by Dan Marlowe
A stinging little wavelet slapped her in the face, and she spat a mouthful of chop. “We'll d-drown!” She strangled. “Drown!”
“Not in this pond.” Johnny reached down and pulled off his other shoe. “I could swim it both ways, if I had to.” He pulled the belt out of his slacks and peeled them off. He ripped and tore at shirt and T-shirt until he felt a blessed freedom. He looked up at the stars, orienting himself, and then turned back to the sobbing woman. He pulled her clothes off in great, bunched handfuls.
He bounced erect in the water for another look at the stars, then settled back. “Put your left hand on my right shoulder,” he told her curtly. “Hold the cushion in your right armpit. Don't fight it; let it balance you. And hang onto me.”
He set out at a steady beat and in three hundred yards had made the adjustment for the drag on his right side. He bored persistently through the rising swells, with head turned to one side to breathe deeply between onslaughts. Twice he paused to check the stars again and altered course slightly; the only noise he heard beside the roar of water in his ears was an occasional animal-like sound from his companion.
He swam strongly, thinking not at all of time or distance, and was surprised when the dark mass of the shoreline blotted out his waterlogged horizon. He had thought they were farther out; he shook his head to clear his ears of the benumbing water pressure and tried to listen. If the noise he heard was surf, and not just the roaring of his own ears, then he had missed the target. Surf meant rocks, and rocks meant trouble. He turned and swam parallel to the thickening blur of the shoreline, and between two waves he lifted his head and saw the little forest of masts. Again he laboriously shifted course and doggedly carved out his watery path until a blacker shadow in the variegated darkness transformed itself into the lee side of a cabin cruiser. He worked his way around to the stern and transferred the nearly limp Lorraine back to her cushion. He pulled himself up to cockpit level on the boat, then set his teeth and brutally muscled his heavy body over and in. The dead-weight lift after all the time in the water was nearly more than he could manage; from the chest down he felt as though he weighed a ton.
He waited for his chest to stop heaving and looked down for the woman bobbing below him. “Watch yourself coming aboard; I'm too pooped to lift you clean.” He didn't know if she had heard him; he braced himself, reached far over, grabbed her under the armpits and lifted until the blood hammered in his ears. She scraped her thighs coming over the side and moaned as she tumbled in a white lump in the bottom of the boat.
Johnny stood up when he could breathe again; he didn't know why he still felt driven, but he couldn't take the rest that common sense urged upon him. He twisted the hasp from a locker and rummaged inside. He threw handfuls of clothing at the white body and found a pair of paint-stained trousers for himself. He could hear her crying as he straightened up wearily, the deep sobs of exhaustion. For an instant he didn't realize she was trying to say something. “-make it up to V–Vic… I w-will-I will!”
He spat salt spume and another taste and walked up to the bow. He jumped heavily to the deck of the next moored boat and again to the one beyond. When he reached a piling ladder he slogged his way up it, the rough timbers reminding his stockinged feet that he should have scouted the ransacked locker for shoes. He was too tired to go back.
He hauled himself erect on the splintered pier topside and automatically turned to look once more out over the Sound. Unconsciously his hands hooked into claws. How could you do it, Mike? We were friends, you and I. And Vic. I hope Vic never knows that you've left him with very nearly as little as you left me.
He started the long trek out to the road; the car keys were at the bottom of Long Island Sound, and they needed transportation. And the police had to be notified. The police he grimaced wryly. He stumbled off the dock timbers onto the gravel, and his heels bit stingingly as his weaving walk jarred him from side to side. His ears still sang from the water-wash, and his bare arms and shoulders were encrusted with a film of sticky salt. He tried to concentrate on steering a straight course on the lighter colored gravel road which led up to the highway and renounced it in favor of putting one foot before the other. The swash in his ears died out gradually, and he could hear the high-pitched whisper of the night breeze in the scrub pines, mournfully persistent.
He put down his head and walked on.
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