“And the ocean…” Olly went on in a low voice. “For fifty years I been figuring that no matter how much man ruined the land, the one thing he’d never destroy, no matter how hard he tried, and I knew he’d try his damnedest, would be the sea…”
Neil let the silence hang briefly and then said softly:
“It’s not destroyed yet.”
Captain Olly removed the perpetually unlit and empty pipe from his mouth and tapped it idly on the deck.
“No,” he said after a while. “It ain’t. But I seem to have underrated man’s talent for making a mess of things. All these years I been depending too much on man’s weakness and stupidity. I figured he was just too dumb to mess things up totally.” He looked up at Neil, his grizzled face and red eyes looking tired and old. “I just pray the Lord God will save us from man’s intelligence.”
Neil looked at him for a long moment and nodded.
“Amen,” he said.
Part Four
LAND
Jeanne had slept while the men anchored Vagabond during the early morning hours, so that when she came up on deck a little after six, she looked out on the boats floating nearby, the quiet, smooth water of the harbor, and the white buildings of the town blossoming up the hillsides in the distance as a child might at her first big city. For more than two weeks she had known only the constant motion of the sea; now Vagabond lay as still as if she were imbedded in concrete. In all that time they had seen no more than four ships, one at a time; now as she slowly swept the horizon with her gaze she could see twenty, thirty… more. For the last two days—since the explosion over San Juan—she had felt continual low-level anxiety; now, surrounded by motionless white hulls, with white houses sleeping in the early dawn light less than a mile away, she felt that anxiety disappear. There was no exhilaration, no joy: simply a sense that here, for the moment at least, was a safe space.
She moved into the wheelhouse and saw Neil stretched out on the cushions asleep, his bearded face and tousled hair showing his exhaustion even as he slept. She wondered if he’d collapsed there, too tired to bother to go aft to his own cabin. He must have fallen asleep after they anchored, only hours earlier.
She slipped quietly down into the galley to prepare herself a cup of tea, then remembered that they had no more tea or coffee. She poured herself a small cup of water. Back in the wheelhouse, sitting opposite the motionless, leaden body of Neil, seeing the slanted rays of the early morning sun sparkling on the golden hairs of his thighs and legs, she felt a wave of longing, tenderness, and pride: they had come through, they had made it. But as she felt love welling up within her she thought too of Frank, and then the beautiful body of Neil, so still in front of her, made her sad.
It was too much for her. They were too much for her. There was no way she could create a world where all of her loved ones could be happy. Although she herself was beginning to feel at home on the water, her children needed the land. But the men, all of them really, seemed unenthusiastic about any of the permanent alternatives that they might find on any of these Caribbean islands. Here they were in Charlotte Amalie in the American Virgin Islands, as far as she could tell as safe and unhostile a place as there was within a thousand miles, and four of the men had spent two hours the previous evening discussing the supplies they would need for another two-week voyage and getting depressed because it seemed hopeless. She had tried to talk about what they could expect from St. Thomas, and though Frank had shown interest, Neil had done no more than give her a book to read.
“What’s that, mommy?” Skip suddenly asked, coming up from his cabin and standing in front of her in his tiny red swimshorts and staring out at the fleet of anchored boats and the distant houses.
“That’s… that’s land, honey,” she answered in a soft voice so as not to disturb Neil. For a week now Skip had been asking “When are we going to get to land, mommy?”
“That’s land?” Skip asked, looking puzzled.
“Yes. That’s the city of Charlotte Amalie on an island called St. Thomas. We may live here for a while.”
“On a boat?”
“No, on land, in a house.”
“Like the one in Washington?”
“No. Smaller. But nice.”
As Skippy pulled himself up onto the cushion beside his mother he was silent, still staring at the distant town.
“They don’t look like real houses,” he said.
“They don’t? Why not, honey?”
After a pause he said, “They just don’t.”
Neil stirred, adjusted a forearm under his head and chin, and then resumed his deadman pose. He had begun to let his beard grow and was in that halfway land of looking scraggly and down-and-out. As she looked at him, affection and desire mingled with her sadness.
“Do they have a McDonald’s?” Skip asked.
“What?”
“Can we go to McDonald’s today?” Skip repeated.
“Oh. No. I’m afraid not. I don’t think they have McDonald’s.”
“What about a Big Whopper?”
“I don’t know, honey. We’ll see.”
Hamburger: it, too, will have disappeared. On the islands there would be no beef or lamb, perhaps a little pork and fowl, but mostly fish. She smiled to herself as she realized that she was imagining herself having to announce to Skip the death of the hamburger. Could he take it at such a young age?
Maybe she should sleep with both of them, she thought. She wanted to sleep with Neil, but could never do so “publicly,” could never slap Frank in the face like that after he had been so fond of her over the last two years. Perhaps she could become a seafaring camp follower, available to whichever officer was officially on watch, the way Katya seemed to have anticipated before they set out.
But she knew she couldn’t, and the tension that existed between Frank and her and Neil was painful. This landfall might represent escape from the waves and starvation and fallout, but there was no escape from themselves.
When a customs launch arrived at eleven, Neil was up, but the other men had to be awakened. Most joined Neil and the others topside, all haggard and grizzled or bearded, even Jim. They looked like the collection of refugees they were. Katya’s hair was tangled; she had lost several pounds from her already slight frame, but still looked healthier than the men. Lisa was a woman now, but because of her frailness she looked more like a child than she had a month earlier.
Although they were nervous about the arrival of the customs launch, they had heard a radio report that the island government had simply ignored the U.S. military. Apparently any attempt to draft the mostly black islanders would have led to an instantaneous revolution. Even as it was, the local government, controlled by blacks but greatly influenced by white interests, was on shaky ground.
The senior customs officer was a nervous, pudgy white man and his two-man crew, black. They searched Vagabond for weapons (all carefully hidden behind a false partition at the back of Jeanne’s berth), asked detailed questions about their previous itinerary—they seemed to want to make certain they had been at sea nine days since the Bahamas—and, without a word of explanation, insisted on taking everyone’s temperature. Just before the customs men left, Neil asked how he and his friends could expect to get food if they had no gold or silver or much else to baiter with.
“Then you fish,” the pudgy officer answered. “New immigrants aren’t eligible for food assistance unless they surrender all their belongings and live in the refugee center out in Capo Gorda.”
After the launch had motored off, their weapons not discovered, they prepared to go ashore. Jim got out the dinghy, and he and Macklin began to inflate it. Jeanne and Katya were talking about the chances of finding a home on St. Thomas when a man and a woman suddenly appeared beside Vagabond in a little eight-foot rowing pram.