Dead calm

by Charles Williams

  Hunger? he wondered. No, a starving man wouldn’t have had the strength to lunge aboard that way. More probably thirst. “Water,” he said quietly to Rae. “Not too much.”

  But she had anticipated the request and was already going down the ladder. The man inched his way aft, clinging tightly to both the lifeline and the handrail along the deckhouse, as though suspended over some terrifying abyss. Ingram followed closely behind him to catch him if he stumbled. The man made it to the cockpit and sank down on one of the cushions, looked around him at the sea with a shuddering motion of his shoulders, and slumped forward with his face in his hands.

  Rae came hurrying up the ladder from below with an aluminum cup partly filled with water. Ingram took it and touched the man lightly on the shoulder. “Here you go,” he said. “Just take it slow, and there’ll be more in a minute.”

  The other looked up, blankly at first, and then with dawning comprehension as though aware of them for the first time, and Ingram was conscious of the thought that the face bore none of the ravages he’d always read of as associated with extreme and prolonged thirst—no cracked and blackened lips or swollen tongue. It was, in spite of the growth of golden beard, a boyish and strikingly handsome face, tanned and slender but not haggard, and unmarked by anything except perhaps exhaustion. The gray eyes were red-rimmed as if the man hadn’t slept in a long time. Besides the life-jacket he wore only white sneakers and a pair of faded khaki shorts, and it was obvious he was not only quite young, probably still in his early twenties, but powerfully built and in top physical condition.

  “Oh,” he said. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.” He reached for the water, almost indifferently, drank, and put the cup down beside him on the cockpit seat. Ingram saw with surprise that he hadn’t even finished it. He drew a hand across his face and made a shaky attempt at a smile. “Man, am I glad to see you.” Then he added abruptly, like a small boy suddenly remembering his manners, “My name’s Hughie Warriner.”

  “John Ingram,” Ingram said, holding out his hand. “And my wife, Rae.” Warriner started to get up, but Rae shook her head and smiled. “No. Just rest.”

  “What’s the trouble?” Ingram asked.

  Warriner gestured wearily toward the other yacht rolling on the groundswell a mile away. “She’s going down. She’s been sinking for days, and I doubt she’ll last through the morning.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” the young man replied. “She just seemed to open up all over. I’ve been at the pump for a week, and almost continuously for the past two days, but I couldn’t keep up with it. And since around midnight it’s been gaining faster all the time.”

  Ingram nodded. It would, as she settled lower in the water and additional seams were submerged. Warriner went on, “I thought I was done for, till I looked over here awhile ago and saw you, and then I was scared to death a breeze would come up and you’d go on without ever seeing me. I fired off a couple of flares, but nothing happened. I guess you couldn’t see ‘em that far away in sunlight—”

  “It was probably while we were below eating breakfast, anyway,” Ingram said. “And the water’s up in your engine now?”

  “Yes. But it hasn’t worked for a long time anyway. I tried calling you on the radio, but of course if you hadn’t seen me you wouldn’t have yours turned on, not out here. So my only chance was to try to get over to you with the dinghy before you caught a breeze.” He sighed and brushed a hand across his face again. “And am I glad you saw me.”

  “Yeah, that’s cutting it a little fine.” Ingram grinned briefly and reached for the ignition key to start the engine again. “But we’d better get on over there. How many aboard?”

  “Nobody,” Warriner said. “I’m alone.”

  “Alone?” Involuntarily, Ingram straightened and looked out across the metallic expanse of sea toward the other yacht. Even at that distance it was obvious she was larger than Saracen. “You were trying to take her across the Pacific single-handed?”

  “No. There were four of us when we left Santa Barbara…” Warriner’s voice trailed off, and he stared down at his hands. Then he went on quietly. “My wife and the other couple died ten days ago.”

