A Man of Affairs (17 page)

“This is what they call the cruel sea,” she said. And I knew then she would not break.

I pulled until my shoulders ached and my arms were leaden. Then came a hard rain, hissing across the sea, sounding like a train bearing down on us. The hard rain flattened the sea, and gave her a chance to get ahead of the incoming water. In the flashes of oddly blue lightning I could see her clearly, blond hair pasted to the shape of her skull.

But after the rain the wind became stronger and the waves broke more often, and I knew we couldn’t survive long in a following sea. As soon as I sensed that we were in a period of relatively quiet water, I turned the boat as quickly as I could. We took some over the side, but not seriously. I held it with the bow into the wind. I could not have rowed much longer. My palms were greasy with blood. Salt water had gotten into the broken blisters. The motion of the skiff was more violent, but we were not shipping water. Bridget worked with stubborn and desperate energy and finally stopped.

“The pumps are staying ahead of the battle damage, Captain, sir.”

“Good work! Go below and get yourself some hot chow.”

“Aye aye, sir. Any idea of where we are?”

“Not the slightest. We should be on course.”

“If the wind hasn’t shifted.”

“If the wind hasn’t shifted. Right.”

It took a long time before I was breathing more easily, and a longer time for the pain in my side to go away. The fragile moon reappeared between clouds. We were in a silvery wilderness, lifting high on the polished gunmetal waves, dipping heavily into the troughs. Every now and again a wave would break near by, with a hissing, sighing sound, and the foam would be swept off into the darkness astern. The moon disappeared, and when it came out again briefly, I saw that Bridget was leaning over the transom, being ill. “Are you all right?”

“I haven’t got my sea legs yet, Captain, sir.”

“You’re relieved. Go to your stateroom.” Without warning another sheet of the hard warm rain swept across us. It rained so hard that it seemed to make it impossible to think clearly or breathe properly. When it ended, Bridget was bailing again, throwing a pathetically small amount of water over the side each time she made the scooping motion with her cupped hands.

And the first wave broke over the bow. I cursed my stupidity and, as soon as I had a chance, I kicked one shoe off and tossed it to her to use for bailing. I got around onto another seat so that I would push with the oars rather than pull, and so I could see the water ahead of the bow.

I do not know when I decided that it was most probable that we would not live through the night. I know it was some hours later. The wind was increasing steadily. It was only by the greatest of luck and a new skill, painfully acquired, that I kept the breaking waves from swamping us. But I was becoming far too weary. My reflexes were slowing. I knew how it would happen. Two or three waves would fill us and I would be unable to prevent the unwieldy boat from turning parallel with the waves, and then one would roll us. We would cling to the boat until we could cling no longer. And very soon after that we would drown. And I did not care to drown. There was too much ahead. And she was curiously included in all of it.

I saw one coming and I could not move in time. It half filled the skiff. Another one right now would do it. But, as though by a miracle, the water seemed more calm. The wind had not lessened. But the water was not cresting and breaking. I could not understand it. And then I heard a surf roar that seemed far away. And I understood the calmer water. The wind had drifted us by an island or a reef and we were partially in the lee of the obstruction. I turned around and nearly lost an oar in my haste. I pulled toward the sound. The water became more calm. And the wind seemed to decrease. Soon it was as calm as in the bay at Dubloon Cay.

“What’s happened?” Bridget demanded. Her voice sounded unnaturally loud.

I rowed until I felt an oar scrape bottom, and then with two final rocking, straining strokes, I drove the skiff aground and slumped over the oars, the breath tearing in my throat, my heart beating like a thick and hasty drum. My hands felt as if I would never be able to straighten my fingers.

“Sam!” she cried. I lifted my head. The moon had come out again, and the sky was much more clear. We were twenty feet from a crescent of white beach jeweled by moonlight. The dark brush began beyond the sand. The island seemed small and narrow. If the wind had not changed, we were on the southwest side of the island.

I wedged my foot into the sodden shoe and stepped over the side of the boat. The earth was wonderfully solid and safe and stable. I held her hand while she stepped out and, still hand in hand, we walked to the beach.

After two steps on the sand, she broke into forty pieces. She sagged against my chest, gulping and sobbing and whinnying. It was reaction, I knew, and it made her gallantry during the black hours more touching, and more commendable. These, I knew, are the rare spirits of the world, the ones who stand up to anything that can be thrown at them, and save the quakes until the danger is over.

Just as she began to pull herself together, we were assailed by ten billion hungry bugs. They had jaws and stingers and blood thirst. We did some wild, flap-armed dancing, and we went out into the shallow water but they followed along, a keening savage cloud around us.

“Windward side!” I yelled at her.

We ripped and flapped and danced our way through the tugging fingers of the brush and came out on the far side not over fifty yards away. Fifteen feet beyond the brush the wind was so strong we could lean against it, and we were magically free of sharp assault,

In the moonlight I saw, fifty yards to my left, a half acre jumble of the familiar black rock of the islands. We walked through the wind and through little gusts of salt spray to find shelter among the rocks. Though it was a warm night, I realized I was shivering. Part of it was the wind against the soaked clothing, and part of it was exhaustion.

Bridget, with the prehistoric instincts of the Neanderthal cave wife, found a sandy hollow in the lee of a five-foot shelf of rock. It was about eight feet long and four feet wide. The moon was in such a position that we were in the moon shadow of the big rock. I heard her teeth cluttering. We were in our special place of warmth and protection. The wind whined, but could not touch us.

“Get out of those wet clothes and into…”

“If,” she said, “you should say dry martini, I might hit you with that rock. That big one. The clothes are coming off.”

We undressed. She insisted on being the little homemaker. She stood up and spread the damp clothes out on the lower shelf of rock to the left of me. She piled small stones on them so they wouldn’t blow away. She worked with her back to me. Her legs, halfway up the thighs, were in the black pool of shadow. Her hair was platinum. Her tan back was a tawny ivory. Her buttocks were purest marble. She was the loveliest vision I had ever seen. I owned the island and the sky and the hemisphere. Then she came down out of the wind and stretched out beside me. The sand and the rocks were still warm from the sun of the day that had ended so long ago. I reached for her, and pulled her close, and kissed the side of her nose, and found a pillow for myself on that precious softness that is equally distant from point of breast, point of shoulder and point of small determined chin.

And as I felt the first stirrings of a great need for her, I lost my balance and missed a frantic grab at the last of consciousness, and slid backward and upside down—down the long steep velvety chute that dropped me into a sleep almost as deep as Mike’s. Or Warren’s.

TWELVE

I WOKE UP flat on my back and opened my eyes and glared up at a deep blue sky that glared right back. Something small bounced off my bare chest and I recognized it as the same sort of thing that had awakened me.

“Cut it out!” I mumbled.

“Oh, such a nice sweet-tempered man in the morning. I’m so glad I found out in time.”

I opened my eyes again and turned my head and looked at her. She sat crosslegged in the sunshine atop the ledge of rock where she had put the clothes out to dry. She had a handful of small pebbles. She plunked another one off my chest. She was fully dressed. My clothes were folded and neatly piled in the approximate order I would put them on. Her hair was a tangly mop, slightly damp.

“Good morning,” I growled. I realized I was buck naked. I sat up.

“Good morning, darling. I’ve been up a long time. I’ve done all the housework, and I’ve drawn you a nice warm tub. Right out there.” She pointed toward the water. “I’ve had my bath.”

I got up and trudged woodenly into the ocean. The water was clear and I kept a careful watch on the bottom. When I was up to my waist, I plunged and wallowed and floundered. I made seal noises and dipped sand off the bottom and scrubbed myself. My hands stung like fire. They looked in worse condition than they were.

She was gone when I came out. I dried quickly in the sun and the early morning breeze. I dressed in dry wrinkled clothing, a little crusty with dried salt. The prints of her bare feet were in the wet sand near the water. I followed the trail to the other side of the island. Halfway around I saw the house. It was weatherbeaten, deserted. There were broken boards in the porch.

I found Bridget staring at an empty cove.

She turned to me and said, “Dearest, I’m afraid somebody stole the car right out of the garage last night.”

“I have true and classic intelligence. I am a very sharp citizen.”

“Did you leave the keys in it, dear?”

“There was an anchor and an anchor line, and all I had to do was remember that there are tides in the ocean. And drop the anchor over the side.”

“Do you like your eggs sunnyside-up or easy-over, dear?”

I walked to a palm pod and sat down. She came over and sat beside me. “I’ll be serious for two or three seconds,” she said. “I can’t find anything I’d risk trying to eat, and I can’t find any water. And I tried your lighter and it is finished. So it is going to be a very good idea to wish real hard for a nice boat to come by, I think.”

“I think so too.”

“I’m not going to get scared.”

“I know you won’t, Murph.” So I kissed her, because that seemed indicated, and then we did some exploring on our island, and learned to stay away from the shrubbery where the bugs lived. The sun climbed higher and hotter. We could see four other islands. Off to the southwest the sea looked empty. But it was so vividly streaked that we knew we were still in the Bahama Flats. At an estimated ten o’clock we saw a fast boat about three miles away, heading north.

I peeled the sodden cards and sticky money out of my wallet and put them in the sun to dry. Remembering something I had read, I dug a hole just above the high-tide mark. I used my hands and a stick and a hefty piece of shell. After I got down over two feet, water began to seep into the bottom of it. I dipped some up with a shell and tasted it. It was warm, brackish and thoroughly nasty. I was thirsty, but not that thirsty. Yet I suspected that it would keep us alive.

Bridget had the idea about the empty whisky bottle. There was a fine supply of same in and around the ruined house. We gathered a little pile of dry leaves and small twigs. By experimentation we found the right way to hold the bottle in the sun so that a tiny white-hot spot was focused on a brown leaf. It took time and patience before it began to char and smoke. I huffed at it until I was dizzy, and finally we had a fire. I went out into the water and found some fat conchs and brought them in. We smashed the shells, removed the creatures, pounded them between rocks with the hope it might tenderize them, and then cooked them over our fire, impaled on green sticks we had broken off.

We said they were just fine. They were edible. Barely. The sun was overhead, and then it began to slide toward the west. I did not care very much for the idea of another night on the island. If there was no wind, we would be eaten alive.

“Well now!” Bridget said. I looked at her. She was staring at a coconut palm.

“Trust us to overlook the obvious,” I said.

We considered the problem. I could get up the palm and I could get them down. But how do you tell which ones you want?

“I think they slosh, sort of,” Bridget said.

“And how do you open them?”

“That’s easy,” she said. “I’ve done it a dozen times. You sit on your back porch with a hammer and a big nail and you hammer the nail into a special little place on the end of it, and then you pour the milk into a jelly glass.”

“Of course,” I said.

At the expense of several square inches of hide, I got up the most promising tree, twisted the nuts loose and dropped them. I split and scraped the husks off on the rocks and used a conch shell to pry a rusty nail out of the house. I hammered it straight between two rocks. I pounded it into a coconut, then worked it out. I poured her a shell full of the cloudy liquid. She drank it and held out her shell and said, “More.”

“Fix the fire first, woman. It’s going to go out.”

She fixed it. We drank the juice. She sighed and said. “Look at us! Water, of sorts. Fire and food and fruit juice. Sam’l, I’ve got a funny idea about us.”

“What is it?”

“I think we can survive, no matter where they drop us. I think we can make out.”

“Is this a proposal?”

“For goodness sake, don’t leer like that.”

“Okay, but look. I’m a fool for work. I work a twenty-hour day when I have to. You could get lonely sometimes.”

“I’m a woman of resource. I’ve got scads of fertile ancestors. So I’ll fill our tarpaper shack with a raunchy crew of little Gliddens, all with runny noses. When the bill collectors come, they’ll say mommy is out in the shed writing a novel.”

“Please don’t look over your left shoulder, Murph, or you’ll see something coming so directly at us that all I can see is the bow wave on either side of the white bow.”

It was an eighteen-foot open boat from the Grand Bahama Club, one of the charter boats. It had twin outboards. It had a brown little guide named Spider. It had been chartered for the afternoon by a couple from Indiana named George and Kate Thatcher. It had an ice chest and, on the ice, several bottles of an English brew called Dog’s Head Ale. Nothing had ever tasted quite as good. They told us it was quarter to four. They had caught some Spanish mackerel and some small amberjack trolling, and Spider had suggested running over to the island and trolling for some barracuda before going in. And we said that was very, very lucky indeed. Kate was worried about George’s sunburn, and she was willing that we should run right back in. It was only nine miles, Spider said. About thirty minutes with five in the boat. I went and collected my dry money.