Long Voyage Back (39 page)

flu' virus that had been talked about weeks earlier was now definitely more than a flu, but the etiology of the 'plague' remained unknown. All that had been established was that the incubation period was between a week and ten days; that transmission seemed to have to be oral - through ingestion of contaminated food or water, or through mouth contact with someone infected. Flies going from the sweat of an infected person could contaminate food.

The prognosis was known now too. The disease began with stomach cramps, then a fever, then a high fever which might last five or six days, followed by either death or a remission of symptoms. Treatment was to try to reduce and control the fever - medication, ice packs, fluids, etc. Unfortunately, none of them was very successful. Although about a quarter survived with no ostensible permanent damage, and a similar number survived but seemed to be debilitated by the disease, lacking in energy and endurance, about half died.

As a result, international travel and trade had almost ceased. Jeanne and Neil listened to a report that the Venezuelan Air Force had threatened to shoot down a Boeing 747 that wanted to land in Caracas after an eight-hour flight from Toronto. When the plane was almost out of fuel and circling outside the city the Air Force did shoot it down. No one survived.

For the first time those aboard Vagabond discussed returning to the US mainland. It appeared that there they could still find sufficient food. The radioactive fallout would be diminishing eventually, or so they hoped. But the problem of avoiding the disease, and of avoiding the violence of those who feared they were carriers of the disease - this was frightening.

Any area of the country untouched by the epidemic would be erecting the same kind of total and deadly barriers to possibly infected outsiders as were other areas of the world. Moreover, most of the stored and growing food would already have been confiscated and controlled by previous survivors in each area, and when winter came these sources would be barely enough for them. Outsiders would not only be feared and kept away because of the 'plague' but because of the burden they would place on the already limited subsistence of those already there. Neil had listened to one shortwave report of a small renegade group of soldiers and a band of survivalists

fighting a pitched battle for the food and shelter the survivalists had prepared. The broadcaster didn't know who had won, but it wasn't a game that any of those aboard Vagabond had any heart for.

Thus, although their stay in the harbour at Charlotte-Amalie permitted them to recover from the weariness of being at sea for almost three weeks, by the end of a week a new kind of weariness was afflicting them: the fatigue of searching endlessly for some end to the threat of starvation, and finding none. 01ly, with help usually from Jim, Lisa, and Katya, spent most of every day fishing, sometimes with hook and line, at others with a net along the shore, or raking for shellfish. Frank, possessive of Jeanne, took on with her the task of bartering for what little food was available in the city. Over the week they bartered away dozens of 'useless trinkets': watches, shirts, shoes, necklaces, blouses, a transistor radio, the rest of Macklin's stolen cigarettes, Jim's remaining small supply of grass. Yet during the week they ate no better than they had at sea and had no more reserve food supply than when they had first dropped anchor. They were running to stand still.

So almost from the first day, on the torpid streets of Charlotte-Amalie Jeanne felt lost and uneasy. She arrived wanting to find a home for herself and Neil and the others, for the alternative seemed an endless sailing from one hostile place to another. But as she talked to government officials, to shopkeepers, as she pushed her way through the devastated and littered streets or along the waterfront bartering for food, she could feel no connection with anyone, black or white, mostly only a powerful, sullen hostility. She felt herself out of sync with the island and its people. By the third day she was just going through the motions. She wanted to leave.

It wasn't simply that she was white in a world mostly black. It was more than colour. She sensed that for those who had lived on the islands for a few years anyone who had arrived after the holocaust - black, white, or Puerto Rican - was an outsider, an intruder - even, she realized with a start, a coward. To have fled one's homeland was to be guilty of selfish betrayal, even if that home had been blown off the earth and the homeland become a vast crematorium. And the anger and contempt with which most of the longtime residents responded to her and the other refugees was undoubtedly intensified by their own fear and their own desire to flee to some ultimately secure haven. A black woman whom she casually tried to befriend at the fish stall turned on her with unexpected hatred: 'Go way, rich lady,' she said fiercely. 'You best fly while you can!' The woman's rebuke acted to re-stir Jeanne's own fear; made her begin calculating if she were still 'rich' enough to flee.

