Dancing After Hours by Andre Dubus Page A

against her knees and palms; she could only see Cal’s feet hit the water and his legs sink into it, and his body to his ribs before the jacket stopped and lifted him, one arm straight upward, his hand gripping a rung and pulling his arm bent as with the other he reached underwater and pushed the captain up and held him while the captain moved his left hand up the vertical rope to the next rung. Then Cal lifted him again and the captain’s feet were on the ladder and she could see Cal’s hand pushing his buttocks, and the captain’s hand moved up to the next rung and pulled, the sunburn gone now from his face more pale than his sun-bleached hair, and blood fell on Cal and spurted on the water where a fin came with the insouciant speed of nature and her remorseless killing. Cal was looking only at the captain’s back above him; he bent one legout of the water, its thigh pressing his abdomen; then his foot was on the ladder; he straightened his leg and the other ascended from the water as quickly it seemed as it had entered when he jumped over the captain, into the sea. Below him the eyes and head rose from blown waves, then went under, and the fin circled the bound orange preservers turning and rocking and rising and falling in the water and downward rush of air from the huge blades. Their loud circling above her made Rusty feel contained from all other time and space save these moments and feet of rope that both separated her from Cal and joined her to him.
    Then quickly and firmly, yet not roughly, a man removed her from the hatch—pushed her maybe; lifted and set her down maybe—and went backward down the ladder. She crawled to the hatch’s side: Cal stood behind the captain, his head near the middle of the captain’s back, his right hand holding the vertical rope beneath the slowing spurt of blood, his left pulling the captain’s hand from a rung, pushing it to the one above; then the man descending stopped and held on to the swinging ladder with the crook of his elbow, and hung out above the water and the fins—four now, five—and lowered a white line she had not seen to Cal, then tied it around his waist and held the captain’s wrist while Cal circled and knotted the line beneath the orange jacket and the face that now was so white, she knew the captain would die. But her heart did not; it urged the three men up as Cal, with his body, held the captain on the ladder and pushed his hand up to a rung, then lifted his left leg to one, then his right, and followed him up while the crewman, with the line around his waist, slowly climbed until he reached thehatch and leaned through it, his chest on the deck, and Gina and Ryan each took an arm and pulled, and Rusty worked her hands under his web belt at his back, and on her knees she pulled until he was inside, kneeling, then standing and turning seaward, to look down the ladder and tighten the rope and say to any of them behind him: “First-aid kit.”
    Hand over hand he pulled the rope, looking down the ladder at his work, keeping his pull steady but slow, too, holding the captain on the ladder and between it and Cal. Then at the bottom edge of the hatch, against a background of blue sky and water, the captain’s face appeared; then the jacket, and the shoulder she could not look away from but she saw the other one, too, and his left arm that did not reach into the helicopter but simply fell forward and lay still. The crewman stepped back, leaning against the rope around his waist, pulling it faster now but smoothly, and though she could not see Cal, she saw the effort of his push as the captain rose and dropped to the deck. She bent over his back, gripped his belt at both sides, and threw herself backward, and he slid forward as she fell on her rump and sat beside him, on the spot where his right arm would have been, and she felt his blood through her wet jeans. The blood did not spurt now. It flowed, and Cal was aboard, crawling in it, before Rusty or Gina or