Dead Calm — 91
Sunset. Suddenly, and with such piercing clarity it made her
cry out, she saw him struggling in the water, alone on the
emptiness of the sea, as the sun went down and the colors
began to fade. She could see every line and angle of the face
her finger tips had come to know so well, the sun-wrinkles at
the corners of the eyes, and that horrible way she had cut his
hair; the eyes themselves were open, the clear, cool gray eyes
that could be ironic or amused but were far more often gentle,
and there seemed to be no fear in them even now but only
something she thought was sadness or regret. He made no
sound. And there was no lifebelt. If you ever lost a boat, he’d
said once, in a place where there was no chance of being
picked up, you were better off without it.
She began to shake, all over and uncontrollably, and fell
back on the pile of sailbags with the back of her left forearm
pressed against her opened mouth while tears welled up in
her eyes and overflowed. Why sunset? Why did she have to
think of sunset? But she knew, remembering the moments of
splendor and that shared enraptured silence when the world
was only two people and a boat and a fragment of time poised
between night and day. Would he be thinking of them? Would
he have to? She was up then, throwing the sailbags behind her
to clear the door. She slammed the cases of stores aside as if
they were empty, and snatched up a marlinspike she somehow
saw in her wildness lying among the coils of rope. Her hand
was yanking at the bolt to open the door when some vestige of
reason made itself heard at last and she was able to stop
herself. She sagged against the bulkhead.
One chance was all she would get. She couldn’t throw it
away.
He was a young man, with a young man’s reflexes. No
matter how fast or unexpectedly she leaped into the cockpit
she couldn’t attack him that way and expect to accomplish
anything but her own destruction. And with hers, John’s. God,
why did she have to be so helpless? There must be some way
to stop him. There had to be.
It was then she remembered the shotgun.
Her mind slid away from it in revulsion. It edged back,
reluctantly but compelled. She could see its dismembered
pieces—two, she thought there were—wrapped in their
separate strips of oiled fleece in one of the drawers under the
Dead Calm — 92
starboard bunk. John had never assembled it since he’d
brought it aboard but he did check it from time to time to be
sure it hadn’t been attacked by rust. He was going to hunt
something with it in Australia, or maybe it was New Zealand.
In the same drawer were two boxes of its ammunition…
It was sickening. It was impossible. Why was she even
thinking about the thing? And there was no use trying to
threaten him with it. You couldn’t threaten a madman.
She looked down then and saw she still had the marlinspike
in her hand. It was over a foot long, of heavy bright steel,
gently tapering from one thick end to a point at the other—the
classic weapon, she knew from the sea stories she’d read, of
the bucko mates of nineteenth-century square-riggers driving
their crews around the Horn. She’d never be able to hit him
with it from in front, but suppose she could get behind him?
She might. His reactions were unpredictable, of course, but
there seemed a chance he wouldn’t attack her out of hand if
she came on deck, at least as long as she didn’t appear to be
trying to interfere with him. And he’d turned his back on her
before. But that was before she’d tried to sabotage the engine,
she thought; he’d be suspicious of her now. Well, she could
look out the companion hatch and see how he reacted before
she went too far.
There was another thing, too, she thought with growing
excitement: once behind him, she could take a quick look into
the binnacle and see what course he was steering. That would
do away with all the trouble and possible inaccuracies of this
other way.
The marlinspike would have to be well concealed, but still
where it could be withdrawn swiftly and without catching on
anything. She experimented. After pulling up the bottom of
her blouse, she shoved it into the waistband of the Bermuda
shorts and down the outside of her left thigh. But the shorts
were a snug fit in this area, and it showed when she walked.
She moved it around in front of the hip, where it angled down
the hollow of her groin to the inside of the thigh. It had passed
inside her nylon briefs, and the steel had a cold and alien feel
against her skin. That was better as far as concealment was
concerned, but she was aware now of the error of having it
inside the shorts at all. When she withdrew it, she had it by
the wrong end. The place for it was inside the blouse, which
Dead Calm — 93
was looser anyway. With the heavy end caught under her arm
and only the point inside the waistband, it lifted out easily and
quickly and was held just right to swing. Conscious of the
extreme shallowness of her breathing, she slid back the bolt
and opened the door.
She crossed the after cabin, mounted the first step of the
ladder, and peered cautiously out. Her head was still below
the level of the deckhouse, but she could see him—or rather,
she could see his head and the naked shoulders. He was
seated behind the wheel, staring into the binnacle.
He still hadn’t looked up, and she had no intention of
venturing farther into his territory until he’d seen her and she
could assess his reaction. From here she could still make it
back to safety before he could get out from behind the wheel
and catch her, but going too far would be like misjudging the
length of chain by which some dangerous wild animal was
secured. She waited, thinking of this and conscious of the
incongruity or even the utter madness of the simile.
Dangerous? This nice, well-mannered, unbelievably handsome
boy who might have stepped right out of a mother’s dream?
That was the horror of it, she thought. Conscious evil or
malicious intent you could at least communicate with, but
Warriner was capable of destroying her with the pointlessness
and the perfect innocence of a falling safe, and with its same
imperviousness to argument.
