by Robert Stone
“I understand why they did it,” Pablo told Holliwell. “I can feel inside me why. I think it’s in my blood.”
Holliwell watched the young man and said nothing.
“You know about the magic they got there?” Pablo asked.
Holliwell reached for the jug and took a swallow of water.
“What magic?”
“I don’t mean the old-time stuff,” Pablo said. “I mean the bad shit that goes on now. The sacrifices.”
“I’m not sure I follow you,” Holliwell said.
Pablo shrugged. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, mister. But you might as well know the old man talked to me. I know what goes on in that place. The Demiurge and that.”
“I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” Holliwell said. He had come to realize that Pablo affected to regard him as party to some freemasonry of his own imagining. He could not decide whether the wiser course was to let him continue in that impression or to try and set him straight.
“I guess you’ll talk to me when you’re ready,” Pablo said. “When the times comes. We could be a long time in this boat.”
Holliwell interpreted Pablo’s statement as threat. He figured the young man’s weight at about a hundred and fifty pounds—but a hard case, sinewy and mean with enough concentrated malice and nervous energy to make him more than difficult. Moreover he was young and crazy and Holliwell growing weak with the sun and the lack of sleep. Holliwell avoided looking at him, trying to be ready and to hope for the best. They might yet be picked up.
Surely, he thought, they must have known at the mission that this boy was mad and dangerous? It might be that he was not as deranged as he seemed. He could not be sure; they were do-gooders there, bien pensants. There was a terrible justice in it that he was not in the mood to savor.
A small freighter had come up on the southern horizon, taking what seemed to be an inshore course. Holliwell licked his lips and fixed his concentration on the ship, holding the throttle on full.
“They say what you don’t know can’t hurt you,” Pablo said, “but that’s not so. You get turned around when you don’t know anything.”
“Right,” Holliwell said.
“Man, I’ll tell you, I found out so much since I come down this way I can’t believe it. The world ain’t anything like I thought it was.”
Holliwell was intrigued. “Is it better or worse?”
Pablo’s face broke into an adolescent smile.
“Uh … let’s see.” He thought about it for a moment. “Better and worse, I guess. There’s more to it. For me, better.”
“Good,” Holliwell said.
“I see what you’re doing,” Pablo said slyly. “You’re playing me along. I’m supposed to learn from you.”
Holliwell looked at him then, studied the spare contours of his brown face, his overheated eyes. It was like looking into some visceral nastiness, something foul. And somehow familiar.
“You know a hell of a lot more than you’re letting on, mister. I can tell that by now.”
As the sun’s force flattened out over the subject ocean, Pablo took off his shirt and pants, dipped the shirt in sea water and wrapped it around his head like a turban. He stretched himself out across the forward part of the boat and it seemed as though he were enjoying himself, enjoying the sun. Holliwell saw that the diver’s knife was strapped to his leg.
The freighter Holliwell had singled out was still coming on. He fixed his eyes on its black hull now, trying to capture the ship with his will. He could see the faint diesel smoke above her funnel. His hand ached as he gripped the engine’s throttle; he was trying to wrestle the boat beyond flank speed.
Pablo was watching him.
“We’re gonna be O.K.,” he told Holliwell.
“That’s what I like to hear,” Holliwell said.
“I’m tellin’ you, man, you got nothing to worry about. We’re going home. At least I am.”
For more than an hour, Holliwell fixed his concentration on the freighter, trying to get some measure of its bearing and speed. Only when his eyes flooded with sweat did he turn away, steadying the throttle with the crook of his arm, to clean his sunglasses and wet his face with a little fresh water. Fresh water afforded only the briefest relief. He could feel his face swelling, heat and salt were marinating his exposed flesh. Lifting the jug, he drank sparingly, thinking of the wasted water. He felt sick and afraid.
Pablo had gone into something like a sleep. His yellow eyes were blank, half covered by twitching lids and shaded by the fold of the shirt tied over his brow. Though Holliwell tried his best to put Pablo’s presence from his mind, it was hard for him not to look at the knife that was secured to the young man’s calf. The knife had a plastic hilt and handle and a wide heavy blade. To Holliwell’s mind, there was something of Pablo himself about it.
In the depths of his sun-stricken panic, a monster image began to form compounded of Pablo and his blood-guttered, Day-Glo knife. For hours he had been hearing the slurred slow speech, trying to read the murky hooded eyes, watching the muscles tense and relax in his companion’s lean brown face. It was as though he had been cornered after a lifelong chase by his personal devil. All his life, he thought, from childhood, the likes of Pablo had been in pursuit of him. But he had not come so far to be trapped like this, at noon, in a lonely place. He resolved that although the ocean might get him, the sun, thirst or starvation, Pablo would not. He would see them both dead first. The resolution gave him a bitter satisfaction that was, after hope, his only comfort; he knew he would hold to it.
The distant ship was still miles away and hardly any bigger on the horizon. He felt like shouting.
“You ain’t gonna make it,” Pablo said to him.
The words froze his blood but he kept his eye on the ship.
“What do you mean by that, Pablo?”
“He changed course is what I mean,” Pablo said. He was looking past Holliwell at the freighter. “You won’t cut across him now.”
Holliwell could almost make out the company signature painted in yellow letters across the sky-blue superstructure. She was such a pretty thing, he thought.
“Maybe he can see us,” Holliwell said.
“If he can, he’s not stopping.”
“He must see us.”
“Well, it’s funny down here,” Pablo said. “Anywhere at sea these days. Just because a man sees you don’t mean he’s gonna come your way. And if he does, that ain’t always good.”
Holliwell kept watching the ship; her angle had shifted so that the letters under the fantail that spelled out her name and port of origin were partly visible. In desperation, he looked to other quarters. There were two other ships in view but they were very far away. He looked at his watch; the hands showed half past noon. The watch seemed a foolish thing, a little tin register of the immensities that surrounded them. And there was only so much daylight. So much fuel, so much water.
Pablo was peeling an orange. Holliwell watched him, mastering his own anger and revulsion.
“We’re in a spot, Pablo, don’t you think?”
Pablo passed him half of the peeled orange and nodded toward the east.
“Look there.”
“What is it?” Holliwell was aware of the faint quaver in his voice. “Is the weather changing?”
Pablo smiled comfortably.
“Islands,” he said. “If we don’t see one today, we will tomorrow. Real pretty islands, too.”
Holliwell made one last attempt to persuade himself of Pablo’s rationality; it failed. He could see nothing but delusion and menace in the animal eyes.
“Well,” he said after a minute, “I’ll take us out for another hour. Then we better wait and see.” He had the sense that Pablo found his firm reasonableness amusing. “If we don’t get any help by four o’clock, I’ll head north and see if we can get a start toward the coast of Compostela.”
“That’s against the wind,” Pablo said. “We’ll never get up there. W
e’re going to the islands.”
Holliwell put the orange section in his mouth, chewed the pulp and spat it out.
“I don’t understand why you’re so sure of that.”
“Because it’s meant to be,” Pablo told him. “That’s why.”
He made no reply but Pablo seemed disappointed in his response.
“You better take it easy, Doc. A man as smart as you, you oughtn’t to be so antsy.”
“I’m fine,” Holliwell said. “You take it easy.”
Pablo’s eyes went cold. A little ripple of anger flashed across their surface, a knife glint.
“Maybe you ain’t who I thought you were,” he said to Holliwell.
“I’m the other guy in your boat,” Holliwell said. “That’s got to be good enough.”
Pablo watched him unhappily for a while and then eased himself aft.
“Take a break,” he told Holliwell. “I’ll steer for a while.”
Holliwell could not bring himself to let go of the throttle.
“What the hell’s the matter?” Pablo said. “Afraid I’ll run us off the road?”
