Gulf Coast Girl

by Charles Williams

  I pulled the curtain aside and stood by her bunk. She slept peacefully, a little flushed with the heat. “Shannon,” I said softly. She didn’t stir. I touched her arm.

  Her eyes opened and looked at me without comprehension at first. Then she stared around the cabin and just for a second her defenses were down as the whole ugly mess came back the way it does in that instant of waking. She absorbed it and took command without a sound.

  “Hello, Bill,” she said. “I’m glad it was you.”

  “How do you feel?”

  She stirred a little, experimentally. “I’m not sure yet. Wobbly, I think.”

  “You look wonderful.”

  She made a wry face. “I’ll bet I do.”

  “Really, you do. You’re beautiful.”

  Self-consciousness seized us both. Too much had been compressed into too short a time. By any normal standards what we had done could have been called ugly and callous and an absolute travesty on any kind of good taste, but normal standards didn’t exist any more. Time was telescoped and flattened like the front end of a car in a head-on crash. We had been through a lifetime in less than a week, and we probably had less than another week to live.

  Sure, he was dead, and he’d died violently less than 24 hours ago, but it meant nothing any more. He had deliberately erased himself long before that. He had run out on her to save himself. She had left him when she knew it—not physically, because out of some sense of obligation she had to stick with him and try until the end to save him in spite of his treachery, but she was gone nevertheless. She didn’t owe him anything; she’d paid it all and canceled the account.

  I hoped she would see all that, too, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything about it now. A girl had a right to be fully awake, I thought, before being assaulted with a speech like that.

  “I’m going to make some sandwiches and coffee,” I said. “Feel up to it?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Fine. Stay right where you are for a minute.” I went into the after part of the cabin and drew a basin of fresh water. Setting it on the little stand between the forward ends of the bunks, I went back and picked up the cardboard carton of clothes and personal effects she had sent aboard. It was on one of the settees where Barfield had been pawing through it as we were coming down the channel.

  “You’ll feel better,” I said.

  She sat up on the bunk, clutching the sheet, with her hair falling about her shoulders.

  “Big, beautiful Swede with an Irish name,” I said.

  She smiled wanly. “I am half Irish,” she said. “But my mother was a Russian Finn nearly six feet tall.”

  “And beautiful.”

  “Very beautiful.”

  I grinned at her. “Don’t ask me how I knew. I might tell you.”

  I went out and drew the curtain.

  Thirteen

  While I was firing up the primus stove and starting coffee I could hear her moving around beyond the curtain. It was wonderful, just knowing she was there. Then I thought of those two in the cockpit and the wonder of it became torment. I damned Macaulay. He had done this to her.

  He must have been a little mad there at the end. He should have known there was no hope of finding that plane. It must have become an obsession.

  What he had done was pass her the baton in a rat race that could never end any way other than in her death. His stupid belief that he could find the plane again had convinced them, and now after Barclay’s off-beat piece of genius she was assumed to have all the facts and was supposed to run and hide until they hauled her down and killed her. I cursed them all for a bunch of fools. It was a game. It was “button, button.” The rules were simple. You dropped a cuff link in two hundred thousand square miles of empty ocean and then went back and found it. If you didn’t find it, you killed somebody. You didn’t know much about the odds on finding cuff links dropped in oceans, but you were hell on wheels at killing people.

  What chance did we have of getting away from them? And if we got away, where did we go? With not only the police after us but the rest of the “button, button” crowd as well. The two we had on our backs now were only part of them. The game never really ended. It just took them a while to find you, and then it started all over again. Macaulay had never been able to shake them, had he?

  I was measuring coffee into the percolator when the idea began to take form. I stopped dead still, so abruptly I spilled the coffee from the spoon, enthralled with the beauty of it. Half of our problem didn’t even exist. Go back?

  Who wanted to go back?

