Dead calm

by Charles Williams

  “John.” Something in Rae’s voice made him turn. She went on sweetly, but with a glint in her eyes he’d never seen before. “I don’t think we’re being very hospitable, or very considerate. Mr. Warriner needs sleep more than anything at the moment, so I’m going to fix a bunk for him. If you’ll just come with me and move those sailbags, dear.”

  She went down the ladder. Ingram followed, conscious of the rigidity of her back as she traversed the rolling cabin and went through the passage at the forward end. The narrow compartment in the eyes of the boat held two bunks, slanted inward toward each other like the sides of a V, but was used only as a locker now. There were cases of food, unopened buckets of paint and varnish, and coils of line, all neatly stowed, and the bunks themselves were piled with bags of sails. There was no hatch above, only a ventilator, and the compartment was dimly lighted by the two small portholes above the bunks.

  She pulled the door shut and came close to him. “John Ingram!” It was a whisper, but forceful. “I’m ashamed of you; I never realized you could be this insensitive. Can’t you see that boy’s on the ragged edge of a nervous breakdown? For heaven’s sake, stop asking him questions and let’s try to get him to sleep.”

  “Well, sure, honey,” he protested. “I realize what he’s been through. But we ought to make some attempt to salvage what we can—”

  “He doesn’t want to go back on there. I’d think you could understand that.”

  “He doesn’t have to. I told him I’d go.”

  “But why? He said there wasn’t anything worth trying to save, didn’t he?”

  “I know. But obviously water wouldn’t ruin everything. Clothes, for instance. Also, he contradicts himself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The radio, remember? He said it’d been ruined by the water. But he’d just got through telling us he called us on it.”

  She sighed. “Why do men always have to be so literal? Do you think he’s some kind of machine? John, dear, he lost his wife and his two friends all in one afternoon, and then spent the next ten days utterly alone on a sinking boat, and he probably hasn’t closed his eyes for a week. I’d be doing well to remember my own name, unless I had it written down somewhere.”

  “All right—” Ingram began.

  “Shhhhh! Not so loud.”

  “Okay. But you’d think he’d at least want to bring off some of her things, wouldn’t you? And there was another thing I was about to explain to him. If that boat’s insured, he’s going to have a hell of a time trying to collect, with no logbook and just his unsupported word she was in sinking condition when he left her—in a dead calm, with no weather making up. The underwriters are going to ask for a statement from me, and I can’t corroborate it. How can I? I’ll just have to tell ‘em she was afloat when I saw her. And that I hadn’t even been aboard and didn’t know how much water she was taking.”

  “He said she probably wouldn’t last through the morning, and we’re not going anywhere in this calm, so well still be in sight when she goes down. But let him get some sleep!”

  “Sure. God knows, he probably needs it.” Still vaguely dissatisfied, he tossed the sailbags into the other bunk and threw a lashing on them. He went back to the cockpit. Warriner was slumped on the starboard seat with the binoculars beside him, as though he’d been looking at the other yacht. Sunlight struck golden fire in his hair, which had been crew-cut originally but had grown long over his ears. Handsome kid, Ingram thought, and then wondered if that could be the reason for his—well, not distrust, exactly. That was overstating it. Call it reservation.

  “You asked me if she was insured,” Warriner said. “I’m sorry to say she’s not. We thought the premium was too high for the risk involved. And also, that if she was lost, we probably would be too.”

  “Is she pretty old?”

  “Yes. Over twenty years. I guess we got stung when we bought her.”

  “You didn’t have her surveyed?”

  “Well—yes. That is, not by a professional, but a friend of mine who’s real savvy about boats.”

  Ingram nodded but refrained from any comment. Under the circumstances, it was too much like kicking a man when he was down to elaborate on the foolishness of buying a twenty-year-old yacht without a professional survey, especially since this was a little on the self-evident side at the moment. “You don’t know what caused her to open up that way? Have any bad weather?”

  Warriner shook his head. “Not recently. That is, except for a few squalls, which never lasted very long. It was just age and general unsoundness.”

