Road To The Coast

by John Harris

  ‘What did I tell you?’ Dodgin said triumphantly as they had to admit to themselves that Carroll wasn’t coming. ‘What did I tell you? He’s done the dirty on us again.’

  The following day was the same, all of them trying to find something to do in an effort to stop their eyes straying towards the shore, snapping at each other in their disappointment and anxiety. By the third day, the tension in the ship had reached explosion point.

  The rain had fallen on and off throughout the whole time and tempers had reached the boiling point. There was nothing to do, nothing even to talk about because, in their anger and mortification, they all seemed suddenly to be at loggerheads with each other again. Only Ash, Grace and Teresa seemed to cling together, part of the drama of the ship but, because they were passengers, still only on the edge of it and absorbed with another drama that concerned only them. They had already become only too well aware of the smallness of the Ballaculish. Where it had once seemed as big as a city and as easy to get lost in, they now found they knew, even in so short a time, every grubby corner of it, and every greasy bolt, from the rancid-smelling hole where the black faces of the crew disappeared into the gloom of the forecastle, to the poop where the red ensign trailed wetly to the deck to which it had been lowered and long since forgotten.

  The ship’s bell, rung intermittently when anyone remembered, tolled the hours. There wasn’t even anything to see, for the town appeared to be deserted in the rain as far as they could make out and uneasily silent, with nothing but an occasional army lorry or a soldier on the street. Only a Catalina, flying upriver, on the lookout for trouble, and once an old Dakota headings east for Córdoba, provided the breaks in the monotonous hours.

  With the rain, the water had risen among the weeds, and small islands of matted twigs and driftwood, snatched from the alders and the willows along the river’s edge, drifted past them with their cargoes of seeds and shoots and frogs, bound together with the loamy soil washed off the banks and the roots of lilies and the twining tendrils of the electric-blue convolvulus. Occasionally, they bore with them flocks of ducks and once they saw a heron, white and long-legged, like a priest in floating pulpit.

  ‘The bastards have forgot us,’ Dodgin said. ‘Forgot us. We’ll stay here till the old scow drops apart.’

  He was wandering morosely round the ship now on Ash’s heels, trailing him everywhere, as though he recognized in him the only person with enough vitality to do something for them, consumed once more with blind hatred, trying to pick quarrels with Grundy, chasing the rats and the cockroaches with a vicious detestation, conducting strange experiments with bottles and boxes and sealed tins to decide which way the currents flowed towards the shore. He was lonely, bored and miserable, his horizon narrower even than Grace’s for, like all sailors, he regarded the element on which the ship floated with as much interest and enthusiasm as a daily commuter to the city would regard the sooty landscape of the suburbs through a train window.

  In his desperation, he cornered Ash on the bridge.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘When are we going to do something? I’m sick of sitting on my jacksie.’

  Ash offered him a cigarette. ‘How far do you reckon it is,’ he asked, scanning the broad acres of muddy water, ‘between here and the town?’

  ‘Half a mile,’ Dodgin said, staring at the shore with an experienced eye. ‘You’d need to be a channel swimmer to swim that lot.’

  Ash drew on his cigarette for a while thoughtfully. ‘I wasn’t thinking of that,’ he said. ‘Haven’t the wind any more. Too many jug-ups. Too many gaspers. Too many nails in the old coffin. Can you swim?’

  Dodgin shrugged. ‘Never learned. Proper sailor. Always thought if you were going to drown, it’s best to go quick.’

  Ash tossed his half-smoked cigarette overboard and studied Dodgin. ‘How about building a raft?’ he asked.

  Dodgin grinned, his eyes lighting up at once. ‘We might,’ he said. ‘I’ve been throwing tin cans and pieces of paper over for a couple of days now and watching ’em with the glasses off the bridge. Know where they go to? Among them reeds over there, just above the town. There’s a sort of mat of twigs and things building up there. I’ve watched it. Why can’t we try that? If the revolution’s over, like they say it is, they won’t shoot at us, will they? That’s one thing.’

  Just before noon, the rain stopped again, and they were all brought on deck by the sound of shooting from the town and the trumpeting of motor horns. The long street was full of people and they could hear the shouting even across the water.