He glanced up then and saw her. He smiled in evident
pleasure and said something she couldn’t hear above the noise
of the engine. It might be a trick, of course, to entice her
within range, but she had to risk it. She went up the ladder,
trying to hold her arm as naturally as possible while it
clamped the end of the marlinspike inside her blouse. The sea
was still like glass, aside from the long undulations of the
swell, and after the dimness below she was dazzled for a
moment by the shimmering glow of sunlight reflected from it.
She stepped out onto the narrow strip of deck along the
starboard side of the cockpit, very scared now and pretending
to look aft along their wake as though searching for the other
boat. Slowly, she thought; stop a minute, and then another
step or two, and don’t try to smile; that would be too phony—
“No,” he said. “Sit down there.” He indicated the starboard
cockpit seat and then added, “Where I can see you.”
Dead Calm — 94
It was impossible to tell by his tone or manner whether he
suspected her of something, but she hesitated only a second.
She didn’t have to go all the way back at once, and it would
never do to argue with him. “Why?” she asked, but she sat
down, some two or three feet forward of the binnacle and the
wheel, with her left arm falling naturally at her side.
“Because your face fascinates me,” he said, tilting his head
slightly to the left and leaning over the wheel to view it better.
“You have no idea what a study it would have made the way
you were looking up and out at me like some hesitant naiad
from a grotto—no. Naiads were Greek. You’re Scandinavian.”
“Partly,” she managed to say. She didn’t even know whether
he’d meant it as a question or not.
“Oh, definitely Scandinavian. Under your clothes you’re
probably as blond as snow.” He smiled, as though to reassure
her that at their level of sophistication there was nothing
tendentious in this discussion of her private blondness. “But it
was your face we were talking about, the magnificent bone
structure. Do you know you’ll still be a beautiful woman when
you’re eighty? I’m speaking as a professional. I’m a painter,
and painters always approach a face from the other side, to
see what’s holding it up. Those high cheekbones and the tilted
eyes are racial, of course; people say Slavic, or Tartar, or a
half-dozen other things, but to me they’re always
Scandinavian. If they came out of western or central Asia it
must have been along the Arctic Circle…”
He was still too far away to hit, even if he should happen to
turn his head. For a moment she saw the whole scene with a
sort of wondering horror—a civilized woman of the twentieth
century, sitting here with the marlinspike of the Cape Stiff
bully-boys secreted against her flesh between her nylon
panties and her bra, listening while this handsome boy who
was murdering her husband as surely as if he’d used a gun
discussed with such charm and evident admiration the
structure of her face. How much more of it could she stand?
The point of no return was sunset, and if she was still alive
then she’d be as mad as he was.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t do anything, she thought, trying
to isolate or identify the ultimate nightmare quality of it; she
wasn’t tied, or locked up, or even openly threatened, and
there was nothing to stop her now from leaping across that
Dead Calm — 95
narrow space with the marlinspike aswing—nothing except
that it might fail, and one chance was all she was going to get.
It always came back to that. She had a life expectancy of just
one more unsuccessful attempt to stop him, and then John
would drown.
Then was she already becoming paralyzed with indecision,
like a boy with only one dime in a candy store, unable to make
up his mind until the store had already closed and he was out
on the sidewalk? She didn’t know, but she could see it coming.
The stakes were too high, the pressure too brutal. Nobody was
equipped to hold entirely in his hands the life of the person he
loved above everything else on earth—no, not even in his
hands, but poised like an egg on the back of one of them as
though for an obstacle race in some macabre party game. Not
even professionals, she thought; the surgeon called in another
surgeon when the life of his own child was at stake.
Dead Calm — 96
10
But when he was quiet like this—if not rational, at least for the
moment not in the seizure of that torment or terror—why in
God’s name couldn’t she get through to him? It was obvious at
a glance what kind of boy he was, and the way he’d been
brought up; he’d open doors for you, give you his seat on a
bus, or bring you a drink at a cocktail party. And while she
suspected there might not be any great strength in him, there
was no doubt he was educated, civilized, and probably
incapable of deliberate evil or pointless cruelty until this
thing, whatever it was, had happened to him. Then why wasn’t
she able to reach in past the snarled wire-ends of his broken
lines of communication and make contact with him, get him to
realize what he was doing?
Maybe she hadn’t tried hard enough. Or she’d tried in the
wrong way; she’d been half hysterical herself, and she’d
screamed at him. And then she’d talked down to him, as
though it were a recognized fact between them there was
something wrong with his mind. Of course, she’d known the
error of this the moment it was done, but it was too late to
correct.
Anyway, try once more, she thought, and with a better
approach; see if you can’t establish some kind of contact
before even bringing up the subject of going back. Get him to
talk about himself? No-o. She hated to throw out the oldest
weapon in the arsenal, but there she’d be flirting with the very
Dead Calm — 97
danger she had to avoid, any reminder of the horror he was
fleeing. The past, maybe, but stay away from the voyage;
whatever it was happened at sea. Talk about painting, even if
you don’t know much about it, talk about yourself. That was it,
she thought; if she could establish an identity he could
recognize, first merely as a woman who was friendly and
sympathetic, and then as one he could help in some way, she
might penetrate the insularity of breakdown and get through,
at least temporarily, to the old behavior patterns. God, if she
could only get him to pick up the phone.
