Dead calm

by Charles Williams

  “Then the other couple had to abandon the trip there and go back to San Francisco because of illness. We lay at anchor in the harbor for nearly three months.”

  “Were you living aboard all the time?” Ingram asked.

  “No. We came back to California, by plane, for several weeks, and part of the time we lived ashore at a hotel. Why?”

  “I think that’s when the dry rot began to run wild. Orpheus may have still been sound enough to make it to Papeete when you left Santa Barbara, but after three months of lying there in La Paz, probably with no ventilation below, she was eaten up with it by the time you sailed.”

  She nodded. “At any rate, we were stranded. Orpheus was too large for two people to handle, even if we’d dared attempt it alone. None of my friends who would have liked to go could get away. We wrote to the yacht broker who’d sold us the boat, and he managed to locate a professional willing to make the trip, a man named Grover or Glover, who turned out to be utterly impossible. He arrived on the plane from Tijuana dead drunk, and somehow managed to stay that way the five days he was in La Paz, without, as far as we could discover, ever taking a drink. And while it might have been interesting from a medical point of view to see if he could stay bagged all the way across the Pacific with no visible intake of alcohol, as a yacht captain he was hopeless. We paid him off and decanted him into the Tijuana plane. So we were on the point of selling Orpheus and flying to Papeete to buy another boat there where we could hire an Island crew, when we met the Bellews at the little hotel ashore. Bellew was gathering material for an article on big-game fishing in the Gulf of California, and we became quite friendly in the two weeks they were there. We asked them to make the trip with us.”

  It was a tragic mistake, but one that had been very easy to make. It was banal to say that Bellew had seemed different ashore, but in the end that was what it amounted to. She supposed they all had, for that matter. Bellew was a man it was easy to get along with sitting around a cafe table sipping tall iced drinks in a backwater fishing port as limited in other diversions and other friends as La Paz. He’d led an intense and active outdoor life and had a great fund of entertaining stories which he told exceedingly well and with only a little suggestion of boasting. He played the guitar and sang folk songs in the manner of Burl Ives, and he and Hughie, who also sang very well, had two or three times put on highly successful impromptu shows for the other patrons of the hotel. He was big and outgoing and, if a little loud at times, not offensively so, and there was a male competence and assurance about him she’d instinctively trusted because they somehow reminded her of her first husband. It would take more trying circumstances than sitting in cafes or fishing for marlin with him to bring up the other side of the coin, the cruelty and the contempt for any kind of weakness.

  Perhaps, on the other hand, Bellew could feel with some justification that he’d been fooled too. He’d claimed no experience with the sea except that highly specialized business of big-game fishing, in power cruisers and usually very near to land, while Hughie, emboldened by the complete success of the trip down the coast from Santa Barbara, had perhaps sounded a little too salty and seagoing, sitting around the drinks.

  And she’d liked Estelle Bellew—at least at first. Estelle was a rather shy and only moderately attractive woman of around forty, who was completely wrapped up in her photography and had no apparent designs on Hughie. This turned out to be another mistake, of course. While she didn’t have any amatory interest in him—then or later—she did have a great reservoir of unexpended gentleness and compassion she’d never had any occasion to use, living with this hairy and domineering bastard she was married to, and she was possessed of an equally frustrated mother instinct that Hughie brought out in full, especially after it became apparent how badly Hughie needed a mother or somebody to protect him from the Pacific Ocean and from Bellew’s abrasive contempt.

  “Why did he want to make the trip?” Ingram asked. “Bellew, I mean.”

  “I don’t even know who first suggested it,” she replied. “It was just one of those ideas that can burst on the scene fully grown when four people are sitting in a bar with their second or third round of drinks. It was about ten days after we’d met them, and we’d just come in from a day’s fishing as his guests on the boat he’d chartered. He already had all the material for the story he was doing on the fishing at La Paz and was sure he could get a story, or perhaps two, out of the trip. I told him we would be glad to pay their air transportation back from Papeete. And, after all, it would only take a month.” She smiled bitterly. “We sailed from La Paz twenty-six days ago.”

