Long Voyage Back

by Luke Rhinehart

  `They can't walk and I can't lift them,' he said.

  Frank pushed himself forward to the older woman, bent_ over and tried to force himself to smile. But when he saw the grey-faced, frozen apparition that stared up at him the 'Hi'

  he had been about to speak froze in his throat. He gasped. Without further effort at sociability he leaned over and picked her up and headed back towards the gangway. The woman was almost dead. She was wearing nothing under the sheet and the contact of his hands with the naked flesh after seeing death on her face horrified and disgusted him. He wanted to run up the stairs, but Jim appeared, descending.

  `Bring the girl and get out quick,' he said sharply to him. Teeth gritted, his face showing his fear and disgust, Frank climbed the cabin steps, went quickly over to Vagabond and, refusing Jeanne's offer of assistance, thrust himself from one boat to the other.

  `Where are you putting her?' Jeanne asked.

  `Frank's cabin, I'm afraid,' Neil interjected. 'All three.' Frank carried the woman down. Jim meanwhile suffered the same sickening shock at the sight and smell of Windsong's cabin as, with face averted, he gently slid his arms under the daughter and lifted her up. She was small and light. As she came into his arms, he noticed her turn her face away from him.

  `Come on,' he said to the man, and began his return to Vagabond. Àre there things we can salvage from Windsong?' Neil asked Frank, who was coming out of his cabin after placing the

  woman up on his double berth and instructing Jim to put the girl beside her. Macklin stood nearby, glaring.

  `No,' Frank snapped back. 'Let's get away now, fast.' The skeleton of a man, standing slightly bent over in the starboard cockpit a few feet away, grimaced.

  'We've got a few emergency rations that you can have,' he said. 'It's stored . .

  `Let's go!' Macklin said sharply to Neil. 'That ship's contaminated. Everything on it may be carrying death. Let's go.

  He himself brushed past the man and untied the aft line that held Vagabond rafted to the other ship, and then hurried forward to get the other. In just a few seconds, Vagabond fell away, her sails filling, then surged forward and past the stricken Windsong. The owner turned and looked at her as Vagabondsteadily but slowly sailed away, then the man moved slowly to the hatchway to go below.

  Frank stepped trembling into the wheelhouse to deposit the fenders Macklin was bringing back under the settee seats. `Take it easy, Frank,' Neil said.

  `We've brought death aboard,' Frank said grimly.

  Neil, staring forward past the little transistor radio which lay on the control panel shelf, was as tight-lipped as Frank. Ì know,' Neil replied. 'But when was he not aboard?'

  The presence of the three apparently doomed refugees upset the occupants of Vagabond. Having three dying people aboard was a disturbing reminder of their own danger and created among some a guilty resentment of the new burden of stricter rationing and more limited space. Frank now had to sleep in the wheelhouse, Jim aft with Neil. Frank found himself resenting mild Sam Brumberger as if he were a boorish guest who'd crashed a previously enjoyable party. He was naturally appalled by his resentment. He realized that if they had abandoned Sam and his family, he world have felt badly. He was annoyed too with Jeanne for showing so much solicitude for the refugees, seeming to spend the whole afternoon in endless trips down into the hellhole of his cabin to minister to their needs. None of the men had any appetite for such service, although Olly went down and spent an hour talking with Sam.

  `Wife's just about dead,' 01ly said to Frank when he emerged. 'The daughter's not going to make it either. Sam now thinks he should have scuttled his ship.'

  `Sam looks pretty bad, too,' Frank commented.

  Yep. Tough way to go,' Captain Olly said. 'Prefer a quick sinking myself.'

  `Me too,' said Frank.

  The rescue of the Brumbergers had cost them more than two hours so that when the wind fell away to nothing at dusk they were still fifteen to twenty miles from land. Sam Brumberger told his story after dinner that night.

  Sam, his wife, and daughter and two male friends had left Miami to bring their boat north for the summer. On the night the war started the ship was shaken by a tremendous blast. With his two friends on watch, Sam was with his family below. He was thrown off the settee berth on to the floor. Recovering, he staggered up and hurried topside. Although there was a terrifying brightness to the southwest which lit the night he couldn't at first see anything wrong. He called to his friends and got no reply. Then he saw one of them lying across a seat in the rear of the cockpit. His friend's body was smoking. He had been literally fried to death.