“… it’s an overworked word,” he was saying, “but definitely
valid here. I know I could feel it.”
She came back with a start. Was he still talking about her
face? “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I missed that. What was it?”
“Empathy,” he replied. “Sometimes you meet people you’re
in full conversation with before a word has ever been said. It
was that way when I first saw you. Oh, I don’t mean the sex
thing—though God knows you have plenty of that.” Again his
smile included her among the mature and the intelligent. He
glanced into the compass and then back at her, leaning over
the wheel. “I knew we’d like each other. I knew I could talk to
you, and neither of us would need an interpreter. But I don’t
even know your first name yet.”
“It’s Rae,” she said. It was starting out beautifully; he was
doing it himself. There were cigarettes and a lighter in the
right-hand pocket of the Bermuda shorts. She took them out
and tried to light one. In the six-knot breeze of their passage,
it didn’t take too much acting ability to fail three times in
succession.
“Here, let me,” he offered.
He lit the cigarette for her and passed it back, and lit one
for himself. Good, she thought; one conditioned response
might lead to another, and then another… Then it occurred to
her she could be oversimplifying just a little the labyrinthine
complexities of modern psychiatry; if doctors spent lifetimes
trying to find out why a mind went off the rails and how to get
it back, there seemed a chance it wasn’t quite that easy. But
at least she was doing something. Saracen heaved up and
swayed, quartering the long groundswell. Sunlight shattered
into golden points of fire in his hair, and the fine gray eyes
were alight with interest as they continued to search her face.
Dead Calm — 98
She tried not to remember the way they’d looked when he was
strangling her.
“Thank you, Hughie,” she said simply. Don’t overdo it; don’t
gush.
“Je vous en prie, madame.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t speak French.” She was about to add that
John was teaching her Spanish, but didn’t. Probably it was
best to keep John out of it until she had some kind of bridge
across the gap.
“I detect just a trace of Southern accent, I think. From
where?”
“Texas,” she replied.
“Oil?”
She shook her head. “Every area has its slum dwellers.
There are Texans who don’t own oil wells.”
“See, I knew we’d like each other.” Then he added, “I’m
from Mississippi. Or was originally.” He explained briefly he’d
gone to school in Switzerland and spent most of his life in
Europe.
“Are your parents still there?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “My mother’s dead. She died six years ago.”
“I’m sorry. But your father is still living?”
The change in him was startling, attuned as she was to
every nuance of his expression. “No!” he said loudly. “I mean
—I don’t know!” Agitation was evident in his eyes, and she
could sense his desperate groping through the mists in back
of them.
Then he appeared to regain control. “I mean, I haven’t seen
him for years. He still lives in Mississippi, and we never write
to each other.”
She breathed softly. That had been close. It was obvious
she’d made a mistake, but she couldn’t understand where or
how. Surely his father hadn’t been on the boat. Pretend you
didn’t see it, she told herself, and change the subject, fast.
But he had already fully recovered, as though it had never
happened. He smiled at her and said, “Never mind me; you
still haven’t told me anything about yourself. Except that
you’re from Texas, which you’ll admit yourself is trite. When
they get to the moon, they’ll find out there’s not only a Texan
Dead Calm — 99
there, but he’s already bought it, air-conditioned it, and
organized a local chapter of the John Birch Society. I could tell
you more than that about yourself, just for a start. The
chances are you weren’t an only child; you had a very good
orthodontist when you were young, or ancestors with
exceptional teeth; you’re warmhearted, and you have a great
deal of sympathy and understanding, but you’re impulsive;
and status probably means little or nothing to you. All surface,
of course, and some guesswork. So you take it. Tell me what
the leopard was looking for on the slopes of Kilimanjaro.” His
gesture included all the vast and empty Pacific. “Just a
parking place, or did he hear music?”
And the leopard was dead, she thought. But more
immediately, that lightning reversal of mood was ominous;
even when he was like this, he was further from reality than
she’d believed. Well, you still had to try.
“He heard music,” she said. “Perhaps not very good music,
and maybe even sentimental, or trite. But he also saw
something up there.”
“What?” he asked. “Samarkand? A trail disappearing into
the mist? Not the edge of a map, because maps don’t have
edges any more. They just say continued on E-12.”
“No,” she said. “What he saw was simply another leopard
listening to the same thing. A rather handsome leopard in a
furry and beat-up sort of way, with the same odd taste for
Mickey Mouse music and listening to it in strange places. It
was like this.”
She didn’t like doing it; revealing herself this way to a
stranger was too much like filling out a Kinsey questionnaire
or undressing in public, but, weighed against any possible
chance of success, the cost was small. She took a puff on her
cigarette and wondered where to begin. Anywhere, she
thought, just so you make him see you.