Holliwell gave over and let Pablo replace him in the stern. When they had crossed he spread his shirt over his face and lay back, resting his head on the tarp. He was exhausted but afraid to sleep.
“I thought you were one of those people,” Pablo was saying to him. “I figured you were all right.”
“What people?”
“One of those people from that place there. I thought you were part of it.
“Just passing through,” Holliwell said.
“You got to understand something, Holliwell. There’s a process and I’m in the middle of it. A lot of stuff I do is meant to be.”
Holliwell was not surprised by this declaration; he had been expecting something of the sort and he was ready. The loathing he felt braced his blood like an antitoxin. He would stay ready. In spite of the sun and the heat he would not lose consciousness. He lifted the shirt from his face and, turning on his side, looked across the bow. Another ship had passed them by, gone north.
“You know what I’m talking about,” Pablo said. “I know fucking well you do.” Then he cut the engine and lapsed into silence.
Gradually, Holliwell gave in to his weariness and let his mind spin out of focus. His dreams, if dreams they were, came as salted and sun-drenched as the waking world around him. He saw ships where there were none. One seemed to loom above them less than an arm’s span away; he saw it in the clearest detail, red lead on the rails, rust under the waterline when she rolled, paintwork and polished brass on the flying bridge.
When he came out of it, some of the heat and light had ebbed from the day. Heavy ridges of cloud were forming ahead and a steady wind had come up that drove the boat before it, misting them with spray at every fifth wave and hurrying them ever farther from the coast. There were no more ships in sight.
Pablo made a sea anchor of a bucket to hold the stern out of the wind and dry his clothes for the coming night. Without speaking, he took Holliwell’s shirt and spread it out beside his own.
“You faked me out, mister,” he said. “If you ain’t part of it you better not fuck it up. You fuck it up—that’s turning me around and I don’t permit that.”
“You have to trust me,” Holliwell said. “We need each other out here.”
“I don’t need anybody,” Pablo told him. “Not no more. Boy, I could tell you the shit trusting people has got me into. I don’t even like to think about it.”
“I’m on your side,” Holliwell said. “Where else could I be?”
As the sun declined, color returned to the sky. A thin green haze seemed to float over the surface of the ocean.
“I don’t feel good,” Pablo said suddenly. “My leg … I got fever, I think.”
Holliwell took heart; he was all concern. He wet his handkerchief in the fresh water and gave it to Pablo for a salve. They traded places and Holliwell took back the tiller. The wind was noticeably cooler now. Pablo put his shirt on and lay back in the bow, resting on the tarp and his folded trousers.
“You’ve got penicillin there,” Holliwell told his shipmate. “You ought to take it.”
Pablo found the pills and Holliwell observed that his fingers trembled as he lifted the plastic top from the tube. He followed the penicillin with one of his other pills, the ones that made him talkative.
“I’m hurting for sure,” Pablo said.
Glancing at the boat compass, Holliwell saw that their drift was dead east. Pablo was probably right then, Compostela would not be for them. Whatever was in store would reveal itself in unbounded ocean.
Pablo struggled up and propped himself on an elbow.
“You wouldn’t try and turn me around, would you, Doc?”
“Of course not,” Holliwell said.
“ ’Cause that’d be the last goddamn thing you ever tried, Jim. You better believe it.”
“Just take it easy, Pablo.” Holliwell’s chest was spongy with fear. The wind chilled him and he began to shiver. Pablo sank back down to his rest and seemed to sleep. Holliwell eyed the knife strapped to his leg; it was held in the sheath by a rubber noose that circled the handle. Getting it loose would be a delicate and extremely dangerous operation. And the little bastard never properly slept, Holliwell thought. His eyes stayed open.
He was no better than an animal. He was an animal.
The lower hemisphere of the sun was almost touching the line when Tabor roused himself again.
“You said you betrayed her.”
For a moment, Holliwell had no idea what he was speaking of.
“You said to her: ‘I betrayed you.’ What’d you mean?”
