Outerbridge Reach (29 page)

A clear sky burned overhead, appropriate to the west wind. Altair shone radiant over the continent behind him, Betelgeuse and Orion over the farther ocean. It was a childish pleasure to have the stars to himself again. Before midnight, he went below. He woke up dizzy. Rising, he had to cling for a moment to the overhead bar. On deck the wind was warmer and tasting of rain but still steady from the northwest. The steering vane was carrying on, heading
Nona
due east on a port tack. The circling beam of his radar showed a clear horizon.

At the chart table, he idly opened his copy of
Ocean Passages for the World.
In the morning, he decided, he would take a sighting and set a provisional course.
Ocean Passages,
for the time of year, directed him to 34° north, 45° west, from which point he might set out against the northeast trades. Browne thought he might east it even farther if the wind held. For the first time, he turned on the monitor of his satellite navigation device. Then he switched on his Icom receiver, tuned in the Naval Observatory time signals and set his watch and the boat's chronometers. At the edges of the cabin, all the wizardry, the electronic telltales with their knobs and gauges, sat dark and dusty. Browne suspected he might never even try to use them.

After a while, he felt thirsty. He went to the galley, helped himself to a few cups of water and lay down in his rack. When he closed his eyes, the dizziness returned. Browne had been seasick only once in his life, bouncing up and down off Little Creek in the beachmaster's boat during a mock invasion nearly twenty years before. It seemed perverse of things to visit the condition on him now.

He got up and dialed some progressive jazz on shortwave and turned off all the cabin lights except the one over his chart table. Then he settled back to listen to the music and tried to sleep. Shortly he was sweating. When he pushed his sleeping bag aside he felt cold. Then all at once he became aware of the wound in his leg where he had cut it on the dock at the boatyard. He sat up and turned on his overhead light.

The sight of the cut, just above his ankle, gave Browne a rush of alarm. It was covered with a scab the color of New York harbor and the skin around it was a bright red that faded by inches. Pressing beside it, he felt a dull muscular sort of pain from ankle to thigh. The wound appeared to be deep although it had not bled much. At the yard, when he had cut himself, the tide had been at ebb. So the spike that had caused the wound was one set below the low-tide line, never exposed to air. It was a classic example of the sort of puncture wound that developed tetanus. Over five years had passed since his last shot and it had not occurred to him to get a new one. Cuts were usually clean at sea.

“Bloody hell,” Browne said.

Gathering himself under the down bag in his rack, he read from
The Complete Home Medical Encyclopedia,
which was part of his medical kit:

“Onset usually begins with headache, low-grade fever, irritability, apprehension, and restlessness. The first real sign of tetanus is a stiffness of the jaw and difficulty in opening the mouth. Muscular stiffness can develop in the neck and elsewhere. Most agonizingly, the patient remains alert. He cannot open his mouth or swallow; his eyebrows become raised; the corners of his mouth become upturned, giving the appearance of a perpetual grin . . .”

The radio faded out as Browne sat down on his bunk. It was extremely unlikely, he thought, that he had tetanus. But not out of the question. He got some aspirin and penicillin from the sick chest and took them with water. The more he thought about his jaw, the stiffer it seemed to him.

He slept for a while after that. When he awoke, he was sicker than before. His mouth tasted foul, his neck was sore and there was a band of pain around his temples. He felt so plainly feverish that he never bothered with a thermometer.

“Early hospitalization is essential,” said the
Home Medical Encyclopedia.
“Much depends on the early administration of tetanus antitoxin.”

Even if it was not tetanus, Browne thought, there were other deadly dangers. Gangrene. Botulism. He looked up each one in the medical text. Later he felt too sick to read or even get out of his bunk. Each time he moved, his body was racked with chills. Eventually, he forced himself up to check the radar screen. All was still clear. He staggered out on deck and looked into the dark haze of his own sickness. The wind was dry and cool again and blowing from the same quarter.

