Well, it was true, wasn’t it? And therein, unfortunately, lay
her guilt, the real responsibility from which there would never
be any escape—the pursuit of the impossible dream, while she
knew it was impossible. She’d known it would never work,
that temperamentally she was wrong for him and she’d
demand too much of him, but she’d managed to ignore the
warnings of her mind.
If only, she thought now in her own contained and private
agony, she’d left him alone. She was worse than any of them;
she’d utterly destroyed him. Because she did love him. She
wondered what crimes the human race could have found to
commit without those great ennobling causes like freedom,
religion, and love.
She glanced up. Ingram had stopped bailing and was
preparing to lower the mainsail. She looked out toward the
squall still making up in the northeast. “Is it coming nearer?”
“I can’t tell yet what it’s going to do,” he replied. “But
there’s no use letting the sails slat any longer.”
“Do you want me to help?”
“No. Better keep pumping. Or just rest for a few minutes.”
She was conscious of numbness in her arms and shoulders,
but she shook her head. “No. I’m all right.” She bent to the
pump again.
If only she’d left him alone…
* * *
The main and mizzen were tightly furled. Ingram finished
lashing the genoa rolled up along the lifeline and looked at his
watch. It was 3:50 p.m. The sun, though lower in the west,
Dead Calm — 115
still beat on them with sullen weight in the sticky and
unmoving air that felt as if you were trying to breathe in a
vacuum. The day was a squall-breeder if he’d ever seen one.
There was no sound except water going overboard from the
pump and those other and inexorably increasing tons of it
sloshing back and forth inside the hull as Orpheus lurched
over on the swell. The whole northeast sky was black now, but
then squalls always looked worse when they were opposite the
sun. There was still a chance it would pass to the northward of
them, and he didn’t want to call Bellew. Not yet. Let him get
all the sleep he could. There was a long night ahead of them—
if they were still afloat.
He was conscious now of his own tiredness and of the fact
he had eaten nothing since breakfast. But he wasn’t hungry; it
was too hot to eat, even if there was anything aboard not
ruined by the water. He picked up the binoculars and climbed
atop the deckhouse. Very slowly and carefully he searched the
horizon all across the southwest, finding nothing but
emptiness. When he lowered the glasses he saw Mrs.
Warriner’s eyes on him. He shook his head. She nodded, her
face as expressionless as his own, and went on pumping.
He stepped back to the ventilating hatch and looked down at
the water washing back and forth in the after cabin. It was
worse, he thought; even with one of them pumping and one
bailing, they were barely keeping up with it. He started to
drop the bucket in but turned and glanced back at Mrs.
Warriner. She was on the verge of collapse. The hell with it.
There was no use letting her kill herself. He tossed the bucket
on the deck, then went over and picked up her cigarettes and
lighter from the deckhouse.
“Here,” he said. He set one of the cigarettes between her
lips and flicked the lighter. “Let me take it for a while.”
She surrendered the pump reluctantly. “But how about
yourself? You haven’t had any rest at all. And won’t it gain?”
“It’ll just have to gain. You’re not going to help things by
keeling over. And while you’re resting, you could finish telling
me what happened—that is, if you feel up to it.”
She sat down on the deck, facing him. “It’s not the
pleasantest thing in the world to tell, but since we did this to
you, I’d say you had every right to know how we did it.” She
took a puff on the cigarette and went on. “To understand why
Dead Calm — 116
he thinks we tried to murder him, you need a little
background and a thumbnail sketch of the characters
involved. Hughie, as I’ve told you, was an oversheltered boy
who never had a chance to grow up; Mrs. Bellew was a rather
plain, very gentle woman with an infinite amount of
compassion; Bellew, of course, is a pig; and I’m an arrogant
and insufferable bitch.”
Ingram paused in his pumping. “Do you have to do that?”
She wondered herself. She’d always held a dim view of the
therapeutic value of catharsis or confession and regarded all
breast-beating and cries of mea culpa as being more vulgar
exhibitionism than anything else. If you’d bought it, you lived
with it as well as you could and with as little fuss as possible.
But on the other hand, if you’d wronged another human being,
you at least owed him an explanation.
“You wanted to understand, didn’t you?” she asked curtly.
“I’ve never been greatly addicted to the use of euphemisms
and evasions, and if I thought you were responsible for
something I wouldn’t hesitate to tell you. To be any good, it
has to work both ways.”
“I know. But aside from the fact I don’t think it’s true—”
“Thank you. You are nice, Mr. Ingram. But you haven’t
heard the story.”
“No.” He resumed pumping. “But there’s more to it than his
thinking you tried to kill him. Why is he so afraid of water?”
“Because he thinks that’s the way we tried to kill him, by
drowning—”
He shook his head. “No. It’s still not that simple.” He told
her briefly of Rae’s throwing the whisky bottle overboard and
of Warriner’s reaction to watching it sink.
She nodded. “Yes. I know about that part of it.” She was
silent for a moment, thinking. “I’m not sure I can explain it
myself, except that I think it’s a fear of drowning carried to
the point of phobia. You know what acrophobia is, of course?”
“Yes. A morbid fear of heights. But it has nothing to do with
water.”