  There were a few more scattered shots and the crowds began to disperse, running. From the ship, they could see their figures disappearing down side streets, then they heard the grinding of vehicles in low gear and saw an army vehicle take up a position by the jetty. A short column of lorries full of soldiers bumped past the trees on the road along the river bank that led to the town, reminding them more forcefully that for the people ashore at least the revolution was not yet over.

  ‘Carroll,’ Ash said. ‘Busily stamping out an uprising. He’s turning his coat so fast it dazzles you. That lot’ll be reinforcements. There’ll be a curfew tonight.’

  ‘It didn’t last long,’ Dainty said, staring at the empty street. ‘It’s all over already.’

  They watched the shore for a little longer, listening to the raucous honk of wild ducks along the banks that carried across the water to them. There was a musky chill from the rain that made them shiver and a small troublesome breeze was getting up again, bringing wavelets to the surface of the grey-yellow water.

  As they turned away, Dainty stopped and stared back at the buoy that marked the spit at the end of Punta de las Rosas where the guns were, and the markers that indicated the course of the channel, the symbols of their road home. Beyond them, the traffic of the river would soon be flowing again, carrying the lumber, the quebracho, and the tannic acid, the wool and the grain and the meat and the passengers from Corrientes and Asunción and beyond.

  ‘It’s a long way home,’ he said wistfully as he entered the saloon, and in his voice was a longing for something he had never known and probably never would.

  Grundy seemed to seize on the old man’s words as an opportunity to voice his own grievances. He looked up from where he was sitting near Dodgin at the inevitably littered table.

  ‘If it’s all that far,’ he said, ‘let’s do something about it.’ He was feeling the urge to put the old ship behind him, to forget the scene of his shame; and a desire to see them moving had been growing into a fidgety short temper for some time now. ‘I think it’s barmy to go on sitting here,’ he went on, ‘saying, why can’t we do this and why can’t we do that?’

  ‘Sure,’ Dodgin said, looking quickly at Ash. ‘Let’s build a raft then. We can get ashore that way. Soon get a message to the coast then.’

  Grundy looked up, startled, and old Dainty, who had stretched himself on the settee with a paper-backed love story, raised himself up wearily, putting the book down again as though he were loth to face up to reality, as though Dodgin’s untiring persistence wore him out. ‘It’s no good,’ he said heavily. ‘You can’t do it.’

  ‘Why not?’ Dodgin demanded fiercely.

  ‘Because somebody might get ’urt,’ Dainty said. ‘And there’s been enough ’urt already.’

  Grundy’s face twisted in a sneer. ‘Rafts,’ he said. ‘You’ve been reading too many comics, Dodgin. You think you’re playing kids’ stuff. He’s got a battery of guns there watching us. He’s got the drop on us. There’s only one way we can get out of here and that’s by signing his lousy little bit of paper.’

  Dodgin turned quickly, his pale eyes contemptuous. ‘You always was a yeller bastard,’ he said with insulting calm. ‘I told you so in Rio when you stood by and let the cops take the bosun into the calabozo. You was then. You always will be.’

  Grundy’s voice rose and he thumped the table with the flat of his hand. ‘It’s plain commonsense,’ he shouted. ‘
All we’ve got to do is sign the bastard’s paper. It’s something the ambassador can sort out, I tell you.’

  ‘We haven’t got the bloody paper,’ Dodgin shouted back, beginning to lose his own easily lost temper so that once more they were on the fringe of one of those frightening little scenes which kept erupting in the saloon. ‘I threw it away.’

  ‘You didn’t.’ Grundy fished in his inside pocket. ‘I picked it up. I’ve got it here.’

  The sight of the paper in his hand had an electrifying effect on Dodgin. He leapt up, scattering food to the floor as he grabbed at the sheet and, before anyone realized what was happening, he and Grundy were locked in each other’s arms.

  ‘My Christ,’ Dodgin shouted, staring at the crumpled surface of the paper over the mate’s reaching fingers. ‘He signed the bloody thing too!’

  They heard the paper tear as Grundy got his fingers to it, then Dodgin gave him a quick backhand blow across the face with his bony fist that brought a yelp of pain from him, and grabbed for the bread knife.

