Authors: John D. MacDonald
When she was through, he went below to put his call in. In the main cabin the television set had fallen out of its brackets and lay face down on the carpeting. The radio set had shifted. He turned it on. It would not light up. He could not send. Then he saw where the cable had been pulled out of the chassis.
Howard Prowt went up and told her. He looked astern, and he could not spot the drifting boat. The water was changing to a new color, to a blue that was mixed with green and gray. To the southeast he saw a southbound tanker. They were out of the Gulf Stream. The motion was easing. They were on course.
She seemed very subdued, and he glanced sidelong at her from time to time to see how angry she was. But it was a remote expression he could not read.
“Junie, honey, it’s only by a freak of chance we ever came close enough to that boat to see it.”
“I suppose.”
“I mean, we wouldn’t be
expected
to see it.”
“Howard, what are you driving at?”
“Honey, on a thing like this, there can be a lot of red tape. I mean it could get us hung up in Bimini, or maybe even having to go back and fill out a lot of reports. You understand, if I was absolutely
convinced
you saw what you thought you saw, wild horses couldn’t have kept me from getting to that boat.”
“Yes, Howard.”
“And I can’t help what happened to the transmitter.”
“I guess not.”
“All in all, I think the wisest course is that we forget we ever saw that boat. We wouldn’t want to spoil anything, you know, like for Kip and Selma.”
“We wouldn’t want to spoil anything,” she said, and went over to begin a careful descent of the open ladderway.
“Is that okay with you?” he called.
“Is what okay?”
“To just forget it happened?”
“Sure. Sure,” she said and backed out of sight. A moment later her face reappeared and she said, “I busted the binoculars.”
“Accidents will happen aboard ship. Don’t give it a second thought. I got the old ones aboard, those surplus ones.”
Later, in calm water, he called her up to the flying bridge. When she stood beside him, he said, “Land Ho, and right on the button. Look at that range marker on shore. By God, we could damn near run that channel without taking her out of pilot.”
“Very good, dear.”
“Look at all the crazy colors in that water off the bar there.”
“It’s beautiful.”
Her lean hand rested atop the instrument panel. He covered it with his and said, “That’s Bimini, old lady. And bank on this—the Prowts and the Heaters are going to have one hell of a month of fun.”
For a long time she did not answer. She slowly withdrew her hand. “It’s going to be a ball,” she said without smile or inflection. “Tell me when you want me to take a line forward.” She climbed back down to the cockpit deck.
Howard Prowt cut off the pilot and took over manual control, cutting his speed another increment as he headed for the channel.
Always, coming into harbor after a good job of navigation, he had that Horatio Hornblower feeling, grizzled and sea-tough and with a look of far places.
He reached for that feeling, and for an anticipation of all the courses he would run, all the expertise he would bring back to Delmar Bay one month hence, but he could find neither.
He merely felt old. And his legs felt tired. And his gut felt uneasy. And he wished he were back sitting on the bank of Heron Bayou with a cold beer in his hand, and the HoJun tied to his own dock in that tricky way he had devised all by himself.
Damn her anyway.
STANIKER
, on an ever-lasting afternoon, fought off the dreams and the visions. There was some kind of a Thing, some tantalizing entity which kept launching them at him to see how he’d make out. That time in South America when they’d gone after those lunker trout in the mountain lake, those Indios had those light nets they could throw, float them out very pretty.
Dreams came like the nets, something throwing them at him, floating down to lay like cobwebs across his mind. So then each time he had to pluck off every strand. There was a way to do it. You focused on some real thing, close at hand. The sheath knife, rusting with an astonishing speed. Could you measure the days by the way the rust grew? Think of the knife and you could pluck away one strand. Look at the pile of empty shells of the sea-things you had eaten, had pried off the ragged black rocks at low tide, smashed with stones, trying to save the juice to suck before eating the creature.