“I know. But in his case I think it does.” She nodded toward
the sea around them. “When you look out there you see
nothing but the surface. So do I; so does everybody. We
realize vaguely that two miles down there’s a bottom, but we
Dead Calm — 117
never think of it, even if we’re swimming in it—probably even
if we’re in trouble in it. It makes no difference whether you
drown in seven feet of water, or seven miles; you still drown
within a few feet of the surface. But you’re in the water; I
think he imagines himself rather precariously suspended on
the surface of it, as if it were a film of some kind, ten thousand
feet above the bottom. In other words, I get the impression he
sees it all the way down. Hence, acrophobia. As I say, I’m only
guessing, but how else can you account for that horror when
he sees something sinking below him? To him, it’s not sinking;
it’s falling. And, like all people with acrophobia, he imagines
himself falling with it.”
Ingram nodded, though still not convinced she was right.
“But he wasn’t always like that?”
“Oh, no. He was an excellent swimmer. And skin-diver. It’s
simply because of what we did to him ten days ago. But you
have to understand what happened before, and what the
situation was. Explosive is a good one-word description. To
begin with, not one of us was competent to take a yacht across
the Pacific, and incompetence multiplied by any number up to
infinity is still incompetence. Four people who don’t know
what they’re doing—”
“Are simply four times worse than one,” Ingram said. “So
nobody was in charge?”
“No. Not after things started to fall apart. Hughie, as legal
owner of the yacht and the only one with any sailing
experience at all, should have been in command, but you can’t
force a man to command, to fight back, to accept
responsibility, if the only responsibility he’s ever had in his life
was to be acceptable and pleasing to a succession of
overprotective women who took care of him. And if you
happen to be in love with him and have to stand there
helplessly day after day and watch this disintegration under
pressure, this thing you can’t do anything about, eventually
your own frustration may goad you into doing something
stupid and cruel and unforgivable. But I didn’t intend to make
excuses, and I’m getting ahead of the story anyway.”
Dead Calm — 118
12
“Hughie,” she went on, “has always been obsessed by a
feeling for the greatness of Gauguin, and it’s been a lifelong
ambition of his to go to Polynesia and live among the islands
as he did, escape from the rat race the same way, paint the
same subjects, experience the same things. So, when we were
married in Europe almost a year ago, I let myself be
persuaded, in spite of the fact I had some misgivings about it.
In the first place, there’s no escape from our so-called
civilization any more; the twentieth century is something
we’re locked into and there’s no way we can get out; when we
got to Papeete we’d probably find the same jukeboxes, the
same headlines, the same cocktail parties, the same jet
service from here to there, the same Bomb, and the same
exhortations to embrace the finer life by buying something.
And in the second place, I was more than a little doubtful of
our ability to sail a boat down there. But at heart I wanted to
be persuaded, and I was. From my point of view there were
several things in favor of it. No doubt you can guess what
some of them were, but in the interests of clarity they might
as well be included in this confession. I’m considerably older
than Hughie, and when I met him I was a widow, a fairly
wealthy one. You know what he looks like. The picture is trite
to the point of banality, except that in this case it’s not true at
all. He’s no glorified beach-boy, and we were genuinely in love
with each other. And while I bleed very little over the opinions
Dead Calm — 119
of other people, I didn’t want him regarded as something he
wasn’t—at least, not yet, by the grace of God. I have a small
but very good collection of paintings, and I know the work of
talent when I see it. I wanted to help him, and in Hughie’s
case one way of helping him—and me—was to keep him out of
the reach of all that gaggle of soi-disant benefactresses and
panting patrons of the arts who couldn’t keep their hands off
him.”
She broke off with an impatient gesture and then went on.
“But enough of that. Hughie bought and studied all the books
he could find on yachting and navigation. We chartered a
yacht, with a professional crew of two, for a cruise in the
western Mediterranean, from Cannes down to the Balearics,
to learn as much as we could from practical experience. We
came back to the States last winter, bought Orpheus, and
began getting ready.”
She smiled musingly. “Then I think we were betrayed. No
doubt you remember the old ploy of crooked gamblers, letting
the sheep, the intended victim, win the first few hands in
order to increase the stakes. It was as if the Pacific Ocean, or
fate, did it deliberately. The passage from Santa Barbara
down to La Paz was ridiculously easy. Nothing went wrong at
all. The weather was perfect, Hughie’s navigation was
seemingly accurate enough, the couple with us, who were old
friends of mine from San Francisco, were congenial, and we
were never at sea long enough for the confinement and too
close association to cause any friction, because we made stops
at San Diego and Ensenada. If anything had gone wrong in
that first leg of the trip we would have been brought face to
face with our own inexperience and incompetence, and we’d
have had sense enough to give it up. But nothing did, and we
were far too overconfident and cocky by the time we reached
La Paz.
“Then the other couple had to abandon the trip there and go
back to San Francisco because of illness. We lay at anchor in
the harbor for nearly three months.”
“Were you living aboard all the time?” Ingram asked.
“No. We came back to California, by plane, for several
weeks, and part of the time we lived ashore at a hotel. Why?”
