by Robert Stone
“The fucker’s got no class,” she said softly. “See him hit me?”
“Of course. I was next to you.”
” Gonna let him get away with that ?”
“Well,” Blessington said, “for the moment it behooves us to let him feel in charge.”
“Behooves us?” she asked. “You say it behooves us?”
“That’s right.”
“Hey, what were you gonna do back there, Liam?” she asked. “Deep-six him?”
“I honestly don’t know. He might have fallen.”
“I was wondering,” she said. “He was wondering too.”
Blessington shrugged.
“He’s got the overstanding,” Gillian said. “We got the under.” She looked out at the water and said, “Boat boys.”
He looked where she was looking and saw the boat approaching, a speck against the shiny sand. It took a long time for it to cover the distance between the beach and the Sans Regret.
There were two boat boys, and they were not boys but men in their thirties, lean and unsmiling. One wore a wool tam-o’- shanter in bright tie-dyed colors. The second looked like an East Indian. His black headband gave him a lascar look.
“You got to pay for dat anchorage, mon,” the man in the tam called to them. “Not open to de public widout charge.”
“We coming aboard,” said the lascar. “We take your papers and passports in for you. You got to clear.”
“How much for the use of the float?” Blessington asked.
Now Freycinet appeared in the companionway. He was carrying a big French MAS 3 6 sniper rifle, pointing it at the men in the boat, showing his pink-edged teeth.
“You get the fuck out of here,” he shouted at them. A smell of ganja and vomit seemed to follow him up from the cabin. “Understand?”
The two men did not seem unduly surprised at Freycinet’s behavior. Blessington wondered if they could smell the dope as distinctly as he could.
“Fuckin’ Frenchman,” the man in the tam said. “Think he some shit.”
“Why don’ you put the piece down, Frenchy?” the East Indian asked. “This ain’t no Frenchy island. You got to clear.”
“You drift on that reef, Frenchy,” the man in the tam said, “you be begging us to take you off.”
Freycinet was beside himself with rage. He hated les nègres more than any Frenchman Blessington had met in Martinique, which was saying a great deal. He had contained himself during the negotiations on Canouan but now he seemed out of control. Blessington began to wonder if he would shoot the pair of them.
“You fucking monkeys!” he shouted. “You stay away from me, eh? Chimpanzees! I kill you quick… mon,” he added with a sneer.
The men steered their boat carefully over the reef and sat with their outboard idling. They could not stay too long, Blessington thought. Their gas tank was small and it was a long way out against a current.
“Well,” he asked Gillian, “who’s got the overstanding now?”
“Not Honoré,” she said.
A haze of heat and doped lassitude settled over their mooring. Movement was labored, even speech seemed difficult. Blessington and Gillian nodded off on the gear locker. Marie seemed to have lured Freycinet belowdecks. Prior to dozing, Blessington heard her mimic the Frenchman’s angry voice and the two of them laughing down in the cabin. The next thing he saw clearly was Marie, in her bikini, standing on the cabin roof, screaming. A rifle blasted and echoed over the still water. Suddenly the slack breeze had a brisk cordite smell and it carried smoke.
Freycinet shouted, holding the hot shotgun.
The boat with the two islanders in it seemed to have managed to come up on them. Now it raced off, headed first out to sea to round the tip of the reef and then curving shoreward to take the inshore current at an angle.
“Everyone all right?” asked Blessington.
“Fucking monkeys!” Freycinet swore.
“Well,” Blessington said, watching the boat disappear “they’re gone for now. Maybe,” he suggested to Freycinet, “we can have our swim and go too.”
Freycinet looked at him blankly as though he had no idea what Blessington was talking about. He nodded vaguely.
After half an hour Marie rose and stood on the bulwark and prepared to dive, arms foremost. When she went, her dive was a good one, straight-backed and nearly splash-free. She performed a single stroke underwater and sped like a bright shaft between the coral heads below and the crystal surface. Then she appeared prettily in the light of day, blinking like a child, shaking her shining hair.
