. “Cut it now, Colton!”

  Just as he said it, though, the bow of his boat tipped under the surface, and he dropped his knife. Water poured over the bow and over Danny. His whole boat was going under. Panicked, I lurched forward, fumbling frantically for my knife, and somehow managed to slash through the taut ropes—just as I was about to be swallowed, too.

  “I’m loose!” I hollered to Danny, only he wasn’t there anymore. His boat wasn’t. The net wasn’t. Nothing was, except the swell, pulling away fast.

  “Danny!” I yelled as loud as I could, over and over. “Danny, where are you?”

  But he was gone.

  I sat there, paralyzed, rocking in the waves. The motor had quit on me, but I didn’t try to start it up. I was too much in shock, staring at the place where Danny had vanished.

  Then, a quarter mile ahead of my now drifting boat, something broke the surface. It was the swell giving way to something enormous and gray, only it wasn’t a whale. It had a tower and deck guns, and as it kept rising out of the water, slowing down, I saw the deck, and the sides with some lettering and some numbers that were too far away for me to read.

  A hatch opened and men climbed out onto the deck.

  I knew what it was right away and terror froze me in place. We’d learned about it from Mrs. Payne, my seventh-grade teacher: a submarine. And not just any sub, but a German U-boat.

  There was talk about Hitler’s U-boats off the East Coast. Folks had been saying it was just a matter of time before there would be fighting in the Atlantic against them. Still, I could hardly believe my eyes.

  I squinted into the distance and saw the fishing net and Danny’s boat caught up on the bow of the U-boat, dangling over the side.

  Some of the German submariners looked back in my direction, just standing around and smoking. Others went over to the boat to cut it loose and dump
it into the ocean. There was still no sign of Danny anywhere.

  One of the men pointed at me and seemed to be laughing, though I couldn’t hear anything except the groaning ocean and waves slapping the sides of my boat. Some other men joined the laughing submariner. Others just stood there.

  I was still so scared that I couldn’t move. There was no place to go anyway. Nowhere to hide. I couldn’t jump in the water or I’d freeze. My motor was still stalled out, and I doubted I could get it started quickly enough to get away. And even if I managed, I knew I couldn’t outrun those deck guns.

  They didn’t do anything, though, except eventually go back down below, close the hatch, and churn away through the dark Atlantic until the sub was just a speck on the horizon.

  I did the best I could to shake off being paralyzed from fear. I had to find Danny. So I got busy trying to start up the motor, praying it would still work. And like a miracle, it did. I was taking on water through a crack in the hull, but I couldn’t worry about that now. I aimed for the spot where the U-boat had surfaced, hoping I’d find Danny, calling his name again, over and over.

  Ten minutes later I saw him, his head barely above the waterline, clutching the ice box where we stored the fish we caught. I forgot about where that U-boat might be lurking. “Danny!” I yelled. “Hold on!”

  He didn’t lift his head or say anything when I pulled up beside him, but at least he was still breathing. He’d probably used all the strength he had clinging on to the ice box. I could barely peel his fingers off to loosen his grip, and then hang on to his arm to keep him from slipping under. The ice box bobbed away out of reach.

  I wasn’t big enough or strong enough to just pull Danny in, so I had to figure something out—and fast, before he got hypothermia and died. Then I could deal with whatever injuries he might have had from being lifted and slammed and dragged underwater by the U-boat.

  I grabbed a line from the bottom of my boat and looped it around the arm I was holding, pulling him up with it as far as I could, and then tying it off. I did the same with more rope and one of Danny’s legs. Then, with him secured to the side of my boat, I reached for Danny’s belt, took hold, braced my feet against the hull, and pulled with all my might until I got him up to the side—and then over. He landed on top of me, both of us splashing into a couple of inches of oily water.

  I sat Danny up as best I could and wrapped a tarp around him because it was about the only thing I had to try to keep him warm. “Just hold on,” I told him, even though he was still unconscious. “Don’t die!”

  Once I had him situated, I aimed the boat back toward Ocracoke—actually north of the island a little way, since the currents would be pulling me south and I had to account for that. I tied off the throttle to keep it open as fast as the waves would let me, and then spent the next half hour bailing water with an old coffee can.

  Danny moaned a couple of times but didn’t open his eyes. Once I had enough water out that the boat could ride high enough to make decent time, I went over to check him, feel for broken bones or anything I could think of. But whatever was wrong with him, I didn’t know enough to be able to tell. Maybe he hit his head, though I couldn’t feel a lump. Maybe he had water in his lungs. Maybe something inside was broken or torn.

  “Hang on, Danny,” I whispered to him, hugging him partly to try to make him warmer, and partly—mostly—because I was so scared and wished he would wake up and tell me what else I should do that I hadn’t thought of yet. I started crying, which I hadn’t done since Dad died. Thankfully, there wasn’t anybody around to see me doing it—especially nobody from school—and if by some other miracle Danny was to open his eyes just then, I doubted he’d make fun of me under the circumstances.

  It was growing darker, which turned out to be not such a bad thing because now I could see lights on the island and had something to navigate to. But I still hated, hated, hated being out on the ocean in the nighttime.

  Mama was waiting for us on the beach, something she always did whenever we went fishing, though we were hours late this time. I saw a lantern first, and then her, standing right where she knew we would put to shore. She had her jeans rolled up and a flannel shirt on but nothing else, not even a hat. And she waded out to take hold of the bow before we even made it all the way in. Her tanned face looked white in the glow of the lantern.