  Before they were more than a week out, everything began to go wrong. They blew out a sail in a squall and lost another overboard. Leaks began to show up from opened deck seams so that when they were shipping any water aboard everything below was soaked. They missed Clipperton Island because something had apparently slipped up in Hughie’s navigation. They used up most of their fuel trying to beat their way back to it, which was ridiculous, since it was uninhabited anyway, but by now they were no longer acting rationally but only motivated by their endless quarrels. They gave up trying to find the island after it failed a second and a third time to appear where Hughie said it was. Orpheus began to leak alarmingly, so it took more pumping every day to keep the water out of the cabins.

  But beyond all that, it was the old story of clashing personalities jammed into too small a space with nowhere to go to avoid each other. Bellew became caustic, loud-mouthed, and finally insufferable, openly contemptuous of Hughie’s mistakes in navigation and seamanship, while Hughie, instead of fighting back, retreated into sullenness and pouting. Estelle Bellew was sympathetic and tried to shield him from her husband. Lillian herself lashed out at Bellew in defense of Hughie—or she did at first, until she decided that wasn’t the answer—but at the same time it was lacerating to have to admit to herself that he even needed defending against another man. Some of her hurt and resentment must have showed, for Hughie began turning increasingly to Estelle rather than to her for comfort when he backed down from Bellew. And Estelle tried increasingly to help him, as though he were a boy, and alone.

  “That in itself was infuriating,” she went on. “The implication was that I was some species of heartless monster who had no sympathy, no feeling for him at all. She had the best intentions in the world, but she simply couldn’t seem to understand that that was the trouble in the first place, that he’d never in his life had to accept the responsibility for his own actions or fight for his rights, because there was always some woman panting to shield him from the one and buy him the other. And she was simply doing it again. I was trying to help him in the only way he could be helped—or that I hoped he could be helped—by letting him work it out for himself, no matter how I cringed and wanted to go somewhere and cry when he simply retreated into petulance in the face of Bellew’s contempt, or no matter how much easier it would have been to set him behind me and then remove Bellew’s skin in strips. So I began to treat her—Estelle—with the same insufferable nastiness that Bellew treated Hughie.

  “In the end I couldn’t stand it any longer—the helplessness of it, I mean—watching Hughie being browbeaten without the spirit to fight back, and not being able to do anything in the world about it except drive him more and more to some other woman for sympathy. I hated both of them, and I hated myself. I blew up. I did the one thing that was guaranteed to hurt everybody. I made an open, deliberate pass at Bellew.”

  “Well, it’s been done before,” Ingram said.

  “But seldom by people who are assumed to be adult. And seldom with consequences as tragic. It happened one night just at the end of the second week.”

  It was shortly after dinner and they were all on deck. She was at the wheel, having relieved Hughie just at dusk so he could take a series of star sights while he could still see the horizon. Bellew was sprawled in the cockpit beyond her, while Estelle was sitting alone on the forward end of the deckhouse, looking
at the fading afterglow of sunset. Hughie’s star sights didn’t work out. He’d got three of them, with three lines of position several hundred miles apart, none of which crossed, or were anywhere near the dead-reckoning position based on the equally dubious fix he’d got at noon. Either his figures were wrong or he’d mistaken his stars. A long time went by while he checked and rechecked his work. Then he came out on deck with a star chart, but in the meantime the moon had risen and the stars were fading and hard to distinguish. And Bellew started on him again. Her flesh crawled.

  “How’s it look, Magellan? We still seem to be in the same ocean?”

  Hughie made no reply. He went on futilely trying to match up at least one of the stars with his chart. Her heart ached for him. She wished she could help him. And why, oh why, in the name of God, didn’t he turn on the badgering and idiotic salaud and tell him to shut up?