It hadn't taken long to learn beyond any doubt the commonness of the currency Philip had called 'pot and pussy'. Marijuana joints were traded as cigarettes had been during earlier wars. Bags of it were the big bills of island currency. And some women, if they were young and attractive and otherwise destitute, went to buy necessities from certain merchants quite reconciled to paying with the availability of their mouths or bodies. One merchant they'd heard about had, out of his own physical limitations, resorted to selling water or fruit or fish to certain women for 'IOUs' -payment to be upon future demand of the bearer of the IOU, the bearer not necessarily being the merchant himself. He, in turn, used the sexual IOUs to buy things he wanted from other merchants. The second real estate agent Jeanne had called upon, a dignified black man her own age, had offered her a month's free rent in a cottage he controlled in return for her `friendship'

. The suggestion seemed to her not so much insulting as irrelevant, but it contributed to her feelings of uneasiness about St Thomas.

So too did what was happening to Lisa and Jim. On their second trip ashore the two had discovered in the downtown city park a gathering of teenagers, black and white - the only

part of the local life that seemed comfortably integrated -playing guitars and ukuleles and drums, singing, smoking pot, even laughing, and often gathering around the latest streetcorner prophet, haranguing about doom or salvation or both. Almost every day after they'

d worked with Olly fishing or gathering shellfish they went ashore and spent time with new friends. Katya sometimes went with them.

Lisa, although younger than most of the others, seemed determined to fit in with this society, one which disturbed Jeanne mainly because she knew so little about it and had no control over it. She could feel Lisa pulling away from her. Lisa and Jim would answer her questions about the Park Square people with code word replies: they were 'cool', '

loving people', were 'non-violent', but Jeanne felt only a dull dread at what seemed an aimless passivity in their response to the threats of starvation and disease. Katya didn't help matters when she said that Jim and Lisa were just trying to hold on to a little more of their normal lives before existence became again solely devoted to day-to-day survival.

And finally the other thing that made her feel out of place in Charlotte-Amalie was the absence of Neil. With him staying so often on the boat or off on other people's boats she had no heart for the land. Neil was a major part of any new home, and if he were rejecting St Thomas then she must too.

And so, after six days, she felt herself back where she had been on day one: on a ship without sufficient food to leave and without sufficient food to stay; unable to live with the man she loved because it would destroy the family that was her new world. And her children, whom she had vowed to save, to whom she felt she wanted to dedicate her life, grew steadily thinner, and Lisa steadily more remote. The climax came one afternoon when Lisa was preparing to go ashore with Jim to visit their Park Square friends. She confronted Lisa down in their cabin as Lisa was changing from the wet clothes she'd worn earlier seining for bait along the shore with Olly, Jim and Tony.

`Lisa, sweetheart,' Jeanne said to her. 'I hardly see you these days. What do you do in the city every day?'

`We don't do anything, Mother,' Lisa answered, slipping out of her one-piece suit and into panties and shorts. As she did Jeanne noticed that Lisa seemed to be trying to show that she was unaffected by her own nakedness, not hiding her breasts as she'd done for most of the last two years.

`For seven-or eight hours?' Jeanne asked, regretting her accusatory tone.

`There's not much to do, you know,' Lisa replied, not looking at her mother. 'This isn't exactly Washington.'

Ì know, I know,' Jeanne said, trying to get away from the confrontational mood. 'What do you talk about?'

`Lots of things,' Lisa answered, pulling a blouse over her head. She no longer wore a bra, partly because the only one she'd had with her was worn out.

`But what are some of them, sweetheart?' Jeanne persisted. Ì'm interested in your life, remember?'

Òh, Mother,' Lisa said with a sigh. 'It's hard to tell you. About lots of things. The way you adults messed up the world. About how to scrounge for food. About what we want to do with our lives.'

`How do most of your friends manage to get food?' Jeanne asked, handing Lisa the brush she knew she was glancing around for.

`Some of them fish,' Lisa answered, beginning to brush her hair. 'Garbage cans outside rich white people's homes. A few go house-to-house begging.'

`Your friends beg?' Jeanne asked.

