Gulf Coast Girl - Charles Williams(7)

I held her, and kissed the closed eyes, and we went under
again with that sensation of falling through infinite rosetinted
space. We came up. I saw the sun rising out of the sea.
I didn’t want to die. They couldn’t take it all away now.
I started to swim again, but the stroke was ragged and
uneven and she seemed to be a heavier weight pulling at me.
Suddenly the drag was gone. Panic seized me. I thought she
had gone under and was drowning. I turned. Her head was
still above surface. She had let go deliberately.
“Go on—” Her face went under and she choked.
I caught her arm and pulled her up and toward me, and
held her with her face above water. I saw the Ballerina going
by again to seaward. They were too far away. They wouldn’t
see us. I wondered if I wanted them to. I couldn’t think; it was
all mixed up. Being willing to die in the future, even in a
future measured in hours, was one thing; dying now was
something else. But it didn’t matter what I thought. They’d
never see us. They were nearly a mile off.


“Go on—” she gasped. “Maybe you can make it. Leave me.
I’ve ruined everything for you—”
“Hush,” I said. “Don’t waste breath.”
We went under.
I pulled her back to the surface. It seemed to take a long
time. Once more, I thought. Maybe twice. But the panic
hadn’t started yet. I hoped we wouldn’t fight each other when
it did. Maybe there wouldn’t be any panic. No, there always
Gulf Coast Girl — 129
was, when you took that first mouthful and your throat shut
off automatically to keep it out.
My eyes opened. We were on the surface again, and I saw
that the sloop had turned and was bearing down directly
toward us. But they couldn’t have seen us. Then some
detached part of my mind figured it out as calmly and
analytically as if I were working out something with a slide
rule in a classroom. It was those glasses. It was those 7 by 50
binoculars I had bought in New Orleans. They were the
reason they’d kept on searching. Barclay had known he could
locate us as soon as it was light.
Somehow we were still afloat. I could see Barclay standing
on the boom with an arm around the mast, directing Barfield
at the helm. They cut the engine and drifted down on us.
I watched them helplessly, unable even to struggle any
more. We had failed. But we were still alive. Barclay climbed
down into the cockpit and tossed a line. I caught it and he
pulled us over. When the sloop rolled down, he and Barfield
caught her arms and lifted her over the side. I heard Barfield
whistle, and then laugh. I stared up at him through the mists
of utter exhaustion, tried to curse him, and couldn’t.
They hauled me in. She was on her knees in the cockpit,
unable to rise, her head bowed and water running out of her
hair. The red rays of the sun coming over the horizon
splashed against her body and the two wisps of underclothing
were stuck to her like wet tissue. She was the most beautiful
thing I had ever seen, and the most completely beaten. I took
a step toward her, stumbled, and fell myself.
“Some dish, Manning,” Barfield said. “A wet dish, but a
dish.”
I tried to get to my feet. He put a hand on my head and
pushed gently, and I collapsed like a column of building
blocks.
Barclay’s voice lashed out, the first time I had heard anger
in it. “Help her below, Barfield,” he said.
They helped her down the companionway. I lay for another
minute in the cockpit, fighting for breath, and then managed
to get to my feet. I went below, staggering weakly and
holding onto anything I could reach. They had put her in the
starboard bunk in the forward part of the cabin, the one she’d
Gulf Coast Girl — 130
been in before. I pulled the curtain aside and leaned against
the door of the head. Barfield stared at me with amusement
and went out.
Barclay was pulling the sheet up over her nearly nude body
with the impersonal efficiency of a nurse.
I looked at him. “Thanks,” I said.
“Not at all,” he replied. “Best fall into the other bunk
yourself. You both look a bit done in.”
I indicated the sheet. “Why?”
He shrugged. “Why not? Gratuitous brutality is for fools.”
He went out.
That was it, I thought, lost in a sea of fatigue. That was as
near as I’d ever come to figuring him out and he’d said it
himself. Gratuitous brutality was for fools. He was a pro, and
was brutal only for pay. Why give away something you could
sell? To Barfield this half-clad girl was a peep-show and a
snicker; to Barclay she was an investment.
I stood beside her bunk, swaying a little, staring down at
the lovely, wide-cheekboned, Scandinavian face and the long
lashes on her cheek. Her hair was a sopping ruin.
I knelt a little and started taking out the pins, and when it
was loosed I spread it across the pillow. Maybe it would dry a
little.

