Long Voyage Back (37 page)

They sailed on. The squalls that hit them four days after leaving Great Abaco Island eased the water problem. To gather water all the self-bailing cockpits were stoppered and even the inflatable dinghy was brought up on the foredeck and partially inflated to catch water there. They gathered two and a half gallons in the first ten-minute downpour, and close to six additional gallons in the two heavier showers that followed. After the squalls the wind shifted to the south, the seas lessened and Vagabond began a long tack directly towards San Juan. With the reduced weight of both man and material the ship's company had already shed almost a hundred pounds - Vagabond began to race towards San Juan at almost a hundred and eighty miles per day clip. For Jeanne, Frank's anger at even the most casual warmth between herself and Neil, and Lisa and Skip's recurrent symptoms of hunger, contributed to a heaviness that nothing could relieve. When she initiated quiet conversations with Neil, hoping to re-establish their warmth, Neil was polite, but somehow withdrawn. Once she had felt like throwing herself into Frank's arms and sobbing out her longing for Neil, only to smile bitterly at the double folly of such an act.

As Vagabond ploughed forward, even the next wave seemed to Jeanne to be a future too distant to consider. She slept, awoke, cooked breakfast, stood watch, read to Skip, ate two mouthfuls of fish at noon, helped Neil with his sextant sunshots, played with Skippy, perhaps helped gaff a fish, cleaned the galley, checked the dried fish, napped, helped with the third meal of the day (the word 'dinner' was too grandiose for the tiny snack which each meal had become), lay on her berth staring at the ceiling, and slept. Sometime in the future, perhaps, she could live again.

A week after leaving the Bahamas, when they were less than eighty miles northwest of San Juan, the outer world, the one they were trying to escape, the one they were trying to rejoin, paid them a fresh visit. It was after one A.M. when a sudden glow lit the distant horizon ahead of them, bloomed briefly like a bright flower, and warned the watchers that man had again unleashed his madness on man.

They reacted to this explosion over San Juan not with terror but with a kind of bewildered mechanicalness, It seemed somehow so wrong, so unjust, that after fleeing for almost three weeks and for over two thousand miles they should find, ahead of them still, more, that they could feel no emotion except dull dread. Jim and Lisa, on watch, turned Vagabond off the wind to sail away from the explosion, Lisa going crisply to the winches to let out the sails - as if responding to this explosion were a normal part of their nautical duties. At Jim's call Neil came hurriedly up on deck, saw the light, now behind them, and went to the helm to check the course. Disoriented, he took a half minute to realize that it was probably San Juan that had been hit. After calculating their approximate position, he ordered Jim to alter course back to east. They would have about two hours before a tidal wave would arrive; only then would they turn to run before it. Because ofthe immense depth of water he guessed that the wave wouldn'

t be breaking and

would probably be less of a threat than the wave in the shallow Chesapeake. Meanwhile they would continue east, towards the Virgin Islands. When Neil took out the transistor radio and tuned it to their usual station in San Juan, they found it was no longer broadcasting.