Look at the crude sticks and poles some forgotten Bahamian fisherman had assembled long ago for rough shelter on this empty island, and at your own additions, poles above and a clumsy thatch for shade from each day’s interminable passage of the sun. Roll over, wincing at the pain of it, and lift your head and look out across the hot white glare of the sand flats of South Joulter Cay, where you had tried to stamp the big arrow and the H E L P, because all the Nassau-Miami flights passed over here, just a little bit south, not too far south. But the white dry loose sand would not take a message, and when you put it in the packed wet sand, the tide would take it away. Look out toward the channel and remember that this was a popular place for the private boats which came flocking over from Florida in May, listed attractively in the Cruising Guide, and it was just one of those weird coincidences that not one had come by. Look over where those brackish pools are, and remember the oily and stagnant taste of the water, and wonder if the fever and the dreams came from the water or from the burns. Look at the outside of the right arm and shoulder, at the outside of the right thigh and calf where the deeply tanned skin had blistered, cracked, sloughed loose, and now suppurated and stank.
The pain of movement was a reality, as was the dull ache of the over-burdened kidneys.
These were realities, and the way he could find his way out of the bright and senseless shifting of the dreams which kept moving him to places he had been, with people who had never been there with him, people from other places who said all the ugly things from childhood. Static reality was something he could brace against, but the changing things, the birds, the airplanes, the quick lizards, he could not tell if they were part of here or part of the cobwebs.
When his teeth began to chatter, Staniker would hunch himself out into the sunlight. And then, brain a-boil, pull himself back into
the shade. Time would slip and the sun would jump three diameters west and sometimes he would become aware of a voice and listen and hear himself talking to Crissy, talking loudly because he was sitting on the edge of her dock and she was swimming slow lengths with her face closed against all listening, all explanations.
Several times there was Mary Jane’s voice in that tired, whining, scolding, hopeless sound; but of course she was three sea miles away and a half a mile deep, her mouth at rest at last, down in the black-green of the Tongue of the Ocean.
The dreams came oftener, and most of the time he did not mind it, merely let them happen, and watched the colors and the changes. But then he would fight free of the strands, and find panic again, the awareness that everything had gone wrong, was continuing to go wrong, could end in a death that would make all the other parts of it meaningless.
When the sun was low, while he was in restless sleep, a Chris-Craft out of Jacksonville came cautiously in over the harbor bar, threading the unmarked channel, a vacationing dentist leaning over the bow rail, reading the channel by the color of the water, using hand signals to guide his friend, a plumbing contractor, owner of the boat, who had the helm. It was an hour or so past low tide. The wheels boiled up sand in the slow wake. The hull was skegged for this kind of shallow-water exploration. In the gentle chop, at the shallowest point, they bumped twice against the packed sand of the bottom, then moved on into the deeper water of the natural channel close to the key, towing the little glass dinghy astern. They came around the point into still water. The engines droned. The chattering wives were aft, fixing the cocktail snacks. The men were studying the chart, inspecting the water, discussing where to anchor. One of the wives turned a transistor radio to music from a Miami station.
These sounds awakened Staniker, and on hands and knees he
crawled and looked around the edge of his shelter and saw the cruiser moving past, a hundred yards away. He pulled himself up, using his right arm in spite of the pain it caused him, and cawed at them as loudly as he could. The cruiser moved on.
The shelter was at a high point, perhaps twenty feet above the water. He tottered down the narrow winding path, terribly afraid that if he should fall, he might not be able to get up. He came down to the narrow band of sandy beach which was covered at high tide, cupped his hands around his mouth and cawed again, his voice cracking to a contralto scream.
He saw them staring at him. The cruiser slowed, and the man at the helm gave it a single burst from both engines in reverse to lay it dead in the water. The dinghy came up and thumped the transom. The engines were turned off. Staniker went down onto one knee and rested his fists against the sand at the water’s edge.
“What do you want?” a man called across the stillness.
“Staniker,” he replied. “Off the Muñeca. Burned. Sick. Help me.”
He heard their excited jabbering, and he let his head sag and closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Soon he heard the familiar snoring sound of a Sea Gull outboard, looked up and saw the dinghy coming toward him with one man aboard. The man, making clucking sounds of dismay at his condition, helped him aboard and took him out to the cruiser. In helping him aboard, they hurt him so badly he screeched and the world tilted into grayness but came slowly back. With many instructions to each other, they helped him below and got him into a bunk.