“I think that’s when the dry rot began to run wild. Orpheus
may have still been sound enough to make it to Papeete when
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you left Santa Barbara, but after three months of lying there
in La Paz, probably with no ventilation below, she was eaten
up with it by the time you sailed.”
She nodded. “At any rate, we were stranded. Orpheus was
too large for two people to handle, even if we’d dared attempt
it alone. None of my friends who would have liked to go could
get away. We wrote to the yacht broker who’d sold us the
boat, and he managed to locate a professional willing to make
the trip, a man named Grover or Glover, who turned out to be
utterly impossible. He arrived on the plane from Tijuana dead
drunk, and somehow managed to stay that way the five days
he was in La Paz, without, as far as we could discover, ever
taking a drink. And while it might have been interesting from
a medical point of view to see if he could stay bagged all the
way across the Pacific with no visible intake of alcohol, as a
yacht captain he was hopeless. We paid him off and decanted
him into the Tijuana plane. So we were on the point of selling
Orpheus and flying to Papeete to buy another boat there
where we could hire an Island crew, when we met the Bellews
at the little hotel ashore. Bellew was gathering material for an
article on big-game fishing in the Gulf of California, and we
became quite friendly in the two weeks they were there. We
asked them to make the trip with us.”
It was a tragic mistake, but one that had been very easy to
make. It was banal to say that Bellew had seemed different
ashore, but in the end that was what it amounted to. She
supposed they all had, for that matter. Bellew was a man it
was easy to get along with sitting around a cafe table sipping
tall iced drinks in a backwater fishing port as limited in other
diversions and other friends as La Paz. He’d led an intense
and active outdoor life and had a great fund of entertaining
stories which he told exceedingly well and with only a little
suggestion of boasting. He played the guitar and sang folk
songs in the manner of Burl Ives, and he and Hughie, who also
sang very well, had two or three times put on highly
successful impromptu shows for the other patrons of the
hotel. He was big and outgoing and, if a little loud at times,
not offensively so, and there was a male competence and
assurance about him she’d instinctively trusted because they
somehow reminded her of her first husband. It would take
more trying circumstances than sitting in cafes or fishing for
Dead Calm — 121
marlin with him to bring up the other side of the coin, the
cruelty and the contempt for any kind of weakness.
Perhaps, on the other hand, Bellew could feel with some
justification that he’d been fooled too. He’d claimed no
experience with the sea except that highly specialized
business of big-game fishing, in power cruisers and usually
very near to land, while Hughie, emboldened by the complete
success of the trip down the coast from Santa Barbara, had
perhaps sounded a little too salty and seagoing, sitting around
the drinks.
And she’d liked Estelle Bellew—at least at first. Estelle was
a rather shy and only moderately attractive woman of around
forty, who was completely wrapped up in her photography and
had no apparent designs on Hughie. This turned out to be
another mistake, of course. While she didn’t have any amatory
interest in him—then or later—she did have a great reservoir
of unexpended gentleness and compassion she’d never had
any occasion to use, living with this hairy and domineering
bastard she was married to, and she was possessed of an
equally frustrated mother instinct that Hughie brought out in
full, especially after it became apparent how badly Hughie
needed a mother or somebody to protect him from the Pacific
Ocean and from Bellew’s abrasive contempt.
“Why did he want to make the trip?” Ingram asked. “Bellew,
I mean.”
“I don’t even know who first suggested it,” she replied. “It
was just one of those ideas that can burst on the scene fully
grown when four people are sitting in a bar with their second
or third round of drinks. It was about ten days after we’d met
them, and we’d just come in from a day’s fishing as his guests
on the boat he’d chartered. He already had all the material for
the story he was doing on the fishing at La Paz and was sure
he could get a story, or perhaps two, out of the trip. I told him
we would be glad to pay their air transportation back from
Papeete. And, after all, it would only take a month.” She
smiled bitterly. “We sailed from La Paz twenty-six days ago.”
Before they were more than a week out, everything began to
go wrong. They blew out a sail in a squall and lost another
overboard. Leaks began to show up from opened deck seams
so that when they were shipping any water aboard everything
below was soaked. They missed Clipperton Island because
Dead Calm — 122
something had apparently slipped up in Hughie’s navigation.
They used up most of their fuel trying to beat their way back
to it, which was ridiculous, since it was uninhabited anyway,
but by now they were no longer acting rationally but only
motivated by their endless quarrels. They gave up trying to
find the island after it failed a second and a third time to
appear where Hughie said it was. Orpheus began to leak
alarmingly, so it took more pumping every day to keep the
water out of the cabins.
But beyond all that, it was the old story of clashing
personalities jammed into too small a space with nowhere to
go to avoid each other. Bellew became caustic, loud-mouthed,
and finally insufferable, openly contemptuous of Hughie’s
mistakes in navigation and seamanship, while Hughie, instead
of fighting back, retreated into sullenness and pouting. Estelle
Bellew was sympathetic and tried to shield him from her
husband. Lillian herself lashed out at Bellew in defense of
Hughie—or she did at first, until she decided that wasn’t the
answer—but at the same time it was lacerating to have to
admit to herself that he even needed defending against
another man. Some of her hurt and resentment must have
showed, for Hughie began turning increasingly to Estelle
rather than to her for comfort when he backed down from
Bellew. And Estelle tried increasingly to help him, as though
he were a boy, and alone.
“That in itself was infuriating,” she went on. “The
implication was that I was some species of heartless monster
who had no sympathy, no feeling for him at all. She had the
best intentions in the world, but she simply couldn’t seem to
understand that that was the trouble in the first place, that
he’d never in his life had to accept the responsibility for his
own actions or fight for his rights, because there was always
some woman panting to shield him from the one and buy him
the other. And she was simply doing it again. I was trying to
help him in the only way he could be helped—or that I hoped
he could be helped—by letting him work it out for himself, no
matter how I cringed and wanted to go somewhere and cry
when he simply retreated into petulance in the face of
Bellew’s contempt, or no matter how much easier it would
have been to set him behind me and then remove Bellew’s
skin in strips. So I began to treat her—Estelle—with the same
insufferable nastiness that Bellew treated Hughie.
Dead Calm — 123
“In the end I couldn’t stand it any longer—the helplessness
of it, I mean—watching Hughie being browbeaten without the
spirit to fight back, and not being able to do anything in the
world about it except drive him more and more to some other
woman for sympathy. I hated both of them, and I hated myself.
I blew up. I did the one thing that was guaranteed to hurt
everybody. I made an open, deliberate pass at Bellew.”
“Well, it’s been done before,” Ingram said.
“But seldom by people who are assumed to be adult. And
seldom with consequences as tragic. It happened one night
just at the end of the second week.”
It was shortly after dinner and they were all on deck. She
was at the wheel, having relieved Hughie just at dusk so he
could take a series of star sights while he could still see the
horizon. Bellew was sprawled in the cockpit beyond her, while
Estelle was sitting alone on the forward end of the deckhouse,
looking at the fading afterglow of sunset. Hughie’s star sights
didn’t work out. He’d got three of them, with three lines of
position several hundred miles apart, none of which crossed,
or were anywhere near the dead-reckoning position based on
the equally dubious fix he’d got at noon. Either his figures
were wrong or he’d mistaken his stars. A long time went by
while he checked and rechecked his work. Then he came out
on deck with a star chart, but in the meantime the moon had
risen and the stars were fading and hard to distinguish. And
Bellew started on him again. Her flesh crawled.
“How’s it look, Magellan? We still seem to be in the same
ocean?”
Hughie made no reply. He went on futilely trying to match
up at least one of the stars with his chart. Her heart ached for
him. She wished she could help him. And why, oh why, in the
name of God, didn’t he turn on the badgering and idiotic
salaud and tell him to shut up?
“I’ll tell you what, Commodore,” Bellew went on, “if it turns
out we’re anywhere near Greeley, Colorado, I got a friend
runs a bar there…”
She closed her eyes. Do something, Hughie!
He did. Like a sullen child, he threw the star chart on the
deck. “Hughie,” she called out quickly, trying to save him from
utter shame, “let me try. Maybe I could help—” But without
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even a glance at her he’d already turned and gone forward to
Estelle. She could see the two of them sitting close together in
the light of the rising moon. She’d bitten her lip to keep from
crying, and she could taste blood in her mouth. Then out of
some dark and insensate desire to wound them all, herself
included, she said to Bellew, “We don’t seem to be entirely
necessary, do we? But it is a beautiful night, and if you’d like
help with some of your problems, why don’t you bring up a
couple of drinks?”
The others had seen, all right—at least the merged
silhouette against the moon—and heard the laughter and the
singing. One of them was dead now, and the other was mad,
at least partly as the result of it, so she was the only one left—
besides Bellew, of course—with any true and rational
appreciation of the scene as something to be treasured
forever. It had taken perhaps fifteen minutes to sicken herself
to the point where she had to go below or jump overboard.
She removed the repulsive hand from inside her bra, got up,
leaving the wheel untended, and went down to the cabin and
locked the door. Hughie never came down at all. Apparently
he’d slept on deck.
She went on in a minute. “So there you have the situation.
We had everything we needed now for disaster, or for
something very messy, but when it came, two days later, it
was only an accident.
“I’ll try to give it to you in chronological sequence, as we
reconstructed it afterward, though it concerned four people in
different places, I was asleep through a good part of it, and at
the end only two of us were still alive and able to give a
coherent account of what had happened. It was two p.m., and
we’d been lying becalmed for over an hour, with all sail still
set, but the booms sheeted in to keep them from banging. It
was Bellew’s wheel watch, and he was sitting in the cockpit,
keeping an eye out for signs of a breeze. Estelle Bellew was
lying in her bunk in the forward cabin, reading, I think, and
Hughie and I were in our cabin aft. I was pretending to be
asleep; that way we had at least the semblance of an excuse
for the fact we weren’t speaking to each other. Hughie went
out.
“He came on deck. Bellew, of course, was in the cockpit.
Dead Calm — 125
Neither of them spoke. Hughie went over to the rail and was
looking down into the water when he saw the school of
dolphin which had been following the boat and playing around
under it for the past two days. These are dolphin, the fish, you
understand, and not porpoises.”
