Goddard lifted the bottle in a gesture that included all his rescuers, and said, “Cheers.” He took a small drink, felt it burn its way down his throat, and returned the bottle to Lind. One might prop him up for a few minutes, but two would drop him in his tracks. He looked around. Captain Steen was regarding him with pious disapproval from the doorway.
“You ought to be down on your knees thanking God,” he said, “instead of drinking that stuff.”
“Believe me, Captain, I was,” Goddard said. “When I saw your flare light off, it struck me that might be an appropriate spot for a little dialogue.”
It was obvious Steen regarded this as flippant, but he merely said, “Yes. Well, get some rest. Come up to my office tomorrow and we’ll get all the information for the log entries and reports.”
He disappeared, leaving grins and amused winks behind him. Somebody made a remark in a language Goddard didn’t understand; provoking laughter, and another said, “Who this guy better thank is that babe with the knockers. She was the one seen him.” This called forth a chorus of whistles, universal gestures, and cries of “Mamma mia!” and “Sweet Jesus!”
“All right, all right, that’ll do!” Lind’s voice, though good-humored, cut through the ribaldry with a parade-ground authority that brought silence.
It all seemed to Goddard to be coming from far away through a dreamlike and winy haze compounded of total exhaustion and the euphoria of alcohol and tobacco. He drew on a pair of shorts, took one more long drag on the cigarette, and reached toward the tray of food. “There’s a woman aboard?” he asked.
“Two,” Lind said. “It was Mrs. Brooke that sighted you. We’re a real gung-ho crowd on here; with a radar and a crew of thirty-eight, we find out from the passengers what’s going on.”
Goddard drained the glass of milk and put it down with elaborate care. He’d never been this drunk in his life. For an instant he was back there on the raft watching the ship draw away from him in the night, and it started to come for him. Gripping the pipe railing of the bunk so they couldn’t take it away from him, he looked up at the big mate with profound solemnity.
“Eternal vigilance,” he said, “is the watchword of the successful passenger, Mr. Lind. Suppose I’d swum over to a ship that didn’t carry any?”
He pitched forward. Lind caught him and stretched him out on the bunk.
He was aboard the raft in a kidney-shaped pool swinging the Jack Daniels bottle at a succession of sharks hurtling out of the water at him while a nude but faceless woman suntanned on a mattress at the pool’s edge, watching boredly and murmuring an occasional and indifferent olé. He awoke, thrashing and shiny with sweat. It was daylight, and heat was stifling inside the room. He saw the pipe bunks and blue bedspreads, and for a moment he was transported back across a quarter century and it was the fo’c’sle of the old Shoshone and he was an ordinary seaman again. He remembered then where he was—except, he thought sardonically, he didn’t know where he was, or even where he was going. Nobody had told him the name of the ship or where she was bound.
In effect, he mused, he was reborn, as innocent of information and at the moment as schooner-rigged as the standard day-old infant. He had on a pair of shorts somebody had given him and a Rolex watch as a legacy from the previous avatar that by all logic had ended when the ship started to go off and leave him in the night, and that was about it. He glanced at the watch. It said nine eighteen, which was the local apparent time of his longitude the day the Shoshone had gone down, and wouldn’t necessarily agree with the ship’s time, but it should be within an hour. Almost at the same moment he heard three bells strike. He set the watch to nine thirty; chronologically at least, he was now meshed with his new existence.
He was conscious of being ravenously hungry, and sat up, wondering if they had left the tray of food. Vertigo assailed him. The faintness and black spots passed in a moment, and he saw there was a bowl of fruit on the desk. He quickly peeled and ate two bananas and then an apple, and lighted a cigarette. He could get a complete hot breakfast simply by opening the door and letting them know he was awake, but he wanted to be alone a few minutes longer. It wasn’t every day you were reborn, and he’d like to examine the phenomenon. Of course, sitting here he wasn’t going to find out where he was bound, but that was unimportant; he found he didn’t care in the slightest.
