The Damagers

by Donald Hamilton

  “How big is that jenny?” she asked, looking forward.

  “About four hundred square feet,” I said. I added uneasily, “It’s a lot of sail.”

  Actually, the Genoa jib, roller-furling like the mainsail, was almost big enough to wrap Lorelei III for mailing. Twice as large as the mainsail, it was by far the largest sail on board—a spinnaker would have been even larger, but apparently Truman Fancher hadn’t wanted to wrestle one of those monstrous kites and its man-killer pole on his retirement boat, for which I was grateful. The jenny was bad enough, a vast expanse of rather stiff, slick Dacron that was, at the moment, safely wound around the head stay that supported the mast up forward with the help of the inner stay, on which the little staysail could be set— which is what I would have done if I was doing it. That is, it’s what I would have done if I had messed with the sails at all in this fairly stiff breeze, which was unlikely.

  “We’ll just give it a try and see how she handles,” Mrs. Bell said. “You get on that starboard sheet; I’ll ease off the furling line.”

  We were standing side by side at the topside steering station. The day was still gray, now with a bit of a drizzle, which seemed to be customary in these parts at this time of year, and I was wearing my cheap yellow oilskins—I hadn’t seen much point in blowing a lot of money, even if it wasn’t my money, on foul-weather gear that was only, I hoped, going to have to last me through this one seagoing mission. My companion’s expensive waterproof pants and jacket were orange-red and, hood up, made her look like a gaudy teddy bear. Lorelei III was coasting along easily on autopilot under the two conservative sails already set, with the engine throttled back to keep things reasonably steady while we worked on deck.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  I gave the sheet three clockwise turns around the big starboard winch on the deckhouse top, to make sure it didn’t get away from me when the strain came on.

  “Any time,” said the stocky lady in red beside me.

  I hauled away, the winch clicked and clattered, and a small triangle of Dacron appeared reluctantly at the other end of the boat; then the wind caught that, and the jenny unrolled with a rush that was only slightly retarded by Mrs. Bell’s efforts to brake it with the thin control line that ran from aft clear out the bowsprit to the roller-furling drum. It started flapping in a heavy, jerky manner and shaking the whole boat.

  Mrs. Bell secured her little line and said, “Here, I’ll tail that sheet for you.”

  I passed it to her; that left me free to use both hands on the crank of the powerful, geared winch. As the sail came in, it stopped flapping and filled with wind. The boat assumed a considerable angle of heel.

  Mrs. Bell said, “That ought to do it… You’d better take a look below and check to make sure all the ports are closed.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Hanging onto any grips I could find, I made my way into the deckhouse and checked out the boat from bow to stern, finding all openings safely shut. Increased noise and more violent motion told me that Mrs. Bell had brought the engine up to cruising RPM. Back in the deckhouse, I saw that the knot meter needle was hitting nine and a half knots. I remembered that we’d been making eight and a half before setting the sails; I couldn’t help thinking that we’d done a lot of work for a gain of just one lousy nautical mile per hour, but I guess sailing fanatics are all speed-crazy in a kind of microscopic way. Hell, the America’s Cup boys will spend a million dollars to gain a tenth of a knot.

  When I stuck my head out the windward door, I saw that Mrs. Bell was working hard at the wheel aft, having switched off the autopilot. She yelled at me to stay below where it was dry, and relieve her in an hour, so I made myself a cup of instant coffee, with some difficulty—I had to hold the pot on the stove—and took it up into the deckhouse to watch the misty, gray view slide past the rain-spotted windows. A bulky container ship moving up the bay was passing us well off to port. At the moment there was no sign of Gulf Streamer.

  I spilled a little of my coffee as the boat lurched violently. There wasn’t any real sense to this, I reflected wryly: the hawk-faced bitch back aft was simply abusing my poor old boat—of course, her outfit had put up the money for it, but the name on the document was mine and the work of rehabilitation had been mine—because she was worried about her job and mad at the world. If Caselius and Dorothy Fancher came to sink us, they’d come, I was sure, whether we were charging along spectacularly with all sail set or just cruising placidly under power.

