Gulf Coast Girl - Charles Williams(1)

Sunset
There was something ghostly about it. The mate and the two
ABs of the boarding party looked at each other, unable to
believe what they saw.
There were no signs of violence or even sickness aboard,
and the Gulf itself had been in a benign mood for weeks. Her
sails were set and drawing gently in the faint airs of sunset,
her tiller lashed, and she was gliding along with serene
purpose on a southeasterly course which would have taken
her into the Yucatan Strait. Her dinghy was still there, atop
the cabin, and everything was shipshape and in order except
that there was not a soul on board. She was as mysteriously
deserted as the Mary Celeste.
She was well provisioned, and she had water. The two
bunks were made and the cabin swept. Dungarees and some


odds and ends of foul weather gear hung about the
bulkheads, and in one of the bunks was the halter of a
woman’s two-piece bathing suit. And subtly underlying the
immemorial bilge and salt-water smells of sailing craft there
still clung to the deserted cabin just the faintest suspicion of
perfume. It would have gone unnoticed except that it was so
completely out of place.
The table was not laid, as it had been on the Mary Celeste,
but there were two mugs on it, and one of them was still full
of coffee. When the hard-bitten old mate walked over and put
his hand against the coffeepot sitting on one burner of the
Gulf Coast Girl — 2
primus stove, it was slightly warm to the touch. There had
been somebody here less than an hour ago.
He went over to the small table where the charts were and
opened what he took to be the logbook, flipping hurriedly
through to the past page on which anything was written. He
studied it for a moment, and then shook his head. In forty
years at sea he had never encountered a log entry quite like
it.
. . . the blue, and that last, haunting flash of silver,
gesturing as it died. It was beckoning. Toward the rapture.
The rapture . . .
Before he closed the book he took something from between
the pages and stared at it. It was a single long strand of ashblond
hair. He shook his head again.
“Holy Jesus, Mate, look at this!” one of the seamen
exclaimed behind him.
The mate turned and the man was holding open a black
satchel that had been lying on one of the settees. He stared.
It was jammed with green blocks of American currency,
paper-banded sheafs of twenties, fifties, and hundreds. What
next? he thought.
“Salvage, man, salvage,” the AB said ecstatically. “Must be
a hundred thousand—”
“You want to spend it now, or wait till the court counts it?”
the mate asked. “You’re pretty far from a gin-mill out here,
anyway.” He took the bag from the other’s hands and
snapped it shut.
Sticking the logbook under his arm, he jerked his head for
the two to follow him back on deck. He jabbed a forefinger
toward the mast.
“See that big rag up there? It’s known as a sail. We used to
drive ships with ‘em. So if you’ll start pulling it down and just
sort of bundling it up, I’ll go back to the ship where I won’t
have to torture myself by watching how you do it, and we’ll
pass down a towline.”
A few yards away in the red sunset the master of the
American tanker Joseph H. Hallock waited on her bridge
while the mate pulled back alone. He saw the two sailors
begin taking in the sloop’s mainsail and jib and, realizing
Gulf Coast Girl — 3
what that meant, directed the bos’n to break out a line and
start getting it over.
Outward bound from Tampico for Bayonne, they had come
up behind the small craft on a converging course some half
hour ago and had hauled up a point or two to pass astern of
her. The mate, watching through the glasses, had noted there
was no one on deck and that the helm was lashed, but had
not been greatly concerned. In weather like this a man sailing
alone could well have gone below to cook supper. But when
no one had come on deck in answer to the bull-throated hail
of the whistle, he had called the master.
Swinging, they had come back, easing up close aboard her
to windward and blanketing her sails. When no one came on
deck then, with the headway off her and the mainsail slatting
idly as she came about, they had acknowledged there was
something ominous about it. Backing down fast on the
engines to remain there and hold her captive, they had put
over the work boat to investigate. There was no need to
launch a lifeboat. It had been flat calm for days, and the
slight breeze which had sprung up in the afternoon was
scarcely enough to ripple the gently heaving pastures of the
Gulf.
Freya, of San Juan, P.R., it said under her stern, and the
master of the tanker studied her curiously while he waited for
the mate to come back to the bridge. She was a long way
from home. He wondered what she was doing this far to the
westward, in the Gulf of Mexico, and why a small boat from
Spanish Puerto Rico should have been named after a Norse
goddess.
The mate came up on the bridge carrying the big ledger
and the satchel. “Sick?” the captain asked. “Or dead?”
“Gone,” the mate said, with the air of a man who has been
talking to ghosts without believing in them. “Just gone. Like
that. Remember the Celeste?
