Gulf coast girl: original title, Scorpion reef

by Charles Williams

  I realized I wasn’t completely rational, and tried to get a grip on myself.

  What had happened? How had it happened? I’d told her, warned her over and over about depth and the awful things pressure could do. She’d been above me, right there under the boat. Maybe that was it. She must have been too near the surface, under the stern maybe, and had been hit on the head by the rudder or propeller as it slid off a passing swell. I stopped. No. She hadn’t been falling, except at the very end. She’d been swimming down. I could swear it. I saw the long legs kicking, the way I had taught her.

  But maybe she had been dazed by the blow and didn’t know which way she was swimming. Or she could have been knocked out momentarily and settled beyond any distance she’d ever been before and had been seized by drunkenness, the rapture of the depths, brought on by breathing air at too great pressure. When I saw her she’d been at least 200 feet down, and she’d never been below sixty before.

  Then I stopped and raised my head and stared unseeingly out across the water. No. She wouldn’t have. It was unthinkable. Why would she? She was happy, wasn’t she? Wildly, deliriously happy, as I had been. Of course she was. It was apparent in every smile, every laugh, every word she said, every gesture of love.

  But I was remembering now. I was thinking of those times I awoke to find her rigid and tense, staring into the darkness beside me. Those times I’d had that feeling she was being tormented in some recess of her mind she’d never let me near. What about the way she had kissed me, suddenly and fiercely, just before we’d gone over the side?

  Was it “Macaulay? Of course it wasn’t. She wasn’t in love with him. And he’d betrayed her. He’d lied to her, and double-crossed her. The very fact of her trying to find excuses for him only showed him up for what he was. She didn’t owe him anything. She’d paid it all. She’d even stayed and tried to save him after she knew what he had done, stayed at her own danger.

  I didn’t bring you much of a dowry, did I?

  I sat up straight, feeling sick. There it was. That was it. I had failed her. I could see all the clues, now that it was forever too late.

  “I’ve been doing this a little longer than you have,” she’d said. “There is no escape.”

  She’d already had too much of being hunted, with Macaulay, and I’d failed in trying to show her we could get away. I remembered the way she had looked at me when I was showing her on the chart, the places we’d go, the things we’d do. She’d been like someone listening to the babbling of a child. She didn’t believe it. She wanted to, and she tried, and she pretended to, but in the bottom of her heart she couldn’t. There were too many of them after us now. She and Macaulay had never been able to get clear away from Barclay’s crowd, and now we had not only them but the police.

  We were doomed, she thought, and she blamed herself for it. She’d tried to keep it from me, to give us what time there was, but in the end it was too much for her. And I’d been too blind and stupid to realize she was being tortured by it. Oh, God, if I’d only been able to show her, to make her understand we could escape! Just one more chance, now that I knew what it was. Please. Please. The whole world was before her, and I let her kill herself. It was agony. I couldn’t sit still. I stared down into the water where she had gone. The sloop rolled. I forced myself away from the rail.

  “No,” I cried aloud. She hadn’t done it deliberately. It was an accident. Nobody could have been outwardly as happy as she had been and be tortured by something like that at the same time. She had been happy. It was an accident.

  “It was an accident,” I cried out wildly. “An accident.”

  But she’d been swimming down.

  The sloop rolled. The silence screamed.

  I went below. She came at me from everywhere at once. I was drowned in her. Everything was saturated with her. She’d touched this, she’d stood there. She came from behind the curtain in a white dress dabbing at the lobe of an ear with the glass stopper of a perfume bottle. “I know it’s ridiculous—” she said. The ghost of the perfume was still there. It was all over the cabin. The mattress and pillow were back on the bunk where they were stowed during the day, and the perfume was on the pillow where her head had lain and there was one long, shimmering, ash-blond hair. I knelt beside the bunk and pressed my face into the pillow, holding it with my arms.

