Stormchild (20 page)

“I thought you were feeling too old to cope with a yacht’s discomforts,” I said accusingly.

“Old?” David laughed. “I’m only fifty! Just three years older than you, Tim.” Jackie glanced at me, then looked away quickly. “So!” David spread his arms to encompass the table. “What do the next three months hold for us?”

“You’re here for three months?” I gaped at him. I had somehow thought he might have come for just two weeks.

“That should be long enough to settle von Rellsteb’s hash,” David said happily, “and still give us time to spot a hummingbird or two. But first we have to beard the monster in his Patagonian lair. How do you plan to do that?”

I unfolded a paper napkin, found a pen, and, still dazed by David’s blunt happiness, made a crude sketch of South America. “We sail to Panama as soon as possible,” I said, “then make a loop out into the Pacific to avoid the Humboldt Current. I’m afraid there won’t be any time to make a visit to Easter Island, or to put in at any of the ports in northern Chile, instead we’ll go straight to the southern coast, probably to Puerto Montt.” I stabbed my crude map low down on the Chilean coast.

“You seem to be in a devil of a hurry.” David lit his pipe.

“From everything I hear it’s sensible to make a landfall in Patagonia before the end of February,” I said, “and between now and then we’ve got the best part of five thousand miles to go, so yes, I’m in a hurry.” I paused. “It’s going to be a very uncomfortable voyage, David.”

David laughed. “He thinks I’ve gone soft,” he confided in Jackie, then looked back to me. “I assure you I’m as fit as you are, Tim.”

“Who’s keeping an eye on the boatyard while you’re away?” I asked with alarm.

“Your new manager. Very good chap, by the way. Knows his onions.”

“Oh, Christ!” I sighed because my elder brother’s arrival threatened to tear my life into shreds. Just three months ago I had been begging for his company, but now, isolated in the strange relationship I had with Jackie, I did not want David’s loud intrusion. Except he was here now, and could not be sent back, which meant that the small fragile bubble in which Jackie and I had been so delicately existing was about to be obliterated by the great gales of David’s bluff goodwill.

Jackie clearly felt the same sense of violated privacy for she had spoken hardly a word since we sat down in the pub, but now she leaned toward me with a frown on her sun-tanned face. “I think maybe you don’t really need me anymore, Tim. Now that your brother’s here.”

“Of course I need you!” I said hastily.

“Every ship must have a cook!” David put in his three cents’ worth of appalling insensitivity.

“Shut your bloody trap!” I snapped at him, then looked back to Jackie. “You can’t jump ship now!”

“What I was thinking,” she said, and without even acknowledging David’s presence at the table, “was that I ought to fly home and make sure everything’s OK there. With my mom, you know? And with my apartment. I mean, hell, I just walked away from it! Things may need looking after.”

“You’re abandoning the Genesis community?” I asked in disbelief.

“No! I just ought to visit home, that’s all! And when I’m there I’ll try and raise the cash to fly down to Chile and meet you. I mean if we really are going to find the Genesis community then I ought to be prepared for it, and I don’t even have a camera with me! What kind of a journalist am I without a camera?”

“I have a camera.” David seemed oblivious of the effect his arrival had caused, but he had never been a sensitive man. A good man, but not subtle. He unzipped one of his bags and pulled out a 35mm camera that he put on the table. “It’s an efficient camera, but if you find it too complicated, my dear, then we can always buy one of those idiot-proof point-and-shoot jobs, isn’t that so, Tim?”

I ignored David, while Jackie, who had gone pale under her tan, just continued talking as though my brother had never spoken. “And maybe if I go home, Tim, I can sell the story to an editor. I know a lot more about Genesis than I did before, and maybe a major newspaper will listen to me now?”

“They’ll certainly listen if you tell them that the famous circumnavigator, Tim Blackburn, is sailing to Chile to shoot a bloody ecologist!” David hooted with laughter at his own wit.

“Shut up.” I spoke with hissing menace to my brother, then looked back to Jackie. “Why don’t you get the story first, then sell it to a newspaper?”

“I don’t know, Tim.” Jackie glanced very quickly at David, thus suggesting to me that his bluff arrival was her real reason for not staying. She seemed not to have taken his words about shooting von Rellsteb seriously, which was a relief, but David was never a man to let a sleeping dog lie, and now he pushed his camera across the table toward Jackie.