From his place in the bow, Freycinet watched Marie’s dive, her underwater career, her pert surfacing. His expression was not affectionate but taut and tight-lipped. The muscles in his neck stood out, his moves were twitchy like a street junkie’s. He looked exhausted and angry. The smell of cordite hovered around him.
“He’s a shithead and a loser,” Gillian said softly to Blessington. She looked not at Freycinet but toward the green mountains. “I thought he was cool. He was so fucking mean—I like respected that. Now we’re all gonna die. Well,” she said, “goes to show, right?”
“Don’t worry,” Blessington told her. “I won’t leave you.”
“Whoa,” said Gillian. “All right!” But her enthusiasm was not genuine. She was mocking him.
Blessington forgave her.
Freycinet pointed a finger at Gillian. “Swim!”
“What if I don’t wanna?” she asked, already standing up. When he began to swear at her in a hoarse voice she took her clothes off in front of them. Everything but the Rasta bracelet.
“I think I will if no one minds,” she said. “Where you want me to swim to, Honoré?”
“Swim to fucking Amérique,” he said. He laughed as though his mood had improved. “You want her Liam?”
“People are always asking me that,” Blessington said. “What do I have to do?”
“You swim to fucking Amérique with her.”
Blessington saw Gillian take a couple of pills from her cutoff pocket and swallow them dry.
“I can’t swim that far,” Blessington said.
“Go as far as you can,” said Freycinet.
“How about you?” Gillian said to the Frenchman. “You’re the one wanted to stop. So ain’t you gonna swim?”
“I don’t trust her,” Freycinet said to Blessington. “What do you think?”
“She’s a beauty,” Blessington said. “Don’t provoke her.”
Gillian measured her beauty against the blue water and dived over the side. A belly full of pills, Blessington thought. But her strokes when she surfaced were strong and defined. She did everything well, he thought. She was good around the boat. She had a pleasant voice for country music. He could imagine her riding, a cowgirl.
“Bimbo, eh?” Freycinet asked. “That’s it, eh?”
“Yes,” Blessington said. “Texas and all that.”
“Oui,” said Freycinet. “Texas.” He yawned. “Bien. Have your swim with her. If you want. “
Blessington went down into the stinking cabin and put his bathing suit on. Propriety to the last. The mixture of ganja, sick, roach spray and pine scent was asphyxiating. If he survived, he thought, he would never smoke hash again. Never drink rum, never do speed or cocaine, never sail or go where there were palm trees and too many stars overhead. A few fog-shrouded winter constellations would do.
“Tonight I’ll cook, eh?” Freycinet said when Blessington came back up. “You can assist me.”
“Good plan,” said Blessington.
Standing on the bulwark, he looked around the boat. There were no other vessels in sight. Marie was swimming backstroke, describing a safe circle about twenty-five yards out from the boat. Gillian appeared to be headed hard for the open sea. She had reached the edge of the current, where the wind raised small horsetails from the rushing water.
If Freycinet was planning to leave them in the water; Blessington wondered, would he leave Marie with them? I
t would all be a bad idea, because Freycinet was not a skilled sailor. And there was a possibility of their being picked up right here or even of their making it to shore, although that seemed most unlikely. On the other hand, he had discovered that Freycinet’s ideas were often impulses, usually bad ones. It was his recklessness that had made him appear so capably in charge, and that was as true in the kitchen as it was on the Raging Main. He had been a reckless cook.
Besides, there were a thousand dark possibilities on that awful ocean. That he had arranged to be met at sea off Martinique, that there had been some betrayal in the works throughout. Possibly involving Lavigerie or someone else in Fort-de-France.
“Yes,” said Blessington. “There’s time to unfreeze the grouper.”
