Gulf Coast Girl - Charles Williams(8)

“So in the end he was driven into a corner and he knew the
only way he would ever be free of them was to make them
think he was dead. And to make it convincing he had to leave
me and let me think he was dead, too. Send me out as a
decoy. Sacrifice me, or something. So condemn him. But
Gulf Coast Girl — 146
before you do, try to remember that he was already beginning
to break. The carrousel was whirling like a centrifuge now,
and he was no longer the same man who’d got on back there
when it was a children’s ride.
“I wasn’t in love with him—not the way I know it can be. I
liked him, and I admired lots of things about him, and he was
wonderful to me and I owed him everything. But that’s not
love, is it? So when I learned what he’d done, or tried to do,
all I had to do was walk out. Wasn’t it? You see? Simple
again.


“Listen, Bill. My father was a vaudeville-skit Irishman, with
all the props. He was little and pugnacious and he got into
fights and he was lovable. He worked on the docks when he
wasn’t in trouble with the union bosses or drunk or in jail for
disturbing the peace. We never had anything. I didn’t finish
high school. I was a big, awkward, slangy, sexy-looking
blonde who didn’t have anywhere to go except bad. I couldn’t
speak English, and I didn’t know how to walk or wear clothes
or have the taste to buy them if I’d had the money to do it
with. When I met him I was twenty and working in a nightclub
chorus. I couldn’t dance and I couldn’t sing, but there
was a lot of me to look at in the costumes we wore, so nobody
complained. He asked me to marry him, and I did, realizing it
probably wouldn’t happen twice in one lifetime. I mean that
anybody that nice, with taste and discrimination, would fall in
love with what amounted to just a lot of bare skin, even if it
was smooth.

“He came from a very nice family; his grandfather had been
a United States Senator. He wasn’t particularly rich, but he
had a good job. He was fifteen years older than I was, but it
didn’t matter. It wasn’t that sort of thing at all. He was
wonderful to me. I’m still a big, sexy-looking blonde, and I’ll
never know anything startling, but if I’m not as awkward and
slangy and brassy as I was at twenty I owe it all to him. He
had a knack for teaching me things without hurting my
feelings or making me feel he was ashamed of me.
“In a lot of ways he was a very gentle person, Bill. He was
nice, until that fear started eating him up. He’d never told me
a lie before. I thought he was entitled to one. So I stayed.”
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She stopped and sat with her head tilted back a little,
looking at the sky. Then she said quietly, “So I ruined
everything for you.”
“No,” I said. “I would have come, anyway, even if you’d
telephoned me. And nothing’s ruined. We’ll get away.”
She shook her head, still not looking at me. “I’ve been
doing this a little longer than you have. There’s no escape.”
Gulf Coast Girl — 148
Fourteen
The breeze held steady out of the northeast, day after day,
and the miles ran behind us. I’d bought time for us, but I
hadn’t bought much, and every day’s run was bringing us
nearer the showdown. I knew what would happen when we
got down there and couldn’t find any shoal. Something had to
happen before then; we had to get a break. But days passed
and we didn’t. I watched them. I studied the pattern of their
movements, looking for the flaw in their complete mastery of
the situation, but there was none. When one was asleep the
other was watching me, never letting me get too near. And
there was always Shannon Macaulay. They had me tied, and
they knew it. It was unique, a masterpiece in its own way; we
were at sea in a 36-foot sloop, so all four of us had to be
sitting right on top of the explosion if it came. I couldn’t hide
her or get her out of the way.
Shannon was silent for long periods when she sat in the
cockpit with me on the night watches. The wall of reserve
was still there between us. Perhaps it was because of the
others there, never more than twenty feet away, or perhaps it
was Macaulay, or both, but I could sense she wanted to be
left alone.
When Barclay had the helm, from midnight to six, I slept in
the cockpit—when I slept at all. Most of the time I lay awake
looking up at the swing of the masthead against the sky while
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my thoughts went around in the same hopeless circle. There
had to be a way to beat them. But how?
It was noon the fourth day out of Sanport. I had taken a
sight and was working out our position at the chart table in
the cabin. Barclay was at the helm, and Barfield lounged
shirtless and whiskery on the other settee, eating an apple.
Shannon stood near the curtain, watching me silently to see
where I put us at noon. She realized what those little crosses
meant, marching across the chart. They were steps, going to
nowhere.
I was nearly finished with my figures when Barfield tossed
the apple core out through the hatch and leaned forward.
“How about it, Admiral Drake?” he asked. “When do we get
there?”