  ‘You deserve this in the guts,’ he was shouting. He flung Grundy away from him with a strength that didn’t seem possible in his puny body, so that he flopped into a chair, his eyes riveted on the unwavering point of the knife. ‘Look! The bastard signed their paper.’

  Without taking his eyes off the white-faced mate, he flourished the torn shreds under Dainty’s nose.

  ‘I bet he was going to try and give it that dago bastard sometime.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ Grundy shouted. ‘I wasn’t going to give it to him.’

  ‘After we’d said “no” as well,’ Dodgin yelled, his pale eyes glowing with fury, his thin face maniac in its hatred. ‘I ought to carve his guts out.’

  He swung the knife back in a murderous gesture, but Ash grabbed his wrist and held it rigid.

  Dodgin twisted round to stare at him. ‘Let me go,’ he stormed. ‘I ought to slit his throat. He signed their lousy paper, I tell you.’

  ‘Well, why not?’ Grundy was suddenly defiant. ‘Somebody’s got to do something, haven’t they? You just can’t stand around and talk.’

  ‘Stand around and talk?’ Dodgin glared. ‘That’s all you ever did. You’d talk yourself out of anything. I ought to stick you. You’re worse than that bloody Fat-bum.’

  He gestured again with the knife but Ash suddenly seemed to tire of the brawling and, with a quick movement, he wrenched it from Dodgin’s hand with a savagery that paralysed his fingers.

  ‘For the sweet love of God,’ he said contemptuously. ‘What do you expect to gain by sticking knives into each other?’

  Dodgin stared up at him, his face twisted into a mask of anger, then his shoulders slumped and he turned angrily away and with a savage gesture tore Carroll’s sheet of paper into minute shreds.

  It was a silent day, nobody quite able to trust themselves to speak. Grundy’s subdued fury and distrust put an edge on any conversation that started. His eyes were angry and he kept looking at Dodgin in a cheated way as though he were being held to ransom.

  The wireless was blaring the whole time as they waited for some change in the news. But, although the bulletins were full of words of liberty, there was still enough talk of the suppression of traitors to make them realize that Carroll was still in a position to do much as he pleased.

  The Presidential Palace was under guard and though the crowds had been destroying the vanished Perón’s pictures, smashing his statues and burning his party headquarters, mechanized troops were still moving into the centre of the capital to maintain order by force. The leaders of the rebellion were now in full control in every centre where the outbreaks had occurred. The régime of tyranny appeared to be over and there was a hint now in the news that the fallen dictator might even be allowed a safe conduct into exile, so long as he went without trouble. But the hunt for the opportunists who had supported him was still going on with increasing severity and all his friends were being sought out and dealt with mercilessly. Every bulletin contained the names of arrested officials.

  Though only Ash could understand the triumphant words, the others seemed able to divine what was going on and even Teresa was subdued by the brooding violence and the tension among the adults, well aware that all the earlier excitement of reprieve had disappeared under a sullen uneasiness that they’d been wrong.

  At the end of the morning came an announcement that new riots had broken out and that in Rosario, downriver, armoured cars were firing on pro-Perón demonstrations.

  Ash listened to the last item with a sober face.

  ‘I don’t like it, Grace, old girl,’ he said later in the privacy of the captain’s room where she had lived alone with Teresa since the first night. ‘All that tripe about liberty seems to have a hollow sound. Carroll can still go on playing the robber baron as much as he likes.’

  Grace nodded. She sat back on the bunk and stretched her legs, kicking off her shoes.

  ‘If I’d only got a change of shoes,’ she mourned, ‘it’d be a help.’

  Ash lit a cigarette and puffed at it thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Sooner or later he’s bound to be found out,’ he said, ‘but he’s hoping before then he’ll have made himself safe. He’s relying on that piece of paper to save his skin, I suppose. But you can’t blame Dodgin for disagreeing, much as it inconveniences the great sporting public. He didn’t pick us in on this manoeuvre and he’s a right to his pride. I remember not so long ago saying to you I didn’t think much of honour but funnily enough I begin to see now that it’s largely a matter of how it’s applied.’

