Outerbridge Reach

by Robert Stone

  “Shouldn’t you be west of the islands?”

  “It’s all right, Annie. As far as that goes.”

  “Is it?” she asked. She was trying to sound cheerful. His admonition had wounded her.

  “Yes,” he said. “Everything’s outstanding.”

  “I’m so relieved,” she said. “And I’m so jealous, Owen. I’m going to do all sorts of unruly things. I’m going to get drunk and wear sexy clothes. I’ll be disorderly.”

  “Now take it easy,” Owen said. “We’re not using procedure and we’re not being discreet.”

  “Screw it,” she said.

  “You’re impossible. You’ve been tapping the admiral.”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “Did you really like my leather miniskirt?”

  He was silent.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” she said. “I was just playing. Just this once.”

  He let her listen to silence for a moment and said, “Phones at sea are peculiar, don’t you think? Unnatural.”

  “Yes,” she said. “They’re funny. They’re frustrating.”

  “That’s it,” he said. “That’s right.”

  “I mean,” she said, “in some ways it’s like you’re right here. As though we’re together. And I’m complaining about what you’re doing. And you’re complaining about what I’m doing. I mean, the old story.”

  “I nearly call you many times,” he said.

  “Do you? God,” she said, “I wish I was with you! What’s it like?”

  “The night has a thousand eyes,” he said.

  “You must call me whenever you feel like it, Owen.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “No?”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  It occurred to her suddenly that he might be angry about something she had left undone. She sat trying to find the reasonableness in what he was telling her.

  “Why?”

  “We’ve got to go off the air, Anne. Except for special occasions. It’s expensive. It’s compromising and we’ll be in trouble with the FCC.”

  “Are you getting enough sleep?” she asked. “Maybe you’re not.”

  She realized that he was right about the marine telephoning. It was peculiar, unsatisfactory and without privacy. It tended to flatten out meaning. Its dead spaces were haunted by suspicion and guilt. Every little unconsidered outburst left echoes to ponder. Its shorthand economies suggested false or pretended comprehension. The tendency was not toward truth.

  “This is very expensive,” she said after a minute.

  “It’s Harry’s money,” Browne said. “But you’re right. We’ll save the calls for emergencies or public occasions. I’ll call you at the Wards’ on Thanksgiving.”

  “Oh, Owen,” she said, “I so wish I was there.”

  “This is silly,” Browne said. “We’re together, phones or no phones. Like it or not.”

  To her own surprise, Anne began to cry. If I cry every time he calls, she thought, he will stop calling. Maybe that was best.

  “Oh, Owen,” Anne said, “I had a letter for your birthday with the boat’s papers. I didn’t manage to get it aboard somehow.”

  “Put it out by mail buoy,” Owen said.

  Mail buoys were an old Navy joke. Aboard ship in the Navy, raw hands were awakened in mid-ocean during the dead of night to look out for mail buoys. They were told it was necessary to watch very closely, since the buoys were hard to see. If the mail buoy was missed, the recruits were assured, no one would get any mail and the lax watch would face the wrath of the entire crew.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “I wish you had taken my letter. I wish I could write to you. I wish there were mail buoys. Are you sure you’re O.K.?”

  “Outstanding,” Browne said.

  34

  AT THE EQUATOR, there were starry nights and glass and useless breezes too feeble to dry sweat or raise a hair. Each morning the sun came up on distant ghostly clouds that never changed their shape or bearing—the same clouds, it seemed, steaming on station, day after day. To coax what little air there was, Browne had raised a ghoster jib, a big light sail with a Kevlar luff sheeted to the afterdeck. He spent hours looking over the stern, watching the little mill-pond ripple of the current under his keel. The water was crazy blue, painted, Brazilian.

  Once a stormy petrel settled safely on the boom to show him how little wind there was. When he approached it, it fixed him with a wise little eye but never shifted. Out of curiosity he reached his hand toward it. The bird made a quarter turn on its perch and pecked at him. Then it shot off, racing eastward an inch over the surface. As though there were anything for anyone out there.