“Nothing serious,” Holliwell told him. “It was a bet we had.”
Pablo’s eyes were vacant and confused.
“You know,” he said, “I’m part of the process and you ain’t.”
“That’s my loss I’m sure,” Holliwell said.
“I thought I was just anybody.” Pablo spoke in a febrile whisper. “I thought I was this loser.”
“But instead you’re part of the process.”
“Everything,” Pablo insisted, “everything that happened, man, happened for a purpose. To teach me. So I could learn. Everything that happened. Everybody I met.”
“Except me,” Holliwell said.
“I ain’t saying that, Holliwell. I ain’t sure of that. Maybe you too. You know, he told me—that old man told me—the eye you look at it with, well, that’s the eye it sees you with. That’s what he told me.”
Holliwell was moved to recall an experiment he had once read about; he had clipped the report of it for his class. An experimenter endeavoring to observe chimpanzee behavior had fashioned a spy hole in the door of the animals’ chamber through which he might watch them unobserved. Putting his eye to it, he had seen nothing more than what he finally identified as the eye of a chimpanzee on the other side of the door. Ape stuff. Another spasm of trembling overcame him; his teeth chattered.
“I think I might be part of the process too,” he said, when he had recovered. “I learned a few things down here.”
Wrapping his shirt around his blistered body, he turned back toward the coast of Tecan, little more than a green line now on the misty horizon. He had learned what empty places were in him. He had undertaken a little assay at the good fight and found that neither good nor fight was left to him. Instead of quitting while he was ahead, he had gone after life again and they had shown him life and made him eat it.
He turned away from Tecan and faced his fellow traveler.
The prospect was death now, after all, sudden or slow, neither earned nor undeserved. And he would have to face it listening to the voice of this pill-brained jackdaw, this jabbering shitbird with his pig sticker and his foul little eyes.
“Me, I was so turned around,” Pablo was saying. “I was so fucked up. I mean I’m sick now but I’m a lot better off than I was.” He looked over his shoulder and
then back to Holliwell. “I’ll be glad to get home,” he said. “Things gonna be a lot different for me.”
Holliwell, shivering in a burst of spray, only nodded.
“I don’t know what you’re gonna do, Holliwell, but I’m goin’ home, goddamn right. I’m goin’ home and it’s gonna be all different. Because I scored, you know what I mean?” He grinned; his teeth were white and regular, the only healthy part of his face, Holliwell thought. “I got regular material things to take back with me. Plenty, Holliwell—never mind asking. And I got spiritual things.” Holliwell watched him repeat the words “spiritual things” under his breath. “And I got a little lady up there, yes sir. And I got a boy and he’s a good boy, too.”
Then a look of alarm came over his face and he touched the breast pocket of his shirt. Whatever he was feeling for was in its place.
“You just keep looking for that island, Holliwell. You’re gonna see it!”
Holliwell again studied the mean contours of his companion’s face and found himself beset by scruple. From sentiment, conscience, a debilitated failure of will, he suddenly recoiled from the thing he had intended. The hope flared up in him that they might survive together. He was thinking now that the boy on the boat with him was no more than a crazy kid, than whom he was older, harder, tougher, that for all Pablo’s bloody prattle he did not really seem bent on murder, that he might even be seen as well-intentioned in his foolish paranoid way. Then too, she had trusted Pablo and taken him in, had given him into Holliwell’s care. Perhaps, Holliwell thought, he owed her. He had an impulse to turn again toward the distant green coast but he did not. Everything there was lost now.
The act itself, the doing of it, repelled him. There might be a ship. Or even, absurdity of absurdities, an island. He decided he would keep his head and a close watch on Pablo and endure the oncoming night.
The colors of dusk shaded the sky. The sun was tame again, fixed to the textured horizon. Steady, Holliwell thought. Live in hope.
“You hear them?” Pablo Tabor asked him.
“Hear what?”
Holliwell listened hard. There were the waves, flumes of spray striking the fiber-glass. Nothing else.