“One night about a year ago a man came to the hotel where
I was registered in Miami, Florida. He was a curt, rather
hardbitten sort of man with too much arrogance and a slight
limp, and I didn’t think I liked him. And apparently it was
mutual; he didn’t seem to think too highly of me. I did believe
he was honest, though, which was important in the particular
circumstances. And the reason I thought he was honest was
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that anybody that disagreeable and that indifferent to the
impression he made on other people almost had to be.
“The reason for our being there—for my being in Miami at
all, and for his being in my hotel room—was a yacht, a big
two-masted schooner named Dragoon. It was mine—or had
been. It also had quite a bit to do with the lack of friendliness
in the meeting. In the first place, there was probably a sensed
difference of attitude as to what a sailing yacht really was. To
me it was just a piece of property, like a parcel of land or a
stock certificate, that I happened to own, mostly by accident,
and which I’d been aboard only once in the two years I had
owned it. To him a boat—a good one—represented something
else. But besides this, and much more important, was the fact
Dragoon had just been stolen, and he was suspected by the
police of having helped to steal it. They’d picked him up and
questioned him, and then released him because they didn’t
have any actual proof, not enough to hold him. I gathered
from the police they’d had a difficult time with him; he wasn’t
a man who took kindly to being called a thief.
“But first maybe I’d better explain how I happened to own a
two-masted sailing yacht in the first place, since I cared
nothing at all about boats then. I was a widow, and not even a
wealthy one—just a lonely one. I’d been married for a long
time and very happily to a quiet and gentle man who was also
one of the coldest-nerved and most fantastic gamblers I’ve
ever known. His name was Chris Osborne, and I suppose
you’d say he was in the real-estate business, though realestate
speculation would be more like it. By the time he was
forty-five he’d already made and lost several fortunes. I’d been
his secretary before we were married, but even with that edge
I don’t think I was ever sure at any given moment whether we
were very well off or in debt. Not that it mattered a great deal.
Without any children—” She couldn’t bring herself to mention
the son who’d died. To a boy as young as Warriner it would
mean very little anyway, and there had to be a limit
somewhere to the coin you were willing to spend to get his
attention. “Without any children to leave it to, I could never
see any point in piling up money you didn’t need. We were
happy, which was the thing that counted. Except that of
course he was away a lot. I wasn’t much good at the social
routine, because I’d worked most of my life, and women from
better backgrounds and expensive schools could always make
Dead Calm — 101
me feel awkward and put me on the defensive—I mean the
ones who wanted to. So I had a business of my own, just for
something to do when he was away, a small sports-car agency.
But none of that’s important.
“Chris was killed three years ago. He’d gone out to Lubbock
to look at a cattle ranch he was interested in, and the plane he
was flying went out of control in a thunderstorm and crashed.
I won’t burden you with what it’s like becoming a widow just
by picking up the telephone, but it’s one of those things you
get through some way, then and afterward. It took nearly two
years to straighten out his business affairs. He was
overextended again and pretty thinly financed on several
deals he was working on, and there was a tax case pending
with the Internal Revenue Service. There wasn’t a great deal
left in the end, but I worked it out as well as I could. And it
was something to do.
“But to get on to Dragoon. Chris didn’t care anything about
boats either; he’d simply taken it in as part payment on some
deal in Florida real estate, intending to sell it later. Then he
was killed, and during the two years it took to get the estate
settled and pay off the tax bill it lay at anchor in Key West
with a watchman living aboard. Then, just as I started
advertising it for sale, it was stolen. Some men got the old
watchman drunk ashore and took it out of the harbor one
night. The police called me in Houston, and I flew down there.
They had only two leads to work on. One was that Dragoon’s
dinghy had been picked up at sea by a fishing boat southeast
of Miami near the Great Bahama Bank. The other was a
suspect.
“It seemed a man had been aboard the yacht just a few days
before, looking it over, and told the watchman he was
interested in it. The watchman remembered his name, and the
police picked him up at the hotel where he was staying in
Miami and questioned him. They’d found out who he was, and
were satisfied with his references—he’d been a charter yacht
captain in the Bahamas for a long time, and had operated a
shipyard in San Juan, Puerto Rico, until he’d got badly burned
in an explosion and fire that destroyed most of it—but they
weren’t satisfied with his story as to why he’d been interested
in Dragoon.
Dead Calm — 102
“He said he’d been hired to take a look at it by a
businessman staying at one of the big Miami Beach hotels, the
president of some pharmaceutical firm, who wanted to buy a
boat for company entertaining and asked him for a
professional opinion of Dragoon before making me an offer
subject to final survey. But when the police checked, the
businessman turned out to be a phony. There was no such
company, and the man himself had checked out of the hotel
the same night Dragoon was stolen. So it was obvious he was
one of the thieves. The only thing the police still weren’t sure
of was whether this man was also one of the thieves or just
another victim.
“So that’s when he came to see me at the hotel, just after
he’d been questioned by the police, this hard-bitten and
disagreeable man with the limp. His name was John Ingram,
he said, and he was going to help me find my boat. I offered to
pay him and was curtly brushed off. There would be no
charge, he said. I was glad to have his help, but I still wasn’t
any fonder of him. I could be stubborn too, and I didn’t like
having favors tossed at me in that manner.
