Gulf Coast Girl (17 page)

It was night. It was day. It was night again. In the day there was sun and at night on the back of my eyelids she was a flash of silver, falling through blue.

Once I went to sleep. She fell like poured quicksilver through a cloud, but I flew down and caught her. I took her by the arm and turned her around and kissed her and we went on falling through the cloud, but now the color was changing from blue to rose. We clung together.

“You didn’t let me explain,” I said. “You’ve got to listen. I can’t live without you, Swede. I didn’t make you understand the first time. Give me another chance—”

“Come with me,” she said. “We’ll live in raptures.”

I awoke and somebody was screaming. I shut my mouth and it stopped.

The current set me to the north and west. I ran back. I drifted. I ran back. I used up all the fuel and could beat my way back only when there was wind. I took star sights at dawn. I shot the sun at noon. I took star sights at dusk. None of them ever worked out exactly on 23.50 North, 88.45 West. I was always off a mile one way or three miles another.

I ran out on deck and looked across the miles of water glittering under the sun. Then the whole thing came to me at once. It was Macaulay. He’d been right all the time. He was the only one of us who was sane. And I’d been stupid enough to think he was mad. I, with my smug superiority and my cheap little bag of tricks like spherical trigonometry and azimuths and sun lines and hour angles and bearings from fixed points, having the effrontery to say a man was crazy because he thought he could go back and find something he’d lost in an ocean. Of course he could go back and find it. The whole thing was absurdly simple. It didn’t even take third-grade arithmetic.

When you got to the spot, you’d know. It was as simple as that.

I looked off to starboard. A seagull was sitting on a piece of driftwood.

That was it. That was the place.

I remembered. There had been a seagull sitting on a piece of driftwood just before we dived.

“Nice seagull,” I said, moving softly. “Pretty seagull. Don’t go away. I’ll bring you some bread crumbs. Don’t fly away.”

When I came back on deck he was still sitting on the piece of wood. “Nice seagull,” I said. I threw the bread crumbs. He flew away. I began to cry.

I threw some more. Maybe he would come back and mark the place again. He had to come back because the other piece of driftwood had a seagull on it. I could see her. She was beckoning, a flash of silver falling into blue.

“Swede, angel,” I said. “I didn’t make you understand. We can escape.”

I began to feel weak. I hadn’t eaten anything for a long time. I ran a hand across my face, and felt shaky all over, waiting for the seagull to come back.

Something heavy was on my shoulders. I felt the straps across my chest. I was wearing the aqualung. That was what I’d gone after.

I screamed.

I tore it off and ran below. I fell into a bunk and lay there, shaking. My mind was clear again. I covered my face with my hands.

It’s all past. I’m rational again, but it scares me to think how near the edge I was a week ago. The whole thing was morbid and neurotic, and it almost cost me my life. I’m ashamed, and she would have been ashamed of me.

The sense of loss is no less terrible than it was, but I can accept it now and go on, the way you’re supposed to. Instead of lacerating myself with all that morbid what-might-have-been I try to remind myself that we did have eight days and that there are millions of people who’ve lived out their entire lives without one hour of what we knew.

Writing it down has helped. What I wanted to do was see it all in one piece, and I did, and I think I see now that she couldn’t have done it deliberately. She was happy. Right to the end. The end was an accident. It had to be.

I’m going on to the Caribbean, the way we had planned. There is a little wind now. I’ve been steadily under way for two days. After I regained my senses there was no wind for a long time and I continued drifting to the westward, but I’ve regained nearly all that on my way into the Yucatan Strait. My sight at noon today put me eight miles northwest of the spot she died. It’s now one p.m., and if the wind holds steady I should pass somewhere over 23.50 North, 88.45 West just at four p.m.

I don’t know any of the service for burial at sea, and there’s no Bible aboard so I can’t do much, but I do intend to drop something of hers just to mark her grave. That white dress I liked so well, I think. I’ll weight it.

I’ve just lashed the tiller again and come back below. It’s 3:30 now, and the breeze is holding on, what there is of it. I don’t think I’m logging more than two knots, but at least I’m on my way and all the sickness has ended. It’s good to be clearheaded and well again. I still don’t understand why they had to take her away from me, but maybe you’re not supposed to understand it. Maybe you’re only supposed to learn to live with it.

