Gulf Coast Girl (16 page)

She turned and saw me looking at her. I grinned at her. “You don’t mind my calling you Swede, do you?”

She smiled. “Of course not. But my mother was a Russian Finn, not a Swede.”

“Hush. All squareheads are Swedes. And you’re all the big, beautiful Nordics in the world rolled into one. If they ever consolidate into one Scandinavian country, I suggest they put you on their money.

“It’s not that I don’t love the Irish half of you, too,” I went on. “But the Irish are supposed to be very dark, when they’re beautiful. Every time I look at you I half expect Thor to come running up and hit me over the head with a short-handled hammer and say, ‘Hold up thar, you polecat, where you a-goin’ with my gal?’ ”

She laughed. “Who’s going to miss television?”

We went below and cooked breakfast. We had bacon and eggs and set up the table between the settees and had paper napkins and were very proper.

A light southeasterly breeze came up at midmorning. We hoisted sail and tacked up against it all day. It died again in the late afternoon. I put another coat of paint over the sloop’s name. It was the same the next day, and the third. We’d beat up against a whisper of air all day and lose what we’d gained when it died and the current set us to the westward. We began to joke about it. We’d never get into the Yucatan Strait. And we didn’t care.

We swam. She sun-bathed—in the two-piece swimsuit at first and later in just the bottom part of it. We rigged a hand line and caught fresh red snapper for dinner. I lettered the new name and port of registry on the stern of the sloop:
Freya of San Juan, P.R.

I began to teach her seamanship and navigation. She protested she couldn’t learn the latter because she’d never been any good at mathematics, but I assured her the math involved was predigested when you used the tables and that the thing that took skill was the sight itself. We practiced each day at noon, shooting the sun, and took star sights at dusk and dawn. We were still over the Northern Shelves, not more than twenty miles to the eastward of the point where Barclay and Barfield had drowned. The current was setting us back when we weren’t under way.

She loved it all. That was the thing that made it finally complete. I had thought at first she might merely tolerate it because I liked the sea and boats and sailing and because it was our only escape, but she took to it as naturally as the Vikings she was descended from.

She was watching me take a sight one noon. “I’m so happy,” she said. “We’ll remember this always, as long as we live, won’t we?”

I glanced at her. “Sure. But don’t forget, this is only the beginning.”

“Oh,” she said. “Yes. Of course.”

We were lying becalmed again the next afternoon when the rain squall hit us. She was sun-bathing on the forward deck in the half bathing suit and I was reading aloud to her from a paper-bound edition of
The Heart of Darkness
I’d had in my gear when we saw it darkening to the eastward. We both ran below. I left the book and took off my dungarees and shoes. It burst over us without too much wind but with a tropical deluge of rain. As soon as it had washed the salt from the deck I blocked the scuppers and opened the filler cap to the fresh water tank and let it run full. When I had topped it off and put the cap back on, I turned, and she was coming forward again with a small bottle of shampoo in her hand, grinning at me through the deluge.

“Here, let me help, too,” I said.

We gravely sat down in opposite directions on deck, as if in a love seat, and unpinned the roll of ash-blond hair. Rain fell over us in sheets. I poured some of the shampoo into my hands and we rubbed it on her head, trying to work up the foam against the beating of the rain. She was naked from the waist up, and well tanned now, and she looked like an Indian 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.

She smiled, a little shyly. “I know it’s ridiculous,” she said. “But it was there in the things I sent aboard—”

“No,” I said. “It’s not ridiculous. On this ship the mate comes to dinner every night with just a suspicion of Tabu behind her starboard ear or she’s logged a day’s pay. Put it in the night order book.”

“Night order book?” she asked, and it was the first time I had ever seen that particular roguishness in her eyes. “Things
are
simplified on ships, aren’t they?”

We were ecstatically happy, and we didn’t care how long it took us to get into the Yucatan Strait. But twice more I awoke at night with that strange feeling she was going through some hell of her own there beside me. She would be lying perfectly still, staring up at the sky, as rigid and tense as someone petrified with fear.

