Long Voyage Back (51 page)

exaggerated smile, made grotesque in his puffed face. 'Gotten so I prefer three-wheelers,'

he added.

`Get back on Scorpio,' Macklin shouted, nervous and angry. "Course the company ain't as nice here,' Olly said. Tut I'm used to the stink of rotting things so . . Tony instinctively lashed out at Olly with his gun arm. When Olly parried the blow and knocked the gun loose, Macklin swung his gun into Olly's chest sending him back against the cockpit seat groaning.

`Hey!' Frank yelled, rushing forward.

Macklin aimed his automatic and snapped off the safety. `Hold it!' he snapped fiercely, backing into the corner of the cockpit and looking uneasily at Frank. Frank stopped only a few feet from where Tony stooped to retrieve his fallen gun.

`The charade's over,' Macklin announced. 'Tony and I are taking over.'

`What's that mean?' Frank said, his fists clenched at his sides. Ìt means Tony and I are taking Vagabond and you can join your friends on Scorpio.'

`You little bastard,' Frank growled, 'you couldn't handle Vagabond for a single second.'

`Get off the boat,' said Macklin.

`Jesus, you and Tony are clowns,' said Frank, sneering. With a suddenness that surprised everyone, he grabbed Tony's gun and tried to twist it free, using Tony's body as a shield from Macklin. Crouching in the corner ten feet away, Macklin swung his gun first towards Frank and then towards Neil, who had taken three quick steps towards him; then he swung his gun back to fire a single shot at the tangle of Frank and Tony. For a moment that tangle seemed to continue its wrestling unaffected, but then Frank slumped to the cockpit floor. Tony, breathing heavily, straightened and stared down fearfully at his fallen adversary.

Macklin, sweating, turned his gun back on Neil. Jeanne

appeared in Scorpio's cockpit next to the young woman at the helm. 'What happened?'

she asked into the silence aboard Vagabond.

Macklin wheeled towards her with a scowl.

`Get back below or I'll kill you,' he said to her.

`Go below,' Sheila shouted at her. 'He's shot Frank.' A look of shock appeared on Jeanne'

s face, then she moved slowly past Janice to Scorpio's starboard side against Vagabond. She could now see down into Vagabond's near cockpit the bleeding body of Frank. Òh, my God,' she said and climbed aboard.

Tony and Mirabai quickly left the cockpit area to avoid the possibly infected Jeanne. Mirabai reboarded Scorpio and Tony came into the wheelhouse. Even as Jeanne knelt beside Frank's fallen body, Macklin held his gun on Neil.

Òscar,' he said to the young man still standing behind Neil, 'put the barrel of your gun in Loken's back and escort him over on to Scorpio.'

As Neil felt Oscar's gun press into his back he began walking towards Macklin, who was still crouched back against the far corner of the cockpit, his eyes flicking nervously. The two ships were sailing serenely forward at six knots, still lashed side to side, rubbing and crashing but held off by both ships' fenders.

Neil glanced at Sheila as he passed her at the helm and hoped she might try to help. Mirabai now appeared behind Macklin aboard Scorpio.

`That's it,' she said to Macklin. 'I've removed everything you asked me to.'

Macklin glanced swiftly at her, then back at Neil who was now only six feet away. Vagabond suddenly swung left, her port bow crashing hard against Scorpio and throwing all of them off balance: Sheila had acted.

Neil wheeled and, grabbing Oscar's gun arm, hurled him across the wheelhouse. He crashed into the mizzen mast, his gun ripped from his hand, and slumped to the floor. As Neil

turned back to Macklin he saw Jeanne wrestling for possession of Macklin's gun. Neil leapt forward, throwing his weight against Macklin's left side and sending all three of them crashing against the coaming, Jeanne screaming as her left arm struck, then sinking slowly to the deck. Neil grabbed Macklin's gun arm and began banging it against the edge of the coaming. Groaning, Macklin let go of the gun.

Grabbing Macklin by the belt and shirt front, Neil half-carried, half-dragged him past Frank and Jeanne to the rear of the cockpit, lifted him high up over his head and hurled him into the sea. Macklin's head struck the side of Vagabond's deck. He fell between the two boats, bobbed up briefly in the ships' wakes, then disappeared behind a swell. Neil stood staring after him a moment, then turned back to the cockpit. Jeanne was again kneeling beside Frank, rocking back and forth, almost as if she had forgotten the other violence that had swirled around her. Neil crouched down beside them. Frank's eyes were open and clear but a thin line of blood trickled from his mouth. He was labouring for each breath, his chest rising, shuddering and collapsing. Neil knew a lung must have been punctured. Jeanne had placed a towel beneath the rib cage and Neil removed it and pushed up the shirt and saw what looked like an exit wound from the bullet. The sight of the immense bleeding gave Neil a sinking feeling: he didn't think they could save him.

