John D. MacDonald
Bimini Kill
First published in “The Yacht,” April 1987
“I don’t like it, Vince,” Nan was saying. “I don’t like any part of it. It scares me, sort of. But he actually begged me, for old times’ sake, and the lawyer said I ought to give him a last chance before I start the divorce thing.”
It was a Sunday afternoon in Lauderdale in the off-season, a hot and lazy day, and I had been aboard my joy and my mortgaged burden, my three-year-old Bertram 54 sport fisherman, the Faraway Gal, when Nan Brogan had come out onto the big dock and stepped aboard.
I was just back from a long charter, and I had been putting the lines and the gear back in first class shape. I was reassembling one of the big marlin reels when Nan appeared. Now she sat on the transom in the sunlight and touched the opened can of cold beer to her cheek and looked at me in a wry way and said, “So I guess I’m asking you for old times’ sake too, Vince.”
It is a sour thing to endure when your girl marries someone else, particularly when you know in your heart she is making a mistake. The cruel ones said she married Yates Brogan for his money, but I knew that wasn’t true. She thought she loved him, I know. And it was partly my fault for having taken her too much for granted before Yates came along, and then, out of injured pride, putting up no fight at all when I saw her being attracted to him. But the worst part of it was watching how the two years of marriage had slowly changed her, had taken the sweet high edge off her spirits, had saddened her dark blue eyes.
“I’ll do it,” I said. “I won’t like it any better than you will, Nan. But I’ll do it. And I can use the five hundred bucks I’ll charge him for the transportation.”
It was exactly the sort of twisted, tension-laden situation you would expect a man like Yates Brogan to cook up. He knew Nan was my girl before he came into her life. The only good thing I can find to say about him is that he is a superb sailor. His custom motorsailer, the Reefcomber, is a jewel to take your breath away, and he has taken her to most of the fine waters of the world. He has inherited money and has never done one day’s work in his life. He has always had a bottle problem and a woman problem, and marriage to my Nan had not lessened either of them. After they were married, Brogan based the Reefcomber in Lauderdale so Nan could be near her folks. They lived aboard and took extended cruises out of Lauderdale, usually with some of Brogan’s hard-living friends aboard. I had seen her after those cruises, looking more dispirited each time they returned.
The final ugliness had taken place in Nassau a month ago, and she had left him there and flown home to begin divorce proceedings. Apparently he hadn’t believed her serious until the first legal documents had caught up with him at Bimini. Then last week he had left the Reefcomber there and flown back to talk her out of it.
“It’s just his dam pride,” Nan said. “I’m not after a penny of his money. We don’t love each other any more. I’m just sort of a possession, somebody a little bit decorative who can handle the lines and chart a course and take a wheel shift. Nothing is going to change my mind, Vince. But, in all decency, I guess I have to give him a chance to speak his piece.”
Yates Brogan had found out I was running over to Bimini on Monday to pick up a charter there, and he wanted me to run him and Nan over so he could bring Nan back on the Reefcomber.
“Why doesn’t he just ask you to fly over with him?” I asked her.
She sighed and shrugged. “I don’t know. Yates likes everything as complicated as possible. I guess he thinks it gives him an advantage or something. He thrives on confusion. But he’s acting very strange. Maybe it’s a silly thing to say, but I have the feeling he might do some strange, violent thing. Anyway, I know I’ll feel safer with you nearby.”
“I won’t be nearby aboard the Reefcomber, Nan.”
“By then I’ll either be over this scary feeling about him or I won’t. He wants to bring her back across the stream on Wednesday. Your charter starts Tuesday morning, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And because of Chet being in the hospital, you’re going to pick up a Bahamian to crew for you after you get into Bimini, aren’t you?”
I was puzzled, wondering what she was driving at. “That’s right.”
Her blush darkened her deep-water tan. “So... to sort of add injury to insult, Vince, could... Johnny Welch crew for you on the way across? Then he’d be there in Bimini if I decided not to come back with Yates, and Yates tried to force me to come with him.”
Maybe it could be a good thing to watch your girl’s marriage going sour if you had the comfortable knowledge you were going to be there to pick up the pieces. And I would have been glad to. I’ve never loved anybody else, and I never will. But I had been off on a long charter at the wrong time, and Johnny Welch had been there to field the rebound.
“Crew for me!” I said with disgust.
She knew what I meant. Johnny is a big hearty young man, a local realtor with various land development interests. A few times in the past I had taken him and some of his hot prospects out to fish the stream. Few men have ever been as inept aboard a small boat. That was one world he could not share — a world that Yates Brogan, Nan, and I belonged in, a world of boats and the sea, the textures of wind and weather.
“Not for pay,” Nan said, “but Yates wouldn’t have to know that. Actually, it was Johnny’s idea. He’s terribly nervous about this whole idea. He wants to be near me. And I guess I would... like to have him near me. I know Johnny is an idiot about boats; he can’t pick up a line without getting it all wound around his ankles. But... I’m not as intolerant of the lubbers as I used to be, Vince. Yates has given me a new kind of... sickness of the sea. Maybe it won’t ever be the same for me again.”
Just as I thought the tears might start, she moved neatly and swiftly to collect my empty beer can and climb up onto the dock to drop it and hers into the white trash bin. She dropped lightly back onto the broad transom, a smallish girl in blue shorts and a white blouse, with frayed old topsiders, a sea tan, cropped black hair that I knew would smell fresh as ocean winds if I could but hold her in my arms as I had done long ago and could never do again. This was a sea girl, a small-boat girl, moving with the sureness that could but accentuate the lurching clumsiness of powerful Johnny Welch.
“You don’t really mean that,” I told her.
“I guess not. But it will take a while. I won’t give you a play by play. I’ll spare you that. But it’s been... grim. I tried to make it work, Vince. I keep telling myself that. I really tried. What about Johnny?”
I shrugged. “He can come along. Makes a cozy little group, huh?”
She knew what I meant and had the grace to blush. The old boyfriend — dating from way back when she had been a scrawny sun-blackened twelve-year-old who’d helped me sail my first boat — and the man she shouldn’t have married and the new boyfriend, the one who had been there for her to lean on at just the right time.
“Things work out in such stupid ways,” she said. “I’m very sorry about the way things have worked out, Vince. You’re the most...”
“Don’t tell me now. How will Johnny react to your coming back on the Reefcomber with Brogan?”
“Maybe I’m hoping he just won’t let me. And maybe I’m making things just a little more complicated than Yates figured on. And I don’t catch him off balance very often. So I’m taking a nasty feline pleasure in that. What time tomorrow, Vince?”
“Miami Marine says the wind will pick up in the afternoon, so let’s roll it by seven.”