Her eyes opened. They looked up at me and her lips moved.
“You could have made it alone.”
“I can’t think of any place I want to go alone,” I said.
“Neither can I,” she whispered.
I bent and kissed her, and everything caved in on me. I fell
into the other bunk and was asleep before I could straighten
out.
* * *
I awoke. Barfield was shaking my arm. “Rise and shine,
Manning,” he said. “Barclay wants to see you.”
It all came back and I could taste the bitterness of failure. I
sat up. I was stiff and sore all over, and the shorts were still
wet with sea water. “What time is it?”
“Four o’clock. You’ve been sacked out for ten hours.”
Gulf Coast Girl — 131
“All right, all right. You can dock my pay.” I reached up on
the shelf above the bunk and found a pack of cigarettes and a
book of matches. I fired one up and inhaled gratefully. She
was still asleep in the other bunk with the sheet pulled up
over her breast. She didn’t stir.
Barfield stepped backward and leaned against the locker.
He had taken off his shirt and was pink with sunburn where
he wasn’t covered with hair. I wondered where the other gun
was and decided Barclay probably had both of them. They’d
have better sense than to try to hide it somewhere. He had a
magnificent build, with shoulders like a lumberjack, and I
thought he’d outweigh me fifteen or twenty pounds. He
moved with good co-ordination and was light on his feet for a
man that much over 200, and I had an idea he’d take me in a
fight. Either way, somebody would get hurt. He’d been hurt
before. The nose was flat because it had been broken and he
had white scar tissue running down into his left eyebrow. The
gray eyes were sure of themselves and a little hard. His hair
was crew cut and almost as white as cotton, or at least it
looked that way against the tanned slab of a face.
I took another drag on the cigarette and studied the beatup
face. “Fighter?” I asked.
“Amateur. In college.”
“Football?”
He shook his head indifferently. “They hired their football
players.”
She was lying on her back with her face turned to one side.
Her hair streamed across the blue pillow slip in a cascade of
silver, and you could see the outlines of her breasts under the
sheet. Barfield stared. “What a build,” he said.
“Why don’t you go ahead and take the sheet off?” I asked.
“She’s asleep.”
He shrugged. “You’re easy to get sick of. Work at it, don’t
you?”
“This cruise wasn’t my idea,” I said. “I didn’t know I was
supposed to be a ray of sunshine.”
“Well, you’d better roll off your fat and get on deck. Barclay
wants you.”
“All right,” I said. “I signed for the message. You can
scram.”
Gulf Coast Girl — 132
His face and the gray eyes were ugly, but he didn’t move
toward me. Barclay had probably read him off about picking
fights with the gilt-edged investments or letting himself be
provoked. A fight could get out of hand, and Barclay needed
his passengers alive for a while yet. He turned and went out.
I went into the after part of the cabin, got some dungarees
out of a sea bag, and put on a pair of slippers. I looked in the
small mirror on the bulkhead. My eyes were puffy with sleep
and I needed a shave. I looked as rugged as I felt. Sticking a
pack of cigarettes and some matches in my pocket, I went on
deck.
It was a clear afternoon. There wasn’t much sea, and the
breeze had moderated a little. She was still on the port tack
under unreefed mainsail and jib. There was no land in sight.
“Good afternoon, Manning,” Barclay said. “Do you feel
better?”
“Rested,” I said. “You want me to relieve you now?”
He shook his head. The only concession he had made to the
informality of an ocean cruise was to take off his tie. He still
had on the tweed jacket, and I could see the bulge of an
automatic in each of the patch pockets. His face was pink
from the sun, and his jaw was covered with a stubble of
brown whiskers.
“No,” he said. “Barfield relieved me for a while this
morning. You can take over at six. What I called you about
was the matter of food. You can cook, I presume?”
“A little,” I said.
“Well, suppose you prepare something, sandwiches at least,
and make some coffee. And call Mrs. Macaulay. Tell her we
shall have a meal of sorts and a briefing session here at
around five o’clock.”
“Briefing?”
His eyebrows raised sardonically. “Yes. We intend to take
up, at long last, the trifling matter that brought us out here. I
refer to the location of that plane. Provided, of course, that
we don’t have any more distracting swimming parties. We
should be some fifty miles offshore now, so perhaps she’ll
leave her life belt below when she comes up.”
