Rocks, The (14 page)

K
neeling on the larder floor,
Gerald worked a small plunger to transfer his olive oil from the large demijohns, in which it came from the press, to liter bottles.

He paused. From the small ventilation brick high in the wall, came the angry insect whine of a chain saw. Gerald set the bottle and plunger down on a sheet of newspaper on the tile floor.

Outside the kitchen door, he heard the chain saw below the carob trees, somewhere down near the road—undoubtedly on his land. The whine dropped to a low buzz for a moment and behind it Gerald heard the snorting of a diesel engine engaged in some fitful, grinding effort. He walked quickly downhill toward the noise.

The whining and groaning became louder, more insistent. Gerald felt the machines eating into him. He began to run through the trees. Ahead something large was moving, leaping in spurts, snapping wood and trees like a maddened rhino. Something yellow.

The woods opened up. On the slope leading down to the road, a tumble of felled trees and ripped limbs lay beside a wide, ragged swath of red-brown dirt that swept fifty yards uphill. At the bottom, twenty feet of the slumbering beige stone wall running beside the road had been breached, the rocks pushed in and swept aside. At the top of the torn gash in the hillside lurched a snorting yellow bulldozer. Gerald recognized the compact shape of Señor Gómez, the builder, in the driver’s seat. He wore a scarred white hard hat. His muscular brown arms worked two long control levers, driving the caterpillar tracks forward in bursts that pawed at the earth beneath them.

Another man in a hard hat—younger, small like Gómez though beefier, his son perhaps—was scything his way up the slope above the bulldozer with the chain saw. The trees dropped as if slaughtered, limbs pawing skyward as they fell. The bulldozer came behind him, the blade uprooting the raw stumps, pushing everything into tangled heaps to the side of the chewed dirt wake stretching down to the road. The two men were progressing uphill at a walking pace. The air was filmy with the noxious particulate of diesel exhaust and the chain saw’s greasy blue smoke.

Gómez, his eyes darting everywhere as he worked, noticed Gerald staring at them. Gómez flicked his head upward in greeting. Gerald’s eyes found his. The Englishman looked dazed. He seemed not to comprehend what the two men were doing. Gómez rested the bulldozer for a moment.

“¡La carretera!”
he shouted. He chopped a hand in front of him, uphill, then away to the right, indicating the path of the access road that would lead to the development in the olive grove. Then his hands returned to the levers and the bulldozer snorted and jolted ahead.

Gerald remembered the road now. It was to start down at the main road and loop around the hill above his house and he’d never see it or hear it, Fergus had said. There would have to be a road of course, not only for the owners to reach their wretched villas, but up which cement mixers and lorries with building materials would rumble for months, years perhaps.

Here it was—already. Gerald had pictured only the little suburb of villas depicted in the artist’s impression on the prospectus that Fergus had shown him. In that flat and literal ink and pastel illustration, a smudgily suggested but mature landscape surrounded the orange Spanishy houses with tile roofs and terraces and alternating window placements to distinguish one model from another. A tidy scene that could have been anywhere. Gerald—foolishly, he now realized—hadn’t thought about the wide borders of destruction that such a modest Eden would inflict on the edges of his remaining property. He hadn’t anticipated the noise. He was shocked by the suddenness of its arrival—for some reason, he’d imagined all this would start after the summer—and the vivid reality of what he had agreed to—all for six thousand pounds, to begin with.

He watched for a few minutes as Gómez and his man continued on up the hill. He was stunned by their speed and brutal efficiency—they would surely hack a broad scar up and around the hill all the way to the olive grove in a matter of a day or two.

Gerald looked at the sawn trunks, limbs, and torn, uprooted trees scattered across the hill like a slain army. Numbly, he turned and tramped back through the carobs toward the house.

I’ve made the most terrible mistake.