  “What happened?” she said as she grabbed Danny’s arm and felt his pulse. She didn’t wait for me to answer before she lifted him half out of the boat and then told me to take his legs and help her get him up on the sand.

  I was crying too hard to answer. I knew Danny needed help, but I wanted Mama to take me in her arms and hug me and tell me everything was going to be okay and not to worry. But instead she said, “You can’t cry right now, Colton. You need to quickly tell me what happened and then run up to town to get help. Danny needs you to be strong for a few more minutes.”

  I swallowed hard and managed to say, “Yes, Mama,” and then I blurted out that there was a German U-boat and it sank Danny’s boat and I lost sight of Danny and he went under and I didn’t know how long and I was so scared but I found him and it took me forever to get back to the island and I kept him as warm as I could and—

  Mama stopped me. She was all business. “That’s enough for now, Colton. Run as fast as you can to get help. Go get Dr. Evans and then Officer Winslow.”

  I took off, running as hard as I could, my feet digging into the sand and feeling like lead. I was so out of breath when I got to Dr. Evans that he tried to make me lie down. But I waved him off. “It’s my brother! We need help!”

  I started to explain what happened, but I probably didn’t make much sense. Dr. Evans grabbed his black medical bag and told me I could tell him the rest later, but right now I had to go get the one policeman on the island, Officer Winslow. Then he took off for the beach, moving a lot faster than I thought a man as heavy as him could.

  Mama was still holding Danny in her lap when Officer Winslow and I got there, using her body to keep him as warm as she could, the damp tarp pulled over both of them. Dr. Evans was checking Danny for broken bones.

  “There’s a head injury, but that’s about all I know right now,” he said. “We need to get him up to the clinic right away and warm him up from this hypothermia.”

  We used the tarp for a stretcher to carry him up to the clinic—each one of us lifting a corner, me struggling the hardest because I was the smallest. Mama filled them in from what little I’d told her, but she was calm enough that at least they could understand what she was saying. I was still panting too hard to add anything more until a lot later, after we got Danny to the clinic, cleaned up, out of his wet clothes, and under warm blankets, with an IV line in his arm for fluids.

  I did my best to tell them the whole story while Dr. Evans checked Danny again for any broken bones he might have missed, listened to his breathing with his stethoscope, and checked his vital signs.

  Finally, when I finished, Mama hugged me. “You were mighty brave out there, Colton,” she said.

  And then she turned her attention back to Danny. We all did, even though there was nothing anybody could do except wait for him to wake up.

  “Is he in a coma, Dr. Evans?” Mama asked. I swallowed hard at the thought.

  “It’s too early to say, Mrs. Graham,” Dr. Evans replied.

  “Well, if it isn’t a coma, then what is it?” Mama asked. I could hear the steel in her voice, but I also realized Mama must be scared, too. She was trying not to let it show.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Dr. Evans said. “I mean, he’s unconscious, but it could be that once he warms up enough, and once we get enough fluids in him, he’ll be just fine.”

  The way he said it, though, not looking at Mama when he talked, made me think Danny really was in a coma, but Dr. Evans didn’t want to say it. Even I knew that if you’re just unconscious, you’ll wake up eventually, but if you’re in a coma, you might never wake up.

  We stayed there
with Danny all night. Mama mostly prayed, or leaned over Danny and whispered in his ear in a voice too low for me to hear. And probably too far away for Danny to hear. But she kept trying.

  Dr. Evans left after a couple of hours but came back first thing in the morning. He was the only doctor on the island and always had a lot of folks to see. He came into Danny’s room first, though. There wasn’t any change.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to move him to the mainland just yet,” he said. Officer Winslow had come back, too, and he chimed in that with a U-boat out there, nobody was too keen on the idea of launching a boat across the sound to take Danny anywhere anyway.

  Mama didn’t say anything. She hadn’t slept and had really dark circles around her eyes.

  Mrs. Thorson, the nurse, brought Mama some coffee and we sat in silence while she drank it.

  And we waited. One day, two days, a week.

  I slept in two chairs pulled together next to Danny’s bed and only ever left to go to the bathroom. I tried to sleep anyway. Except whenever I closed my eyes I kept hearing that roar behind us and seeing that swell come up under us, and Danny disappearing, and those German U-boat sailors standing on their deck, cutting loose Danny’s boat and smoking their cigarettes and looking back at me like none of it mattered. Like Danny and I were nothing to them. Not even real people.

  I woke up sweating even though it was cold in the clinic. The winter wind was picking up outside, the loud surf half a mile away sounding like it was hitting up against the other side of the wall.

  Mama was there as much as she could be, sitting with Danny and me, but with her two jobs, she kept having to leave. After the first few days of Danny being in the coma—eventually even Dr. Evans started calling it that—she got on me that I had to go to school, but I wouldn’t do it. I felt like what had happened to him was my fault somehow.

  And with money already tight, now it was going to be even tighter. No money from Danny’s fishing. No money from him going into the navy. Instead, his being in the hospital was just going to mean more bills.

  I told Mama I thought I should drop out of school and see about getting a job on one of the trawlers that operated on the island. Or get with Dean Shepherd after school and go out every afternoon with the drop net to catch our own fish like Danny did, not just once in a while like I’d originally figured.