“Get lost, Herman,” Morrison said, without opening his eyes.
Ingram looked down at him in the waning light of afternoon. There was no feeling about him at all any more—no hatred, nothing. “Who was the man that drowned? He have any name besides Herman?”
The lips scarcely moved in the big, rugged face with its brown splotches of freckles. “Reefers.”
“Reefers what?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Judson, Jensen—something like that. Everybody just called him Reefers. He smoked ‘em.”
“Marijuana?”
“Sure. Tea. Pod, the Beats call it.”
“Did you know he used heroin?”
“No. So that’s the reason he kept his shirt on all the time.”
“I guess so,” Ingram said. “You want to go to the head?”
“No. Get lost, will you?”
“If you ditched all of Ives’ identification, why’d you let Reefers keep his watch?”
“I didn’t know the dumb clown had it. He must have kept it in his pocket.”
Ingram walked back through the galley and the passageway to the large after cabin. The air was fresh and clean here too, with good circulation from the ventilator forward and no odor of gasoline at all. Since pumping the last of it overboard shortly before noon yesterday they’d flooded the bilges twice with sea water and pumped them out. Then he’d used fifty gallons of fresh water and a half case of soap powder to scrub down the cabin and engine compartment, everything the gasoline had touched, letting the soapy water run into the bilge and pumping it overboard. They were taking some sea water through a few bullet holes below water line, but a few minutes at the pump every four hours took care of it.
He stepped quietly up the first two rungs of the ladder and his eyes softened as he paused with his head just above the level of the hatch. She hadn’t seen him. She was perched on the helmsman’s seat in back of the wheel, wearing a pair of his khaki trousers rolled up to the knees and gathered in folds about the slender waist with a piece of line, and one of his shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Her mouth was nicely painted, but the tawny hair was windblown, and there was an expression of pure joy on her face. Or maybe you’d call it half an expression, he mused with tender humor. Some of the swelling was gone from the eye now, but it still retained all its startling and chromatic grandeur with its blues and blacks and purples splashed so spectacularly against the blonde and handsome face.
She looked happily around the sea for a moment, and when her eyes returned to the binnacle he could tell she was off course. Her face took on the sudden and furious concentration of a child’s and her tongue protruded from the corner of her mouth as she wrestled with the problem of which way to turn the wheel. He could almost hear her repeating to herself: Don’t try to move the compass, move the lubber-line. Don’t try to move the compass, move the lubber-line.
He grinned, erased it from his face, and said sternly, “How’s your course, Mate?”
She glanced up at him, her face alight. “I’m off five degrees to—to—Oh, the devil.” She gave up and pointed to windward. “That way. That’s not too bad, is it?”
He smiled. “Not too bad, considering we don’t even know whether the compass is within ten degrees of being right. Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about it. From a hundred miles out, North America’s a pretty big target.”
He came up the ladder and sat down beside her. “We should raise Miami sometime after daylight in the morning if this breeze holds.”
“I’m not in any hurry,” she said. “Are you?”
“No.”
She glanced up at the great curving expanse of white dacron cutting across the sky. A little dollop of spray blew back and spatted against the cushions. “How long has this been going on?” she asked.
“Several thousand years,” he replied.
They fell silent for a moment. Then he asked, “You want me to take it for a while?”
She shook her head. “No. Just watch, and tell me when I do something wrong.” She brought the wheel up a couple of spokes. “Ingram?”
He turned. She was staring fixedly, and a little self-consciously, into the binnacle. “What?” he asked.
“Do you have any great desire to get rich?”
“Not particularly,” he said.
“Could two people sail this boat? Very far, I mean?”
“Hmmm. Under some circumstances. But most of the time they’d have their hands full.”
“But what about two people who’d just as soon have their hands full of each other, at least a good part of the time?”
“I’d recommend something a little smaller. Say a forty- to forty-five-foot ketch. Why?”
“That would still be large enough for the charter business?”
“Sure.” He grinned. “At least, for somebody who didn’t care whether he got rich or not.”
She continued to stare at the compass. “Well, say you knew two people like that who had a forty-five-foot ketch. And they wanted to go in the charter business—maybe in Nassau—but one of them didn’t know anything about boats and sailing at all. Wouldn’t you think the ideal solution would be for them to sail the boat from Miami to Nassau so this second party could learn all about it?”
He gave her a thoughtful glance, wondering what she was up to. “Sure,” he said. “It’s at least a hundred and fifty miles, and if this hypothetical joker of yours is as brilliant as he is lovely—”
“I was thinking of another route. By way of the Indian Ocean.”
“What?”
“That’s the reason I asked you if you really cared much about making money. I don’t think you do. I don’t either.”
“It’d take two or three years.”
She removed her attention from the binnacle long enough to give him a delighted, low-comedy leer. “I know. I know.”
He started to reach for her.
“Hands off, sailor. I’m at the wheel. And I want to talk to you.”
“All right. But talk fast, Mate.”
“We’ve kicked this around quite a bit already. I mean, how adult we are and how we’ve got sense enough to know that people don’t fall in love with each other in four days, and you’ve told me at least six times that I’ve seen you only in your own special environment, doing the things you do best, and all the rest of that wisdom-of-the-ages routine, and how we have to be sensible, and so on. But I also know what you told me when you were coming to here in the cockpit yesterday with your head in my lap, trying to get your breath through an overcast of large, soggy blonde. You said you loved me. And, in between raising the mean annual rainfall of the Bahamas, that was what I was telling you. But we’re going to be sensible about it, aren’t we?”
“Yes. I think so. Or I mean, I did think so.”
She went on, still staring intently into the binnacle. “You bet we’re going to be sensible, Ingram. This way. When we get into Miami, I’m going back to my own environment, and take a long, slow look at it—as you suggested—while you do another of these technical jobs you never let me pay you for. I want you to put the Dragoon in shipyard, have her replanked in those places you said she needed it, overhauled, and repainted, and then sell her. You’ll have my power of attorney. Then you buy a forty- or forty-five-foot ketch—”