“Two of ‘em, as near as I can figure it,” he went on,
sketching it tersely. “A man and a woman. One or both of ‘em
was there not over an hour ago.”
“Well, as soon as you get that line on her we’d better go
back and see,” the captain said. “Anything in the log?”
Gulf Coast Girl — 4
“Gibberish,” the older man replied. He passed over the
book, and then the satchel. “Take a gander in that, Cap.
Whatever was botherin’ ‘em, it wasn’t financial trouble.”
The captain pursed his lips in a silent whistle as he opened
the bag to stare briefly and incredulously at the bundles of
currency. He looked outward at the Freya, where the men
were making the towline fast, and frowned thoughtfully. Then
he opened the big journal at the page the mate indicated and
read the last entry.
He frowned again.
The rapture . . . the rapture.
Something nudged gently at his mind. He groped for it, and
found it. He was a studious and reflective seafaring man who
had read Conrad, and the thing which had struck him was the
odd, reverse-English similarity to Kurtz’s agonized death cry
in The Heart of Darkness. “The horror. The horror.”
Flipping back, he hurriedly read the last five or six pages of
the handwritten journal. Then he closed it gently and walked
to the wing of the bridge to stand looking down.
“When you get your men aboard,” he said slowly, “you can
resume your course, Mr. Davidson.”
“We’re not going back?” the mate asked incredulously.
The captain shook his head. “There’s nothing to go back
for.”
“But, Cap—That coffee was still warm. And she couldn’t
have been logging over two knots. We might find ‘em.”
“No.” The captain gazed back over the flat surface of the
sea that was red now in the afterglow. “No. You’d find
nothing. Nothing at all.”

But in the end, of course, they did go back, with a lookout
on the foremast with the big Navy glasses. They served the
sea, and the sea demanded it. And they found nothing but the
empty and darkening prairies of the Gulf.
When there was no longer any light at all and they had
given up and resumed their course, the captain counted the
money in the presence of two of the ship’s officers and locked
it in the safe. It came to eighty-three thousand dollars. Then
he sat down alone in his office and opened the journal again.
Gulf Coast Girl — 5
He pulled the long strand of ash-blond hair through his
fingers and held it up to the light. Freya, he thought
musingly; Freya, the Viking goddess of love. He wished now
he had boarded the sloop himself. The mate was a superb
sailor, and intelligent, with a sharp eye for detail and clues in
a thing like this, but he wasn’t a particularly sensitive man.
Maybe he could have felt it if he had stood there in the
cabin where it had been. The span of time it took a pot of
coffee to cool was not a very long one, and whatever was
there must have been powerful, and magnificent, and perhaps
even terrifying. Emotion was intangible, of course, and should
leave no traces after the people who had felt it were gone,
but—who knew? Perhaps even now, eddying in lifeless air in
the corners of that deserted cabin—
He opened the journal at the first page and began to read.
Gulf Coast Girl — 6
One
23.50 North, 88.45 West
It was a hot, Gulf Coast morning in early June. The barge was
moored out on the T-head of the old Parker Mill dock near the
west end of the waterway. Carter had gone to New Orleans to
bid on a salvage job and I was living on board alone. I was
checking over some diving gear on the forward deck when a
car rolled out of the end of the shed and stopped beside mine.
It was a couple of tons of shining Cadillac, and there was a
girl in it.
Or maybe a better way of putting it would be to say a girl
came out of the shed, wearing a Cadillac. You’d see her first.
She got out and closed the door and walked over to the
edge of the pier with the unhurried smoothness of poured
honey. “Good morning,” she said. “You’re Mr. Manning, I
hope? The watchman out at the gate—”
I straightened. “That’s right,” I said, wondering what she
wanted. It might be possible to look more out of place on a
water-front than she did, but it wouldn’t be easy.
She looked me over quite deliberately, and I had an odd
impression she was trying to size me up for something. There
wasn’t any basis for it really except that she took a little too
long at it and didn’t look like a woman who normally went
around staring at people. I was suddenly conscious of the
beat-up old dungarees and my hairy and sunburned
Gulf Coast Girl — 7
nakedness from the waist up, and was a little burned at the
same time because I was conscious of it. What the hell? I was
at work, wasn’t I? What was this, a State Department tea?
“What can I do for you?” I asked curtly.
“Oh.” She was a little flustered for a moment. “I—I’d like to
talk to you. Could I come aboard?”
I glanced at the spike heels and then at the ladder leaning
against the pier, and shook my head. “You’d break your neck.
I’ll come up.”
I did, and the minute I was up there facing her I was struck
by the size of her. She was a cathedral of a girl. In the high
heels she must have been close to six feet. I’m six two, and I
could barely see over the top of the smooth ash-blond head.