When he went below, his gaze fell on the radio transmitter. The obvious course, it seemed, was to turn around and head for land. If it got worse he might raise the Coast Guard. As soon as he pictured himself being rescued, he felt a moment's certainty that aborting the trip was the right thing to do. He was plainly too sick to go on. The image of his own illness overpowered him. He sat on the bunk with his chin on his chest, too sick to see straight, wanting to start back but too addled to commence coming about. All he was aware of in the cabin was the transmitter. He had the urge to ring up his wife. He wanted to recruit her into his dilemma, but still more he wanted to hear her voice. He felt whipped and frightened. In the end, he simply took more aspirin and more penicillin and went back to sleep.

When he awoke again it was still dark. A cloud of fever dreams had held him down, each one depicting some anxiety. It took him a moment to remember what the actual trouble was supposed to be. Then he could only lie there, pondering his condition, meditating on symptoms. To be sure, his neck was stiff, his jaw ached; he was still very feverish. But this time the accompanying panic failed to strike him. It was as though he had not the energy for panic.

If I die of tetanus, Browne thought later, or gangrene or botulism or whatever else, then I will simply die of it. I will lie here as long as it takes to die and call no one. I will not run puking home to her or the Coast Guard or anyone else.

He realized then that he would have to relearn, in soft, advancing middle age, the sense of suspended fortune that had been mother wit and second nature when he was young and in the war. Such things did not simply come back. In spite of all the conscious preparation, he was unprepared for sea.

It was so much in the mind, Browne thought. The logic of ordinary life was the logic of weakness and fear. The imperatives of weakness and fear were persuasive. His helpful medical book was a busy encumbrance. The time to treat the cut had been before the race began and he had chosen to ignore it. He would live with his own decision, excused from further responsibility. There were ways of coping with everything, even despair.

And it was useful to think of the dividing world overhead, the gates of Altair sliding closed, Orion leading on. He was in a zone of transit between his lost world and the one beginning to take hold. He swallowed another penicillin tablet and turned over.

Just before first light a strange signal came in on shortwave. A man with a West Indian accent was reading aloud:

“. . . a man riding a red horse an' he stood among de myrtle that were in de bottom

“And behind him were dere red horses, speckled and white.

“Then said I, Oh”—and here the man moaned softly and in such a sad way that Browne would never forget it—“oh, my Lord, what are dese?”

Browne opened his eyes in hope of daylight but there was none to see. He was still sick enough. The signal faded out then. Browne pulled the bag close around himself. He had enough trouble, he thought, without mystery sky pilots.

Later on, he awoke to a sound that cheered him. The sun was high in the sky and Morse code was coming over the Icom, loud and clear at over thirty words a minute. As a midshipman, in the autumn before he was commissioned, Browne had spent some months at the Navy's radio school in Norfolk. He had been taught to receive at the typewriter; typing a sentence still brought ghostly electronic echoes to his inner ear. Trying to follow the Morse on his receiver, Browne sat up and realized he felt better.

Hand-transmitted Morse had practically disappeared from the sea lanes in the days since Browne had been a midshipman. Nearly everything was faxed or automated. Listening more closely to the signals, he understood that there were two operators on the line repeating each other's signals. The sending speed was incredibly fast for hand transmission but distinctly that. Then it came to Browne that what was being sent back and forth were variations on the phrase BEN'S BEST BENT WIRE. In Morse the words were pure rhythm and used by old-time operators to demonstrate the quality of their fist, their skill with the key. After about five minutes of electronic syncopation, the operators signed off.

“GL, OM.” Good luck, old man. A marine operator's sign-off from Conrad's time. Roger. Out.

“Bless you, Sparky,” Browne said aloud. “Both of you.”

He climbed out of his bunk and felt his sickness had passed. It was early afternoon and he was hungry. Later, he decided, he would take a sighting.

He made himself a cheese omelet for breakfast and ate it with fried ham and, as things did at sea, it tasted marvelous. When he had washed the dishes he went on deck.