  The other friend had disappeared, presumably thrust overboard by the blast. His wife, sleeping in an upper berth forward, had been badly burned in the stomach region and upper thighs. He and his daughter had escaped direct injury from the blast. That morning when fallout began to fall on to his deck he got his engine going and motored northeast for eleven hours skirting north of Grand Bahama Island until he ran out of

  fuel. Meanwhile, he, his wife and daughter had begun to vomit. On the fourth day Sam spotted a fishing boat and fired a flare and the boat motored over. It was a beat-up, twenty-five-foot runabout with an outboard on its last gasp. There were two black Bahamian men aboard and one white man. They looked shocked at the sight of Sam and his boat and Sam's wife. At first Sam was afraid they were just going to motor away. But they decided to stay. They locked Sam in the forepeak, looted Windsong, and took turns raping his daughter • on the settee berth three feet away from her dying mother. Since then Windsong had been drifting helplessly.

  Listening to Sam tell his story, Frank found it strange to listen to a man who knew he was dying, accepted that he was dying and who handled everything with emotionless objectivity. He was also strangely apologetic in what he said and did, as if the needs of a man who was going to die were futile and irrelevant. Commenting on the war, Sam seemed to speak from some other world that he alone, because of his condition, had moved into. 'I never thought we could spend a trillion dollars on something without sooner or later demanding our money's worth.'

  Later that night, after everyone but Neil, Frank and Jeanne were in bed and Vagabond was wallowing in a dead calm, there was a strange scene. Jeanne, having just returned from another visit to Frank's cabin to clean up after one of the sick, had stopped, after washing out a towel in salt water, to take a look at Neil's elbow. Frank was steering, and Jeanne sat beside Neil on the wheelhouse settee and adjusted the kerosene lantern in order to get a good look.

  The swelling of Neil's elbow had gone down considerably. He could move his lower arm about forty-five degrees without pain, although there was still redness over a three square-inch area. They had not used antibiotics and were depending on Neil's body to handle the infection by itself.

  Neil, happy to have Jeanne near him, tried to joke lightly

  with her about his arm and her ministrations, but she seemed solemn and withdrawn.

  `You're sure you want to keep trying to do without the sling?' she asked after they'd finished the examination and wrapped the elbow again with gauze.

  `Yes. I think that's the best way to put pressure on myself to use the arm more normally.'

  Àll right. But the infection's still there.'

  `For Christ's sake,' Frank suddenly interjected. 'Put some mercurochrome and a bandaid on it and let him be. People dying all over the world and you're worrying about Neil's sore elbow.'

  Jeanne looked up towards Frank, who kept his back to

  -them, and then glanced fearfully at Neil. She moved away

  from him and stood up.

  `She also spent half the day with the Brumbergers,' Neil said to Frank's back. Àt least they're dying,' Frank shot back, half-turning. `Can't you take care of yourself anymore?'

  In the awkward silence that followed, Jeanne gathered up the medicine kit and hung the lantern back from the roof.

  Ì promise either to heal myself or to reach a dying state as
soon as possible,' Neil finally rejoined.

  Ànd you, Jeanne,' Frank said, ignoring Neil's remark and stopping her on her way down to the main cabin. 'Don't waste so much time with the Brumbergers. You've got your own life to live.'

  Ì thought I was living it,' she replied coolly.

  `You're not,' Frank countered loudly. 'You're spending all your time with Lisa and Skippy and cleaning up vomit and mothering Neil and not a second on yourself.'

  Neil saw Jeanne watching Frank closely, seeming to study him. Ì'm sorry, Frank,' she said. 'I suppose I am compulsively doing things whether they need doing or not. I'll try to relax.'

  Frank stared at her, seeming as surprised as Neil by her abrupt acquiescence.

  `Well ... It's just that I want you to be happy,' Frank finally said. Ì know,' she replied. Th en she stepped down into the main cabin. Later, after she'd gone over to her own cabin to sleep, Frank stopped Neil as he too was headed to bed.

  `That's one incredible woman,' he said to Neil.

  `Yes,' said Neil.

