Sea of Lost Dreams: A Dugger/Nello Novel

by Ferenc Máté

  The albatross turned. It banked so low and steeply its wing grooved the water, then it leveled out, gliding, and vanished in the sun. For a moment they all stared into the blinding glare. The bird shot back at them hard and dark, swept clear around the ketch, then flew away again.

  “It’s just hungry,” Dugger said.

  Guillaume went below to get some flying fish. The bird came and Guillaume flung one high, but the bird let it fall. It gave a cry, then turned away and flew back into the sun.

  “Not hungry,” Nello said.

  “It wants us to follow,” Kate said.

  “It’s just shaken from the storm,” Dugger said.

  No one disagreed.

  “Stupid bird,” Dugger muttered. But he took the mainsheet and slowly winched it tight and turned the wheel back until the ketch pointed again toward the blinding light.

  THEY SHIELDED THEIR EYES with hats and hands.

  Nello held the binoculars rigidly against his eyes, focusing, readjusting.

  “Don’t look at the sun,” Dugger ordered.

  The bird flew alongside, its wing touching the sail, and then rose. Up ahead, like a small scar across the sun, weaving slowly just a boat-length ahead, was the bobbing boathook and the lantern. And the skiff.

  Dugger eased the sheets and slowed the ketch, and now saw the lantern glisten in the sun, the painter of the skiff trailing in the water. Slumped over the stern with her head on the thwart and arms spread on the gunwales, facedown, was the nun.

  Kate buried her face in Dugger’s arms. Nello turned away. Guillaume crossed himself for the first time in eighteen years.

  The albatross banked and flew off, back to where Guillaume’s fish silvered on the water.

  “I told you it was hungry,” Dugger hoarsely said.

  Chapter 23

  By midday there was no trace of the storm. The sky had cleared, the wind fallen, the sea shone smooth and blue, and only long swells gently lulled the ketch. Nello had dropped the sails, and everyone fell exhausted in the shade of the awning or the coddling comfort of their dark berths below, and soon the only sound was of long, soft breaths.

  The albatross played the light air just off the port bow, then settled on the sea and tucked its head under its wing. The last cloud vanished over the horizon, and in the blue circle of the sea, under the clear dome of the sky, there was only the sun, and the bird, and the ketch.

  At twilight, Nello awoke from a slumber so deep that for a moment he wasn’t sure whether it was sunset or dawn. He lay facedown on the crumpled staysail, his arm under his head, with the smell of the warm wood and the tar of the seams confounding his dreams. Men were pouring hot tar between paving stones on the quay of Rangoon, and in a forest in Ceylon fresh-sawn teak boards were piled under the palms. And in both places there was the nun, walking near him.

  One by one the others stirred, all except Darina, who slept motionless in her cabin with the covers over her head to drown out even the soft whoosh of the sea.

  Guillaume stoked the galley stove and soon the fragrance of fried garlic and salt cod filled the air. By the time Darina came on deck, they all huddled around the cockpit table under the dangling lantern. They ate and drank, passing with few pauses the second bottle of rum. They talked at first quietly, then ever louder, recalling the barbarous storm, their paralyzing fears, and the gloom that had seeped like a poison through their hearts at the prospect of an unsuccessful search. And only at long last that strange matter of the bird.

  They drank until they laughed and clutched each other’s arms.

  In the midst of it all, Guillaume vanished. He rattled about the galley and soon came up the ladder with a cake barely higher than a waffle but in its middle a fluttering candle.

  He stopped and bowed before the still sleepy Darina. “Happy first day back, Sister,” he said.

  “To a hell of a nun.” Dugger raised his cup, then added bashfully, “You know what I mean.”

  Darina blushed. Her cheeks glowed in the candle light.

  “A wish. You have to make a wish,” Kate said.

  Darina looked down. They all stood still. For a moment there was silence, then she said, “I wish you would call me Darina.”

  “Call you what?” Nello asked.

  “Darina,” she repeated. “That’s my name.”

  “To Sister Darina,” Dugger offered.

