Gulf coast girl: original title, Scorpion reef

  Oddly, it wasn’t fear I felt now that it was actually here. It was rage—a strange, hopeless, terrible sort of anger I’d never felt before. I turned and looked at her, thinking how it could have been if they had just left us alone. She was all I’d wanted since the first time I’d seen her. I hadn’t asked for anything else, and she hadn’t asked for anything except a chance to live, and now they were going to take it all away from us. I was shaking.

  I turned and hurried back to her. “Go forward,” I said. “Lie down on deck, against the forward side of the cabin. Stay there. If anything happens to me, you can raise the jib alone. Just the jib. Keep running before the wind in a straight line and you’ll hit the coast of Mexico or Texas—”

  “No,” she whispered fiercely. “No—”

  I peeled her arms loose and pushed her. “Hurry!” She started to say something more, looked at my face, and turned, running forward. She stepped up from the cockpit and went along the starboard side of the cabin, stumbling once and almost falling.

  It was like a black wind blowing. I knew I didn’t have a chance, but all I wanted now was to get my hands on one of those guns for just two seconds. Maybe she could make it to land alone. They’d kill me, anyway, so I had nothing to lose. I was tired of being run over in traffic.

  I had to hurry. They’d be coming up any minute. I slipped forward and stood on the deck, looking down the hatch.

  “Surf!” I yelled. “Surf, ho!”

  When they were both on the steps I’d dive down on top of them. All three of us would go down in one tangle in that narrow space between the settees, three of us with two guns in an area not quite as wide and a little longer than a casket. Then, in all the foaming craziness some detached part of my mind wondered quite calmly how a girl alone would ever get us out of there. She’d be a week reaching land, maybe ten days. She’d go mad. They were starting up. Barclay was coming first. I didn’t dive.

  “Surf!” I yelled again. I pointed.

  He came up on deck, his head starting to turn in the direction I was pointing. I swung. It kept on turning, and I felt his jaw break, and then his whole body pivoted and went off balance and the sloop rolled to starboard and he went over the side. I was falling, too, across the open hatch, across the head and shoulders of Barfield emerging from the hatch, like dropping across the arms of a rising grease rack or the top of an ascending freight elevator that didn’t stop or even slow down at the impact but just kept on coming up.

  He was a bull. He came erect on the top step before he toppled at last and fell. We crashed to the deck and when the sloop rolled down to port we hung poised over the rail with blue water slipping by just under my face. For some reason we didn’t go overboard, but rolled in one straining tangle onto the cockpit seat and then down onto the grating. A big fist beat at my face. I tried to get my hands around his throat. He heaved upward and we rolled over in the space between the seats. The gun was in his hip pocket. He had it out and was swinging it at my face. I caught his wrist. The gun went off as I got my other hand on his wrist and twisted. It slid out of his hand and kicked along the grating.

  He hit me on the temple and my head slammed back against the planks. He was coming to his knees, groping behind him for the gun. I tried to push myself up, and then beyond him I saw her. She ran along the deck and dropped into the cockpit. I opened my mouth to yell at her, but nothing came out. Or maybe I did yell and my eardrums were still paralyzed by the crashing of the gun. Everything was happening in an immense silence and slow motion, as if we were three bits of something caught and held suspended in cooling gelatin. She picked up the gun and was swinging it at his head. He should have fallen, but it had no more effect on him than a dropped chocolate Eclair. He heaved upward, lashing out behind him with one big arm. She fell, and her head struck the coaming at the forward end of the cockpit. I came to my feet and lunged at him and we fell over and beyond her onto the edge of the deck just as the sloop rolled again and we slid over the side into the water.