I went to get the white dress ready, but while I was in her things I found the little flask of perfume. It would be much more appropriate; I don’t know why I didn’t think of it in the first place. There’s something personal about it. It’s so completely hers. It has a French name I’m not familiar with, and I never knew anyone else who used it.

It’s here on the chart table where I’m writing. I removed the glass stopper and held it under my nose for an instant, and in replacing it I spilled a drop on the chart under this book. It’s amazing how one drop of something so delicate could invade a whole compartment. It must be very expensive.

Of course, when I drop it the chances are I won’t be within a mile of the place she died, but she’ll understand. Navigation is never that exact. In the final analysis it’s only a human being measuring something with an instrument designed by another human being, and as such is subject to human error, however small. That’s one thing that scares me about the way I was—thinking, like Macaulay, that you could go back to a place on the ocean where you’d lost something. He was mad, of course, and I was very near to madness myself.

She had a habit of sometimes coming up behind me when I was working over the chart table like this and drawing her finger tips very softly up the back of my neck. It was a delicious, shivery sensation that made my whole back tingle, and then I would smell the good, clean, salt-water-and-sun smell of her and that faint suggestion of perfume, and I’d turn and the gray eyes would be laughing at me very near to mine because she was so tall, and silvery hair would be brushing shoulders as smooth as satin and beautifully tanned, and then we would look squarely into each other’s eyes and the teasing and that always precarious veneer of lightness would blow up in our faces.

“That’s not fair,” she would whisper shakily just under my lips. “You’re cheating.”

That’s just the way it always began, with that same sensation of finger tips being drawn ever so gently up the back of the neck, and before I turned I would be conscious of the fragrance of you. Remember?

Who am I to say Macaulay wasn’t right, after all? But, no. The whole thing is absurd. Science is one thing and madness is another, and Macaulay was mad. But, still—

You never understood. We can escape, darling. Give me another chance to show you. Let me tell you. We’ll go to all those places. They’ll never catch us. Antigua—Barbados—Martinique— The trades blow in the afternoons and the nights will almost make you drunk. We’ll look up at the stars.

Swede
. You’re everywhere— That wasn’t the place the other time. I know it now, because the seagull flew away. But I’ll find it. I’ll tell you.

I can close my eyes and see the whole thing—the blue, and that last, haunting flash of silver, gesturing as it died.

It was beckoning. Toward the rapture. The rapture . . .

The master of the
Joseph H. Hallock
closed the journal.
The poor devil,
he thought
. The poor, tortured devil. Four o’clock—and we raised the sloop a little after five.

He sat for a moment, thinking with that vaguely puzzled frown on his face again. It was late, after 2 a.m. and very quiet in the dim seclusion of his office.

It was odd, he thought, still trying to come to grips with the disturbing factor, that it should have been the girl who realized there was no escape for them in that boat. Or any boat. It should have been Manning. It was something not likely to be known except by shipmasters and persons who had cruised on their own craft—and Manning had said he had cruised the Caribbean once for eight months.

Changing the name of the sloop was farcical. Painting out what was lettered on the stern didn’t alter the identity of any kind of seagoing craft. There were papers. And more papers. It was as futile as writing your own name on a borrowed passport. Manning should have known that, as he should have known it took about ten pounds of paperwork and red tape to enter any foreign port in the world with a boat, and that included fishing villages. They all had port authorities, and they all demanded consular clearances from the last port of call, bills of health from the last port, registry certificate, customs lists, crew lists, and so on, ad infinitum, and in the case of pleasure craft they probably required passports and visas for everybody aboard. They didn’t have a prayer of a chance of getting away with something like that, and Manning should have been the first to know it. Not the girl.

But from the evidence of the journal, Manning was certainly no utter fool, and not particularly given to wishful thinking. He appeared to be quite intelligent, in fact. Then was it sheer desperation, knowing there was no escape for them in the States with the police and a gang of criminals looking for them? Of course, the question was academic, since they had both died before they’d had a chance to flee anywhere, but the whole thing persisted in bothering him. And there was something else that nibbled at the edge of his mind.

He changed into pajamas and climbed into his bunk. He turned out the reading lamp on the bulkhead above his pillow, still puzzling over it. Then he sat upright. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly. “I’ll just be damned. It would be perfect.”