I glanced at the chart, about to mark the position on it, and
then paused. An idea was beginning to nudge me. We
wouldn’t pass near enough to Scorpion Reef to sight it, so
they had to take my word as to where we were. Barclay knew
approximately, of course, because he checked the compass
headings against each day’s position, but he had to accept my
figures for the distance run.
I was thinking swiftly. It might work.
Twenty or twenty-five miles beyond the point where
Macaulay was supposed to have crashed lay the beginnings of
the Northern Shelves. If there was a shoal or reef in a
hundred miles it would be out there. The chances were a
thousand to one that it was somewhere in that vast shallow
area that he had actually gone into the drink, even though
they were about a hundred billion to one against our ever
finding where. So if I put us out there when they thought we
were on the location she had given me—We might find a
shoal. And any shoal would do. “Oh,” I said to Barfield, as if I
had just remembered his question. “Have it in a minute.”
I set the little cross down 15 miles to the westward and a
little north of our actual position and tore up my work sheet.
Subtract ten miles tomorrow noon and I’d have it made
without exciting Barclay’s suspicions. We’d be twenty-five
miles ahead of where Barclay thought we were, right in that
shoal area of the Northern Shelves when he thought we were
50 miles north-northeast of Scorpion Reef, the position
Macaulay had given her. We would also run through
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Macaulay’s position in getting there, so we’d have two
chances instead of one of finding something. Taking up the
dividers, I stepped off the distance. “Let’s see, this is
Wednesday. Sometime Friday afternoon, if this breeze holds.”
He nodded and went on deck to tell Barclay. Shannon was
watching me. “That means,” she said quietly, “that by
Saturday night or Sunday, if we don’t find anything, the
animals will be growing ugly.”
I started to tell her what I was doing. The words were
almost out of my mouth when I stopped. I couldn’t. The object
of the whole thing was to get her off the boat, and if she knew
why I wanted her off she wouldn’t go. She’d have some
foolish idea about not letting me face it alone, and I’d never
convince her that alone was the only way I had a chance.
I looked down at the chart. “Maybe we’ll find the shoal,” I
said.
“If we don’t, I’m going to jump. Don’t come after me.”
I had to say something. “No,” I said. “When they start it,
climb on Barfield. Just hang on. Bite him. Anything. I’ll try to
get to Barclay. He’ll have the guns.”
It was a stall, and I knew it. They’d slug me and tie me up
before they started to work on her. But maybe she hadn’t
figured that out and it might give her something to live with.
* * *
I worked star sights at dusk, and again just at dawn
Thursday, checking our leeward drift and course made, trying
to pinpoint our position as closely as possible. At noon I
dropped our ostensible position back the other ten miles.
Barclay apparently suspected nothing. He merely nodded,
seemingly satisfied with all the effort I was making to put us
over the right spot.
Friday morning was clear again, and the breeze was
dropping a little. I took a series of star sights just at dawn
and worked them out while Barclay took the helm. Barfield
smoked a cigarette and watched me, surly at having been
awakened so I could come down into the cabin.
My sights checked out within a mile of each other. We were
right on the nose, 45 miles northeast of Scorpion Reef. I
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marked the position on the chart as being 20 miles northeast,
and went on deck.
“We’re far enough south,” I said, “but still setting too far to
the westward. Have to come a little north of east.”
“I don’t think she’ll sail that close to it,” Barclay said. “Have
to tack.”
I took the helm, relieving him, and we came about on the
starboard tack. It was lucky, I thought; we’d cover that whole
area pretty thoroughly beating up against the wind. The sun
was coming up now. Barclay went below, and I heard him
telling Barfield to start making some coffee.
It was a beautiful morning. A very light sea was running,
not breaking now in the gentle breeze. The deck was wet with
dew. I lit a cigarette and kept watching the horizon, looking
for white water. It was the same unbroken blue as far as the
eye could see, with not even a tinge of shoal-water green. But
it was all right. We had two chances this way, instead of one,
and I didn’t really expect to find anything around here.
Macaulay had been completely haywire in his reckoning. By
late afternoon, when they thought we were arriving on
Macaulay’s position, we’d be on the edge of the Northern
Shelves and in much shallower water. The chances should be
reasonably good for seeing surf somewhere. And when we
did, the odds might swing, ever so slightly, in our favor.
Shannon came up from the cabin and brought me a cup of
coffee, carrying another for herself. Her face was pale, and
she was very quiet. It would be even worse for her, I thought,
if she realized that this empty blue expanse of water we were
tacking across right now was the position Macaulay had
given her.
We beat slowly to the eastward. At noon I worked out
another sight. We were already beyond the area Macaulay
had thought he’d gone down in. I put our position on the
chart twenty miles to the westward.
