Dead Calm by Charles Williams 1963(8)

 somewhere near the center, and hauled
Dead Calm — 158
the whole cumbersome bundle over to the base of the mast.
He made the line fast to the halyard above the shackle.
Bellew was passing then with the last of the cans. He
grabbed two of them from his arms and swung the ax on them.
The first was linseed oil. He poured it on the two sails. The
other was kerosene. He dumped this on them also, and onto
the mainsail, which was dangling in folds along the boom. He
could hear the fire beginning to roar below him now, and
smoke was pouring through the broken windows. “Give me a
hand on this halyard,” he called out to Bellew.
They hoisted. The mainsail went up, and with it the great
dangling mass of the two spare sails made fast to the head of
it. Kerosene and linseed oil began to drip on them.
Bellew grunted. “For that real homey feeling, it ought to be
gasoline.”
“If it breaks out of the chartroom,” Ingram said, “go right
over the side;”

Dead Calm by Charles Williams 1963(7)

Dead Calm — 136
She dropped the blanket beside her on the ladder and
brought up the gun, pushing the safety button forward. The
barrels reached up and out, resting on the coaming in front of
her, and when she put her shoulder against the stock and
sighted along them they were pointing just slightly to one side
of his face. She moved them over, and when she closed her
left eye they were lined up, foreshortened and centered on his
forehead ten feet in front of her. She could no longer breathe
at all. Her right index finger, like some great unwieldy
sausage, came in against the gun, felt the forward edge of the
trigger guard, slipped back around it, inside, and lay against
the trigger. All she had to do was pull. She tried.

Dead Calm by Charles Williams 1963(6)

Well, it was true, wasn’t it? And therein, unfortunately, lay
her guilt, the real responsibility from which there would never
be any escape—the pursuit of the impossible dream, while she
knew it was impossible. She’d known it would never work,
that temperamentally she was wrong for him and she’d
demand too much of him, but she’d managed to ignore the
warnings of her mind.
If only, she thought now in her own contained and private
agony, she’d left him alone. She was worse than any of them;
she’d utterly destroyed him. Because she did love him. She
wondered what crimes the human race could have found to
commit without those great ennobling causes like freedom,
religion, and love.
She glanced up. Ingram had stopped bailing and was
preparing to lower the mainsail. She looked out toward the
squall still making up in the northeast. “Is it coming nearer?”

Dead Calm by Charles Williams 1963(5)

Dead Calm — 91
Sunset. Suddenly, and with such piercing clarity it made her
cry out, she saw him struggling in the water, alone on the
emptiness of the sea, as the sun went down and the colors
began to fade. She could see every line and angle of the face
her finger tips had come to know so well, the sun-wrinkles at
the corners of the eyes, and that horrible way she had cut his
hair; the eyes themselves were open, the clear, cool gray eyes
that could be ironic or amused but were far more often gentle,
and there seemed to be no fear in them even now but only
something she thought was sadness or regret. He made no
sound. And there was no lifebelt. If you ever lost a boat, he’d
said once, in a place where there was no chance of being
picked up, you were better off without it.
She began to shake, all over and uncontrollably, and fell
back on the pile of sailbags with the back of her left forearm
pressed against her opened mouth while tears welled up in
her eyes and overflowed. Why sunset? Why did she have to
think of sunset? But she knew, remembering the moments of
splendor and that shared enraptured silence when the world
was only two people and a boat and a fragment of time poised
between night and day. Would he be thinking of them? Would
he have to? She was up then, throwing the sailbags behind her
to clear the door. She slammed the cases of stores aside as if
they were empty, and snatched up a marlinspike she somehow
saw in her wildness lying among the coils of rope. Her hand
was yanking at the bolt to open the door when some vestige of
reason made itself heard at last and she was able to stop
herself. She sagged against the bulkhead.
One chance was all she would get. She couldn’t throw it
away.
He was a young man, with a young man’s reflexes. No
matter how fast or unexpectedly she leaped into the cockpit
she couldn’t attack him that way and expect to accomplish
anything but her own destruction. And with hers, John’s. God,
why did she have to be so helpless? There must be some way
to stop him. There had to be.
It was then she remembered the shotgun.
Her mind slid away from it in revulsion. It edged back,
reluctantly but compelled. She could see its dismembered
pieces—two, she thought there were—wrapped in their
separate strips of oiled fleece in one of the drawers under the
Dead Calm — 92

Dead Calm by Charles Williams 1963(4)

She gave him an icy stare but was too exhausted to reply.
“How about bad weather?” Ingram asked.
There hadn’t been much, at least nothing to bother a sound
boat. Two days out of La Paz they’d run into a freak condition
of fresh to strong winds which had kept them reefed down for
the better part of twenty-four hours. They’d had a couple of
days of bad squalls, the worst of which was around two weeks
ago when they were trying to beat their way back to
Clipperton Island after they’d decided they’d overshot it. The
squalls had left a rough, confused sea, and she’d pounded
heavily.
“And it was just after that you noticed it was taking more
pumping to keep her dry?”

Dead Calm by Charles Williams 1963(3)

5
Far to the northward a squall flickered and rumbled along the
horizon, but here they appeared to hang suspended in a
vacuum while the sun beat down and the oily groundswell
rolled endlessly up from the south. The air was like warm
damp cotton pressing in on them, muggy, saturated,
unmoving.
Perspiration didn’t evaporate. It collected in a film over the
body, a film that became rivulets, now running, now stopping
momentarily, now moving again with the irritating feel of
insects crawling across the skin. It ran down into his already
sodden and clinging shorts and dripped into his sneakers. His
back ached from crouching under the boom.

Dead Calm by Charles Williams 1963(2)

3
The sun was hotter now. He turned, searching the horizon for
any darkening of the surface of the sea that would indicate the
beginnings of a breeze. Rae came up the ladder. “Your bunk’s
all ready, Mr. Warriner. Try to sleep until this time tomorrow.”
Warriner smiled. “Please call me Hughie. And I don’t know
how to thank you.”

“You don’t have to. Just get some rest.”
“In a little while. For some reason, I don’t feel sleepy at all.”
She nodded. “You’ve been wound too tight for too long. But
I know how to fix that.” She disappeared down the ladder and
came back in a minute with a bottle containing a little over an
ounce of whisky. She poured it into the cup that was still
beside him. “There’s just about enough here to do it.” He
drained it and accepted the cigarette she held out. “By the
time you finish that,” she said, “you’re going to collapse all
over. Just try to make it to the bunk when you feel yourself
start to go.”

Dead Calm by Charles Williams 1963(1)

1
Though it had been less than four hours since he’d secured
everything on deck and come below, Ingram awoke just at
dawn. He turned his head in the faint light inside the cabin
and looked at his wife asleep in the opposite bunk. Rae,
wearing sleeveless short pajamas of lightweight cotton, was
lying on her stomach, her face turned toward him, the mop of
tawny hair spread across the pillow encircled by her arms, her
legs spread slightly apart and braced, even in sleep, against
the motion of the ketch. She never minded, he thought; some
people grew irritable and impossible to live with on a sailboat
too long becalmed, with its endless rolling and slatting of gear
and its annoying and unstoppable noises of objects shifting
back and forth in drawers and lockers, but except for an
occasional pungent remark when the stove threw something
at her she took it uncomplainingly. They weren’t in a hurry,
she pointed out, they were on their honeymoon, and they had
privacy measurable in millions of square miles.