The day was fine, the wind steady and the ocean still and blue. As a bonus, four gray bottlenose dolphins were leaping with
Nona
's bow, as good an omen as could be. He hurried back below to get the camera Strickland had given him. For whatever reason, the dolphins disappeared, declining to be recorded. Just for practice, Browne focused his lens on the horizon and shot the empty sea.

When the wind picked up, he buckled on his safety harness and leaned his back against the mast. It was a bad night that he had put behind him. He found it difficult to imagine his way back into the depths of fear and helplessness that had assailed him. Kneading his sore leg, he found it quite serviceable. End of alarm.

It all had to do, Browne thought, with the zones of transit he had crossed. Within them, what was human met with what was not. Over there, the continent, with its frantic egoism, millions of ravenous wills. Here the sea, serene and unforgiving. Out of such places, interior storms arose. He settled back against the mast with Strickland's camera on his lap and waited for the dolphins.

W
ITH
Owen securely at sea, Anne had started working for
Underway
magazine again. The week before Thanksgiving, she spent one morning in the office alone reading the January issue's proofs. When they were ready, she walked them to the printer's herself and took an afternoon train home from Grand Central. She was expecting his call that evening, via the marine operator.

Riding home, she found herself a little high with anticipation. She had gotten the magazine out ahead of time, using the prospect of his call as a treat and incentive. At the same time she knew perfectly well that the telephone link was an ambiguous pleasure.

Driving from the station, it occurred to her that she might sign up as a volunteer at the Veterans' Hospital in Bristol. She had worked there during Maggie's first years in grade school. During the Vietnam War, she had volunteered at the Naval Rehabilitation Center in Kaneohe. Her memories of that were more pleasant than otherwise. If only she could summon back the tricks that had worked for her in those days. But they were lost in time and their memory drowned in nostalgia. To wish for those old tricks was to wish youth back.

She stopped at Gemma's Exxon on the Post Road to fill up on gas and get a quart of oil. Since she was in the neighborhood, she took the opportunity of running next door to Post Liquors for a quart of Finlandia.

That evening, as the time for Owen's call-in approached, she sat in the study drinking vodka and orange juice and thinking back on the years of the war. She could not altogether suppress the guilty pleasure she felt recalling them. How impossible it would have been at the time to imagine she could ever look back on them with pleasure. And with more than pleasure, she thought: with longing. It was partly, she supposed, a longing for him and for things to end well.

From the day after his departure, she had been running into the residue of things done wrong. There was the matter of the solar panels. Then she discovered that she had made a miscalculation in the amount of cooking oil he would need. He was almost certain now to run out of it before the race was over. The rubber for a reinforced casing around the mast step was shown by its invoice to have been the wrong sort. A letter for his birthday she had put aboard in a briefcase with the boat's papers had somehow ended up back in the car. There were many, smaller things. Besides them, there were the telephone calls at night. For some reason she did not understand, she connected these calls with the errors. They were the standard silent harassing calls in the night: a pause and the receiver replaced. Of course, the race had been much publicized. She was known to be alone. She said nothing to anyone about either the calls or the mistakes.

Three quarters of an hour before his call was due, she gathered up her charts and rulers and went upstairs to change clothes. She thought it might be fun to dress up for him, and before long she had laid a considerable variety of clothes on the bed for her slightly addled inspection. Then, in the depths of the closet, as though it were meant to be, she found a leather miniskirt that she had bought in the late sixties, too dated to wear, too nice to throw away. When she tried it on she found it fit, although barely. It was what she had worn to meet him at Oakland airport when he came home from the war.

“Far out,” he had said, feeling her up in it. It was hard to imagine him saying that now.

She ended up putting on an old knit leotard of the sort that went with leather miniskirts and a pair of old boots and a purple turtleneck sweater that she had once worn with an ivory pendant on a silver chain. Then she sat down at the dressing table to fuss with her hair, a drink at her elbow. It was permitted, she thought, to drink while you talked to your husband at sea. And she had been cutting down.