Her hair was gathered in a roll very low on the back of her
neck and she was wearing a short-sleeved summery dress the
color of cinnamon which intensified the fairness of her skin
and did her no harm at all in the other departments. Maybe
by some bean-pole standards she didn’t save enough ground
on the turns, but not by mine. I’d never seen any reason
women had to look like boys.
Her face was wide at the cheekbones in a way that was
suggestively Scandinavian, and her complexion matched it
perfectly. She had the smoothest, clearest skin I’d ever seen.
The mouth was a little wide, too, and full-lipped. It wasn’t a
classic face at all, but still lovely to look at and perhaps a
little sexy. No, that wasn’t it exactly. Just intensely female,
like the rest of her. The eyes were large and gray, and very
nice. And scared, I thought. It didn’t make sense, but she was
afraid of something.
It was hot in the sun, and quite still, and I was a little
uncomfortable, aware I was too damned conscious of her and
that I’d been doing the same thing I’d been angry at her
about. Staring. Maybe we could just stand here the rest of the
morning and look at each other like a couple of idiots.
“What can I do for you?” I asked again.
“Perhaps I’d better introduce myself,” she said. “I’m Mrs.
Wayne. Shannon Wayne. I wanted to talk to you about a job.”
We walked over in the shadow of the shed by her car and
she opened the door and sat down on the end of the seat with
a hand on the window frame. She wore no jewelry except the
Gulf Coast Girl — 8
engagement and wedding rings and a thin gold watch that
looked fragile and useless enough to cost a young fortune.
Her fingers tapped nervously against the metal.
“What kind of job?” I asked.
She glanced at my face, and then away. “Recovering a
shotgun that was lost out of a boat.”
“Where?”
“In a lake, about a hundred miles north of here—”
I shook my head. “It would cost you more than it’s worth.”
“But,” she protested, the gray eyes very near to pleading,
“you wouldn’t have to take a diving suit and air pump and all
that stuff. I thought perhaps you had one of those aqualung
outfits.”
“We do,” I said. “In fact, I’ve got one of my own. But it
would still be cheaper to buy a new shotgun.”
“No,” ‘she said. “Perhaps I’d better explain. It’s quite an
expensive one. A single-barreled trap gun with a lot of
engraving and a custom stock. I think it cost around seven
hundred dollars.”
I whistled. “How’d a gun like that ever fall in a lake?”
“My husband was going out to the duckblind one morning
and accidentally knocked it out of the skiff.”
I looked at her for a moment, not saying anything. There
was something odd about it. What kind of fool would be silly
enough to take a $700 trap gun into a duckblind? And even if
he had money enough to buy them by the dozen, a singlebarreled
gun was a poor thing to hunt ducks with.
“How deep is the water?” I asked.
“Ten or twelve feet, I think.”
“Well, look. I’ll tell you how to get your gun back. Any
neighborhood kid can do it, for five dollars. Get a pair of
goggles, or a diving mask. You can buy them at any dime
store. Go out and anchor your skiff where the gun went
overboard and send the kid down to look for it. Take a piece
of fishline to haul it up with when he locates it.”
“Don’t you want the job?” she asked. “Why?”
Gulf Coast Girl — 9
I wondered myself. I wasn’t doing anything, and I hated
sitting around. It would be easy, and she didn’t mind paying
for it, so why the reluctance?
I shrugged. “Well, it just seems silly to pay a professional
diver all that travel time for something a kid could do in half
an hour.”
“It’s not quite that simple,” she said. “You see, it’s about
three hundred yards from the houseboat to where the
duckblind is, and we’re not sure where it fell out.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It was early in the morning, and still dark.”
“Didn’t he hear it?”
“No. I think he said there was quite a wind blowing.”
It made a little more sense that way, but not much. I still
hesitated. Maybe I only imagined it, but I could feel a tension
inside her that she was trying to hide and it had to be caused
by something more than a lost shotgun. And I was too
damned aware of her. I could feel her, even when I wasn’t
looking at her. I realized this was stupid, but it didn’t change
the fact. Maybe I’d been living too long alone.
She turned her head a little then and I got those eyes full in
the face. She said only one word. She said, “Please.”
If the shotgun had been under the Arctic ice pack it
wouldn’t have made a bit of difference. “When do you want to
start?” I asked.
“Right now,” she said. “Unless you have another job.”
“No. I’m not doing anything.”
“That’s fine. We’ll go in my car, if it’s all right with you. Will
your equipment fit in back?”
“Sure,” I said.
