The Detonators (14 page)

“Do you want me to start fixing something for lunch?” Amy asked as the U.S.A. fell astern at last.

I said, “Sure. A good stiff Scotch on the rocks with a dash of water. Have one yourself.”

She shook her head. “My first bout with alcohol was hardly a glorious victory. I’m not in a hurry to try a rematch, thanks. But you’ll have to translate. Teach me how to bartend. Just exactly what’s a stiff drink and what isn’t?”

I said, “The chances of your being a promising AA candidate are very small, but suit yourself. A normal shot is an ounce and a half. For me, let’s try two ounces as a therapeutic dose. The jigger’s hanging on the galley bulkhead next to the ice pick.”

“Matt—I mean, Johnny…” She hesitated.

“What is it, Penny?”

She was studying me quizzically. “Do you know what you’re doing… Johnny? You looked awfully tense back there.”

I said indignantly, “What do you mean, woman? We haven’t hit anything yet, have we? We didn’t run aground, did we? Questioning the competence of the skipper comes under the heading of mutiny, a walk-the-plank offense. If we had a plank.” I grinned. “No, Mrs. Matthews, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. My salty female partner was supposed to handle the boat; my job was the muscle and the guns. I’ve been on a lot of boats run by other people delivering me hither and yon across the water in the line of business, government business, but I haven’t handled very many myself, and very few sailboats, and none on a hardship cruise like this with a heartless dame who deliberately lets the captain die of thirst at his post of duty.”

Amy laughed softly. “I guess I’d better start reading that seamanship book on the cabin shelf, huh?”

“After I’ve finished it,” I said. “I’m just working my way through A for Anchor at the moment. Does it worry you?”

“Being stuck out in the middle of the ocean with somebody who doesn’t know how to sail?” She gave me an odd, crooked little smile. “No, not really. Strangely, it doesn’t. It’s the ugly things inside my head that worry me, the things that make me do ugly things to myself and let people do ugly things to me. Drowning isn’t one of my big fears. Anyway, I don’t think you’re nearly as helpless as you pretend, nautically speaking. One drink coming up.”

“Switch on the Loran while you’re down there; it takes a little while to warm up. I’d better start making like a navigator as soon as we’ve finished lunch.”

I watched her make her way through the hatch and down the ladder, a slim figure in jeans and a horizontally striped blue-and-white knitted shirt with an open sailor collar and short sleeves. The saggy pantaloons and baggy bloomers some females have taken to wearing these days have performed a miracle I’d have called impossible a few years back: they’ve succeeded in making girls in ordinary, well-fitting jeans look attractive. There was a time when I’d have said they shouldn’t be let out of the barn until they’d got the manure all shoveled and were ready to bathe and don presentable clothing; but my current shipmate didn’t look too bad to me at all, even with her bottom swathed in crude blue denim.

Although I kept telling myself that it was all an act and she’d naturally do her best to tug at my susceptible heartstrings, I found myself with a strong urge to cherish and protect the poor disturbed little thing. There was, of course, another factor involved besides sympathy. There always is. The lady was beginning to look good enough to me in other ways to create something of a problem, call it a propinquity problem. Well, I told myself firmly, there was obviously nothing to be done about it at the moment, confronted as I was by a lot of tricky navigation, with an unfamiliar boat to manage, and the land getting lower and lower on the western horizon.

After finishing my drink and devouring one of the Swiss-on-rye sandwiches Amy had constructed for us, I got to work and figured out where we were, electronically. I can’t tell you how Loran works, except that there are numbered lines on most nautical charts these days representing the transmissions from certain land stations. Punch the right buttons on your magic box and similar numbers will come up in the two windows. Find the lines on the chart corresponding to those numbers, and where they cross is where you are. That’s the basic theory; in practice you can make those silicon chips do almost anything on board short of cooking and hoisting the sails—the next step in our nautical progress, as I told Amy.