“Sometime this afternoon,” I told Barclay. “Or early tonight.
Depends on the wind.”
He merely nodded. He was growing quieter now, colder
than ever, and unapproachable. You could feel the tenseness
in the air. We had to sight something, and soon.
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The breeze kept threatening to die altogether, but held on,
dead ahead. We tacked, and kept on tacking. When I wasn’t
being watched I experimented to see how close to the wind I
could sail her, and she was a dream, but I didn’t hold her
there. I wanted to cover as much water on each side of our
course as possible.
The afternoon wore on and sunset flamed, and we saw
nothing. Barfield’s face was ugly as he watched her now, and
several times I saw him glance questioningly at Barclay. We
were all in the cockpit. I had the tiller.
“Listen,” I said harshly. “Both of you. Try to get it through
your heads. We’re not looking for the corner of Third and
Main. There are no street signs out here. We’re in the general
area. But Macaulay could have been out ten miles in his
reckoning. My figures could be from two to five miles out in
any direction. Error adds up.”
He was listening, his face expressionless.
I went on. I had to make them see. “When Macaulay
crashed, there was a heavy sea running. There’s not much
now but a light ground swell. There could have been surf
piled up that day high enough to see it five miles away, and
now you might think it was just a tide rip. We’ve got to
crisscross the whole area, back and forth. It may take two
days, or even longer.”
Barclay studied me thoughtfully. “Don’t take too long.”
It was dusk. We came about and headed due north. Three
hours later we came up into the wind and beat our way
eastward again for an hour, and then ran south. Nobody said
anything. We listened constantly for surf and strained our
eyes into the darkness. The hours went by.
I was growing desperate. Our only chance lay in making
them think we had found the place. Their vigilance would
slacken a little. If we actually found a reef, any reef, and
started dragging and diving I could ask for help. We had two
aqualungs. If Barfield went over with me I could come back
on some pretext and I’d have only Barclay to contend with. If
she went over, I’d have her out of the way, so I could make a
bid for one of those guns. Anything to get the four of us split
up.
Gulf Coast Girl — 153
We ran south until after midnight, beat our way east a few
miles, and swung back to the northward again. It went on all
night. There was no sound of surf, no white relieving the
darkness of the horizon. Dawn came. The sea was empty and
blue as far as the eye could see.
The breeze died completely and we lay becalmed, the sails
slatting. We lowered them.
“Start the auxiliary,” Barclay said.
“We’ll need the gasoline to drag with,” I protested, “when
we find the reef.”
“Might I point out that we don’t appear to have found any
reef,” he said icily. “Start the engine.”
I started it. The sun came up. We went on. The strain was
bad now. You could feel it there in the cockpit.
Barclay took the glasses and stood up, scanning the horizon
all the way around. Then he said, “Perhaps you’d better make
some coffee, George.”
Barfield grunted and went below. In a few minutes Barclay
followed him. I could hear the low sound of their voices in the
cabin. She sat across from me in the cockpit, her face
stamped with weariness. When she saw me looking at her,
she tried to. smile.
The voices in the cabin stopped. I slipped a lashing on the
tiller and stood up, easing my way softly to the forward end of
the cockpit. I could see them below me, inside the cabin.
Time had run out on us at last.
Barfield had taken a coil of line from under one of the
settees and was cutting a section from it with his pocketknife.
He cut off another, shorter piece. I saw Barclay hand
him one of the guns.
Oddly, it wasn’t fear I felt now that it was actually here. It
was rage—a strange, hopeless, terrible sort of anger I’d never
felt before. I turned and looked at her, thinking how it could
have been if they had just left us alone. She was all I’d
wanted since the first time I’d seen her. I hadn’t asked for
anything else, and she hadn’t asked for anything except a
chance to live, and now they were going to take it all away
from us. I was shaking.
I turned and hurried back to her. “Go forward,” I said. “Lie
down on deck, against the forward side of the cabin. Stay
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there. If anything happens to me, you can raise the jib alone.
Just the jib. Keep running before the wind in a straight line
and you’ll hit the coast of Mexico or Texas—”
“No,” she whispered fiercely. “No—”
I peeled her arms loose and pushed her. “Hurry!” She
started to say something more, looked at my face, and turned,
running forward. She stepped up from the cockpit and went
along the starboard side of the cabin, stumbling once and
almost falling.
It was like a black wind blowing. I knew I didn’t have a
chance, but all I wanted now was to get my hands on one of
those guns for just two seconds. Maybe she could make it to
land alone. They’d kill me, anyway, so I had nothing to lose. I
was tired of being run over in traffic.