Ingram nodded. “Very beautiful fish, like flame under water.
The Mexicans call them dorado—golden, or gilded. They like
to lie under anything floating on the surface.”
“They’re the ones. Anyway, while he was looking at them he
remembered that Estelle had said she’d like to see if she could
photograph them from below the surface if the school was
ever around when we were becalmed. So, still without
speaking to Bellew, he went back below. Only, when he
passed through the deckhouse, he went forward first into the
main cabin—that is, the saloon—and called out to Estelle
through the curtained passage at the forward end of it, telling
her about the fish. She was eager to try to photograph them,
so she said she’d put on a swim suit and meet him on deck.
Bellew, still aft in the cockpit, heard none of this, of course.
Hughie then went back up into the deckhouse and on down
into our cabin to put on his swim trunks and get a diving mask
and snorkel. But I didn’t know it, because by this time I was
asleep.
“Hughie was below probably only a few minutes, but when
he came back up through the deckhouse and stepped on deck
Bellew was no longer there. He’d gone below, into the main
cabin, to make a sandwich. This, of course, is forward, toward
the Bellews’ cabin, so—since the two of them hadn’t met in
the deckhouse—Bellew had no idea Hughie had returned to
the deck. Fortunately, you know the layout below, and you can
understand why we had to reconstruct this whole thing
afterward to try to understand how it could have happened.”
Ingram nodded. He could see the tragedy already beginning
to take form, like the choreography of some death scene in a
ballet, where every movement had to fit.
She went on. “In another minute or two Estelle came on
deck from the forward hatch, the one leading up directly from
their cabin. She had on her swim suit and was carrying a
snorkel and mask and an underwater camera. That is, it
wasn’t really an underwater camera with a housing, but one of
her thirty-five-millimeter cameras that she’d made a
Dead Calm — 126
watertight bag for with some kind of clear plastic and carried
slung around her neck on a cord. Hughie put the ladder over
just forward of amidships, and they eased down it into the
water—not jumping or diving in because they didn’t want to
frighten the dolphin.
“It was a rule, of course, since all of us did swim when we
had the chance, that nobody should ever go in the water
without notifying whoever was on watch. But Hughie
apparently thought, since Bellew was gone from the deck, that
he was forward in his own cabin and that Estelle had told him
before she came up. And Estelle, since Hughie had been the
one who’d brought up the whole thing, must have assumed
that Hughie had notified him. She hadn’t even seen Bellew,
because he was in the main cabin. So they put on their masks
and snorkels and began trying to get close to the school of
fish, which was now moving away from the boat. There was a
moderate groundswell running, so even when Bellew came
back on deck he probably wouldn’t have seen them unless
he’d happened to be looking in their direction at the moment
they rose to the top or the near side of a swell.
“Hughie has never been completely rational since, and when
I saw him again, six hours later he was raving and incoherent,
but as well as I could piece it together they’d been in the
water about ten minutes and were not over a hundred yards
from the boat when it happened. They were fairly close to the
dolphin and they’d both dived, Hughie just looking at them
while Estelle tried to snap a picture. Hughie came up first,
and when his head was above water he was aware that
something had changed. It was a second or two before he
realized what it was. A breeze was blowing across his face. He
turned and looked toward Orpheus and screamed. But Bellew
didn’t hear him.
“As I said, this was at two p.m. I awoke a little after threethirty
and could tell from the angle of heel and the lessened
rolling that we’d picked up a breeze while I was asleep and
were under way. I noticed Hughie wasn’t in his bunk, but paid
no attention to it. In a few minutes I got up, dressed, washed
my face, and went up through the deckhouse to the main
cabin to brew a cup of tea. It was ten minutes of four when I
carried it out on deck. Bellew was at the wheel, of course. We
Dead Calm — 127
were on the starboard tack and probably making around two
knots in a breeze that didn’t much more than fill the sails.
“Bellew merely grunted when I sat down in the cockpit, but
in a minute he said, ‘Did you call the great Magellan? Or are
you going to take his watch?’
“That was the first second it dawned on me I hadn’t seen
him anywhere. I jumped up, spilling the tea, and ran below,
and I was all the way down in the main cabin before I realized
that if he had gone to that woman’s cabin, if he’d been silly
enough to go in there with her husband on deck, I’d already
given it away and Bellew would probably beat him to death. I
spoke outside the curtain. There was no answer, so I pulled it
back. The cabin was empty. I pounded on the door of the
washroom and opened it. There was no one in it, nor in the
one aft.”
She was whimpering and numb with terror by the time she
made it back to the deck and saw the ladder hanging over the
side. Bellew already had the wheel hard over, and Orpheus
was coming ponderously about.
She had got her voice back at last and was shrieking at him
as she set up the weather runner and trimmed the jib sheet.
“When? How long ago? You blind, stupid, forgetful fool, you’ve
killed them!”
”Shut up!” Bellew ordered curtly. “They didn’t tell me.”