  He sat down on the end of the bunk, his big body moving with the restless grace of a caged animal.

  ‘Wish we’d got a drink,’ he said morosely. ‘If I don’t get an occasional jug, I get so I start hating people’s faces. I’d hate to hate you, Grace.’ He looked up and grinned.

  ‘It’s a bit of a mug’s game, hating,’ she agreed. ‘That Dodgin’s shrivelling himself up with it. He looks mad enough half the time to kick himself. Soon he’ll go up in smoke and there’ll be nothing left but a heap of nasty-smelling cinders. He makes me feel I want to say a Hail Mary every time I see him in case it happens tomorrow and he’s gone without a blessing. I don’t like hating people – I like – I like–’

  She stopped and gave a short rich laugh and Ash found she was gazing at him, at a loss for words. He looked at those dramatic eyes of hers and somehow in her forthrightness there was shelter and knowledge and downright common sense, and more than that, a deep tempestuous devouring flame that managed to reach out and touch him too.

  They found themselves with nothing to say, unable to thrust aside any longer their consciousness of each other. He leaned towards her, not with any embarrassment, but with the same lusty directness he saw in her eyes. She took his hand, grasping if fiercely, drawing in her breath luxuriously. Then, as she reached out to him, eagerly, hungrily, with all the strength of her passionate nature, there was a clatter of feet in the alleyway outside and they started apart as they heard Teresa’s voice calling them. Ash stood up abruptly, guiltily, beating his hands together.

  ‘Damnation,’ he said feelingly as the door burst open.

  ‘Grace, a ship’s coming out to us,’ the child said, her face flushed with excitement. ‘Mr Dodgin says it’s bringing water. Mr Ash, it’s nearly here. Oughtn’t you to be getting out on deck?’

  Ten

  As the flat-topped water tender drew nearer to the Ballaculish, buffeting though the slapping wavelets the wind had stirred up, Dodgin threw away his cigarette end so that it curved down in an arc and died in a sizzle as it hit the water.

  ‘Fat-bum’s there,’ he said, suddenly suspicious. ‘Standing on the foredeck. He’s got a lot of blokes with him too.’

  ‘And they’re armed to the teeth,’ Dainty pointed out. ‘It don’t look like a peace convention to me.’

  ‘There’s one thing’ – Dodgin glanced triumphantly at the sullen Grundy – ‘Prince Charming ’ere can’t do the dirty
on us any more. That’s for sure.’

  As he climbed aboard, Carroll looked peaked and miserable, as though the whole affair were becoming too much of a burden to him. The revolution was ended for him and with its end a lot of hope and vanished too. He had given his loyalty to the late unlamented regime, had supported it, had even benefited from it in rank, and with its passing a lot of his ambitions had vanished in the dust that was now slowly settling over the uprisings.

  The elderly battery captain followed him, his face expressionless, as though he were touched with a little of Carroll’s uneasiness, and after him came four soldiers armed with rifles. They stood in a group on deck, swathed in plastic mackintoshes, the water dripping off their caps.

  ‘What’s all this?’ Ash demanded.

  ‘The water boat we promised,’ Carroll said, waving a hand to the other vessel which was still making fast alongside.

  ‘You didn’t promise it,’ Ash pointed out coldly. ‘Your officer did.’

  Carroll ignored the comment. ‘There’s a pilot on board,’ he said, ‘who will want to discuss arrangements with your navigating officer.’

  It was his gestures rather than any understanding of his words that came across to Dodgin and Danity and Grundy, and they turned to Ash, their faces suddenly cheerful.

  ‘Are we going?’ Danity asked.

  Ash turned back to Carroll with the old man’s question but Carroll shook his head.

  ‘Not immediately,’ he said quickly. ‘But arrangements must be made in preparation.’

  ‘That’s something at least.’

  ‘There’s also some question of coal. I think there’s been a mistake, but perhaps your engineer can discuss it. There’s a solider on the water boat who can speak a little English. He’ll help. Perhaps you’ll tell your friends, though, that no communication with the shore can be permitted through anyone on the water boat. There’ll be soldiers to see this order’s adhered to.’