For the first time Vagabond’s crew discussed returning to the U.S. mainland, since it appeared that there they could still find enough food and perhaps a more friendly welcome. But Neil argued that radioactive fallout would be increasing for months, if not years, not diminishing. And the problem of avoiding the “plague,” and of avoiding the violence of those who would fear them as carriers was also frightening. Moreover, most of the stored and growing food would already have been confiscated and controlled by previous settlers in each area, and when winter came these sources would be
barely enough for them. Outsiders would not only be feared and kept away because of the “plague” but because of the burden they would place on the already limited carrying capacity of the region. Neil had listened to one shortwave report of a small renegade group of soldiers and a band of survivalists fighting a pitched battle for the food and shelter the survivalists had prepared. The broadcaster didn’t know who had won, but it wasn’t a game that anyone aboard Vagabond had any heart for.
Thus, although their stay in the harbor at Charlotte Amalie permitted them to recover from the weariness of being at sea for almost three weeks, by the end of a week a new kind of weariness was afflicting them: the fatigue of searching endlessly for some end to the threat of starvation, and finding none. Olly, with help usually from Jim, Lisa, and Katya, spent most of every day fishing—sometimes with hook and line, sometimes with a net along the shore—or raking for shellfish. Frank, possessive of Jeanne, took on with her the task of bartering for what little food was available in the city. Over the week they bartered away dozens of “useless trinkets”: watches, shirts, shoes, necklaces, blouses, a transistor radio, the rest of Macklin’s stolen cigarettes, Jim’s remaining small supply of grass. Yet during the week they ate no better than they had at sea and had no more reserve food supply than when they had first dropped anchor. They were running to stand still.
So almost from their first day on the torpid streets of Charlotte Amalie Jeanne felt lost and uneasy. She had arrived wanting to find a home for herself and Neil and the others, for the alternative seemed to be an endless voyage from one hostile place to another. But as she talked to government officials, to shopkeepers, as she pushed her way through the devastated and littered streets or along the waterfront bartering for food, she could feel no connection with anyone, black or white, mostly just a powerful sullen hostility. She felt herself out of synch with the island and its people. By the third day she was just going through the motions. She wanted to leave.
It wasn’t simply that she was white in a world that was mostly black. It was more than color. She sensed that for those who had lived on the islands for a few years anyone who had arrived after the holocaust—black, white, or Puerto Rican—was an outsider, an intruder, even, she realized with a start, a coward. To have fled one’s homeland was to be guilty of selfish betrayal, even if that home had been blown off the earth and the homeland become a vast crematorium. And the anger and contempt with which most of the longtime residents responded to her and the other refugees was undoubtedly intensified by their own fear and their own desire to flee to some ultimately secure haven. A black woman whom she casually tried to befriend in the fish stall turned on her with unexpected hatred: “Go ’way, rich lady,” she said fiercely. “You best fly while you can!” The woman’s rebuke acted to reawaken Jeanne’s own fears, made her begin calculating if she were still “rich” enough to flee.
It hadn’t taken long to learn beyond any doubt the universality of the currency Philip had called “pot and pussy.” Marijuana joints were traded as cigarettes had been during earlier wars. Bags of it were the big bills of island currency. And some women, if they were young and attractive and otherwise destitute, went to buy necessities from certain merchants quite reconciled to paying with their mouths or bodies. One merchant they’d heard about had, because of his own physical limitations, resorted to selling water or fruit or fish to certain women for “IOU’s”—payment to be upon demand of bearer, who would not necessarily be the merchant himself. He, in turn used the sexual IOU’s to buy things he wanted from other merchants.
The second real estate agent Jeanne had called upon, a dignified black man her own age, had offered her a month’s free rent in a cottage he had at his disposal in return for her “friendship.” The suggestion seemed to her not so much insulting as irrelevant, but it contributed to her feelings of uneasiness about St. Thomas.
So too did what was happening to Lisa and Jim. On their second trip ashore the two had discovered in the downtown city park a gathering of teenagers, black and white—the only aspect of local life that seemed comfortably integrated—playing guitars and drums, singing, smoking pot, even laughing, and often gathering around the latest street-corner prophet who was haranguing about doom or salvation or both. Almost every day after they’d worked with Olly, fishing or gathering shellfish, they went ashore and spent some time with their new friends. Katya sometimes went with them.
Lisa, although younger than most of the others, seemed determined to fit in with this society, which disturbed Jeanne mainly because she knew so little about them and had no control over Lisa’s activities on shore. She could feel Lisa pulling away from her. Lisa and Jim would answer her questions about the Park Square people with code word replies: they were “cool, loving people,” they were “nonviolent,” but Jeanne felt only a dull feeling of dread at what seemed an aimless passivity in the face of starvation and disease. Katya didn’t help matters when she said that Jim and Lisa were just trying to hold on to a little more of their normal lives before existence was, once again, solely devoted to day-to-day survival.
And finally the other thing that made her feel out of place in Charlotte Amalie was the absence of Neil. Since he stayed so often on the boat or off on other people’s boats, she had no heart for the land. Neil was a major part of any new home, and if he was rejecting St. Thomas, then she must too.
And so, after six days, she felt that she was back where she had been on day one: on a ship without enough food to leave and without enough food to stay, unable to live with the man she loved because it would destroy the family that was her new world. And her children, whom she had vowed to save, to whom she felt she wanted to dedicate her life, grew steadily thinner, and Lisa, steadily more remote. The climax came one afternoon when Lisa was preparing to go ashore with Jim to visit their Park Square friends.
Jeanne confronted her down in their cabin as Lisa was changing from the wet clothes she’d worn earlier while seining for bait along the shore with Olly, Jim, and Tony.
“Lisa, sweetheart,” Jeanne said to her. “I hardly see you these days. What do you do in the city every day?”
“We don’t do anything, Mother,” Lisa answered, slipping out of her one-piece suit and into panties and shorts. As she did, Jeanne noticed that Lisa seemed to be trying to show that she was unaffected by her own nakedness, not hiding her breasts as she’d done for most of the last two years.
“For seven or eight hours?” Jeanne asked, regretting her accusatory tone.
“There’s not much to do, you know,” Lisa replied, not looking at her mother. “This isn’t exactly Washington.”
“I know, I know,” Jeanne said, trying to get away from the confrontational mood. “What do you talk about?”