Madge’s face was shiny with spray and exhilaration. If only he could enjoy the violence of the weather. He wished she and Al Banks weren’t so—
“Gerald, are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes. Yes. Hell, yes.” He said it a little too sharply.
“You look a little green.”
Well, he felt a little green. But, “I’m all right,” he said. “Those Dramamines seem to be doing the trick.”
“I feel wonderful,” Madge said. “I love a stormy day like this.” She turned her face into the wind and her long dark brown hair blew wildly. She was wearing shorts and a sweat shirt and Gerald admired her long muscular legs, with strong calves and a pleasing fullness at the thighs from lacrosse and lots of tennis and a fondness for walking. He wished he had a better figure. He had never been very good at outdoor games. He could never find time for them. He had been a quiet, serious kid with a compulsion to work a little harder than he had to. Breaking in as a radio writer the summer he left college, he had forced himself after a few strenuously profitable years to cross the bar into that world where one must play slave to his own Simon Legree: free-lance writing.
He had worked passionately, religiously, and in ten years there had been five novels, one of them a mild best-seller. Gerald Millinder had nine lines in Who’s Who in the East, an honorary degree from his college, and a secure niche in the insecure bracket of “promising authors.” But a pattern of all-night typing and an incapacity for recreation had left him jittery. There was a notebook full of ideas but little to draw on for physical confidence. He had driven himself—as everybody called it—to the point of exhaustion. Right now, for instance, his stomach awash with the sickening roll of the boat, he had only to think around the edges of his book-club dilemma and he could feel tears coming into his eyes. First little signpost of breakdown, his doctor had warned. Where did responsibility to conscience begin and to family welfare leave off? Hell, the complexities of modern life, the compromises it kept demanding of you. No wonder this was a field day for those modern witch doctors, the psychoanalysts. No wonder they call them shrinks. As our world expands, our ability to cope with it shrinks.
Al Banks was holding the Lorelei’s bow at right angles to the swollen waves, easing her down, into and through the sea aroused by winds blowing out of the north. Once in a while he threw his head back and sang in a not-bad voice a snatch of a chanty. The words were a lusty description of the buxom charms of willing maids, and he looked around roguishly to see if they were with him.
“Isn’t he delicious?” Madge said. “He’s been telling me the most marvelous stories. He sailed all through the Caribbean by himself in a twenty-foot yawl. He’s brought alligators back alive from the Everglades. He’s even been a harpooner on a whale boat. He’s done everything.”
“Mmmhmmm, I can imagine,” Gerald mumbled. As far back as he could remember he had been tormented with a fear of doing things. Physical things. He was, he knew to his regret, a sorry example of the atrophied species Homo sapiens megalopolis—modern city man. He had used his right arm to push a pencil by the hour, to dial the telephone, to shake hands and hold narrow-stemmed glasses at cocktail parties, to keep a chain of cigarettes nervously alive in his mouth and to tip an endless line of cab drivers, waiters, hatcheck girls and doormen.
Madge patted him on the hand, rather patronizingly, he thought, and said, in the same way, “I love you.” He answered with a weak nod. Why, at this moment, must she tell him that? Could it be a twitch of guilt for the attraction she was feeling toward the skipper? Gerald felt impatient with himself for admitting such a thought. He watched as Madge went forward and stood beside Al Banks at the wheel. She stood with her legs apart and braced and it was something to see her standing there without holding on to anything and yet not losing her balance as the deck of the Lorelei angled precariously back and forth. Once the water fell away from the hull and the boat plunged downward with a resounding crash that almost sent Madge reeling backwards. She and Al looked at each other and laughed together in such a way as to make Gerald think. Somehow they’re going to find a way to have each other, these two strong, fresh-air, physical people. And in any other society but ours his kind of man would have won her. In our brainy, shut-in world, women fall in love with our prestige and our Early American houses and our private schools for the children, with our winter vacations, with our evenings of hi-fi culture, with our minds. Not that Madge would ever think of it that way. In fact, if she had been able to read his mind she would have been shocked and hurt, and probably angry. What he meant was that his intelligence and little niche of prestige had given him the power, the opportunity to attract a woman like Madge that he would never have had in a less mental, more primitive society.