  “Swede,” I said. “Swede—Swede—Swede—”

  I knew the danger of it. It was morbid. I stopped.

  The sloop rolled. The silence rose and screamed.

  The sun went down. It was night. I couldn’t sleep. When I closed my eyes the picture was there on the backs of my eyelids, the infinite blue and that last flash of silver, beckoning as it faded.

  I’ve got to quit seeing it, I thought. I’ve got to. I’ve got to.

  The boat rocked. There was no wind.

  At dawn I took star sights and worked them out because I had to have something to do. The current had set me 18 miles to the northwest. I started the engine and ran back. I wasn’t sure why, except that 23.50 North, 88.45 West was a place. It had existence. It was fixed. Nothing else had reality. I shot the sun at noon and plotted my position. I was at 23.46 North, 88.44 West. I had missed it four miles. I was too far south.

  “Well,” I said reasonably, “it’s all right. I knew that wasn’t the place, anyway.”

  I stopped. I’d said it aloud. I looked out across the heaving, trackless miles of water. I knew that wasn’t the place. I went below and looked at myself in the mirror.

  It was night. It was day. It was night again. In the day there was sun and at night on the back of my eyelids she was a flash of silver, falling through blue.

  Once I went to sleep. She fell like poured quicksilver through a cloud, but I flew down and caught her. I took her by the arm and turned her around and kissed her and we went on falling through the cloud, but now the color was changing from blue to rose. We clung together.

  “You didn’t let me explain,” I said. “You’ve got to listen. I can’t live without you, Swede. I didn’t make you understand the first time. Give me another chance—”

  “Come with me,” she said. “We’ll live in raptures.”

  I awoke and somebody was screaming. I shut my mouth and it stopped.

  The current set me to the north and west. I ran back. I drifted. I ran back. I used up all the fuel and could beat my way back only when there was wind. I took star sights at dawn. I shot the sun at noon. I took star sights at dusk. None of them ever worked out exactly on 23.50 North, 88.45 West. I was always off a mile one way or three miles another.

  I ran out on deck and looked across the miles of water glittering under the sun. Then the whole thing came to me at once. It was Macaulay. He’d been right all the time. He was the only one of us who was sane. And I’d been stupid enough to think he was mad. I, with my smug superiority and my cheap little bag of tricks like spherical trigonometry and azimuths and sun lines and hour angles and bearings from fixed points, having the effrontery to say a man was crazy because he thought he could go back and find something he’d lost in an ocean. Of course he could go back and find it. The whole thing was absurdly simple. It didn’t even take third-grade arithmetic.

  When you got to the spot, you’d know. It was as simple as that.

  I looked off to starboard. A seagull was sitting on a piece of driftwood.

  That was it. That was the place.

  I remembered. There had been a seagull sitting on a piece of driftwood just before we dived.

  “Nice seagull,” I said, moving softly. “Pretty seagull. Don’t go away. I’ll bring you some bread crumbs. Don’t fly away.”

  When I came back on deck he was still sitting on the piece of wood. “Nice seagull,” I said. I threw the bread crumbs. He flew away. I began to cry.

  I threw some more. Maybe he would come back and mark the place again. He had to come back because the other piece of driftwood had a seagull on it. I could see her. She was beckoning, a flash of silver falling int
o blue.

  “Swede, angel,” I said. “I didn’t make you understand. We can escape.”

  I began to feel weak. I hadn’t eaten anything for a long time. I ran a hand across my face, and felt shaky all over, waiting for the seagull to come back.

  Something heavy was on my shoulders. I felt the straps across my chest. I was wearing the aqualung. That was what I’d gone after.

  I screamed.

  I tore it off and ran below. I fell into a bunk and lay there, shaking. My mind was clear again. I covered my face with my hands.

  Seventeen

  It’s all past. I’m rational again, but it scares me to think how near the edge I was a week ago. The whole thing was morbid and neurotic, and it almost cost me my life. I’m ashamed, and she would have been ashamed of me.

