“I’ll help you,” said Jim.
“You stay here,” Frank said gloomily to Neil, grabbing his shoulder. “With your bum arm you’re the wrong man for the job.”
After Frank boarded Windsong, Jim quickly followed. Ducking below into the main cabin, Frank saw that there were two women lying under dirty sheets on opposite sides of the main saloon on what normally would have been settees. The cabin was a jumble of pails, towels, open cans of food, dirty dishes, clothing, blankets. The stench of sweat, urine, and excrement was stifling. The small hollow-eyed man stood apologetically next to his wife.
“They can’t walk, and I can’t lift them,” he said.
Frank pushed himself over to the older woman, bent over, and tried to force himself to smile. But when he saw the gray-faced, frozen apparition that was staring up at him, the “Hi” he had been about to speak froze in his throat. He gasped. Without any further efforts at sociability he leaned over and picked her up and headed back toward the gangway. The woman was almost dead. She was wearing nothing under the sheet, and the contact of his hands with her naked flesh after seeing death on her face horrified and disgusted him. He wanted to run up the stairs, but Jim appeared, on his way down.
“Bring the girl and get out quick,” he said sharply.
Teeth gritted, his face showing his fear and disgust, Frank climbed the cabin steps, went quickly over to Vagabond and, refusing Jeanne’s offer of assistance, thrust himself from one boat to the other.
“Where are you putting her?” Jeanne asked.
“Frank’s cabin, I’m afraid,” Neil interjected. “All three.”
Frank carried the woman below.
Jim had suffered the same sickening shock at the sight and smell of Windsong’s cabin as, with face averted, he gently slid his arms under the daughter and lifted her up. She was small and light. As he took her in his arms, he noticed that she turned her face away from him.
“Come on,” he said to the man and started back to Vagabond.
“Are there things we can salvage from Windsong? Neil asked Frank, who was coming out of his cabin after lifting the woman up on his double berth and instructing Jim to put the girl in beside her. Macklin stood nearby, glaring.
“No,” Frank snapped back. “Let’s get away now, fast.”
The skeleton of a man, standing slightly bent over in the starboard cockpit a few feet away, grimaced.
“We’ve got a few emergency rations that you can have,” he said. “It’s stored—”
“Let’s go!” Macklin said sharply to Neil. “That ship’s contaminated. Everything on it may be carrying death. Let’s go.” He brushed past the man and untied the aft line that kept Vagabond rafted to the other ship, and then hurried forward to get the other line. In just a few seconds Vagabond fell away, her sails filling, then surged forward and past the stricken Windsong.
The owner turned and looked at her as Vagabond steadily moved away, then the man moved slowly to the hatchway to go below.
Frank stepped trembling into the wheelhouse to stow the fenders Macklin was handing back to him.
“Take it easy, Frank,” Neil said.
“We’ve brought death aboard,” Frank said grimly.
Neil, staring forward past the little transistor radio that lay on the control panel shelf, was as tight-lipped as Frank.
“I know,” Neil replied. “But when was he not aboard?”
The presence of the three apparently doomed refugees upset Vagabond’s company. Having three dying people aboard was a disturbing reminder of their own danger and gave rise in some to a guilty resentment of the new burden of stricter rationing and more limited space. Frank now had to sleep in the wheelhouse, Jim aft with Neil. Frank found himself resenting mild Sam Brumburger as if he were a boorish guest who’d crashed a previously enjoyable party. He was naturally appalled by his resentment. He realized that if they had abandoned Sam and his family, he would have felt worse.
He was annoyed, too, with Jeanne for showing so much solicitude for the refugees; she seemed to spend the whole afternoon in endless trips down into the hellhole of his cabin to minister to their needs. None of the men had any appetite for that sort of thing, although Olly went down and spent an hour talking with Sam.
“Wife’s just about dead,” Olly said to Frank afterward. “The daughter’s not going to make it either. Sam thinks now he should have scuttled his ship.”
“Sam looks pretty bad too,” Frank commented.
“Yep. Tough way to go,” Captain Olly said. “Prefer a quick sinking myself.”
“Me too,” said Frank.
The rescue of the Brumburgers had cost them more than two hours, so that when the wind fell away to nothing at dusk they were still fifteen to twenty miles from land.
Sam Brumburger told his story after dinner that night.
Sam, his wife and daughter, and two male friends had set out from Miami to bring their boat north for the summer. On the night the war started the ship was shaken by a tremendous blast. With his two friends on watch, Sam was with his family below. He was thrown off the settee berth onto the floor. Recovering, he staggered up and hurried topside. Although there was a terrifying brightness to the southwest that lit up the night, he couldn’t at first see anything wrong. He called to his friends and got no reply. Then he saw one of them lying across a seat in the rear of the cockpit. His friend’s body was smoking. He had been literally burned to death.
The other friend had disappeared, presumably thrown overboard by the blast. His wife, sleeping in an upper berth forward, had been badly burned on the stomach and upper thighs. He and his daughter had escaped direct injury from the blast.
That morning, when fallout began to fall onto his deck, he got his engine going and motored to the northeast for eleven hours, skirting north of Grand Bahama Island until he ran out of fuel. Meanwhile, he, his wife, and his daughter had begun to vomit.
On the fourth day Sam spotted a fishing boat and fired a flare and the boat came over to investigate. It was a beat-up twenty-five-foot runabout with an outboard that was on its last gasp. There were two black Bahamian men aboard and one white man. They looked shocked at the sight of Sam and his boat and Sam’s wife. At first Sam was afraid they were just going to motor away. But they decided to stay. They locked Sam in the forepeak, looted Windsong, and took turns raping his daughter on the settee berth, three feet away from her dying mother. Since then Windsong had been drifting helplessly.
When Sam told his story, Frank found it strange to listen to a man who knew he was dying, accepted that he was dying, and who looked at everything with emotionless objectivity. His manner was also strangely apologetic, as if the needs of a man who was going to die were futile and irrelevant. Commenting on the war, Sam seemed to speak from some other world that he alone had moved into. “I never thought we could spend a trillion dollars on something without sooner or later demanding our money’s worth.”
Later that night, after everyone but Neil, Frank, and Jeanne had gone below, and Vagabond was wallowing in a dead calm, there was a strange scene. Jeanne had just returned from another visit to Frank’s cabin to clean up after one of the Brumburgers and had stopped, after washing out a towel in salt water, to take a look at Neil’s elbow. Frank was steering, and Jeanne sat beside Neil on the wheelhouse settee and adjusted the kerosene lantern to get a good look.
The swelling on Neil’s elbow had gone down considerably. He could move his lower arm about forty-five degrees without pain, although there was still redness over a three-square-inch area. They had not used antibiotics and were depending on Neil’s immune system to handle the infection by itself.