  2

  “Oh, how awful!” Rae cried out and checked herself barely in time to keep from adding, “You poor boy!”—in spite of Warriner’s being in the neighborhood of six feet and probably not more than six or eight years younger than she was. Already drawn by the clean-cut, boyish appearance, good looks, and obvious good manners in the face of disaster, she felt a stab of almost motherly compassion and an illogical desire to take him in her arms and comfort him. “How did it happen?” Then she went on hurriedly, “But never mind. You can talk later. Can I get you something to eat? Or some more water?”

  “No, thank you, Mrs. Ingram, I’m all right,” Warriner replied. “But I could use a cigarette if you have one.”

  “Of course.” She produced them from the pocket of her shorts and held out the lighter. “And why don’t you take off that life-jacket? It’s hot enough without wearing that thing.”

  “Oh… sure.” Warriner looked down at it uncertainly and began unfastening it. He placed it on the seat beside him. “I guess I forgot I had it on.”

  Ingram’s cigar had gone out. He relighted it and tossed the match overboard. “What happened?” he asked.

  It was some kind of food poisoning.” Warriner stared somberly at the smoke curling upward from the cigarette forgotten between his fingers. “They all died in one afternoon, within four hours. It was horrible…” He shook his head and then went on in the same flat, mechanical voice. “No, there’s no word for what it was like, alone in the middle of the ocean with three people sick and dying, one after the other, all in different stages of the same symptoms, and not being able to do anything about it. And knowing after the first one died there was no hope for the others. My wife was the last one, just at sunset. And the terrible part of it was I wasn’t even sick. I just stood there and watched them die, like something that was happening on the other side of a glass wall I couldn’t get through.”

  Rae reached down and put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But don’t talk about it now. You’ve got to get some sleep.”

  “Thank you,” Warriner replied, “but I’m all right. After the first couple of days I managed to snap out of it and get going again. And it was about then I began to notice the bilges were filling up with water and that it took longer every day to pump them out. Before long it was so bad I didn’t have time to think about anything but staying afloat. Maybe that was what saved me from cracking up.”

  “Do you know what the poison was?” Ingram asked.

  Warriner nodded. “The only thing it could have been was a can of salmon that must have spoiled. I didn’t eat any, because I don’t like salmon.”

  “Had it been opened a long time?”

  “No, just a few minutes before they ate it. But it wasn’t commercially canned; it was some Russ and Estelle—they were the other couple—some they put up themselves. Every year Russ goes up to the Columbia River for a week’s fishing when the Chinook run is on, and when he catches any they have some of it smoked and Estelle cans the rest because Russ claims—I mean, claimed—” Warriner took a deep breath and went on— “claimed it was better than the commercial pack. When we started out on this cruise to Papeete, they had four or five cans left over from last year, so he put them in the stores. About ten days ago—at least, I think it was ten days, I’ve lost all track of time—it was Estelle’s turn to fix dinner. It was hot and muggy and nobody was very hungry. But she happened to remember the salmon and thought she might be able to make some kind of salad out of it by cutting up pickles and onions and putting mayonnaise on it. I didn’t eat any; I always figured salmon was for cats, so I made myself a sandwich out of something.”

  “And nobody noticed anything wrong with it?” Ingram didn’t know why he asked. There didn’t seem to be much you could do to
change the outcome of a tragedy that had happened ten days ago. “The can wasn’t bulged or anything?”

  “If it was, she didn’t notice it. Frankly, she’d had about three rum sours before she went below to fix it. We’d all had, for that matter. And if there was any odor, the onions must have covered it up.

  “That was around seven p.m. The next morning between six and six-thirty Russ came up from below—I was at the wheel—and said Estelle was feeling nauseated and upset and wanted to know if I had any idea where those pills were that we’d brought along for the tourist trots. I turned the wheel over to him and went below to look for them.