  “No,” Darina said. “Just Darina. I was with the sisters in Galway, but not as a nun. I scrubbed laundry for seven years. I was committed for my sins.” When she saw everyone in rapt attention, she went on. “I said I was a nun so you’d bring me with you.” Then, looking away, she added, “I’m a Magdalene Penitent.”

  Guillaume’s cup froze midair in surprise.

  “You know what that is, don’t you, Monsieur?” Darina said with a sad smile.

  Guillaume didn’t respond. He glanced at the others and saw that only Kate knew. He raised his cup. “To Darina,” he said warmly, “the most intrepid lady of them all.”

  They clanged their cups. She blew out the candle.

  FOR THE NEXT FIVE DAYS they were as spirited as children. The trade winds returned steady and reassuring, and with the yankee and the storm trysail and the mizzen all balanced, the ketch sailed her course as if on a rail. Nello and Kate stitched and patched the main. Dugger sometimes steered, sometimes let the ketch go on her own to take sextant sights of the sun or stars.

  Guillaume fished and cooked without respite. From a steel washer and shredded ribbon he devised a fancy lure, which, dragged behind the ketch, dove and skimmed like a livid squid. He caught a big bonito and two smaller fish they didn’t recognize, which he gutted, sliced, and marinated.

  Darina took a piece of dry sharkskin and feathered the old varnish, then spread fresh varnish on the wood, never spilling a drop. She hummed a hymn but soon switched to shanties.

  Her skin had grown tanned and her eyes seemed to have become an even deeper blue, and they smiled more often now. Late one afternoon, when they were alone in the cockpit with the falling sun glaring on the ripples of the sea, Dugger spoke to her directly for the first time since the storm.

  “There is an old tradition among seamen,” he began without looking at her. “When someone saves a life, he is not thanked for it no matter how brave the gesture.” He paused. “But everyone knows that the gratitude is there.” He glanced at her, caught her eye, and then glanced away. “And if the need arose, the other would, without hesitation, do the same.” Then he said more softly, “Without hesitation.” When she said nothing, he took a deep breath and asked, “Do fishermen on Inishturk do that?”

  She thought for a while before she replied, “I don’t know. But I do know that that’s the most I’ve heard you speak since I met you.”

  Her forwardness made him blush and he turned his head to check the mizzen. “I’m not the chatty type.”

  “Never have been?”

  He turned back and shook his head.

  She laughed out loud. “Did you just use up your last word for today?”

  He couldn’t help but laugh. For a moment they held each other’s gaze, then he said, “You shouldn’t let the glare of the sea hit your face in late afternoon. It can burn you worse than the noonday sun.”

  She shifted about. With the glare now behind her, he could no longer see her eyes.

  THAT NIGHT, after the last of Guillaume’s rum-drenched tart was gone and the long rounds of compliments ended, Guillaume finished his third glass of rum, leaned back against the cockpit coaming, and stared up at the stars. “If you had all the choice in the world,” he mused, slurring the words slightly, “where would you like to wake up in the morning?”

  For a while nobody answered. Dugger lit his pipe and blew a cloud of smoke at the chimney of the lantern. Nello held the sextant to his eye and shot a star. Finally Kate spoke. “In my lover’s arms.”

  The wind blew the smoke into the darkness over the sea.

  “I had geography in mind,” Guillaume s
aid. “But I must admit, I prefer your response.”

  Something like a breath of wind stirred beside the ship. Then Dugger said, “My lover’s arms sound good to me too.” And under the cockpit table he wove his toes into Kate’s.

  “Me too,” Nello added. “Especially if I had a lover.”

  “Tout a fait, I can think of no better place,” Guillaume said with a wistful sigh.

  Then they looked up at Darina, but her face gave away nothing and she said, “I hope you don’t all have the same lover, for it could get awfully crowded in here.”

  THE WOOSHING SOUND rose again beside the ship and they saw the albatross. It ghosted on the air that swept over the swells, and with the white of its eyes and its underwings glowing in the lantern light, it hung motionless as if fastened to the darkness.

  “Okay, I have another one.” Guillaume brightened. “Can you remember the best day of your life?”

  Darina glanced worriedly at Kate, but she was still riveted on the bird against the night. “You first this time, Monsieur Guillaume,” Darina said quickly.