I went down the ladder to the barge and stowed away the
gear I’d been working on, and got the aqualung and diving
mask out of the storeroom. I set them on the dock and
returned for some swimming trunks. While I was in my
quarters I put on some lighter shoes and changed into white
linen slacks and a sport shirt. I checked all the doors to be
sure they were locked and went back up on the pier. She
handed me the car keys and I put everything in the trunk.
Gulf Coast Girl — 10
“I think this is fun,” she said, smiling for the first time. “It’ll
be fun watching you work.”
I shrugged, and said nothing. I wondered a little irritably if
she really wanted that gun back, or if this was just her idea of
a lark. After all, if it was lost during duck season it had been
lying there for six months now. Maybe she had so much
money and was so bored that hiring a diver came under the
heading of entertainment, like ordering a clown for a
children’s party.
Then I asked myself morosely why I was so intent on
picking her to pieces. She hadn’t done anything, and so far as
I knew there was no law against looking like a Norse
goddess, even a slightly sexy one.
Norse? With a name like Shannon? It was odd, though,
because she did look like a Swede.
I asked her to stop at the watchman’s shanty for a moment
while I told him I’d be gone the rest of the day in case
anybody called. The mill was abandoned now and the pier
was seldom used for anything, but the place was still fenced
and a bored watchman put in his hours reading in a little
shack beside the gate.
As soon as we were out the gate she fumbled in her bag for
a cigarette. I lit one for her, and another for myself. She
drove well in traffic, but seemed to do an unnecessary
amount of winding around to get out on the right highway.
She kept checking the rearview mirror, too, but I didn’t pay
much attention to that. I did it myself when I was driving. You
never knew when some eager type might try to climb over
your bumper.
When we were out on the highway at last she settled a little
in the seat and unleashed a few more horses. We rolled
smoothly along at 60. It was a fine machine, a 1954 hardtop
convertible. I looked around the inside of it. She had beautiful
legs. I looked back at the road.
“Bill Manning, isn’t it?” she asked. “That wouldn’t be
William Stacey Manning, by any chance?”
I glanced quickly around. “How did you know?” Then I
remembered. “Oh. You read that wheeze about me in the
paper?”
Gulf Coast Girl — 11
It had appeared a few days ago, one of those interestingcharacter-
around-the-water front sort of things, written by a
rather intense girl who oozed her dedication to capital-J
journalism all over the pier and was determined to pump me
up into a glamorous figure for at least a column if it killed
her. It had started over the fact I’d won a couple of races out
at the yacht club, handling a friend’s boat for him. I wasn’t
even a member; he was. But it had come out I’d deck-handed
a couple of times on that run down to Bermuda and was a
sailing nut; hence the story. Then she made the fact I’d gone
to M.I.T. for three years before the war sound as if I were a
South Seas beachcomber with a title. I didn’t get it myself.
Maybe she thought divers ate with their feet. It was a good
thing I hadn’t said anything about the four or five stories I’d
sold. I’d have been Somerset Maugham, with flippers.
Then an odd thought struck me. I hadn’t used my middle
name in that interview. I hadn’t used it, in fact, since I’d left
New England.
She nodded. “Yes. I read it. And I was sure you must be the
same Manning who’d written those sea stories. Why haven’t
you done any more?”
“I wasn’t a very successful writer,” I said.
“But I thought they were awfully good.”
“Thank you.”
She was looking ahead at the road. “Are you married?”
“I was,” I said. “Divorced. Three years ago.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. I mean, I didn’t intend to pry—”
“It’s all right,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it.
It was just a mess, but it was over and finished. A lot of it
had been my fault, and knowing it didn’t help much. We’d
fought until we wore it out, and it takes two to do that. I’d
owned the boat before Catherine and I were married, and I
insisted on hanging onto it in spite of the fact she cared
nothing about sailing and the upkeep on it was too much for a
married man on the salary I was making in the steamship
office where I worked. She wanted to give parties, and play
office politics. None of the office brass sailed; they all played
golf. I should sell the boat and join a country club. The hell
with that, I’d said; I didn’t care what the brass did. I spent my
leisure time sailing, and trying to write. I didn’t have any
Gulf Coast Girl — 12
ambition, and I was antisocial and pigheaded. Who the hell
did I think I was? Conrad? It folded.
We even fought over that, over money again. We sold the
house and the boat at a big loss in an outburst of mutual
savagery and split the whole thing up like two screaming kids
in a tantrum. I had learned diving and salvage work in the
Navy during the war, and after the wreckage settled I drifted
back into it, moving around morosely from job to job and
going farther south all the time. If you were going to dive you
might as well do it in warm water. It was that aimless. I’d
tried writing again, but nothing came out right any more and
everything was rejected. I was 33 now with nothing much to
look forward to and not much behind except an increasing list
of “ex-’s”—ex-engineering student, ex-Navy lieutenant, exhusband,
and ex-aspiring writer.
