Dead calm

by Charles Williams

  “But to get on to Dragoon. Chris didn’t care anything about boats either; he’d simply taken it in as part payment on some deal in Florida real estate, intending to sell it later. Then he was killed, and during the two years it took to get the estate settled and pay off the tax bill it lay at anchor in Key West with a watchman living aboard. Then, just as I started advertising it for sale, it was stolen. Some men got the old watchman drunk ashore and took it out of the harbor one night. The police called me in Houston, and I flew down there. They had only two leads to work on. One was that Dragoon’s dinghy had been picked up at sea by a fishing boat southeast of Miami near the Great Bahama Bank. The other was a suspect.

  “It seemed a man had been aboard the yacht just a few days before, looking it over, and told the watchman he was interested in it. The watchman remembered his name, and the police picked him up at the hotel where he was staying in Miami and questioned him. They’d found out who he was, and were satisfied with his references—he’d been a charter yacht captain in the Bahamas for a long time, and had operated a shipyard in San Juan, Puerto Rico, until he’d got badly burned in an explosion and fire that destroyed most of it—but they weren’t satisfied with his story as to why he’d been interested in Dragoon.

  “He said he’d been hired to take a look at it by a businessman staying at one of the big Miami Beach hotels, the president of some pharmaceutical firm, who wanted to buy a boat for company entertaining and asked him for a professional opinion of Dragoon before making me an offer subject to final survey. But when the police checked, the businessman turned out to be a phony. There was no such company, and the man himself had checked out of the hotel the same night Dragoon was stolen. So it was obvious he was one of the thieves. The only thing the police still weren’t sure of was whether this man was also one of the thieves or just another victim.

  “So that’s when he came to see me at the hotel, just after he’d been questioned by the police, this hard-bitten and disagreeable man with the limp. His name was John Ingram, he said, and he was going to help me find my boat. I offered to pay him and was curtly brushed off. There would be no charge, he said. I was glad to have his help, but I still wasn’t any fonder of him. I could be stubborn too, and I didn’t like having favors tossed at me in that manner.

  “But at the same time I began to have a very funny feeling about it. We’d find the boat. We’d find it if he had to sift the Atlantic Ocean with a tea-strainer. Maybe the thieves had made a mistake stealing it in the first place, but their really sad mistake was ever getting this man involved in it.

  “He had an idea it was in trouble, probably out there somewhere near where the dinghy had been found, so we chartered a seaplane in Nassau to search the area from the air, and we finally located it aground on a sandbar on the edge of the Great Bahama Bank, about a hundred and fifty miles southeast of Miami. The pilot landed us, with a rubber raft, and we went aboard. Two of the men who’d stolen it were still on it. They’d been trying to run a cargo of guns to one of the Central American countries, when they’d run up onto the Bank from poor navigation.

  “John got the boat away from them, refloated it—without a towboat—threaded it through all those shoals and sandbars into deep water again, and sailed it back to Miami. I watched him do it; otherwise I probably wouldn’t have believed it. But that isn’t what I started out to tell you, not just a story of watching an indomitable man do the impossible against a background I didn’t even know existed, nor even the fact that I got my boat back. Long before we reached Florida I didn’t care whether we ever did, and Dragoon had ceased to be important at all. I was just terrified he was going to sail it into Miami, tie it up, step off onto the dock, and say, ‘Now, Mrs. Osborne, there’s your goddamned boat,’ and turn around and walk away without even looking back. And if he did I knew I couldn’t stand it. It was as simple as that.

  “I realize you can’t even become acquainted with somebody in five days, let alone fall in love with him. But it happened. Maybe it was the slow-motion effect of time and that increased sensitivity to everything you have in an unusual situation. Maybe it was from being with him every minute there in his own element, this world that was so strange and so utterly fascinating to me, as if I were actually seeing him for the first time. As I was. He wasn’t an arrogant and disagreeable man at all, but just a very proud one who felt he’d been made a fool of. And a very lonely one. He tried to hide it under all that armor of self-sufficiency, the way he fought the limp from those burns, but it was as clear to me as if he’d been carrying a sign.

  “The same thing was happening to him, and he didn’t walk away when we got to Miami, but naturally it wasn’t as hasty and impulsive as all that, not with either of us. It took some time to clear myself of the suspicion of being some wealthy and socially prominent man-eater who was trying to buy him for a pet, and to convince him that I didn’t have any more money than he did. Then he pointed out that I’d seen him only in his own environment, and he’d look entirely different in mine—that is, living and working ashore. That wasn’t true, of course, but I knew he would be unhappy. But it was a dead issue anyway; there was nothing in my old life I wanted to go back to. I was as in love with this exciting new world of his just as much as he was, and I had a simpler approach to the subject of environment anyway. Mine was any place that included him. But then I warned you this was sentimental and probably corny.