I had to hurry. They’d be coming up any minute. I slipped
forward and stood on the deck, looking down the hatch.
“Surf!” I yelled. “Surf, ho!”
When they were both on the steps I’d dive down on top of
them. All three of us would go down in one tangle in that
narrow space between the settees, three of us with two guns
in an area not quite as wide and a little longer than a casket.
Then, in all the foaming craziness some detached part of my
mind wondered quite calmly how a girl alone would ever get
us out of there. She’d be a week reaching land, maybe ten
days. She’d go mad. They were starting up. Barclay was
coming first. I didn’t dive.
“Surf!” I yelled again. I pointed.
He came up on deck, his head starting to turn in the
direction I was pointing. I swung. It kept on turning, and I felt
his jaw break, and then his whole body pivoted and went off
balance and the sloop rolled to starboard and he went over
the side. I was falling, too, across the open hatch, across the
head and shoulders of Barfield emerging from the hatch, like
dropping across the arms of a rising grease rack or the top of
an ascending freight elevator that didn’t stop or even slow
down at the impact but just kept on coming up.
He was a bull. He came erect on the top step before he
toppled at last and fell. We crashed to the deck and when the
sloop rolled down to port we hung poised over the rail with
blue water slipping by just under my face. For some reason
Gulf Coast Girl — 155
we didn’t go overboard, but rolled in one straining tangle
onto the cockpit seat and then down onto the grating. A big
fist beat at my face. I tried to get my hands around his throat.
He heaved upward and we rolled over in the space between
the seats. The gun was in his hip pocket. He had it out and
was swinging it at my face. I caught his wrist. The gun went
off as I got my other hand on his wrist and twisted. It slid out
of his hand and kicked along the grating.
He hit me on the temple and my head slammed back
against the planks. He was coming to his knees, groping
behind him for the gun. I tried to push myself up, and then
beyond him I saw her. She ran along the deck and dropped
into the cockpit. I opened my mouth to yell at her, but
nothing came out. Or maybe I did yell and my eardrums were
still paralyzed by the crashing of the gun. Everything was
happening in an immense silence and slow motion, as if we
were three bits of something caught and held suspended in
cooling gelatin. She picked up the gun and was swinging it at
his head. He should have fallen, but it had no more effect on
him than a dropped chocolate Eclair. He heaved upward,
lashing out behind him with one big arm. She fell, and her
head struck the coaming at the forward end of the cockpit. I
came to my feet and lunged at him and we fell over and
beyond her onto the edge of the deck just as the sloop rolled
again and we slid over the side into the water.
We went down through warm greenness, still struggling
and almost completely oblivious to the fact of having moved
our hatred from one element to another. The propeller
rumbled past, scattering white bubbles like dust. One of his
arms was still locked around my neck and he was trying to
swing with the other, the blows softened and slowed down by
the water. Neither of us made any attempt to break and swim
to the surface. I could see the flat slab of a face inches from
mine, and tried to get my hands back at his throat. We went
on down, turning slowly like a big pinwheel. Then he jerked
with sudden spasm and the arm around my neck clamped
tighter, with something wild and frantic about it now. I
brought my feet up and put them against him and pushed. It
felt as if my head were being pulled off. My lungs hurt. I
knew I was going to inhale in a minute, and that he already
had. I kicked at him once more and my head came free and I
shot toward the surface.
Gulf Coast Girl — 156
I came out into sunlight and sparkling blue, and sobbed for
air. I shook water from my face and breathed in again,
shuddering, feeling my lungs swell with it. He hadn’t come up
yet. I turned, searching the water for him. A gentle ground
swell lifted me and I came down into the trough as it passed.
Seconds went by, and I knew he wasn’t coming up. He’d had
the breath knocked out of him when we hit the deck, just
before we slid overboard, and he’d drowned down there.
I could hear the boat’s engine behind me, fainter now, and I
turned to see which way it was circling. I stared. It wasn’t
turning. It was two hundred yards away, going straight ahead
for Yucatan with nobody at the helm. I didn’t see her
anywhere. She’d been knocked out when she fell. And I had
lashed the tiller.
I started to cry out, but stopped. Even if she were conscious
she couldn’t hear me above the noise of the engine. The boat
was already too far away. I was utterly helpless; there was
nothing I could do at all. If she didn’t regain consciousness
and start back before she’d gone too far she’d never find me.
I reached down mechanically and started taking off my
dungarees and slippers.
I was calm now, after the crazy, foaming rage had gone
away, and I looked at it with complete objectivity. It just
wasn’t intended to be. We’d been doomed from the start.
There was something inexorable about it; it was what
mathematicians called an infinite series with a limiting factor.