  They didn’t come. Nobody came. Nothing came except more wind and a few more large ships that materialized out of the murk ahead or astern, passed us, and dematerialized astern or ahead. Occasionally, we’d catch a glimpse of Gulf Streamer in the distance, and oddball flashes on our radar indicated that she was keeping track of us on hers.

  I took my turns at the wheel. It was hard work, and late in the afternoon, with the wind still rising, I almost lost her twice; clearly my growing skill as a helmsman was not keeping pace with the increasing demands of the situation. Or perhaps the situation was getting out of control—after all, Lorelei III was not a racer; she wasn’t designed to be driven this hard. The second time, it was a toss-up whether or not I was going to be able to avoid a broach; the boat swung almost broadside to the waves before the rudder took charge at last…

  It happened without warning. There was a sharp crack up forward, as loud as a gunshot, and the Genoa took off skyward. I didn’t have time to analyze what had gone wrong; I was too busy getting the boat back under control. Then Mrs. Ball was on deck shouting commands.

  “Cast off the jib sheet… Ease the main… Head straight downwind and try to blanket that jib so I can secure it…”

  It became clear that a tired elderly fitting at the end of the bowsprit had broken, turning loose the headstay and the Genoa’s rollerrfurling gear as well as the sail itself. After I’d slacked off the sheet, the flailing jenny was still attached to the boat by two of its three corners. The substantial wire halyard held the head of the sail firmly at the masthead, and the little quarter-inch control line connected its furling drum, which had broken off with the rest of the apparatus, loosely to the bowsprit. Mrs. Bell had made her way forward and was trying to use that flimsy line to haul the lower corner of the sail—tack, to you—down within reach.

  Sweating at the wheel, I tried to find the wind angle that would give her the most assistance, but trying to blanket a four-hundred-square-foot jib with the wind shadow of a two-hundred-square-foot mainsail is not really a profitable occupation. But suddenly it worked, for a moment—the wrong moment. The flapping Genoa lost its wind and collapsed, and a corkscrewing lurch of the boat sent the heavy roller-furling drum, several pounds of steel and aluminum, slashing through the air like a giant mace.

  Mrs. Bell saw incoming and tried to get out of its way, but she’d been thrown off balance and didn’t quite make it. The swinging drum caught her a glancing blow across the head, and she went down to hang limply across the rail like a shapeless red sack, threatening to flip over into the rushing bow wave. I threw a hasty look over my shoulder: Gulf Streamer was visible on the horizon, but she was at least three miles away. Even if I called her in by radio, she’d never arrive in time to help if the woman went overboard; and the chances of my making the pickup in this wind, single-handed, with the Genoa going berserk aloft, were nonexistent. I’d already yanked the engine control back to neutral to slow things down a bit, but Mrs. Bell was teetering up there very precariously, and I didn’t think I had time to get Lorelei III tracking straight under autopilot, or properly heave to, so I could leave the wheel and run forward…

  So I did the thing that you are warned never to do on a sailing vessel going downwind in any kind of a breeze: I jibed the damn boat all standing.

  I spun the wheel to starboard and everything went to hell. The wind got behind the sails. The mizzen boom came slashing across where my head would have been if I hadn’t ducked. The mainsail came crashing across between t
he masts like a great swinging gate. I had no idea what was happening to the idiot jenny aloft; I was just hanging onto the steering wheel trying to stay with the boat, on that high aft deck, as she went over on her ear and slewed up into the following wave, which broke right over her.

  Then she was lying there kind of shaking herself like a wet dog, with water sluicing off the decks; and the masts were still standing. I was proud of the rugged old girl, surviving a jibe under those conditions. The sails were flapping thunderously, all except the Genoa, which, on this tack, was mostly plastered high up against the forward rigging by the wind.