The cigarette was making him light-headed again. Traditionally, he thought, life was supposed to take on some deep and newfound significance now that it had been given back to him. If it weren’t already in the script, somebody would bring it up at the first conference. I’m just spit-balling, fellas, but to me right here is the turning point for Liebefraumilch—we gotta find a better name for him, let’s make a note of that—not just some penny-ante resolution he’s gonna stop knocking back the sauce with both hands and screwing everything in sight, but I mean, you know, something big. Of course, he’s too old for the Peace Corps, unless there’s a change in the casting, and I’ve just heard from Bedfellow’s agent and he’s read the script and he’s ape for it.
Goddard’s thoughts broke off then, and he grinned, as he remembered what Lind had said. It was a passenger, a woman, who had sighted him, a Mrs.—Brooks? No, Brooke. And judging from the comment, she must be pretty, even after due allowance for the fact that among seamen this far from port, Tugboat Annie or a reasonably chic orangutan would arouse some lewd speculation. Fellas, believe me, I’m all for it—it’s a sweetheart of a gimmick—here’s our guy, he owes his life to this absolute doll with boobs you wouldn’t believe—but that’s just it. Nobody will believe it. It’s just too improbable, you with me? I mean, everybody knows on a ship you got all these sailors on lookout up there in the crow’s nest and on the yardarm and like that, so who’s going to buy it was just the doll that saw him? You’re right, Mannie, it would never work.
And anyway, Goddard thought, with another dizzying inhalation of smoke, I’ve already ruined the staging of the scene where they meet. Pommefrite—we gotta find a better name for him, let’s make a note of that—Pommefrite opens his eyes and she’s here in the room. It’s a two-shot; his viewpoint is her back, about three-quarters, so he can see her hands, and she’s filling a syringe very professionally from a vial with a rubber membrane. The second setup, of course, we get Pommefrite’s reaction: eccchhh! another needle-throwing dragon. She turns, radiantly beautiful, eyes right into the camera, widening a little and almost shy as she sees he’s awake—
The door opened a few inches and somebody looked in at him. “Oh, you’re up.” A sharp-faced man pushed the door on back and came in. “How do you feel?”
“Fine,” Goddard replied. “A little woozy yet. And hungry.”
“We’ll fix you up. I’m the chief steward. George Barset.”
They shook hands, and Barset asked, “How about a whole breakfast, ham and eggs and the works? Can you handle that?”
“Sure,” Goddard replied.
“How long was it? On the raft, I mean?”
“Less than three days.”
Barset grinned. “Well, you sure came up smelling of roses. I’ll be right back.” He went out.
Goddard brushed his teeth, and looked at himself in the mirror above the washbasin. Takes class, he told himself, to face something like that without a gun. All his face not covered with a mottled black and gray wire-brush of whiskers was burned a shiny red over the old tan, and skin was peeling from his ears. And note, gentlemen, that while this species of moose appears to have no antlers, this is not true at all, as even the most outstanding rack can be tastefully concealed in its hair. Whether this concealment is a symbolic castration forced on the bull by feminist and aggressive elements within the harem or whether he simply hopes with this camouflage to elude the constant demands for money has never been completely established.
Barset came back bearing a pot of coffee. “Here you go, Mr. Goddard. Rest of it’ll be along in a few minutes.”
“Thanks a lot,” Goddard said. He poured
a cup, black and very hot, and sipped it. He grinned. “Good coffee. It’s got authority.”
Barset lit a cigarette and sat down on the opposite bunk. “Where you from?”
“California,” Goddard replied. “I sailed from Long Beach about twenty-five days ago.”
“Where to?”
Goddard shrugged. “Marquesas, and on down through the islands. Australia, maybe. All ad lib.”
“Just alone, in a puddle-jumper? Not even a babe?” It was obvious this made no sense to the steward. “You going to write a book about it?”
“No,” Goddard replied, aware that by thus disavowing both sex and money as possible objectives he was leaving the other no alternative to the seaman’s blanket rationale for all types of exotic behavior: you don’t have to be crazy but it helps. “What ship is this? And where are we bound?”
“Leander,” Barset replied. “Manila and Kobe, from South America. Callao was the last port.”