  Browne made a log entry: “Mother Carey’s chicken on a fuck-you note.”

  A not too suitable reflection.

  One night he turned on the radio and scanned the dial in search of a few sounds. The clown colors of the sunset had put him in mind of tropical riot, sambas, sibilant Portuguese. What he got was a religious lady on the customary band.

  “Many of you have written in,” said the grimly English religious lady, “to ask what is meant by God’s covenant.”

  Browne scratched his balls, opened a can of peaches and settled down to listen in spite of himself.

  “By God’s covenant,” the lady said, “is meant the job that we are meant to do. If the boss gives you a job and you do it and are paid for it, then you have kept your covenant with the boss. But if you do not do the job, do not expect the boss to pay you.

  “God has a job for all His creatures,” the lady went on, “and we must each do ours. For we are either covenant keepers or covenant breakers. Are you a covenant keeper or a covenant breaker? You must think about it.

  “If you are not a covenant keeper, then you are in rebellion. I wonder how many of our listeners are covenant keepers. I hope it is very, very many. How lovely it would be if all our listeners were covenant keepers. I hope that none of our listeners are in rebellion.”

  “Not me,” Browne said.

  “To be in rebellion,” the lady continued, “is to be alone. It is to be insane. For all reality belongs to God.”

  “I disagree,” Browne said.

  “We must all remember,” the lady said, “what we are told in Hebrews Four: ‘For the word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit and of the joints and marrow and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

  “‘Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in His sight but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with Whom we have to do.’”

  Browne found it curious to consider the dividing asunder of soul and spirit. The dividing asunder of joints and marrow was a sight he knew, familiar to him both from the dinner table and the aftermath of tactical air support. One might think of osso buco but also of someone’s arm, impossibly bent, its boiling tubes exposed to flies, its red-mottled white bone to beetles. Hebrews Four, Browne thought, unquestionably had war and sacrifice on its bloody mind.

  Overhead the stars were exquisite and, inviting reverence, featured the Southern Cross. Let Him with Whom we have to do, Browne thought by way of prayer, never sunder my spirit from my soul. It certainly did sound like insanity. Let Him with Whom we have to do have nothing to do with me.

  When the fax with everyone’s position came in, awakening him, he found himself disinclined to read it. It was as though he wanted not to be in a race. Which was not to say, he thought, that he wanted not to win one.

  He actually left the fax unread, except for the section about the weather. Not checking it was a little stupid but he was in his own house, in his own kingdom, and he supposed he would find out about the others soon enough. Is this self-confidence or cowardice, he had to ask himself, independence or spite? The church lady’s broadcast had put him in a vein of self-examination. He felt as though he might be in rebellion.

  At dawn the next day, the same
clouds were stretched out in convoy along the eastern horizon. The motionless sea changed with the sky from violet to smoky blue. Browne watched it close over his little wake. When the heat of the day came on, his rebellion took the form of a refusal to patiently endure another stifling day of calm. The silky glowing surface of the water, its cool blue promise, drove him to action.

  He payed out a sheet to trail behind Nona as a safety line, its end wrapped around a belaying pin. The other end he secured to the mainmast. He left a bar of salt-water soap on the afterdeck. Then he stripped, went forward to the bow and leaned against its aluminum rail for a moment to take a measure of the boat’s faint forward motion. In the next instant he took a breath and dived over. The warm, still water closed welcomingly around him. Unresisted, he pushed deep and far. When he surfaced, his head was six feet from Nona’s hull. He swam a stroke and put his hand against her skin; he could barely feel her sliding past. Turning over, he swam a few strokes aft, and when the sheet came by he seized it and pulled himself up to the boat’s stern ladder. He soaped himself and did it all over again. The satin water, the rush of silence and surface in his ears, the salt on his lips—all made him feel renewed. When he had played the game for a while, he made himself a lunch of crackers, canned crabmeat and vegetable juice, and went to sleep in the cockpit.