I couldn’t get to it. Whatever it was, she never let me come near it.

She liked to swim, and had no exaggerated fear of sharks. I coached her to get her out of the dog-paddle class, and she improved tremendously. She was a natural. She was in no sense an athlete, but then neither are most really hot girl swimmers. You don’t have to be lumpy-muscled and bony to get around in water.

We spent hours at it, lots of times even when there was enough wind to have been under way. This was paradise and we were so wonderfully alone it was impossible to be concerned with headway or making a schedule or taking advantage of every capful of wind. The world between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer was our oyster, and we had the rest of our lives to savor it. We swam, and we lay side by side at night looking up at the stars, and we fished and read, and we dived with the aqualungs.

Diving fascinated her, and she was never afraid of it from the first. We were over the Northern Shelves in the beginning, and in three days she was going to the bottom with me in a shoal spot we found where the water was only ten fathoms deep. She loved confronting startled schools of fish—any kind of fish. They were all the same to her, and actually were nearly all red snapper.

“They look so absurd.” She laughed. “Not really scared, but just offended, as if you’d done something in very bad taste by coming down there bothering them.”

“Fish expressions are deceptive as hell,” I said. “They’re probably whistling at you. You do have nice legs.”

She made a face at me. “I wouldn’t know about that. It seems to me you haven’t mentioned them recently. Not in the past hour or so.”

“You know why I joke, honey?”

Laughter faded, and the eyes were soft. “Yes. We have to, I guess, Bill. You get too filled with wonder and you’d just bog down and go dumb if you couldn’t relieve the pressure with a little lightness.”

“Maybe we should have been Latins,” I said. “Then we could be intense and articulate at the same time.” I thought about that. Then I said, “No. The hell with it. I’d have to change the name of the boat again, to some brunette goddess. I’ll struggle along with you the way you are.”

We had a day of good breeze, and worked up into it for 16 hours, running for the Strait. Then it fell again and the current set us west and north for two days and nights. On the eighth day after Barclay and Barfield had drowned we were far out on the northern edge of the Shelves where the Campeche Bank drops off into the depths.

We took a sight at noon and worked it out. We were at 23.50 North and 88.45 West. When I put it on the chart I saw we were right on the hundred-fathom curve.

It was hot in the sun and very still, and the immense pastures of the Gulf heaved gently all around us. A gull sat on a piece of driftwood off to starboard and stared at us, and a school of flying fish burst out of the side of a ground swell to go ricocheting off the next like skipping stones.

She was quieter than usual, and last night late I had roused once to find her lying awake beside me again.

“What is it, angel?” I’d asked. “Is something bothering you?”

Her voice had sounded all right, however, when she replied. “Oh, I was just thinking about us, Bill. I didn’t bring you much of a dowry, did I?”

“What kind of talk is that?” I asked, puzzled.

“Silly talk,” she said. “Go back to sleep, darling.”

I put my head on her breast. There was almost a full moon now, and it was low in the sky. The boat rocked gently and she hugged my head to her with sudden, impulsive fierceness.

“Oh, Bill, Bill,
Bill—”

She stowed the sextant in its case now and we went on deck. A school of porpoises was playing around to port. She looked at them with quick interest.

“Let’s dive,” she said, “and see if we can watch them from below.”

I dropped a line over the side to make the aqualungs fast to when we were ready to come out. I watched her slip her arms through the straps of one of them. She had torn the bathing cap the other day and had to throw it away. Her hair was free, down on her shoulders. She was nude except for that single wisp of swimsuit and beautifully tanned all over now, more like some magnificent pagan than ever. Just before we put on the masks she came close to me and kissed me, hard, on the mouth with her arms fierce and tight about my neck.

I caught her. “Not many things could make me lose interest in porpoises,” I said, “but—”

She slipped away from me, adjusted the mask, and slid into the water. I followed her.

The porpoises were gone, of course, by the time we got out there. We came back and swam just below the surface in the shadow of the
Freya,
looking the hull over again to see if we’d begun to collect any marine growth. It was cool and pleasant, and I loved watching the silvery flow of hair about her head as she swam. A few minutes later I saw a small shovel-nosed shark off to one side and below, and swam down to watch him. He retreated, going deeper. I looked back over my shoulder, and she was still under the boat.

