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Show 168 he gave up trying to sleep and climbed the stairs to the deck. Wind hit him with such force it nearly knocked him backward down the stairs. The water, instead of being 'a little choppy', rose in twenty-foot crests that burst against the ship's hull, sending spumes of spray across the deck. Karl had never before been on board a ship, and he'd certainly never seen anything as awesome as the house-high waves that roared toward the J. Pierpont Morgan. Wind howled, water crashed, the ship cracked and groaned in an explosion of noises. Karl leaned against the ship's railing, again thinking how easy it would be to let himself go, to fall into destruction. If a wave pulled him overboard, tons of water would crush him just as heavily as the coal in the hold would have crushed him that afternoon, and this time Andy wasn't there to pull him back. Half a year earlier, the great ship Titanic had gone down in the north Atlantic, dragging hundreds of people to their deaths. Did it matter to them, Karl wondered. Were any of them already crushed inside, as he was, so that the weight of the ocean was no heavier than the pain they already carried? Were any of them already cold and dead inside, so that the icy waters couldn't hurt them further, but only put an end to the pain? A wave higher than the rest burst against the ship and knocked Karl to the deck, splashing the boards slick. As he slid toward the edge, instinct made him fling his arms and legs around a post supporting the rail. The wave sucked backward, ripping a sob from |