“How’s it look, Magellan? We still seem to be in the same ocean?”
Hughie made no reply. He went on futilely trying to match up at least one of the stars with his chart. Her heart ached for him. She wished she could help him. And why, oh why, in the name of God, didn’t he turn on the badgering and idiotic salaud and tell him to shut up?
“I’ll tell you what, Commodore,” Bellew went on, “if it turns out we’re anywhere near Greeley, Colorado, I got a friend runs a bar there…”
She closed her eyes. Do something, Hughie!
He did. Like a sullen child, he threw the star chart on the deck. “Hughie,” she called out quickly, trying to save him from utter shame, “let me try. Maybe I could help—” But without even a glance at her he’d already turned and gone forward to Estelle. She could see the two of them sitting close together in the light of the rising moon. She’d bitten her lip to keep from crying, and she could taste blood in her mouth. Then out of some dark and insensate desire to wound them all, herself included, she said to Bellew, “We don’t seem to be entirely necessary, do we? But it is a beautiful night, and if you’d like help with some of your problems, why don’t you bring up a couple of drinks?”
The others had seen, all right—at least the merged silhouette against the moon—and heard the laughter and the singing. One of them was dead now, and the other was mad, at least partly as the result of it, so she was the only one left—besides Bellew, of course—with any true and rational appreciation of the scene as something to be treasured forever. It had taken perhaps fifteen minutes to sicken herself to the point where she had to go below or jump overboard. She removed the repulsive hand from inside her bra, got up, leaving the wheel untended, and went down to the cabin and locked the door. Hughie never came down at all. Apparently he’d slept on deck.
She went on in a minute. “So there you have the situation. We had everything we needed now for disaster, or for something very messy, but when it came, two days later, it was only an accident.
“I’ll try to give it to you in chronological sequence, as we reconstructed it afterward, though it concerned four people in different places, I was asleep through a good part of it, and at the end only two of us were still alive and able to give a coherent account of what had happened. It was two p.m., and we’d been lying becalmed for over an hour, with all sail still set, but the booms sheeted in to keep them from banging. It was Bellew’s wheel watch, and he was sitting in the cockpit, keeping an eye out for signs of a breeze. Estelle Bellew was lying in her bunk in the forward cabin, reading, I think, and Hughie and I were in our cabin aft. I was pretending to be asleep; that way we had at least the semblance of an excuse for the fact we weren’t speaking to each other. Hughie went out.
“He came on deck. Bellew, of course, was in the cockpit.
Neither of them spoke. Hughie went over to the rail and was looking down into the water when he saw the school of dolphin which had been following the boat and playing around under it for the past two days. These are dolphin, the fish, you understand, and not porpoises.”
Ingram nodded. “Very beautiful fish, like flame under water. The Mexicans call them dorado—golden, or gilded. They like to lie under anything floating on the surface.”
“They’re the ones. Anyway, while he was looking at them he remembered that Estelle had said she’d like to see if she could photograph them from below the surface if the school was ever around when we were becalmed. So, still without speaking to Bellew, he went back below. Only, when he passed through the deckhouse, he went forward first into the main cabin—that is, the saloon—and called out to Estelle through the curtained passage at the forward end of it, telling her about the fish. She was eager to try to photograph them, so she said she’d put on a swim suit and meet him on deck. Bellew, still aft in the cockpit, heard none of this, of course. Hughie then went back up into the deckhouse and on down into our cabin to put on his swim trunks and get a diving mask and snorkel. But I didn’t know it, because by this time I was asleep.
“Hughie was below probably only a few minutes, but when he came back up through the deckhouse and stepped on deck Bellew was no longer there. He’d gone below, into the main cabin, to make a sandwich. This, of course, is forward, toward the Bellews’ cabin, so—since the two of them hadn’t met in the deckhouse—Bellew had no idea Hughie had returned to the deck. Fortunately, you know the layout below, and you can understand why we had to reconstruct this whole thing afterward to try to understand how it could have happened.”
Ingram nodded. He could see the tragedy already beginning to take form, like the choreography of some death scene in a ballet, where every movement had to fit.
She went on. “In another minute or two Estelle came on deck from the forward hatch, the one leading up directly from their cabin. She had on her swim suit and was carrying a snorkel and mask and an underwater camera. That is, it wasn’t really an underwater camera with a housing, but one of her thirty-five-millimeter cameras that she’d made a watertight bag for with some kind of clear plastic and carried slung around her neck on a cord. Hughie put the ladder over just forward of amidships, and they eased down it into the water—not jumping or diving in because they didn’t want to frighten the dolphin.
“It was a rule, of course, since all of us did swim when we had the chance, that nobody should ever go in the water without notifying whoever was on watch. But Hughie apparently thought, since Bellew was gone from the deck, that he was forward in his own cabin and that Estelle had told him before she came up. And Estelle, since Hughie had been the one who’d brought up the whole thing, must have assumed that Hughie had notified him. She hadn’t even seen Bellew, because he was in the main cabin. So they put on their masks and snorkels and began trying to get close to the school of fish, which was now moving away from the boat. There was a moderate groundswell running, so even when Bellew came back on deck he probably wouldn’t have seen them unless he’d happened to be looking in their direction at the moment they rose to the top or the near side of a swell.
“Hughie has never been completely rational since, and when I saw him again, six hours later he was raving and incoherent, but as well as I could piece it together they’d been in the water about ten minutes and were not over a hundred yards from the boat when it happened. They were fairly close to the dolphin and they’d both dived, Hughie just looking at them while Estelle tried to snap a picture. Hughie came up first, and when his head was above water he was aware that something had changed. It was a second or two before he realized what it was. A breeze was blowing across his face. He turned and looked toward Orpheus and screamed. But Bellew didn’t hear him.
“As I said, this was at two p.m. I awoke a little after three-thirty and could tell from the angle of heel and the lessened rolling that we’d picked up a breeze while I was asleep and were under way. I noticed Hughie wasn’t in his bunk, but paid no attention to it. In a few minutes I got up, dressed, washed my face, and went up through the deckhouse to the main cabin to brew a cup of tea. It was ten minutes of four when I carried it out on deck. Bellew was at the wheel, of course. We were on the starboard tack and probably making around two knots in a breeze that didn’t much more than fill the sails.