So he’d arrived in Salisbury almost an hour late, taken an agonizing thirty minutes to rent a car (so much for O.J. Simpson flying through the airport), and finally made it to Crisfield after nine o’clock in the evening.
And no Vagabond. When he’d inquired at the marina, it had taken him so long to find someone with a message from Neil that he figured he’d missed the last ferry to Tangier Island. The damn woman said only that Neil was becalmed at Tangier and to take the ferry. But there was now a light breeze blowing. Would Neil try to sail on to Crisfield?
Then it turned out he hadn’t missed the last ferry, because the last ferry hadn’t even gotten back in from Tangier. So he was pacing back and forth across the dock, a half-dozen locals sitting on the waiting benches staring at him as if he were a performing acrobat. He didn’t care. He had the new propeller shaft, he had his fishing gear and swimsuits and scuba equipment, and he was eager to be out
on the bay. The smell of salt water and dead fish had even eased his annoyance at first, since he felt such a sudden stab of joy after nothing but the smells of Manhattan for three months.
Finally the lights of the tiny ferry appeared in the distance. Frank placed himself at the edge of the dock, leaning out toward it, as if he were a magnet capable of drawing the stupid thing in faster. The local fishermen and their families simply sat there smoking and joking and generally behaving with that air of calm self-sufficiency that drove Frank crazy—until he’d been aboard Vagabond for a few days and began to recreate it for himself.
The ferry was a big launch with a long deckhouse roof and six or seven benches that would probably seat forty people during the height of the tourist season. There were only four people coming off the island.
Some of the locals came up as the boat approached the dock and took the two mooring lines. A skinny little man was at the wheel and a young kid put out the fenders. When the launch was secured, the little man came out of the wheelhouse, puffing on a pipe. After Frank had walked back to where he had left his duffel bags and then got himself and his stuff onto the ferry, the captain helped a woman he apparently knew to climb on board.
“You folks heah about the woah?” he asked her and the two men with her.
“What war is that, Cap?” one of the men asked in return.
“I don’t know as whether they’ve named it yet,” he answered, a quizzical frown on his round face. “But it’s another one of our woahs.”
“What do you mean?” the woman asked nervously, sitting down next to Frank on a middle bench.
“My radio says theah’s going to be a woah. With the Russians.”
“Oh, that,” said Frank, feeling the tension that the captain’s vague statements had created beginning to lessen.
“When’d you hear this?” another man asked.
“Five minutes ago, I’d guess,” the captain said. “Made it seem pretty impohtant. National emergency or something. Like an air-raid wahning.”
“Air-raid warning for where?” Frank asked irritably.
“Well, I guess for just about the whole country,” the little man replied.
“What are you going to do about it, Cap?” the first man asked.
“Not much I can do till I finish this last ferry trip,” he said, motioning to the kid to free the mooring lines.
“Has anyone been killed yet?” the woman asked.
“Not that they mentioned,” the captain replied as he went through to the wheelhouse. He turned back to them when he got halfway to the wheel. “They just kep’ saying emergency,” he concluded.
The forty-five-foot ferry swung out of the dock area and began its hour-and-a-half-long trip through the darkness to Tangier. Frank leaned back on the bench, hugging his right knee for balance, and sensed the anxiety rising within him. It was one thing to have a war scare but another to declare some sort of national emergency that made people start telling their neighbors there was a war.
He stared unseeingly off to his right and began to consider the effect an escalation of the panic might have on his business fortunes when a glow caught his attention. He concentrated his attention to his right.
There was a strange, steadily increasing glow across the bay, like the lights of a huge city being slowly turned on. It didn’t seem like-fire; the light was too diffuse, too much just a glow. Unless it was a long way off.
“What’s that?” the woman next to him asked the man beside her. Along with the seven or eight other passengers Frank watched fascinated as the light, like the spreading hood of a cobra, slowly loomed up to fill the sky. Feeling a stab of horror he stood up.
“Looks like a fire,” someone said.
Frank pushed past the knees of the two people next to him and strode forward to the wheelhouse.
“What’s our heading?” he asked the little captain in the dimly lit wheelhouse.
“Heading?” the little man asked, squinting up at him.
Frank could read the compass bearing for himself by the soft reddish light over the binnacle. Their course was southwest. The glow then was to the northwest, perhaps a little north of northwest. He tried to visualize the map of the Chesapeake that he’d been studying the day before, then looked back at the spreading and intensifying glow.
Washington. There were no cities along the Chesapeake northwest of Crisfield. The first city northwest of Crisfield was way inland, was Washington. A hundred miles away.
A hundred miles away. Holy sweet Jesus. The light glowed more brightly. Frank staggered out of the wheelhouse.
Captain Olly was dozing in his faded and worn overstuffed chair, the television set gleaming in front of him, the sound turned down low, though still audible. Hours before his son had gone out to a Smith Island bar, but Olly had decided to stay home, bushed as usual.
The face of a newscaster was on the screen murmuring in tense, anxious tones, but Olly didn’t hear. Then, with a gentle popping sound, the screen went dark, and the lights Olly had left on behind the set and in the kitchen went out also.
Olly stirred and, awakened by the change, opened his eyes.
“Chris?” he said into the darkness.
He began feeling with his hands for the thin blanket Chris sometimes put over him when he’d fallen asleep in his chair and Chris didn’t want him to wake up. But his lap was bare. It didn’t feel like he’d been sleeping that long, but if Chris was home and had turned out all the lights it must be damn late.
He shuffled slowly to the bathroom and without bothering to turn on the light, pissed into the sink—no problem with aiming at such close range. Then he shuffled off to his small bedroom at the rear of the house. He hesitated for a moment at his bedroom door, a vague feeling of uneasiness nagging at him. In years at sea and in the bay he’d learned to be responsive to such intuitive hints of trouble, but he was in his own little house, anchored solidly to Smith Island, which was anchored less solidly in Chesapeake mud. It was the moonlight streaming in the bedroom window that bothered him, but he couldn’t tell why.
He was old, and he was tired. He fell onto his bed fully clothed and closed his eyes. Something was wrong, but damned if he could think of anything that wouldn’t wait till morning. Soon he was asleep in the empty house, the half-moon not yet risen in the east, but light streaming in his window from the northwest.