And the Deep Blue Sea

by Charles Williams

  “Give us pressure on the fire line,” he barked. He threw the phone back on the hook, rang the engine room telegraph to STOP, and ran back across the boat deck, followed by the others. With no one on the bridge except an unconscious third officer and a Filipino messman, the Leander continued blindly ahead into the squall.

  Gutierrez stepped to the wheelhouse door and looked in, his face still suffused with wonder. The pretty blond one was back there somewhere, and if they returned there was no doubt she would simply come aboard again. Perhaps not even wet. How was it the steering man had started to perform the return? This way? Yes, a la izquierda, without doubt. He grasped the spokes of the wheel and began turning it to the left. When it would go no farther, he left it, dragged the third mate inside out of the rain where he might await resurrection in more comfort, and went out onto the boat deck to watch the fire. On any other ship, a thing like that would be very unusual and frightening.

  The Leander, her engine stopped but with full way on her and still plowing ahead at nearly twelve knots, began a hard-over turn to port through the opaque and wind-lashed sheets of rain where one direction was like another.

  In a violent gray world less than a hundred yards across, they floated face to face with the rim of the life ring between them, eyes half closed against the beating of the rain. Thunder exploded on the heels of a jagged flash of lightning.

  “Why do you suppose she was going that way?” Karen asked. “They couldn’t be looking for us?”

  “No,” Goddard said. It was brutal, but raising false hopes was even more so. Lind would still be in command, even now that she was afire; there were at least six of them, and they’d all be armed. “She could be out of control, or they changed course to keep the fire off the midships house.”

  “Well, they couldn’t find us, anyway. You can’t see fifty yards.”

  “Did you ever see anything of Rafferty?” he asked.

  “No.” She wiped water from her face, and shivered. “Why do you suppose he did it? One of his own men?”

  “Rafferty was stupid. Lind would probably have killed him later, anyway. I mean, if the thing had worked. They’d never trust a secret like that to some two-bit punk who’d spill it in the first bar he hit.”

  There was also a good chance Lind had done it with the knowledge her reaction would be just what it had been, to get her to the rail, but he saw no point in saying so.

  “Do you suppose he was a Nazi too? An American?”

  “Probably,” Goddard said.

  The squall was kicking up a sharp and confused sea atop the swell. Spray blew off it to mingle with the rain. There was so much water in the air that breathing was difficult.

  “It’s strange,” she said, “but I don’t even know if you have any family or not.”

  “A brother in Texas,” he replied. “And an ex-Mrs. Goddard, somewhere in Europe. We communicate through a power of attorney and a bank account; if the dollar holds firm, it’ll be years before she hears about this.”

  “You didn’t have any children?”

  “A daughter,” he said, “by a previous marriage. She was killed in a car crash.” Then he was surprised. Had he really said that?

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was five months ago.”

  Why? he wondered. Was it the imminence of death, or some latent tendency to spill himself he’d never suspected before, just waiting for a captive audience with no bra to get in the way? Since he’d walked away from the hospital that afternoon in his private and invisible bubble he’d never said anything to anybody except to call Suzanne and tell her that Gerry was dead, he would be home in three hours, and not to be there.

  People had asked occasionally, and he’d said he had no children. Once or twice during that marathon drunk some more convivial and inquisitive type had forgotten and asked the question twice, to receive a brief smile that left him with an impression his martini was freezing to a lump of solid ice in his hand. Well, yes, I did have a daughter, but her stepmother and I killed her. How about a refill?

  Her arms looked very soft and round on the rim of the life ring. Somehow he wanted to touch them. Water coursed down her face.

  “Did you have any?” he asked.

  “No.” Then, without knowing why, she added, “I had abortions instead. Two of them.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “They were induced. My husband didn’t want children.”

  “I’m not a professional Angeleno,” Goddard said, “but don’t they have the pill in San Francisco?”

  “They were still experimental then.” She said nothing else. Well, it was an unlikely place to hold a seminar on planned parenthood. But at least neither of them had anybody else to worry about, and if they didn’t start slopping over about each other—So why had he come back here? He didn’t know.

  “I’m sorry I said that,” he apologized. “It must have been left over from some cocktail party. And God damn your husband.”

  She gave him a strange look, but said nothing. That was understandable, however; he wasn’t making sense even to himself. If he wanted to stamp his foot and stick out his tongue at somebody, why not Lind, instead of some anonymous dead man?

  “I mean, it’s degrading,” he said, still floundering. “For Christ’s sake, I don’t know what I mean.”

  “It’s all right,” she said gently. “I don’t even know why I said it.”

  We gotta do something with this scene, fellas; it’s fuzzy as hell and the dialogue stinks. Maybe what the script meant was our boy Shrdlu—we got to find a better name for him, let’s make a note of that—Shrdlu is about to buy the John Donne bit, only he’s still all futzed up with his old behavior patterns. This babe is now the whole human race—I buy that—she’s Every-babe, mother, sex object, suffering, boobs, and all, and he feels the old tidal pull. He wants to tell her he’s sorry, or buy her a chocolate Easter egg, but the best he can do is get mad because she was married to some guy thinks a pregnancy is a clogged drain, you send for a plumber.