“But at the same time I began to have a very funny feeling
about it. We’d find the boat. We’d find it if he had to sift the
Atlantic Ocean with a tea-strainer. Maybe the thieves had
made a mistake stealing it in the first place, but their really
sad mistake was ever getting this man involved in it.
“He had an idea it was in trouble, probably out there
somewhere near where the dinghy had been found, so we
chartered a seaplane in Nassau to search the area from the
air, and we finally located it aground on a sandbar on the edge
of the Great Bahama Bank, about a hundred and fifty miles
southeast of Miami. The pilot landed us, with a rubber raft,
and we went aboard. Two of the men who’d stolen it were still
on it. They’d been trying to run a cargo of guns to one of the
Central American countries, when they’d run up onto the Bank
from poor navigation.
“John got the boat away from them, refloated it—without a
towboat—threaded it through all those shoals and sandbars
into deep water again, and sailed it back to Miami. I watched
him do it; otherwise I probably wouldn’t have believed it. But
that isn’t what I started out to tell you, not just a story of
watching an indomitable man do the impossible against a
Dead Calm — 103
background I didn’t even know existed, nor even the fact that
I got my boat back. Long before we reached Florida I didn’t
care whether we ever did, and Dragoon had ceased to be
important at all. I was just terrified he was going to sail it into
Miami, tie it up, step off onto the dock, and say, ‘Now, Mrs.
Osborne, there’s your goddamned boat,’ and turn around and
walk away without even looking back. And if he did I knew I
couldn’t stand it. It was as simple as that.
“I realize you can’t even become acquainted with somebody
in five days, let alone fall in love with him. But it happened.
Maybe it was the slow-motion effect of time and that
increased sensitivity to everything you have in an unusual
situation. Maybe it was from being with him every minute
there in his own element, this world that was so strange and
so utterly fascinating to me, as if I were actually seeing him
for the first time. As I was. He wasn’t an arrogant and
disagreeable man at all, but just a very proud one who felt
he’d been made a fool of. And a very lonely one. He tried to
hide it under all that armor of self-sufficiency, the way he
fought the limp from those burns, but it was as clear to me as
if he’d been carrying a sign.
“The same thing was happening to him, and he didn’t walk
away when we got to Miami, but naturally it wasn’t as hasty
and impulsive as all that, not with either of us. It took some
time to clear myself of the suspicion of being some wealthy
and socially prominent man-eater who was trying to buy him
for a pet, and to convince him that I didn’t have any more
money than he did. Then he pointed out that I’d seen him only
in his own environment, and he’d look entirely different in
mine—that is, living and working ashore. That wasn’t true, of
course, but I knew he would be unhappy. But it was a dead
issue anyway; there was nothing in my old life I wanted to go
back to. I was as in love with this exciting new world of his
just as much as he was, and I had a simpler approach to the
subject of environment anyway. Mine was any place that
included him. But then I warned you this was sentimental and
probably corny.
“We were married six months later, after I’d wound up all
the loose ends in Houston and sold everything I didn’t want to
be burdened with any more. I sold Dragoon, which was too big
for two people to handle, and we bought Saracen. Some day
Dead Calm — 104
we expect we may go into the charter business in the
Bahamas or West Indies, but that’s in the future. Now we’re
on our honeymoon. We’re on our way to Tahiti. We realize it
has jet runways now, but there are places beyond that don’t.
We don’t know how long the cruise will last nor how far we’ll
go. Maybe we’ll simply go broke. We don’t really care. I
suppose you could call it a juvenile dream, or flight from
responsibility, or refusal to accept the challenge, but
everybody doesn’t have to listen to the same drum. I like ours.
I fell in love with it the first time I heard it, one night on a
grounded schooner on the Great Bahama Bank, when I
discovered what he was listening to and that I was in love with
him. I’ve heard it ever since. I heard it this morning at dawn,
becalmed a thousand miles from land, when he woke me
winding a chronometer, and in a hundred other places and
times and different kinds of weather, and always with him. If it
ever stopped, or anything happened to him, I don’t think I’d
want to go on living.” She paused and took a deep breath to
steady the shaky feeling inside her. If she hadn’t reached him,
she never would.
“Now, Hughie,” she went on quietly, “don’t you think it’s
time we went back?”
His eyes had been on her face throughout with that same
look of interest. Now he appeared to be caught off guard by
this abrupt change of subject.
“Back?” he asked politely.
“Yes. To get John.”
“You mean back there?”
“Yes. We have to, Hughie. You realize that as well as I do—”
He shook his head. “Of course we can’t go back.”
She held on tightly. Don’t scream at him. Don’t lose your
head. Some of it must have got through. “Hughie, please—”
But how in God’s name could you keep repeating the obvious
without the appearance of talking down, of explaining
something to an idiot? How did you keep it on an intelligent
level after you’d said it a dozen times? There simply wasn’t
any way. “We have to go back now, Hughie. Now, before it’s
too late.”
Dead Calm — 105
“No,” he said with a little shrug of annoyance. She could see
him beginning to go away, as though she had disappointed
him again with this revelation of selfishness in her character.