  We went down through warm greenness, still struggling and almost completely oblivious to the fact of having moved our hatred from one element to another. The propeller rumbled past, scattering white bubbles like dust. One of his arms was still locked around my neck and he was trying to swing with the other, the blows softened and slowed down by the water. Neither of us made any attempt to break and swim to the surface. I could see the flat slab of a face inches from mine, and tried to get my hands back at his throat. We went on down, turning slowly like a big pinwheel. Then he jerked with sudden spasm and the arm around my neck clamped tighter, with something wild and frantic about it now. I brought my feet up and put them against him and pushed. It felt as if my head were being pulled off. My lungs hurt. I knew I was going to inhale in a minute, and that he already had. I kicked at him once more and my head came free and I shot toward the surface.

  I came out into sunlight and sparkling blue, and sobbed for air. I shook water from my face and breathed in again, shuddering, feeling my lungs swell with it. He hadn’t come up yet. I turned, searching the water for him. A gentle ground swell lifted me and I came down into the trough as it passed. Seconds went by, and I knew he wasn’t coming up. He’d had the breath knocked out of him when we hit the deck, just before we slid overboard, and he’d drowned down there.

  I could hear the boat’s engine behind me, fainter now, and I turned to see which way it was circling. I stared. It wasn’t turning. It was two hundred yards away, going straight ahead for Yucatan with nobody at the helm. I didn’t see her anywhere. She’d been knocked out when she fell. And I had lashed the tiller.

  I started to cry out, but stopped. Even if she were conscious she couldn’t hear me above the noise of the engine. The boat was already too far away. I was utterly helpless; there was nothing I could do at all. If she didn’t regain consciousness and start back before she’d gone too far she’d never find me.

  I reached down mechanically and started taking off my dungarees and slippers.

  I was calm now, after the crazy, foaming rage had gone away, and I looked at it with complete objectivity. It just wasn’t intended to be. We’d been doomed from the start. There was something inexorable about it; it was what mathematicians called an infinite series with a limiting factor. Add .1 and .01 and .001 and .0001 and so on and on forever until you’d worn out all the adding machines on earth and you’d never reach 1.

  My head jerked suddenly erect and I looked around, wondering if I had lost my mind. What I had heard was a gunshot, and ten feet off to my left something had gone chu-wuuug! into the side of a ground swell. It was insane. The stern of the Ballerina was receding in the distance and I was alone in a blue immensity of gently heaving, sunlit water and calm, empty sky, and somebody had spliced the sound track of a western movie onto it. I had forgotten all about Barclay.

  He came to the surface of the sea forty yards away. He was drowning—drowning in a waterlogged tweed jacket with a gun in his hand as if he would no more have parted with either of them than he would have condescended to notice the existence of the Gulf of Mexico when he was busy trying to kill me. I forgot even to be afraid, watching him. It was fantastic.

  He would go under. The gun would reappear first, held above his head, and then his face, the broken jaw agape and water running out of his mouth. He would calmly tilt the gun barrel down to let the water run out so it wouldn’t explode when he fired, and then he’d shoot. His aim was wild because of his exertions to keep himself afloat long enough to fire. The bullet would ricochet off a swell and go screaming into the blue emptiness behind me, and the ejected shell would whistle into the water on his right. He would go under. And then fight his way back to the surface to do it all over again. There was something utterly magnificent about it, and I didn’t even hate him any more. I forgot I was the one he was shooting at.

  He shot three more times. The fourth time he didn’t quite make it. The gun came up out of the water and then sank back and there was an explosion just under
the surface as he pulled the trigger while it was submerged. He never came up again.

  I was alone now. I looked around. The Ballerina was far out on the horizon, still going away.

  Fifteen

  Even when you don’t have anywhere to go, you keep swimming. I swam toward the boat, disappearing now, and toward the coast of Yucatan a hundred and twenty miles away. The sun was on my left. It climbed higher.

  I didn’t panic, but I had to be careful about letting the loneliness and immensity of it get hold of me or thinking too much about how near we had been to winning at last. I wondered if she had been killed, or badly hurt, and saw in a moment that wasn’t safe, either. I concentrated on swimming. Don’t think about anything.