He dozed off into a troubled dream too jumbled to unravel or interpret, the toned-down ending of the book they wanted him to change, falling overboard and drowning and his youngest girl sobbing and Captain Banks and Madge making love on the deck. Then he was falling again, over the side and into a swarm of man-eaters. At the last moment he managed to save himself by suddenly waking. An abrupt lurch had almost swung him out of his chair and he saw that Madge was at the wheel, heading into the waves as Al had shown her, doing fairly well although the pitching of the Lorelei was even more violent now.
Gerald felt as if his stomach was rolling up through his chest and into his mouth. Scraping the bottom of his strength and concentration, he fought down the impulse to purge himself of the impurities that were poisoning him. Hold me in, hold me together, oh Dramamine, he prayed, and he hated worse than the biliousness the sign of weakness in front of these two. Somehow, in the green turmoil it seemed as if the two strong ones standing upright were man and wife and he was the intruder, that despised outsider whose unwelcome presence makes a crowd.
Al Banks looked around at him and tried to cheer him up. “Nearly there, Mr. Millinder. Are you OK? How do you like my new mate?”
Madge was steering confidently and Al Banks, close behind her, was leaning over her shoulder to check the compass.
At what seemed to Gerald the last possible moment for survival, he was given a reprieve. Al Banks took over and was working his way into the channel. In a few minutes they were on the lee side of the island and the sea cradled them gently. The horizon had swallowed the sun and a curtain of mist, incredibly blue, hung over the lagoon. The only inhabitants of the island were a few herons who stared at them suspiciously. There was a small beach and Al Banks eased the Lorelei in as close as she would draw. After the anchor-splash there wasn’t a sound in the lagoon. More closely viewed, it looked as if blue smoke were rising from the smooth dark surface. Fifty yards into the lagoon was a miniature island with a slender arm of sand curving into the water to form a natural pool.
Madge went back to join her husband in the stern. “Know what it reminds me of? That picture on our record album—The Isle of the Dead.”
“Half an hour more and you could have buried me there,” Gerald said. He had held on and soon he would be all right. He unbuttoned his shirt to his waist, exposing his narrow chest and a soft white belly. He took a deep breath and thought about how the fishing would be tomorrow if the wind let up. He breathed deeply again, enjoying the fresh evening air cooling his throat.
“Madge, how about a drink? Then we’ll go ashore and claim these islands in the name of the Authors League of America.”
“I’d love a drink,” Madge said.
He went below to dig out a bottle of fifteen-year-old rum picked up on the Keys. He took off his canvas shoes and his socks and rolled up the cuffs of his pants. He wondered if Al Banks knew what a lucky s.o.b. he was, no worries, no problems, except to match wits with the winds and the tides. He twisted the cork out of the bottle and gulped a mouthful. He felt a little giddy with recovered strength, an unfamiliar vigor.
He brought the bottle back with him. Madge was peeling off her sweat shirt. “Are you up to a swim?”
“Isn’t it too lat
e?”
“The water looks beautiful, Gerald. All velvety.”
He took another swallow from the bottle and handed it to Madge.
“OK, I’m game.”
His momentary euphoria flagged at the thought of having to explore the deceptive calm of these waters. But he had to keep up with Madge. With Madge and her Al Banks. He had to show them. He had to prove something to himself.
Madge put one leg over the railing, ready to dive. She paused a moment, to remember it. About twenty feet off the stern there was a splash, a momentary swirl from which a circle of ripples widened toward the boat.
Madge said, “Al, something broke out there.”
Al Banks came aft and studied the dark water. He held a light rod with a steel jig. He cast well out into the lagoon and reeled in rapidly. He watched the water closely as the jig wiggled up to the stern. Following it in was a long, slender shadow that sensed the boat and knifed away.
“A scooter,” Al Banks said. “The place is crawling with ’em.”