`Certainly, Mother,' Lisa snapped back. 'There are no jobs and no food. What do you expect?'

`Don't their parents manage to provide food?' `Sometimes,' said Lisa. 'But most of us want to be independent of our parents.'

`By begging?'

Ìt's better than blowing the world apart.'

Ì don't see how parents here are responsible for the war,' Jeanne responded, feeling annoyed with Lisa's self-righteousness.

`Some of them are white, Mother,' Lisa said, as if that explained it. 'And Robby says all whites started it with their super-rationality.'

Àh,' said Jeanne, knowing she was too annoyed to enter reasonably into an abstract discussion. 'I see.'

`That's why music is so important,' said Lisa.

`Yes . . said Jeanne, standing uncertainly in front of Lisa, who was ready to leave. 'Tell me, sweetheart, is Jim your lover now?'

Lisa, who was about to escape, stopped, her eyes on the floor. In front of Jeanne she slowly raised her eyes and faced her. 'Yes, Mother,' she answered quietly, without defiance or apology.

Jeanne, who'd been holding her breath, let out a sigh. see.' `You and Neil . . .' Lisa began. Ìt's all right, honey,' Jeanne said, biting her lip and averting her face to look out the window. 'I . . . Jim . . . Jim is ... a fine man.'

Ì love him, Mother,' Lisa said in a low, uncertain voice.

Ì know, honey,' Jeanne said and went forward and hugged Lisa to her. 'I know.' They held each other for half a minute until Jim's voice called Lisa from the dinghy alongside Vagabond.

Tut Lisa,' Jeanne said releasing her daughter but blocking her path. 'I don't want you abandoning the boat. Stay here. Make love here if you must.'

It's not that,' she said, and, inexplicably to Jeanne, she became irritable again. 'You don't understand. There's no life for us on the boat. Nothing but more of the violence that Neil and Frank seem to believe in. Some of the people in Amalie are different, and Jim and I are interested in finding a better world.'

Jeanne felt herself stiffen again at Lisa's oversimplified

rejections and a frightened sadness at her daughter's need to escape from the boat and the adults on it. Their world was falling apart. Tut, honey . . .' she began. Ì'm going,' Lisa announced and brushed past Jeanne and left the cabin. Jeanne followed and as Lisa climbed down into the dinghy she wanted to call her back or issue some warning, but couldn't articulate even to herself what she feared. 'Lisa,' she called down to her. 'I . . . I want you to find a better world, but ... just he certain it is a better world.'

For a moment Lisa pretended to busy herself with helping Jim get an oar in the oarlock, but then she looked up at her mother defiantly. 'It can't be any worse than the one that's sent us here to starve to death,' she said.

Jeanne, feeling she had nothing better to offer Lisa, could only look down in shocked silence. Jim, smiling up at her awkwardly, shoved off and slowly rowed Lisa away. For Neil, after a week on St Thomas, land was again enemy territory. After their first few days anchored in the harbour he let any or all of the others go ashore to try to find food or a house or whatever it was they thought they wanted. He believed that each of them would soon conclude the hopelessness of finding here a haven. Every time he left Vagabond he was ill-at-ease, constantly looking back at the water towards the white trihulled form of his ship, his home. Except when he was with Jeanne; together they carried home with them.

The idea of settling on St Thomas was against his instincts. He feared Vagabond's being pirated; feared the plague; feared putting himself under a governmental authority that itself was little better than piracy. His reaction to the appalling conditions on St Thomas was ambivalent. While he sympathized with the native islanders and resented the rich whites flying or sailing off to other havens, he knew full well he was one of the lucky ones who had a vehicle to flee with and knew he'd be happy to use it. Indeed, was constantly scheming to be able to use it.

Yet that alternative, all the alternatives, were, as always, heartbreaking. Somehow, some way they had to get in sufficient food for a voyage even longer than the one they had just completed. Somehow, some way they had to obtain more weapons to protect themselves against pirates and eventually, Neil speculated, against foreign navies and air forces. Somehow, some way they had to find a place on the planet where they could feed themselves and be free of the great leaning grey weight of the nuclear holocaust. Somehow, some way. It was life.