“That’s the big jib up forward, rolled up like a window blind,” I said, “but we won’t unroll it yet. Next comes the little forestaysail. In a moment you can go up there and get the lashings off it; I think they’re actually called stops. I thought the hinged spar at the bottom of that sail was a jibboom, but I was advised that jibbooms went out with clipper ships; it’s called a club. Be sure you call it by the right name. You’ve got to call everything by the right name afloat, or the damn boat will sink like a rock. At least that’s the impression I got from the dockside geniuses. Next comes the mainsail on the main boom. We’ll start with that. I’m told the proper response is ‘Aye, aye, sir.’”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Incidentally, falling overboard is frowned upon,” I said. “One hand for the ship and one for yourself, as the old saying goes. Okay, give me a minute to figure out this crazy autopilot so I can let go of this stick, known as a tiller, and we’ll get to work.”

Setting sail is, I believe, supposed to be a five-minute job on a boat the size of
Spindrift.
It took us well over an hour. All the lines seemed to go to the wrong places, and if they were correctly led, we found them tangled in the rigging overhead when we tried to haul on them. The mast was equipped with little patent steps like certain telephone and power poles, so you could climb up to fix things at the top, but they seemed to have a devilish affinity for any rope that flopped within range. The sails themselves had been improperly installed. By me, of course. Nothing worked right the first time, or even the second, but at last we had the little sail hoisted forward of the mast and the big one hoisted aft of it, reasonably taut and pretty.

I turned off the motor and had Amy help me adjust things until the nautical speedometer said we were making maximum speed through the water, actually a gentle two knots with an occasional surge to three. Hardly America’s cup performance, but good enough for a couple of landlubbers feeling their cautious way toward seamanship. By dinnertime there was no land on the horizon, although a yellowish dome of pollution haze astern let us know that Miami was still back where we’d left it. We ate in the cockpit, little panfried steaks and fresh vegetables she’d insisted on buying. I’m strictly a can opener-type chef myself.

“I’ll do the dishes,” I said. “No reason for you to have all the galley duty.”

She said, “I’ll do them. I don’t mind. Then, if you don’t need me, I think I’ll lie down for a while. Those seasick pills are making me very sleepy. Matt?”

“Yes?”

“It’s… it’s very nice out here. Thank you again for bringing me.”

“Wait till we’ve made it across,” I said. “We’ve been lucky with the weather so far, but that’s not to say we won’t have a hurricane by morning, although the weatherman tells it otherwise. And there’s one thing we’d better do while we have the ocean to ourselves. A little artillery practice. Can you bring yourself to get out the revolver I put away under the mattress of the starboard bunk, and the shotgun from its clips at the back of the galley locker? And the ammunition, for both, bottom galley drawer. You should get used to grabbing for them and handling them. You may have to do it for real sometime.”

I was demonstrating how seriously I took this mission of searching out the secret island den of that wicked purveyor of chemical evil, Mr. Constantine Grieg—I had, of course, given her all the details to show how much I trusted her. Well, almost all the details. And of course I’d spoiled it, the sense of peace she’d been feeling; but she obeyed in silence and I put her through the basic drill. Open and close. Load and unload. Hammer cocked and uncocked. Safety on, safety off. Then I had her snap the weapons empty, working the mechanisms repeatedly.

At last I had her shoot the .38. I didn’t make her fire the shotgun, although I let off a few rounds myself to check it out. It was a police-type Winchester pump in stainless steel, presumably just about the same gun I’d been told Doug Barnett had carried on his boat, a handsome weapon in a brutal way; but a twelve-gauge is really too much gun for a beginner, particularly a relatively small beginner who’s been brought up to be afraid of guns. With that short barrel, and the heavy loads that were all I’d brought along, the noise and recoil were ferocious. I’d learned what I wanted to know. There was no need to hurt her.

Taking the weapons back below, she paused in the hatchway to look back at me. “You didn’t teach me to hold the handgun in both hands as they do on TV,” she said.

“Without one hand to steady yourself, you could have been pitched into the drink if the boat lurched, right?” I said. “Sure, you can make better scores on a paper target, or some people can, using two hands; but that doesn’t do you much good if you’re swimming, does it? Think about it.”

She frowned at the guns she was holding. “I suppose you did this to remind me that this isn’t really a pleasure cruise,” she said a little stiffly.

