He had no idea how long it lasted, but a sudden peace descended like a cotton blanket. The blackness surrounded them; it was like standing in a huge silo with a tiny skylight far above. Burt looked around in the unearthly, yellow green twilight. They stood on an almost barren ridge of rock laced with tiny pockets of sand. The silence was broken only by the gurgle of runoff water and the slopping of fish trapped on the land. He saw why their tree had remained intact; it was rooted in a pocket of earth in the solid rock.
He felt Tracy move under his hands. “Please, you’re hurting...”
It was slow work, for his joints had locked together and each uncoupling was agony. When she was free, she straightened and breathed deeply. All that remained of her shirt was the collar and a tattered strip of cloth on the right side. Suddenly she gasped and began to tear at the belt.
“Don’t,” he said. “We’re not through yet.”
She kept tugging, and he crawled around the tree and seized her wrists. “Stay put, Tracy! We’re just in the center. There’s another jolt coming just like the last one.”
She looked at him in terror. “But it’s gone! My kit is gone. I had it right here—” She pressed her palm to the sunken cavity of her stomach. “I’ve got to find it! Help me look!”
“Look?” He waved his arm. “Where would you look? It’s five miles at sea by now.”
She looked around, dazed, as though she had just realized that there had been a hurricane. Then she squeezed her eyes shut and screamed up at the tiny circle of light. “Rolf! Rolf! Where are you?”
He seized her and shook her until her jaw wobbled, and then she collapsed against his chest and called Rolf’s name in a weak and plaintive voice. Her utter dependence on Rolf angered him.
“How heavy was your habit?”
“I’m not sure.” Her voice was muffled against his chest. “I used to hold it down to one capsule a day, but then Rolf didn’t seem to care, so I gradually took more and more. When you have it laid on you like that, you cabaret all the time. I used... maybe three, four a day. Maybe five, I don’t know.”
“You poor nitwit.” Burt was appalled; a person with a habit that heavy could die if left suddenly without it He’d known it to happen in small back-country jails: The addict thrown into a cell and left to kick the drug cold-turkey... convulsions, incessant vomiting, muscle spasms so strong they can throw joints out of place. Eventually the heart bursts, the lungs rupture...
He looked down into her eyes, saw the opaque film which, it was said, an addict never loses. Behind that, he saw fear... and dependence.
“I’ll die... won’t I?”
She wanted reassurance, and he wanted to give it. He remembered the letters and realized that the prospect of doing without the drug could start her down that same blind alley. He also remembered that he had been unable to see his boat on the sand spit, and that they might be a long time in leaving the island.
“We must get to St. Vincent tomorrow,” he lied. “I know a doctor there...”
When the next blow struck, he covered her with his body. Hours passed with the wind clawing at his back and from time to time the woman stirred against him. He felt a futile anger at the turn of events. Even if he brought her alive through this, she’d have another hell to go through tomorrow.
Twelve
The wind died gradually from about midnight on. Burt loosened Tracy’s belt and arranged her in a sitting posture with her back to the tree. She moaned but didn’t awaken. Burt sat beside her and dozed.
Dawn came with a bleak gray light. The leaden sky was mottled by black clouds kicked along by blasts of wind. Rain drops stung his face like BBs. He looked at Tracy sleeping with her head back, her lips parted. His eyes followed the straight white column of her neck down to her wasted body; the small cuplike breasts were bare and rainwashed to an ivory whiteness. He could see the blue veinings beneath her skin, and he wondered what had given her such a frail, unearthly beauty. Her face seemed to glow with its own cold light; her eyes were shadowed and deep in their sockets. Camille, he thought, or St. Joan of Arc in the dying ecstasy of her martyrdom.
He took off his tattered shirt and put it around her. He stood up and surveyed the debris which had been deposited on their barren rock: Several palm leaves, dozens of coconuts, an entire guava tree stripped clean of bark and leaves, a few shattered boards and assorted specimens of dying undersea life, including a ray the size of a dining room table which was draped over a rock and beginning to swell. He saw that their island had been split in two; thirty yards west of their tree was a twenty-foot chasm of rushing white water. Where the sand spit had been, a few jagged rocks thrust up from the lashing foam. So much for the boat...
He draped palm leaves over the trunk of the guava tree and laid Tracy beneath the waist-high shelter. Her forehead was cold and clammy, but she was breathing. He decided not to awaken her; when the withdrawal pains came there would be no rest for her anyway. He used his knife to open a can of beef and ate half of it with his fingers. He punctured a coconut, drank the sweet water, then gathered up all the coconuts he could find and piled them beside the shelter. At least they’d have no drinking problem...
He returned with his last load to find her struggling to sit up. “Lie down,” he said.
“But I need my — oh!” She lay back and looked up at him from wide frightened eyes. “I... didn’t really lose my kit, did I? That wasn’t real.”
“Yes,” he said. “You lost it.”
She closed her eyes and began to tremble. He touched his hand to her forehead; it was cold and moist, like the flesh of a dead chicken. Her teeth clattered.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Like... like th-th-they were squirting hot w-w-water up my n-n-nose.” She started to sneeze, then rolled over on her side and retched. Burt sat helplessly until she finished.
“Maybe if you ate,” he said.
He handed her the remaining half-can of beef. The beef dropped off her shaking fingers and down the front of her shirt. Her mouth was loose and drooling, and moisture ran out of her nose. He took the can from her hand. “Lean back and try to relax. I’ll feed you.”
It was a bizarre and intimate scene; he dipped the beef from the can and she ate it from his fingers. He remembered that some Indian marriage ceremony included a ritual of bride and groom feeding each other by hand. He wondered why he should get ideas like that. When the can was empty, he said, “I’ll open a coconut. You can drink.”
“I... I don’t think—” Her face turned green. He jerked back just in time to escape the spew of bully beef. She doubled over and vomited again, then again, until all the beef was gone. Still the retching continued. He put his palm on her arched back and felt the spasm rip through her body. He lost track of time and lost count of her convulsions. He saw that there was really such a thing as black bile, and he wondered how much punishment the frail body could stand. He didn’t leave her, though there was nothing he could do to ease her pain; he had a strange feeling that soon she would be nothing but empty skin, lying on the sand like a discarded laundry bag.
At last she sighed and lay back. Her face looked like a skull. Cold moisture gleamed on her pale skin. “The doctor...” she gasped, closing her eyes. “We’ve got to go...”
“I am afraid—” he began, but he saw the slow rise and fall of her bosom beneath the sweat-soaked shirt. She was asleep; she seemed to be resting.
He rose on aching limbs and walked to the break in the island. Peering beyond, he saw his rope tied to a rock where the sand spit had been. His heart stopped when he saw the rope go taut, then slacken. Could there be a boat on the end of that? It seemed impossible.