  The sense of loss is no less terrible than it was, but I can accept it now and go on, the way you’re supposed to. Instead of lacerating myself with all that morbid what-might-have-been I try to remind myself that we did have eight days and that there are millions of people who’ve lived out their entire lives without one hour of what we knew.

  Writing it down has helped. What I wanted to do was see it all in one piece, and I did, and I think I see now that she couldn’t have done it deliberately. She was happy. Right to the end. The end was an accident. It had to be.

  I’m going on to the Caribbean, the way we had planned. There is a little wind now. I’ve been steadily under way for two days. After I regained my senses there was no wind for a long time and I continued drifting to the westward, but I’ve regained nearly all that on my way into the Yucatan Strait. My sight at noon today put me eight miles northwest of the spot she died. It’s now one p.m., and if the wind holds steady I should pass somewhere over 23.50 North, 88.45 West just at four p.m.

  I don’t know any of the service for burial at sea, and there’s no Bible aboard so I can’t do much, but I do intend to drop something of hers just to mark her grave. That white dress I liked so well, I think. I’ll weight it.

  * * *

  I’ve just lashed the tiller again and come back below. It’s 3:30 now, and the breeze is holding on, what there is of it. I don’t think I’m logging more than two knots, but at least I’m on my way and all the sickness has ended. It’s good to be clearheaded and well again. I still don’t understand why they had to take her away from me, but maybe you’re not supposed to understand it. Maybe you’re only supposed to learn to live with it.

  I went to get the white dress ready, but while I was in her things I found the little flask of perfume. It would be much more appropriate; I don’t know why I didn’t think of it in the first place. There’s something personal about it. It’s so completely hers. It has a French name I’m not familiar with, and I never knew anyone else who used it.

  It’s here on the chart table where I’m writing. I removed the glass stopper and held it under my nose for an instant, and in replacing it I spilled a drop on the chart under this book. It’s amazing how one drop of something so delicate could invade a whole compartment. It must be very expensive.

  Of course, when I drop it the chances are I won’t be within a mile of the place she died, but she’ll understand. Navigation is never that exact. In the final analysis it’s only a human being measuring something with an instrument designed by another human being, and as such is subject to human error, however small. That’s one thing that scares me about the way I was—thinking, like Macaulay, that you could go back to a place on the ocean where you’d lost something. He was mad, of course, and I was very near to madness myself.

  She had a habit of sometimes coming up behind me when I was working over the chart table like this and drawing her finger tips very softly up the back of my neck. It was a delicious, shivery sensation that made my whole back tingle, and then I would smell the good, clean, salt-water-and-sun smell of her and that faint suggestion of perfume, and I’d turn and the gray eyes would be laughing at me very near to mine because she was so tall, and silvery hair would be brushing shoulders as smooth as satin and beautifully tanned, and then we would look squarely into each other’s eyes and the teasing and that always precarious veneer of lightness would blow up in our faces.

  “That’s not fair,” she would whisper shakily just under my lips. “You’re cheating.”

  That’s just the way it always began, with that same sensation of finger tips being drawn ever so gently up the back of the neck, and before I turned I would be conscious of the fragrance of you. Remember?

  Who am I to say Macaulay wasn’t right, after all? But, no. The whole thing is absurd. Science is one thing and madness is another, and Macaulay was mad. But, still—

  You never understood. We can escape, darling. Give me another chance to show you. Let me tell you. We’ll go to all those places. They’ll never catch us. Antigua—Barbados—Martinique— The trades blow in the afternoons and the nights will almost make you drunk. We’ll look up at the stars.

  Swede. You’re everywhere— That wasn’t the place the other time. I know it now, because the seagull flew away. But I’ll find it. I’ll tell you.

  I can close my eyes and see the whole thing—the blue, and that last, haunting flash of silver, gesturing as it died.

  It was beckoning. Toward the rapture. The rapture . . .