He looked at the miles of ocean between the boat and the beach at the foot of the mountains. Far off to the right he could see white water, the current running swiftly over the top of a reef that extended southwesterly, at a 4 5-degree angle to the beach. Beyond the reef was a sandspit where the island tapered to its narrow southern end. On their left, the base of the mountains extended to the edge of the sea, forming a rock wall against which the waves broke. According to the charts, the wall plunged to a depth of ten fathoms, and the ocean concealed a network of submarine caves and grottoes in the volcanic rock of which the Pitons were composed. Across the towering ridge, completely out of sight, was the celebrated resort.
“I’ll take it out of the freezer,” Blessington said.
A swimmer would have to contrive to make land somewhere between the rock wall to the north and the reef and sandspit on the right. There would be easy swimming at first, through the windless afternoon, and a swimmer would not feel any current for the first mile or so. The last part of the swim would be partly against a brisk current, and possibly against the tide. The final mile would seem much farther. For the moment, wind was not in evidence. The current might be counted on to lessen as one drew closer to shore. If only one could swim across it in time.
“It’s all right,” said Freycinet. “I’ll do it. Have your swim.”
Beyond that, there was the possibility of big sharks so far out. They might be attracted by the effort of desperation. Blessington, exhausted and dehydrated, was in no mood for swimming miles. Freycinet would not leave them there, off the Pitons, he told himself. It was practically in sight of land. He would be risking too much—witnesses, their survival. If he meant to deep-six them he would try to strike at sea.
Stoned and frightened as he was, he could not make sense of it, regain his perspective. He took a swig from a plastic bottle of warm Evian water dropped his towel and jumped overboard.
The water felt good, slightly cool. He could relax against it and slow the beating of his heart. It seemed to cleanse him of the cabin stink. He was at home in the water, he thought. Marie was frolicking like a mermaid, now close to the boat. Gillian had turned back and was swimming toward him. Her stroke still looked strong and accomplished; he set out to intercept her course.
They met over a field of elkhorn coral. Some of the formations were so close to the surface that their feet, treading water, brushed the velvety skin of algae over the sharp prongs.
“How are you?” Blessington asked her.
She had a lupine smile. She was laughing, looking at the boat. Her eyes appeared unfocused, the black pupils huge under the blue glare of afternoon and its shimmering crystal reflection. She breathed in hungry swallows. Her face was raw and swollen where Freycinet had hit her.
“Look at that asshole,” she said, gasping.
Freycinet was standing on deck talking to Marie, who was in the water ten feet away. He held a mask and snorkel in one hand and a pair of swim fins in the other. One by one he threw the toys into the water for Marie to retrieve. He looked coy and playful.
Something about the scene troubled Blessington, although he could not, in his state, quite reason what it was. He watched Freycinet take a few steps back and paw the deck like an angry bull. In the next moment, Blessington realized what the problem was.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” he said.
Freycinet leaped into space. He still wore the greasy shorts he had worn the whole trip. In midair he locked his arms around his bent knees. He was holding a plastic spatula in his right hand. He hit the surface like a cannonball, raising a little waterspout, close enough to Marie to make her yelp.
“You know what?” Gillian asked. She had spotted it. She was amazing.
“Yes, I do. The ladder’s still up. We forgot to lower it.”
“Shit,” she said and giggled.
Blessington turned over to float on his back and tried to calm himself. Overhead the sky was utterly cloudless. Moving his eyes only a little, he could see the great green tower of Gros Piton, shining like Jacob’s ladder itself, thrusting toward the empty blue. Incredibly far above, a plane drew out its jet trail, a barely visible needle stitching the tiniest flaw in the vast perfect seamless curtain of day. Miles and miles above, beyond imagining.
“How we gonna get aboard?” Gillian asked. He did not care for the way she was acting in the water now, struggling to stay afloat, moving her arms too much, wasting her breath.
“We’ll have to go up the float line. Or maybe,” he said, “we can stand on each other’s shoulders.”
“I’m not,” she said, gasping, “gonna like that too well.”
“Take it easy, Gillian. Lie on your back.”
What bothered him most was her laughing, a high-pitched giggle with each breath.