  And up in the bow the formless orange-red sack was no longer draped over the starboard rail—it lay sprawled on the foredeck where the bulwarks and lifelines would keep it from going over the side. Okay. So if you have something hanging precariously off the starboard bow that you want back on board, and you can’t get forward to attend to it yourself, all you have to do is heel the boat hard to port and smash her into a big wave and hope it’ll do the job for you. Who ever said seamanship was difficult?

  I drew a long breath and found that, as far as I was concerned, unconscious was a hell of a good way for Mrs. Teresa Othman Bell to be, letting me run my boat for a while without her breathing down my neck. I didn’t need expert advice about what came next, it was obvious even to a New Mexico cowboy: all I had to do was stabilize the vessel in a reasonably safe attitude, drag the unconscious woman into the cabin, and then get rid of that crazy sail aloft. Simple.

  I quickly learned what I suppose generations of lone sailors had learned before me, that a good boat isn’t going to disintegrate because of a little wind or a few flapping sails or some water washing along the deck or even a broken rigging wire or two; and that if you don’t panic— ha!—and just keep solving one problem at a time and ignore all the other shit going on around you, eventually you’ll get it all worked out…

  “Need any help?”

  The bullhorn almost made me jump overboard. It was Lori Fancher’s voice, electronically distorted and magnified; and there was Gulf Streamer right on top of us. The girl was at the flying bridge controls and Billy Barstow was balancing on the sportfisherman’s high, plunging bow ready to make a flying leap between the boats—but in that sea, even with all Lori’s seamanship, there was no chance of making the transfer without some boat contact. There would be at least minor damage and possibly a major smashup. Anyway, I didn’t want the redheaded clown on my boat.

  I waved them away. “Stay clear,” I shouted. “Just stand by.”

  “Where’s Ma Bell?” That was Barstow.

  “She’s okay,” I yelled, and pointed to the cabin.

  For all I knew, I’d dumped a dead woman down there—I hadn’t taken time to check—but to hell with him. And her. I was aware of relief as Gulf Streamer pulled away and left me alone to deal with my next problem: how to work the Genoa, which I’d got under some kind of control, loose from the tangled mess it had made. It was late in the day now, and I was racing against darkness; but at last it was done, and everything else that needed doing was also done, and we were blowing downwind quite peacefully, considering the weather, steered by the autopilot.

  Standing at the wheel aft, I looked down the length of my little vessel with a certain amount of satisfaction. Behind me, the jenny and various busted and twisted parts of its furling gear made a rather untidy pile lashed down on the aft deck, but otherwise she was shipshape. The jib halyard was secured to the end of the bowsprit and set up taut to replace the headstay, which was lashed to one of the starboard shrouds minus the roller-furling drum, which I’d got rid of by chopping it off with an enormous bolt-cutter that old Truman Fancher, bless his experienced seaman’s soul, must have put aboard specifically for the purpose of cutting away damaged wire rigging in an emergency. The mizzen and mainsail were furled, and I’d set the staysail forward, figuring that the little sail pulling from the bow would make life easier for the autopilot—as well as the woman below, if she was alive—than the big motor pushing from the stern.

  I patted the shiny steering wheel and spoke to my boat. “Okay, old girl, be good: I’ll give you a course as soon as I figure out what it is.”

  I made my way into the deckhouse and found no woman on the carpet where I’d left her; it seemed that these dames with damaged heads simply wouldn’t stay where you put them. There was only a damp spot on the rug and Mrs. Bell’s foul-weather gear, looking like something shed by a large, red bug. Then I heard a sound forward that I recognized—without the motor running, the boat was reasonably quiet in spite of the wind outside. Well, if she was alive enough to vomit, she’d last a little longer without my help.

  Daylight, such as it was, was going fast. I switched on the tricolor masthead running light, all that was required under sail, and snapped on the chart-table light, and frowned at the chart spread out beneath it. I was going to have to figure out just how far we’d come, and in what direction, since the last position recorded by Mrs. Bell, and I had to decide where we should go from there; and I was very much aware that I hadn’t had a hell of a lot of practice at dead reckoning. After making a rough estimate of our position, I grabbed the parallel rules to lay out a tentative course, remembering that the after-guards on the old square-riggers used to make a big mystery of navigation to prevent mutiny on board: if you could kid the dumb sailors forward into believing that they’d never get home without the genius officers aft to show them the way across the oceans, they weren’t likely to take over the ship no matter how often the cat-o’-nine-tails was employed or how rotten the bully beef became…

  “Don’t forget the variation, about nine degrees west.”