I took a last puff on the cigarette and tossed it overboard. “I
have some news for you,” I said. “She lost the life belt when
Gulf Coast Girl — 133
she went overboard and didn’t expect to reach shore. She
was merely committing suicide rather than come back.”
“Very touching,” he said. “But you’ve come to the wrong
department. I’m not the custodian of Mrs. Macaulay’s
happiness.”
Barfield spread his hands and shrugged with burlesque
sympathy. “You see, Mortimer? It’s a cruel world.”
“And I have more news for you,” I went on, ignoring
Barfield. They’d know, sooner or later, so why not start
preparing them? “You’re never going to find that plane. She
told me what Macaulay told her, and you couldn’t find the
Pacific fleet with the information.”
He shrugged. “Really, we don’t expect to find it that easily.
It may be the second or third location before she begins to
get near the truth.”
I kept my face expressionless, but it scared me. It was what
I had been afraid of all the time. They had no conception at
all of the immense waste of water out here and of the
firsthand, pinpointed accuracy of information you had to have
in order to locate something lost in it. The only thing they’d
ever be able to see was that she wanted the stupid diamonds
herself and was holding out on them.
“If you had lost your watch overboard between here and
the sea buoy,” I said, “could you go back and find it?”
“An airplane is considerably larger, old boy. And Macaulay
knew exactly where it went in, or he wouldn’t have tried to
hire a diver. But enough for now. We shall take that up when
Mrs. Macaulay is present. Right?”
I said nothing as I turned and went below. Arguing with
him was futile.
I pulled the curtain aside and stood by her bunk. She slept
peacefully, a little flushed with the heat. “Shannon,” I said
softly. She didn’t stir. I touched her arm.
Her eyes opened and looked at me without comprehension
at first. Then she stared around the cabin and just for a
second her defenses were down as the whole ugly mess came
back the way it does in that instant of waking. She absorbed
it and took command without a sound.
“Hello, Bill,” she said. “I’m glad it was you.”
Gulf Coast Girl — 134
“How do you feel?”
She stirred a little, experimentally. “I’m not sure yet.
Wobbly, I think.”
“You look wonderful.”
She made a wry face. “I’ll bet I do.”
“Really, you do. You’re beautiful.”
Self-consciousness seized us both. Too much had been
compressed into too short a time. By any normal standards
what we had done could have been called ugly and callous
and an absolute travesty on any kind of good taste, but
normal standards didn’t exist any more. Time was telescoped
and flattened like the front end of a car in a head-on crash.
We had been through a lifetime in less than a week, and we
probably had less than another week to live.
Sure, he was dead, and he’d died violently less than 24
hours ago, but it meant nothing any more. He had
deliberately erased himself long before that. He had run out
on her to save himself. She had left him when she knew it—
not physically, because out of some sense of obligation she
had to stick with him and try until the end to save him in spite
of his treachery, but she was gone nevertheless. She didn’t
owe him anything; she’d paid it all and canceled the account.
I hoped she would see all that, too, but I couldn’t bring
myself to say anything about it now. A girl had a right to be
fully awake, I thought, before being assaulted with a speech
like that.
“I’m going to make some sandwiches and coffee,” I said.
“Feel up to it?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Fine. Stay right where you are for a minute.” I went into
the after part of the cabin and drew a basin of fresh water.
Setting it on the little stand between the forward ends of the
bunks, I went back and picked up the cardboard carton of
clothes and personal effects she had sent aboard. It was on
one of the settees where Barfield had been pawing through it
as we were coming down the channel.
“You’ll feel better,” I said.
She sat up on the bunk, clutching the sheet, with her hair
falling about her shoulders.
Gulf Coast Girl — 135
“Big, beautiful Swede with an Irish name,” I said.
She smiled wanly. “I am half Irish,” she said. “But my
mother was a Russian Finn nearly six feet tall.”
“And beautiful.”
“Very beautiful.”
I grinned at her. “Don’t ask me how I knew. I might tell
you.”
I went out and drew the curtain.
Gulf Coast Girl — 136
Thirteen
While I was firing up the primus stove and starting coffee I
could hear her moving around beyond the curtain. It was
wonderful, just knowing she was there. Then I thought of
those two in the cockpit and the wonder of it became
torment. I damned Macaulay. He had done this to her.
He must have been a little mad there at the end. He should
have known there was no hope of finding that plane. It must
have become an obsession.