L
uc was sick of sailing.
It was the most excruciating pastime he’d ever encountered. Going, essentially, nowhere, indirectly, uncomfortably, and agonizingly slowly. At the same time he was a prisoner, forced to endure and negotiate Szabó’s notions about plot and story and what would please a distributor, and the bludgeoning monotoneity of his poodle wife and her lobotomized (until today) sister. All through lunch, and afterward, as the boat lurched and turned and drifted slowly farther from the land that remained tantalizingly in view, Luc kept seeing his mother leaping overboard, a sublime act of defiance and independence that he admired and envied increasingly as the hours dragged by. He saw himself in the sea, swimming away from the yacht, its noise and foolishness diminishing over the waves.

During lunch, he became invisible. He said little, then nothing. Nobody paid any attention to him. He was a known commodity to the group on the boat and to the guests from the Rocks, but they were new meat to one another and, evidently, mutually fascinated. After lunch he went below to his cool cabin to lie on his bunk and read.

•   •   •

L
uc awoke disoriented.
It was light; for a moment he thought it was morning. Then he heard the voices on deck, indistinctly, and remembered who was aboard.

It was oddly quiet. After a moment he realized the engine was off. The yacht was rising and falling gently, and rolling slowly from side to side. Through the small porthole beside his bunk he could see that the light outside had softened, hitting the water at a more oblique angle, the sky was bluer, past the shattering white heat of the middle of the day.

He lay on his bunk for a while, lulled by the peaceful motion of the boat and the disinclination to get up and go on deck and talk with anybody. He wanted to get off the boat and have dinner with his mother. He looked at his watch: almost five o’clock. They must be sailing back to port on a favorable wind, close to arrival. He sat up.

When he came on deck and looked forward over the bow he saw only the sea. He finally found Mallorca low on the horizon and far away—eight miles, he guessed from the distances he’d learned to estimate on the cruise so far. He was confused: the big square sail had been rolled up like a windowshade, the mainsail set and hove flat amidships in a way that Luc had come to understand was meant not for propulsion but to steady the rolling of the yacht.

Sarah’s voice, edged with stridency, came from the cockpit: “Any news, Luc?”

He turned. Sarah, Dominick, Fergus, and Mireille sat in the cockpit, presenting a strange tableau. Except for Mireille, they looked like people in a station waiting for a train. Mireille, topless, sat beside Fergus, one leg raised, with her foot planted on the teak bench, the other stretched out with its foot on the table, her bikinied crotch getting a good airing. Luc had never seen her drunk but she looked it now.

“When are we going back?” Luc asked.

Sarah made a face of theatrical chagrin and reached for a wineglass on the table.

Mireille giggled.

“Well, that’s the sixty-four-thousand-peseta question right now,” said Dominick.

“What do you mean?” said Luc.

“THE ENGINE’S CONKED OUT!” Sarah shouted. “Where have you
been
?” She was red with sunburn in the face and across her shoulders and Pouter pigeon bosom above her small bikini top.

Now Mireille laughed loudly.

“It’s not funny!” Sarah snapped. “I’ve got children waiting for me. They’ll be wondering where I am.”

“Yes, me too, but at least they know we’re all right,” said Fergus consolingly. “We’ve been in sight of the Rocks the whole time—”

“Then they must be going out of their bloody minds wondering why we’re just
sitting
here!” said Sarah. “My
God
, I wish I’d jumped overboard with Lulu! She
knew
! She bloody well
knew
!”

“She didn’t know,” said Luc. “She just doesn’t go out on boats.”

“Well, now I know why! My
God
—”

Luc went below and found the engine room door open. Inside the cramped compartment, filled with pipes, hoses, wires, dials, valves, Tony was sitting on a small milk crate beside the engine. Parts of it were unbolted, rubber hoses unclamped, oily bits and pieces sat in a red plastic tub at his feet. He was bolting or unbolting something with a socket wrench worked by a clicking ratchet. Roger, the ponytailed crewman, was squatting nearby, holding tools like a nurse beside a surgeon.

“Hi,” said Luc.

“Hiya,” Tony said pleasantly. He didn’t quite look at Luc, inclining his head toward the door, his eyes alighting briefly on a pipe near Luc’s head.

“I missed all the excitement, I guess. I’ve been asleep. What happened?”