  Ingram was struck by a sudden thought. “You say you were bound from California to Papeete—aren’t you pretty far east? Seems to me you’d have crossed the Line nearly a thousand miles west of here.”

  “We were taking it by stages. Down the Mexican coast to La Paz, and then by way of Clipperton Island.” Warriner made an attempt at a smile. “Look, I’m sorry I got dumped on you this way. But I can pull my weight, and it will shorten the watches. And I’ll keep out of your hair as much as possible; it’s not much fun having a third party around.”

  “Forget it,” Ingram said, feeling uncomfortable for some reason. It was the first time he’d ever heard of a shipwreck victim apologizing for his existence, and he tried again to put his finger on exactly what there was about this boy that he couldn’t quite like. There didn’t seem to be any answer. “Hell, we’re just happy we came along when we did.”

  Warriner made no reply. Ingram picked up the glasses, braced himself against the mizzen boom, and searched out the other yacht. She was near enough now to make out details on deck, but he couldn’t tell whether she was any lower in the water than she had been. She wasn’t down by the head or stern, but there was no doubt she had water in her, and plenty of it, from the drunken way she lurched on the swell, taking too long to come back each time she rolled. She had a short, rather high deckhouse with windows rather than portholes located near amidships, and in silhouette was vaguely reminiscent of a motor-sailer rather than a conventional sailing yacht. Dumpy-looking, he decided, and probably cranky as hell and slow. Big auxiliary, no doubt, lots of greenhouse for cocktail parties, and probably built for somebody who never used the sails except when he ran out of gas. Still, Warriner probably had upwards of $30,000 invested in her, and it was a sad way for a boat to end. “She’s still on an even keel,” he said, without lowering the glasses. “You sure we couldn’t gain on it, by pumping and bailing together—at least enough to start locating the leaks and calking ‘em?”

  Warriner shook his head. “It’s hopeless. It’s been pouring in since around midnight. Nearly six inches in seven hours.”

  Ingram glanced down at him and then returned to his scrutiny of the other boat without comment, still aware of that nagging sense of dissatisfaction. Something about the whole thing disturbed him, but he couldn’t put a finger on it. Just what was it? Warriner was certainly in a position to know how much water was coming into her. And when you stopped to take a good look at it, saving her was only a pipe dream. Even if they could pump her out enough to plug a few of the leaks, the kid would never make land in her alone. She was too big for one man to handle, even without the necessity of being at the pump twelve to fifteen hours a day.

  3

  The sun was hotter now. He turned, searching the horizon for any darkening of the surface of the sea that would indicate the beginnings of a breeze. Rae came up the ladder. “Your bunk’s all ready, Mr. Warriner. Try to sleep until this time tomorrow.”

  Warriner smiled. “Please call me Hughie. And I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “You don’t have to. Just get some rest.”

  “In a little while. For some reason, I don’t feel sleepy at all.”

  She nodded. “You’ve been wound too tight for too long. But I know how to fix that.” She disappeared down the ladder and came back in a minute with a bottle containing a little over an ounce of whisky. She poured it into the cup that was still beside
him. “There’s just about enough here to do it.” He drained it and accepted the cigarette she held out. “By the time you finish that,” she said, “you’re going to collapse all over. Just try to make it to the bunk when you feel yourself start to go.”

  “Thank you,” Warriner said. “You’re very nice.”

  She tossed the bottle overboard and perched on the edge of the deckhouse to light a cigarette for herself. The bottle landed with a faint splash just off the port quarter, rolled over as a swell passed under it, and started to fill. It righted itself, its neck out of water. Ingram glanced at it indifferently, and then forward, conscious that Warriner’s dinghy was bumping as Saracen rose and fell. They’d have to cast it adrift; there was no room to stow it on deck, and of course they couldn’t tow it. He looked around and was about to mention this when he stopped, arrested by something in the other’s face.