What he had done was pass her the baton in a rat race that
could never end any way other than in her death. His stupid
belief that he could find the plane again had convinced them,
and now after Barclay’s off-beat piece of genius she was
assumed to have all the facts and was supposed to run and
hide until they hauled her down and killed her. I cursed them
all for a bunch of fools. It was a game. It was “button,
button.” The rules were simple. You dropped a cuff link in
two hundred thousand square miles of empty ocean and then
went back and found it. If you didn’t find it, you killed
somebody. You didn’t know much about the odds on finding
cuff links dropped in oceans, but you were hell on wheels at
killing people.
What chance did we have of getting away from them? And if
we got away, where did we go? With not only the police after
us but the rest of the “button, button” crowd as well. The two
we had on our backs now were only part of them. The game
Gulf Coast Girl — 137
never really ended. It just took them a while to find you, and
then it started all over again. Macaulay had never been able
to shake them, had he?
I was measuring coffee into the percolator when the idea
began to take form. I stopped dead still, so abruptly I spilled
the coffee from the spoon, enthralled with the beauty of it.
Half of our problem didn’t even exist. Go back?
Who wanted to go back?
Here was the Ballerina, the answer to any blue-water
sailor’s dream. There she was, beyond that curtain, the girl
I’d never had out of my mind since the moment I met her.
And behind me, in a black satchel, was eighty thousand
dollars. I stood there holding the coffee can in my hand,
feeling the deck heel down and hearing the sound of water
along the hull while I rolled the names around on my tongue:
Grand Cayman, Martinique, Barbados, Guadeloupe, Granada
—Not the big places, not San Juan or Port-au-Prince or
Havana, where we’d be caught, but the little ones, the small
tropical islands with long golden beaches and native villages
in sheltered bays where the water was blue and still.
They’ll never find us. That much money would last us a
lifetime. I thought of it and could feel the intense longing take
hold of me. Just the two of us. It was like looking at paradise.
And on the other side of the world—Borneo, Java, Sumatra,
Tongareva, the Marquesas—all those names out of Conrad
and Jack London that made your mouth water. Go back? With
all that tropic, coral-reefed, blue-watered world there waiting
for us, and the boat and a fortune right here in our hands?
Why in the name of God hadn’t I thought of it before? We’d
change the name of the sloop, and her port of registry.
Change our own names, and be married by a priest in some
out-of-the-way native village.
* * *
Aboard the American tanker Joseph H. Hallock, the master
looked up from the thick journal and frowned. It was past
midnight. He sat in a leather-upholstered easy chair in the
dim and well-ordered seclusion of his office with the book in
his lap in the glow from the single reading lamp. There was
only the faint vibration from the big diesels aft to indicate he
was at sea.
Gulf Coast Girl — 138
His eyes were thoughtful, as if something puzzled him.
Slipping a finger between the pages to mark his place, he
flipped back, looking for something. When he found it he
reread the passage. With the thumb and forefinger of his left
hand he pinched his lower lip in a gesture that was
characteristic of him when he was thinking, and sat for
another minute staring at the page. Then he shook his head
and went on reading, a little faster now, forgetting he was up
long past his bedtime.
* * *
I came abruptly back to earth, and the dream faded. All that
was waiting for us, but knowing it and yearning for it only
made reality worse. You couldn’t dream Barclay away, nor
escape from Barfield by imagining he wasn’t there.
But there must be a way. There had to be.
I put the coffee away and began slicing bread for
sandwiches. I took salami and cheese from the icebox. What
were the chances at any given moment? Last night Barclay
had mockingly handed me his gun, knowing I wouldn’t use it
because Barfield could kill her. But now she was behind me,
and they were both in the cockpit, Barfield unarmed. Suppose
—
Suppose I went out there, came close to Barclay on the
pretext of handing him a sandwich, and slugged him. He was
slender, fine-boned, and probably easy to hurt, and he had
two guns in his pockets. I might get one. But what would
happen? For a fraction of a second I was off guard as far as
Barfield was concerned, and he didn’t have to be armed if you
didn’t have your hands up. He’d belt me from behind and I’d
be lying in the cockpit having my face kicked in. He was built
for it, and he knew his business.
But they had to sleep sometime. So what if they did? They
slept one at a time, and the other was watching me. And
there was always the threat of what they could do to her. If I
got hold of a gun they could make me give it up if they had
her. Anything I tried had to work the first time, and all at
once, or it was no good at all.