  Mrs. Bell was standing on the steps leading down into the main saloon, looking gray-face and shaky.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  I’d already made allowance for the local compass variation, necessary because there are only a few places in the world where a magnetic compass points to true north and Chesapeake Bay isn’t one of them.

  “You’d better switch on the running lights,” she said. “Well, without the motor running, all we need to be legal is the three-color masthead light.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m all right,” she said, and collapsed on the steps.

  It was as good a place for her as any. I looked at my lightly penciled course line and had no faith in it; it was based largely on guesswork. Without much hope—it had been displaying nothing but gibberish earlier in the day—I switched on the loran, the landlubber’s friend. To my joy, some good-looking numbers started coming up on the little dual screens; apparently the U.S. Navy’s disk jockeys were taking a dinner break or something.

  With a firm latitude and longitude safely written down on a scrap of paper—I reminded myself to pick up a real logbook in Norfolk to replace Truman Fancher’s missing mystery volume—I used the loran computer to give me a new course south. I was pleased to see that my previous guesswork, while off by a few miles and degrees, had erred in the right direction and would not have run us aground.

  I tweaked the autopilot knob until the steering compass showed us to be on the new course. Then I went topside to see, while there was still light enough to see by, how things looked up there. They looked okay, but I trimmed the staysail slightly to compensate for our changed heading. There was enough wind that the little sail was pulling us along at an easy two to three knots. I stood there for a moment, feeling pretty good; I was discovering that playing sailor could be kind of fun—if you were allowed to work it out for yourself without a lot of expert advice and assistance.

  When I came below, Mrs. Bell was sitting on the steps where Mrs. Fancher had sat only a few days ago, also with a trauma-induced headache. Mrs. B had her head in her hands, but she raised it to look at me.

  “If you’ve got the jenny off, you’d better secure the jib halyard up forward in the place of the broken headstay. I don’t think that inner forestay is str
ong enough to take the full strain indefinitely.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Let me look at your head.”

  She said, “When we get down near Norfolk you want to give Old Point Comfort a reasonably wide berth. There’s actually enough water close in, but with this wind the seas will get sloppy near shore; it’s better to stay… Ouch!”

  I said, “You’ve got a good-sized lump there, but I don’t feel any dents in the skull, and the hood of your jacket seems to have saved your scalp; there’s no external bleeding. Let me see your eyes.” I held her face steady for a moment, and released her.

  “What was that for?” she asked.

  “Maybe I just like to stare into your lovely eyes, sweetheart… I know, I know, I mustn’t call you ‘sweetheart.’ I never knew anybody so damned sensitive about what they were called. You’re welcome to call me Squarehead Helm any time you feel like it, us Scandihoovians don’t insult as easy as you Ayrabs.” I grinned, and went on. “If one pupil is smaller than the other, it means something. I don’t know what, but yours are the same size, so it doesn’t matter.”

  Mrs. Bell said, “Actually, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, do you?”

  “Correct. And since I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, I’m going to call in Gulf Streamer and get you aboard somehow, even though it’s a sloppy night to make the transfer. With those big engines, Lori will have you in a Norfolk hospital before morning.”’

  “No!” Mrs. Bell spoke the monosyllable violently.

  I regarded her for a moment. “Look, lady,” I said, “I have a hard enough time putting up with you when you’re in good health. Puking all over my boat and maybe going into convulsions, you’ll be unbearable and I’ll have to shoot you.”

  She said, “Damn you, don’t call me ‘lady’!”

  I said, “There you are. Just like I said, unbearable.”

  I reached for the microphone of the VHF. She rose and caught my arm. She licked her lips and made what was obviously, for her, a tremendous effort.