“Take it, dear girl, with my blessing.”

“No, really.” Jackie tried to push the camera back.

“Of course you must take it. We are one for all and all for one, are we not?” David offered Jackie his most benevolent smile. “Besides, you look much too frail to use one of the rifles. Not that I think we shall need the guns.” David palpably changed mental gears and offered me his most serious expression. “I need to talk with you, Tim, about what we plan to achieve in Patagonia. I really don’t think I can involve myself in violence. It just wouldn’t look good in the
Church Times!
Of course, if we’re attacked, and we do have to defend ourselves, then I assure you I’ll be shoulder to shoulder with you.” He smiled at Jackie. “And frankly those old Lee-Enfields have the devil of a kick, so I doubt you’d be strong enough to fire one. Not that I think we’ll need them, but you never know.”

“Shut up,” I said plaintively, but much too late.

“Lee-Enfields?” Jackie asked. “What are Lee-Enfields, Tim?”

I did not answer. I had been cornered in a lie and I was desperately thinking how to find an elegant way out, but there was none.

“Are they guns?” Jackie demanded of me.

“There are two rifles on board
Stormchild,”
I told her very flatly. “I hid them before I left. It seemed a good idea at the time.”

“A damned good idea!” David said with an elephantine lack of tact.

Jackie stared at me very coldly. “Are you planning to fight von Rellsteb, Tim? Is that what you’ve been planning all along?”

“I’m planning to find my daughter,” I said as calmly as I could.

“For which purpose you’re carrying guns?” Jackie accused me.

“You’re the one who warned Tim that these wretched people are survivalists”—David was trying to retrieve the damage he at last perceived he had caused—”and you can’t really expect us to face such maniacs unarmed, can you?”

Jackie ignored him. “I’m going to the Archipielago Sangre de Cristo to secure a story, Tim, and I thought you were going to help me.” She paused in an effort to control the fury that was suffusing her voice, but instead of calming down she seemed to shake with a sudden rage. “But now I find that you lied to me! That you’re carrying guns! And that you expect me to help you in your stupid macho crusade!”

There was silence. Some Americans at the next table, embarrassed by the intensity of Jackie’s words, raised their voices as if to demonstrate that they were not really eavesdropping, while David, realizing that he had sown the wind that had raised this whirlwind, desperately tried to calm the storm. “Dear girl! Please calm down!”

Jackie still ignored him, fixing me with a fierce look instead. “Did you lie about the guns?”

“Yes,” I said wretchedly. “I’m sorry.”

“So all this time, when you’ve been talking about finding your daughter and reasoning with her, you were really planning to use violence?”

“No!” I insisted, though weakly, because I was again lying. I believed von Rellsteb had murdered Joanna, and I knew I would take revenge if it was possible. I could see Jackie did not believe my feeble denial, so I tried another and more plausible justification. “If we’re attacked,” I said, “then we have to be able to defend ourselves.”

“Even the act of carrying a weapon is offensive,” Jackie said passionately, “and is liable to encourage violence in others.”

“Oh, come!” David said. “Does carrying a fire extinguisher make a man an arsonist?”

Jackie threw down her napkin. “I thought we were going to Chile to find a story! To discover a truth! I can’t be a part of some stupid scheme to start a fight!” Her eyes were bright with tears and she shuddered, clearly in the grip of an overpowering emotion. “And I will not involve myself in even the smallest part of your futile and primitive violence!” She glared at David. “Not even as a fucking cook!”

Her piercing voice had now attracted the attention of half the bar. Someone cheered her last words.

“For God’s sake, girl!” David tried frantically to calm her, but Jackie would not be calmed. She flung her chair backward and stalked away between the tables. An amused group of Americans offered her loud applause and a berth on their own yacht.

“Oh, good Lord,” David groaned, “I’m sorry, Tim.”

“Look after the bill,” I said to him, then hurried after Jackie, but she had run from the pub to the quay, and, by the time I came out into the harsh sunlight, she was already swinging herself down to
Stormchild’s
deck. “Jackie?” I called as she disappeared down the yacht’s companionway.

“God damn it, Tim! Leave me alone!”