  There was a simultaneous flash of lightning and a crackling explosion of thunder. Water beat at his face. And after the squall would come the agony of the sun. I’m not so sure, Mannie; this is just off the top of my head, but I think what it is with Shrdlu is he’s scared spitless.

  Gerry hadn’t entirely given up on the over-twenty-five generation; there was still hope even if a good many of them did seem to have the moral outlook of howler monkeys. The Haight-Ashbury routine wasn’t for her, with its promiscuity and pot; she was at UCLA, fulminating against Rusk and the CIA and Dow Chemical recruiters, even if it was her opinion that blaming the latter for napalm was about as logical as crusading against fever because it sometimes killed people with malaria. You were still only treating the symptoms.

  He didn’t know what she’d come home for that afternoon. He’d come back from the studio for some notes he’d forgotten that morning in regard to the third cut they were taking at The Salty Six in a last desperate attempt to save what everybody was already calling “a real nice picture, Harry.”

  The studio had served notice they were going to drop his option, but that wasn’t what was riding him; he was pretty well fixed financially. It was simply the failure. The picture was a bomb, and it was his baby from beginning to end; he’d written the script and produced it. On the surface it would seem to be a good comedy situation, the misadventures of a sailing yacht in mid-ocean with a male captain and a five-girl crew, but when it was in the can there wasn’t a belly laugh in it. He should have known to begin with that there weren’t five good comediennes in the industry, that if there were they wouldn’t work together, and that, finally, with all five of them in full cry after the one male within two thousand miles and he the Godhead, Authority, the Captain, nothing in Christ’s world, script, director, or threat of death, was going to make them be funny; they were going to be sexy. He had a headache, which he’d had almost nonstop since he’d seen the director’s cut over a month ago, and no amount o
f Miltown could any longer retract and sheathe his nerve-ends.

  Gerry was living on campus, when she wasn’t working in Watts or picketing an induction center somewhere, so she didn’t know yet how near he and Suzanne were to calling it quits. Not, he thought, that he’d known it had gone that sour, until he got to the house. There was a strange car in the driveway, but he didn’t pay any attention to it; it was just one of Suzanne’s friends. He went in through the front and back to the den, but he couldn’t find the notes. Maybe she’d know where they were; she was probably out by the pool. He went out through the sliding glass door of the living room, apparently just ahead of Gerry. He hadn’t heard the Porsche pull into the driveway, so it must have been while he was in the den.

  He didn’t see Suzanne, but the shallow end of the pool was around the corner of the master bedroom. He stepped around it and almost onto two nude bodies on the poolside mattress with the wet trunks and swimsuit discarded beside it, Suzanne in an equestrienne attitude with her eyes closed and beyond hearing anything less than an amphibious assault, the recumbent one a posturing and epicene writer named Ransome he’d always assumed was a fag. Ransome’s eyes were open, looking up at him; they kept growing wider in horror as he made a strangled sound and fought to escape, both of which could have been interpreted as ardor until at last his voice returned and he wailed, “Oh, good heavens!” Suzanne’s eyes opened and she looked around at him with the blank stare of someone in a trance. It hadn’t been more than two seconds.

  In spite of the roaring in his head, his voice seemed to be perfectly matter of fact. “I don’t care if you lay this double-gaited son of a bitch,” he said, “but could you do it somewhere else? I’d like to think the pool’s exclusive, anyway.”

  There was a gasp behind them then. He whirled, and Gerry was staring at all three of them, her eyes sick with loathing. She turned and ran. There was a snarl from the Porsche out in the driveway, a scream of rubber, and she was gone.

  There was no use trying to catch her; he’d just have to keep calling her at the dormitory tonight until he could get her to come to the phone. Maybe he could make her understand he’d been operating in shock himself. He went back to the studio, and was in one of the projection rooms two hours later when the call came from the California highway patrol. She’d spun out through a guardrail on the San Diego Freeway.

  Afterward, when he walked away from the hospital isolated from everything in his private world of silence, all he had to hang onto was the knowledge she hadn’t done it deliberately; she was too healthy-minded and vital for that. She was just burning out her anger and disgust by driving too fast, a kid hitting back blindly at the only things available at the moment, the throttle of an overpowered car and the speed laws promulgated by the same can of worms.

  It was a lovely face, he thought, with magnificent bone structure, and he was conscious of a desire to tell her this, but she was probably already convinced he was some kind of nut. He was appraising the exquisite effect of that slight tilt to the eyes when a little black streak trickled briefly down her cheek like running mascara and then disappeared under the pelting of the rain. Now another oozed from the blond hair plastered to her head. He was wondering at this when she said, “There’s soot or something in the rain. It’s on your face.”

  The ship, of course! It was the fallout from the fire. He swung his head, searching the limits of the rain-swept void around them, but could see nothing except the short and choppy sea fading away into the murk. In the squall it could be blown for miles. But there was more of it now. Sooty splotches were dotting her arms. It had to be nearby. He turned, eyes slitted against the spindrift and rain, and stared directly to windward. Then he saw it—not the ship itself, but a faint and shapeless wash of orange glowing through the gray. He spun Karen around and pointed.

