The tractor that puts the boat in the sea has an hour meter and a key, and the key lives in a safe, and the hours are checked against the launch log because the tractor is serviced on them. Every morning the meter is two hours up. The tyres are wet and the treads are full of sand. And on the beach, at low water, there are tractor tracks from the slip to the edge of the sea, and none coming back, and the tractor is in the house.
I am the head launcher at a lifeboat station with a tractor launch, and the tractor is the thing I drive into the sea, and at night somebody else does.
The tractor.
A waterproof machine, sealed cab, snorkel, that pushes the boat on its carriage down the slip and along the beach and into the sea until the boat floats, and comes out again, and waits, and goes back in to recover. It has an hour meter and a key, and the key is in the safe, and the hours are matched against the launch log at every service.
Every morning the meter is two hours up and the log has no launch.
The morning.
The tractor is in the house. Where I left it. The tyres are wet, and the treads are packed with sand, the fine grey sand from below the low water mark, not the beach sand, and the cab has salt on the glass, and the snorkel has a drip coming out of it, and the engine is warm.
The beach at low water has tracks. Tractor tracks, ours, by the tread, from the bottom of the slip out across the sand to the water's edge, and into it, and the tide has not been up to wash them because the tide is out and they are fresh.
There are no tracks coming back.
What has been checked.
The meter, replaced. Two hours a night.
The key, in the safe, in my hand, at midnight, while the tractor started in the house behind me, and moved, and I heard the doors, and I heard it go down the slip.
The beach, at midnight, by me, on the dunes. The tractor came down the slip with its lights on, and there was nobody in the cab, and the carriage behind it was empty, no boat, and it went out across the sand at the speed you drive a tractor on sand, which is slow, to the water, and into it, and the lights went under, the way they do on a deep launch, green under the water, and then out, and the sea was dark, and I stood on the dunes for two hours and the tractor did not come out.
At two I went to the house and it was in the house, wet, with the engine warm, and the tracks on the beach went in and did not come back.
Who.
The station's launchers are not on the wall. The crew are on the wall and the launchers are the ones who put them in the sea and are forgotten, and the station's book has a page for them, and one line on it is a man's name and a date in the seventies and the words, lost during recovery.
He had taken the tractor in, the old hands said, to recover the boat in bad weather, and the tractor had gone deeper than it should, and the sea had taken the cab, and the boat had come home and the tractor had come home, in the end, on a low tide, and he had not.
He is launching. Every night. Taking the tractor out, with no boat behind it, into the sea, to recover something, and the tractor comes back without him, because that is what happened, and the tracks do not come back because his did not.
What is done about it.
The meter hours are on the service schedule and the tractor is serviced on them and the mechanic has asked me whether we are launching every night and I have said the tractor is, and he has looked at the sand in the treads and not asked again.
What I do.
I run the launch.
A launcher in the sea has a man on the beach with a light. That is the rule, and it was the rule then, and on the night he was lost the man on the beach had been called away to the boat, and the tractor had been in the water with nobody watching the lights.
So I watch. At midnight I am on the beach, at the edge, in my drysuit, with the big torch, and when the tractor goes in I keep the torch on it, on the snorkel, then on the place where the snorkel went under, and I hold it there, the way the rule says, all the time the tractor is in, and I say into the radio, which is on the station channel, which nobody is on, tractor in, I have the lights, which is what the beach man says, and I stand there for two hours with the torch on the sea.
The tracks have started coming back. Not all the way. A few metres. The tractor comes out of the water, by the tracks, and stops, and goes back in, the way a tractor does when the driver is looking for something in the surf and cannot find it, and each night it comes a little further up the sand before it goes back, and I think he is seeing the light, and I think he is coming towards it, and I think that one night the tracks will come back to the slip, and the tractor will come up it with him in the cab, and I will say, tractor out, all clear, and I do not know what happens after that, and I am not going to stop holding the torch to find out.