When the sun came out we sat in the cockpit with towels, drying it. It gleamed like freshly burnished silver against the smooth, tanned skin of her face and shoulders. If I live until I’m ninety and never see anything beautiful again, they don’t owe me a thing.
That night when we prepared dinner she changed into the white dress again, and when she came out of the forward end of the cabin she had a small bottle of perfume in her hand and was touching the glass stopper to the lobe of an ear.
She smiled, a little shyly. “I know it’s ridiculous,” she said. “But it was there in the things I sent aboard—”
“No,” I said. “It’s not ridiculous. On this ship the mate comes to dinner every night with just a suspicion of Tabu behind her starboard ear or she’s logged a day’s pay. Put it in the night order book.”
“Night order book?” she asked, and it was the first time I had ever seen that particular roguishness in her eyes. “Things are simplified on ships, aren’t they?”
We were ecstatically happy, and we didn’t care how long it took us to get into the Yucatan Strait. But twice more I awoke at night with that strange feeling she was going through some hell of her own there beside me. She would be lying perfectly still, staring up at the sky, as rigid and tense as someone petrified with fear.
I couldn’t get to it. Whatever it was, she never let me come near it.
Sixteen
She liked to swim, and had no exaggerated fear of sharks. I coached her to get her out of the dog-paddle class, and she improved tremendously. She was a natural. She was in no sense an athlete, but then neither are most really hot girl swimmers. You don’t have to be lumpy-muscled and bony to get around in water.
We spent hours at it, lots of times even when there was enough wind to have been under way. This was paradise and we were so wonderfully alone it was impossible to be concerned with headway or making a schedule or taking advantage of every capful of wind. The world between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer was our oyster, and we had the rest of our lives to savor it. We swam, and we lay side by side at night looking up at the stars, and we fished and read, and we dived with the aqualungs.
Diving fascinated her, and she was never afraid of it from the first. We were over the Northern Shelves in the beginning, and in three days she was going to the bottom with me in a shoal spot we found where the water was only ten fathoms deep. She loved confronting startled schools of fish—any kind of fish. They were all the same to her, and actually were nearly all red snapper.
“They look so absurd.” She laughed. “Not really scared, but just offended, as if you’d done something in very bad taste by coming down there bothering them.”
“Fish expressions are deceptive as hell,” I said. “They’re probably whistling at you. You do have nice legs.”
She made a face at me. “I wouldn’t know about that. It seems to me you haven’t mentioned them recently. Not in the past hour or so.”
“You know why I joke, honey?”
Laughter faded, and the eyes were soft. “Yes. We have to, I guess, Bill. You get too filled with wonder and you’d just bog down and go dumb if you couldn’t relieve the pressure with a little lightness.”
“Maybe we should have been Latins,” I said. “Then we could be intense and articulate at the same time.” I thought about that. Then I said, “No. The hell with it. I’d have to change the name of the boat again, to some brunette goddess. I’ll struggle along with you the way you are.”
We had a day of good breeze, and worked up into it for 16 hours, running for the Strait. Then it fell again and the current set us west and north for two days and nights. On the eighth day after Barclay and Barfield had drowned we were far out on the northern edge of the Shelves where the Campeche Bank drops off into the depths.
We took a sight at noon and worked it out. We were at 23.50 North and 88.45 West. When I put it on the chart I saw we were right on the hundred-fathom curve.
It was hot in the sun and very still, and the immense pastures of the Gulf heaved gently all around us. A gull sat on a piece of driftwood off to starboard and stared at us, and a school of flying fish burst out of the side of a ground swell to go ricocheting off the next like skipping stones.
She was quieter than usual, and last night late I had roused once to find her lying awake beside me again.
“What is it, angel?” I’d asked. “Is something bothering you?”
Her voice had sounded all right, however, when she replied. “Oh, I was just thinking about us, Bill. I didn’t bring you much of a dowry, did I?”
“What kind of talk is that?” I asked, puzzled.
“Silly talk,” she said. “Go back to sleep, darling.”
I put my head on her breast. There was almost a full moon now, and it was low in the sky. The boat rocked gently and she hugged my head to her with sudden, impulsive fierceness.
“Oh, Bill, Bill, Bill—”
She stowed the sextant in its case now and we went on deck. A school of porpoises was playing around to port. She looked at them with quick interest.
“Let’s dive,” she said, “and see if we can watch them from below.”
I dropped a line over the side to make the aqualungs fast to when we were ready to come out. I watched her slip her arms through the straps of one of them. She had torn the bathing cap the other day and had to throw it away. Her hair was free, down on her shoulders. She was nude except for that single wisp of swimsuit and beautifully tanned all over now, more like some magnificent pagan than ever. Just before we put on the masks she came close to me and kissed me, hard, on the mouth with her arms fierce and tight about my neck.
I caught her. “Not many things could make me lose interest in porpoises,” I said, “but—”
She slipped away from me, adjusted the mask, and slid into the water. I followed her.
The porpoises were gone, of course, by the time we got out there. We came back and swam just below the surface in the shadow of the Freya, looking the hull over again to see if we’d begun to collect any marine growth. It was cool and pleasant, and I loved watching the silvery flow of hair about her head as she swam. A few minutes later I saw a small shovel-nosed shark off to one side and below, and swam down to watch him. He retreated, going deeper. I looked back over my shoulder, and she was still under the boat.
I sounded again, and the shark kept his distance. He was quite small, and utterly harmless. I swam down a little more, and I could still see him circling below me in the clear blue water, which grew darker as it fell away into the depths. I was down about a hundred feet.
A school of some kind of small fish I had never seen before swam by me in a big circle and I watched them idly, enjoying the relaxation of lying suspended in the water. It must have been several minutes later that I turned and looked above and behind me to be sure she was still under the boat. I saw the boat, all right, but she wasn’t there.
I looked straight above, toward the ground-glass screen of the surface. She was nowhere in sight. I began to be uneasy. But maybe she had gone back aboard for some reason. I was turning to look behind me again when a flash of silver caught the corners of my eyes at the edge of the mask. I froze with horror. She was at least a hundred feet below me, going straight down.
I pushed my feet up and sounded vertically, pulling myself down so fast I could feel the pressure clamp on my head like a vise. I tore at the water. I gained on her, but the depths were gaining on us both. It was terrible, not being able to call out to her. She was swimming straight down. I could see her legs kicking, and the silvery undulation of her hair. The squeeze was beginning. I was growing drunk and the water was darker all about me. She was down past 300 feet, not swimming now, turning a little, falling into the infinite and darkening blue below me. I could never reach her because she was going into that terrible wall of pressure faster than I could gain on her. Maybe I imagined it, or it was a trick of the waning light, but I thought I saw her lift one arm and beckon just as she faded into the depths. I closed my eyes to shut it out. I clamped them shut, and it was on the backs of my eyelids like a motion picture screen. It’s there yet.