“Well, you must have seen them! You were supposed to be
on deck!” She broke off then, realizing at last that they were
wasting precious seconds on this idiocy when there was so
much to be done. They had to figure out the reciprocal of the
course he’d been making and estimate the distance they’d
come since the breeze sprang up. And none of it was easy. The
wind had been erratic, and he’d had to tack twice when it
headed him. Their speed had varied from an estimated less
than one knot to an estimated three and a half. None of it had
been written down because he’d intended to write a rough
average of it in the log when he was relieved. She took the
wheel, heading back in the approximate direction, while he
struggled with the figures. In around ten minutes he had it
calculated as closely as they ever would—somewhere to the
east-northeast, four to five miles.
She began to hope again. It was only two hours, and they
were both good swimmers. Hughie, she knew, could stay
Dead Calm — 128
afloat four hours easily, and they would have been swimming
this way—no, he couldn’t even see the masts at this distance,
not down in the water. But for at least half the time he would
have been able to see them, anyway each time he came to the
top of a swell. It was still three hours and more till dark, and
she’d get Bellew to hoist her to the top of the mainmast in a
bosun’s chair. They’d get there in time. Then the breeze began
to falter. It came on again for three or four minutes, dropped
once more, and then died completely.
They couldn’t run the engine. They’d already used up all the
fuel. They lay helplessly in the trough and rolled.
They launched the dinghy. Bellew wanted to go because he
could row faster, but she insisted. She was two hundred yards
away before she realized she didn’t have the faintest idea
which direction she was going in. She came back and got a
compass and set it between her feet, even though she knew it
was hopeless looking for them in the dinghy. She was too low
in the water to see anything or to be seen. She was far out
from Orpheus when the sun went down and it began to grow
dark. She stood up in the dinghy, calling his name until she
could no longer see anything but the distant gleam of the
masthead light Bellew had turned on. She rowed back and
went aboard. She lay in the cabin in the darkness, trying not
to think of what it must have been like to see the boat sailing
away from him a thousand miles from land. Bellew came in
and tried to speak to her. She didn’t even know what he said.
He went away, into the forward cabin.
About half an hour later she heard him run through the
deckhouse on the way to the deck, shouting, “I heard
something.” She ran up. The spreader lights were on, as well
as the masthead light, but they were glowing only faintly,
scarcely brighter than candles, because the batteries were
discharged. She ran back into the deckhouse for a flashlight.
She began throwing its beam out across the water. Then she
heard the sound too, a faint whimpering, but it was coming
from aboard rather than from the water. She threw the light
forward.
Hughie had come up the ladder and was lying at the foot of
the mainmast, his arms locked around it, his face pressed
against the wood. His shoulders shook, and he was still
making that not quite human sound deep in his throat. She
Dead Calm — 129
noticed, in that way you sometimes fix your attention on
details in moments of overwhelming emotion, that there was a
gaping and bluish cut, no longer bleeding, across the knuckles
of his right hand. He was alone. Estelle hadn’t come back.
“As weak as he was after six hours in the water,” she went
on, “it took both of us to pry his arms loose from the mast. We
half led and half carried him below and put him on his bunk.
He opened his eyes; at first they were completely blank, and
then he began to recognize us. He cringed back and jumped
off the bunk and cowered back in a corner, screaming at us.
He was almost incoherent, but we could understand bits of
what he was saying. We’d tried to kill him. We’d gone off and
left him deliberately. I was only pretending to be asleep and
knew he’d gone into the water. And there was something
about a shark, over and over.
“In the end, Bellew had to hold him while I injected a
sedative dose of morphine in his arm. He fought us, and when
he felt the prick of the needle he screamed.
“He never let either of us come near him again. He slept, if
he ever slept at all, in the sail locker up forward, with the door
barricaded inside. He looked rational, at least most of the
time, but he was silent and withdrawn. He would never
approach the rail without that look of horror on his face and a
death grip on something solid, like a man with acrophobia
frozen to a girder a thousand feet above the street. When we’d
try to question him about Estelle, he’d go all to pieces and
begin shouting again about a shark. I made Bellew stop asking
him.
It was three days before I got a more or less coherent story
of what had happened.
“They’d been attacked by a shark. He still had his mask on,
and he swam down and hit it on the snout with his fist, trying
to drive it away. That was the way he got that wound on his
hand. It had avoided him because he was under the water, but
had come up and gone for Estelle, who was threshing on the
surface. It cut her in two. There was nothing he could do. He
swam out of the bloody water and got away, but the sight of it
was too much—that and the fear, and the belief we’d done it
deliberately. He cracked up.”
So Bellew was right, Ingram thought. He was on the point of
asking if she believed the story herself, but realized the futility
Dead Calm — 130
of it. If she did believe it, it was only because she refused to
accept the truth. She, better than any of them, should know
what Hughie was really running from, but if she had already
made the choice and was determined to accept the blame,
argument was useless, and there were more urgent things to
think about at the moment. No doubt a psychiatrist could dig
it out of her and force her to acknowledge it, but he wasn’t a
psychiatrist, they were on a sinking boat in mid-ocean, and
nine-tenths of his mind was occupied with the cold and
relentless struggle to keep the thought of Rae from swamping
it. And, in the end, perhaps the specific act for which she
blamed herself wasn’t significant anyway. The guilt she
accepted was the blanket indictment of having been the link
at which the lengthening chain of Hughie-protection had
finally snapped. She’d been minding the baby when it crawled
into the goldfish pond and drowned.