  Warriner was staring past him with an almost frozen intensity, apparently at something in the water. Ingram turned, but could see nothing except the bottle, which was about to sink. It had rolled onto its side again as another swell upset it, and water was flowing into its mouth. A few bubbles came up, and it went under. Puzzled, Ingram glanced back at Warriner. The other had risen from his seat and leaned forward, clutching the port lifeline with a white-knuckled grip as he stared down at the bottle falling slowly through sun-lighted water as clear as air. Drops of sweat stood out on his forehead, and his mouth was locked shut as though he were stifling, with an effort of will, some anguished outcry welling up inside him. The bottle was six feet down now, ten, fifteen, but still clearly visible as it continued its unhurried slide into the deepening blue and fading light beyond. Warriner’s eyes closed, and Ingram sensed the effort he was making to tear himself away from whatever hell he saw in an innocent and commonplace bottle falling into the depths of the sea, but they came open again almost immediately, still full of the same hypnotic compulsion and horror, like those of a bird impaled on the freezing stare of a snake.

  Ingram opened his mouth to ask what the matter was, but caught Rae’s eyes on him. She shook her head. They both looked seaward and in a moment heard Warriner sit down again. The whole thing hadn’t lasted more than a few seconds. Probably doesn’t know we even saw it, Ingram reflected. But what was it? Terror? Terror of what? For some reason he was thinking of the way Warriner had come aboard, the trancelike stare, the convulsive lunge onto the deck, and the way his fingers had flattened themselves around the handrail.

  “Breeze coming!” Rae called out suddenly. “Anybody for Papeete?”

  Off to the south the surface of the sea was beginning to darken under the riffles of an advancing cat’s-paw of wind. Ingram sprang on deck and began casting the gaskets off the mainsail. Rae had run forward and was breaking out the jib. Long months of practice had made them a smoothly functioning team, and by the time they could feel the faint movement of air against their faces a cloud of billowing white Orion was mounting against the sky. Rae came aft to take the wheel. The mainsail filled. Saracen began to move, almost imperceptibly at first, and when she had gathered enough way to come about Ingram looked around and nodded. Rae brought the wheel hard over; she came up into the wind, hung for an instant, and fell off on the port tack, toward the southwest and Tahiti.

  For a moment he had forgotten Warriner, but when he turned from setting up the mainsheet to trim the jib, he found the other already hauling on it. Warriner threw it on the cleat and straightened. “How about the mizzen?”

  Ingram nodded and began taking off the gaskets. “Might as well get everything on her; the breeze might last for a while. But you go ahead and turn in.”

  * * *

  Warriner smiled. “I think I will, as soon as we get this up.” He seemed to have recovered completely from the horror of a few minutes ago. They hoisted the mizzen and trimmed the sheet. Ingram leaned over to look in the binnacle. “Can we make 235?” he asked Rae.

  “Easy,” she replied. “We’re to windward of that now.” She came right a little. “Here we are—230 … 233 … 235.”

  Ingram glanced aloft at the strands of ribbon on the shrouds and started the mainsheet a little. Saracen heeled slightly under a puff and began to gather way. He turned to Warriner. “We’re going to have to cast your dinghy adrift. No room to stow it.”

  Warriner nodded. “Yes. Of course.”

  Ingram loosed the painter from the lifeline stanchion, coiled it, dropped it into the dinghy, and gave the boat a push away from the side. It drifted back and began to fall behind in the wake, riding like a cork over the broad undulations of the swell. Warriner had turned and was staring toward the other yacht, which was off the starboard quarter now that they had come about. The dinghy was a hundred yards astern, growing smaller and looking lost and forlorn in the immensity of the sea.

  “Well, if it’s all right with you, I guess I’ll turn in,” he said at last. “If the breeze holds, I can take over tonight.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Rae said. “You’d better rest for a couple of days. There’ll be something for you to eat when you wake up.”

  “It’ll be pretty hot down there,” Ingram added, “but if you leave the door open you’ll get a little circulation of air from the ventilator.”

  Warriner nodded and went down the ladder. He paused once to turn for a last look at the other boat before his head disappeared below the level of the hatch. When Ingram looked around at Rae, her eyes were misted with tears. He leaned forward and peered down the hatch. Warriner was going through the passage into the forward compartment. He couldn’t hear them if they spoke in normal tones.

