Long Voyage Back

  look at the face. In the dim light from the aft cabin where Jeanne was still with Seth he could see little, but something looked strange. He asked Frank to shine a light over and then he saw: the man's face was disfigured with recent burns. Neil wondered if the whole boatload of attackers was equally disfigured.

  He briefly recited from memory the concluding verses from the Navy burial service and then rolled the man off the deck into the sea.

  At dawn Neil, sleeping in the back of the old wheelhouse area, was half-awakened by he knew not what. Lying on his back he had the vague feeling of still being in a dream. He was disoriented. In the dream he was lying where he was lying, and Jim was at the helm, and another figure, also himself it seemed, was seated a few feet away over on the port settee. The third figure in the wheelhouse was both himself and an intruder, and he struggled in his half-wakened state to determine who the other person was. In the dream the figure began to take on a more ominous emotional tone; Neil began to have that nightmarish feeling of struggling to awaken himself in order to deal with a nearby danger.

  He sat up with a groan, awake at last. Jim was standing facing forward at the wheel as in the dream, and to his left, seated with characteristic calm, was the thick small figure of Conrad Macklin. He was sipping a cup of tea.

  For a brief moment Neil felt himself back in the dream, then realized, with a sinking feeling, that he was facing reality. Conrad Macklin was back on board. He looked steadily at the man, who gazed back without expression.

  `Would you like some hot tea?' Macklin asked.

  `Where'd you come from?' Neil finally asked.

  Ì never really left,' Macklin answered. 'I stowed away in some sort of storage area up front.'

  `How did you get back aboard?'

  `Swam out, mostly underwater, right after you put me ashore,' Macklin replied. 'Pulled myself up the anchor line as you were loading the last group on to the dinghy.'

  Neil continued to look at Macklin coldly, then released a long sigh. À man is wounded,' he said. 'I suppose you'd better look at him.'

  `Good,' said Macklin.

  Ì doubt it,' said Neil.

  An hour later, awake but with his eyes closed, he realized that all night long, even before the dream of Macklin, something had been missing, something he ought to be feeling but was not. Vagabond was cutting cleanly through the blue waters; dead ahead the sun now sparkled like diamonds on the whitecaps. He had escaped to sea; the horrors of land were receding. At such times he should feel elated. But he wasn't. Something within him must be telling him that this time there was no escape: the tentacles of land had reached out and even now lay heavily on his deck. He was at sea, but that ninety-eight-cent lump of land called 'man' was still with him.

  Part Two

  ASHES

  The moon, now almost three-quarters full, lit the sea to the left of Vagabond like a giant nightlight. It was after midnight and Neil had enjoyed the last hour more than any since they'd fled the Chesapeake three days before. After two seemingly endless days during which they had been mostly becalmed, and gloom from the radio news hung over them like an invisible shroud, Vagabond was now rushing through the night at eleven or twelve knots, and Neil was feeling that exhilaration which for him only a sailing boat tearing through the sea at night could give.

  Behind were three trails of phosphorescent white bubbling out so fast it seemed Vagabond must be doing twenty knots, no matter what the speedometer read. Ahead Neil could see almost nothing. The trimaran charged into the blackness as if totally confident that nothing could harm her queenly being.

  They were now about a hundred miles east of the North Carolina coast and Neil held his course at due south by lining up a cluster of stars that made up Orion's belt with the port upper shroud. He had let Jim and Lisa, whose official watch it was, continue sleeping rather than wake them for their midnight to three A.M. watch. Vagabond, plunging forward through the night, was just on the edge of being over-canvassed, and Neil kept checking to feel if the wind were getting too strong for the sail area up. So far it hadn't and part of his joy arose from the feeling that he, Vagabond, the wind and the sea were in total attunement.