A tidal wave came rolling in at Vagabond in the early-morning hours on schedule, a wave a little less than twentyfive-feet high appearing among the three-foot seas that had been running. Frank, at the helm in the darkness, with Tony, Neil sleeping in the wheelhouse behind, saw it at almost the last moment, a huge wall of water glistening in the light of the moon. He swung Vagabond away to run before it, but the gigantic unbreaking swell instead hit him on the aft quarter. Vagabond lurched violently, skidded along the wave at tremendous speed as it was carried like a toy for forty or fifty feet, and then lurched again as it toppled back to starboard at the crest, the wave rolling under her like the back of a mammoth whale. The huge sea was followed by several other large waves in the fifteen-to twenty-foot range, but by then Frank had swung Vagabond downwind running before them, surfing down their faces sometimes for half a minute and setting him to grinning with incongruous exhilaration at Vagabond's speed and grace under pressure. Neil came clambering up awake after the first smash and, groggy from sleep, shouted seemingly contradictory suggestions,. but Frank, having survived the first awful wall of water, was not much concerned with Vagabond's handling the puny little fifteen-footers. He just grinned at Neil and kept doing what he was doing. The sunrise the following morning provided a terrible beauty. The whole southeast became a glowing sweep of bright reds and oranges such as none of them had ever seen before at dawn. Already above them high dark clouds were spreading out across the sky, tinged now with the most delicate pink, but, as the sun rose higher, shading to tannish yellow, then brown, then a brownish grey, and finally and simply to the all-pervading thick dull grey which they had so hated and feared in the Chesapeake. By nine A.M. San Juan was about seventy miles to the southwest. Sailing east, they were moving in the opposite direction from the high altitude flow of radioactivity, which was westerly. Yet even sailing at eight knots they didn't gain on the expansion of the cloud; it spread outwards from its centre faster than they could flee. When the familiar terrifying ash first again appeared on their decks Neil once more ordered everyone below and had Tony dress in foul-weather gear to sweep the decks clean. By the time he had finished just the first clean-up he was collapsing from the heat and, calling weakly, had to be helped down into the main cabin. Neil had developed a technique of steering Vagabond by compass from down below in this emergency since the steering cables passed down from the wheel at the rear of the main cabin and could be pulled alternately to adjust Vagabond's course. The decks could be swept down every twenty minutes or so by someone as well protected as Tony had been, but no one dressed for the arctic had to be on deck to steer.

By noon, three hours after the first discovery, they were no longer able to see any evidence of additional fallout. The dark cloud was mostly west and south of them, only a thin grey layer being directly above.

It was Captain 01ly who seemed most disturbed by the latest explosion. Neil discovered him late that afternoon sitting forward on the starboard hull, staring blankly out at the grey water to the southeast of them. Neil realized he must have been sitting there for hours.

`What's happening, old fellow?' Neil asked him, standing nearby, holding on to a stainless steel shroud for balance. Vagabond was rolling and plunging uncomfortably as she reached eastward in the southerly wind.

`Feeling a little poorly,' 0lly answered after a brief pause. `Your stomach?' Neil asked, concerned about radiation sickness.

`My heart,' said 011y.

`My God, what's the matter?'

`Not that heart,' said Olly irritably. 'I mean . . . I mean that dust gets me down.'

Ì know.'

Ì don't mind explosions or tidal waves or fires or big winds. A sailor's meant to have to deal with those. But when it rains death, how do you reef for that?'

Neil didn't answer. They stared together out at what seemed to be an ugly grey sea beneath the cloud bank to the south.

Ànd the ocean . . Olly went on in a low voice. Tor fifty years I been figuring that no matter how much man ruined the land, the one thing he'd never destroy, no matter how hard he tried, and I knew he'd try his damnedest, would be the sea . . . '

Neil let the silence hang briefly and then said softly: 'It's not destroyed yet.'

Captain 01ly removed the unlit and perpetually empty pipe from his mouth and tapped it idly on the deck.

`No,' he said after a while. 'It ain't. But I seem to have underrated man's talent for making a mess of things: All these years I been depending too much on man's weakness and stupidity. I figured he was just too dumb to mess things up totally.' He looked up at Neil, his grizzled face and red eyes looking tired and old. 'I just pray the Lord God will save us from man's intelligence.'

Neil looked at him a long moment and nodded. 'Amen,' he

said.

LAND

Jeanne had slept while the men anchored Vagabond during the early morning hours, so that when she came up on deck a little after six, she looked upon the boats floating nearby, the quiet, waveless harbour, and the white buildings of the town blossoming up the hillsides in the distance as a child might at her first big city. For more than two weeks she had known only the constant motion of the sea; now, Vagabond lay as still as if embedded in concrete. In all that time they had seen no more than four ships, one at a time; now as she slowly swept the horizon with her gaze she could see twenty, thirty .... more. For the last two days . . . since the explosion over San Juan - she had felt continual low-level fear; now, surrounded by motionless white hulls, with white houses sleeping in the early dawn light less than a mile away, she felt that fear disappear. There was no exhilaration, no joy: simply a sense that here, for the moment, at last, was a safe space. She moved into the wheelhouse and saw Neil stretched out on the cushions asleep, his bearded face and tousled hair showing his exhaustion even as he slept. She wondered if he'd collapsed there too tired to bother to go aft to his own cabin. He must have fallen asleep after the anchoring only hours earlier.

