Although he was less hopeful that they could save Jim and Lisa, it wouldn’t be for lack of trying. All during that long first day Jeanne and Neil tended the two feverish patients. They lay on adjacent berths, only conscious occasionally, sometimes hallucinating, their temperatures over one hundred and five degrees. Jeanne worked tirelessly, putting on and taking off the seawater-soaked towels and shirts, carrying Lisa’s bony, torrid body to immerse her in the side cockpit, which had been filled with six inches of seawater. She watched helplessly as the fever raged on unabated and Lisa’s breath become faster and faster, shallower and shallower. Neil helped bring water and towels and moved Jim when necessary; Sheila often helped them, but most of the burden was Jeanne’s.
Neil found it depressing to be down in the heat and stink of Frank’s cabin to confront the sweating bodies, feverish eyes, and incoherent mutterings of Jim and Lisa. Jim kept trying to act as if he were only mildly sick, joking about it, always asking about Lisa, who was just out of sight around the partition that separated their two berths, and once even volunteering to help carry her to the seawater bath in the cockpit. When he found he couldn’t even stand up, he lost some, of his youthful cockiness.
With three of the ship’s company close to death and those who were still healthy feeling almost powerless to help them, the gloom during the day was broken only once, when in late afternoon Olly unexpectedly announced that they should hold a short memorial service for Conrad Macklin, as they had ten days before for Katya.
“He was our shipmate,” Olly explained. “And besides, burying him might put us in a better mood.” So Olly, Neil, and Sheila had stood awkwardly in a side cockpit and Olly had spoken.
“Well, Lord, we want to pay our last respects to Conrad Macklin,” Olly began in a serious voice and with bowed head. “Connie was probably beat on as a kid, and his mom probably weaned him too early and his dad must have kicked his butt, so he developed into something of a shit, Lord, pardon the expression, but he didn’t work hard at it and was only that way when he felt like it. Still we figure You got the big picture, Lord, and will know exactly what to do with Connie. Us, we got the small picture. All we could think of doing with him was throw him to the sharks… Amen, Lord. Over and out.”
Neil and Sheila said nothing.
“Now we symbolically commit his body to the sea,” said Olly and, when he slapped Neil on the back, Neil gathered the ceremony was over.
“Funny thing, death,” Olly announced as they walked back into the wheelhouse area. Neil waited for him to come out with some sort of punchline but he didn’t, as if his three words summarized his meager fund of wisdom on the subject.
Neil was doctoring Frank. When the wounded man spoke without bitterness of Tony and Macklin, his tranquility began to remind Neil of Sam Brumburger. Frank even joked about their triangular relationship with Jeanne, announcing that he was “retiring from the field.” Feeling helpless in treating Frank, twelve hours after the mutiny Neil made the decision to head for land. Frank’s chances were slim at best, and then only if they could find modern medical facilities on the coast of Brazil.
Neil was aware of the dangers involved: the Brazilian government was sinking unauthorized ships who tried to land. The day before an airplane had passed overhead, the first they’d seen since leaving the Virgin Islands, and a freighter had passed them heading south. These sightings had disturbed Neil at the time; he feared that Vagabond’s presence might be reported to the Brazilian military authorities. His hope lay in their lying off the northeastern coast of Brazil, relatively uninhabited, and in Vagabond’s approaching the coast at night and hopefully arriving at dawn. He consulted with each of the others, warned them of the terrible dangers of landing, but they all voted to risk it. Frank alone argued against it.
“I don’t think I’m going to make it, no matter how many tubes they stick in me,” he said painfully. “You ought to stay out to sea.”
But they turned southwest, heading for one of the coastal towns to the north of the mouth of the Amazon. Neil didn’t plan to sail into a harbor but to sneak in, find a sympathetic doctor, and only then to bring Frank ashore.
At dusk, after looking at his primitive large-scale map of the coast, he went to fetch their automatic rifle and to begin planning defensive strategies for their landfall. The rifle was missing. He asked Sheila if she had moved it, and she said no. Nor had Olly. Disturbed, he discovered the 9 mm automatic on his cabin shelf was missing too. He asked Olly to check for the two other weapons they kept in the main cabin, and he reported them missing too. He and Olly were leaving the main cabin feeling baffled when Jeanne met them coming from hers.
“I threw the guns overboard,” she announced quietly, looking frightened of what Neil’s reaction might be.
Neil stopped in front of her, stunned, staring at her, not wanting to believe her, but knowing that this was the only explanation. “All four of them?” he asked.
She nodded.
“My God,” he commented, turning away from her and staring off astern.
“I know I seem crazy to you,” she said quietly, “but I don’t want to live in the kind of world they create.” Neil still looked away, his lined, bearded face tense and puzzled. “I love you, Neil. I know you’ve saved us a dozen times, sometimes with guns, but never again. Now we live or die like the rest of God’s creatures, by the strength of our bodies alone.”
Neil still stared stiffly off to sea, Olly, behind him, stroking his wispy white beard and scowling.
“I can understand what you did, Jeanne,” Sheila said from the helm. “The guns make us a part of the madness of the rest of the world. I’m glad they’re gone.”
Jeanne looked thankfully at Sheila and then back at Neil.
“Never trusted ’em myself either,” said Olly. “Only thing I ever killed with a gun was a rabbit, and he died of a heart attack from my missing him so often.”
Neil walked farther aft and stared out at Vagabond’s wake. At first he had felt enraged that Jeanne had acted behind his back like that, frightened by the unexpected loss of weapons he thought he needed to survive, but with the voices of Sheila and Olly echoing Jeanne’s, he felt an unexpected sense of tranquility replace his anger. The guns were gone. They themselves were out at sea, only a half-day from land and the enemy. It was not possible that the kind of fighting they’d had to do was over, but even if it wasn’t, the odds were heavily against their winning, even with guns. They’d have to fight the way they’d fought the submarine. We’d better, he thought, smiling ruefully to himself at the thought of their being armed now with Olly’s gaff and the flare gun. He walked back to Jeanne and held her gently.
“You did what you had to do, Jeanne,” he said, aware of the tension in her that these new horrors had caused. He could feel her yielding only slightly in his embrace. “We haven’t had much luck holding off death with guns, so it can’t be much worse without.”