Neil groaned, reaching out to touch Frank and letting a hand fall helplessly on his shoulder. Frank managed a grin that was mostly a grimace. 'Christ,' he gasped out, 'have I botched it!'

`Can't we help him?' asked Jeanne, turning to Neil desperately.

`Yes,' said Neil. 'We've got to drain the blood from his lung. Somehow get new blood into him.' He stood up. Tony was in a corner of the wheelhouse along with the still groggy Oscar. For Neil they had no more relevance than bothersome insects.

`We're taking Vagabond,' he said to them. 'And staying for the time being at sea. We'll redivide the food after we've tried to save Frank.'

Tony stood with one arm holding the mizzen mast to steady

himself, the other still clutching his pistol. He seemed to be groping for an appropriate line of action and not finding any. `You'll have to tell me when you changed course during the

night,' Neil went on. 'I'll plot your course for Barbados.' `You . . . you're letting us go?'

Tony asked, as if Neil held a

gun on him rather than he on Neil.

`Yes, ' said Neil, and went below to try to save what still could be saved. Once again Vagabond sailed on alone. The two ships had parted. Tony, Oscar and the four others had taken Scorpio, planning to sail it downwind back to Barbados. Neil's last exchange with Tony, after he'd checked over the relative food supplies of the two ships and sent some back to Scorpio and given Tony one of the two automatic rifles and ammunition, was brief. 'Good luck,' Neil said to him as they prepared to cast off the rafting lines.

Tony, who had been unusually subdued in the two hours since the wounding of Frank, nodded. 'You too,' he said, and as Neil released one line and was moving to untie the next, added quickly: 'Sorry about . ..' but didn't finish.

Neil merely released the second line, signalled Olly on the port bow to release his, and the two ships, free of each other at last, angled out away. Since Vagabond was now altering course from west back to southeast the two ships had to cross paths one more time, vagabond lulling her sails and then sailing across Scorpio's wake. For a moment everyone in both ships acted as if the other ship wasn't there, until Olly, still on Vagabond's bow collecting the fenders, stood up and waved heartily.

`Go get 'em, Tony,' he shouted. Tony gave a subdued wave in return, and then the two vessels were speeding away from one another, one to the west, one to the southeast, each to its own fate.

Àlways give people encouragement when they're sailing off,' Olly said to Neil after he'd returned aft. 'Otherwise they might come back.'

Philip and Sheila had remained with Vagabond. When Sheila had talked to her husband late that morning about

whether they should join Scorpio Philip had shaken his head. Ì have to have something to live for,' Philip told her. 'With those people I wouldn't. Here ... I do.'

But his fever was now over a hundred and three degrees; and Neil started a third antibiotic.

Frank, berthed in the dinette where Philip had been, still lived. They had sedated him, drained the blood from the lung, and managed, with great difficulty and uncertainty, to draw almost a pint of blood from Sheila's arm and inject it into Frank. Neil knew that with the primitive syringe he was using there was danger of an embolism but he had concluded that without a transfusion Frank wouldn't survive the first night. Lisa and Jim were quarantined in Frank's old cabin, Philip installed on a wheelhouse settee, with Sheila in the forepeak berth. Jeanne and Skippy remained in the port cabin, but Jeanne began to spend most of her time with Lisa and Jim, planning to sleep on their cabin floor. The disease would reach its climax in the first three or four days so the battle might well be won or lost quickly. Knowing that the disease was not air-transmitted and that cleanliness could have a decisive effect on whether one became infected or not, Neil hoped that they could contain the disease.

Although he had less hope that they could save Jim and Lisa it wouldn't be for lack of trying. All during that long first day Jeanne and Neil tended the two feverish patients. They lay on adjacent berths, only occasionally conscious, sometimes hallucinating, their fevers over one hundred and five degrees. Jeanne worked tirelessly putting on and taking off the seawater-soaked towels and shirts, carrying Lisa's bony, torrid body to the side cockpit to immerse her in the six inches of sea water there. She watched helplessly as the fever raged on unabated and Lisa's breath became faster and faster, shallower and shallower. Neil helped bring water and towels and moved Jim when necessary. Sheila often helped, but most of the burden was Jeanne's.