  It could have been an hour, or two hours, when I looked off to the right and saw the mast. It was at least a mile away and she wouldn’t see me, but even so a great surge of hope and thanksgiving went through me and I broke the rhythm of my stroke and went under and almost strangled. She was all right! She’d only been knocked out. I reminded myself realistically of the odds against her ever finding me in this immense waste of water, but just knowing she was alive and could reach land helped me to keep going.

  I waved frantically each time I was lifted on a swell. She went on past, far to the westward, and was soon hull down to the north. I kept watching her, looking over my shoulder. Now she was swinging, heading east. I began to hope. I saw what she was doing. I loved her. God, she was wonderful. Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, she was wonderful. When she’d regained consciousness she didn’t have any way of knowing how long she’d been out or where we’d gone overboard, so she couldn’t go back and swing in a big circle. But she knew the sloop was on a 180 degree heading. So she was running offset north-and-south courses, cutting the whole area into a big grid. A girl who didn’t know anything about boats or compasses or the sea. I turned and started swimming toward the sun.

  Far out, she turned, heading south again. I tried to estimate how far to the eastward she’d pass me. I couldn’t tell yet, but I swam faster. She steadied up, began to grow larger. She was passing three or four hundred yards ahead of me. I could see her. She’d lashed the tiller and was standing on the boom with an arm about the mast. I remembered the glasses again. Each time the ground swell lifted me I kicked myself as high as I could in the water and waved an arm. She was going on by.

  Then I saw her jump down from the boom and run aft. The bow began to swing. I closed my eyes for an instant, and the breath ran slowly out of me.

  The sound of engine died and she drifted down toward me and came to rest, rolling gently in the trough. Shannon was in the cockpit with a coiled line in her hand. She started to throw it. I shook my head. She watched me swim over. Her face was utterly still. She didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. I caught the rail when the boat rolled, and pulled myself up. She knelt on the cockpit seat to help me. She put a hand on my wrist and an arm about my shoulders and I came up on the seat beside her in the warm sunlight. She let go then. Everything went. They blew the dam.

  Maybe you live your whole life for one moment. If you do, that was the moment.

  She was all over me. She was crying. I started to cry. I couldn’ t help it. Tears ran down my face and I was holding her so tightly she couldn’t breathe and I was kissing her. I kissed her on the mouth and the boat rolled and it was the way it had been that other time with that sensation of falling through light-years of rose-colored space and the way it had been the first time with that feeling of drowning in her, of being overrun, submerged, lost, of never being able to come up again, nor ever wanting to. I kissed the tears on her face and kissed the closed eyelids, and at last I just held her in my arms with my face pressed to her throat, feeling her heart beat. Neither of us had said a word.

  After a long time I raised my head so I could see her. Water had dripped out of my hair onto her face, mingling with the tears. I had got her dress all wet, holding her against me. There was a puffy and discolored bruise on her forehead, just at the hairline. The morning sun slanted across the closed eyes and the broad-cheekboned planes of her face, and with all of it she was so beautiful my breath caught in my throat.

  Her eyes opened. They were wet and they were radiant, and the lashes looked darker, matted together with tears. She was somewhere between crying and laughing, and then the smile came and it trembled about the corners of her

  “I—I didn’t think I was going to find you,” she whispered. “Oh, Bill! Bill—”

  I leaned down and brushed the bruise on her forehead very gently with my lips. “You Swede,” I said. “You big, lovely, magnificent Swede. Hold still. I’ve got to look at you. I’ve got to touch you—”

  It occurred to me I was both looking at her and touching her already and that I must be a little wild and not making much sense, but I didn’t really expect to. I was overloaded. I couldn’t handle any more right then. They were gone. We’d won. We were free. We were alone. The whole world was ahead of us. I loved her so much I choked up just looking at her. I tried to tell her all this, but I floundered and went dumb. I suppose you can take only so much of any emotion—even happiness—and then your circuit-breakers start to trip.

  “I love you,” I finished lamely. “Maybe some day I’ll be able to make you understand how much—”

  She nodded, and whispered, “I know. It’s the same with me. I have all the time, even before I knew what he’d done. I couldn’t help it. Don’t you see now why I couldn’t go off and leave him? The rest of my life I’d have felt I was the one who deserted him. And I couldn’t let it show in front of those two—pigs. I’d have died. I’d have felt naked.”

