A Ruby Beam of Light

by Tom DeMarco

  “Jesus.”

  She was on her back. She sat up onto her elbows, looking down over her body. From just below her navel, a narrow line of dark fur descended down her belly toward her pubic hair. She took his hand and ran one of his fingers along the little line. “Do you know what that dark line is called, Loren?”

  “No.”

  “My mother told me once. I was in the bath, quite a grown up little girl. And that little line of hair had just begun to be visible there. My mother was sitting on the edge of the tub. I showed her the line. I was almost in tears. It seemed ugly to me, I wanted it to go away. But she laughed her lovely laugh. She said ‘That, young lady, is the Pathway to Heaven.’”

  “The Pathway to Heaven,” he repeated.

  Sonia nodded. “One day. But not yet.”

  They lingered on the beach through the morning, swimming again and again. Half a day spent in Sonia’s lovely and nude presence. He had not seen her so cheerful or so animated before. Perhaps it was being undressed. On this almost empty island, they could spend most of their lives nude, why not? Only the final acts of lovemaking were, for the present, withheld from them, he still couldn’t say why. There were things allowed and things not allowed. Things not allowed were not even discussed. Each time he raised the subject of marriage or of lovemaking, she would smile her mysterious smile and turn the subject away. When he seemed hurt, she became perversely merry:

  “My young man is in a sulk. Because he is thinking about what he may not yet have, and forgetting about what he has just received.” She was sitting under the cabana with her legs folded under her. She raised her arms from her sides, arched her back dramatically to draw his eyes down over her body. “This is what my dear Loren has received today. The vision of moi.” At the sound of her own words, she fell back giggling on the blanket.

  Near mid-day it was time to set sail. Outside the shelter of Punta Caleta they could see the wind gusting along the surface of the sea. There were small whitecaps indicating a breeze of 14 knots or more. It would be against them almost all the way, a long slog home. Loren calculated they would be back at Baracoa Beach by late afternoon the following day. They would sail through the night. There was no place to anchor or put in anyway; the coast to the east was an almost unbroken cliff all the way to Point Maisi. The plan was to sail one long leg south, offshore for a distance of some forty miles, and then turn to the northeast. That should bring them through the Windward Passage by morning. Sonia sat beside him in the cockpit as he took the helm, her eyes still smiling, looking back toward their their secret lagoon.

  Loren was asleep below when Columbia pulled even with the town of Maisi the following morning. He woke to Sonia’s stamping on the cockpit deck just above him.

  “Loren. Come up please. Bring the binoculars.” He rolled out of his berth and up the companionway stairs in a rush, wearing only his cotton briefs. “Don’t worry, silly, it’s not a hostile navy or anything. Come back here where you can see.” She gestured for him to move around behind her at the wheel so he could look out behind the mainsail. As he went by, she snapped the elastic of his underpants. “Cute.” She took his elbow to point him off to starboard. “Look there, just below the wind. There is something that wasn’t there when we came through before.”

  Loren couldn’t see anything with the naked eye. He braced one knee on the cockpit cushion and leaned against Sonia’s back to steady the glasses. On the second sweep of the horizon, he picked up a dark spot approximately where she had indicated.

  “Looks like a rock,” he said. “A big rock.”

  “I don’t think so. There is twenty one hundred feet of water through there. And it’s a major navigational route. There couldn’t be an unmarked rock in the middle of it. Besides, I saw a glint of sunlight reflected off it a few minutes ago.”

  Loren glanced up at the sun, judging the time. At the rate they were going, they could be back at the village by three or earlier. If they detoured to investigate the spot, unfortunately almost dead upwind, they would barely be in by nightfall. There was so much to be done back at the village. He could feel the frustration in his chest not to be there now, helping to organize. Homer’s words to the assembly that last night at the Marina Hotel kept coming back to haunt him: “Those madmen in Washington are tearing their hair out this very minute. They are screaming for blood.” It was all too obvious where Homer and his followers had run. Only a matter of time now before the attack would come. Having lingered for a whole morning at their lagoon, thinking only of the pleasure of the moment, he was guiltily aware now of the defenses still to be mounted.