She slowed going through a small town, and when we were
on the open highway again she looked around at me, her face
thoughtful, and said, “I gathered you’ve had lots of
experience with boats?”
I nodded. “I was brought up around them. My father sailed,
and belonged to a yacht club. I was sailing a dinghy by the
time I started to school.”
“How about big ones, out in the ocean—what do they call
it?”
“Offshore? Sure. After the war I did quite a bit of ocean
yacht racing, as a crew member. And a friend and I cruised
the Caribbean in an old yawl for about eight months in 1946.”
“I see,” she said thoughtfully. “Do you know navigation?”
“Yes,” I said. “Though I’m probably pretty rusty at it. I
haven’t used it for a long time.”
I had an odd impression she was pumping me, for some
reason. It didn’t make much sense. Why all this interest in
boats? I couldn’t see what blue-water sailing and celestial
navigation had to do with finding a shotgun lost overboard in
some piddling lake.
We went through another small town stacked along the
highway in the hot sun. A few miles beyond she turned off the
pavement onto a dirt road going up over a hill between some
cotton fields. She was watching the mirror again. I looked
back, but there was nobody behind us. Then I asked myself
Gulf Coast Girl — 13
abruptly what I cared if there were. This was only a job,
wasn’t it? What the hell, her husband had just lost his
shotgun in a lake—
Hadn’t he?
We passed a few dilapidated farmhouses at first, but then
they began to thin out. It was desolate country, mostly sand
and scrub pine, and we met no one else at all. After about
four miles we turned off this onto a private road which was
only a pair of ruts running off through the trees. I got out to
open the gate. There was a sign nailed to it which read:
Posted. Keep Out. Another car had been through recently,
probably within a day or two, breaking the crust in the ruts.
I gathered it must be a private gun club her husband
belonged to, but she didn’t say. We dropped on down the hill
into swampy country where big oaks festooned with Spanish
moss met above the road. I could see old mudholes here and
there through the timber, the silt cracking into geometric
patterns and curling as it dried. It was quiet and a little
gloomy, the way you imagined a tropical jungle would be.
We went on for about a mile and then the road ended
abruptly. She stopped. “Here we are,” she said.
It was a beautiful place, and almost ringingly silent the
minute the car stopped. The houseboat was moored to a pier
in the shade of big moss-draped trees at the water’s edge,
and beyond it I could see the flat surface of the lake burning
like a mirror in the sun. There was no whisper of breeze. I got
out and closed the door, and the sound was almost startling
in the hush.
She unlocked the trunk and I took my gear out. “I have a
key to the houseboat,” she said. “You can change in there.”
It was a lot larger than I had expected, and looked as if it
must have four or five rooms. It was moored broadside to the
pier which ran along parallel to and just off the bank under
the overhanging limbs of the trees. A narrow gangplank ran
from the bank out to the pier, and another shorter one onto
the deck of the scow.
She led the way, disturbingly out of place in this wilderness
with her smooth blond head and smart grooming, the slim
spikes of her heels tapping against the planks. I noticed the
Gulf Coast Girl — 14
pier ran on around the end of the scow at right angles and
out into the lake.
“I’ll take the gear on out there,” I said. “I’d like to have a
look at it.”
She came with me. We rounded the corner of the houseboat
and I could see the whole arm of the lake. This section of the
pier ran out into it about thirty feet, with two skiffs tied up at
the end. They were about half full of water, and there were
no oars in them. I put down the aqualung and mask and
looked around.
The lake was about a hundred yards wide, glassy and
shining in the sun between its walls of trees, and some two
hundred yards ahead it turned around a point.
“The duckblind is just around that point, on the left,” she
said.
I looked at it appraisingly. “And he doesn’t have any idea at
all where the gun fell out?”
She shook her head. “No. It could have been anywhere
between here and the point.”
It still sounded odd, but I merely shrugged. “All right. I
might as well get started.”
She started to turn, and then froze. She was listening to
something. Then I heard it, very faintly, over the immense
hush all around. It was a car, somewhere a long way off. Her
face grew very still and I could see the color go out of it. The
sound of the car faded away; I couldn’t tell whether it had
stopped somewhere or gone on.
We were standing very close together on the end of the
pier. Our eyes met. “What’s the gag?” I asked roughly.
“Gag?”
“You’ve been looking for a car, or listening for one, ever
since you picked me up. Is somebody following you?”