  Fowey Rocks Abeam

  The master of the Joseph H. Hallock closed the journal. The poor devil, he thought. The poor, tortured devil. Four o’clock—and we raised the sloop a little after five.

  He sat for a moment, thinking with that vaguely puzzled frown on his face again. It was late, after 2 a.m. and very quiet in the dim seclusion of his office.

  It was odd, he thought, still trying to come to grips with the disturbing factor, that it should have been the girl who realized there was no escape for them in that boat. Or any boat. It should have been Manning. It was something not likely to be known except by shipmasters and persons who had cruised on their own craft—and Manning had said he had cruised the Caribbean once for eight months.

  Changing the name of the sloop was farcical. Painting out what was lettered on the stern didn’t alter the identity of any kind of seagoing craft. There were papers. And more papers. It was as futile as writing your own name on a borrowed passport. Manning should have known that, as he should have known it took about ten pounds of paperwork and red tape to enter any foreign port in the world with a boat, and that included fishing villages. They all had port authorities, and they all demanded consular clearances from the last port of call, bills of health from the last port, registry certificate, customs lists, crew lists, and so on, ad infinitum, and in the case of pleasure craft they probably required passports and visas for everybody aboard. They didn’t have a prayer of a chance of getting away with something like that, and Manning should have been the first to know it. Not the girl.

  But from the evidence of the journal, Manning was certainly no utter fool, and not particularly given to wishful thinking. He appeared to be quite intelligent, in fact. Then was it sheer desperation, knowing there was no escape for them in the States with the police and a gang of criminals looking for them? Of course, the question was academic, since they had both died before they’d had a chance to flee anywhere, but the whole thing persisted in bothering him. And there was something else that nibbled at the edge of his mind.

  He changed into pajamas and climbed into his bunk. He turned out the reading lamp on the bulkhead above his pillow, still puzzling over it. Then he sat upright. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly. “I’ll just be damned. It would be perfect.”

  Just Manning? he wondered. Or both of them? He hoped it was both of them.

  * * *

  It was sunset again, two days after they had taken the Freya in tow. The Joseph H. Hallock. was waddling, full-bellied, up the coast of Florida just south of Fowey Rocks. She was well inshore from the main axis of the Stream, since they had made arrangements by radio to have a Coast Guard boat meet them off Miami and take the Freya off
their hands. Or, at least, that was the master’s excuse to Mr. Davidson, the mate. He felt, actually, a little like Conrad’s master in The Secret Sharer, a story he was sure Manning had enjoyed.

  He was on the bridge now with Mr. Davidson, who was waiting to catch Fowey Rocks light in the pelorus as it came abeam, to complete his four-point bearing. The master himself was staring astern in the afterglow where the Freya rode easily at the end of her long towline. He had been watching her as they passed each of the keys during the day, but this was the closest they would come inshore until they were off Miami itself and the Coast Guard came out to get her.

  When you resolved the contradiction and acknowledged that Manning couldn’t possibly have believed any of that moonlit dream about escape to the tropics in a boat, he mused, what did you have left? You had left the twin facts that Manning was a writer, and that he was trying to save himself and that girl he was so much in love with.

  They had nowhere to go, the girl had said. Nowhere to go, that is, as long as they were being sought by a gang of criminals and also by the police. But if they weren’t being actively sought by anyone, they could come back to their own country, where they would attract less attention than anywhere else on earth. And they would no longer be sought if everyone believed them dead.

  There could be little doubt they’d be given up as dead. Not many people would have the specialized knowledge to cause them to wonder at that contradiction in Manning’s story. And certainly the facts were convincing enough. The boat was only 36 feet long, was on the open sea, and had been searched by three men. The entire area had been searched by the ship itself, and there had been no survivors and no other boat. The sloop had been under way, and its dinghy was still there on the cabin. The last person aboard had disappeared less than an hour before, because the coffee was still warm, and the sloop was nearly 150 miles from the nearest land.