  “They’re gone. Forget them.”

  Her eyes grew suddenly grave. “There isn’t anywhere left in the world we can go, is there? But right now I don’t care. We’re alone. They’ll never take this away from us. We’re more alone than any two people have ever been in the world.”

  I sprang up and caught her hand and pulled her erect. “What do you mean, there’s nowhere left we can go? Come here; I want to show you something.”

  She looked at me as if I’d gone crazy, but let me hurry her down the companionway. I suddenly remembered I had nothing on but my shorts, but there was no time to worry about that now. I had to show her.

  “Here,” I said. “Look.” I snatched away the top chart, the one of the Gulf of Mexico. The one below it was a chart of the whole Caribbean from Cuba down to the Windward Islands. “Look, Shannon. Honey. Look at it! That’s where we’re going. Nobody will ever catch us. We’ve got the boat. It can go anywhere. I could sail it around the world. All that money in that bag is yours—”

  I put an arm about her and pointed at the chart, talking faster now, carried away with it, wanting her to see it. “Barbados—Antigua—Guadeloupe—Martinique. The small islands. Fishing villages. Just the two of us. Going places and doing things even millionaires just dream about. Think of it, honey: mountains and jungles rising straight out of the sea, water so blue you won’t believe it when you’re looking at it, beaches you never saw before, the trade winds blowing, and nights that almost make you drunk. And just us. They’ll never find us. Not the police, or anybody. They’ll forget us. We’ll change the name of the boat. Change her port of registry to—to—” I stabbed at the chart with a forefinger. “To San Juan. When we get tired of the Caribbean we’ll cross the Atlantic on the southern track and go through the Mediterranean and Suez to the Indian Ocean and down to the East Indies and the South Pacific. Java. Borneo. Tahiti—”

  I stopped. She was watching me with the expression of someone listening to the babbling of a child.

  “What is it, honey?” I asked. “Don’t you want to try it?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Why—yes. Want to? Bill, I’d give anything on earth. Do you really think we can do it?”

  “Do it?” I put my hands on each side of her face. “You big, beautiful Swede, of course we can do it! We’ll forget the whole world. You’re going to le
arn to sail a boat, and navigate, and swim, and fish off the reefs, and dive for lobsters, and you’re going to be tanned by every tropic sun there is, and made love to by moonlight off Trinidad and in the Malacca Strait and the Solomons and in tropical lagoons—”

  “Bill—” She stopped. She couldn’t talk.

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  At noon a little whisper of breeze blew up. We hoisted sail and I laid a course southeast toward the Yucatan Strait. We logged a scant two knots, but we were on our way. Toward sunset it dropped to dead calm again. I put the dinghy in the water and went around under the stern with a pot of white paint. I put a coat over the name and port of registry. When it dried I’d add a second, and a third, and then letter in the new name with black.

  While I was working she came on deck in a rubber cap and a bathing suit that was just a brief pair of trunks and a bra. She dived over the side and swam around to hang onto the stern of the dinghy and watch me. When I had finished she helped me put the dinghy back on the cabin, and we sat in the cockpit and smoked, watching the afterglow fade.

  “We’ll have to think of a name,” she said.

  “It’s forgone,” I said. “Inevitable. It’ll be Freya.”

  “Who was Freya?”

  I grinned. “Another Swede. A goddess. The Norse goddess of love, to be exact.”

  Her eyes were soft. “Bill, you’re sweet. And I hope you never change. But I’m just a big blonde.”

  “So was Freya,” I said. “And Juno. And the Milan cathedral is a pile of rocks.”

  She stopped me in quite the nicest way there is to stop anybody.

  The last of the flame died in the west and there was a half portion of moon just past the meridian in the sky. The masthead swung in a lazy arc against the stars and we lay in the cockpit on a mattress from one of the bunks and looked up at it and made love and slept, and waked to whisper again.