Scorpion Reef

by Charles Williams

  I tried to remember which way the current set along here, but I couldn’t. The tide should be flooding now, which would help, but it would reach high water and start to ebb long before we were anywhere near shore. That was when it would get us. We might go on for hours, but inevitably our arms and legs would grow heavier and heavier until it took everything we had merely to stay afloat. After that it would come fast.

  I wondered if we could make it, by some miracle. I had swum that far once or twice, I was sure. You lost body heat very slowly in this Gulf water. The sea and wind were behind us. No, I was just kidding myself. I’d done it before, but never after having been nearly 48 hours without sleep, and never towing somebody else. She would become exhausted, even if I didn’t, and begin to struggle in panic, and when she dragged us under we were finished. I tried not to think about it.

  I saw the lights of the Ballerina. She was coming back now, and passed several hundred yards to seaward. When she returned the next time she was half a mile downwind. They thought we had the life belt, and would keep right on searching.

  Time passed somehow. The reach, pull, reach became monotonous, and then mechanical, and at last eternal. I had never done anything else; I’d been born swimming through warm water toward a shore that receded nine miles ahead as fast as I advanced. Ursa Major wheeled over and down in the northwest and Cassiopeia swung up like the other arm of a giant counterbalance turning around Polaris. It would soon be dawn.

  My arms began to grow heavy long before I would admit I was tiring. My breathing was ragged now, and sometimes I inhaled water and choked. I looked around once and the sky was pink in the east. Then, suddenly, it was full daylight. I looked ahead. There was nothing but water, and the sea running, and far off to our left the bare mast of the Ballerina. Land didn’t even exist any more.

  We couldn’t have covered much more than a third of the distance, and I knew I was almost done. I let my feet down, treading water, and she came up against me with only her head above the surface. Her face was drawn with weariness, and there were blue circles under her eyes. She put a hand on my arm under water and tried to smile. A sea picked us up and threw us together. Her face was only inches from mine.

  “I’m sorry about the life preserver,” she said, her voice thin with exhaustion.

  “It’s all right,” I said. There was a bad pain in my side and my breathing was labored. I knew it was stupid to waste breath talking, but suddenly I wanted to tell her.

  I put a hand on each side of her face. “I couldn’t tell you before,” I said. “Even—if he had run out on you. But it doesn’t matter now. Have to tell you. I love you. More than anything—in the world. You’ve never been out of my mind since you walked out on the edge of that pier—”

  She didn’t say anything. She brought her arms up very slowly and put them about my neck. We went under, our lips together, arms tight about each other. It was like falling endlessly through a warm, rosy cloud. I seemed to realize, very dimly, that it was water we were sinking through and that if we didn’t stop it and swim up we’d drown right there, but apparently there was nothing I could do about it. I didn’t want to turn her loose long enough to swim up. We went on falling, through warmth and ecstasy and colors.

  White water crashed about our heads. We were right on the surface and hadn’t fallen anywhere. We gasped for breath and I held my face against hers. “Shannon—Shannon—” I said.

  “Don’t talk,” she whispered.

  I held her, and kissed the closed eyes, and we went under again with that sensation of falling through infinite rose-tinted space. We came up. I saw the sun rising out of the sea. I didn’t want to die. They couldn’t take it all away now.

  I started to swim again, but the stroke was ragged and uneven and she seemed to be a heavier weight pulling at me. Suddenly the drag was gone. Panic seized me. I thought she had gone under and was drowning. I turned. Her head was still above surface. She had let go deliberately.

  “Go on—” Her face went under and she choked.

  I caught her arm and pulled her up and toward me, and held her with her face above water. I saw the Ballerina going by again to seaward. They were too far away. They wouldn’t see us. I wondered if I wanted them to. I couldn’t think; it was all mixed up. Being willing to die in the future, even in a future measured in hours, was one thing; dying now was something else. But it didn’t matter what I thought. They’d never see us. They were nearly a mile off.

  “Go on—” she gasped. “Maybe you can make it. Leave me. I’ve ruined everything for you—”

  “Hush,” I said. “Don’t waste breath.”

  We went under.

  I pulled her back to the surface. It seemed to take a long time. Once more, I thought. Maybe twice. But the panic hadn’t started yet. I hoped we wouldn’t fight each other when it did. Maybe there wouldn’t be any panic. No, there always was, when you took that first mouthful and your throat shut off automatically to keep it out.