“You mean barracuda?” asked Madge.
“Will they really attack you?” Gerald wanted to know.
The skipper laughed. “Let me have a shot of that painkiller and I’ll tell you a little story.”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“There’s this fellow from Minneapolis, manufactures television aerials and stuff like that, who comes down every winter. Only has one arm. His left arm is off clean, just below the shoulder. When he hooks a fish, someone has to hold the rod for him while he reels in. Most people who come out with me, the last thing they want to hook into is a scooter, but not this joker. ‘Al,’ he says to me, ‘all I want is to get me a barracuda.’ Well, it’s not much of an order down here in the Gulf. So we find him his barracuda and he reels ’im in and then when I swing ’im in over the stern this one-armed bastard from Minneapolis takes a club and beats the head of that scooter to jelly. Then he says, ‘OK, Al, that’s all the fishin’ I want for t’day.’ Every winter the same story. I never asked him about his arm and he didn’t seem over-anxious to tell me, but last winter we got weathered in for a couple of days at the Dry Tortugas and he got himself pretty well whiskied up and this is what he tells me.
“About fifteen years ago he was fishing out here in the Gulf and something hit his line and took off in such a hurry that it jerked him clean overboard. He was under water fighting to get to the surface when something hit him like a buzz-saw. The skipper finally fished him out, but as for the arm, well by that time a thirty-pound barracuda was sitting down to a fancy dinner.”
Al Banks laughed and helped himself to another swallow of rum. The laugh puzzled Millinder. It was not even a nervous laugh. He was just laughing because he felt good and because he didn’t mind about the arm and because he liked to sit out there over a jug of rum and spin the evenings away.
“Then these scooters really are dangerous?” Gerald said.
“I wouldn’t say so,” Al Banks said cheerfully. “A thing like that happens, well, maybe once in a thousand times. I’ve been fishing these waters since I was a kid and I’ve yet to see a man bit. Maybe if the scooter is crazy hungry, or if you’re wearing something bright like a wide gold ring that flashes in his eye he might decide to go for you. But if you feel like you want to swim I’d say go ahead. I don’t think these scooters will give you any trouble.”
“How about you, Captain? Would you go in?”
Gerald’s question had a petulant edge. Al Banks grinned disarmingly.
“Me, I never go in. Not even a swimming pool. I’m strictly a boat man.”
Madge stared down into the black velvet water that was dead quiet now. “I think it’s getting pretty late anyway.”
Gerald was grateful. He had not been able to stop thinking about the feeling of barracuda jaws ripping at his flesh. Unseen and unheard it was on you like that and there was your arm in its cold sharp mouth.
“It does look a little too dark,” he said, as casually as possible, as if ten minutes earlier he would have been eager for the dip.
After dinner they sat up for a while drinking rum and listening to AI Banks’s tall stories of fishing and exploits of the sea. There was the time on a yawl when he was caught in a hurricane that snapped his mast and swept him forty miles off his course. And the time he was alone in a dinghy leaking faster than he could bail and a twelve-foot shark came up alongside to wait for him and he got rid of the thing by reaching his leg over the side and kicking it right in the face. “I know it sounds like a fish story, but Mister Shark took off and never came back again.”
“And you weren’t frightened, Al?” Madge had been watching him with what Gerald described to himself as flattering intensity.
“Why be frightened? If you live on the sea I figure she’s gonna get you sooner or later. So you might as well have fun right up to the minute they deep-six you. And that I have, Madge.”
He had never used her name before and it sounded strangely intimate. “Everything I do is fun because I don’t do nothin’ I don’t want to do. Maybe I do some things I shouldn’t oughta do—things the missus would tan my hide for if she knew—” He winked in a way that was winning enough to make Madge smile, though Gerald saw the gesture as overbearing and cheap. “Yes sir, what I always say is if you can’t always be right have fun going wrong. Let every man do what he’s man enough to do and if it hurts someone else that’s his tough luck.”