  Guillaume sighed. “One night in the Dordogne, in a small pension over a noisy cataract, une gorge. Owned by a lovely woman who cooked like an angel. I rewarded myself with foie gras laced with truffles and washed it down with a bottle of Sauternes.”

  “I knew it was going to be food,” Nello said. When no one else volunteered to speak, he said quietly, “When I was five, my granddad took me climbing in the Dolomites. It was all pink crags. I was scared to death. We climbed a peak, not steep, but high. The whole world lay below us. Even the clouds. And my granddad said, ‘If you ever doubt yourself, just remember you were up here when you were five.’ ”

  A tin cup clicked against the bottle in the silence.

  “And you, Captain,” Darina gently nudged.

  Dugger emptied his glass before replying. “Well. I have to say my best day was a night. The night I got the ketch. Blind luck . . .”

  “Oh, sure,” Nello injected, aiming the sextant at a small, bright constellation. “The fool owner cut her anchor lines in a gale to collect the insurance. He fell in and drowned. The ketch was heading for a cliff with no one aboard her. Cappy rowed out in hellish seas and saved her. He was nearly killed but managed to raise the sails. He salvaged her.”

  “You never told me that,” Kate said, astonished.

  Dugger shrugged. “Not much to tell.”

  Guillaume clapped, and the others clapped with him. “Capitaine, my esteem for you rises every day.”

  “Mine too,” Kate said in open admiration. She looked far out to sea where the stars touched the horizon. Then she said softly, “My best day was a night too. When Cappy salvaged me.”

  No one stirred. Kate looked up and saw their tipsy, expectant faces.

  “It was twilight, Cappy. Remember?” Kate beamed like one flush from a night of love. “The twenty-ninth of May; three days after my birthday. We had sat down to dinner—me and my husband—a dour and vicious man to say the least. Our big motor yacht, over eighty feet, was anchored in a cove near Vancouver. Cappy’s ketch was anchored near us, in the shadows of the woods. Mr. Tippins, the captain of our yacht, had asked Cappy for advice on how to rig a sailing dinghy my husband bought me for my birthday. A big birthday; I was turning twenty-five.

  “Cappy rowed over alone—he lived alone. When I saw him, my breath stopped. We had met two weeks before, you see, in passing, on a street corner. I smiled. He frowned and we fell . . . Hopelessly, stupidly—like children do. The kind of falling that leaves you staring at the ceiling at night, dreaming.

  “Two weeks later he found me. That twilight. The cabin boy and butler were serving dinner, and the bosun went around the decks lighting lanterns. There I was, surrounded by crystal, lace curtains, and silver, and there was Cappy, barefoot and on one knee, out on the aft deck in the dusk with our captain, showing him how to align blocks and chain plates, fairleads and cleats. I saw his eyes, ablaze with that intensity as if every moment of his life were the best. Oh, God, how I fell. I almost swallowed my fork with the roast duck. He saw me. A bolt of lightning is but a glimmer to that feeling.”

  “You’re drunk,” Dugger said, embarrassed.

  Kate smiled. “No more than you.”

  “Oh, love,” Guillaume said with a sigh. “How it dwarfs them all. Fame . . . fortune . . . conquest? Sad jokes. Toys, for those afraid to fall into its ecstasy. Its catastrophe.” He laughed and shook his head. “Love. Blind love. Without it life is . . .” then, catching himself, he said, “Tais-toi, Guillaume. You’re sounding like a girl.”

  Nello moved away and held the sextant to his eye.

  “What? Monsieur,” Darina pressed, “what is life without it?”

  Guillaume swished his cup and stared into its depth. “It seems—to me—but a slow march to the grave.”

  “Oh, yes!” Nello cried out. Then, smiling broadly, he lowered the sextant and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have crossed the equator.”

  WHEN THE OTHERS WENT TO BED, Kate remained with Dugger on his watch. He sat in the cockpit and she lay in his arms. “There’s nothing wrong with your memory, is there?” he said, holding her face.

  “Why should there be?”

  “You said there were things you couldn’t remember.”

  She laughed. “I don’t remember saying that.”