She slipped quietly down into the galley to prepare herself a cup of tea, then remembered that they had no more tea or coffee. She poured herself a small cup of water. Back in the wheelhouse, sitting opposite the motionless, leaden body of Neil, seeing the slanted rays of the early morning sun sparkling on the golden hairs of his thighs and legs, she felt a wave of longing, tenderness and pride: they had come through; they had made it. But as she felt love welling up

within her she thought too of Frank, and then the beautiful body of Neil, so still before her, made her sad.

It was too much for her. They were too much for her. There was no way she could create a world where all of her loved ones could be happy. Although she herself was beginning to feel at home at sea, her children needed land. But the men, all of them really, seemed unenthusiastic about any of the alter natives that they might find for living on any of these Caribbean islands. Here they were in Charlotte-Amalie in the American Virgin Islands, as far as she could tell as safe and unhostile a place as there was within a thousand miles, and four of the men had spent two hours the previous evening discussing the supplies necessary for another two-week voyage and getting depressed because it seemed hopeless. She had tried to talk about what they could expect from St Thomas and though' Frank had shown interest, Neil had done no more than give her a book to read.

`What's that, Mommy?' Skip suddenly asked, coming up from his cabin and standing in front of her in his tiny red swimming shorts and staring out at the fleet of anchored boats and the distant houses.

`That's . . . that's land, honey,' she answered in a soft voice so as not to disturb Neil. For a week now Skip had been asking `When are we going to get to land, Mommy?'

'That's land?' Skip asked, looking puzzled.

`Yes. That's the city of Charlotte-Amalie on an island called St Thomas. We may live here for a while.'

Òn a boat?'

`No, on land, in a house.'

`Like the one in Washington?'

`No. Smaller. But nice.'

As Skippy pulled himself up on to the cushion beside his mother he was silent, still staring at the distant town. 'They don't look like real houses,' he said.

`They don't? Why not, honey?'

After a pause he said: 'They just don't.'

Neil stirred, adjusted a forearm under his head and chin and then resumed his deadman pose. He had begun to let his beard grow and was in that halfway land of looking scraggly and down-and-out. As she looked at him, affection and desire mixed with her sadness.

`Do they have a MacDonald's?' Skip asked.

`What?'

`Can we go to MacDonald's today?' Skip repeated.

Òh, no. I'm afraid not. I don't think they have a MacDonald's.'

`What about a Big Whopper?'

Ì don't know, honey. We'll see.'

Hamburger: it too will have disappeared. On the islands there would be no beef or lamb, perhaps a little pork and fowl, but mostly fish. She smiled to herself as she realized that she was imagining herself having to announce to Skip the death of the hamburger. Could he take it at such a young age?

Maybe she should sleep with both of them. She had to sleep with Neil, but with Frank the outsider, could not do so `publicly', could never in that way slap Frank in the face after his fondness for her over the last two years. Perhaps she could become a seafaring camp follower, available to whichever officer was officially on watch, the way Katya seemed capable of being.

But she knew she couldn't, and the tension that existed between Frank and her and Neil was painful. This landfall might represent escape from waves and starvation and fallout, but it was no escape from themselves.

When a Customs launch arrived at eleven, Neil was up but the other men had to be awakened. Most joined Neil and the others topside, all haggard and grizzled or bearded, even Jim. They looked like the collection of war refugees they were. Katya's hair was tangled; she had lost several pounds from her already small frame, but still looked healthier than the men. Lisa, though now a woman, looked, because of her frailness, more like a child than she had a month earlier.

Although they were. nervous about the arrival of the Customs launch, they had heard a radio report that the local island government had simply ignored the US military. Apparently any effort to draft the mostly black islanders would have led to an instantaneous revolution. Even as it was, the local government, controlled by blacks but greatly influenced by white interests, was on shaky ground. The senior Customs officer was a nervous, pudgy white man and his two-man crew was black. They searched Vagabond for weapons, asked detailed questions about their previous voyage, seeming to want to be certain they had been at sea nine days since the Bahamas, and, without explanation, insisted on taking everyone's temperature. Just before the Customs men left, Neil asked how he and his friends could expect to get food if they had no gold or silver or much else to barter with.