Add .1 and .01 and .001 and .0001 and so on and on forever
until you’d worn out all the adding machines on earth and
you’d never reach 1.
My head jerked suddenly erect and I looked around,
wondering if I had lost my mind. What I had heard was a
gunshot, and ten feet off to my left something had gone chuwuuug!
into the side of a ground swell. It was insane. The
stern of the Ballerina was receding in the distance and I was
alone in a blue immensity of gently heaving, sunlit water and
calm, empty sky, and somebody had spliced the sound track
of a western movie onto it. I had forgotten all about Barclay.
He came to the surface of the sea forty yards away. He was
drowning—drowning in a waterlogged tweed jacket with a
gun in his hand as if he would no more have parted with
either of them than he would have condescended to notice
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the existence of the Gulf of Mexico when he was busy trying
to kill me. I forgot even to be afraid, watching him. It was
fantastic.
He would go under. The gun would reappear first, held
above his head, and then his face, the broken jaw agape and
water running out of his mouth. He would calmly tilt the gun
barrel down to let the water run out so it wouldn’t explode
when he fired, and then he’d shoot. His aim was wild because
of his exertions to keep himself afloat long enough to fire. The
bullet would ricochet off a swell and go screaming into the
blue emptiness behind me, and the ejected shell would
whistle into the water on his right. He would go under. And
then fight his way back to the surface to do it all over again.
There was something utterly magnificent about it, and I
didn’t even hate him any more. I forgot I was the one he was
shooting at.
He shot three more times. The fourth time he didn’t quite
make it. The gun came up out of the water and then sank
back and there was an explosion just under the surface as he
pulled the trigger while it was submerged. He never came up
again.
I was alone now. I looked around. The Ballerina was far out
on the horizon, still going away.
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Fifteen
Even when you don’t have anywhere to go, you keep
swimming. I swam toward the boat, disappearing now, and
toward the coast of Yucatan a hundred and twenty miles
away. The sun was on my left. It climbed higher.
I didn’t panic, but I had to be careful about letting the
loneliness and immensity of it get hold of me or thinking too
much about how near we had been to winning at last. I
wondered if she had been killed, or badly hurt, and saw in a
moment that wasn’t safe, either. I concentrated on swimming.
Don’t think about anything.
It could have been an hour, or two hours, when I looked off
to the right and saw the mast. It was at least a mile away and
she wouldn’t see me, but even so a great surge of hope and
thanksgiving went through me and I broke the rhythm of my
stroke and went under and almost strangled. She was all
right! She’d only been knocked out. I reminded myself
realistically of the odds against her ever finding me in this
immense waste of water, but just knowing she was alive and
could reach land helped me to keep going.
I waved frantically each time I was lifted on a swell. She
went on past, far to the westward, and was soon hull down to
the north. I kept watching her, looking over my shoulder.
Now she was swinging, heading east. I began to hope. I saw
what she was doing. I loved her. God, she was wonderful. Oh,
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, she was wonderful. When she’d regained
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consciousness she didn’t have any way of knowing how long
she’d been out or where we’d gone overboard, so she couldn’t
go back and swing in a big circle. But she knew the sloop was
on a 180 degree heading. So she was running offset northand-
south courses, cutting the whole area into a big grid. A
girl who didn’t know anything about boats or compasses or
the sea. I turned and started swimming toward the sun.
Far out, she turned, heading south again. I tried to estimate
how far to the eastward she’d pass me. I couldn’t tell yet, but
I swam faster. She steadied up, began to grow larger. She
was passing three or four hundred yards ahead of me. I could
see her. She’d lashed the tiller and was standing on the boom
with an arm about the mast. I remembered the glasses again.
Each time the ground swell lifted me I kicked myself as high
as I could in the water and waved an arm. She was going on
by.
Then I saw her jump down from the boom and run aft. The
bow began to swing. I closed my eyes for an instant, and the
breath ran slowly out of me.
The sound of engine died and she drifted down toward me
and came to rest, rolling gently in the trough. Shannon was in
the cockpit with a coiled line in her hand. She started to
throw it. I shook my head. She watched me swim over. Her
face was utterly still. She didn’t say anything. I didn’t say
anything. I caught the rail when the boat rolled, and pulled
myself up. She knelt on the cockpit seat to help me. She put a
hand on my wrist and an arm about my shoulders and I came
up on the seat beside her in the warm sunlight. She let go
then. Everything went. They blew the dam.
Maybe you live your whole life for one moment. If you do,
that was the moment.