  Ìf I don't achieve anything else in the rest of my life except see to it that she's taken care of, I think I'd be satisfied.'

  Neil looked into Frank's intent, confiding face and felt a distant stab of fear.

  `She . . . She's a fine woman,' he said.

  Ì hate to see her martyring herself,' Frank went on. 'She's working much too hard.'

  `Maybe it's better for her now than thinking,' Neil commented.

  `Maybe,' Frank said and took a deep breath. 'Jesus, what a world. Just when things were beginning to look good we get three breathing corpses.'

  Ì know what you mean.'

  `You think it'll ever end?'

  Neil looked at Frank's now less intent, somewhat distracted face and, without thinking, answered simply: 'No.' And he went to bed.

  At dawn the next day Sam came up from his cabin to report that his wife and daughter were dead. He announced his news to Neil apologetically, as if announcing that he'd broken someone's tea cup. He and Neil discussed their deaths briefly and concluded that they should be immediately buried at sea. Land was visible four miles to the south and Neil was worried about both pirates and Bahamian government boats. By six-thirty everyone except Jim and Katya, who were in their berths after an early morning at the helm, had finished a spare breakfast and was ready for the burial. Jeanne, concerned about the effect on Skippy of seeing bodies tossed casually into the ocean, asked Lisa to keep him occupied in the forepeak.

  The adults gathered self-consciously in the cockpit outside Frank's cabin and looked morosely at the covered bodies of the women, which lay the length of the cockpit seat. Jeanne had wrapped them together in a clean sheet and Neil had weighted the bodies with an old dinghy anchor. He'd tied it and the sheet to the body with light twine. Sam Brumberger was Jewish but his wife was not, and he had told them he had no strong feelings about how she should be buried, only that he wanted to speak publicly over them before they were committed to the sea.

  As he watched and listened, Neil was struck by the grotesqueness of this funeral. Everyone, including Sam, was dressed in bathing suits or cut-offs or jeans, and was either bare-chested or wearing a tee-shirt. Vagabond was sailing forward under cloudless blue skies, through sparkling blue water. Only an unpleasant odour - from either the bodies or

  Frank's cabin - and everyone's increasing thinness reminded him of death. Sam spoke again with that almost painful objectivity that his own death seemed to give him of the troubles he and his wife and daughter had had, her weaknesses, his, as if they were traditional parts of a eulogy. He was like an historian summing up a doomed civilization. Sam seemed to be not just burying his wife, but himself also. He was summing up before the Lord his being, offering it without apologies.

  `Human beings don't plan to die,' he was saying. 'They get picked, incredulous and protesting, and leave the stage like a vaudeville performer getting the hook. In some ways Ingrid and I've been lucky: we got to say our goodbyes, sing our final song, and walk off the stage under our own power, knowing precisely where we were going.

  `So, Lord, we commit Ingrid's body to the sea. I thank you for her life. I thank you for her death.'

  At first when Sam ceased speaking, Neil was uncertain that indeed he was finished. Then he nodded at Frank, and Neil joined Frank in lifting the linked bodies up, first to the edge of the coaming, and then, with a quick thrust, into the sea. Sam had stood with lowered head during this act and he did not raise it to watch the bodies swirl aft, slowly sinking. Jeanne came up and gently embraced him, held him for five or six seconds, and then wordlessly went back into the wheelhouse. Neil, surprised at his mild revulsion at seeing Jeanne hugging the dying man, then went up and put his hand on Sam's shoulder.

  `That was fine, Sam,' he said, feeling awkwardly that he sounded as if Sam had just done a good job hauling anchor.

  The others, too, after saying a brief word to Sam, moved into the central part of the boat. It was Neil who, turning back to adjust the mainsheet, saw Sam Brumberger climbing up out of the cockpit. Neil saw him, one leg already over, straddling Vagabond's coaming, moving clumsily and weakly,

  knew what he was doing, knew he could stop him, but didn't. As he watched, Sam pulled his other leg up on to the coaming, looked down into the water rushing past, then pushed himself off into the sea.

  `HEY!' Frank shouted from behind Neil, and then rushed past into the cockpit. Sam's head bobbed up briefly in the wake of Vagabond's starboard hull, then disappeared. Frank stared aft.