  There was no way to tell how far away she was or in what direction she was going. It was simply a color without form or dimension, and they had no framework of orientation except the wind, which could be veering all around the compass. But it was growing brighter, he thought, conscious of the pounding of his heart.

  Then they could see the flames and the dark clouds of smoke, and the side of the ship began to materialize in the mists at the limit of visibility. It was in profile, going past them very slowly with scarcely any disturbance to the swell or the confused and choppy sea set up by the squall.

  “The engine’s stopped!” Goddard said. “And she’s lost most of her headway.”

  Karen slipped out of the life ring. They each hooked an arm through it and began to kick in the direction of the ship. She was fading from view into the curtain again, off to their right, but the glow was still visible and he knew she was slowing all the time.

  XII

  THEY MUST BE ALMOST THERE, Antonio Gutierrez thought; he should see the pretty blond one any minute now. One could see the ship was stopping, just as it had when they had gone back to pick up the big American on his rubber raft. The engine room telegraph meant nothing to him, and he had no way of knowing the Leander had been moving through the water only from her own headway ever since Lind and the others had run from the bridge.

  But it was very difficult to see anything in all this rain, and to make it worse nobody even appeared to be watching for her. The officer still lay where he’d left him in the house where the wheel was, and on the decks below everybody was shouting and running around dragging hoses as they shot streams of water into the fire which still roared and threw flames as high as the stack. He himself had started to leave the boat deck once, before they discovered him up here where he had no business, but the men with guns were around the ladder below him, with no way for him to get past them unnoticed, so he had remained. His white jacket and trousers were drowned, and water ran out of his hair and down into his eyes. But since he was the only one watching, he would continue to watch.

  He went over to the rail between the starboard lifeboats and looked down. She wasn’t there, but he could see that the ship was barely moving now. He searched the surface as far out as he could see through the blown curtains of rain. Nada. He went over to the port side and peered outward and then down. Truly, they had not yet reached her. He went back to the door of the wheelhouse and looked in. The officer was trying to sit up. He was very weak and holding his head with the dolor, and a little stream of blood ran down across his face.

  It was agonizingly slow and exhausting, trying to make any headway against the wind and the steep-sided chop it was kicking up into their faces, and they’d had to stop several times and rest. Goddard didn’t know how long they’d been struggling after the orange glow in the rain, dragging the life ring. They’d almost lost it at first. It had faded until they could scarcely see it, but the ship had lost way rapidly as she continued to turn and had finally come head up into the wind and sea. She was dead in the water now, directly ahead. The dark shape of the counter materialized below the column of flame. In a few minutes they were under it. They looked up at the railing of the poop far above them, and then at each other in mutual admission of what they’d both known all along. When they did reach her, there was no way to get aboard.

  To call out would be to attract the attention of Lind or one of his men. They’d simply be shot in the water, or ignored, to be left there when the ship got under way again. If she did, Goddard thought, looking up at the tower of flame and smoke blown back across the poop by the force of the squall. If they didn’t get the fire under control very soon, the Leander was doomed.

  Lind and the bos’n would be back here directing the fight, so their best chance of attracting the attention of someone else would be to go forward. He gestured to Karen, and they began kicking ahead along the black steel cliff of her starboard side. They could hear shouted orders and the roaring of the fire, but no one appeared at the bulwark above them. They passed the well-deck, and were below the midships house.

  Harald Svedberg climbed unsteadily to his feet, assisted by Gutierrez. He was nauseated, his head
was splitting, and when he put a hand to his face, it came away with blood on it. The ship was stopped, he noted, they were still enveloped in the opaque fury of the squall, and there was nobody else on the bridge except this waterlogged and obviously insane Filipino messman who appeared to have taken up residence on it There was a roaring sound in his ears, which he took to be part of the headache until he became aware the messman was speaking English now and was saying something about a fire. He made it to the door of the wheelhouse and looked aft, and the whole picture clarified itself then as he remembered Mayr and that other messman with their guns. Lind had taken over the ship, that man he’d seen back there in the wake had probably been thrown overboard, and now they were all fighting the fire.

  Their only hope was that Captain Steen was still alive and that he might have a weapon of some kind. He went in through the office to the captain’s stateroom. The improvised oxygen tent was gone now, but Steen still lay on the bunk in the same position he’d been in last night, and his eyes were closed. Svedberg grabbed a wrist. The flesh was warm, and after several hurried and fumbling attempts he located a pulse. Steen was alive, and still the legal master of the ship, whether drugged or not. It seemed unlikely that a man of his devout religious beliefs would own a gun, but captains quite often did, and a forlorn hope was better than none. He began yanking open drawers under the bunk, and then the desk, conscious of the ominous sound the fire was making and the fact that he had no idea how many of the crew were involved in this with Lind. He moved out into the office and began hurriedly ransacking the desk there. Then the crazy messman, dripping water like a sponge, ran in from the starboard wing of the bridge.

  “We have arrived,” he said, pointing outward. “She is right there.”