But five days! Maybe a week. They had to slip up sometime.
If I kept watching them, and waiting—
Gulf Coast Girl — 139
I was stacking sandwiches on a plate when the curtains
parted and she came out. She was wearing a summery blue
cotton dress and sandals, and her legs were bare. She had
put her hair back up, but it was still faintly damp and a little
of its fine, soft sheen was lacking. Salt water was poor for a
shampoo. She wore no make-up.
She came over beside me. Self-consciousness was still like
a wall between us. “Feel better?” I asked.
She nodded. “I’m hungry, too.”
She glanced beyond me, toward the companionway. They
couldn’t see down here unless they were in the forward end
of the cockpit. Sunlight streamed in the open hatch and slid
along the deck as we rolled slightly in the sea.
The big eyes were grave, and her lips scarcely moved.
“You’re pretty wonderful,” she said. “Thanks for
understanding.”
Then she went on, in a louder tone: “Shall I help you carry
something up to the animals?”
“Sure,” I said. I handed her the sandwiches. “Take these,
and I’ll bring the coffee and some cups.”
We went up. Barclay was at the tiller, and Barfield lounged
on the port side, his legs outstretched. He drew them in, and
grinned. “Going for a swim, honey?” he asked.
She glanced briefly at him as if he were something that had
crawled out of a ditch after a rain, and sat down on the
starboard side holding the plate of sandwiches in her lap.
Barclay smiled coolly. “I trust you’ve recovered.”
She nodded. “I have. Thank you.”

He signed to me. “Take the helm for a while Manning.”
I set the coffeepot on the cockpit deck and moved back. He
slipped past and I took the tiller. The sun was low in the west
and the breeze had subsided to a light air scarcely filling the
sails. Barclay sat down on the weather side beyond Barfield
and took one of the sandwiches from the plate. A lock of
brown hair was breeze-blown across his forehead and he
looked more like a young poet or student than ever, if you
forgot the heavy sag of the jacket and didn’t look too closely
at the cool deadliness of the eyes.
Gulf Coast Girl — 140
He glanced at me and then at Shannon. “If you’ll be kind
enough to give me your attention I shan’t have to say this
more than once. We are now at least fifty miles from the
nearest land. Obviously, any further attempt to swim ashore
is futile. I have thrown overboard the oars to the dinghy, so
you can’t get away in that. Any attempt at upsetting the
status quo will be met with a pistol-whipping.”
He stopped. Barfield had leaned forward to take a sandwich
from the plate on her lap, and while he was about it he patted
her on the knee. She stared at him with icy contempt.
“Listen to the nice man, baby,” he said.
“You are listening, aren’t you, Mrs. Macaulay?” Barclay
asked coldly. “I was speaking primarily to you, since you will
be the recipient of the pistol-whipping if Manning tries to get
out of hand.”
She was superb. She turned and regarded him calmly. “I
hear you. But you don’t have to impress me; you forget, I’ve
already seen you at work.”
He shrugged. “That being the case, shall we get down to
business? Your husband told you where his plane crashed. I
should like you to tell us exactly what he said.”
“Of course I’ll tell you,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I? But I
fail to see why you had to bring me out here to ask a simple
question like that.”
“Obvious, isn’t it?” he said. “But go ahead.”
“All right. It was late in the afternoon, he said, near sunset,
when he picked up Scorpion Reef. He changed course slightly
so as to hit the Florida coast somewhere above Fort Myers. A
few minutes later he began to have trouble with his starboard
engine. Then it caught fire. He couldn’t put it out, and he
knew he was going to crash. He had noticed a reef or shoal
below him just a minute or two before, and tried to get back
so he could land on the downwind side of it, where the sea
wouldn’t be so rough, but he couldn’t make it. He crashed on
the east side of it, about two miles off, and the plane sank
almost immediately. He just had time to climb out on a wing,
and throw the raft in the water. As you probably know, he
couldn’t swim at all.”
“Why didn’t he try to get the diamonds off with him?”
Gulf Coast Girl — 141
“He had stowed the box in a locker so it wouldn’t go flying
around if the weather got rough. And the locker was aft,
already under water.”
“What about the other man? The diver?”
This was the only part of it that hurt her. She hesitated for
a moment, and I could see the sickness in her eyes. “He said
the man didn’t have his belt fastened, and was killed in the
crash.”
