She came up with his eggnog and a list. Perishables were dwindling. Eggs, milk, butter, lettuce. Candle Key had a Handy-Dandy-Open-Nights-and-Sunday. The wind would make easy sailing in the dink. The little limey outboard runs like a gold watch. My shoulders felt as if they were webbed with hot wires. So, with an excess of character, I left sail and motor behind, climbed down into the dink, and headed across the two miles of bay, rowing with the miniature oars.
Coming back against the wind was almost as much fun as a migraine, and it didn’t help a bit to have the wind die the instant I clambered aboard and made the dinghy fast. Chook came and took the groceries. As she did so, and with a dull red sun sitting on the horizon line, we were invaded by an advance guard of seven billion salt marsh mosquitoes.
They are a strange kind. They don’t bite, but some ancestral memory tells them they should get in position to bite. They are large and black and fly slowly, and when you wipe a dozen off your arm, they leave black streaks like soot. They are inept at the mosquito profession, but come in such numbers they can rattle the most easy going disposition. As you breathe them in, you find yourself asking in desperation-But what do they want?
Chook and Arthur had showered and changed, and it was immediately obvious they had somehow made each other totally unhappy. Arthur was leaden and remote. Chook was brisk and remote. All they would exchange were the most formal politenesses. I showered amid the fading scent of Chook’s perfumed soap, in that absurd mirrored stall, big enough, almost, for a Volkswagen garage.
It is a grotesque waste of space in a fifty-two-foot houseboat, even with a twenty-one foot beam, almost as much of a waste as the semi-sunken pale blue tub, seven feet long and four feet wide. I imagine that the elderly Palm Beach party who lost the vessel to me over the poker table needed such visual stimulations to do right by his Brazilian mistress.
In response to the unexplained drearies of my boat guests, I had a vicious attack of the jollies, regaling them with anecdote, absurdity and one-sided repartee, much like a solitary game of handball. Once in a while they would pull their lips away from their teeth and go heh-heh-heh. And then politely pass each other something that was within easy reach of everyone in the small booth adjoining the galley.I judged,it a favorable development. People were choosing up new sides. Chook and I had been united in caring for the sick. Now any relationship, even a rancorous one, which shut me out, was proof that he was not entirely defeated. She had to pump some spirit into him or my chances of any salvage were frail indeed. And maybe this was a start.
Five
ON MONDAY we pulled the hooks and droned in stately fashion down to a new anchorage off Long Key, charging the batteries and getting beyond the range of the sooty mosquitoes which were restricting us to the belowdecks areas. During the swimming that followed, I was heartened by a small triumph. The long contest was around a distant marker and back to the boarding ladder. Halfway back she pulled even and moved a half length ahead. I knew from the pain in my side that in another hundred yards I would begin to wallow and roll and lose the stroke.
Suddenly the reserves were there-missing so long it was like welcoming an old friend. It was as if a third lung had suddenly opened up. I settled into it until I was certain, then upped the tempo and went on by her in a long sprint finish, was clinging to the ladder when she arrived, and feeling less like a beached blowfish than on other days.
“Well now!” she gasped, looking startled and owlish.
“You had to let me win one of these.”
“The hell I did! I was busting a gut trying to keep up.” She snapped her head back and gave me the first grin I had seen since rowing back with the groceries.
“Come with me,” I said, and swam slowly, away from the Flush, rolled and floated and, looking back, saw Arthur busy at the chore I had given him, putting new lacing in a section of the nylon fabric that is lashed to the rail around the sun deck. Chook made a surface dive and came up beside me, and blew like a porpoise.
“I could put you two in the shower stall,” I said. “What you do, you each take a corner of a silk handkerchief in your teeth, left hands tied behind you, six-inch knife in the right hand.”
“Skip it, McGee.”
“It’s just that the way you two go around chuckling and laughing, it gets on my nerves. I keep wondering what could make two people so hilarious.”
“Maybe you could guess. I’m a big girl. I’m a big healthy girl. And I’m leading a very healthy life. I’m sleeping with him, in that half acre bed of yours. And that’s the precise word, McGee. Sleeping. Just that. So I thought maybe he was well enough, and it was going to take you a long time to get back with the groceries. I showered first, and got into a sexy little thing made of black cobwebs, and dabbed a little Tigress here and there and yonder, and spread myself out like picturesque, with my girlish heart going bump bump bump. It’s not as if it had never happened with him before. And the son of a bitch acted as if I’d solicited him on a street corner. He was offended, for God’s sake. He made me feel sleazy!”
“Maybe you’re putting the wrong interpretation on it.”
“There comes a point when I stop being understanding, friend. And that was it. It’s his move. And unless he makes one, there’s an invisible wall right down the middle of that bed. It’s made of ice cubes. All he’ll get from me is some practical nursing care.”
In the night I was awakened by the creak of the lines as the Flush was trying to go around on the tide change, swinging further each time until pushed back by the breeze, I always rig two bow hooks in such a way that she shifts her weight from hook to hook when she changes end for end. As this was the first night at the new anchorage, I wanted to check and see that she wasn’t working loose with all the swinging, and that she would swing the way I had guessed. As a rule of thumb they will always swing with the bow toward the nearest shallows. But the wind can make a difference, and there can be a tide current you didn’t read.
So, as the easiest way out, I went forward and up through the hatch. I pulled the line she was still on and found it firm. I have a reflector plate under my riding light, and it keeps the decks in relative shadow, but just enough gets past the plate so you can check lines when your eyes are used to the darkness. From the relation of the way she was swinging to the lights along the keys, I could tell she was going to go around the right way. I decided to wait until she was around and then check the other anchor line.
I had a lot of scope, big Danforths and a good bottom, so it was a thousand to one I was fine. But there are a lot of dead sailors who took things for granted. On a boat things go bad in sets of threes. When you pull a hook and then go hustle to get the wheels turning, something will short out on you so that you go drifting, dead in the water. And that is the time when, without lights, you drift right out into the ship channel, see running lights a city block apart coming down at you, run to get your big flashlight, fumble it and drop it over the side. A boat is something that never has just one thing wrong with it.
As I sat on the corner of the bow hatch, waiting, I felt a little faraway thud. I felt it through the soles of my bare feet, wondered what the hell, then realized it was the dink tied astern, swinging in the wind, nudging mother. I padded back along the side deck, put another line on its little stern cleat and snubbed it up against the two fenders hanging over the transom.
I’d gone aft on the port side, and went forward on the starboard side, and came suddenly on a pale ghost that nearly made me leap over the rail. It startled her too, and then she made a miserable snorting sound and came into my arms for comfort. She had on a skimpy white hip-length nightie. She clung, snorting again. Her body heat was high, her breath hot and timid. She had that flat-sweet unmistakable scent of female sexual effort. Her nipples were hard as little pebbles against my bare chest.