  “I’ll tell you what, Commodore,” Bellew went on, “if it turns out we’re anywhere near Greeley, Colorado, I got a friend runs a bar there…”

  She closed her eyes. Do something, Hughie!

  He did. Like a sullen child, he threw the star chart on the deck. “Hughie,” she called out quickly, trying to save him from utter shame, “let me try. Maybe I could help—” But without even a glance at her he’d already turned and gone forward to Estelle. She could see the two of them sitting close together in the light of the rising moon. She’d bitten her lip to keep from crying, and she could taste blood in her mouth. Then out of some dark and insensate desire to wound them all, herself included, she said to Bellew, “We don’t seem to be entirely necessary, do we? But it is a beautiful night, and if you’d like help with some of your problems, why don’t you bring up a couple of drinks?”

  The others had seen, all right—at least the merged silhouette against the moon—and heard the laughter and the singing. One of them was dead now, and the other was mad, at least partly as the result of it, so she was the only one left—besides Bellew, of course—with any true and rational appreciation of the scene as something to be treasured forever. It had taken perhaps fifteen minutes to sicken herself to the point where she had to go below or jump overboard. She removed the repulsive hand from inside her bra, got up, leaving the wheel untended, and went down to the cabin and locked the door. Hughie never came down at all. Apparently he’d slept on deck.

  She went on in a minute. “So there you have the situation. We had everything we needed now for disaster, or for something very messy, but when it came, two days later, it was only an accident.

  “I’ll try to give it to you in chronological sequence, as we reconstructed it afterward, though it concerned four people in different places, I was asleep through a good part of it, and at the end only two of us were still alive and able to give a coherent account of what had happened. It was two p.m., and we’d been lying becalmed for over an hour, with all sail still set, but the booms sheeted in to keep them from banging. It was Bellew’s wheel watch, and he was sitting in the cockpit, keeping an eye out for signs of a breeze. Estelle Bellew was lying in her bunk in the forward cabin, reading, I think, and Hughie and I were in our cabin aft. I was pretending to be asleep; that way we had at least the semblance of an excuse for the fact we weren’t speaking to each other. Hughie went out.

  “He came on deck. Bellew, of course, was in the cockpit.

  Neither of them spoke. Hughie went over to the rail and was looking down into the water when he saw the school of dolphin which had been following the boat and playing around under it for the past two days. These are dolphin, the fish, you understand, and not porpoises.”

  Ingram nodded. “Very beautiful fish, like flame under water. The Mexicans call them dorado—golden, or gilded. They like to lie under anything floating on the surface.”

  “They’re the ones. Anyway, while he was looking at them he remembered that Estelle had said she’d like to see if she could photograph them from below the surface if the school was ever around when we were becalmed. So, still without speaking to Bellew, he went back below. Only, when he passed through the deckhouse, he went forward first into the main cabin—that is, the saloon—and called out to Estelle through the curtained passage at the forward end of it, telling her about the fish. She was eager to try to photograph them, so she said she’d put on a swim suit and meet him on deck. Bellew, still aft in the cockpit, heard none of this, of course. Hughie then went back up into the deckhouse and on down into our cabin to put on his swim trunks and get a diving mask and snorkel. But I didn’t know it, because by this time I was asleep.

  “Hughie was below probably only a few minutes, but when he came back up through the deckhouse and stepped on deck Bellew was no longer there. He’d gone below, into the main cabin, to make a sandwich. This, of course, is forward, toward the Bellews’ cabin, so—since the two of them hadn’t met in the deckhouse—Bellew had no idea Hughie had returned to the deck. Fortunately, you know the layout below, and you can understand why we had to reconstruct this whole thing afterward to try to understand how it could have happened.”

  Ingram nodded. He could see the tragedy already beginning to take form, like the choreography of some death scene in a ballet, where every movement had to fit.