She was all over me. She was crying. I started to cry. I
couldn’ t help it. Tears ran down my face and I was holding
her so tightly she couldn’t breathe and I was kissing her. I
kissed her on the mouth and the boat rolled and it was the
way it had been that other time with that sensation of falling
through light-years of rose-colored space and the way it had
been the first time with that feeling of drowning in her, of
being overrun, submerged, lost, of never being able to come
up again, nor ever wanting to. I kissed the tears on her face
and kissed the closed eyelids, and at last I just held her in my
Gulf Coast Girl — 160
arms with my face pressed to her throat, feeling her heart
beat. Neither of us had said a word.

After a long time I raised my head so I could see her. Water
had dripped out of my hair onto her face, mingling with the
tears. I had got her dress all wet, holding her against me.
There was a puffy and discolored bruise on her forehead, just
at the hairline. The morning sun slanted across the closed
eyes and the broad-cheekboned planes of her face, and with
all of it she was so beautiful my breath caught in my throat.
Her eyes opened. They were wet and they were radiant,
and the lashes looked darker, matted together with tears. She
was somewhere between crying and laughing, and then the
smile came and it trembled about the corners of her
“I—I didn’t think I was going to find you,” she whispered.
“Oh, Bill! Bill—”
I leaned down and brushed the bruise on her forehead very
gently with my lips. “You Swede,” I said. “You big, lovely,
magnificent Swede. Hold still. I’ve got to look at you. I’ve got
to touch you—”
It occurred to me I was both looking at her and touching
her already and that I must be a little wild and not making
much sense, but I didn’t really expect to. I was overloaded. I
couldn’t handle any more right then. They were gone. We’d
won. We were free. We were alone. The whole world was
ahead of us. I loved her so much I choked up just looking at
her. I tried to tell her all this, but I floundered and went
dumb. I suppose you can take only so much of any emotion—
even happiness—and then your circuit-breakers start to trip.
“I love you,” I finished lamely. “Maybe some day I’ll be able
to make you understand how much—”
She nodded, and whispered, “I know. It’s the same with me.
I have all the time, even before I knew what he’d done. I
couldn’t help it. Don’t you see now why I couldn’t go off and
leave him? The rest of my life I’d have felt I was the one who
deserted him. And I couldn’t let it show in front of those two
—pigs. I’d have died. I’d have felt naked.”
“They’re gone. Forget them.”
Her eyes grew suddenly grave. “There isn’t anywhere left
in the world we can go, is there? But right now I don’t care.
Gulf Coast Girl — 161
We’re alone. They’ll never take this away from us. We’re
more alone than any two people have ever been in the world.”
I sprang up and caught her hand and pulled her erect.
“What do you mean, there’s nowhere left we can go? Come
here; I want to show you something.”
She looked at me as if I’d gone crazy, but let me hurry her
down the companionway. I suddenly remembered I had
nothing on but my shorts, but there was no time to worry
about that now. I had to show her.
“Here,” I said. “Look.” I snatched away the top chart, the
one of the Gulf of Mexico. The one below it was a chart of the
whole Caribbean from Cuba down to the Windward Islands.
“Look, Shannon. Honey. Look at it! That’s where we’re going.
Nobody will ever catch us. We’ve got the boat. It can go
anywhere. I could sail it around the world. All that money in
that bag is yours—”
I put an arm about her and pointed at the chart, talking
faster now, carried away with it, wanting her to see it.
“Barbados—Antigua—Guadeloupe—Martinique. The small
islands. Fishing villages. Just the two of us. Going places and
doing things even millionaires just dream about. Think of it,
honey: mountains and jungles rising straight out of the sea,
water so blue you won’t believe it when you’re looking at it,
beaches you never saw before, the trade winds blowing, and
nights that almost make you drunk. And just us. They’ll never
find us. Not the police, or anybody. They’ll forget us. We’ll
change the name of the boat. Change her port of registry to—
to—” I stabbed at the chart with a forefinger. “To San Juan.
When we get tired of the Caribbean we’ll cross the Atlantic
on the southern track and go through the Mediterranean and
Suez to the Indian Ocean and down to the East Indies and the
South Pacific. Java. Borneo. Tahiti—”
I stopped. She was watching me with the expression of
someone listening to the babbling of a child.
“What is it, honey?” I asked. “Don’t you want to try it?”
“Oh,” she said. “Why—yes. Want to? Bill, I’d give anything
on earth. Do you really think we can do it?”
“Do it?” I put my hands on each side of her face. “You big,
beautiful Swede, of course we can do it! We’ll forget the
whole world. You’re going to learn to sail a boat, and
Gulf Coast Girl — 162
navigate, and swim, and fish off the reefs, and dive for
lobsters, and you’re going to be tanned by every tropic sun
there is, and made love to by moonlight off Trinidad and in
the Malacca Strait and the Solomons and in tropical lagoons
—”
“Bill—” She stopped. She couldn’t talk.