Neil found it depressing to be down in the heat and stink of Frank's cabin to confront the sweating bodies, feverish eyes and incoherent words of Jim and Lisa. Jim kept trying to act as if he were only mildly sick, joking about it, inquiring always of Lisa, just out of sight around the partition that separated their two berths, and once even volunteering to help carry her to the seawater bath out in the cockpit. When he found he couldn't even stand, he lost some of his youthful cockiness. With three of the ship's company close to death and those still healthy feeling almost powerless to help them, the gloom during the day was broken only once, when in late afternoon Olly unexpectedly announced that they should hold a short memorial service for Conrad Macklin, as they had ten days - before for Katya.

`He was our shipmate,' Olly explained. 'And besides, burying him might put us in a better mood.' So he, Neil and Sheila had stood awkwardly in a side cockpit and Olly had spoken. 'Well, Lord, we want to pay our last respects to Conrad Macklin,' he began in a serious voice and with bowed head. 'Connie was probably beat on as a kid, and his Mom probably weaned him too early and his Dad kicked his butt so he developed into something of a shit, Lord, pardon the expression, but he didn't work hard at it and was only that way when he felt like it. Still we figure You got the big picture, Lord, and will know exactly what to do with Connie. Us, we got the small picture. All we could think of doing with him was throw him to the sharks . . . Amen, Lord. Over and out.'

Neil and Sheila said nothing.

`Now we symbolically commit his body to the sea,' said Olly, and when he slapped Neil on the back Neil gathered the ceremony was over.

`Funny thing, Death,' Olly announced as they walked back into the wheelhouse area. Neil waited for him to go on with some sort of punch line but he didn't, as if his three words summarized his meagre wisdom on the subject.

Neil was doctoring Frank. When the wounded man spoke

without wrath of Tony and Macklin his tranquillity began to remind Neil of Sam Brumberger. Frank even joked about their triangle with Jeanne, announcing that he was '

retiring' from the field. Feeling helpless in treating Frank, twelve hours after the mutiny Neil made the decision to head for land. Frank's slim chances lay in their finding modern medical skills on the coast of Brazil.

Neil was aware of the dangers involved: the Brazilian government was sinking unauthorized ships trying to land. The day before, a plane had passed overhead, the first they'd seen since leaving the Virgin Islands, and a freighter had passed them heading south. These sightings had disturbed Neil at the time; he feared that Vagabond's presence might be reported to Brazilian military authorities and create the possibility of their being attacked. His hope lay in their being off the northeasternmost coast of Brazil, relatively uninhabited, and in Vagabond's approaching the coast at night and hopefully arriving at dawn. He consulted with each of the others, warned them of the terrible dangers of landing, but they all voted to risk it, Frank alone arguing against. Ì don't think I'm going to make it no matter how many tubes they stick in me,' he said in pain. 'You ought to keep to sea.

But they turned southwest, heading for one of the coastal towns to the north of the mouth of the Amazon. Neil didn't plan to sail into a harbour but to sneak in, find a sympathetic doctor and only then bring Frank ashore. Even as he searched for a viable plan he knew the risks were great.

At dusk, after looking at the primitive small-scale map he had of the coast he went to fetch their automatic rifle and began planning defensive strategies for their closing with land. The rifle was missing. He asked Sheila if she had moved it and she said no. Nor had Olly. Disturbed, he discovered the nine-millimetre automatic on his aft cabin shelf was missing too. He asked Olly to check for the two other weapons they kept in the main cabin and he reported them gone too. He

and Olly were leaving the main cabin feeling baffled when Jeanne met them coming from hers.

Ì threw the guns overboard,' she announced quietly, looking frightened of Neil's possible reaction.

Neil stopped in front of her, stunned, staring at her, not wanting to believe her, but knowing that this was the only explanation.

Àll four of them?' he asked.

She nodded.

`My God,' he commented, turning away from her and staring off aft. Ì know I seem crazy to you,' she said quietly. Tut I don't want to live in the kind of world they create.' Neil still looked away, his lined, bearded face tense and puzzled. 'I love you, Neil. I know you've saved us a dozen times, sometimes with guns, but no more. Now we live or die like the rest of God's creatures, by the strength of our bodies alone.'