We went down through warm greenness, still struggling and almost completely oblivious to the fact of having moved our hatred from one element to another. The propeller rumbled past, scattering white bubbles like dust. One of his arms was still locked around my neck and he was trying to swing with the other, the blows softened and slowed down by the water. Neither of us made any attempt to break and swim to the surface. I could see the flat slab of a face inches from mine, and tried to get my hands back at his throat. We went on down, turning slowly like a big pinwheel. Then he jerked with sudden spasm and the arm around my neck clamped tighter, with something wild and frantic about it now. I brought my feet up and put them against him and pushed. It felt as if my head were being pulled off. My lungs hurt. I knew I was going to inhale in a minute, and that he already had. I kicked at him once more and my head came free and I shot toward the surface.
I came out into sunlight and sparkling blue, and sobbed for air. I shook water from my face and breathed in again, shuddering, feeling my lungs swell with it. He hadn’t come up yet. I turned, searching the water for him. A gentle ground swell lifted me and I came down into the trough as it passed. Seconds went by, and I knew he wasn’t coming up. He’d had the breath knocked out of him when we hit the deck, just before we slid overboard, and he’d drowned down there.
I could hear the boat’s engine behind me, fainter now, and I turned to see which way it was circling. I stared. It wasn’t turning. It was two hundred yards away, going straight ahead for Yucatan with nobody at the helm. I didn’t see her anywhere. She’d been knocked out when she fell. And I had lashed the tiller.
I started to cry out, but stopped. Even if she were conscious she couldn’t hear me above the noise of the engine. The boat was already too far away. I was utterly helpless; there was nothing I could do at all. If she didn’t regain consciousness and start back before she’d gone too far she’d never find me.
I reached down mechanically and started taking off my dungarees and slippers.
I was calm now, after the crazy, foaming rage had gone away, and I looked at it with complete objectivity. It just wasn’t intended to be. We’d been doomed from the start. There was something inexorable about it; it was what mathematicians called an infinite series with a limiting factor. Add .1 and .01 and .001 and .0001 and so on and on forever until you’d worn out all the adding machines on earth and you’d never reach 1.
My head jerked suddenly erect and I looked around, wondering if I had lost my mind. What I had heard was a gunshot, and ten feet off to my left something had gone chu-wuuug! into the side of a ground swell. It was insane. The stern of the Ballerina was receding in the distance and I was alone in a blue immensity of gently heaving, sunlit water and calm, empty sky, and somebody had spliced the sound track of a western movie onto it. I had forgotten all about Barclay.
He came to the surface of the sea forty yards away. He was drowning—drowning in a waterlogged tweed jacket with a gun in his hand as if he would no more have parted with either of them than he would have condescended to notice the existence of the Gulf of Mexico when he was busy trying to kill me. I forgot even to be afraid, watching him. It was fantastic.
He would go under. The gun would reappear first, held above his head, and then his face, the broken jaw agape and water running out of his mouth. He would calmly tilt the gun barrel down to let the water run out so it wouldn’t explode when he fired, and then he’d shoot. His aim was wild because of his exertions to keep himself afloat long enough to fire. The bullet would ricochet off a swell and go screaming into the blue emptiness behind me, and the ejected shell would whistle into the water on his right. He would go under. And then fight his way back to the surface to do it all over again. There was something utterly magnificent about it, and I didn’t even hate him any more. I forgot I was the one he was shooting at.
He shot three more times. The fourth time he didn’t quite make it. The gun came up out of the water and then sank back and there was an explosion just under the surface as he pulled the trigger while it was submerged. He never came up again.
I was alone now. I looked around. The Ballerina was far out on the horizon, still going away.
Fifteen
Even when you don’t have anywhere to go, you keep swimming. I swam toward the boat, disappearing now, and toward the coast of Yucatan a hundred and twenty miles away. The sun was on my left. It climbed higher.
I didn’t panic, but I had to be careful about letting the loneliness and immensity of it get hold of me or thinking too much about how near we had been to winning at last. I wondered if she had been killed, or badly hurt, and saw in a moment that wasn’t safe, either. I concentrated on swimming. Don’t think about anything.
It could have been an hour, or two hours, when I looked off to the right and saw the mast. It was at least a mile away and she wouldn’t see me, but even so a great surge of hope and thanksgiving went through me and I broke the rhythm of my stroke and went under and almost strangled. She was all right! She’d only been knocked out. I reminded myself realistically of the odds against her ever finding me in this immense waste of water, but just knowing she was alive and could reach land helped me to keep going.
I waved frantically each time I was lifted on a swell. She went on past, far to the westward, and was soon hull down to the north. I kept watching her, looking over my shoulder. Now she was swinging, heading east. I began to hope. I saw what she was doing. I loved her. God, she was wonderful. Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, she was wonderful. When she’d regained consciousness she didn’t have any way of knowing how long she’d been out or where we’d gone overboard, so she couldn’t go back and swing in a big circle. But she knew the sloop was on a 180 degree heading. So she was running offset north-and-south courses, cutting the whole area into a big grid. A girl who didn’t know anything about boats or compasses or the sea. I turned and started swimming toward the sun.
Far out, she turned, heading south again. I tried to estimate how far to the eastward she’d pass me. I couldn’t tell yet, but I swam faster. She steadied up, began to grow larger. She was passing three or four hundred yards ahead of me. I could see her. She’d lashed the tiller and was standing on the boom with an arm about the mast. I remembered the glasses again. Each time the ground swell lifted me I kicked myself as high as I could in the water and waved an arm. She was going on by.
Then I saw her jump down from the boom and run aft. The bow began to swing. I closed my eyes for an instant, and the breath ran slowly out of me.
The sound of engine died and she drifted down toward me and came to rest, rolling gently in the trough. Shannon was in the cockpit with a coiled line in her hand. She started to throw it. I shook my head. She watched me swim over. Her face was utterly still. She didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. I caught the rail when the boat rolled, and pulled myself up. She knelt on the cockpit seat to help me. She put a hand on my wrist and an arm about my shoulders and I came up on the seat beside her in the warm sunlight. She let go then. Everything went. They blew the dam.
Maybe you live your whole life for one moment. If you do, that was the moment.