  Here was the Ballerina, the answer to any blue-water sailor’s dream. There she was, beyond that curtain, the girl I’d never had out of my mind since the moment I met her. And behind me, in a black satchel, was eighty thousand dollars. I stood there holding the coffee can in my hand, feeling the deck heel down and hearing the sound of water along the hull while I rolled the names around on my tongue: Grand Cayman, Martinique, Barbados, Guadeloupe, Granada—Not the big places, not San Juan or Port-au-Prince or Havana, where we’d be caught, but the little ones, the small tropical islands with long golden beaches and native villages in sheltered bays where the water was blue and still.

  They’ll never find us. That much money would last us a lifetime. I thought of it and could feel the intense longing take hold of me. Just the two of us. It was like looking at paradise. And on the other side of the world—Borneo, Java, Sumatra, Tongareva, the Marquesas—all those names out of Conrad and Jack London that made your mouth water. Go back? With all that tropic, coral-reefed, blue-watered world there waiting for us, and the boat and a fortune right here in our hands? Why in the name of God hadn’t I thought of it before? We’d change the name of the sloop, and her port of registry. Change our own names, and be married by a priest in some out-of-the-way native village.

  * * *

  Aboard the American tanker Joseph H. Hallock, the master looked up from the thick journal and frowned. It was past midnight. He sat in a leather-upholstered easy chair in the dim and well-ordered seclusion of his office with the book in his lap in the glow from the single reading lamp. There was only the faint vibration from the big diesels aft to indicate he was at sea.

  His eyes were thoughtful, as if something puzzled him. Slipping a finger between the pages to mark his place, he flipped back, looking for something. When he found it he reread the passage. With the thumb and forefinger of his left hand he pinched his lower lip in a gesture that was characteristic of him when he was thinking, and sat for another minute staring at the page. Then he shook his head and went on reading, a little faster now, forgetting he was up long past his bedtime.

  * * *

  I came abruptly back to earth, and the dream faded. All that was waiting for us, but knowing it and yearning for it only made reality worse. You couldn’t dream Barclay away, nor escape from Barfield by imagining he wasn’t there.

  But there must be a way. There had to be.

  I put the coffee away and began slicing bread for sandwiches. I took salami and cheese from the icebox. What were the chances at any given moment? Last night Barclay had mockingly handed me his gun, knowing I wouldn’t use it because Barfield could kill her. But now she was behind me, and they were both in the cockpit, Barfield unarmed. Suppose—

  Suppose I went out there, came close to Barclay on the pretext of handing him a sandwich, and slugged him. He was slender, fine-boned, and probably easy to hurt, and he had two guns in his pockets. I might get one. But what would happen? For a fraction of a second I was off guard as far as Barfield was concerned, and he didn’t have to be armed if you didn’t have your hands up. He’d belt me from behind and I’d be lying in the cockpit having my face kicked in. He was built for it, and he knew his business.

  But they had to sleep sometime. So what if they did? They slept one at a time, and the other was watching me. And there was always the threat of what they could do to her. If I got hold of a gun they could make me give it up if they had h
er. Anything I tried had to work the first time, and all at once, or it was no good at all.

  But five days! Maybe a week. They had to slip up sometime. If I kept watching them, and waiting—

  I was stacking sandwiches on a plate when the curtains parted and she came out. She was wearing a summery blue cotton dress and sandals, and her legs were bare. She had put her hair back up, but it was still faintly damp and a little of its fine, soft sheen was lacking. Salt water was poor for a shampoo. She wore no make-up.

  She came over beside me. Self-consciousness was still like a wall between us. “Feel better?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I’m hungry, too.”

  She glanced beyond me, toward the companionway. They couldn’t see down here unless they were in the forward end of the cockpit. Sunlight streamed in the open hatch and slid along the deck as we rolled slightly in the sea.

  The big eyes were grave, and her lips scarcely moved. “You’re pretty wonderful,” she said. “Thanks for understanding.”

  Then she went on, in a louder tone: “Shall I help you carry something up to the animals?”

  “Sure,” I said. I handed her the sandwiches. “Take these, and I’ll bring the coffee and some cups.”