The skipper was feeling his rum. Gerald noticed for the first time how small his eyes were; the pupils had contracted until they were the size of gunshot. Gerald didn’t like the way Al Banks kept looking at Madge as he talked. It struck him—he was convincing himself as he thought about it—as a look of frank appraisal, of open invitation.
Around ten o’clock Gerald began to feel drowsy. “Well, if the weather is with us we ought to pull out of here by dawn. What do you say we hit the sack?”
“I’m not sleepy yet,” Madge said, “and it’s turning out to be a beautiful night. I think I’ll have another cigarette.”
Gerald felt awkward. He wasn’t sure whether he should turn in alone or sit it out with Madge and the skipper. After a few minutes of forced conversation, he went below. Madge came down more than half an hour later. He had looked forward to this, hopefully, as a romantic night on the water, as a special adventure for them, and now it was more like the tension they had had before they left Westport. For no objective reason and almost without any exchange of words, a space had moved between them. Gerald made a furtive move toward her, at once appeasing and possessive, and she turned toward the edge of the bunk until her back made a wall against him.
He said something to her, almost in a whisper, and she said no, she was too tired.
“You weren’t too tired to stay up on deck for an hour.”
“Gerald, please, if you mean what I’m afraid you mean—”
“I don’t mean anything. I just wondered.”
“Just wondered what I was doing up there with him for twenty-five minutes.”
“You don’t have to put it that way.”
“Oh, yes I do. I have to put it exactly that way. I could see the looks. I could feel the righteous suspicion. For God’s sake, Gerald, I hardly know the man. If I was the sort of woman who—”
Finding herself caught up in the clichés of domestic strife, defending herself where there was no act, no case that needed defending, she lapsed into a resentful silence, first pretending sleep and then with healthy insensitivity actually slipping off into a deep, restful slumber. Gerald Millinder lay awake with his nerves and his fears, wondering if this was how a marriage dissolves, worrying about his children and the money-making changes that would weaken his book and the man from Minneapolis who had left his arm in the hungry jaws of the thirty-pound barracuda.
When they moved out of the lagoon at dawn the sea was almost as quiet outside the atoll as within.
“We’ll catch fish this morning,” Al Banks called to them.
>
But after trolling for nearly an hour all they had were some barracuda, around five pounds apiece. Al would lower them into the fish box with the hook still in their mouths and slam the lid down on their heads to hold them so as to get the hook out without taking a chance of their catching him with their sharp teeth.
“Nasty things,” Madge said.
“I call ’em the rats of the sea,” Al Banks told her as he threw back a dead one.
“But you still don’t think they’d bother us?” Gerald said.
The skipper shrugged. “Like rats. If they’re cornered or hungry. But around here there’s plenty of small stuff for them. From sardine to shrimp. They ought to be satisfied.”
“Before I took any chances with them I’d want to know for sure,” Gerald said. “I’d just as soon not serve myself up as an extra little snack for some gluttonous barracuda.”
“What do you want to bet you could swim completely around this boat right now,” Al Banks said, “and come out the same way you went in?”
“Thank you, no—” Gerald started to say, and then his rod dipped suddenly under pressure of a solid strike and he had to attend to business. As he reeled it toward the boat they could see it was another barracuda. “Just another small one,” Gerald was saying and then something hard hit his line and the line went slack. All he pulled in was the head of a barracuda. The body had been severed as cleanly as if a fishmonger had whacked it off with a sharp cleaver. The decapitated head was still alive.
“Ugh,” Madge said.
“Another scooter went for him,” Al Banks explained. “They’ll do that sometimes.”
“Nice fellers,” Gerald said.
They cruised north for a few miles and then turned west for another half hour. Except for one small bonito, it was the same story.
“Looks like barracuda day,” Al Banks said. His business was to find game fish and he always felt increasingly fidgety and mean when this kind of fishing went on too long.
Finally, after Madge had pulled in another scooter she said, “Why don’t we go in toward shore again and do some bottom fishing? We can catch some grouper and yellowtail. At least we’ll have fresh fish for lunch.”
Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales Page 26