He went on. She was under the Panamanian flag, but registry was the only thing about her connected with Panama; she was owned by Greeks and under charter to the Hayworth Line, with offices in London. She was built in 1944, reciprocating engine, single screw, and she’d be pushed to make thirteen knots downhill. Goddard began to form a picture of her, an old bucket verging on obsolescence as she shuttled around the Pacific basin from Hong Kong to Australia and the west coast of South America to the Philippines and Japan, able to compete with modern eighteen-knot freighters only with the aid of tax breaks and lower wages.
Captain Steen, known as Holy Joe, was scowegian, a Bible-pounder who got sidetracked and went to sea, a booze-hater and a nickel-squeezer. It was that big mate, Lind, who really ran the show; he’d go to bat for you, and Holy Joe didn’t impress him at all, but he was too good at his job for the skipper to get mad enough to fire him. The second mate was a Dutch-Indonesian type and the third mate was a young Swede.
The Filipino entered with a tray, and Goddard ate as Barset went on talking. He himself was American. He offered no explanation as to why he was on here, working for probably half of what he’d get as chief steward on an American ship, but Goddard was aware there could be any number of reasons for this—union trouble, woman trouble, or police trouble back in the States. In his speech and manner there were faintly discernible overtones of the wise guy, the promoter and angle-shooter, which were always the same no matter in which part of the jungle you ran into them.
“Do you carry many passengers?” Goddard asked.
Not many. They had accommodations for twelve, but it was pretty hard for an old pot like this to compete with those new freighters clipping it off at sixteen to eighteen knots with air-conditioned staterooms and fancy lounges. They had four at the moment, two men and two women.
One of the men was a Limey, but not a bad sort of Joe, about sixty-five, retired from Her Majesty’s Bengal Lawncers or something. He’d been living in BA, but apparently the Argentine inflation was getting to be too much for his pension so he was going to try the Philippines. The other man had a Brazilian passport, but must be some kind of Polack; his name was Krasicki. He’d been sick nearly ever since they’d sailed from Callao. Lind treated him, but hadn’t been able to find out what was wrong with him. A weirdo, anyway. Stayed shut in his cabin when the temperature was ninety degrees even out on deck, porthole closed, curtain drawn, like he couldn’t stand daylight. Seemed to sleep most of the day and stay up all night. Sometimes in the afternoon you’d hear him having a nightmare in there, yelling his head off. Kept a steamer trunk in his cabin with three padlocks on it. Honest to God, three. Reminded you of those store fronts in Lima when they closed down for siesta, padlocks all over the shutters like an overloaded mango tree.
One of the women was the widow of a retired U.S. navy captain. Fifty, around there, probably, but looked younger. Seemed to spend her time just knocking around the world on freighters, and she’d been everywhere at least once. A little on the Southern belle side, but a real savvy type and interesting to talk to. The other was younger, in her early thirties and a real looker, pleasant and friendly enough but played it cool and didn’t say much about herself. She was a widow too, in spite of being that young, but he didn’t know what had happened to her husband. She’d been working in Lima and was on her way to another job in Manila with the same company. He guessed it was pretty dull for them up there with just two old crocks in their sixties and one of them a kook who stayed crapped out in his cabin all the time. They’d be tickled pink to have another man aboard. Or was Goddard going to be up there?
“I don’t know,” Goddard said. “Be up to the skipper, I suppose.”
“You stay down here,” Barset said. “Holy Joe’ll probably want you to turn to with a chipping hammer.”
Barset’s trouble, Goddard thought, was that he was working entirely in the dark. There must be an angle here somewhere, if he could only find it; a man you fished naked out of the ocean a thousand miles from land was a consumer right out of a huckster’s dream, not only virginal but captive, but he was also an enigma. Another man up in the passenger country would mean more tips, of which no doubt Barset got his cut, plus the sale of drinks or bottled goods and possibly other services, but you had to know something of the prospect’s financial status. He was aware the other was using the two women as bait, but it had been just as obvious he’d kept himself severely under wraps in speaking of them. Any smirks or nudges could backfire on him disastrously if, for example, it developed the prospect was another Holy Joe, or for that matter, a fellow operator ready to embrace the fuller life with an unverifiable line of credit, and it wasn’t easy to pinpoint the cultural, moral, and socioeconomic background of a man whose only visible status symbols were a watch and somebody else’s underwear.