  By late afternoon, only shifting light had changed the stockstill diagram of boat, attending clouds, and sea. He went swimming again; it was a drill with a rhythm, a good way of staying in shape. He decided he would keep at it through the calms.

  Once he broke the surface of the water to find the upper world in unfamiliar shadow. From some quarter of the sky a cloud had come across the sun. Browne swam on his back, squinting at the sky. He felt himself rise on an invisible swell and, looking over his shoulder, saw the ghoster slowly filling, its contours darkening and curving as it puffed out. The boat began to groan; he saw her heave and slide forward, making a sound against the surface like rain in leaves. Then, before he knew it, the trailing safety line was rushing past him. He made an awkward overhand reach for the belaying pin at the end of the sheet and felt it slip through his fingers. In the growing distance, his future life, Nona was sailing on alone, leaving him her new wake. Calmly, he swam after the line in strong considered strokes that increased his speed with every kick. After fewer than a dozen, he had caught the sheet; he wrapped it around his wrist and let the boat’s strength haul him for a while.

  Back aboard, he stood by the transom, looking back at the empty sea where he had made an object. Although the flow of the wake went on and the camber of the sail suggested wind, he felt no breeze against his naked body. In the grip of a sudden notion, he hurried forward and dived ahead of the boat again. This time his heart raced, not with a true panic but with a safer, imagined one. All the same, he swam as hard as he could and when the sheet went by, seized it with both hands and pulled himself home. He did the same thing again and again until he was almost exhausted. There was no sign of the cloud that had obscured the sun before.

  Afterward he lay down again on deck, half sleeping, half dreaming of the shore, childish days in the surf, summer birthdays and his parents. In his single true dream, the sky had gone dark and he was swimming in warm water littered with floating straw. He opened his eyes to faded blue. The sun was low. Physically he felt very tired.

  He had put his trunks on and was sitting in the cockpit when, on the edge of a vision, a shadow like that of a sail passed along Nona’s bow. Leaning over the side, he saw that it was an enormous shark, just under the surface. The thing seemed unseeing and mechanical, barely animate. Once past the stern, it swerved and came alongside the hull again. This time its dorsal fin broached slightly, silently shearing an inch or so of the breathing world. Browne crouched absolutely still to watch its pass. It was perfect, he thought. Worshipful. At home, unlike him.

  When the shark was gone Browne found himself discontent. He had never even thought of trying to get the camcorder. When he tried, sitting at his navigation table, to describe for his journal what had happened—his swimming, missing the line, the shark coming—he could not make it turn out right. Nor could he quite manage the thing in memory. Remembering it, he felt both fear and longing, insulted and exalted.

  In the middle of the night, when the next false breeze came up, Browne shivered and slaked his peculiar thirst with water.

  35

  ANNE AND Maggie went briskly down the Academy walks in the November sunshine. Anne was taking Maggie to the chapel, where her parents had been married. Above them loomed the unwashed, oxidizing mass of Bancroft Hall. Strickland and Hersey followed along twenty yards or so behind.

  “It’s so gloomy,” Maggie said.

  Because it was Thanksgiving Day there were no midshipmen or visitors about.

  “Well of course,” Anne said. “Everyone’s away.”

  The plan had been for Strickland to photograph the whole of their visit to the Academy. It had been approved by Duffy although apparently conceived by Owen himself. Somewhat to Anne’s satisfaction, it had fallen through. The Annapolis administration would not allow photography on the premises without a number of permits that were not available on the holiday. The film makers were forced to content themselves with an inspection of the Academy grounds in company with Anne and Maggie.

  Mother and daughter moved through the gloom of the chapel while Strickland and Hersey huddled in the doorway. From the corner of her eye, Anne watched Maggie inspect the mosaic stained-glass banners and funereal marble shields.

  As they went out, Strickland attempted to kid with Maggie.