She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “I hope
not.”

“Your husband?”
Her face jerked up toward mine and I could see the ruffling
of an Irish temper in the eyes. “My husband? And why would
my husband be following me, Mr. Manning?”
Gulf Coast Girl — 15
I was a mile off base, and realized it. “I’m sorry,” I said. It
had been a stupid thing to say, and I wondered what there
was about her that made me so uncomfortable and ready to
jump down her throat at the slightest excuse. She wasn’t
bothering me, was she? The hell she wasn’t bothering me.
She smiled, a little shakily, and I knew she was still scared.
“It’s all right,” she said. “You really didn’t mean it, anyway.
You’re very nice, you know.”
“Maybe we’d better get started looking for that shotgun,” I
said.
“Would it help if I went, too, in one of the boats?” she
asked. “I’d like to watch. And I thought perhaps, if you had
something to guide you—”
I looked around. It would help, all right. The water was
fairly clear and the visibility should be pretty good with the
sun directly overhead, but still I’d have to come to the surface
every few yards to get my bearings.
“Sure,” I said. “But you can’t go out in a skiff the way
you’re dressed. I can bail one out, but it’d still be dirty and
wet.”
“I think I’ve got an old swimsuit in the houseboat. I could
change into that.”
“All right,” I said. We went back around to the gangplank
and walked aboard. She unlocked the door. It led into a big
living-room which was well-furnished and even had a
fireplace. There was a rug on the floor, a sofa, some
overstuffed chairs, a bookcase, and two or three framed
pictures along the walls. The windows were closed and
curtained. It was in the center of the deckhouse structure,
and two doors led off into other rooms at each end. The air
was dead and still, and smelled faintly of dust.
She nodded to one of the doors at the right end of the
living-room. “You can change in there. I’ll see if I can find my
swim-suit.”
I went in. It was a bedroom. There was a double bed in it,
and a dresser, and the floor was carpeted from wall to wall.
So this was roughing it in a duck camp in the wilds. I took off
my clothes and got into the swimming trunks. It was hot, and
I was shiny with sweat. I wondered if she had found her suit,
and then wished irritably I could quit thinking of her.
Gulf Coast Girl — 16
I took a cigarette out of the shirt and lit it before I went out
in the living-room again. The doors at the other end were
closed, but I could hear her moving around in one of the
rooms. It sounded as if she was changing clothes. I located a
pair of oars and went down to the end of the pier.
Hauling one of the skiffs up alongside, I began bailing with
an old can. There was no shade here, and the sun beat down
on my head. In a moment I heard the whispered padding of
bare feet behind me and turned around.
She could make your breath catch in your throat. The
bathing suit was black, and she didn’t have a vestige of a tan;
the clear, smooth blondness of her hit you almost physically.
A few inches shorter with the same build and the same legs
and she would have been downright voluptuous; as it was
there was something regal about her. I looked down and went
on bailing.
I fitted the oarlocks and held the boat while she got in and
sat down amidships. Setting the aqualung and mask in the
stern, I shoved off.
“Pull out about twenty yards,” I directed. The water was
only about five feet deep around the pier and I could see the
bottom from the surface. The gun was nowhere around there.
“All right,” I said in a moment. “Hold it right there while I
go over. Row very slowly toward the point, just as if you were
going to the blind, but don’t get too far ahead of me. You’ll be
able to tell where I am by the bubbles coming up. I’ll have to
cover fifty or seventy-five feet on each side, because it was
dark and he could have wandered that much off the course.”
She nodded, and watched with intense interest while I
slipped the straps of the outfit over my shoulders and put on
the mask. I bit on the mouthpiece and slid over the stern. The
water was only about ten feet deep and the visibility was
good. I went down and brushed bottom. It was soft, and my
hand raised a cloud of silt.
That was the only thing I was afraid of. In all that time the
gun might have sunk completely out of sight in the mud. But
still it should leave a track, an outline, where it disappeared,
as there were no currents to disturb the bottom and erase it.
I looked up and could see the boat directly above me on the
ground-glass screen of the surface. The oars dipped once,
scattering bubbles. I swam to the right, just above the mud
Gulf Coast Girl — 17
and not disturbing it, made a wide swing, and came back to
cover the other side. Here and there an old log lay on the
bottom. I searched carefully around them.
She moved the boat slowly ahead. Time went by. I saw an
empty bottle, two or three beer cans, and an underwater snag
festooned with bass lures. Now and then bass and perch
would stare at me goggle-eyed and slide away.
We couldn’t have been over seventy-five yards off the pier
when I found the gun. If I’d been looking ahead instead of
staring so intently at the bottom I’d have seen it even sooner.