  “It’s nothing, Sonia.”

  “Oh, nothing. Well, that’s the one possibility I hadn’t suspected.” Sonia the mimic: she spoke in Homer’s voice. “Because for nothing it looks a lot like something.”

  “I mean it’s nothing important.”

  “So far all we know is that it is not a rock. I’m baffled how you deduced from that that it is nothing important.”

  “Mm. You want to go take a look, don’t you?”

  “Uh huh. If it’s a ship, it’s been adrift for twenty two days. There could be people still alive on board. They’ll be on the rocks in a few more hours. If we could save even one life, Loren…”

  “Then Sonia would no longer have the weight of a multitude of deaths on her conscience, only a multitude minus one.”

  “Something like that.”

  Loren handled the jib sheets as Sonia put Columbia about. With Baracoa almost directly behind them, they began to work up toward the spot on the horizon. Within an hour they could see it clearly, a small white cruise liner, drifting sideways down the Windward Passage toward the black cliffs of Punta Negra. Loren went below to put on some clothes.

  There were signal flags aloft over the ship. Loren fetched a codebook from the chart table The first noun flag was at the back of the book in an appendix on Ceremonial Signals. It meant “maiden voyage.” But the vessel he was looking at was no maiden. She looked like a leftover from the sixties, refitted with an outlandish pointed prow. Two long wing-like masts were slanted back toward the stern, serving no useful purpose beyond decoration. And there was a glassed-in area amidships, probably a small pool. The vessel’s name was Stella Linda. From the shape of the stack, he judged her to be a diesel motor ship. There was an American flag flying upside down at the masthead. The decks were crowded with waving figures.

  Loren had the helm for the approach. He jibed around by the bow to run down along the length of the vessel. There were white uniformed officers on the deck, hurrying along to keep pace with Columbia as she passed. Almost all the other people on the deck were a foot or more shorter than the officers. After a moment, Loren realized they were children, seemingly hundreds of them. They were all dressed in yellow life jackets.

  He turned Columbia neatly into the lee of the liner. Their remaining momentum brought them close enough for Sonia to toss a bow line up to the two sailors waiting on the afterdeck. A moment later three officers came rushing up to the promenade deck rail. One of them leaned over to shout down to Sonia.

  “My name is Van Hooten,” he said. “Captain Van Hooten.” He looked startled to see that she was a woman. Catching sight of Loren, just visible behind the sail, he shouted back to him. “My name is Van Hooten. Captain Van Hooten.”

  Sonia leaned out from the headstay to catch Loren’s eye. “Could you bear off a little, Loren? Just to put some tension on the line.”

  Loren gathered in the main sheet loosely, turning Columbia’s nose away from the ship’s stern. The bow line tightened up. Sonia lifted herself up onto the chrome bow pulpit. She gestured for him to hold position. Waiting for a moment when the prow was riding up on a swell, she launched herself into the space between the sailboat and the ship, caught the bow line and pulled herself hand over hand thirty feet up to the lower deck. There was an explosion of cheers from the promenade deck. Loren glanced up to see a mass of juvenile faces crowded around the two officers. Son
ia stood on the lower deck railing. Van Hooten shouted, “Stay right there, young lady, we’ll come down to you.” Then he stared at her in astonishment as she leapt from the rail up to cable stay that braced the stern flag post. She pulled herself up onto the horizontal post where she stood without support. Then she reached up for the upper cable brace, lifted herself along it hand over hand to the point where she was just above the promenade deck rail. She dropped onto the rail and from there down onto the deck in front of the captain. The children gave another loud cheer.

  “Well,” said Van Hooten. “You are…um, welcome. Welcome to the Stella Linda, young lady. Are you OK?” He noticed that Sonia wasn’t breathing heavily, though he himself was quite out of breath from his short run along the deck.