  “What do you think, guy?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said stiffly, looking past him. She could not keep from blushing.

  “Ch . . chip off the block,” said Strickland to his assistant when the women were ahead and out of hearing.

  “Which block? Her or him?”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Strickland asked. “Daddy’s girl. We’ll want to see that.”

  “Jesus,” Hersey said, looking around the grounds as they headed for the gate, “it’s all so fascist!”

  “Think so?” Strickland asked.

  “Certainly.”

  “I don’t find this place particularly fascist,” Strickland said. “I mean, resist the obvious. The Guggenheim Museum is fascist. This is about something else.”

  “Yeah? What?”

  Strickland eyed the athletic fields and the statue of Chief Tecumseh.

  “Virtue. Republican virtue. Republican virtue in the water.”

  “I don’t get it,” Hersey said.

  “Your generation is blessed,” Strickland told him.

  Ahead of them, Anne and Maggie stopped for a moment on the walk. Anne folded her arms, took a deep breath and looked around.

  “It was very glamorous,” she explained. “To have a boyfriend at the Academy was, oh, just enormously prestigious. It was to die for.”

  “There are still girls who would go for it,” Maggie said.

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “Like greasers,” said Maggie, who was in some obscure rage, “who like athletes. Or cops and uniforms.”

  Anne declined the bait.

  “Well, it was considered very desirable,” she said. “They were beautiful, you know. We were proud of them.”

  It made her wonder if her daughter would ever learn what being proud of a man entailed.

  “If you went out with a guy at the Academy,” Maggie said, “it must have been hard not to marry him. In those days.”

  “The girls wanted the guys to marry them,” her mother agreed. “They were a great catch.”

  “And did the guys not want to get married as much?”

  “I think they probably did.”

  “I know you and Dad really did.”

  “Oh yes,” Anne said. “Of course, the Vietnam War was on and there was a certain fatality about things.”

  “Really,” Maggie agreed.
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br />   “By then, of course, there was a lot of antiwar stuff around too. You had to take a lot of guff some places.”

  Maggie looked dark. “Did you get like really angry?”

  “Some of it was silly,” Anne said. “Some of it I’ll never forgive the people of this country for.”

  At the Duke Street gate, Anne directed Strickland and Hersey to Hubie’s to feed themselves, with directions to telephone after four. They were not, she explained, to interfere in any manner with the Wards’ dinner.

  “You probably don’t like turkey anyway, right? Hubie’s has great crab cakes. You’ll enjoy them.”

  “Would you tell your friends,” Strickland said, “that we would appreciate some daylight for our work?”

  “I’ll tell them,” she said. “And Owen’s calling in at six, got it? And you be respectful to Commander Ward and Mrs. Ward. Or you’ll be sorry.”

  “Sure thing,” said Strickland.

  “Jawohl,” said Hersey under his breath.

  At the Wards’ house along the Severn, Anne made a quick call to Duffy to get the position reports from the other entries. Then she and Maggie were introduced to Lieutenant (jg) and Mrs. Benny Conley, Jr., who were their fellow guests at dinner. The lieutenant was a tall Afro-American, dark-skinned, with a formal bearing and an open adolescent face. His wife was small, blond and extremely shy. Buzz poured champagne for all the ladies, Maggie included. For himself and the lieutenant, he poured out a measure of Wild Turkey. In the wood-paneled parlor everyone stood for a toast.

  “Our ships and men,” Buzz intoned. “And women,” he remembered to add.

  They all, even Maggie, repeated it.

  “You must be really excited, Mrs. Browne,” Lieutenant Conley said to Anne. His wife, beside him, nodded vigorously in his support. Her name was Joan.

  “Yes,” Anne said. “And petrified.”

  “Petrified, hell,” Buzz said. “She wishes she was out there.”

  “Well,” Anne said, relaxing, “not right now. I’m happy where I am.”

  “How about you?” Lieutenant Conley asked Maggie. “Are you a sailor too?”