  My eyes opened. We were on the surface again, and I saw that the sloop had turned and was bearing down directly toward us. But they couldn’t have seen us. Then some detached part of my mind figured it out as calmly and analytically as if I were working out something with a slide rule in a classroom. It was those glasses. It was those 7 by 50 binoculars I had bought in New Orleans. They were the reason they’d kept on searching. Barclay had known he could locate us as soon as it was light.

  Somehow we were still afloat. I could see Barclay standing on the boom with an arm around the mast, directing Barfield at the helm. They cut the engine and drifted down on us.

  I watched them helplessly, unable even to struggle any more. We had failed. But we were still alive. Barclay climbed down into the cockpit and tossed a line. I caught it and he pulled us over. When the sloop rolled down, he and Barfield caught her arms and lifted her over the side. I heard Barfield whistle, and then laugh. I stared up at him through the mists of utter exhaustion, tried to curse him, and couldn’t.

  They hauled me in. She was on her knees in the cockpit, unable to rise, her head bowed and water running out of her hair. The red rays of the sun coming over the horizon splashed against her body and the two wisps of underclothing were stuck to her like wet tissue. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and the most completely beaten. I took a step toward her, stumbled, and fell myself.

  “Some dish, Manning,” Barfield said. “A wet dish, but a dish.”

  I tried to get to my feet. He put a hand on my head and pushed gently, and I collapsed like a column of building blocks.

  Barclay’s voice lashed out, the first time I had heard anger in it. “Help her below, Barfield,” he said.

  They helped her down the companionway. I lay for another minute in the cockpit, fighting for breath, and then managed to get to my feet. I went below, staggering weakly and holding onto anything I could reach. They had put her in the starboard bunk in the forward part of the cabin, the one she’d been in before. I pulled the curtain aside and leaned against the door of the head. Barfield stared at me with amusement and went out.

  Barclay was pulling the sheet up over her nearly nude body with the impersonal efficiency of a nurse.

  I looked at him. “Thanks,” I said.

  “Not at all,” he replied. “Best fall into the other bunk yourself. You both look a bit done in.”

  I indicated the sheet. “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Why not? Gratuitous brutality is for fools.” He went out.

  That was it, I thought, lost in a sea of fatigue. That was as near as I’d ever come to figuring him out and he’d said it himself. Gratuitous brutality was for fools. He was a pro, and was brutal only for pay. Why give away something you could sell? To Barfield this half-clad girl was a peep-show and a snicker; to Barclay she was an investment.

  I stood beside her bunk, swaying a little, staring down at the lovely, wide-cheekboned, Scandinavian face and the long lashes on her cheek. Her hair was a sopping ruin. I knelt a little and s
tarted taking out the pins, and when it was loosed I spread it across the pillow. Maybe it would dry a little.

  Her eyes opened. They looked up at me and her lips moved. “You could have made it alone.”

  “I can’t think of any place I want to go alone,” I said.

  “Neither can I,” she whispered.

  I bent and kissed her, and everything caved in on me. I fell into the other bunk and was asleep before I could straighten out.

  I awoke. Barfield was shaking my arm. “Rise and shine, Manning,” he said. “Barclay wants to see you.”

  It all came back and I could taste the bitterness of failure. I sat up. I was stiff and sore all over, and the shorts were still wet with sea water. “What time is it?”

  “Four o’clock. You’ve been sacked out for ten hours.”

  “All right, all right. You can dock my pay.” I reached up on the shelf above the bunk and found a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches. I fired one up and inhaled gratefully. She was still asleep in the other bunk with the sheet pulled up over her breast. She didn’t stir.

  Barfield stepped backward and leaned against the locker. He had taken off his shirt and was pink with sunburn where he wasn’t covered with hair. I wondered where the other gun was and decided Barclay probably had both of them. They’d have better sense than to try to hide it somewhere. He had a magnificent build, with shoulders like a lumberjack, and I thought he’d outweigh me fifteen or twenty pounds. He moved with good co-ordination and was light on his feet for a man that much over 200, and I had an idea he’d take me in a fight. Either way, somebody would get hurt. He’d been hurt before. The nose was flat because it had been broken and he had white scar tissue running down into his left eyebrow. The gray eyes were sure of themselves and a little hard. His hair was crew cut and almost as white as cotton, or at least it looked that way against the tanned slab of a face.