Just Manning?
he wondered. Or both of them? He hoped it was both of them.

It was sunset again, two days after they had taken the
Freya
in tow.
The Joseph H. Hallock.
was waddling, full-bellied, up the coast of Florida just south of Fowey Rocks. She was well inshore from the main axis of the Stream, since they had made arrangements by radio to have a Coast Guard boat meet them off Miami and take the
Freya
off their hands. Or, at least, that was the master’s excuse to Mr. Davidson, the mate. He felt, actually, a little like Conrad’s master in
The Secret Sharer,
a story he was sure Manning had enjoyed.

He was on the bridge now with Mr. Davidson, who was waiting to catch Fowey Rocks light in the pelorus as it came abeam, to complete his four-point bearing. The master himself was staring astern in the afterglow where the
Freya
rode easily at the end of her long towline. He had been watching her as they passed each of the keys during the day, but this was the closest they would come inshore until they were off Miami itself and the Coast Guard came out to get her.

When you resolved the contradiction and acknowledged that Manning couldn’t possibly have believed any of that moonlit dream about escape to the tropics in a boat, he mused, what did you have left? You had left the twin facts that Manning was a writer, and that he was trying to save himself and that girl he was so much in love with.

They had nowhere to go, the girl had said. Nowhere to go, that is, as long as they were being sought by a gang of criminals and also by the police. But if they weren’t being actively sought by anyone, they could come back to their own country, where they would attract less attention than anywhere else on earth. And they would no longer be sought if everyone believed them dead.

There could be little doubt they’d be given up as dead. Not many people would have the specialized knowledge to cause them to wonder at that contradiction in Manning’s story. And certainly the facts were convincing enough. The boat was only 36 feet long, was on the open sea, and had been searched by three men. The entire area had been searched by the ship itself, and there had been no survivors and no other boat. The sloop had been under way, and its dinghy was still there on the cabin. The last person aboard had disappeared less than an hour before, because the coffee was still warm, and the sloop was nearly 150 miles from the nearest land.

And the clinching argument, the master thought, was that eighty-three thousand dollars lying there on the settee in its satchel. In a world where money mattered above everything, who would believe two people would deliberately and unhesitatingly give away an amount like that just to have each other for the rest of their lives? It was unanswerable, he thought, and he loved them both.

He wondered if they had found the plane. It was rather unlikely, he thought. The whole story was probably true except the ending. It almost had to be, for the benefit of the rest of that gang, who knew everything prior to the actual departure of the boat from Sanport. And if the circumstances of the plane crash were as Manning had set forth, finding it was obviously impossible.

But I don’t know any of this, he thought. I’m only theorizing. I don’t really want to know, absolutely and finally, because I’d be obligated to report it. They hadn’t committed any real crime, unless it was a crime to defend oneself, and he hoped they got away with it.

Mr. Davidson came out of the chartroom. “Fowey Rocks abeam at seven-oh-three, Cap,” he said. “Seven miles off. Pretty close in, for northbound.”

“Just keep a good lookout for fishermen and southbound tankers,” the master replied. “We’ll haul out as soon as we drop our tow.”

Then he saw what he had been watching for, astern and slightly inshore from the
Freya
. It could be driftwood, or it could be a head, or two heads. He peered aft in the gathering twilight, and almost raised the glasses.

No,
he thought reluctantly;
if I know, I have to report it. But nobody is interested in the unverified vaporings of a sentimental old man.

He wondered what Mr. Davidson would think of all this moonshine. The mate was a good man, who knew his job, and he had searched the sloop thoroughly. But being a sound and practical seafaring man not given to foolishness, he had, understandably, not bothered to look under it. It would have been easy for them to ditch the diving gear and climb back aboard on the offboard side just before the towline tightened.

They would make it ashore without any trouble, with the life belts. And they probably had enough money to buy some clothes to replace their bathing suits. Not that they would be likely to attract any attention in Florida, however, if they went around in their bathing attire for years.

But they were drifting back rapidly. Would he have to lift the glasses to satisfy himself? Then the objects separated momentarily for an instant before they merged again as one. And one of them had been definitely lighter in color than the other. The master sighed.

“Bon voyage,” he said softly. He turned and went into the chartroom with the glasses still swinging from his neck.