“Hughie, he’s my husband. I love him. Do you think I could
go off and leave him on a sinking boat, to drown? You can’t,
either; you know you can’t. You’re not capable of a thing like
that. How could you justify it? You couldn’t live with yourself
—”
“Do you always have to ruin everything by becoming
hysterical? He won’t drown.”
“But that boat is sinking!”
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“You said it was. You told us yourself.”
“I did?” It was obvious he didn’t believe it. He glanced into
the binnacle, dismissing the whole thing as of no importance.
“I don’t know why I would have said a thing like that.”
“Well, if it’s not sinking, why did you abandon it and come
on here?”
“Why?” He looked up sharply. “Because they’re trying to kill
me.”
She knew she was skirting the precipice now, but there was
no way to avoid it. You couldn’t plead with him to go back
without running into his reasons for not going. “Who’s trying
to kill you?”
“Both of them.” His expression changed then, becoming one
of triumphant slyness. “But I fooled them. They’ll never get
me now, even with your husband helping them.”
There it was, she thought. They had come full circle and
were back facing each other across the unbridgeable chasm.
But at least he hadn’t become violent, and if she could stay
here and go on talking maybe eventually she could get behind
him. The marlinspike was cold and frightening against her
flesh.
“Hughie,” she said soothingly, “nobody wants to kill you—”
“What?”
“I said nobody wants to hurt you.”
The craftiness in his eyes became more pronounced. “You
mean I just imagined it?”
Dead Calm — 106
She saw the trap and tried to avoid it. “No, I mean it must
be a mistake, a misunderstanding of some kind—”
“No! I know what you meant. You think there’s something
wrong with me, don’t you?”
“Of course I don’t, Hughie.”
“Oh, yes, you do. You’re just the same as they were. First
your husband, and now you! Poor Hughie’s subject to
hallucinations!” His voice slipped up into falsetto, apparently
in imitation of someone, and was charged with an
indescribable bitterness. “You just imagined it, Hughie, dear.
Of course you did, darling.”
“Hughie! Stop that!” She tried to sound stern and forceful.
Maybe she could shock him out of it.
His hands tightened on the wheel, and his eyes were on her
with the beginnings of wildness in them. “And I thought I
could trust you! I thought you were like Estelle!”
She could only stare in terror then. The name itself seemed
to do something to him, to goad him beyond reason. Tendons
stood out in his throat, and muscles writhed along his arms
and shoulders as he tried to pull the wheel loose, or shake it.
He cried out as though something were tearing inside him,
and began to shout, leaning toward her across the wheel. She
could feel the drops of spittle on her arm.
“They murdered her! They tried to kill us both! And you
want to take me back there, don’t you, so they can finish the
job? Oh, I know what you’re trying to do!” He half rose from
the seat, as if to come out from behind the wheel.
Trying to stop him with the marlinspike would be suicide.
She’d only hit him on an upraised arm, and then he’d take it
away from her. If she ran, it would almost certainly trigger
pursuit, and he could catch her before she could make it to
the forward cabin. She did the only dung that was left. She sat
still, forcing herself not even to draw back from him. For a
second that seemed to go on forever it hung there, and then
he dropped back to the seat again.
“They did it!” he shrieked. “They did it!” He was staring
straight in front of him, and she sensed that he had forgotten
her. His lips continued to move, but he made no further
sound, and a muscle kicked spasmodically under one eye.
Dead Calm — 107
She never knew how afterward, but she forced herself to
remain seated for another thirty seconds. Then she stood up
slowly and with exaggerated casualness, on legs that trembled
and had to be locked at the knees to support her. He paid no
attention. She stepped back into the hatchway and started
down, still clasping the marlinspike under her arm. At the
bottom her legs quit on her at last, but she made it to one of
the bunks before she collapsed. She turned then and looked
back at the hatch. Sunlight fell into it unobstructed, sweeping
back and forth across the ladder treads as Saracen rolled. The
clatter of the engine went on, and above it she could either
hear or feel the pounding of her heart.
It was the starboard bunk she was on—her own, where John
came to her when they made love. Above it was the
radiotelephone that was powerless to reach him, its very
silence a cry for help. And under it in one of the drawers was
the shotgun. She had remembered it too easily this time. Her
mind slipped away from it with the same revulsion, but she
could still see it. She pushed herself off the bunk and ran on
into the forward cabin and bolted the door.
It was 11:10 a.m. She raised her eyes from the watch and
swept them around the tiny V-shaped compartment that was
no longer a sanctuary or a haven but a corner. It even looked
like one.
Dead Calm — 108
11
There were two choices, and she had seven hours in which to
make up her mind. But both choices were impossible, and
nobody could endure this for seven hours.
What happened then?
She could foresee the answer, but she went over it again,
just to be sure. Her mind was operating quite coldly at the
moment, and she was calm; she was stronger than she’d
thought. But then this was only the beginning, and the show
hadn’t even started yet. She knew what was coming.