Time slipped again, and in the next instant he could feel the movement of the hull, hear the engines at cruising speed, identify the hull motion as a deep-water motion with a following sea off the port quarter. The cabin lights were on. A thin leathery man in his
fifties, wearing steel-rimmed glasses, was staring appraisingly at him. Behind him, in the shadows, was a tall woman standing braced against the motion of the boat.
“Can you hear me, Captain?” the man asked.
“Yes, yes sir.”
“Swallow these. For fever and pain.”
The water was in a tall dark-blue plastic glass, with ice. He had never tasted anything as delicious.
The man took the empty glass and said, “I am not a medical doctor, Staniker. I’m a dentist. We have to know a certain amount of medicine. I’ve dressed your burns with what we could improvise. Your fever is running a hundred and three and a half. It was probably higher in the afternoon. We’re making a night run to Nassau. My name is Barth, by the way. Bert Hilger, my friend who owns this boat, couldn’t raise anything on the damned radio after we found you. So we’re running you in where you can get hospital attention. Do you understand, Captain?”
“How—how bad off am I, Doctor?”
“How long were you alone there on South Joulter?”
“What day is it?”
“Today? Friday, the—uh—”
“Twentieth,” the woman said.
“We—we blew up and burned last Friday night.”
“You are a superb physical specimen, Captain. If you don’t get pneumonia, I suspect you’ll snap back quickly with proper care. Can you answer some questions? In case you’re not conscious when we dock at Nassau.”
“Yes sir.”
“What happened?”
“It was—about nine o’clock. They were all below. They would have been topsides, it was such a nice night, except they were having dinner. They always ate late. Moonlight night, and we were heading
for the Joulters. I was running her from the flying bridge, on pilot, and I’d turned the depth-finder on. When it began to pick up any bottom at all, I was going to cut down, take over, and find the passage I’ve been through before, place where there’s no coral heads to bother you. On that Muñeca, you’ve got—you had every control duplicated up on the fly bridge. I remembered how one bank of batteries was pretty well down, and from the running time I didn’t think we’d gotten the other bank charged full yet. Any boat I’m operating, I like to keep the batteries up. That would mean running the auxiliary generator after we anchored. And no reason at all why I couldn’t run it while we were under way. Spoils a quiet anchorage when you have to run it at night, like of course you have to when they wanted the air conditioning on. I remember every once in a while I could just barely hear Bix—Mr. Kayd—laugh. He had a loud laugh. So I switched the auxiliary generator to the spare bank, and I pressed the button wondering if it would catch right off—it was a little cranky sometimes—and there was a big flash and a whoomp, and the next thing I know I’m in the water, choking and strangling and thrashing around, with a funny orange light on the water and the back of my neck hot. I guess I was knocked out for a little while and the water brought me out of it. When I got turned around, she was fire from bow to stern, and burning to the waterline. I was sick to my stomach from swallowing water. I saw something in the water and I managed to swim to it. It was one of those styrofoam sort of surf-board looking things with a glass place to look through. Miss Stella had brought it aboard in Key West, and she liked to use it to float around over the coral reefs, looking down at the fish. She wasn’t a good swimmer on account of her leg. The board was scorched and melted along one edge, but when I pulled myself onto it, it held me all right. And about then, the Muñeca—that means doll in Spanish—went down like a rock, with a lot of hissing when the flames went underwater, and some bubbling and
boiling on the surface for just a few seconds. Then it was quiet. When I could stop coughing, I started calling them. I guess I was out of my head. Maybe the only one I was calling was my wife, Mary Jane. But no answer at all.”
“But wasn’t the Muñeca diesel powered?” the dentist asked.
“Yes sir. But the auxiliary generator was gasoline powered, and my guess is that gas leaked into the bilge from its fuel tank or one of the tins stowed down there to fuel it with. The spark, when I tried to start it, blew the boat up, and the heat of the explosion was greater than the flash-point of the diesel fuel. Maybe I goofed. My God, sir, I’d never start gasoline marine engines without running the blowers first. But with an auxiliary, you don’t think of that so easy. And maybe Bix—Mr. Kayd—goofed too, not having a sniffer installed when he had the gas auxiliary put below decks. Using a blower is something you think of when you’re tied up, not running along at cruising speed.”