It was slanting into the mud, barrel down, at about a 60-
degree angle with the stock up in plain sight. I pulled it out
and kicked to the surface. I was some twenty feet from the
boat. She saw me and rowed over.
I caught the gunwale and lifted the shotgun out of the
water so she could see it. Her eyes went wide, and then she
smiled. “That was fast, wasn’t it?” she said.
I set it in the bottom of the boat, stripped off the diving
gear, and heaved that in, too. “Nothing to it,” I said. “It was
sticking up in plain sight.”
She watched me quietly as I pulled myself in over the stern
and sat down. I picked up the gun. It was a beauty, all right, a
trap model with ventilated sighting ramp and a lot of
engraving. I broke it and held it over the side, swishing it
back and forth to get the mud out of the barrel and from
under the ramp. Then I held it up and looked at it. She was
still watching me.
“It’s a pretty gun, isn’t it?” she said self-consciously.
I stared at it again, and then back at her, feeling the silence
lengthen out. It was the stock that gave it away, the stock and
she herself. She was a lousy actress.
The barrel could conceivably have stayed free of rust for a
long time, stuck in the mud like that where there was little or
no oxygen, but the wood was something else. It should have
been waterlogged. It wasn’t. Water still stood up on it in
drops, the way it does on a freshly waxed car. It hadn’t been
in the water 24 hours.
I thought of that other set of car tracks, and wondered how
bored and how cheap you could get.
Gulf Coast Girl — 18
Two
She pulled us back to the pier. I made the skiff fast and
followed her silently back to the car, carrying the diving gear
and the gun. The trunk was still open. I put the stuff in,
slammed the lid, and gave her the key.
Why not, I thought savagely. When had I become such a
priss? I couldn’t understand myself at all. If this was good
clean fun in her crowd, what did I have to kick about? Maybe
the commercial approach made the whole thing a little
greasy, like an old deck of cards, and maybe she could have
been a little less cynical about waving that wedding ring in
your face while she beat you over the head with the
advertising matter that stuck out of her bathing suit in every
direction, but still it was nothing to blow your top about, was
it? I didn’t have to tear her head off.
I didn’t know. All I was sure of was that I was sick of the
whole lousy thing and of her most of all. Maybe it was just the
sheer magnificence of her, paradoxically, that made it seem
even junkier than it was. She didn’t have any right to look like
that and work the other side of the street at the same time.
“You’re awfully quiet,” she said, the gray eyes faintly
puzzled.
This was the goddess again. She was cute.
“Am I?” I asked.
Gulf Coast Girl — 19
We walked back to the pier and went into the living-room of
the houseboat. She stopped in front of the fireplace and stood
facing me a little awkwardly, as if I still puzzled her.
She smiled tentatively. “You really found it quickly, didn’t
you?”
“Yes,” I said. I was standing right in front of her. Our eyes
met. “If you’d gone farther up the lake before you threw it in
it might have taken a little longer.”
She gasped.
The storm warnings were going up the halyards, but I was
too angry to see them. Angry at myself, I think. I went right
ahead and reeled my neck out another foot.
“Things must be pretty tough when a woman with your
looks has to go this far into left field—”
It rocked me, and my eyes stung; a solid hundred and fifty
pounds of flaming, outraged girl was leaning on the other end
of the arm. I turned around, leaving her standing there, and
walked into the bedroom before she decided to pull my head
off and hand it to me. She was big enough and angry enough.
I was shaking. I choked with anger, and I choked thinking
of her, and at the same time I told myself contemptuously I
was acting like the heroine in a silent movie and that I ought
to lean against the closed door with my hand on my chest.
Why didn’t I call a cop, or faint?
I stripped off the wet swimming trunks and slammed them
on the bed and began furiously dressing. I was buttoning the
shirt when it finally occurred to me to ask myself the same
question I’d implied to her. Why? Even if she did like her
extra-marital affairs rough, ready, and casual, she didn’t have
to chase them this far. With the equipment she had—even
with that wedding ring showing—all she had to do was
stumble. But what other explanation was there? She’d
deliberately thrown the gun in the lake. I gave up.
I was reaching for a cigarette when I suddenly heard
footsteps outside on the pier. I held still and listened. They
couldn’t be hers. She was barefoot. Or even if she’d already
changed and put her shoes on, this wasn’t the clicking of a
woman’s high heels. It was a man. Or men, I thought. It
sounded as if there were two of them. They came aboard and
Gulf Coast Girl — 20
into the living-room, the scraping of their shoes loud and
distinct in the hush. I stiffened, hardly breathing now.