“Nothing too exciting,” said Tony. “Engine overheated. Had to shut it down. We sucked a bag or something up into the seawater heat exchanger. Got through the strainer plate in the hull. Blocked the water to the impeller, which burned out and broke into pieces. Got a spare impeller, of course, but I’ve got to clear the system of whatever the obstruction was, and burned bits of impeller and what have you.”

“How long do you suppose it’ll take to fix?”

“Dunno,” said Tony, as if it were an intriguing philosophical conundrum, suddenly presented and greatly worth pondering. His face looked unusually thoughtful for a moment. “Done when it’s done, is my best guess,” he concluded cheerfully, looking down at the engine as if it were a naughty child. Then he turned to Roger with a knowing look and said: “At least it’s not a Volvo Penta.” Roger laughed, catching some tacit witticism, but Tony merely smiled complacently.

Luc had noted Tony’s serene, Buddhistic detachment in the course of their cruise. Perhaps from long exposure to the whims of charterers and the vagaries of mechanical or marine problems, the captain was blithely unruffled by changes of plan, contradictory orders, disappointments such as no dock space at Portofino, tension or moods, adversity of any kind. He kept to himself, either near the helm on the aft deck when under way, or unobtrusively going about ship’s business, listening to weather forecasts on the radio, navigating, tightening or adjusting the odd bit of gear, instructing his crew with very few words. He was not a front-of-house captain or a raconteur who entertained guests with sea stories or salty charm. He was peripherally ever present, his eyes generally fixed either on the horizon or some piece of boat, a vague, low-wattage stoner smile deflecting any invitation to chat or intimacy.

“Right,” said Luc.

He started to turn away, and Fergus appeared beside him, stooping to push his head into the engine room.

“How’s it going?” Fergus asked with forced cheeriness.

“Yes, coming along,” said Tony, lifting his head for a moment, with a pleasant smile.

“Oh good!” said Fergus, with relief. “Be on our way soon, will we?”

“Ah. That I can’t tell you,” said Tony genially.

“Oh. Right. Well . . . Look, can we get in touch with somebody ashore? We’d like to let them know we’re all right and when we’ll be back. Do you have some sort of radio thingy we might call the Rocks on?”

“Yes, of course,” said Tony. “Roger can do that for you up at the nav station. Rodge, try the Real Club Náutico on two-one-eight-two. They can probably patch you through to a telephone ashore. Would that help?”

“That would be super,” said Fergus.

Roger laid his tools down, wiped his hands on a cloth, and came out of the engine room. Fergus followed him.

Luc went into the galley to get a beer. Véronique and Gaspard were going through the fridge and freezer, taking smoking packages out and re-storing them, talking at a fierce argumentative pitch, gesticulating emphatically, snorting with disgust, but agreeing absolutely, about the threat of Danish butter to the European Economic Community. They paid no attention to Luc as he crept between them and reached into the fridge.

“Where’s Gábor?” he asked.

“Don’t disturb him,” said Véronique. “He’s lying down. He’s completely stressed with all these people with their problems.”

“What problems?”

“They want to go home! What can he do?”

“I’m sure no one thinks it’s his fault.”

“Of course it’s not his fault!” said Véronique.

Luc took his beer outside, passing through the navigation cubbyhole as Roger was saying, “Real Club Náutico, yacht
Dolphin
, over . . . Real Club Náutico . . .” into the radio, while Fergus looked on.

Outside, the unhappy captives looked expectantly at Luc as he came on deck. Mireille had disappeared.

“What’s the word on the engine?” asked Dominick. Strands of his normally slicked-back hair were hanging down on either side of his forehead, signs of spillage stained his shirt. Much of the detritus of lunch had been cleared away, but their half-filled wineglasses still sat on the table. A bottle bobbed with the motion of the yacht in a silver bucket of melted ice.

“I don’t know,” said Luc. “They’re working on it.”

“But this is ridiculous, Luc!” said Sarah. “I mean, how long are we going to sit here, drifting out to sea? I mean,
look!
We’re bloody miles away now! Jessica and the others will be
frantic
!”