  “I thought they might be in the medicine closet in the head amidships, but when I got down there Estelle was in it, and I could hear her vomiting. When she came out her face was white and sweaty and she looked bad. She didn’t have much on, and when she saw it was me instead of Russ she motioned for me to look the other way and ran forward into their cabin. I found the pills and got a glass of water and called out to her. She said it was all right to come in, she was in the bunk. I gave her one. She swallowed it, but she kept rubbing her hand across her face and shaking her head. ‘Brother, that rum,’ she said. ‘It must have had a delayed-action fuse on it’ Her voice sounded funny, as if she had something stuck in her throat.

  “I asked her if she was sure it was the rum, and she said, ‘I don’t know. But you look fuzzy around the edges; I can’t get you into focus.’ She held out her hand and looked at it and said, ‘God, a Picasso hand. It’s got seven fingers on it—”

  “What?” Ingram interrupted. He frowned. “Wait a minute-double vision. There’s something I’ve read, or heard—”

  “Botulism,” Rae said.

  “What’s that?” Warriner asked. “You mean you don’t think it was the salmon?”

  “Yes, it probably was the salmon,” Rae explained. “Botulism’s a very dangerous type of food poisoning that attacks the nervous system. I remember reading an article about it somewhere. I don’t remember the other symptoms, but I do recall the double vision and the trouble in speaking or swallowing.”

  “Do you know what the treatment is?” Warriner asked. “We had a pretty good medicine chest and I tried everything I could think of, but if it turns out that some simple thing we had aboard could have saved them …”

  Rae shook her head. “You can put your mind at rest about that. I don’t think there is any treatment except an antitoxin, which nobody’d have in a first-aid kit. Even if you’d been an M. D. you couldn’t have done anything for them.”

  “Oh. I guess that helps. A little, anyway.” Warriner went on. “She looked bad, as I said, but I didn’t realize then how sick she was. I guess she didn’t either. Anyway, about that time we took two or three heavy rolls and I heard the sails begin to slat, so I went back on deck. I thought the wind had died out again and we’d have to sheet everything in—we’d been becalmed off and on for the past two days, just a capful of breeze now and then from all around the compass. But when I got up in the cockpit, that wasn’t it; Russ had left the wheel. He was hanging over the rail, vomiting, and she’d come up into the wind.

  “He said he thought he’d got a touch of it too. Even then it’d never occurred to any of us it could be serious; it was just a joke, like the turista. I told him where the pills were, and to go on back and turn in and not to relieve me at eight unless he was sure he was all over it. He went below. The breeze held on, fairly steady out of the west; we were making at least four knots, and not too far off the course we wanted, so I didn’t want to leave the wheel, even when it was eight o’clock and he didn’t come up.

  “About eight-thirty I heard somebody moving around in the galley and decided at least one of them was feeling better, but it was Lillian—my wife. She brought me a cup of coffee, and one for herself, and was sitting in the cockpit drinking it when all of a sudden she doubled over with a cramp in her stomach. She ran below to the head. Nobody was able to take the wheel, and Orpheus was always a cranky boat; she wouldn’t steer herself on any point of sailing. So I doused everything and went below to see how they were. Russ and Estelle were still in their bunks, when they weren’t trying to get back and forth to the head. And now Russ was complaining that everything looked fuzzy, and he was having trouble talking. Lillian didn’t have any symptoms like that yet; she was just nauseated and crampy. But I was beginning to be scared, real scared, thinking of all that empty ocean between us and a doctor. It almost had to be some kind of food poisoning, and everybody decided it must have been the salmon because I hadn’t eaten any and I wasn’t sick—at least, I wasn’t so far. I got the medicine kit out and started through the first-aid handbook that came with it. It was no help; there wasn’t anything about food poisoning in it at all, just a lot of jazz about what to do if somebody swallows lye or iodine or something, and how to treat burns and fainting spells and broken bones.

  “By ten o’clock Lillian was beginning to have the same symptoms, the fuzzy vision and difficulty in swallowing or talking. The breeze had died out, and it was like an oven below deck with the sun beating down. Russ and Estelle were having trouble breathing. I gave up pawing through the medicines long enough to rig an awning over the cockpit, intending to move them up there, but by now they were too sick to make it up the ladder. I couldn’t carry them, not with the boat rolling the way she was, lying becalmed. I rigged wind-chutes, which was stupid, because there wasn’t a breath of air moving, but by this time I was so panicky I didn’t know what I was doing. I gave them the turista pills, and aspirin, and paregoric, and I don’t remember what else, but by noon neither Russ nor Estelle could swallow anything any more. They couldn’t even talk. All they could do was he there and fight for breath.

  “Russ died a little after three in the afternoon. I hadn’t thought there could be anything more horrible in the world than standing there listening to the two of them fighting for breath in that stifling cabin and not being able to do anything to help them, but there was. It was when I realized that only one of them was making that noise now; Russ had stopped. Which meant there was no hope for the others either. Estelle was unconscious by that time, so she didn’t know he was dead. Lillian was still conscious and just beginning to fight for breath, but she was in our cabin, aft of the doghouse, so she didn’t know either.

  “Then Estelle died, less than an hour after Russ. The rest of the day is kind of mixed up and run together; I can only remember crazy pieces of it—Lillian asking me how the others were, and I’d say I’d go see, and I’d go into the forward cabin where they were both dead and then come back and say they were getting much better now and that she’d be over the worst of it in a little while. Then I’d go out of the cabin to pray, so she wouldn’t see me. I remember going up on deck once; maybe it would work better up there in the open. I hadn’t prayed for anything since I was a kid, and I guess I didn’t know how; it struck me once that it seemed like I was trying to negotiate with God, or strike a bargain, or something. I kept saying two of them were gone, couldn’t He leave one?

  “Lillian died a little after six. When the sound of her breathing stopped, the silence was like something screaming in my ears, and I let go of her and ran up on deck and the sun was just going down. The sky was red in the west, and the sea was like blood, and everywhere there was that terrible silence that went on and on and on as if it was pressing in on me from all around the horizon…” Warriner dropped his face in his hands.

  Tears were overflowing Rae’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” Ingram said, conscious at the same time of something that disturbed him. It was the word theatrical intruding on the perimeter of his mind, and he was angry with himself at this apparent callousness. Try it on your own stiff upper lip, he thought, before you throw any rocks; try ten days of it without hearing another voice and you might get a little purple about it too. He wished uncomfortably that he could think of something to add to the simple “I’m sorry,” but nothing was going to help the boy except the passage of time. He reac
hed toward the ignition key to start the engine. “But we’d better shag over there and see if we can salvage some of your gear before she goes under.”

  Warriner shook his head. “There’s nothing worth going after. It’s all ruined by the water—radio, sextant, chronometer, everything—”

  “How about clothes?”

  “These will do. Anyway, I don’t think I could go back aboard. You understand, don’t you? It isn’t only their dying. Remember, they all died below deck. Can you imagine what it was like, what I had to do?”

  Ingram nodded.

  Warriner’s face twisted. “Talk about the dignity of death, and last respects to the dead—pallbearers and bronze caskets and music and flowers. I dragged my wife’s body up a companion ladder with a rope—”

  “Stop it!” Rae cried out. “You’ve got to quit thinking about it!”

  “I understand,” Ingram said. “But you don’t have to go aboard; I’ll take care of it, if you’ll just tell me where to find things—”

  “But there’s not anything, I tell you!”

  “We ought to get your passport,” Ingram pointed out. “And whatever money you have aboard. We’re bound for Papeete, and you’ll need it for your passage home from there. Also, there’s the log and ship’s papers—”

  Warriner gestured impatiently. “The log and ship’s papers and passport and money are all pulp and sloshing around in the bilges in three feet of water. If I haven’t already pumped them overboard.”

  “I see,” Ingram said, wondering if he did. “But there’s another thing. Is she insured?”