I sounded again, and the shark kept his distance. He was quite small, and utterly harmless. I swam down a little more, and I could still see him circling below me in the clear blue water, which grew darker as it fell away into the depths. I was down about a hundred feet.

A school of some kind of small fish I had never seen before swam by me in a big circle and I watched them idly, enjoying the relaxation of lying suspended in the water. It must have been several minutes later that I turned and looked above and behind me to be sure she was still under the boat. I saw the boat, all right, but she wasn’t there.

I looked straight above, toward the ground-glass screen of the surface. She was nowhere in sight. I began to be uneasy. But maybe she had gone back aboard for some reason. I was turning to look behind me again when a flash of silver caught the corners of my eyes at the edge of the mask. I froze with horror. She was at least a hundred feet below me, going straight down.

I pushed my feet up and sounded vertically, pulling myself down so fast I could feel the pressure clamp on my head like a vise. I tore at the water. I gained on her, but the depths were gaining on us both. It was terrible, not being able to call out to her. She was swimming straight down. I could see her legs kicking, and the silvery undulation of her hair. The squeeze was beginning. I was growing drunk and the water was darker all about me. She was down past 300 feet, not swimming now, turning a little, falling into the infinite and darkening blue below me. I could never reach her because she was going into that terrible wall of pressure faster than I could gain on her. Maybe I imagined it, or it was a trick of the waning light, but I thought I saw her lift one arm and beckon just as she faded into the depths. I closed my eyes to shut it out. I clamped them shut, and it was on the backs of my eyelids like a motion picture screen. It’s there yet.

It must have been pressure that drove me out—pressure and training, because I remembered nothing of it at all. After a while I was conscious of being on my knees in the cockpit of the boat with my forehead on my arms on one of the seats, praying. I hadn’t had an identifiable religion for years and had never believed in immortality, but I was asking Somebody to be good to her.

“—be gentle with her. Take care of her. Please, please, please, be gentle with her—”

The sun beat down on my back and water dripped off me. After a while I stopped, and for the first time I realized I had been praying aloud because when my voice ceased I began hearing the silence. The whole boat was drenched with silence. There was an emptiness about it you could actually feel. It pressed in on me. I went down in the cabin and it drove me back on deck. I sat on one of the cockpit seats with my face in my hands, still numb with shock and only half aware of what I was doing. Less than an hour ago she had been right here, here in the cockpit, alive, warm, lovely, brilliant, thrilling to touch and look at.

That was it, I thought. She was here all about it; not a million miles away, but right here, offset only by a thin, transparent sheet of time one hour thick. Why couldn’t you reach through an hour’s time the way you could through a foot’s space? What was time but a ball of mud spinning on its axis? Time? Her watch down there in the cabin was set on 90th meridian, Central Standard Time. The chronometer within three feet of it in space was six hours away on Greenwich, zero meridian time. The local apparent time where we were ourselves was 88th meridian.
Time?
I wanted to cry out. Offset slices of time lay side by side here like laminations of plywood and she was forever unreachable because she was on the other side of one thin, unshatterable pane of it.

I realized I wasn’t completely rational, and tried to get a grip on myself.

What had happened? How had it happened? I’d told her, warned her over and over about depth and the awful things pressure could do. She’d been above me, right there under the boat. Maybe that was it. She must have been too near the surface, under the stern maybe, and had been hit on the head by the rudder or propeller as it slid off a passing swell. I stopped. No. She hadn’t been falling, except at the very end. She’d been swimming down. I could swear it. I saw the long legs kicking, the way I had taught her.

But maybe she had been dazed by the blow and didn’t know which way she was swimming. Or she could have been knocked out momentarily and settled beyond any distance she’d ever been before and had been seized by drunkenness, the rapture of the depths, brought on by breathing air at too great pressure. When I saw her she’d been at least 200 feet down, and she’d never been below sixty before.