  “We were married six months later, after I’d wound up all the loose ends in Houston and sold everything I didn’t want to be burdened with any more. I sold Dragoon, which was too big for two people to handle, and we bought Saracen. Some day we expect we may go into the charter business in the Bahamas or West Indies, but that’s in the future. Now we’re on our honeymoon. We’re on our way to Tahiti. We realize it has jet runways now, but there are places beyond that don’t. We don’t know how long the cruise will last nor how far we’ll go. Maybe we’ll simply go broke. We don’t really care. I suppose you could call it a juvenile dream, or flight from responsibility, or refusal to accept the challenge, but everybody doesn’t have to listen to the same drum. I like ours. I fell in love with it the first time I heard it, one night on a grounded schooner on the Great Bahama Bank, when I discovered what he was listening to and that I was in love with him. I’ve heard it ever since. I heard it this morning at dawn, becalmed a thousand miles from land, when he woke me winding a chronometer, and in a hundred other places and times and different kinds of weather, and always with him. If it ever stopped, or anything happened to him, I don’t think I’d want to go on living.” She paused and took a deep breath to steady the shaky feeling inside her. If she hadn’t reached him, she never would.

  “Now, Hughie,” she went on quietly, “don’t you think it’s time we went back?”

  His eyes had been on her face throughout with that same look of interest. Now he appeared to be caught off guard by this abrupt change of subject.

  “Back?” he asked politely.

  “Yes. To get John.”

  “You mean back there?”

  “Yes. We have to, Hughie. You realize that as well as I do—”

  He shook his head. “Of course we can’t go back.”

  She held on tightly. Don’t scream at him. Don’t lose your head. Some of it must have got through. “Hughie, please—” But how in God’s name could you keep repeating the obvious without the appearance of talking down, of explaining something to an idiot? How did you keep it on an intelligent level after you’d said it a dozen times? There simply wasn’t any way. “We have to go back now, Hughie. Now, before it’s too late.”

  “No,” he said with a little shrug of annoyance. She could see him beginning to go away, as though she had disappointed him again with this revelation of selfishness in her character.

  “Hughie, he’s my husband. I love him. Do you think I could go off and leave him on a sinking boat, to drown? You can’t, either; you know you can’t. You’re not capable of a thing like that. How could you ju
stify it? You couldn’t live with yourself—”

  “Do you always have to ruin everything by becoming hysterical? He won’t drown.”

  “But that boat is sinking!”

  “Why do you keep saying that?”

  “You said it was. You told us yourself.”

  “I did?” It was obvious he didn’t believe it. He glanced into the binnacle, dismissing the whole thing as of no importance. “I don’t know why I would have said a thing like that.”

  “Well, if it’s not sinking, why did you abandon it and come on here?”

  “Why?” He looked up sharply. “Because they’re trying to kill me.”

  She knew she was skirting the precipice now, but there was no way to avoid it. You couldn’t plead with him to go back without running into his reasons for not going. “Who’s trying to kill you?”

  “Both of them.” His expression changed then, becoming one of triumphant slyness. “But I fooled them. They’ll never get me now, even with your husband helping them.”

  There it was, she thought. They had come full circle and were back facing each other across the unbridgeable chasm. But at least he hadn’t become violent, and if she could stay here and go on talking maybe eventually she could get behind him. The marlinspike was cold and frightening against her flesh.

  “Hughie,” she said soothingly, “nobody wants to kill you—”

  “What?”

  “I said nobody wants to hurt you.”

  The craftiness in his eyes became more pronounced. “You mean I just imagined it?”

  She saw the trap and tried to avoid it. “No, I mean it must be a mistake, a misunderstanding of some kind—”

  “No! I know what you meant. You think there’s something wrong with me, don’t you?”

  “Of course I don’t, Hughie.”

  “Oh, yes, you do. You’re just the same as they were. First your husband, and now you! Poor Hughie’s subject to hallucinations!” His voice slipped up into falsetto, apparently in imitation of someone, and was charged with an indescribable bitterness. “You just imagined it, Hughie, dear. Of course you did, darling.”

  “Hughie! Stop that!” She tried to sound stern and forceful. Maybe she could shock him out of it.

  His hands tightened on the wheel, and his eyes were on her with the beginnings of wildness in them. “And I thought I could trust you! I thought you were like Estelle!”

  She could only stare in terror then. The name itself seemed to do something to him, to goad him beyond reason. Tendons stood out in his throat, and muscles writhed along his arms and shoulders as he tried to pull the wheel loose, or shake it. He cried out as though something were tearing inside him, and began to shout, leaning toward her across the wheel. She could feel the drops of spittle on her arm.

  “They murdered her! They tried to kill us both! And you want to take me back there, don’t you, so they can finish the job? Oh, I know what you’re trying to do!” He half rose from the seat, as if to come out from behind the wheel.

  Trying to stop him with the marlinspike would be suicide. She’d only hit him on an upraised arm, and then he’d take it away from her. If she ran, it would almost certainly trigger pursuit, and he could catch her before she could make it to the forward cabin. She did the only dung that was left. She sat still, forcing herself not even to draw back from him. For a second that seemed to go on forever it hung there, and then he dropped back to the seat again.

  “They did it!” he shrieked. “They did it!” He was staring straight in front of him, and she sensed that he had forgotten her. His lips continued to move, but he made no further sound, and a muscle kicked spasmodically under one eye.