  We went up. Barclay was at the tiller, and Barfield lounged on the port side, his legs outstretched. He drew them in, and grinned. “Going for a swim, honey?” he asked.

  She glanced briefly at him as if he were something that had crawled out of a ditch after a rain, and sat down on the starboard side holding the plate of sandwiches in her lap.

  Barclay smiled coolly. “I trust you’ve recovered.”

  She nodded. “I have. Thank you.”

  He signed to me. “Take the helm for a while Manning.”

  I set the coffeepot on the cockpit deck and moved back. He slipped past and I took the tiller. The sun was low in the west and the breeze had subsided to a light air scarcely filling the sails. Barclay sat down on the weather side beyond Barfield and took one of the sandwiches from the plate. A lock of brown hair was breeze-blown across his forehead and he looked more like a young poet or student than ever, if you forgot the heavy sag of the jacket and didn’t look too closely at the cool deadliness of the eyes.

  He glanced at me and then at Shannon. “If you’ll be kind enough to give me your attention I shan’t have to say this more than once. We are now at least fifty miles from the nearest land. Obviously, any further attempt to swim ashore is futile. I have thrown overboard the oars to the dinghy, so you can’t get away in that. Any attempt at upsetting the status quo will be met with a pistol-whipping.”

  He stopped. Barfield had leaned forward to take a sandwich from the plate on her lap, and while he was about it he patted her on the knee. She stared at him with icy contempt.

  “Listen to the nice man, baby,” he said.

  “You are listening, aren’t you, Mrs. Macaulay?” Barclay asked coldly. “I was speaking primarily to you, since you will be the recipient of the pistol-whipping if Manning tries to get out of hand.”

  She was superb. She turned and regarded him calmly. “I hear you. But you don’t have to impress me; you forget, I’ve already seen you at work.”

  He shrugged. “That being the case, shall we get down to business? Your husband told you where his plane crashed. I should like you to tell us exactly what he said.”

  “Of course I’ll tell you,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I? But I fail to see why you had to bring me out here to ask a simple question like that.”

  “Obvious, isn’t it?” he said. “But go ahead.”

  “All right. It was late in the afternoon, he said, near sunset, when he picked up Scorpion Reef. He changed course slightly so as to hit the Florida coast somewhere above Fort Myers. A few minutes later he began to have trouble with his starboard engine. Then it caught fire. He couldn’t put it out, and he knew he was going to crash. He had noticed a reef or shoal below him just a minute or two before, and tried to get back so he could land on the downwind side of it, where the sea wouldn’t be so rough, but he couldn’t make it. He crashed on the east side of it, about two miles off, and the plane sank almost immediately. He just had time to climb out on a wing, and throw the raft in the water. As you probably know, he couldn’t swim at all.”

  “Why didn’t he try to get the diamonds off with him?”

  “He had stowed the box in a locker so it wouldn’t go flying around if the weather got rough. And the locker was aft, already under water.”

  “What about the other man? The diver?”

  This was the only part of it that hurt her. She hesitated for a moment, and I could see the sickness in her eyes. “He said the man didn’t have his belt fastened, and was killed in the crash.”

  You could take your choice, I thought. He might have been alone, already a murderer, or he could have left an injured man to drown. Or possibly there was just a slim chance he was telling the truth. She could hold onto that, anyway.

  “Very well,” Barclay said. Then he lashed at her suddenly: “Now. Why was he so sure of his exact bearing from that reef? He didn’t have time to take a compass reading before the plane went down, and he didn’t have a compass on the raft.”

  She was quite calm. “It was late afternoon, I said. The sun was setting. The plane, the very northern end of the surf on the shoal, and the sun were all in one straight line.”

  She looked around suddenly at me. “I remember now, you asked me that, didn’t you, Bill? Whether he could see surf from the raft. And I’d forgotten.”

  I nodded. It would make a difference, all right; but you still had to find the reef. It was hopeless.

  Barclay dropped the rest of the sandwich over the side and cupped his hands to light a cigarette. “Very well. Now, what was the position?”