  He slid back close beside her. “What do you make of it?”

  “That thing about the bottle?”

  “Yes.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. But grief does strange things—grief and complete isolation.”

  “But just a sinking bottle—”

  “Obviously it wasn’t a bottle he was seeing.” She paused, her eyes fixed moodily on the compass card. Then she went on, “What’s a sea burial like?”

  “I’ve never seen one, thank God, but from what I’ve read, you sew the body in canvas and weight it with something. Why?”

  “I’m not sure, but …” She gestured helplessly.

  “I think I know what you mean,” Ingram said. “But I’m not sure I agree with you.” Wrapped in white Orion, with the water this clear and the boat lying dead in the water above them, the bodies would still be visible a long way down if you wanted to torture yourself by leaning over the side and watching them disappear into the dark down there. “But that’s only morbid. This was worse. Horror—I don’t know what you’d call it.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “I know. But being utterly alone afterward …” Her voice trailed off. The breeze had dropped to a whisper. Saracen ghosted through the bald spot for a few yards, the sails beginning to slat; then it picked up again, only to die out once more in less than fifteen minutes. Saracen rolled heavily, booms aswing. Ingram sheeted them in. He stood up, still disturbed, and annoyed at himself because he didn’t know why, and trained the binoculars on the other yacht. Then, with a gesture of impatience, he made up his mind.

  “I’m going aboard her.”

  Rae looked up. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. There’s something about the whole damned thing I can’t quite swallow; no matter how I turn it, it won’t go down. Look, Rae, anybody who managed to get this far from land in a boat without killing himself must be a sailor, and that’s not the way a sailor abandons one. Just because somebody else comes along going in the same direction—like a hitch-hiker. You’d bring something off, or you’d go back for what you could salvage.”

  “You don’t believe she’s sinking?”

  “All I know is she’s still afloat.” He continued to study the other yacht. As far as he could tell, there was no change in her trim or amount of freeboard. Well, it didn’t mean anything, actually; it could be hours, or even days, before
she went under. He was probably being silly.

  “Did he say whether she was insured or not?” she asked.

  “He says she’s not.”

  “Then it’d be pretty expensive, wouldn’t it, just going off and leaving her in the middle of the ocean?”

  He frowned. “Yes, but that’s still not what I mean. If she’s leaking at all, he’d never make port in her alone; she’s too big for singlehanded sailing, to say nothing of being at the pump all the time. He almost has to abandon her, but not the way he did. I keep getting the feeling he doesn’t want anybody to go aboard.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. Admittedly, it doesn’t make any sense. But look—you’ll notice he didn’t turn in until we were under way. And had cast his dinghy adrift.”

  “That was probably just coincidence.”

  “Sure. It could be.”

  “You’re going to put our dinghy over?” Rae asked.

  “No.” He turned, searching for the other one. He could still see it when it crested a swell, several hundred yards astern. “Well pick his up again. No strain, if we get another breeze.”

  Saracen had begun to swing around on the swell, to a southerly and then a southeasterly heading. Ingram stood up again with the glasses and could see the water beginning to darken once more to the southward. He looked at his watch. It had been nearly thirty minutes since Warriner had gone below. He slipped down the ladder, crossed to the passage going into the forward compartment, and looked in. Warriner lay on his back, his eyes closed, breathing heavily.

  He came back to the cockpit just as the breeze began to stir again. It was out of the south, to starboard on the heading they were on now, and the other yacht lay perhaps a mile and a half away on the port bow, with the dinghy somewhere in between. Saracen began to move ahead. He motioned for Rae to steady up where she was, and stepped forward to search out the dinghy. In a moment he saw it top a swell almost dead ahead. There was a long boathook lashed atop the deckhouse. He slid it free and looked down to windward, hoping the breeze would continue strong enough to give them steerage-way. As far as he could see the surface was riffled and dark. He stepped back to the break of the deckhouse and spoke quietly to Rae. “See it?”