  With sea conditions moderate, he had been able to adjust the mizzen so that Vagabond was steering herself. He could wander out of the wheelhouse into either cockpit to stare at the stars or watch the moonlight on the sea, and Vagabond, like a giant puppy unleashed and glorying in a midnight romp, galloped forward by herself through the night. At moments like this she seemed as human as he, and he loved her, urged her on in his mind, congratulated her when, after an errant wave had pushed her bow off course, her mizzen slowly pushed her rear end around to get her back on course. All the troubles of the day were flushing away in Vagabond's bubbling wake. Although the familiar grey cloud masses which had seemed to be permanently pursuing them had dissipated two days earlier, Neil, Frank and 01ly had all suffered from radiation sickness. Frank was still nauseous and sick after three days and 01ly still suffered from diarrhoea. Although the men had told the others it was seasickness, they all knew that none of them was ever seasick except in exceptionally bad seas. Neil himself had been queasy for two days and once - only he knew it had happened - vomited off the aft deck. His sickness frightened and depressed him, but on this third day appeared to be gone. In addition, listening to reports of the war had been a depressing and divisive experience. Although a Pentagon spokesman that morning had made a long, vague report about the vast devastation wreaked upon the Soviet Union, about a great naval victory in the Indian Ocean, about the grudging way Allied forces gave ground in what was left of Europe; the idea that the US might win the war seemed irrelevant in the face of a report that most of the population east of Cleveland, north of Philadelphia, and south of Boston was fleeing from the effects of the war - lack of food, water, electricity, and the reality and fear of radioactive fallout. It was implied that half the northeast might soon be uninhabitable for all except a tenth of the former population. Other sections of the country were equally endangered. How people were evacuating when all fuel was requisitioned by the military and the public transportation network had ceased to exist was not explained.

  `They're jogging,' Frank had commented, not mentioning

  that his wife and daughter might still be alive and part of the fleeing millions. Neil wandered to the back of the cockpit to adjust the drag on the trolling rig jammed in place there. Although they rarely hooked anything at night, especially at ten knots, Neil had asked 0lly to try. As he set the drag and checked the feel of it, he remembered that it was Jeanne who had finally got them out of their oppressive moods. Earlier that evening she had browbeaten them into a singalong. It had started out as lugubriously as mourners at a funeral, but ended with giddy silliness. Captain 0lly taught them a blatantly obscene sea shanty and, though Lisa blushed, little Skippy sang along loudly, and triggered the last burst of laughter by announcing that he liked songs about pussies. Pressing the rod back into place Neil smiled at the memory. The world of the last several days was one emotional somersault after another: the gloom of thinking about the war and personal losses alternating with the delights of sailing or of eating their meagre meals or bringing in a fish. He wished he could control the lows. In the Chesapeake they had endured seemingly hourly threats to their survival, but now, ninety miles from land, he felt it was his task to create for them a new world of more order, routine and dependability. As he returned to lean against the entrance of Frank's cabin and look forward, he thought of his watch teams.

  Frank and Tony, 01ly and Macklin, and Jim and Lisa were now working out well. At first he'd tried Tony with 01ly, figuring 01ly might need Tony's extra strength, but it hadn't worked. Tony was a huge athletic man of twenty-eight, outgoing, ebullient, used to running things - a former football star and successful salesman. He'd had trouble getting along with 011y. Although 011y never appeared to order Tony, he as naturally assumed control of Vagabond as he had of Lucy Mae. He treated Tony as a minor tool,
a winch handle perhaps, and didn't tend to listen when the winch handle spoke. Once when Tony finished a brilliant analysis of

  why loosening the genoa sheet and altering course three degrees had increased their speed a half-knot, Olly responded with a brief silence, a puff on his unlit pipe, and the suggestion to Tony to tighten up on the genoa a bit and alter course three degrees back again. At the end of their first day at sea Tony had taken Frank aside to complain. 'The old guy's senile,' he said off in the port cockpit after Olly had retired into the aft cabin to nap. 'I don't think he relates to people any more.'

  Ònly when he wants to,' Frank had replied.

  `He spent an hour on watch today talking about the various positions he used in screwing his third wife. Claimed there were twenty-seven and began mumbling and swearing when he could only remember twenty-two.'

  Frank smiled. 'You get a free stand-up comic every watch,' he said. Ì don't want a stand-up comic,' Tony exploded. 'I want to talk with someone who speaks English.'

  Ì'll take it up with Neil,' Frank said.

  `Why the hell can't you change the watches?' Tony went on. 'You own the boat, don't you?'