Detectives? Wayne himself? Suddenly I remembered the
way she’d doubled all over town getting out on the highway
and how she’d kept watching the rearview mirror. I cursed
her bitterly and silently. This was wonderful. This was all I
lacked—getting myself shot, or named correspondent in a
divorce suit. And for nothing, except having my face slapped
around under my ear.
I looked swiftly around the room. There was no way out.
The window was too small. I eased across the carpet until I
was against the door, listening.
“Well, it’s the scenic Mrs. Macaulay,” a man’s voice said.
“You don’t mind if we look around, do you?”
Mrs. Macaulay? But that was what he’d said.
“What do you want, now?” Her voice was little more than a
whisper, and it was scared.
“The usual,” the man replied easily. “Tiresome, aren’t we?”
“Can’t you ever understand that I don’t know where he is?”
she said passionately. “He’s gone. He left me. I don’t know
where he went. I haven’t heard from him—”
“A bit tiresome yourself, if you don’t mind my saying so.
We’ve heard the routine. But to get back to the present
moment—we found your making two trips out here in twentyfour
hours rather intriguing, and thought we’d look into it.
Might even take up nature study ourselves. Now, where’s
Macaulay? Is he up here?”
“He’s not up here, and I don’t know where he is—”
Her voice cut off with a gasp, and then I heard the
explosive impact itself. It came again. And then again. She
apparently tried to hold on, but she began to break after the
third one and the sob which was wrung from her wasn’t a cry
of pain but of utter hopelessness. I gave it up then, too, and
came out.
There were two of them. The one to my left lounged on the
arm of an overstuffed chair, lighting a cigarette as I charged
into the room. I saw him only out of the corners of my eyes
because it was the other one I was after. He was turned the
other way. He had her backed up against one end of the sofa
and off balance with a knee pressed into her thighs while he
Gulf Coast Girl — 21
held her left wrist and the front of her bathing suit with one
hand and hit her with the other. He wasn’t as tall as she was,
but he was big across the shoulders. It was utterly
methodical, efficient, and sickening.
I caught the arm just as he drew it back again. He dropped
her. She fell across the sofa. He was blazingly fast, and even
taken by surprise that way he was falling into a crouch and
bringing his left up as he stepped back. But I was already
swinging, and it was too sudden and unexpected for even a
pug to get covered in time. He was still moving back and off
balance when it landed, and he kept going. He bounced off
the arm of another overstuffed chair, and rolled. He brought
up against a three-legged wall table near the door. It fell over
on him.
I started for him again, but something made me jerk my
eyes around to the other one. Maybe it was just a flicker of
movement. It couldn’t have been any more than that, but now
instead of a cigarette lighter in his hand there was a gun.
He gestured casually with the muzzle of it for me to move
back and stay there. I moved. There was something about
him.
He smiled. “Damned dramatic,” he said, almost
approvingly. “Hell’s own shakes of an entrance.” Then he
looked boredly at the gun in his hand and dropped it back in
the right-hand pocket of his jacket.
I was ten feet from him. And I remembered how fast it had
appeared in his hand before. He was safe enough, and knew
it. I watched him, still feeling the hot proddings of anger but
beginning to get control of myself now. I’d come out without
even stopping to think because I couldn’t take any more of
the noises coming from in here, and now I didn’t have the
faintest idea what I’d walked into, except that it looked
dangerous. I couldn’t place them. They weren’t police. And
they obviously weren’t private detectives hired by her
husband, because it was her husband they were looking for.
Somebody named Macaulay, and she’d told me her name was
Wayne. It was a total blank.
The one I’d hit was getting up. Pug was written all over
him, in the way he hitched up his trousers with his wrists and
the heels of his thumbs, shook his head to clear it, and began
advancing catlike on the balls of his feet with his hands out.
Gulf Coast Girl — 22
He was a good six inches shorter than I was, but he had
cocky shoulders and big arms, and I could see the bright,
eager malice with which he sized me up. He was a tough little
man who was going to cut a bigger one down to size.
“Drop it,” the lounging one said.
“Let me take him.” The plea was harsh, and urgent.
The other shook his head almost indifferently. He was long
and loose-limbed and casual, dressed in a tweed jacket and
flannels. It was impossible to tab him. He might have been an
intercollegiate miler or a minor poet, until you ran into that
cool and unruffled deadliness in the eyes. He had that
indefinable something about him which enables you to tell the
master craftsman from the apprentice in any trade, whether
you know anything about it or not. There was something
British about his speech.
“All right,” the pug said reluctantly. He looked hungrily at
me, and then at the girl. “You want me to ask her some
more?”