? ? ?
At noon a little whisper of breeze blew up. We hoisted sail
and I laid a course southeast toward the Yucatan Strait. We
logged a scant two knots, but we were on our way. Toward
sunset it dropped to dead calm again. I put the dinghy in the
water and went around under the stern with a pot of white
paint. I put a coat over the name and port of registry. When it
dried I’d add a second, and a third, and then letter in the new
name with black.
While I was working she came on deck in a rubber cap and
a bathing suit that was just a brief pair of trunks and a bra.
She dived over the side and swam around to hang onto the
stern of the dinghy and watch me. When I had finished she
helped me put the dinghy back on the cabin, and we sat in
the cockpit and smoked, watching the afterglow fade.
“We’ll have to think of a name,” she said.
“It’s forgone,” I said. “Inevitable. It’ll be Freya.”
“Who was Freya?”
I grinned. “Another Swede. A goddess. The Norse goddess
of love, to be exact.”
Her eyes were soft. “Bill, you’re sweet. And I hope you
never change. But I’m just a big blonde.”
“So was Freya,” I said. “And Juno. And the Milan cathedral
is a pile of rocks.”
She stopped me in quite the nicest way there is to stop
anybody.
The last of the flame died in the west and there was a half
portion of moon just past the meridian in the sky. The
masthead swung in a lazy arc against the stars and we lay in
the cockpit on a mattress from one of the bunks and looked
up at it and made love and slept, and waked to whisper again.
I awoke late at night and the moon was gone and the deck
was wet with dew. She lay very quietly beside me in the
Gulf Coast Girl — 163
darkness, but in a moment I began to feel somehow she was
awake. I put a hand on her bare thigh, and all the muscles
were taut, and she was shaking. She was making no sound,
but she was tight as violin strings.
“Shannon, honey,” I said. “What is it?”
It was a moment before she answered. “It’s all right, Bill,”
she said. “I’m just a poor sleeper.”
I wondered if she had been thinking of Macaulay again, but
I couldn’t ask her. I could feel the tenseness and rigidity flow
out of her after a while and she lay quietly beside me. The
stars began to fade.
“Let’s go swimming,” she said. “Last one in’s a landlubber.”
I sat up, and she was pulling the rubber bathing cap over
her hair. We stepped onto the seat and dived, hand in hand,
over the side. When we came up I caught her in my arms and
she laughed. The shadowy form of the Ballerina rocked on the
swell beside us and there was a splash of pink across the
eastern sky. It was so beautiful it hurt, and so wonderful you
wanted to tear it out of the context of time and put it in an
album.
I kissed her, and stopped treading water with my feet, and
we sank down through the water with our arms tight about
each other and our lips together with that beautiful sensation
of falling through space.
We came out. “I love you,” I said. “I love you. I love you.”
“Let’s don’t ever go to land again,” she said. “Let’s stay out
here forever.”
I had reached that overloaded condition again, where I
could no longer express myself. “You’d miss television,” I
said.
We swam in a circle around the sloop. “We’d better get
out,” she whispered. “It’s growing light.”
I grinned at her. “That wouldn’t bother the other
goddesses. Where’s your union card?”
She laughed. “Freya was probably never paid for parading
half-naked in a night club. She’d have got self-conscious,
too.”
I climbed out and helped her up. She was a tall blond gleam
in the pre-dawn darkness as she hurried past me and down
Gulf Coast Girl — 164
the companionway. She clicked on the light and I heard her
draw the curtain. I went below and dressed in dungarees and
put on some coffee. I lit a cigarette and sat listening to her
moving around beyond the curtain.
It had been a thousand years since yesterday. It seemed
impossible the two of them had been here in this cabin just
one dawn ago, with their guns and their cold-blooded
deadliness, and that we had been so near to dying. I tried to
figure out what I felt about being responsible for their deaths,
but I couldn’t run down any feeling about it at all. They lived
by violence. They had died the same way. It was just an
industrial accident.
I thought of the police looking for me. And for her. But if
our luck held they would never know we had left there in a
boat. Nobody would know except Barclay’s gang. They knew
we had all gone to sea together and the boat had never been
heard of again, and they’d be looking for us, thinking we had
killed the two of them and tried to run with their lousy
diamonds. But how could they ever find us? Nobody could
find us.
She came out. She had put on a short-sleeved white
summer dress. She smiled. “The last of my traveling
wardrobe. If I don’t get to wash something pretty soon I’ll be
down to a swimsuit.”