  I took another drag on the cigarette and studied the beat-up face. “Fighter?” I asked.

  “Amateur. In college.”

  “Football?”

  He shook his head indifferently. “They hired their football players.”

  She was lying on her back with her face turned to one side. Her hair streamed across the blue pillow slip in a cascade of silver, and you could see the outlines of her breasts under the sheet. Barfield stared. “What a build,” he said.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and take the sheet off?” I asked. “She’s asleep.”

  He shrugged. “You’re easy to get sick of. Work at it, don’t you?”

  “This cruise wasn’t my idea,” I said. “I didn’t know I was supposed to be a ray of sunshine.”

  “Well, you’d better roll off your fat and get on deck. Barclay wants you.”

  “All right,” I said. “I signed for the message. You can scram.”

  His face and the gray eyes were ugly, but he didn’t move toward me. Barclay had probably read him off about picking fights with the gilt-edged investments or letting himself be provoked. A fight could get out of hand, and Barclay needed his passengers alive for a while yet. He turned and went out.

  I went into the after part of the cabin, got some dungarees out of a sea bag, and put on a pair of slippers. I looked in the small mirror on the bulkhead. My eyes were puffy with sleep and I needed a shave. I looked as rugged as I felt. Sticking a pack of cigarettes and some matches in my pocket, I went on deck.

  It was a clear afternoon. There wasn’t much sea, and the breeze had moderated a little. She was still on the port tack under unreefed mainsail and jib. There was no land in sight.

  “Good afternoon, Manning,” Barclay said. “Do you feel better?”

  “Rested,” I said. “You want me to relieve you now?”

  He shook his head. The only concession he had made to the informality of an ocean cruise was to take off his tie. He still had on the tweed jacket, and I could see the bulge of an automatic in each of the patch pockets. His face was pink from the sun, and his jaw was covered with a stubble of brown whiskers.

  “No,” he said. “Barfield relieved me for a while this morning. You can take over at six. What I called you about was the matter of food. You can cook, I presume?”

  “A little,” I said.

  “Well, suppose you prepare something, sandwiches at least, and make some coffee. And call Mrs. Macaulay. Tell her we shall have a meal of sorts and a briefing session here at around five o’clock.”

  “Briefing?”

  His eyebrows raised sardonically. “Yes. We intend to take up, at long last, the trifling matter that brought us out here. I refer to the location of that plane. Provided, of course, that we don’t have any more distracting swimming parties. We should be some fifty miles offshore now, so perhaps she’ll leave her life belt below when she comes up.”

  I took a last puff on the cigarette and tossed it overboard. “I have some news for you,” I said. “She lost the life belt when she went overboard and didn’t expect to reach shore. She was merely committing suicide rather than come back.”

  “Very touching,” he said. “But you’ve come to the wrong department. I’m not the custodian of Mrs. Macaulay’s happiness.”

  Barfield spread his hands and shrugged with burlesque sympathy. “You see, Mortimer? It’s a cruel world.”

  “And I have more news for you,” I went on, ignoring Barfield. They’d know, sooner or later, so why not start preparing them? “You’re never going to find that plane. She told me what Macaulay told her, and you couldn’t find the Pacific fleet with the information.”

  He shrugged. “Really, we don’t expect to find it that easily. It may be the second or third location before she begins to get near the truth.”

  I kept my face expressionless, but it scared me. It was what I had been afraid of all the time. They had no conception at all of the immense waste of water out here and of the firsthand, pinpointed accuracy of information you had to have in order to locate something lost in it, The only thing they’d ever be able to see was that she wanted the stupid diamonds herself and was holding out on them.

  “If you had lost your watch overboard between here and the sea buoy,” I said, “could you go back and find it?”

  “An airplane is considerably larger, old boy. And Macaulay knew exactly where it went in, or he wouldn’t have tried to hire a diver. But enough for now. We shall take that up when Mrs. Macaulay is present. Right?”

  I said nothing as I turned and went below. Arguing with him was futile.

  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 i
n 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.

  Chapter 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.