“Fergus is trying to call the Rocks now.”

“Luc, what about the dinghy?” said Dominick, pointing to the large rubber Zodiac dinghy with an outboard motor hanging from davits over the stern. “Can’t they run us ashore in that thing?”

“I don’t know,” said Luc. It was the yacht’s tender, used in every port or anchorage to run the guests to and from shore. It was fast, stable, and sped across the water like a commando boat used to storm a beach. He looked forward and noticed Tim and Ian,
Dolphin
’s other two crewmen, sitting up in the bow, smoking.

“Could you
please
go find out, Luc?” Sarah implored.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Thank you!”

Rather than run it by the blissed-out Tony down in the engine room, Luc walked forward to the two crewmen in the bow. Both were English lads, perhaps working through a gap year.

“Hi,” said Luc as he approached.

“Oh, hi, Luc,” said both Tim and Ian.

Luc smiled at them pleasantly. “Could you run a few of us back ashore in the Zodiac?” He inclined his head aft. “They’ve got to get back to their kids.”

“Oh . . .” Tim frowned for maximum effect, conveying a convincing middle ground between tremendous willingness and expert doubt. “I dunno. It’s quite a ways now. I mean, we’re at least six miles offshore. You’d better ask Tony, I think.”

“Could you ask him while I get our group ready? We really have to go.”

“Sure,” said Tim, throwing his cigarette overboard and loping gamely down the deck.

“Great. Thanks,” said Luc, coming behind him.

In the cockpit, Sarah and Dominick sat up and looked expectantly at Luc.

“Tim’s going to go see about it,” he said brightly.

“
Brilliant!
Thank you
so much
, Luc!” said Sarah. She and Dominick stood up, as if their train was approaching.

Fergus came out on deck. “They can’t seem to get through on the blower for some reason—”

“Never mind,” said Sarah, “we’re going back in the rubber boat. Luc arranged it.”

“Oh, fantastic,” said Fergus, nodding to Luc across the chasm of their mutual acquaintance. “Well done.”

Tim appeared. “I’m afraid Tony says it’s too far to go in the Zodiac.”

“What?” said Sarah, indignantly. She turned to Luc. “I thought you said we could go?”

“Well, I thought we could. I just asked Tim if he could ask the captain.”

“It really is too far, actually, to go in a dinghy,” said Tim. He frowned again, tremendously sympathetically. “It could be quite dangerous over such a distance.”

Fergus addressed Tim. “Why aren’t we sailing back right now? You’ve got the sails, at least. Why are we simply floating here? Can’t you work on the engine while we sail back? Or sail us back and work on it tomorrow? I mean, we’ve got obligations ashore, you know. The engine’s not our concern. Will you go tell that to your captain, please?”

“Yeah, I will, absolutely,” said Tim. But he stood in place, bobbing slightly, hesitantly. “The thing is, we
would
of course sail back if we could, but there’s not much wind right now, and what there is, is coming off the land, actually blowing us away from Mallorca, and the yacht’s very heavy, so we couldn’t actually get anywhere under sail alone, at least in that direction. Right now we’re sort of hove to so we don’t drift even farther away. So, unless there’s a change in the weather, we can’t really get back to shore until they fix the engine.”

“But that’s ridiculous!” said Sarah, appealing to them all. “We can’t just sit here and drift all over the bloody Mediterranean! We’ve got obligations—I’ve got
children
waiting for me ashore! I mean, it’s all right for Gábor, who’s obviously gone to bed or something, but
we
didn’t sign on for a bloody cruise, did we? We came for
lunch
! I mean, it’s just
not on
!”

“Absolutely,” said Tim, now bobbing with sympathetic concurrence. “Look, I’ll just go get Tony, shall I? You can talk to him about it.”

Unhesitatingly, he disappeared into the saloon.

Dominick lifted the dripping wine bottle out of its bucket. “Anybody fancy a top-up?”

Sarah snatched a glass off the table and shoved it toward him. “I do!”