“What do you do for a living?” Barset asked, coming to the point at last.
“Nothing at the moment,” Goddard said. “I used to work in pictures. Writer. Producer.”
Barset came to attention. This was a live one, if he was telling the truth. “What pictures have you done?”
“Tin Can,” Goddard said. “The Amethyst Affair. And several others. The last one was The Salty Six.” And a bomb. A comedic idea that didn’t work.
“Hey, I saw Tin Can,” Barset said, excited. “Destroyers, in World War II. It was terrific. Well, look, you don’t want to stay down here in this dog-hole.”
Goddard shrugged. “Why not?” It would be interesting to live in the fo’c’s’le with working seamen again.
The Filipino boy, whose name was Antonio Gutierrez, was a good barber, an AB gave him a sport shirt, and one of the black gang the loan of an electric razor. His face was still raw from sun and salt, but he managed to mow off the crop without too much discomfort, and he looked considerably more presentable as he mounted to the boat deck shortly after eleven. He didn’t see anybody on the passengers’ deck as he passed it, but as soon as he finished with the skipper he’d look up Mrs. Brooke and express his thanks.
It was a beautiful morning, sunny and hot, with just enough breeze out of the southeast to put a slight chop on the long groundswell as the Leander plowed ahead across an infinity of blue. Looked a lot better from up here, too, he thought, with the throbbing sound of power from the engine room ventilators and a solid deck under his feet; no matter how much you liked the sea, there was such a thing as getting too close to it.
The third mate was walking the starboard wing of the bridge. The captain was up, he said, and his office was through the wheelhouse, the door on this side. Goddard nodded to the helmsman, and knocked on the facing of the door, which was open. “Yes?” a voice asked, and Captain Steen appeared. He was in tropical whites, the shirt having short sleeves and shoulder boards bearing four gold stripes. “Come in, Mr. Goddard.” He gestured toward a big armchair. “Sit down.” He was a gaunt, balding man with a solemn countenance, baby-blue eyes, and a long neck and prominent Adam’s apple, but to Goddard the impression was not so much the stern asceticism he had ex
pected as it was a sort of self-righteous stuffiness and lack of warmth.
There was another armchair, a threadbare rug, and a desk with a swivel chair in front of it. On the bulkhead above the desk were two framed photographs, one of a small, neat house set in the awesome beauty of a Norwegian fjord, and the other of a woman and two young girls. At the rear of the office another door opened into the stateroom. Captain Steen sat in the swivel chair and took notes as Goddard told him the story. It was obvious he disapproved of the whole thing.
“You realize you were very foolish,” he said. “It’s a wonder to me your coast guard allows it.”
Goddard pointed out that single-handed passages in small boats were commonplace by sailors of all maritime nations and sanctioned by yacht clubs, and that there had been a number of single-handed races across the Atlantic. There was a difference between a competent seaman going to sea in a sound boat and some nut going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. He stopped when he realized he was wasting his breath.
“But you did lose your boat,” Steen said. “And it’s just the Lord’s infinite mercy you’re alive. Your passport was lost too, I suppose?”
“Yes,” Goddard replied. “Somehow it didn’t seem important at the time.”
“Very unfortunate.” Steen frowned and tapped on the pad with his pencil. “There will be complications, you realize, and a great deal of red tape.”
Goddard sighed. “Captain, every maritime nation on earth has machinery for processing shipwrecked and castaway seamen.”
“Yes, I know that. But you are not a seaman, legally signed on the articles of a merchant vessel. To the Philippine authorities you will be simply an alien without identification, visa, or money. This places the company in the position of having to post bond.”
I’ll be a sad son of a bitch, Goddard thought. “I am sorry, Captain. I guess it was selfish and inconsiderate of me to swim over here and hail you that way.”
Captain Steen was pained, but forgiving. “I think you’ll agree that was uncalled for, Mr. Goddard. We are very happy to have been the instruments of Providence, but the formalities and red tape are something we have to take into account. Now, about your arrangements on here; you can continue in the hospital where your are now and eat with the deck crew’s mess, but you won’t be required to work your passage—”