“Maybe we’ll get a rain squall and catch some fresh water,”
I said. We had plenty yet, but you never used it for washing
or bathing at sea.
We took cups of coffee and sat down in the cockpit. It was
light now, and the sea was empty and blue to the horizon.
“Do you think anybody could ever find that plane?” she
asked.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think there’s a chance. What he saw
may have been a tide rip instead of a shoal. And even if he
was right and he crashed in shallow water near surf, on the
weather side of a reef or shoal the plane would break up in a
matter of weeks and be covered with sand.”
“You wouldn’t have looked for it any more, anyway, would
you?”
“No,” I said. “I haven’t lost any diamonds. Have you?”
She shook her head.
Gulf Coast Girl — 165
“I’ve already got what I wanted,” I said.
“Thank you, Bill.”
She was gazing off to seaward. I’d never get tired of just
looking at her, I thought. There was variety in her, and
contradiction. The generally smooth humor was balanced by
that flash-burn of a temper I’d seen twice, when she was
provoked or pushed too far, and the definite hint of sexiness
in her face by the straightforward honesty of the eyes.
She turned and saw me looking at her. I grinned at her.
“You don’t mind my calling you Swede, do you?”
She smiled. “Of course not. But my mother was a Russian
Finn, not a Swede.”
“Hush. All squareheads are Swedes. And you’re all the big,
beautiful Nordics in the world rolled into one. If they ever
consolidate into one Scandinavian country, I suggest they put
you on their money.
“It’s not that I don’t love the Irish half of you, too,” I went
on. “But the Irish are supposed to be very dark, when they’re
beautiful. Every time I look at you I half expect Thor to come
running up and hit me over the head with a short-handled
hammer and say, ‘Hold up thar, you polecat, where you agoin’
with my gal?’ ”
She laughed. “Who’s going to miss television?”
We went below and cooked breakfast. We had bacon and
eggs and set up the table between the settees and had paper
napkins and were very proper.
A light southeasterly breeze came up at midmorning. We
hoisted sail and tacked up against it all day. It died again in
the late afternoon. I put another coat of paint over the sloop’s
name. It was the same the next day, and the third. We’d beat
up against a whisper of air all day and lose what we’d gained
when it died and the current set us to the westward. We
began to joke about it. We’d never get into the Yucatan Strait.
And we didn’t care.
We swam. She sun-bathed—in the two-piece swimsuit at
first and later in just the bottom part of it. We rigged a hand
line and caught fresh red snapper for dinner. I lettered the
new name and port of registry on the stern of the sloop:
Freya of San Juan, P.R.
Gulf Coast Girl — 166
I began to teach her seamanship and navigation. She
protested she couldn’t learn the latter because she’d never
been any good at mathematics, but I assured her the math
involved was predigested when you used the tables and that
the thing that took skill was the sight itself. We practiced
each day at noon, shooting the sun, and took star sights at
dusk and dawn. We were still over the Northern Shelves, not
more than twenty miles to the eastward of the point where
Barclay and Barfield had drowned. The current was setting us
back when we weren’t under way.
She loved it all. That was the thing that made it finally
complete. I had thought at first she might merely tolerate it
because I liked the sea and boats and sailing and because it
was our only escape, but she took to it as naturally as the
Vikings she was descended from.
She was watching me take a sight one noon. “I’m so
happy,” she said. “We’ll remember this always, as long as we
live, won’t we?”
I glanced at her. “Sure. But don’t forget, this is only the
beginning.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes. Of course.”
We were lying becalmed again the next afternoon when the
rain squall hit us. She was sun-bathing on the forward deck in
the half bathing suit and I was reading aloud to her from a
paper-bound edition of The Heart of Darkness I’d had in my
gear when we saw it darkening to the eastward. We both ran
below. I left the book and took off my dungarees and shoes. It
burst over us without too much wind but with a tropical
deluge of rain. As soon as it had washed the salt from the
deck I blocked the scuppers and opened the filler cap to the
fresh water tank and let it run full. When I had topped it off
and put the cap back on, I turned, and she was coming
forward again with a small bottle of shampoo in her hand,
grinning at me through the deluge.
“Here, let me help, too,” I said.
We gravely sat down in opposite directions on deck, as if in
a love seat, and unpinned the roll of ash-blond hair. Rain fell
over us in sheets. I poured some of the shampoo into my
hands and we rubbed it on her head, trying to work up the
foam against the beating of the rain. She was naked from the
waist up, and well tanned now, and she looked like an Indian
Gulf Coast Girl — 167