Far better the grotesquerie of disbelief, the absurd search, Don Quixote with bull horn and Japanese binoculars, peering and braying across the ten-thousand-year silence of the shallow Bank, giving not a damn for image, for impression, for status of any kind.
And I care too much, he thought. So much that I blush for a kind of madness I should cherish. So much I have pressured them all — Leila, Lydia Jean, Boy-Sam — trying to turn them into Carolyn Coopers and fellows full of sleek and watchful assurance...
The room phone rang and he went in, closing the glass door, to tell Stanley Moree he had a firm contract and Jonathan would join him at the boat. He then ordered food to be brought up to the room. After he had eaten, he listened again to Lulu Hilger’s voice in a sequence which interested him.
“I was watching over him. Bill and Bert were topside. Francie had been with me, but it made her too nervous watching him. And there was an unpleasant smell where the burns on his arm were infected, even after Bill Barth had dressed them, and Francie is always just a little queasy when she stays below in any kind of a sea. It never bothers me.
“He was sleeping, but he would thrash around sometimes and groan and mumble. Bill took his temperature before, and it was over a hundred and two. And his pulse was very fast. I wondered if he was getting more fever. I was sitting on the foot of the bunk. I leaned way over and hitched closer and put the back of my hand against his forehead. He gave kind of a convulsive jump and grabbed my arm just above the elbow. He sat right up, staring at me and breathing hard. I can’t remember exactly what he said. He had terrible strength in his hand. I think I almost fainted from the pain. See? I’ll have these bruises for weeks. He called me Christy. He seemed to be pleading with me to understand something. And like he was almost in tears about it. He was saying something like, ‘It wasn’t that way! You’ve got to understand that, Christy. You’ve got to help me. You’ve got to.’ He seemed terribly agitated. Then he slumped back suddenly, letting go of me. He was breathing very deeply and very fast. His eyes were closed. His face was covered with beads of sweat.
“I had some lavender-flavored rubbing alcohol, and I sopped a little hand towel with it and swabbed his face off, keeping it away from his eyes. His breathing slowed down. Then he opened his eyes and he was himself and he knew who I was. I asked him who I was. I said he’d called me Christy.”
“What was his reaction to that, Mrs. Hilger?”
“I guess it scared him to know he’d been out of his head. It would scare anybod—”
“No. I mean exactly what did he do and say?”
“At first he didn’t say anything. He closed his eyes. He pushed my hand away from his face. Not roughly. Just slowly and gently. Then he asked what he’d said. I said he was trying to make Christy understand something and he was asking her for help. I said that people in delirium don’t make sense. I said he was just a little wilder this time.”
“And there was a special reaction then?”
“I don’t know what you mean by special, Mr. Boylston. He seemed surprised. ‘This time?’ is what he said, lifting his head off the pillow. I told him that the other times he was just moaning and thrashing and mumbling.”
“How soon after that did he go into convulsions?”
“It wasn’t long after that. Four minutes. Five. It scared me half to death. I thought he was dying. I know what I should have done, but I didn’t know it then. You’re supposed to wedge something across their teeth, as far back as you can get it, so they won’t chew their tongue to ribbons. I ran and yelled to Bill and he came hurrying down. By then Captain Staniker was quiet again. Asleep or unconscious. He was like that without any change when they took him off and put him in the ambulance.”
He put the tape on fast wind, all the voices sounding like a nest of agitated mice, and, with a couple of pushes on the rewind button, located the resonant and antagonistic baritone of Bert Hilger, plumbing contractor and owner of the Chris-Craft named Docksie. He numbered himself among the boat-people. Sam Boylston was an outsider. A batch of boat-people had been lost at sea, and he resented technical questions from someone who did not know the bilge from the binnacle, yet was compelled to answer because of the familiar gratification of imparting expertise.
“Check and check and check again,” he said. “You stay healthy if you don’t depend on the gadgets, Boylston. You mistrust them every minute. Duplicate everything and check the gadgets against each other. I run on gas, so I got two sniffers in the bilge, independent of each other. But before I make a run I still crawl down there and hold a cup with a few drops of gas in it next to the probes to make sure the buzzers and blinkers work on both of them. I’m wired for separate electric on both engines, independent fuel supply, and I watch fuel consumption, battery levels, rate of charge like an eagle. I check the compasses against each other and against the charts. I got two big hooks rigged so I can drop them fast if I get into trouble. I listen to every piece of weather I can find on the dial. I carry spare wheels and a wheel puller. Hell, things have gone wrong. Things always go wrong. But if you don’t trust anything, you don’t get into bad trouble. When the sea is building, you’ll find the Docksie in a protected anchorage with all the water and supplies we need to wait it out.”
“Then you think the Muñeca should have had a detection device for gas fumes.”
“The question doesn’t mean anything. She was diesel. If I was diesel and had a gasoline generator and gas cans of fuel for it below decks, I would have had a sniffer. Some perfectly sound boat owners I know wouldn’t have. Most of them, maybe. It’s how careful you want to be.”
“Suppose Staniker was at anchor and wanted to turn on the generator.”
“Then without even thinking about it he would have opened some hatches and run the blower first. He wasn’t some Kansas clown on his first cruise, you know. He was running, and when you’re running you don’t think of any accumulation of fumes in the bilge, not with a diesel, because you’ve got air movement through the bilge. You pick it up with a bow ventilator arrangement and it runs through and comes out somewhere near your transom. But the way I see it, he ran into a freak situation. He had a following wind and sea at about the same knots he was making. So he was running with dead air below. It wasn’t moving.”
“And the explosion that blew him into the water could have ignited his diesel fuel?”
“I wouldn’t know about that. As I understand it, compression creates heat, and I’ve seen some of those custom jobs they make for heavy duty work up there in North Carolina. They’re solid. Any fuel has a flash point. Put enough heat on it all of a sudden, and it will go. And if it did, the only place anybody would have a chance would be if they were on the fly bridge. And even then you’d get seared pretty good, the way he did.”
“Does it seem odd to you that no other boat saw the fire?”
“Why should it? Let me show you on the chart here. He was north of Andros according to the approximate position he gave me, up beyond North Goulding Cays far enough so no one would see him from Morgan’s Bluff, Nicholl’s Town or Mastic Point. He was moving in toward coral head areas, and it was night, and nobody who didn’t know how to sneak through there, as he did, would be well clear of it, way out in this area, far enough away so they’d see a glow, but if they did, the normal guess would be some kind of fire on shore.”
“Mr. Hilger, could you show me a few other places on this chart where it would be the same sort of situation, I mean where a fire at sea would attract so little attention?”