“OK, let’s do it,” she said, spitting salt water. “Let’s do it before he does.”
“Slow and steady,” Blessington said.
They slowly swam together; breaststroking toward the boat. A late afternoon breeze had come up as the temperature began to fall.
Freycinet and Marie had allowed themselves to drift farther and farther from the boat. Blessington urged Gillian along beside him until the big white hull was between them and the other swimmers.
Climbing was impossible. It was partly the nature of the French-made boat: an unusually high transom and the rounded glassy hull made it particularly difficult to board except from a dock or a dinghy. That was the contemporary, security-conscious style. And the rental company had removed a few of the deck fittings that might have provided hand- and footholds. Still, he tried to find a grip so that Gillian could get on his shoulders. Once he even managed to position himself between her legs and push her a foot or so up the hull, as she sat on his shoulders. But there was nothing to grab on to and she was stoned. She swore and laughed and toppled off him.
He was swimming forward along the hull, looking for the float, when it occurred to him that the boat must be moving. Sure enough, holding his place, he could feel the hull sliding to windward under his hand. In a few strokes he was under the bow, feeling the ketch’s weight thrusting forward, riding him down. Then he saw the Rastafarian float. It was unencumbered by any line. Honoré and Marie had not drifted from the boat—the boat itself was slowly blowing away, accompanied now by the screech of fiberglass against coral. The boys from the Pitons, having dealt with druggies before, had undone the mooring line while they were sleeping or nodding off or scarfing other sorts of lines.
Blessington hurried around the hull, with one hand to the boat’s skin, trying to find the drifting float line. It might, he thought, be possible to struggle up along that. But there was no drifting float line. The boat boys must have uncleated it and balled the cleat in nylon line and silently tossed it aboard. He and Freycinet had been so feckless, the sea so glassy and the wind so low that the big boat had simply settled on the float, with its keel fast among the submerged elkhorn, and they had imagined themselves secured. The Sans Regret, to which he clung, was gone. Its teak interiors were in another world now, as far away as the tiny jet miles above them on its way to Brazil.
“It’s no good,” Blessington said to her.
“It’s not?” She giggled.
“Please,�
�� he said, “please don’t do that.”
She gasped. “What?”
“Never mind,” he said. “Come with me.”
They had just started to swim away when a sudden breeze carried the Sans Regret from between the two couples, leaving Blessington and Gillian and Honoré and Marie to face one another in the water across a distance of twenty yards or so. Honoré and Marie stared at their shipmates in confusion. It was an embarrassing moment. Gillian laughed.
“What have you done?” Honoré asked Blessington. Blessington tried not to look at him.
“Come on,” he said to Gillian. “Follow me.”
Cursing in French, Freycinet started kicking furiously for the boat. Marie, looking very serious, struck out behind him. Gillian stopped to look after them.
Blessington glanced at his diver’s watch. It was five-fifteen.
“Never mind them,” he said. “Don’t look at them. Stay with me.”
He turned over on his back and commenced an artless backstroke, arms out straight, rowing with his palms, paddling with his feet. It was the most economic stroke he knew, the one he felt most comfortable with. He tried to make the strokes controlled and rhythmic rather than random and splashy to avoid conveying any impression of panic or desperation. To free his mind, he tried counting the strokes. As soon as they were over deep water, he felt the current. He tried to take it at a 4 5-degree angle, determining his bearing and progress by the great mountain overhead.
“Are you all right?” he asked Gillian. He raised his head to have a look at her. She was swimming in what looked like a good strong crawl. She coughed from time to time.
“I’m cold,” she said. “That’s the trouble.”
“Try resting on your back,” he said, “and paddling with your open hands. Like you were rowing.”
She turned over and closed her eyes and smiled.
“I could go to sleep.”
“You’ll sleep ashore,” he said. “Keep paddling.”
They heard Freycinet cursing. Marie began to scream over and over again. It sounded fairly far away.