By the time I had reached
Stormchild
’s saloon Jackie had already locked herself in her forward cabin. “I don’t want you to leave!” I shouted through the door.

“I am not going to be part of a killing expedition! That is not why I came! I want to write a good piece of journalism, and I want to help the parents whose kids have run off with von Rellsteb, but that is all I want to do! I do not want to be a part of your violence, so from now on I’ll have to make my own arrangements!” I could hear a half sob in her voice.

“Jackie!” I tried to open the door, but its bolt was too solid to be forced. “I don’t want to kill anyone,” I said, but it sounded a rather feeble defense, even to me.

“Then throw the guns overboard! You know how I hate guns! Will you throw them overboard?”

“Just come out and talk to me,” I said, “please.”

“Will you throw the guns away?”

“I might if you come out and talk to me,” I said, but my halfhearted concession earned nothing but Jackie’s silence, or rather the sounds a girl makes when she stuffs a seabag full of dirty clothes. “Jackie!” I rattled the door again.

“Go away.”

“You can’t leave,” I said, “you haven’t got any money.”

“I’ve got plastic!” she shouted at me as though I had insulted her.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll make you some tea, then we’ll talk about it, OK?” I went back to the galley, leaned my hands on the stove, and sighed. God damn it, I thought, God damn it. Then, taking my time so that Jackie would have a chance to calm down, I made a pot of the herbal tea she liked so much. I let the concoction steep, then poured it into her favorite mug—one that showed two cats with twined lovers’ tails and surrounded by little love hearts. I carried the tea to her cabin. “Jackie?”

There was no answer.

I knocked harder. “Jackie?”

The silence was absolute.

“Jackie!”

I ran back through the saloon, up the companion-way, and onto
Stormchild’s
deck, where I found the forehatch was open and the bird was flown.

She must have climbed on deck while I was making the tea, tiptoed her way aft, then climbed to the quay and disappeared. I ran through the dockyard, but there was no sign of her. I even caught a cab and raced to the island’s small airport, but still I did not find her. My shipmate had vanished; she was gone.

“There’s an obvious explanation for the girl’s behavior,” David said to me a week later. It had been an awkward week. We had spoken about such mundane matters as navigation and watch-keeping, but neither of us had spoken about Jackie’s abrupt departure. David, realizing that he had behaved in Antigua with the sensibility of a falling rock, seemed to be ashamed of himself for detonating the emotional outburst, while I was just plain miserable. But now, as
Stormchild
slammed into a vicious steep wave, my brother at last tried to break the silence that was so painfully between us.

“Tell me what is obvious,” I, at last, invited him.

“The girl was in love with you.”

“Thank you, David,” I said with a caustic venom, “and now please shut up.”

I had waited three days for Jackie to return to
Stormchild,
but she had not appeared. I couldn’t raise any answer from her home telephone number, and, finally, believing that action would be a better diversion than anger, I put back to sea where I had crammed on all sail to drive the big yacht through the Caribbean as though the devil himself was in our wake. It was proving a rough passage for the east winds were driving the Atlantic waters into the shallow basin of the Caribbean and heaping them into steep, short waves. David and I had rigged jack-lines down either side of the deck, and I insisted that we wore safety harnesses and lifelines if either of us moved out of the cockpit. We had also erected the new spray hood so that the helmsman could crouch behind its view-perspex screens as the seas shattered white at our stem and splattered down the decks like shrapnel. Now, four nights out of English Harbour, David and I were sharing the sunset watch as he steered
Stormchild
fast toward the Panama Canal. He was also trying to repair the breach that gaped between us. “I think you’ll find I’m right,” he said mildly, “she showed all the symptoms.”

“I thought you were a vicar, not an agony aunt.”

He crouched to light his pipe. When, at last, the tobacco was drawing sweetly, he straightened up to steer
Stormchild
into the next steep wave. “A man in my job is constantly being tapped for help by people having emotional crises, so one does learn to recognize the symptoms.”

I was tempted to observe that an emotionally troubled parishioner seeking David’s help was the equivalent of a seriously ill patient calling for the services of a mortician, but I contented myself with asking him how on earth Jackie’s behavior had suggested to him a bad case of love. “I would have thought,” I continued sarcastically, “that if the girl was in love with me she’d have stayed on board. She’d hardly have run away from me!”