It was possible, of course, that Hughie did think—or had
managed to convince himself—that they’d deliberately gone
off and left the two of them to die. And naturally he might
have an irrational fear of water, after having been in it for six
hours in mid-ocean, part of the time in the dark and thinking
of the bottom ten thousand feet below him. But neither of
these was the horror he was trying to escape, the thing he saw
when something was sinking in the water below him. That was
Estelle. The only part of it that was difficult to understand was
what sick compulsion had kept him there, looking down
through the mask at her body falling into the depths after he
had killed her.
He’d seen the wound on Hughie’s hand. And it wasn’t an
abrasion such as he’d have received from striking the sandpapery
skin of a shark. It was a cut. It had been caused by
human teeth, or the broken glass of a diving mask.
So Estelle had panicked and tried to climb up on him to get
out of the water, the way the drowning often did. He’d beaten
her off with his fists and knocked her out. And the ironic part
of it was that, for anybody willing to accept at least a portion
of the blame, there’d still have been a way out. Subduing the
panicky person who was threatening to drown both himself
and his rescuer was an accepted part of lifesaving. Somebody
else might have convinced himself he’d hit her only to try to
save her, so he could turn her on her back and tow her, and
Dead Calm — 131
then she’d slipped away from him and drowned before he
could get her back to the surface. But not Hughie, who
couldn’t accept any of the penalty for anything. He’d had to
invent his nonexistent shark, which even he couldn’t believe.
But he had to believe it, and go on believing it, or face an
unpleasant fact for the first time in his life. And, for a
beginner, he’d been handed a rough one to face.
She must have still had the camera slung around her neck.
Those 35 mm. jobs were heavy for their size, and with none of
the built-in buoyancy from a standard underwater housing it
must have been just enough to tip the scales beyond that state
of near equilibrium of a woman’s body in salt water—any
woman except the very thin and muscular and heavy-boned—
and keep her falling straight below him after she was
unconscious. Even then, the rate of descent was probably very
slow, at least until she was down to where the pressure began
collapsing her chest cavity. And Hughie had watched her.
No, he thought then, not necessarily. Maybe he’d only
imagined watching her; maybe it had already begun in his
mind. At any rate, there was the horror, and there was the
beginning of that awareness of depth, or of height, upon
which he was impaled—seeing the body of this friend, this
woman who’d been so good to him and whom he’d killed in
panic to save his own life, slide into the ever-deepening abyss
below him, still clearly visible at fifty feet, a hundred, maybe a
hundred and fifty, and after she had dwindled and
disappeared entirely he could go on imagining it—a thousand
feet, five thousand, ten thousand, and still falling.
Jesus, he thought, I’m glad I’m carrying it around looking for
a place to set it down.
He was aware then that Orpheus’s motion was changing.
The groundswell was becoming confused as it encountered
the mounting seas built up in the squall. He glanced out
toward the dark turbulence of the sky in the northeast and the
advancing wall of rain that was probably less than two miles
away.
“Maybe you’d better call Bellew,” he said.
Dead Calm — 132
13
Without any remembrance at all of how she’d got there she
was standing on the companion ladder, looking out into
blazing sunlight and the encircling blue of the sea. Ten feet in
front of her the golden impervious head was poised above the
binnacle, and she could hear herself shrieking through the
clatter of the engine.
“Go back! For the love of God, go back before something
awful happens! Don’t make it happen, don’t make it, please
don’t make it!” Her voice skidded up over the rim into hysteria
and incoherence.
There was no reply. He glanced at her briefly and then back
at the compass with something of the studied avoidance of a
diner looking the other way after a waiter has dropped a tray
of food, as though he was as disappointed in this uncouth
screeching as he had been in her selfishness. Then, with no
clear idea how she’d got there either, she was back in the
forward cabin, holding onto the upright pipe of the bunk
frame with one hand while she ran the fingers of the other
across the side of her face and upward into her hair.
Something was quivering, either her face or the hand, but she
wasn’t sure which, any more than she was sure whether she’d
actually gone out there and screamed the warning at him or
whether she’d just imagined it. No, she must have gone out,
because the door was unlatched and open. She could hear it
banging behind her as Saracen rolled.
Dead Calm — 133
The shotgun still lay on the bunk where she’d dropped it,
the three separate, improbable pieces suddenly united and
frozen into this unmistakable shape of deadliness. She jerked
her eyes away from it and looked at her watch, and then a
second time in disbelief. It was 12:45 p. m. Time was hurtling
past her, and she was beginning to lose whole intervals of it.
They were already twenty miles from that sinking boat, and by
sunset, when they’d be over fifty, she would have cracked
completely. Her chin still quivering, she looked around the
tiny compartment again, seeing for the twentieth time only the
walls of the trap, this comer she’d been backed into and from
which there was no escape except one. She’d tried everything
else, and it was hopeless. He was impregnable, unreachable.
