“Indeed? What sort of trouble?”
“I... I was losing a little pressure on the starboard engine. Anyway, we went close enough to it to be certain there wasn’t anybody aboard.”
“Certain there was no one in the bunks below?”
But it probably wouldn’t be like that at all. It was just a boat that had slipped its moorings somehow. And how much could they ask of you anyway?
As he turned he saw June come scrabbling dangerously down the ladderway, clutching and lurching. She had the binoculars hung around her neck. He winced as he saw them swing and whack solidly against the hand rail. He was about to tell her exactly what they had cost when he saw the frantic expression on her face.
“A hand! We’ve got to go back, darling! We’ve got to do something.”
“A what? Make sense!”
“I saw it with the glasses. It came up and held onto the edge and then it let go. A little hand. A child’s hand. We’ve got to do something.”
Howard Prowt clambered heavily but swiftly up to the fly bridge. She was beside him when he took it out of automatic pilot. Try to get it around quickly, or ease it around? Maybe a little of both. Ease it slowly until it begins to wallow in the trough, then reverse the port engine and kick it around and gun it to get out of the way of the following wave.
Twice he brought it almost parallel with the swells, but the alarming motion caused him to head back into the wind. He resolved to do it on the third try. He got it into the trough and when she heeled over further than he would have thought possible, and when he heard a thudding and crashing below, he ran it back up into the wind again.
“At that distance, with both boats jumping all over the goddam ocean, you saw one hand?”
“I did!”
“You saw an end of a rag flap over the gunnel for a moment. Something like that.”
“Can’t we turn around?”
“It isn’t a case of can’t. Sure. But why crash a lot of gear around below because you’ve got that imagination of yours?”
Suddenly she turned away from him, lurched, grabbed the rail, hunched over it and was spasmed by nausea, the sea wind whipping at her damp hair. He eased the HoJun back onto course and locked it into pilot, checked his gauges. He looked at her, at the brown hide and slender legs of his life-long wife, at the regular pulsations of nausea which shook her body, and, to his mild astonishment, felt desire for her. It was an obscure and shameful pride that at a time and place so incongruous, this notion, impossible to fulfill, should come to him. Maybe it can happen from being scared, he thought, of thinking of yourself drowning and dying here in this big blue mess, and it’s a way of telling yourself you’re alive.
When she was through, he went below to put his call in. In the main cabin the television set had fallen out of its brackets and lay face down on the carpeting. The radio set had shifted. He turned it on. It would not light up. He could not send. Then he saw where the cable had been pulled out of the chassis.
Howard Prowt went up and told her. He looked astern, and he could not spot the drifting boat. The water was changing to a new color, to a blue that was mixed with green and gray. To the southeast he saw a southbound tanker. They were out of the Gulf Stream. The motion was easing. They were on course.
She seemed very subdued, and he glanced sidelong at her from time to time to see how angry she was. But it was a remote expression he could not read.
“Junie, honey, it’s only by a freak of chance we ever came close enough to that boat to see it.”
“I suppose.”
“I mean, we wouldn’t be expected to see it.”
“Howard, what are you driving at?”
“Honey, on a thing like this, there can be a lot of red tape. I mean it could get us hung up in Bimini, or maybe even having to go back and fill out a lot of reports. You understand, if I was absolutely convinced you saw what you thought you saw, wild horses couldn’t have kept me from getting to that boat.”
“Yes, Howard.”
“And I can’t help what happened to the transmitter.”
“I guess not.”
“All in all, I think the wisest course is that we forget we ever saw that boat. We wouldn’t want to spoil anything, you know, like for Kip and Selma.”
“We wouldn’t want to spoil anything,” she said, and went over to begin a careful descent of the open ladderway.
“Is that okay with you?” he called.
“Is what okay?”
“To just forget it happened?”
“Sure. Sure,” she said and backed out of sight. A moment later her face reappeared and she said, “I busted the binoculars.”
“Accidents will happen aboard ship. Don’t give it a second thought. I got the old ones aboard, those surplus ones.”
Later, in calm water, he called her up to the flying bridge. When she stood beside him, he said, “Land Ho, and right on the button. Look at that range marker on shore. By God, we could damn near run that channel without taking her out of pilot.”
“Very good, dear.”
“Look at all the crazy colors in that water off the bar there.”
“It’s beautiful.”
Her lean hand rested atop the instrument panel. He covered it with his and said, “That’s Bimini, old lady. And bank on this — the Prowts and the Heaters are going to have one hell of a month of fun.”
For a long time she did not answer. She slowly withdrew her hand. “It’s going to be a ball,” she said without smile or inflection. “Tell me when you want me to take a line forward.” She climbed back down to the cockpit deck.
Howard Prowt cut off the pilot and took over manual control, cutting his speed another increment as he headed for the channel. Always, coming into harbor after a good job of navigation, he had that Horatio Hornblower feeling, grizzled and sea-tough and with a look of far places.
He reached for that feeling, and for an anticipation of all the courses he would run, all the expertise he would bring back to Delmar Bay one month hence, but he could find neither.
He merely felt old. And his legs felt tired. And his gut felt uneasy. And he wished he were back sitting on the bank of Heron Bayou with a cold beer in his hand, and the HoJun tied to his own dock in that tricky way he had devised all by himself.
Damn her anyway.
Chapter Two
Staniker, on an ever-lasting afternoon, fought off the dreams and the visions. There was some kind of a Thing, some tantalizing entity which kept launching them at him to see how he’d make out. That time in South America when they’d gone after those lunker trout in the mountain lake, those Indios had those light nets they could throw, float them out very pretty.
Dreams came like the nets, something throwing them at him, floating down to lay like cobwebs across his mind. So then each time he had to pluck off every strand. There was a way to do it. You focused on some real thing, close at hand. The sheath knife, rusting with an astonishing speed. Could you measure the days by the way the rust grew? Think of the knife and you could pluck away one strand. Look at the pile of empty shells of the sea-things you had eaten, had pried off the ragged black rocks at low tide, smashed with stones, trying to save the juice to suck before eating the creature. Look at the crude sticks and poles some forgotten Bahamian fisherman had assembled long ago for rough shelter on this empty island, and at your own additions, poles above and a clumsy thatch for shade from each day’s interminable passage of the sun. Roll over, wincing at the pain of it, and lift your head and look out across the hot white glare of the sand flats of South Joulter Cay, where you had tried to stamp the big arrow and the H E L P, because all the Nassau-Miami flights passed over here, just a little bit south, not too far south. But the white dry loose sand would not take a message, and when you put it in the packed wet sand, the tide would take it away. Look out toward the channel and remember that this was a popular place for the private boats which came flocking over from Florida in May, listed attractively in the Cruising Guide, and it was just one of those weird coincidences that not one had come by. Look over where those brackish pools are, and remember the oily and stagnant taste of the water, and wonder if the fever and the dreams came from the water or from the burns. Look at the outside of the right arm and shoulder, at the outside of the right thigh and calf where the deeply tanned skin had blistered, cracked, sloughed loose, and now suppurated and stank.