She could kill Warriner with the shotgun, or she could go off
and leave John to drown. Since neither of these was even
conceivable, she had the third, which wasn’t an alternative
choice but merely a statement of fact or at least of probable
truth. Nobody could endure this for seven hours. Her nerves
would crack. Sometime between now and sunset her whole
nervous system would go up in a puff of smoke like a shortcircuited
pinball machine; bells would ring, lights would flash,
and she’d wind up lying on the bunk staring blankly at nothing
while she picked at the fuzz on the blankets. In which case,
alternative number two would win by default, and John would
drown anyway.
Was that all?
No. There was still one other possibility. At the moment her
nerves snapped she might run out and attack Warriner with
Dead Calm — 109
the marlinspike or with her bare hands. The result of that was
foregone.
Then she had to kill Warriner, and she had to do it before
just thinking of it drove her out of her mind.
No. She sat down on one of the sailbags with her hands
pressed against her temples. Nothing in life could ever be
reduced to as simple terms as that. There had to be some
other way out of the corner.
Well, where was it? Try them all again.
Hit him with something? He was suspicious of her now, and
she couldn’t get behind him. And again you ran into the same
old limiting factor; you’d get only one blow, and if that didn’t
work you were dead, and so was John.
Try once more to reason with him? After what had just
happened? You could carry on long conversations with him on
any subject in the world, except one. At the mere mention of
going back, he retreated into his madness and pulled up the
bridge.
Well, maybe John wouldn’t drown; maybe Orpheus wasn’t
sinking. That there was no way of proving definitely, one way
or the other, but she had the evidence of her own eyes that
there was water in the boat, lots of water. And why didn’t the
radio work? Then she thought of something else. The engine
didn’t work either, or John would have followed them. So
everything below was flooded. Even if it weren’t in danger of
sinking within the next few hours, John would never make port
in it. Nobody could pump continuously for twenty days or
more. Warriner said there were others aboard, but they hadn’t
been on deck, and they would have been. So either they didn’t
exist except in his madness, or they were hurt or already
dead.
But at least she could try the radio again. She slid back the
bolt and went out, carrying the marlinspike. If he started
down the ladder she could throw it at his legs to be sure of
getting back in time. She called and listened alternately on
both the intership frequencies. There was no answer, no
sound except the eternal crackling of the static. At the end of
twenty minutes she knew she no longer had any hope of one,
that she was only putting off the thing she had to face. She
switched it off and went back. Very carefully and precisely she
Dead Calm — 110
noted the heading on the compass and wrote it down on the
scratch pad along with the time.
11:40 AM 226 degrees
It looked neat and businesslike. And there was the illusion
she was doing something.
They hit her then from opposite sides, or rather she ran
headlong into the second while she was recoiling from the
first. The first, of course, was John. He was in the water,
drowning, as the sun went down. She leaned forward with her
face pressed against the scratch pad on her knees, her eyes
tightly closed and then opened again because it was more
clearly seen and more terrible with them closed. Then it was
gone, as if an automatic projector were changing slides, and
she saw the thing that would be there in the cockpit when the
shotgun had done its work.
She’d never in her life shot anything with a gun of any kind,
but her father and two older brothers had been hunters of
quail, and inevitably she had seen a few examples of the mess
that resulted when a bird was shot too close under the gun.
She had no illusions as to what would be up there. She
swallowed, fighting the nausea pushing up into her throat.
Seven hours?
Maybe she could merely frighten him with the gun, point it
at him the way they did on television, and say, “All right,
Hughie, turn around and go back.” This, she knew in her
heart, was idiocy comparable to that other cliché of the
private eyes and western marshals, the immaculate and neatly
packaged death by gunshot wound that never hurt, either the
shooter or the shot, but she gathered it to her for a moment in
the desperation of her need for some other way out of the
corner. Granted there didn’t seem to be much likelihood of
scaring a man who was already insane from fear, you could at
least examine it and try to figure out what would happen.
You had to assume two things, she thought. The first was
that Hughie was capable of evaluating two different fears and
making a conscious choice of the lesser. Could he? Probably,
at least part of the time, but at any specific moment it would
be as unpredictable as tossing a coin. The second was that a
quaking matron with a gun would be more fearsome than the
irrational horror that had already taken possession of his
Dead Calm — 111
mind. No. Certainly not. The things in the darkness beyond
the firelight were always more terrible than the ones that you
could see. He’d either pay no attention to the gun at all, or at
the mere mention of going back he’d go berserk and charge
straight at her.
But it was still worth trying, wasn’t it? Even if there was
only one chance in a thousand she could bluff him into going
back and could control him all the way there without actually
having to shoot, at least there would be that one. No. She saw
the stupidity of it. Trying to bluff a man she couldn’t bluff,
with a gun she hoped she wouldn’t have to use, was nothing
short of suicide. In that second when she was still hysterically
voicing threats and praying he would stop before she had to
shoot, it would be too late to shoot, even if she could, and he’d
have the gun away from her and he’d kill her. If she took it up
that ladder at all and committed herself, it had to be with the
hundred-per-cent certainty she was prepared to use it. And
that she didn’t have.
Why not? It was Warriner, wasn’t it, who’d backed her into
this corner from which there was no other exit?