“Something like that,” I said. “And to give me a chance to deliver my famous lecture on the proper employment of firearms. Remember this: A gun is serious business. Once you point a gun at somebody you’re a murderer; whether or not you get around to pulling the trigger is irrelevant. So you’d damn well better decide if that’s what you want before you start waving the piece around. It’s only in the movies that a pistol, or whatever, is a magic wand that bends people peacefully to your will. The cops have to try it because they’re supposed to bring ’em back alive if they can. We don’t. I don’t point guns at people I’m not prepared to kill; and if anybody points a gun at me, I figure he means it, and I think about nothing but killing him until I have him totally dead. Or he has me; but somehow that hasn’t happened yet. Forget that idiot drop-your-gun-and-put-your-hands-up nonsense. Do you remember the old TV show called
The Twilight Zone
?” When she nodded, I said, “The moment you aim a gun at somebody, you’ve moved into the twilight zone, baby, the killing zone, and you’d better be ready to finish the job and do them in fast before they do you. End of sermon.”

She licked her lips. “I understand,” she said quietly. “And I hope you noticed that I don’t shriek and swoon every time somebody hands me a firearm. You just caught me by surprise that once. But I’d better warn you that I don’t really think I could pull the trigger if the target was a man and not a milk carton. Not that I could hit it anyway, or him, dainty pacifist me. As we just proved. Good night, Matt. Wake me if you need me.”

Well, the experiment had been a success, I reflected grimly as I watched her disappear down the hatch. I’d determined that she was quite ignorant about guns. It’s something that’s impossible to fake. But I found myself wondering if she was thinking, as I was, that we now had a rather lovely sunset, and a beautiful gentle sea with a light favoring wind. If recent nights were any guide, there should even be quite a presentable moon on display fairly soon. Two people who didn’t have to play lousy games with each other could have had a very pleasant and companionable sail across the Gulf Stream tonight. And speaking of the Gulf Stream, the numbers in the lighted Loran windows were telling me I should steer even more to the east to allow for the current sweeping us north…

She insisted on taking over the watch at two in the morning to give me a little rest. At four she woke me to report a small, winking light far ahead. I went on deck and timed the winks with my fancy digital watch: fifteen seconds. Great Isaac Light at the northwest corner of the Great Bahama Bank. Bull’s-eye. With Loran you, too, can be a great navigator.

I’d already explained to Amy that while the little town of Bimini on the island of the same name was the closest Bahamian port of entry to the U.S, I’d lost nothing there. According to the guidebook it had a tricky entrance channel that I didn’t want to tackle and the kind of endless shallow banks behind it that I didn’t want to cross until I became a hotshot sailor, say a week from now. So we were bypassing Bimini and heading for Freeport on the sizable island of Grand Bahama to the north, staying in the deep water of the Florida Straits and the Northwest Providence Channel, and making an end run around those particular banks. Sooner or later I’d have to learn how to get around in that shallow stuff, but I wanted a little more boating practice first.

“You can turn in again. I’ll take her now,” I said.

Amy shook her head. “No. I’ve had enough sleep. I like it up here.”

“Well, curl up on the cockpit seat if you get tired.”

She said a bit sharply, “Don’t treat me like a baby, Matt. I may have a few screws loose in my head, but there’s nothing wrong with my body.”

“Not a damn thing,” I agreed. “I’ve been noticing that.”

She gave me a sharp glance and started to make some kind of a protest, then checked herself. In the red light from the binnacle, I saw a little secret smile come to her lips; the smile of a woman who’s discovered, somewhat to her surprise, that she doesn’t really mind being told that a man finds her desirable.

With daylight, we summoned our collective courage and unrolled the big jib, almost doubling the sail area and raising the speed to just about four knots. The good weather held. The Loran led us by the hand across the Northwest Providence Channel. It was a considerable thrill, after all those hours with an empty horizon, to see the hotels and condominiums of Freeport-Lucaya rise out of the sea ahead. Columbus and Magellan move over, please; here comes Helm.

Sails down, I managed to negotiate the entrance of the Lucayan Harbour Marina under power and take us to the customs dock without casualties. An hour later, legally admitted to the Bahamas, we were tying up in the slip that had been assigned to us off one of the long concrete piers and, after making everything shipshape, we celebrated our successful ocean passage by having a drink under the cockpit awning. At least I was having a drink. She was having canned pineapple juice. Ugh.