  “Fine thanks.” Sonia looked back over her shoulder at Punta Negra, wondering how much time they had. “You’re in trouble,” she said.

  “Yes. Blasted engines, just reconditioned and won’t start up. We’ve been adrift for three weeks. No one on the islands was willing to send help. Imagine. And everything is wrong on board, nothing works, mostly the result of the refitting. A disgrace. Miss Keesha, please take these children and put them back in their places! Children, off with you.” He looked down in some embarrassment to one little girl who had managed to slip her hand into his. “Off with you too, little miss.

  “Yes, Captain Van. Aye Aye Sir,” she said. The other children called out in chorus, “Aye Aye, Captain Van.”

  He shook his head. “An old bachelor. What do I know of these things? You are Miss…?”

  “Duryea, Sonia Duryea.”

  “Thank you for coming. I don’t know what you can do to help, but we need some help.” He drew Sonia back toward the rail, out of earshot of the others.

  “It’s all my fault what has happened, you see. I took command of the vessel without checking things out enough. I have been kicking myself. All these children’s lives in my hands.”

  “Why are there so many children?”

  “It is an organization that has chartered Stella Linda, the National Council of Student Councils. The children come from all fifty states. They are prize winners of an essay contest, or some such thing. The prize was a six day cruise on the Stella Linda out of the port of Savanna. A hundred and fifty children from 10 to 16 years old. And only a handful of teachers and counselors. We’ve been adrift for three weeks.” Captain Van Hooten had a huge leonine head which he shook now sadly. Above his clear blue eyes were striking bushy white brows. He seemed to be in his late fifties.

  “Couldn’t you have lowered the boats away? You must have come within a dozen miles of Haiti.”

  “That is part of what I was telling you. It was all my fault for accepting the Stella Linda after her refitting without checking everything out thoroughly. There was so little time. The written inventory was a masterpiece of completeness, everything one could want. Only much of it never got on board. We don’t have a block and tackle or a come-along, in fact almost no tools at all. Not even a crescent wrench. The engines have both failed. There is no cordage on board at all, not a foot of spare line.”

  “But the boats?”

  “…are on motor driven davits. They depend on the electric current supplied by the main generators to lower the boats away. There is a backup system at each unit in case the main current is off, a small gasoline engine to control the davits. We couldn’t start a single one of them! And the drives themselves are welded shut so we can’t get at them to play the line out by hand. The lifeboats are frozen into position. Stupid, stupid, stupid! The only thing we could do was cut them loose from the motorized cranes and try dropping them into the water. The boats are made of the thinnest fiberglass as you can see. We put two over the side and both were damaged by the fall and sunk straightaway.” He was wringing his hands. “It all sounds so idiotic and it is. But it’s my stupidity.”

  “Sonia caught sight of a wide framework of plastic sheeting set up on an angle over the pool. “You’ve been distilling sea water in the sun?”

  “Yes. We had to. Otherwise the whole company of us would be dead by now.

  “This is clever. Was this your idea?”

  “Yes. What else could we have done for water?”

  “So a hundred and fifty children plus all the crew and the teachers are alive today, because of your ingenuity. Not bad.”

  “Alive for part of today,” he said, nodding toward the cliffs.

  “Yes. I’ve got to tell you something that isn’t going to make a lot of sense. You’re a brave man, Captain Van Hooten, you’re going to have to make a brave decision and quickly. We can only talk over the wisdom of it after the fact. We could be on the rocks in a few hours.”

  “Tell me.”

  “This ship’s engines are not going to restart. Think of it as an atmospheric disturbance that has made it impossible for them to ignite. That’s why you haven’t even been able to light a match.”

  “Yes…”

  “Continuing to work on the engines is a waste of time. I want you to scuttle the Stella Linda.”

  “What?”

  “Open the sea-cocks. Load the children in the boats and as she settles enough for the boats to float free, cut them loose.”

  The captain didn’t reply. He turned to face out over the sea.

  “It’s our only chance, Captain. Please.”