Then, with the suddenness of a thrown switch, the wildness
and despair were gone, and she was strangely calm. It was as
if her mind had come into focus at last, with everything else
dropping away until there remained only the two simple,
elemental facts she’d been groping for all the time, the only
two that mattered at all. John was going to die unless she
saved him. And she had the means to do it.
At first she thought the engine had stopped, it had grown so
quiet. But when she listened, she could still hear it; it was just
farther away, and there was a faint rushing or ringing sound
inside her head, as if she had been taking quinine. It was like
being enclosed in some huge bubble that protected her from
all extraneous sound or thought or interference. It was cold
inside the bubble, and there didn’t seem to be enough air,
because her breathing was rapid and very shallow, but she
was invulnerable to everything beyond. She went over and
picked up the shotgun.
And this was strange too, with some feeling that she’d done
it before and knew exactly what she had to do. It was as if,
while her conscious mind was recoiling from it in revulsion,
some far level of the unconscious had already accepted the
gun with complete fatalism and calmly planned its use. She
had to learn how it worked. She pointed it away from her and
tried to pull the triggers. Nothing happened. But she’d
expected that. Guns had safety mechanisms of some kind so
they couldn’t be fired accidentally. She began searching for
the key to it, and found it immediately, since it was the only
part of the weapon not already identified. It had to be this
Dead Calm — 134
small oblong button just back of the lever that broke it open at
the breech so you could put in the shells. She tried to push the
button down, but nothing happened. Then it must slide. She
pushed it forward, and it did, perhaps a quarter of an inch.
She pulled the triggers and heard the clicks, one after the
other, as hammers fell on the firing pins.
The shells. Still inviolate within her bubble of cold and
unswerving concentration, she went out into the after cabin
and knelt before the drawer. There were two boxes of them.
Both had been wrapped in plastic and then covered with two
or three coats of varnish to protect them from the humidity of
the tropics. She’d need a knife. She was making a note of this
and reaching over the medicine kit for one of the boxes of
shells, when she paused. It was only for a minor part of a
second, a fleeting but inexplicable hiatus of movement that
was noticeable at all only because ever since she’d accepted
this thing and committed herself she’d been going forward
with the inevitability of some machine running downhill on
rails.
Poised there on the dead center of this almost imperceptible
hesitation, with the feeling that somebody was pounding on
the wall of the bubble, trying to get in or to attract her
attention, she looked down into the drawer, wondering what
had caused it. Besides some heavy clothing they wouldn’t
need until they got down into the higher latitudes, it held only
those articles which, in addition to the shotgun, had to be
sealed in port by customs—the shells; her cigarettes; John’s
cigars; the medicine kit, because of the narcotics it contained;
and several bottles of whisky and two or three of rum. Then
the feeling was gone. The protective concentration closed in
around her again, and she was moving ahead. She gathered
up the box of shells, picked up a small paring knife from a
galley drawer, and hurried back.
It took several minutes to hack her way into the box. She
extracted two of the shells and set the box on the deck under
the bunk. She broke the gun at the breech with the lever,
dropped them in, and closed it. She was fortunate in that her
very lack of familiarity with guns spared her the deadly
association of those three sounds linked in sequence—the
toinnnk, toinnnk, of the shells dropping into the ends of the
Dead Calm — 135
tubular air columns of the barrels, and the metallic click as
the breech closed and locked.
But she wasn’t so lucky with the blanket. Strangely, the
blanket was worse now than the gun, and it might have
stopped her except for the furious intensity of her
concentration and the momentum she had already gathered.
Because she knew what she had to do with it, and do
immediately and without hesitation or thought; if she waited,
she might never go up there at all, and the act would have
been for nothing.
She set the gun down on one of the sailbags, peeled the
blanket from the bunk, and held it up before her by the
corners with her face averted, like a fireman approaching a
blaze behind a shield. The ocean of sickness beyond the
bubble surged inward and threatened to collapse it, but she
looked down at her feet, her mind shored up against
everything but the problem, and decided she could get up the
ladder this way and across the cockpit.
She retrieved the gun, took the blanket in her other arm,
and went out. The roaring in her head was louder now, so she
could scarcely hear the engine. She was cold all over and
wasn’t sure she was breathing at all; there seemed to be some
tremendous weight pressing on her chest. She walked with a
stiff-legged artificial gait, like a mechanical toy, fighting the
rubbery weakness of her knees, but she was still going
forward, still protected and invulnerable. She could see
nothing on either side of her. Straight ahead, as if at the end
of a long tunnel, the bright oblong patch of sunlight fell
through the open hatch, sweeping back and forth across the
ladder as Saracen rolled. She reached it. She stepped up on
the first tread of the ladder and peered out.
She could just see over the hatch coaming, and only his face
was visible as he sat in the after end of the cockpit behind the
wheel. He was looking down into the compass, and his lips
were moving, apparently without sound, though she didn’t
know for sure because of the engine noise and that roaring in
her ears. He glanced up then, straight into her eyes, but there
was no recognition, no indication he even saw her. He looked
back at the compass, his lips continuing to move. Somewhere
inside her a voice was screaming: Now, now!
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