Legally there was no question of her right to do so. There
would be a hearing, somewhere and sometime, at which she
would have to testify as to the circumstances, but that was all.
She wouldn’t be charged with anything, and nobody would
attach any blame to her. Then it was simply because of all
those nights she’d wake up screaming, and the fact that until
the day she died her mind would never emerge completely
from the shadow of that unanswered question: could there
have been some other way?
So in the end it boiled down to a simple act of purchase,
didn’t it? If she had no illusions about the price or about the
fact she would have to pay it, the terms were clear and
understood. For John’s life she gave up her peace of mind for
the rest of her own. Why not? People gave up their lives
themselves for others, didn’t they? This was the opposite of
heroic, and the act itself was abhorrent, but the same love was
involved, the same willingness to pay.
She realized then there was no sense to any of these
arguments. You couldn’t rationalize killing a man with a
shotgun, and you didn’t arrive at the deed by any process of
thought, of weighing the advantages and disadvantages. If you
Dead Calm — 112
did it at all, it was after you’d quit thinking, in desperation,
when nothing else was left.
And, anyway, she probably couldn’t even assemble the gun.
John had never done it since it had been aboard, and it had
been nearly twenty years since she’d seen her father do it.
And it could be a different kind, or a later model. Guns must
change over the years, the way cars did, didn’t they? Of
course they did.
But there were only two pieces.
No, it was just her impression there were only two pieces.
There might be more. She’d never counted them, had she?
Well, if she found out she couldn’t assemble it, that would
settle it, and the torture would stop.
Then, without even knowing how she’d got there, she was
kneeling beside the bunk in the after cabin, pulling out the
drawer. There were only two rolls of the fleece, one long one
and another shorter and bulkier. She ran back into the
forward cabin with them and bolted the door. She put them on
the bunk and began untying the cords that bound them.
There were three pieces.
The long roll contained only the barrels, the twin dark tubes
fixed side by side, but the other held two pieces. One was the
part that went against your shoulder—the stock, she thought
it was called—with the lever for breaking it open to put in the
shells, and the trigger guard and the triggers. The other piece
was a hand-grip sort of thing she seemed to remember went
under the barrels just in front of the stock. It was mostly of
wood, rounded on the sides and bottom, tapering at one end
and fitted with a concave piece of steel at the other. She had
no idea how it was supposed to be attached to the barrels.
The barrels themselves had a projection at one end, on the
bottom, that must fit into something in the metal part at the
front end of the stock. She took them in one hand and the
stock in the other and began trying to match them. Yes, there
it was. They went together, and formed a hinge. She swung
the barrels up, and they locked in place.
But there was still the third part. And it was obvious it was
the wrong piece for this kind of gun, or that something was
missing. It was supposed to go under the barrels, right there,
and there was nothing to hold it. The concave end must go
Dead Calm — 113
against the rounded metal end there at the front of the stock.
And you could see it didn’t even fit; it still stuck out at a slight
angle. Well, John must have ordered another one to be
shipped to them in Papeete. And since the gun couldn’t be
assembled without the right piece— There was a little click,
and she gasped. The fore end had snapped up into place
against the spring tension that held it there.
She stared at it in horror. It was a complete shotgun. It was
all there, and it was assembled.
* * *
For the third time in ten minutes Lillian Warriner saw Ingram
glance off to the northeast where the squall flickered and
rumbled along the rim of the world. She could see no
appreciable difference in the squall itself. It was still the same
swollen mass of purple, shot through with the fitful play of
lightning and trailing its skirts of rain, seemingly no larger or
nearer than it had been a quarter of an hour ago—but it was
Ingram himself she was watching. She judged by the simple
fact that he kept looking at it that he was worried about it,
though he said nothing. He continued to bail, the gray eyes
expressionless.
Well, it wasn’t likely he’d be running in circles and wringing
his hands. And there was nothing they could do about the
squall anyway, except get the sail off, and probably he’d send
her to wake Bellew. No doubt there was some quixotic male
convention against allowing the porcine bastard to drown in
his sleep.
She liked Ingram and was conscious of increasing
admiration for him, though this of course only added to the
burden of her guilt, while at the same time evoking a mild sort
of wonder at her willingness to credit her appraisal of anybody
any more after having been so conspicuously wrong about
Bellew. No, it wasn’t so much that she’d been wrong as that
she’d simply had no way of knowing how small even a large
yacht could become after a few days at sea. Human beings
confined in too small an area were apparently subject to the
same laws regarding molecular friction and the generation of
heat as gases under compression.
So now not only had they managed to blow themselves up,
but the spreading shock wave of disaster had engulfed two
Dead Calm — 114
other people whose only crime had been the fact they were in
the same part of the ocean. The guilt was still hers, and she
accepted it, though it seemed a terrible price to pay for the
pursuit of an impossible dream, a few minutes of arrant and
unforgivable bitchiness, and an accident. There were
beckoning avenues of escape: the accident couldn’t have been
her fault because she’d been asleep at the time, and she’d
been goaded into the bitchiness, but these were sleazy
evasions and technicalities for which she had nothing but
contempt. They were the type of thing that Hughie— She
stopped.
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