  Ì own it,' Frank replied evenly. 'And Neil is captain. I'll speak to him.'

  `Let me work with you,' Tony said. `Macklin is exactly the quiet sort that 01ly will love.'

  `You're probably right,' Frank had said, smiling, and, when he had reported the conversation, Neil had laughed and changed the watch teams as suggested. Jim and Lisa were an unexpected gift. Lisa hopped around the boat with the nimbleness of a cat, and although she had to be reminded to wear a life jacket when she went forward to change a sail, she otherwise followed orders quickly and well. Intensely serious most of the time, she seemed to glow when working with Jim, as if the physical work liberated her from her seriousness.

  For a moment Neil was brought out of his reverie by the appearance of a light off the port bow but decided it was just

  the moonlight reflecting off a distant whitecap. He wandered from the starboard cockpit through the wheelhouse with its unattended wheel to the port side to get a better look and to take a piss off the aft deck. As he approached he was startled to see a head and shoulders silhouetted against the reflection of the moonlight on the water. It was Jeanne's profile, silent and motionless compared to the swirling, rushing rollercoaster ride of Vagabond through the ocean.

  He stopped unnoticed a few feet away and looked with her out over the water, the night breeze stirring her long hair away from her face.

  Òh!' she said, turning her face as she became aware of his presence. Ìncredible, isn't it?' he asked softly.

  She turned away again to look out at the river of moonlight that sparkled across the ocean towards them from the east. `Yes,' she said.

  Neil stood close behind her, steadying himself with his right arm on the wheelhouse roof and smiling, in love with Vagabond, the sea, the night, the moon.

  `Who's steering?' Jeanne asked, turning briefly back to him, her face obscured with her back to the moon.

  ' Vagabond,' he answered. 'She told me she wanted to handle things herself for a while.'

  Jeanne rose slightly to stare past him into the wheelhouse and saw the unattended wheel. Then she looked up at the sails and aft at the three white rivers of light bubbling out behind them. Finally she looked back at Neil. 'Amazing,' she said. Às long as there are wind, sails, and sea, the world won't be all bad,' he said.

  `For you,' she commented.

  `For me,' he agreed quietly.

  Ì'm still not comfortable out here,' she said. 'The idea that there's a mile of water beneath me and no dry land within a hundred miles is a little terrifying. I'm sorry.'

  Ìf it weren't a little terrifying,' Neil replied after a pause, ìt wouldn't be so beautiful.'

  She too took a time before commenting. Tor a while I thought you weren't emotional about anything,' she said.

  Ì guess I'm not,' he replied. 'Except about the sea.'

  `Millions can die but a good wind cures all,' she said, not sarcastically but rather questioningly, as if trying to understand him.

  Ìf I can't save the millions,' Neil replied cautiously, 'then I'm willing to enjoy a good wind.'

  Tut what if you can?' she countered.

  `Then I'd like to know how.'

  She turned away and stared out into the darkness. 'No, the millions are lost,' she finally said. 'And I have to admit you're good at saving the single digits.'

  Neil remained standing behind her, the magic of the moment now lost in the awareness of the world's problems flooding in.

  À ship's no place for children,' Jeanne went on quietly. Èspecially with reduced rations

  . . . no definite destination . . . people sick . . . their whole previous lives . . . gone forever . . Ì know,' Neil said, 'but children who've just . . . lost their father, seen their mother beaten up, been struck on the head with a gun, aren't likely to be comfortable in any new place.' He paused. Tut Lisa's doing great out here,' he went on. `Skippy will too. Give him time.'

  Ì suppose so,' she said. Tut the portions of food you're letting us serve are so pathetically small it's frightening.'

  Ì know,' Neil said, having to grab the back of Jeanne's settee when a swell sent him staggering. 'But just ask yourself how you're going to feed Skippy two weeks from today.

  '

  She grimaced, nodded, and finally managed a small smile.

  Ì keep forgetting that the next supermarket may be a decade away.'