  He bit her neck. “You know, they say that on a long sea voyage you have to exercise. To stay limber. Gymnastics are good. Or stretching. I once saw a yogi in Madras who could wrap his legs around his neck. Can you do that?”

  “No, darling,” she purred. “But I can wrap them around yours.”

  Chapter 24

  The seventh day after the storm, the ketch stood in the doldrums as if it had run aground. The air hung damp and stagnant, and the sea lay without a swell or ripple. The calm of the first two nights had been a blessing; they dropped the sails, tied off the wheel, and all slept strewn on the deck bathed in starlight. But at sunrise the haze was so bright it hurt their eyes, and the air was a smothering wet rag on their faces. The sails hung damp and limp like forgotten flags.

  By midmorning, nerves were frayed. Making a pot of coffee, Guillaume called up in agitation that he couldn’t cook without water and there wasn’t a drop coming through the pump. Nello swung below in disbelief. He unscrewed the bronze lid of the main tank on the port side, and with a long stick gauged its depth. The stick came up dry. He shut off the valve to the tank, then unscrewed the lid of the small spare tank to starboard. He expected to see water to the lid, but there was only dark air. He gauged it. Two inches of water showed where there should have been ten. He checked the valve and found it open. He went above. “The last five gallons,” he said flatly to Dugger.

  “Where the hell did it go?” Dugger snapped, slamming down the canvas bucket.

  “I guess the storm,” Nello lied. “We were on our side so much. Maybe the lid was loose.” He didn’t mention that someone had opened the valve.

  “That’s bloody great,” Dugger grumbled. “At a quart per person per day, it will last four days. Three days after that, we start to die.”

  They abandoned the course for Tahiti and headed for the Marquesas, closer by nine hundred miles. Dugger tightened the water rations to half a cup at dawn, another at noon, and a last one at sunset. Using salt water to cook, the fresh water might last ten days, by which time they should hit Nuku Hiva. If not, then some other island in the northern Marquesas group. To make sure they hit something, Nello worked a heading between Nuku Hiva and Ua Huka, less than thirty miles apart. In almost any weather, they’d spot one or the other. Unless, of course, they sailed by both in the middle of the night. But in that case they would run into Ua Pou.

  With the awnings stretched between the masts, a decent downpour could fill the tanks in half an hour, even a steady rain could fill them all by noon. But there was no rain, only the sun’s flame on the mirror of the sea.

  “WON’T IT BE LOVELY to ste
p onto solid ground?” Kate mused. She shifted uncomfortably in the stifling shade.

  “As long as they don’t eat us,” Darina replied, then began reading aloud from her book by Segalen. “The major reason for conflict in the Marquesas, over the centuries, was drought. It dried up their main staple: the breadfruit in the valleys. Mangoes so shriveled even birds wouldn’t peck them and the coconut-robber crab had no fallen coconuts to eat. Whole villages were reduced to sharing a few birds—pigeons, fruit doves, rails and parrots—whose meager flesh barely replaced the amount of effort expanded upon their capture. It pushed those starving inland toward the sea. Those living on the sea pushed back. It was village against village; hunger against hunger. When the breadfruit dried, the wild pigs died, and ‘long pig’ caught in battle took their place. And yet the tribes of the islands never thought themselves eaters of human flesh.”

  Kate shuddered and Guillaume turned away.

  Darina went on. “Segalen once asked a chief if he were a practicing cannibal. The chief roared in anger as if he’d just been stripped of his last bit of pride. ‘Never have I eaten anyone from my village.’”

  “What a relief,” Nello said with a sigh.

  THE KETCH HAD NO STEERAGE. Without wind she made no head-way, so the rudder couldn’t bite, yet she seemed to hold her bow on course—south by southwest—maintaining the illusion of progress. Every few hours, a rogue wave came and went, a remnant of some distant storm that disrupted their slumber.

  The ketch rolled violently, the masts whipping, the sails emptying, then filling with a bang; cups tumbled and pots slid and the crew grabbed sea rails or grab rails, stanchions or the gunwales. Then the ketch returned to its motionless heading.

  They shifted uneasily under the awning. When the sun made the deck too hot for bare feet, they sloshed the decks down every hour, then sat and suffered in the slowly rising steam.