I got around the corner in time to see him make his leap into the black water, a dozen feet short of the mangrove roots. He jumped high and wide to clear the narrow side deck, jumped feet first like a kid going off a high board. He hit just where the bright galley lights shone out the port, silvering the water. You expect a great splash. He stopped with a horrid abruptness, the waterline still a few inches below his belt. He remained right there, oddly erect, silent, head thrown back, cords standing out in his neck. I thought he had wedged himself into a shallow mud bottom. But then I saw he seemed to be moving back and forth, a strange sway like a man on a treetop. He reached down to himself, putting his hands under the water, and he made a ghastly sound, like someone trying to yell in a whisper. He turned his head slowly and looked toward the three of us. He held his right hand out toward us, opened his mouth wide and made the same eerie sound once more. Then he bowed slowly to us, laid over gently, face down. Something seemed to nudge at him from below, nudge him and shove him free, and as he floated toward the darkness, slowly there reappeared, with a slowness that told of the length of it that went down through black water to the dead root system, just an inch or so showing above water, the dark rotted end of the stub, four or five inches thick, upon which he had burst himself and impaled himself.
Chook was clinging to Arthur and crying as though her heart was broken.
Her arms went around his neck, and the gun slipped from her slack fingers, put a little dent in my rail before plopping into the sea. I sent them inside, got a light and the longest boathook, went to the starboard deck, hooked him most gingerly by the back of his shirt collar, towed him forward and hung him against the small dark shoots of the new mangrove sprouting at the waterline. Only then did I remember my laboring engines and run to turn them off before they burned out. Arthur sat in the lounge in the big chair, Chook in his lap, all arms wrapped tightly and all eyes closed, making no sound and no movement. I crawled the bilge with the flashlight, looking for some little hole the size of a motorcycle sidecar. Probably some seams were sprung, but she looked sound. Surprisingly sound.
When I went back through, Arthur asked me if he could help. I took him aft and we sounded all around the stern area with boat hooks and found there was plenty of water back there. I sent him forward in the bilge with a light and a little emergency horn on a compressed air can to give me a blast if broken mangrove trunks started to come in.
I tried to back it straight off. I got about a yard with full throttle, thought things over, then tried one forward and one in reverse to swing the stern. It swung, with an unpleasant crackling sound from up forward. I had noticed that the compass put us on a dead easterly heading at the time we hit. It’d gotten more change than I’d hoped for. Figuring time, we couldn’t be very far south of Pavilion Key, maybe halfway down to the Chatham River. I backed, gained a little more, swung it the other way, backed again. After the fourth swing, she suddenly came all the way off, making very ugly noises.
I backed clear, turned her, put her on pilot and a due west heading, and at very meager rpms, went scrambling down to the bilges to see how she was. And she was, astonishingly, bone dry sound. Apparently the hull shape had just pushed that springy mangrove aside.
I located our position with the radio loop, close enough for my purposes. I remembered the wrench and got it away from the pilot compass before I ran us aground again.
A Coast Guard chopper circled us a half hour after dawn, making that distinctive whappling noise. He hung off the stern while we all beamed and waved at him, and finally, after he had done everything but throw his hand phone at us, I gave a great gesture of comprehension and ran to my set. He moved a half mile away so I could hear and came in on the Coast Guard frequency. I was astonished we’d been so close to a maniac like Waxwell, yes indeed. Wow. It makes you think. When we broke off, he gave himself a little treat. He came over and took a long appreciative look at Chook. She had come out in a little flimsy shorty nightgown to wave at the pretty helicopter, and the flyer and his buddy up here swung craftily around to put the rising sun behind her. But the instant he was gone, we stopped grinning like maniacs.
“Is it right, Trav?” she said. “All those people hunting and hunting?”
“The tide was an hour past high when I snagged him onto the shore. There aren’t any branches over him. They ought to find him soon.”
I put her on radio watch, monitoring the Coast Guard frequency. At quarter of eight she came up to tell us they had the body and a positive identification. She looked wan and dreary, and we sent her back to bed. But before she went, she gave Arthur a rib-cracking hug, stared into his eyes with her head cocked, and said, “I just thought I’d tell you something. Frankie would not have done what you did. For me. For anyone. Except Frankie.”
After she sacked out, we went through Waxwell’s gear. We deep-sixed it, rifle and all. Except something we found in the box under his dehydrated rations. Carefully folded into saran wrap. Ninety-one brand new hundred dollar bills in serial sequence.
Chook came up for air at three in the afternoon, all soft and blurred and dreamy.
“What do we do,” she said, “anchor for four or five or six days, like on the way over, huh?”
“Okay.” they said, simultaneously, and it was at that moment I decided the unexpected nine thousand was a wedding present, if my hunch paid off.
Sixteen
MY HUNCH paid off, on the Fourth of July, with perhaps the only beach picnic reception of the season serving hamburgers and champagne to about two hundred types, from beach bums to a state senator, from waitresses to a legitimate, by blood, baroness.
And on the afternoon of the Fifth of July, as I was once again making the motions of assembling the delayed cruise over to the islands, a merry voice called me up from the engine room. And there, at my gangplank, slender and graceful as a young birch tree, dressed in a pale high fashion gray, five matched pieces of luggage standing beside her, cab driver hovering in the background, stood Miss Debra Brown, Calvin Stebber’s disciplined cigar-lighter and daiquiri mixer, her crystal mint eyes alight with mischief and promise.
“It’s all right, driver,” she said.
He turned to go and I said, “Hold it, driver.”
“But darling,” she said, “you don’t understand. There was this contest, three words or less, how and where and with whom would you most like to spend your vacation, and you won, darling McGee. And here I am!”
I slowly wiped my hands on the greasy rag I had brought up from below.
“So Uncle Cal got it in his head I got a very nice piece of Wilma’s bundle, and you’ve cooked up something that might work.”
She pouted. “Darling, I hardly blame you. After all. But really, I have just been terribly terribly mopey ever since you visited us. You genuinely intrigued me, dear. And this is a very seldom thing with Debra, believe me. Poor Calvin, he finally got so weary of all my little sighs and hints that he told me to come over and get it out of my system before I came down with the vapors or something. I swear to you, dear McGee, this is an entirely personal affair, and has nothing whatever to do with… my professional career.”
It was a temptation. She was a convincing elegance. Headwaiters would unhook the velvet rope and bow you in. Elegance with the faintest oversweet odor of decay. Perhaps for any man there can be something very heady about a woman totally amoral, totally without mercy, shame or softness.