  She never knew how afterward, but she forced herself to remain seated for another thirty seconds. Then she stood up slowly and with exaggerated casualness, on legs that trembled and had to be locked at the knees to support her. He paid no attention. She stepped back into the hatchway and started down, still clasping the marlinspike under her arm. At the bottom her legs quit on her at last, but she made it to one of the bunks before she collapsed. She turned then and looked back at the hatch. Sunlight fell into it unobstructed, sweeping back and forth across the ladder treads as Saracen rolled. The clatter of the engine went on, and above it she could either hear or feel the pounding of her heart.

  It was the starboard bunk she was on—her own, where John came to her when they made love. Above it was the radiotelephone that was powerless to reach him, its very silence a cry for help. And under it in one of the drawers was the shotgun. She had remembered it too easily this time. Her mind slipped away from it with the same revulsion, but she could still see it. She pushed herself off the bunk and ran on into the forward cabin and bolted the door.

  It was 11:10 a.m. She raised her eyes from the watch and swept them around the tiny V-shaped compartment that was no longer a sanctuary or a haven but a corner. It even looked like one.

  11

  There were two choices, and she had seven hours in which to make up her mind. But both choices were impossible, and nobody could endure this for seven hours.

  What happened then?

  She could foresee the answer, but she went over it again, just to be sure. Her mind was operating quite coldly at the moment, and she was calm; she was stronger than she’d thought. But then this was only the beginning, and the show hadn’t even started yet. She knew what was coming.

  She could kill Warriner with the shotgun, or she could go off and leave John to drown. Since neither of these was even conceivable, she had the third, which wasn’t an alternative choice but merely a statement of fact or at least of probable truth. Nobody could endure this for seven hours. Her nerves would crack. Sometime between now and sunset her whole nervous system would go up in a puff of smoke like a short-circuited pinball machine; bells would ring, lights would flash, and she’d wind up lying on the bunk staring blankly at nothing while she picked at the fuzz on the blankets. In which case, alternative number two would win by default, and John would drown anyway.

  Was that all?

  No. There was still one other possibility. At the moment her nerves snapped she might run out and attack Warriner with the marlinspike or with her bare hands. The result of that was foregone.

  Then she had to kill Warriner, and she had to do it before just thinking of it drove her out of her mind.

  No. She sat down on one of the sailbags with her hands pressed against her temples. Nothing in life could ever be reduced to as simple terms as that. There had to be some other way out of the corner.

  Well, where was it? Try them all again.

  Hit him with something? He was suspicious of her now, and she couldn’t get behind him. And again you ran into the same old limiting factor; you’d get only one blow, and if that didn’t work you were dead, and so was John.

  Try once more to reason with him? After what had just happened? You could carry on long conversations with him on any subject in the world, except one. At the mere mention of going back, he retreated into his madness and pulled up the bridge.

  Well, maybe John wouldn’t drown; maybe Orpheus wasn’t sinking. That there was no way of proving definitely, one way or the other, but she had the evidence of her own eyes that there was water in the boat, lots of water. And why didn’t the radio work? Then she thought of something else. The engine didn’t work either, or John would have followed them. So everything below was flooded. Even if it weren’t in danger of sinking within the next few hours, John would never make port in it. Nobody could pump continuously for twenty days or more. Warriner said there were others aboard, but they hadn’t been on deck, and they would have been. So either they didn’t exist except in his madness, or they were hurt or already dead.

  But at least she could try the radio again. She slid back the bolt and went out, carrying the marlinspike. If he started down the ladder she could throw it at his legs to be sure of getting back in time. She called and listened alternately on both the intership frequencies. There was no answe
r, no sound except the eternal crackling of the static. At the end of twenty minutes she knew she no longer had any hope of one, that she was only putting off the thing she had to face. She switched it off and went back. Very carefully and precisely she noted the heading on the compass and wrote it down on the scratch pad along with the time.

  11:40 AM 226 degrees

  It looked neat and businesslike. And there was the illusion she was doing something.

  They hit her then from opposite sides, or rather she ran headlong into the second while she was recoiling from the first. The first, of course, was John. He was in the water, drowning, as the sun went down. She leaned forward with her face pressed against the scratch pad on her knees, her eyes tightly closed and then opened again because it was more clearly seen and more terrible with them closed. Then it was gone, as if an automatic projector were changing slides, and she saw the thing that would be there in the cockpit when the shotgun had done its work.

  She’d never in her life shot anything with a gun of any kind, but her father and two older brothers had been hunters of quail, and inevitably she had seen a few examples of the mess that resulted when a bird was shot too close under the gun. She had no illusions as to what would be up there. She swallowed, fighting the nausea pushing up into her throat.

  Seven hours?

  Maybe she could merely frighten him with the gun, point it at him the way they did on television, and say, “All right, Hughie, turn around and go back.” This, she knew in her heart, was idiocy comparable to that other cliché of the private eyes and western marshals, the immaculate and neatly packaged death by gunshot wound that never hurt, either the shooter or the shot, but she gathered it to her for a moment in the desperation of her need for some other way out of the corner. Granted there didn’t seem to be much likelihood of scaring a man who was already insane from fear, you could at least examine it and try to figure out what would happen.