"No," said Sig.
They all looked at him. He was standing at the chart table with both hands on it.
"Not Jure," Sig said. "Me. You need Jure on the searchlight, and you need your brother on deck to tend the line, and you need yourself on that wheel to hold this boat off the rocks. I'm the only man aboard you don't need." He was already taking off his pea coat. "And I've been in a small boat in a big sea before."
Duncan remembered it afterward in pieces, the way he remembered the night of the Santa Rosalia, as if the whole of it had been lit by a strobe.
The skiff going off the net pile with the two of them in it and hitting the water like a car wreck. The diesel catching on the second try. The tow line going taut, Jure on the stern paying it out by hand, Zoran in the wheelhouse holding the seiner's bow into the sea a hundred yards off the rocks, the searchlight swinging over them and away and back. Sig in the bow, sixty-five years old, on his knees in his shirtsleeves with a boat hook and a coil of line, calling the seas. Here's one. Hold her. Hold her. Now. Go now.
The breakwater coming up out of the dark, enormous, every block as big as a car, the white water climbing it and pouring off it in sheets. Kelp and granite and diesel. Branko Perovich's face in the searchlight, ten feet away, white as paper, looking at them as if they were a dream.
"Branko," Duncan screamed. "Branko, the line. Take the line."
Sig threw it. It was a perfect throw, low and flat, under the wind, and it fell across Branko's shoulders. And Branko looked at it. He looked at the line across his shoulders and Duncan saw him decide, saw it in his face in the white light, saw him lift his hands off the rock.
"No!" Duncan shouted. "No, you don't, you son of a bitch, you don't get to—"
And then he was in the water.
He didn't remember going in. He remembered the cold like being struck all over with a board, and the black, and the roaring, and then the rock in front of him and his hands on Branko's belt, Branko's shirt. A sea lifted them both and slammed them into the granite and something in his side gave way, and he held on. He got his arm across Branko's chest from behind, the way they taught you in the Red Cross course at Cabrillo Beach when you were fourteen, and when the sea drained off the rocks it took them both out into the black water, and Branko was fighting him, trying to break the grip and go down, and Duncan held on.