Then I stopped and raised my head and stared unseeingly out across the water. No. She wouldn’t have. It was unthinkable. Why would she? She was happy, wasn’t she? Wildly, deliriously happy, as I had been. Of course she was. It was apparent in every smile, every laugh, every word she said, every gesture of love.

But I was remembering now. I was thinking of those times I awoke to find her rigid and tense, staring into the darkness beside me. Those times I’d had that feeling she was being tormented in some recess of her mind she’d never let me near. What about the way she had kissed me, suddenly and fiercely, just before we’d gone over the side?

Was it “Macaulay? Of course it wasn’t. She wasn’t in love with him. And he’d betrayed her. He’d lied to her, and double-crossed her. The very fact of her trying to find excuses for him only showed him up for what he was. She didn’t owe him anything. She’d paid it all. She’d even stayed and tried to save him after she knew what he had done, stayed at her own danger.

I didn’t bring you much of a dowry, did I?

I sat up straight, feeling sick. There it was. That was it. I had failed her. I could see all the clues, now that it was forever too late.

“I’ve been doing this a little longer than you have,” she’d said. “There is no escape.”

She’d already had too much of being hunted, with Macaulay, and I’d failed in trying to show her we could get away. I remembered the way she had looked at me when I was showing her on the chart, the places we’d go, the things we’d do. She’d been like someone listening to the babbling of a child. She didn’t believe it. She wanted to, and she tried, and she pretended to, but in the bottom of her heart she couldn’t. There were too many of them after us now. She and Macaulay had never been able to get clear away from Barclay’s crowd, and now we had not only them but the police.

We were doomed, she thought, and she blamed herself for it. She’d tried to keep it from me, to give us what time there was, but in the end it was too much for her. And I’d been too blind and stupid to realize she was being tortured by it. Oh, God, if I’d only been able to show her, to make her understand we
could
escape! Just one more chance, now that I knew what it was. Please.
Please
. The whole world was before her, and I let her kill herself. It was agony. I couldn’t sit still. I stared down into the water where she had gone. The sloop rolled. I forced myself away from the rail.

“No,” I cried aloud. She hadn’t done it deliberately. It was an accident. Nobody could have been outwardly as happy as she had been and be tortured by something like that at the same time. She
had
been happy. It was an accident.

“It was an accident,” I cried out wildly. “An accident.”

But she’d been
swimming
down.

The sloop rolled. The silence screamed.

I went below. She came at me from everywhere at once. I was drowned in her. Everything was saturated with her. She’d touched this, she’d stood there. She came from behind the curtain in a white dress dabbing at the lobe of an ear with the glass stopper of a perfume bottle. “I know it’s ridiculous—” she said. The ghost of the perfume was still there. It was all over the cabin. The mattress and pillow were back on the bunk where they were stowed during the day, and the perfume was on the pillow where her head had lain and there was one long, shimmering, ash-blond hair. I knelt beside the bunk and pressed my face into the pillow, holding it with my arms.

“Swede,” I said. “Swede—Swede—Swede—”

I knew the danger of it. It was morbid. I stopped.

The sloop rolled. The silence rose and screamed.

The sun went down. It was night. I couldn’t sleep. When I closed my eyes the picture was there on the backs of my eyelids, the infinite blue and that last flash of silver, beckoning as it faded.

I’ve got to quit seeing it,
I thought.
I’ve got to. I’ve got to.

The boat rocked. There was no wind.

At dawn I took star sights and worked them out because I had to have something to do. The current had set me 18 miles to the northwest. I started the engine and ran back. I wasn’t sure why, except that 23.50 North, 88.45 West was a place. It had existence. It was fixed. Nothing else had reality. I shot the sun at noon and plotted my position. I was at 23.46 North, 88.44 West. I had missed it four miles. I was too far south.

“Well,” I said reasonably, “it’s all right. I knew that wasn’t the place, anyway.”

I stopped. I’d said it aloud. I looked out across the heaving, trackless miles of water.
I knew that wasn’t the place.
I went below and looked at myself in the mirror.