  Ìf we're lucky,' Neil replied. The radio reports made it

  clear that back on the mainland supermarkets had ceased to exist even in the untouched areas. Everything - even in the farm regions - was being confiscated and rationed by the military. Food was going to be their major worry for a long, long time. He and Jeanne had created an emergency food kit on their second day at sea, good for ten days, he figured, at half-rations, but not counting that emergency cache they had enough food even at their present low rate of consumption for only four or five more days. Catching fish was their key to survival.

  A random wave slapped loudly at the speeding hull and sent a fine spray up over them in the cockpit. As he stood there he suddenly felt a strong sense of Jeanne's fear and loneliness.

  I'm afraid stability and the familiar are gone forever,' he said quietly. She was still looking out over the sea. 'Even on land there's no place left to stand,' she said in a low voice.

  In a shattering rush Neil was aware of her as a woman, filled with the desire to hold her, protect her, care for her. He released his grip on the wheelhouse roof and took a stride towards her just as an unexpected swell lifted Vagabond's port hull and then lowered it with a slam, sending Neil tumbling forward and down on to Jeanne. After clutching her right thigh to steady himself he ended up seated beside her on the cockpit seat.

  `What's happening?' she asked him urgently. 'Are you all right?'

  Neil laughed softly. He could see her face clearly for the first time in the moonlight. Her bruise was almost gone and she looked beautiful.

  I wanted to come over and comfort and protect you,' he said, smiling. 'Instead I almost knocked you overboard.'

  Gazing wide-eyed at him, she took a while to absorb what he'd said. 'Maybe you'd better get us life jackets,' she commented, smiling.

  For Neil the world was reduced to her eyes gleaming in the

  moonlight. He pulled her gently against holding her head and hair against the side of his face, simply holding her close. He only noticed the stiffness of her initial response when he felt her suddenly sag against him, relax and sigh.

  Òh, Neil,' she said, and he felt her arms tighten around his back, her powerful hug surprising him. After a long moment they released the strength of their embrace and Jeanne pulled back her head to look with her large glowing eyes into his. Their faces then came together as slowly and inevitably and perfectly as Vagabondcorrecting her course; their lips touched, wetted, parted, kissed. Neil lost track of time and
place and when the kiss ended and Jeanne gasped for breath he instinctively glanced at the sails and sea to assure himself that his ship was still on course.

  Jeanne sighed. 'Well,' she said, blinking her eyes and looking a little dazed. 'Well.'

  `How beautiful you are,' said Neil.

  She looked up at him uncertainly. 'Hold me,' she said, coming into his arms again, her face against his.

  `NEIL! . . . NEIL!'

  When Jim's voice invaded their world with cruel suddenness Neil released Jeanne and stood up.

  Òver here, Jim,' he said, looking into the wheelhouse and dimly seeing Jim standing at the wheel looking for him.

  Òh, there you are,' Jim said, rubbing his eyes. 'I just came up to go on watch and saw no one at the wheel and panicked.'

  `Vagabond's sails are balanced,' he said, remaining near Jeanne. 'She's self-steering.'

  `Really? That's fantastic,' Jim said, coming towards Neil. Ìsn't it about time for me to take the helm. I thought you said . . . Oh! . . . Hi, Jeanne.'

  `Hi, Jim,' Jeanne said.

  Ìt's about twelve-thirty,' Neil said, glancing at his watch. `Since Vagabond was doing the job by herself I thought I'd let you and Lisa sleep.'

  `Thanks,' said Jim. 'Wow. Look at that moon.'

  Neil turned to follow Jim's stare out to the east, his eye just meeting Jeanne's briefly. Ìt's quite a night,' Neil agreed.

  Ì feel great,' said Jim. 'I think I needed the extra sleep.' `Do you want me to fix you some coffee?' Jeanne asked. Òh, no, I'm fine,' said Jim. 'Besides, Neil says we can't have any coffee at night except under pressure conditions.' `Pressure conditions"?'

  Jeanne inquired, looking up at

  Neil.

  Ì think it means no coffee unless we're sinking,' said Jim, grinning. Ì doubt we'll be able to get any more coffee unless we end up in South America,' Neil commented with his usual seriousness. 'It's now a delicacy. Sorry.'

  Òur Captain Bligh,' said Jeanne, smiling.