  “Fifty miles north-northeast of Scorpion Reef.”

  He stared coldly. “And why did you say it was to the westward when I asked you last night?”

  “I’m sure I didn’t,” she replied.

  “The fact remains, you did. Make up our minds, shall we?”

  “It’s north-northeast.”

  “Very well,” he said crisply. “George, run down and bring up that chart. And the parallel rulers and dividers.”

  Barfield brought them up and the two of them crouched over the chart in the bottom of the cockpit. She drew her knees to one side and continued to regard them as if they were some kind of vermin. Barclay’s face was thoughtful. “‘North-northeast—”

  “Make it twenty-two degrees,” I said. “Get it off the compass rose and slide the rulers over.” I knew what he would find, and waited, a little tensely.

  He had the line, and picked up the dividers. He looked over at me, his eyes questioning. “Edge of the chart, isn’t it? Mean latitude, or something?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Sixty nautical miles to the degree.”

  He picked the distance off and set the dividers along the line. Then he turned his head and stared bleakly at Shannon Macaulay. “Perhaps you would like to try again.”

  “You asked me what he told me,” she said indifferently. “I have just repeated it, word for word. What else would you like me to do?”

  “Tell the truth, for one thing.”

  “I am telling the truth.”

  He sighed. “I see. Then we are to assume the chart-maker was lying. The nearest sounding shown here is forty-five fathoms. A practical joke, no doubt.”

  “And why do you think I would lie about it?”

  “Really? For a paltry three quarters of a million?”

  There was Irish in her, all right, and it flared now, the second time I had seen it. “Why, you idiotic vermin! I wouldn’t stoop to pick up your damned, filthy diamonds if I stumbled over them in the dark. I don’t want them. I wouldn’t have them. I have no interest in them whatever. If I had them here in my lap, I’d give them to you, and be glad to get rid of them. But there’s no way you can understand that, is there? I’d be wasting my breath trying to explain
it to you.”

  “Excellent scene,” he said. “More effective, as a rule, however, if you throw something. Now, shall we start over?” He paused, and nodded to Barfield. “George.”

  Barfield turned, still on his knees, and caught her left wrist. He started to twist it, slowly at first.

  I pulled my feet under me, and crouched, still holding the tiller. “Call him off,” I said.

  Barclay slipped the gun out of his right-hand jacket pocket and pointed it carelessly in my direction. “As you were, Manning.”

  “Call him off!”

  Barfield had stopped to watch us, but he continued to hold her arm. Her lips were tightly compressed, and I knew it was already hurting.

  I was too wild to be scared. “Listen, Barclay. This whole thing is going to come unzipped. If he hurts her, it’s you I’m coming for, and you’re going to have to use that gun to stop me. If you think you can find that reef without my help, go ahead.”

  It hung poised, ready to go either way. I tried to take a breath through the tightness in my throat. “Don’t be a damned fool,” I went on. “If she were going to lie, would she give you a stupid position like that? Maybe there is a shoal there, or somewhere within fifteen miles or so. All that area hasn’t been sounded. Macaulay could have been off in his reckoning. The only thing to do is go there and see, and you’ll never get there unless I take you. You name it. Now.”

  He saw I was right. He motioned for Barfield to turn her loose. The tension drained away, and I was limp. I’d bought a little time, but I knew that when the next time came I’d be tied up before they started.

  She stood up, turned deliberately to smile at me, and went below, ignoring them.

  Barfield lounged on the seat with a cup of coffee in his hand. “The hero,” he said. “We’ve got a real, live hero aboard, Joey.”

  * * *

  Barclay took over again while I ate a sandwich and drank some coffee. I relieved him at six. He and Barfield went below and sat in the cabin, talking. After a while I heard them turn on the radio. It had short wave in addition to the marine bands, and they got an Argentine station playing Latin American dance music. Sunset was a great splash of salmon and orange and pink, fading slowly while the sea stretched out like a rolling, dark prairie.