Neither of us belong here, he thought. It’s all some kind of pretend. She’s a fifty-eight-year-old housewife and mother from Moline, and since we moved down here she’s dieted and exercised and trimmed herself down, and baked herself brown, turned from gray to blonde, wears these play clothes, even talks in ways which would puzzle the placid Moline matron of two years ago. But it is all pretend for both of us — damn fools out of a yachting magazine ad, tricked finally into playing our game out here where all of a sudden it’s all turned real.
“Getting rougher, darling?” she called over the sound of wind and sea and engines.
“Staying about the same. You feel better?”
“A little.” The fixed smile stayed in place, even when she stared ahead.
Full fuel tanks, he thought. Full water tanks. And that damned couple of tons of provisions we carried aboard and stowed. Riding lower in the water than she ever has, and we have to get into this.
He made a businesslike routine of reading all the gauges, wearing his seamanship frown.
“Something wrong?” she called, the smile gone, her mouth pinching tight, bloodless lips sucked in, looking suddenly like an old, old woman garbed for some vulgar ingenue role.
“There’s not a damn thing wrong!”
“You don’t have to shout at me, Howard. I mean — I don’t understand the engines and things. And it just seems to get — worse and worse.”
He patted her on the shoulder. “Everything’s fine. Really fine.”
“Will — the whole trip be like this?”
“WE ARE CROSSING THE GULF STR—” He caught himself, changed his tone. “Honey, this is the only rough part.”
“If you aren’t nervous, why do you act so cross?”
“I am not nervous. I am not cross.”
He wondered if it would be different — better — if Kip and Selma had been able to cross with them instead of flying over day after tomorrow to Bimini. Most of their gear was aboard. Kip had some kind of meeting at the last minute. Of course Kip didn’t know item one about seamanship, piloting and small-boat handling. Nor did Selma. But maybe four people wouldn’t get as...
He peered ahead from the top of a crest, saw a white object far ahead, too fleetingly to determine what it was before the glide into the trough cut off his view.
When they lifted again, he could not spot it. But the next time it was there again, and Junie said, “Isn’t that a little boat?”
“I think so.”
He took the binoculars out of the rack, couldn’t get focused on the object on the next lift, but managed a swift glimpse on the succeeding one.
“Small open boat,” he announced.
“Out in this!”
The spoked wheel kept turning as the automatic pilot kept searching and correcting. The distant boat would appear first a little off the port bow, then off the starboard bow, and he realized it was dead on course. He rehearsed the procedure he would follow, lock the pilot on a new course five degrees more southerly, check the time he made the change, and then when they were opposite it, return to course by giving it ten degrees more north for the same elapsed time, then put it back on his plotted compass direction. Or were you supposed to correct just five degrees and then...
He was reluctant to touch or change anything. He had tried some careful alterations in the rpm’s to see if she would ride easier, but succeeded only in alarming himself. At slower speed she had a tendency to fall off course. Faster, she merely made a more sickening crashing sound when she came off the crest. And he could not guess how she would react to even a minor course alteration. He decided to wait and see how close they might come to the smaller boat.
Soon he could see it at every crest, an open boat, a power boat twenty feet long, or a little longer, with a sleek hull, windshield, white topsides, and a green-blue hull lighter in shade than the strange blue of the Stream. The high sun made bright gleams on the metal fittings, the controls, the chromed windshield frame. She appeared to be floating light and high, bow to the wind, moving with a carefree grace to the long steep passage of the swells.
But it was dead in the water. With the glasses he saw it was equipped with two stern-drive units, both uptilted. He could not make out the name on the transom. The boat appeared to be empty. To his immediate relief, he saw that with no course alteration, it would go by on his port at least a hundred feet away. The wind and the Stream combined to drift it northwest.
“Hadn’t we ought to do something?” Junie asked.
“Do what? So it’s some drunk. He rigged a sea anchor and he’s sleeping it off. Or young lovers.”
She reached quickly and pressed the air horn button on the control panel. That sound, so huge when he would make the turn from the yacht club basin into the channel, sounded frail out here. In intense annoyance, he slapped her hand away.
“It’s a vessel in distress, isn’t it?” she demanded, her face pinched into an expression of indignant anger. “Or a derelict? Aren’t we supposed to do something? What if somebody is sick, like a heart attack?”
“Honey, you started the Power Squadron course. You didn’t finish the Power Squadron course. I finished the Power Squadron course. I am in command of this vessel.”
“Oh dear Jesus, Captain Bligh. I just mean...”
“I can see that she’s dragging some kind of bow line. I’d say it was an anchor line that maybe frayed, maybe right down at the anchor ring so she’s dragging enough so the line itself keeps her bow into the wind. So some careless damn fool loses his pretty little boat. So what if we try to come about? Ever think of that? Crossways on these swells, we’ll roll everything loose, and maybe coming about we get one of the breakers just right off the corner of the stern and we broach. Then what, baby? And do you want to be the one to try to get that line with a boat hook? And what if I judge it wrong and she punches a big son of a bitch of a hole in our hull? What I’ll do is report her position, and they’ll send a helicopter out of Lauderdale, or a cutter or something.”
“That name on it, Howard! Muñequita. Out of Brownsville, Texas?” Money-quit-ah, she pronounced it.
“What about it?”
“Howard, I swear I read something about that boat or heard something about that boat. Something in the news. Last week, maybe.”
“For God’s sake, June, you always want to make some kind of a big thing out of every little thing that happens.”
“An empty boat out here in the middle of the ocean? That’s such a little thing it’s practically nothing?”
It was abeam of them and they both stared at it. She took the binoculars from the rack, braced herself with one arm hooked around the back of the pilot seat. “Gee, Howard, it’s a pretty little boat, it really is. Like new.”
“I’ll go down and report it,” he said. He went down the ladderway carefully, anticipating the now-familiar movements of the HoJun. In the pilot house he checked the chronometer, figured the distance traveled, and, with his dividers, made an exact little prick mark on the penciled course line. He drew an X at that mark, then measured over to the chart border to get the exact position, latitude and longitude in degrees and minutes.
He rehearsed exactly how he would report it on the emergency channel. But he did not want to report it. He could guess that any skipper familiar with the Stream would have taken the boat in tow without a second thought. This was supposed to be a good day for a crossing.
“All right, Captain, why didn’t you take a look and see if anybody aboard needed help? That’s your obligation, you know.”
“Well, I was having a little trouble myself.”