September 16, 2010

Gulf Coast Girl - Charles Williams(9)


in a white turban. Our eyes met and she started to laugh.
Soap ran down her face. I kissed her and got soap in my
mouth. We held onto each other and strangled with laughter
while the rain rinsed her hair clean. We could never pin down
afterward what had been so funny about it.
When the sun came out we sat in the cockpit with towels,
drying it. It gleamed like freshly burnished silver against the
smooth, tanned skin of her face and shoulders. If I live until
I’m ninety and never see anything beautiful again, they don’t
owe me a thing.
That night when we prepared dinner she changed into the
white dress again, and when she came out of the forward end
of the cabin she had a small bottle of perfume in her hand
and was touching the glass stopper to the lobe of an ear.

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.

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.

Gulf Coast Girl - Charles Williams(6)


machinery and several thousand cases of whisky that
somehow hadn’t been smashed.
“So that’s the first time your diamonds were dunked,” I
said. “But where did Macaulay get into the act?”
As soon as I asked, I began to get the connection. Salvage—
underwriters; so she had been telling the truth about part of
it, anyway. The part about his being in the marine insurance
business.
“That is correct,” he said. “They were aboard the Shetland
Queen. But—” He looked up and smiled in the faint glow from
the binnacle. “Through some oversight they didn’t appear on
the cargo manifest or any of the customs lists. To be exact,
they were in some cases of tinned cocoa which had been
loaded in Holland and were consigned to a small importing
firm in New Orleans. Quite an economical way to ship
diamonds, if you follow me, except that it can be damned

Gulf Coast Girl - Charles Williams(5)


“Okay. Thanks,” I said. I felt along the edge of the window
frame in the opposite door. Hurry. For the love of Christ,
hurry.
My finger tips brushed across a hand. I inhaled again.
I let the truck roll slowly ahead three or four feet, and said,
“If you see a kid like that, call the station, will you? We’d
appreciate it.”
I moved the light away from him. He wouldn’t be able to
see anything for twenty or thirty seconds, and Macaulay was
on the far side of the truck, walking along with me. But he
had to be in before we hit the street below Fontaine, under
the light. I slipped the clutch and hit the accelerator a couple
of times, shooting the flashlight beam along the sidewalk. The
door opened soundlessly, and he was sitting beside me. He
closed it gently.

Gulf Coast Girl - Charles Williams(4)


I drove the car out on the pier and as I got out I thought of
him down there somewhere below me in the impenetrable
blackness of night and silt-laden water, and for a moment he
wasn’t a vicious little hoodlum but just somebody who’d been
alive a few hours ago looking at sunlight and feeling hungry
and thinking about girls and inhaling smoke from a cigarette.
I brushed it away savagely. There wasn’t any time for being
morbid about a dead gangster. I’d be dead myself very shortly
if I didn’t get out of there.
I hurried down the ladder. The waterway was dark and still,
like a jungle river, and it was hot in the thick clots of shadow
below the side of the pier. When I opened the door and went
inside the trapped air was stifling. I looked at my watch. It
was nearly three.

Gulf Coast Girl - Charles Williams(3)


I was ready. Then I hesitated, thinking coldly. I didn’t know
much about law or the workings of courts, but I had sense
enough to realize that what I was about to do was
deliberately criminal. The other hadn’t been, even though it
had killed him. I could still go call the police and report it,
and everything would be on my side. A half dozen generations
of lawyers and New England clergymen leaned over my
shoulder and whispered fiercely that that was the only thing
to do.
And on the other hand? Once I did this it was irrevocable,
and I was on my own. If they caught me then there’d be no
evidence of a fight or accident. They might convict me of
deliberate murder, because I’d tried to cover it up. Even
there in the hot night I could feel the chill run up my back.
I waited, trying to make up my mind. I didn’t have all night.

Gulf Coast Girl - Charles Williams(2)


I waited, feeling the hot tension in the room. It was going to
be rough if he started asking her some more. I wasn’t any
hero, and didn’t want to be one, but it wasn’t the sort of thing
you could watch for very long without losing your head, and
with Tweed Jacket you probably never lost it more than once.
Tweed Jacket’s amused gaze flicked from me to the girl and
he shook his head again. “Waste of time,” he said. “He’d
scarcely be here, under the circumstances, unless the rules
have changed. Might go through the rooms, though, and have
a dekko at the ash trays. You know his brand of cigarettes.”
The pug went out, managing to bump against me and push
me off balance with a hard shoulder as he went past. I said
nothing. He turned his face a little and we looked at each
other. I remembered the obscene brutality of the way he was
holding and hitting her, and the yearning in the stare was
mutual.

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

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn