Assignment to Disaster (15 page)

Durell awoke quietly in the chill wet dawn. The world was a vague, misty bowl surrounding the mound on which they had spent the night. Deirdre still slept. She lay with one arm across him, her face turned against his chest. Her breathing was soft and regular. He saw the scratches on her cheek, made by the brush, the smudge of mud on her chin, the stray strands of dark hair across her forehead.

Durell did not move. He let his mind drift backward, remembering the hours of the night. He knew that with Deirdre, as with him, this was not something casual, to be lived and forgotten. But when he looked at her now, she seemed remote and detached from him, strangely aloof, yet a child without defenses or strength. He watched the mist move in gray streamers through the moss hanging from the oak branches above. The sun was up, but it would be an hour before a stray beam could slant through the swamp foliage overhead. He knew how quickly the temperature would soar then, and when he considered where they were and the day that loomed ahead, he was touched by agony for her and what she might suffer.

When he looked at her again, her eyes were open, almost golden in the gray dawn, watching him. She smiled and nestled in the bend of his arm.

"Good morning, darling."

"Hello," he said.

"I love you, darling."

He kissed her. "Hungry?"

"Oh, yes. Ravenous. I'd like — let me see — a mango or a Persian melon, bacon and eggs done just so, lots of
brioches
and coffee, pots and pots of coffee. I think, though, I'll settle for a simple drink of water."

He grinned. "Coming right up."

"Do you have any idea where we are, Sam?"

"Paradise." he said.

She laughed. "Then I'm glad to be here."

"I'm glad, too," he said simply.

"Sure?"

"Never surer."

"Then where is Paradise?" she asked.

He laughed. "Twenty miles from nowhere. Let's go."

The pirogue was safely where he had left it. When they were through at the spring, had washed as best they could, Durell helped her into the narrow boat and shoved away from the mound. It was still cool and damp. Wild hibiscus and bougainvillea made splashes of color against the moving mists around them. He judged direction only by marking the most intense area of light as being in the east, and kept it on his right hand to head north. There was no sign of human life anywhere. They might have been alone in a primeval marshland at the very beginning of time.

When he thought ahead, he realized there could be no definite plan of action to cope with the day. Somehow he had to reach McFee. His only concrete objective was to reach Bayou Peche Rouge, where his grandfather might provide some help.

Deirdre sat with her back to the bow, facing him. Her eyes were somber. "What are you thinking of, Sam?"

"You," he said. "And what may happen to us."

She looked around at the tangled swamp. "I wish we could stay here."

"We can't. We can't hide forever."

"I would like to."

The thought of the
Three Belles
and old Jonathan made him feel better, and he drove the paddle into the water with a stronger stroke.

He continued to use the back channels and lagoons, pushing northward. Once they heard a hunter's shots to the east, but it was impossible to find the right waterway through the maze of drifts, and the shots were not repeated. And although a tenderfoot in the delta country would have been hopelessly lost within the first half hour, traveling in circles or losing himself in the deep muck that could swallow a man with only a trace of bubbles to mark his passage, Durell had no fears. He knew this country and his course was set with confidence. His only concern was for Deirdre's comfort. As the heat of the day reached steamy thickness, he knew she was suffering from thirst and hunger.

He soon fell into a rhythm of paddling that was broken only when Deirdre spelled him briefly. The heat was suffocating, the insects a torment that reached new crescendos with each passing hour. By midmorning Durell knew his face was swollen with biles, and Deirdre sat in limp exhaustion, head bowed, stricken by the heat. Most of his efforts were against the sluggish downriver currents made by the main river channel, somewhere to the left. They passed through enormous cypress groves where the shadows of deep evening still prevailed, and now and then they entered vast muskeg reaches where the wild canes grew ten feet high and he marked the channel only by the bend of the vegetation that conformed with the current. They crossed ponds of blazing beauty, aflame with massed blossoms of hyacinth and wild orchids. The life of the swamp spoke noisily all about them, flickering with movement on every hand.

By ten o'clock the narrow waterway they followed suddenly debouched into a wide channel that was clearly used as a canal. The transition from deep marsh to open water came as a shock as the blazing sunlight hit them without the protective foliage to ward off its sting. The pirogue drifted into midstream. Deirdre lifted her head and looked at Durell and smiled.

"It's all right." he said hoarsely.

"Are we there?"

"It will get better now." he said.

There were no boats in sight, no houses, until they went about half a mile upstream. The canal became choked with weeds and underwater grasses and narrowed where the embankment had washed into the water, undercut by spring floods. Durell knew they could expect no water traffic here. He glimpsed the shack ahead with a grateful surge of relief.

It was only a bayouman's camp, rickety and weathered, ready to collapse into the marshy ground. There was a small landing and, more important, a flat-bottomed rowboat with an old outboard motor. Nobody was in sight. Durell stopped paddling and felt the burn of aching muscles across his back. He saw Deirdre lick her dry, puffed lips. She straightened stiffly and fended off the bow of the pirogue as they came into the landing.

Nobody challenged them. There was only oiled paper over the windows of the shack, and no screens. The door was open. Inside there was a rusted oil stove, an iron cot with a thin straw mattress, a shelf holding canned food over the stove, a kerosene lamp.

There was a thick, rancid smell in the place, like that of an animal's lair.

He searched the place thoroughly. Somebody had slept here the night before, judging from the rumpled cot. Three cane fishing poles leaned against one wall. Durell surveyed the canned food, feeling hunger pangs in him, and as he reached for a can of soup to heat on the kerosene stove, a voice spoke from the doorway over Deirdre's quick gasp.

"Put it down, mister, and git."

Durell turned and saw a gaunt, bony man with an unkempt beard standing beside the girl, who shrank aside. The man wore a gray shirt and gray suspenders and the color of his skin was that of his clothes. He carried a new, shining Remington pump gun.

Durell said easily, "We've been lost in the swamp and haven't eaten since yesterday."

"Git, I said."

"We're hungry and thirsty. We'd like help getting back to town. Maybe you'll give us a lift with your kicker."

The gray man looked at Deirdre and then at Durell and nothing changed in his face. It was a knotty slab of weathered cypress.

"I'm not goin' anywhere today. I got my traps to run."

"Then let me hire your kicker. I'll send it back tonight."

"I tol' you, I got to run traps today."

"Look, I'm not asking help for nothing." Durell said patiently. "I'll pay you. Will ten dollars be enough?"

"I'm busy today."

"Twenty?"

"Git," said the gray man.

Durell said angrily, "How much do you want to help us?"

"I got nothin' to sell you."

"All right," said Durell. "We'll go."

"You got a gun on you, mister. I can see it. Leave it here."

Durell took his gun from his pocket and tossed it to the cot and started through the door. The muzzle of the rifle followed him in a brief arc. As he passed the gray man, Durell jumped arid knocked the pump gun aside and hit the bayouman with all his strength. As the man sprawled in the saw grass, Durell picked up the rifle. Deirdre's face was white. She ran into the cabin and retrieved Durell's gun.

"What kind of man is that?" she asked. "You told him we were lost and hungry!"

Durell made no reply. He watched the bayouman hitch himself backward on his rump until he leaned against the shack. Durell took out a twenty-dollar bill from his sweat-soaked wallet and threw it to the ground. "We're borrowing your boat, outboard, and rifle. You can pick them up in Bayou Peche Rouge."

The bayouman simply looked at him with dull hatred.

It was nearly noon when the high stacks of the
Three Belles
loomed above the oaks on shore. Durell slowed the kicker and the boat eased into the lagoon with a diminished surge of power. He held the .30-08 rifle across his knees and watched the channel open up to reveal the ancient hulk of the old side-wheeler.

The
Three Belles
rested in the mud at the upper end of the lagoon, whose waters appeared black and bottomless. She looked the same as always: a forgotten ghost in a forgotten backwater. The network of guy wires between the twin stacks was festooned with moss. Then the upper decks came into view, still white, with huge antique lettering in red curlicues and ornate serifs spelling out her name. Finally the gingerbread rails, the wide afterdeck, the squat paddle-wheel housings amidships. Her machinery had long since been sold for scrap.

Forty years ago, in a poker game that lasted from Memphis to New Orleans, Jonathan Durell had won the
Three Belles
on a final double-or-nothing turn of the card. In the midst of a champagne celebration later, word came to him that his wife had died in a fire that destroyed his home at Bayou Peche Rouge. Jonathan had ordered everyone ashore except a skeleton crew to work the steamboat, and had run the side-wheeler downriver and into the bayou and full tilt into the mud ashore, where the blackened ruins of his home still smoldered. He had never left the bayou since.

Durell saw nothing to alarm him. Sunlight winked off broken glass in the salon windows and glimmered on brass in the pilot house, where Jonathan had his sleeping quarters. Yet his nerves jumped in him like tight wires that pulled at his bones and his skin.

Deirdre looked at the old steamboat with soft eyes.

"So this is where you were born. I think it's wonderful."

"The old man is wonderful," Durell said.

"Isn't he here now?"

"He must be. He couldn't be far away."

He eased the boat around the low freeboard of the bow and cut off the kicker. The racketing sound of the motor died away across the lagoon, pillowed in the stately oaks and cypress trees. Silence crept in after the echoes. The air was hot and still.

The old man might be asleep. He might have taken a pirogue and gone fishing for his supper. He might be sick. He might be dead.

"Grandpa!" he called.

His words had a strange, muffled quality. The echoes rolled back and forth, back and forth. There was no answer.

"Come on," he said to Deirdre.

He tied up to the stern of the hulk and helped Deirdre to the deck. He did not know what he had expected here, but ever since he had settled on the
Three Belles
as their destination, he had looked forward to its peace and beauty as an oasis of serenity, where time was endless and unchanging. His nerves felt raw. He held the rifle ready as he led the way across the vine-grown deck toward the lacy stairway that lifted up to the once plush cabin deck. From this height they looked out over the clearing where Jonathan's fire-gutted house of forty years ago made a mound of vines and young cypress trees, with here and there a black beam exposed. The twin chimneys stood stark against the hot, murky sky. Anxiety clutched him, honed sharp by the silence. A hundred boyhood memories came back to him. He remembered climbing the giant rusted rocker arms that turned the paddle wheels, exploring the dusty, mysterious staterooms and the vast echoes of the boilers; he remembered fishing off the stern, swimming in the lagoon, climbing the rickety stacks while his grandfather shouted in alarm…

"Sam," Deirdre said. "Is anything wrong?"

"I don't know." He had stopped in the wide corridor that led forward to the pilothouse. "It smells like a trap."

"But who could know about this place?"

He was irritable. "Washington. Weederman. Anybody."

He started walking ahead of the girl. Better get it over with. He went into the wide pilothouse, where the sun shone through old curved glass windows and glinted on the brass fittings of the wheel. Even as he stepped across the threshold, he knew. So he was not surprised.

Swayney was there, and Art Greenwald. And his grandfather.

"Drop the rifle, Sam," Swayney said. "Stand aside from the girl."

Deirdre turned as if to run. Durell caught her arm. "It's all right." he said. "Stand over there. Don't be afraid."

Swayney laughed. Art Greenwald looked embarrassed. Durell said, "Hello, Grandpa."

The white-haired old man in a maritime uniform said gravely, "Better drop the rifle, boy. They've been waiting here since dawn. They mean business. I'm sorry I couldn't warn you off."

"It's all right. Grandpa."

"It isn't all right. I'm ashamed of myself. But there was nothing I could do."

Durell put the rifle down. He felt tired; his bones ached. In a way, he felt relieved. Burritt Swayney looked smug and satisfied. It seemed strange to see him out of his Washington office, away from his desk. His pursy mouth was tight with disapproval as he looked at the girl, but the triumph was there in his codfish eyes, in the way he picked up the pump gun and handed it to Art Greenwald. Art still looked embarrassed, as if all this was painful to him.