You could take your choice, I thought. He might have been
alone, already a murderer, or he could have left an injured
man to drown. Or possibly there was just a slim chance he
was telling the truth. She could hold onto that, anyway.
“Very well,” Barclay said. Then he lashed at her suddenly:
“Now. Why was he so sure of his exact bearing from that
reef? He didn’t have time to take a compass reading before
the plane went down, and he didn’t have a compass on the
raft.”
She was quite calm. “It was late afternoon, I said. The sun
was setting. The plane, the very northern end of the surf on
the shoal, and the sun were all in one straight line.”
She looked around suddenly at me. “I remember now, you
asked me that, didn’t you, Bill? Whether he could see surf
from the raft. And I’d forgotten.”
I nodded. It would make a difference, all right; but you still
had to find the reef. It was hopeless.
Barclay dropped the rest of the sandwich over the side and
cupped his hands to light a cigarette. “Very well. Now, what
was the position?”
“Fifty miles north-northeast of Scorpion Reef.”
He stared coldly. “And why did you say it was to the
westward when I asked you last night?”
“I’m sure I didn’t,” she replied.
“The fact remains, you did. Make up our minds, shall we?”
“It’s north-northeast.”
“Very well,” he said crisply. “George, run down and bring
up that chart. And the parallel rulers and dividers.”
Barfield brought them up and the two of them crouched
over the chart in the bottom of the cockpit. She drew her
knees to one side and continued to regard them as if they
Gulf Coast Girl — 142
were some kind of vermin. Barclay’s face was thoughtful.
“‘North-northeast—”
“Make it twenty-two degrees,” I said. “Get it off the
compass rose and slide the rulers over.” I knew what he
would find, and waited, a little tensely.
He had the line, and picked up the dividers. He looked over
at me, his eyes questioning. “Edge of the chart, isn’t it? Mean
latitude, or something?”
“Yes,” I said. “Sixty nautical miles to the degree.”
He picked the distance off and set the dividers along the
line. Then he turned his head and stared bleakly at Shannon
Macaulay. “Perhaps you would like to try again.”
“You asked me what he told me,” she said indifferently. “I
have just repeated it, word for word. What else would you like
me to do?”
“Tell the truth, for one thing.”
“I am telling the truth.”
He sighed. “I see. Then we are to assume the chart-maker
was lying. The nearest sounding shown here is forty-five
fathoms. A practical joke, no doubt.”
“And why do you think I would lie about it?”
“Really? For a paltry three quarters of a million?”
There was Irish in her, all right, and it flared now, the
second time I had seen it. “Why, you idiotic vermin! I
wouldn’t stoop to pick up your damned, filthy diamonds if I
stumbled over them in the dark. I don’t want them. I wouldn’t
have them. I have no interest in them whatever. If I had them
here in my lap, I’d give them to you, and be glad to get rid of
them. But there’s no way you can understand that, is there?
I’d be wasting my breath trying to explain it to you.”
“Excellent scene,” he said. “More effective, as a rule,
however, if you throw something. Now, shall we start over?”
He paused, and nodded to Barfield. “George.”
Barfield turned, still on his knees, and caught her left wrist.
He started to twist it, slowly at first.
I pulled my feet under me, and crouched, still holding the
tiller. “Call him off,” I said.
Gulf Coast Girl — 143
Barclay slipped the gun out of his right-hand jacket pocket
and pointed it carelessly in my direction. “As you were,
Manning.”
“Call him off!”
Barfield had stopped to watch us, but he continued to hold
her arm. Her lips were tightly compressed, and I knew it was
already hurting.
I was too wild to be scared. “Listen, Barclay. This whole
thing is going to come unzipped. If he hurts her, it’s you I’m
coming for, and you’re going to have to use that gun to stop
me. If you think you can find that reef without my help, go
ahead.”
It hung poised, ready to go either way. I tried to take a
breath through the tightness in my throat. “Don’t be a
damned fool,” I went on. “If she were going to lie, would she
give you a stupid position like that? Maybe there is a shoal
there, or somewhere within fifteen miles or so. All that area
hasn’t been sounded. Macaulay could have been off in his
reckoning. The only thing to do is go there and see, and you’ll
never get there unless I take you. You name it. Now.”