  She went on. “In another minute or two Estelle came on deck from the forward hatch, the one leading up directly from their cabin. She had on her swim suit and was carrying a snorkel and mask and an underwater camera. That is, it wasn’t really an underwater camera with a housing, but one of her thirty-five-millimeter cameras that she’d made a watertight bag for with some kind of clear plastic and carried slung around her neck on a cord. Hughie put the ladder over just forward of amidships, and they eased down it into the water—not jumping or diving in because they didn’t want to frighten the dolphin.

  “It was a rule, of course, since all of us did swim when we had the chance, that nobody should ever go in the water without notifying whoever was on watch. But Hughie apparently thought, since Bellew was gone from the deck, that he was forward in his own cabin and that Estelle had told him before she came up. And Estelle, since Hughie had been the one who’d brought up the whole thing, must have assumed that Hughie had notified him. She hadn’t even seen Bellew, because he was in the main cabin. So they put on their masks and snorkels and began trying to get close to the school of fish, which was now moving away from the boat. There was a moderate groundswell running, so even when Bellew came back on deck he probably wouldn’t have seen them unless he’d happened to be looking in their direction at the moment they rose to the top or the near side of a swell.

  “Hughie has never been completely rational since, and when I saw him again, six hours later he was raving and incoherent, but as well as I could piece it together they’d been in the water about ten minutes and were not over a hundred yards from the boat when it happened. They were fairly close to the dolphin and they’d both dived, Hughie just looking at them while Estelle tried to snap a picture. Hughie came up first, and when his head was above water he was aware that something had changed. It was a second or two before he realized what it was. A breeze was blowing across his face. He turned and looked toward Orpheus and screamed. But Bellew didn’t hear him.

  “As I said, this was at two p.m. I awoke a little after three-thirty and could tell from the angle of heel and the lessened rolling that we’d picked up a breeze while I was asleep and were under way. I noticed Hughie wasn’t in his bunk, but paid no attention to it. In a few minutes I got up, dressed, washed my face, and went up through the deckhouse to the main cabin to brew a cup of tea. It was ten minutes of four when I carried it out on deck. Bellew was at the wheel, of course. We were on the starboard tack and probably making around two knots in a breeze that didn’t much more than fill the sails.

  “Bellew merely grunted when I sat down in the cockpit, but in a minute he said, ‘Did you call the great Magellan? Or are you going to take his watch?’

  “That was the first second it dawned on me I hadn’t seen him anywhere. I jumpe
d up, spilling the tea, and ran below, and I was all the way down in the main cabin before I realized that if he had gone to that woman’s cabin, if he’d been silly enough to go in there with her husband on deck, I’d already given it away and Bellew would probably beat him to death. I spoke outside the curtain. There was no answer, so I pulled it back. The cabin was empty. I pounded on the door of the washroom and opened it. There was no one in it, nor in the one aft.”

  She was whimpering and numb with terror by the time she made it back to the deck and saw the ladder hanging over the side. Bellew already had the wheel hard over, and Orpheus was coming ponderously about.

  She had got her voice back at last and was shrieking at him as she set up the weather runner and trimmed the jib sheet. “When? How long ago? You blind, stupid, forgetful fool, you’ve killed them!”

  ”Shut up!” Bellew ordered curtly. “They didn’t tell me.”

  “Well, you must have seen them! You were supposed to be on deck!” She broke off then, realizing at last that they were wasting precious seconds on this idiocy when there was so much to be done. They had to figure out the reciprocal of the course he’d been making and estimate the distance they’d come since the breeze sprang up. And none of it was easy. The wind had been erratic, and he’d had to tack twice when it headed him. Their speed had varied from an estimated less than one knot to an estimated three and a half. None of it had been written down because he’d intended to write a rough average of it in the log when he was relieved. She took the wheel, heading back in the approximate direction, while he struggled with the figures. In around ten minutes he had it calculated as closely as they ever would—somewhere to the east-northeast, four to five miles.