  “Yes, yes. It shall be as you say. I am thinking how to keep the ship on an even keel as she settles.”

  Sonia relaxed her grip on the rail. She could feel the tingling as the blood rushed back into her fingers.

  “My first officer, Klipstein, is a very good man for such things. I have to talk to him right away. I look to you, Miss Sonia, to explain to the others. It will take more than an hour to begin taking on water, perhaps more time to allow for rigging some way to correct for list.” He gestured to a group of teachers who were standing at a distance with the children. “Mr. Garner, Miss Blake, please come listen to this young lady. I want you to take your orders directly from her.

  Sonia explained hurriedly what had to happen next.

  The one the captain had called “Miss Blake,” a pleasant faced woman of perhaps thirty five, interrupted, “We have only three adults per boat, even counting some of the older children as adults. Most of our little folk are too small to handle the oars. We’ve been trying them out over the past few weeks of almost continual boat drill.” She was grinning as she spoke. “Boy, have we worked boat drill for all it was worth. If you could take even thirty of the smallest kids on the sailboat, we could put four adults in each of the remaining boats.”

  “Good, let’s do that first. We can shoot them down the line to Loren.” She jumped down the stairs to the lower deck to explain to Loren what would be happening. When she looked up from the rail, there was a chattering troop of kids being led down by the two teachers. A moment of doubt before beginning. Maybe time would prove that there was some better approach that might have occurred to them if only they thought longer and harder about it. Only there were the cliffs, nearer and nearer. If the sea-cocks were small enough, if the ship settled slowly enough, it might already be too late.

  “Who’s the bravest little kid on this whole ship?”

  “Me me me me me me me me me meeeeee.” They were shouting wildly. It was just a lark as far as they were concerned. Sonia picked out one little boy, the squeakiest wheel.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Tiger!”

  “Well Tiger, I don’t know if you’re the bravest or just the loudest, but you’re going to be the first one to shoot the shoot.”

  “YAY!!!” Tiger clasped his hands together over his head like a prize fighter as the others cheered him on.

  She turned to a deck hand who was beside her. “I need lots of table napkins, clean or dirty. Cloth napkins. Or small towels. Whatever you can find.” The man nodded.

  Sonia lifted the little boy up onto the rail. “Now, don’t look down.” She tickled him. “No looking
down. That’s part of the fun.” The little boy looked up at the sky, laughing nervously. Sonia kept one hand under his chin. She took a white tea towel from the deckhand when he came back and twisted it into a short cloth rope. One end she ran in a loop over the child’s right hand, and the other in a loop over the left hand. The middle of the cloth rope passed over Columbia’s bow line which she had refastened to the cable support above the rail.

  “Now hold tight, no matter what you do, don’t let go. I want you to keep your eyes shut and hold on for all your worth.” The little boy nodded, wide-eyed. “And one more thing. When I push you off, I want you to shout out as loud as you can, Woooooooo, all the way down. Let me hear your Woooooo.”

  “Woooooo.”

  “Louder, much louder.”

  “WOOOOOOOOOOOOO.”

  “This kid is a terrific woo-er. OK, now hold tight, eyes closed, here you go…” She glanced down to be sure Loren was ready on the bow below. A gentle push.

  “WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.”

  Loren caught the little boy as he came skittering onto the bow.

  “Umph.”

  Tiger sat down in a heap, looking slightly dazed. He shook his head. “Wow,” he said, “Can I go again?”

  Loren whispered, “Stand up and let them see you weren’t frightened.”

  He hopped to feet and began shouting back up to the dozens of open faced children on the afterdeck. “It’s WUH-UNDERFUL!” he shouted. “Com’on you sissies!”

  Sonia looked around for the next. She picked a little girl with skinned knees. “Let me hear your Woooooooooo.”

  “WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.”

  “Wow. You others are going to have to work to get a better Woooooooo than that.” She wrapped the child’s hands with a loop of cloth. “Hold tight, keep your eyes shut, let me hear you…”