He saw I was right. He motioned for Barfield to turn her
loose. The tension drained away, and I was limp. I’d bought a
little time, but I knew that when the next time came I’d be
tied up before they started.
She stood up, turned deliberately to smile at me, and went
below, ignoring them.
Barfield lounged on the seat with a cup of coffee in his
hand. “The hero,” he said. “We’ve got a real, live hero aboard,
Joey.”
* * *
Barclay took over again while I ate a sandwich and drank
some coffee. I relieved him at six. He and Barfield went below
and sat in the cabin, talking. After a while I heard them turn
on the radio. It had short wave in addition to the marine
bands, and they got an Argentine station playing Latin
American dance music. Sunset was a great splash of salmon
and orange and pink, fading slowly while the sea stretched
out like a rolling, dark prairie.
Gulf Coast Girl — 144
I was about to call Barclay to take the tiller so I could light
the running lights when Shannon came up through the hatch.
After I’d shown her briefly how to handle it, she took over
while I attended to them.
When I came back she slid forward and sat there near
enough to touch, but not touching, saying nothing. Sunset
was a bad time of day if you had trouble, but I could sense
she didn’t want any help with it, at least not yet. There was
an odd awkwardness between us. It would go away after a
while, but until it did there was nothing we could do about it.
I tried imagining that this was the Java Sea and we were
alone aboard, two people who had forgotten the rest of the
world and had been forgotten by it. For a moment it was very
real, and the longing was almost unbearable.
There was just enough light in the afterglow to see her
face, and when I looked around again she was crying. She
was doing it quite silently with her head tilted back a little
and not trying to put her hands up to her face or wipe away
the tears or anything. The crying just welled up in her and
overflowed.
“I’m sorry, Bill,” she said after a while. “This will be the last
time. I got to thinking of him all alone there in that big house,
with it getting d-dark outside. He was afraid of the dark. For
months he was terrified of it. B-But always before I was there
with him—”
He was leaning on her. She held him up and kept the
sawdust from leaking out while he planned to double-cross
her and leave her. And when it blew up in his face he went
back and leaned on her some more. I didn’t feel anything for
him, nor care a damn if it did get dark outside, but it was a
gruesome picture if you couldn’t keep your mind off it—a
dead man lying there alone in all that Swedish modern with
one bridge lamp burning day in and day out and a
phonograph still going if it hadn’t shut itself off. He probably
wouldn’t be found for over 24 hours yet. She’d said Tuesday
and Friday were the days the maid came. When they did,
they’d pick up her car out at the airport almost immediately
and know they had it made, all except finding her.
There was nothing I could do. I let her cry. It was a helpless
feeling.
Gulf Coast Girl — 145
After a while she got it under control, and she said quietly,
“I wonder why nothing is ever simple and clear-cut. Why
can’t things be completely black or completely white, instead
of all mixed up? What he did amounted to deliberate betrayal;
so that should make it easy, shouldn’t it? There’s your nice,
pat answer. It’s routine. It’s a cliché. She was in love with
him, but he wasn’t in love with her. That’s fine, except it was
the other way around. He was a heel. That’s simple and easy,
except it wasn’t true.”
I waited, saying nothing. She was trying to tell me about it,
or maybe trying to straighten it out in her own mind, and she
didn’t want me mixed up in it. Not yet, anyway. She was
talking to a psychiatrist, or a priest, or to herself.
“He was driven to it. It’s easy to say it was his own fault,
that he was old enough to know it was wrong, and that he
began it deliberately. But people have been tempted by easy
money before, and it’ll go on happening as long as you have
people and have money. What I’m trying to say is that in the
beginning there was no question of running out on me.
Maybe he even thought he was doing it partly tor me. He
liked to give me things. Expensive things.
“You don’t dive or fall into something like that all at once.
It’s gradual. It was simple at first, and then it failed and it
was more difficult, and in the end it was an obsession. And he
was afraid. There’s no way I can make you understand fear
like that, probably, because it’s something the human race
has forgotten. Being hunted, I mean. It’s been too long. It’s
an individual experience now, and you have to go through it
yourself to know what it’s like.
“So that brings us to another easy answer. All he had to do
was forget the stupid diamonds and get word to Barclay
where they were so they’d go recover them and quit trailing
him. And all a heroin addict has to do is make a New Year’s
resolution and quit. And how did he know they’d stop trying
to kill him even if they got them back? He’d stolen from them,
hadn’t he?