  When Neil turned into the wheelhouse, he saw Captain 0lly steering Vagabond as if nothing had happened.

  `Good man, Sam,' Captain Olly said, staring forward. `-Got himself a good death, too.'

  For Neil, Olly's wisdom made only the smallest dent in the horror. The low smudge of land lying on the horizon dead ahead grew slowly towards them through the hot, still morning. They had listened at eight to news of destruction and starvation throughout the world that made their recent deaths and present rationing seem insignificant, yet Neil sensed his ship approached this land reluctantly, with more fear than hope. They'd had no rain and foresaw none through the next day anyway and Neil felt they had to try to duck into an outer cay for water if an opportunity arose. Jim was reading a Guide to the Bahamas trying to determine which islands had fresh water and which didn't, but the writers of the Guide had never anticipated anyone's wanting to get water on uninhabited islands when it was available at any port. Neil doubted that any of the small islands would have springs or wells. Any hope they'd had earlier ofsailing into Hopetown or Marsh Harbour for supplies had been dashed by the government edict that all foreign vessels had to clear Customs and be -disarmed in Nassau or Freeport. At eleven that morning they observed a small plane flying south. Its circling low around Vagabond had made Neil uneasy, and he called everyone together to discuss tactics for repelling pirate attacks. They had only three weapons, the nine-millimetre pistol with four dozen bullets, Macklin's .45 with two dozen bullets, and the .38 revolver with two bullets. They were 'short on artillery', as 01ly had described it. They decided their flare gun could appear to be a fourth weapon. They talked about the possible ways they might be attacked, and Neil assigned them to various defensive positions with standing orders on how to respond in various contingencies.

  By one o'clock they were only about half a mile off from

  where the surf was breaking against the outer reef: They were sailing south-southeast along this barrier, low islands being visible across the emerald lagoon beyond the reef. When they came within clear sight of an abandoned lighthouse Neil was able to verify their landfall: they were off Man-of-War Cay. The next opening in the reef was six miles down, into Marsh Harbour, the most populated town on Great Abaco Island. Neil knew that it was desirable to land for food and water, but before he decided on whether to try to sneak in for supplies, or sail to Nassau, or bypass the Bahamas completely, he hoped to be able to talk to someone on one of the local boats.
<
br />   An hour later the gloom which had accompanied the first hours of their fresh contact with land deepened when they sailed past the buoyed channel leading into Marsh Harbour. They could see the town and a few boats anchored in the cove and at the dock. They sailed past. They were outcasts.

  After another mile Neil ordered Jeanne to bring the ship about to head offshore to avoid the reef. As soon as they had tacked he noticed a launch speeding towards them from the Marsh Harbour Inlet. Neil ordered them to take their prearranged defensive positions: Jeanne, Lisa and Skippy below amidships with smoke flares; Neil standing in the aft cabin hatchway holding Macklin's .45; Frank in the forepeak hatch with the .38 revolver; Jim in the starboard cabin hatchway with the Navy nine-millimetre pistol; and Tony in the port cabin hatchway with the flare gun. Captain Olly was with Katya at the helm. They all kept their meagre weapons momentarily out of sight, their intent being to create the illusion of having four heavily armed men on guard at four widely separated points. Neil, standing on the second step of his aft cabin, with his head and shoulders sticking out above the cabin opening, clutching the .45 in his right hand, watched the launch speed up to them from the left. It had a machinegun mounted on the foredeck, manned by two black men. As the launch slowed, he saw in the cockpit two additional black men, one studying Vagabond through binoculars. When the launch swung up behind them Neil saw the second man in the cockpit, who was wearing white shorts and shirt in contrast to the khakis and jeans of the others, smile a big, white-toothed smile at Vagabond. Neil had the momentary absurd idea that he was about to shout 'Welcome to the Bahamas!'

  Instead the launch pulled up parallel to Vagabond, holding off about thirty feet. For perhaps fifteen seconds the men on the two ships contemplated each other, their two vessels slicing serenely through the water side by side at five knots. Captain Olly broke the silence.

  `Hi, there, fellas,' he shouted amiably. 'How they hanging?'

  As far as Neil could tell the launch was manned only by the four black men already visible, all of whom looked back at Captain Olly blankly.