by A Tan
I came out of a daze and saw a tall ship bearing down on me about a mile away. There was just enough angle so I could make her out as a threemasted schooner, and she had all the canvas on her, all the fore and aft sails flying, tilting her on a long reach.
I knew it could be reality or fantasy, and the - smart money would bet on fantasy. I guessed she had come out of St. George's, and from my estimate of the wind, if she was headed north to the Grenadines, she would stay on that course until she was far enough out to come about and put her on the opposite tack for a single long run that would clear all of Grenada and head her for Carriacou.
I felt remote, as if working out a problem that had nothing to do with me. My arms had no feel ing. I moved up and down on big, slow, blue swells.
The crests were not breaking. I kept kicking myself back to an angle where I could watch her, see the boil of white water at her bows. My chance of being seen was one in ten thousand, even if she passed by me fifty yards away.
But then I had an idea. I suppressed it because it was going to involve a lot of effort and any effort did not really seem worthwhile. There would be fishermen aboard, people who always scanned the sea even when there is no hope of stopping for a chance at whatever quarry they see. The big fish smash the water, whack it to foam, send the spray flying. Go to work. Make a fuss. Give them something to spot. Hard to do. Double up and snap. Get the bound legs up and whack them down. Get into a spin, writhing and turning the body, kicking. Duck under and come out and kick as high as you can. Dizziness then. Sickness. Vision going. A sound of sails slatting, lines creaking, a thin cry. Sound of an outboard nearby. Hands grasping, lifting me. Fall onto hardness, onto oil stink, fish smell, and vomit up quarts and quarts of sea water...
Then came that burlesque of fantasy, an ironic parody of the seafarer's paradise. I was on a low, broad hatch cover, and I could feel the motion of a ship under me. I squinted up into brightness to see, clustered close around me-all their lovely faces somber, all their girl voices murmuring of concern-the sirens of all the legends, seawind stirring their tresses, their lovely skin in shades from antique ivory to oiled walnut. They were close around me, a multitude of them, prodding and massaging calves; ankles, and puffy feet forearms, wrists, and swollen hands.
One lifted my dead left hand, and I stared at it with remote interest. It was a dark purple rubber glove, overinflated, with deep dimples where the knuckles had been.
Suddenly I screamed. It astonished me. I am not the screaming type. There was a pain in my right hand equivalent to having all the fingernails yanked off simultaneously. Pain shoved me far enough into sudden darkness so that the raw scream seemed far away and I could think of it as an angry white bird, clawing and flapping its way out of my open throat.
I came out of blackness in time to get myself braced for the next pain. It was again in the right hand, and as it faded, I got a big one in the left hand, which caught me off-balance and so I roared. The enchantresses moved back a little, looking down at me in worried speculation. They were all in little sleeveless blouses in bright colors, no two alike, all in little white shorts.
Captain Mickey Laneer came into view and perched a haunch on the hatch cover beside my hip. She wore a khaki shirt and a baseball cap. "What the hell have you been trying to do to yourself, McGee?"
"Hello, Mick. Lost an argument."
"Somebody throw you overboard?"
"Ran away, got into a rip, floated out from shore."
She stared at me. "From shore? Jesus! You could be a little bit hard to kill. Gals, this is an old and good friend of our old and dear friend, Rupert Darby, captain of the Dulcinea. Say hello to Travis McGee." They said hello in smiling musical chorus. "McGee, clockwise around you, starting with Julia in the yellow shirt, meet Teddie, Louise, Hester, Janey, Joyce, Margot, and Valerie. Teddie, get to the helm on the double and tell Mr. Woodleigh he's falling off to port, for chrissake, and bring him back on. Janey, Mr. McGee needs a big mug of black coffee with four ounces of Fernandez rum in it. Margot, you help me get Mr. McGee onto his feet, and we'll put him in my cabin while we run back in."
I started to say something to her, then had to clamp down on the pains. Very savage pain but not as bad as the first ones.
"Speak to you privately, Mickey?"
"Move back, gals."
"Somebody is going to make very damned sure I drowned. It could revise their plans if I didn't. They'll keep a watch on the hospital. They could get to me there, I think. It's a bad risk."
"McGee, I like you. But I can't get involved in anything. The government pretends I don't exist. They like the money I bring in. The black power types talk about me forcing blacks into prostitution. Bullshit! Hester is the only almost pure black, and there are three less than half. Every girl has freedom of choice, believe me. Any publicity of any kind, any infraction, they hit me with a heavy fine. Enough to hurt without driving me out of business. Don't kill the goose. But don't let her get fat. You need hospital attention for the head and the hands. So I'm going to come about and have a nice run back and turn you over to Rupe to put you in the hospital. I've got four good, regular customers aboard who've paid their money for a ten-day cruise. Sorry."
I started to fade out and couldn't have pulled my self back in time if a sudden pain hadn't hit my right foot, as if an electric icicle were being shoved through it.
"Mick. I'm... sorry, too. Rupe heading up to Dominica Wednesday. Take me up to Grenadines, set up a meet, transfer me. Reach him on radio?"
"Yes but, dammit-!"
"Take me back, and I blow your tired businessman cruises right out of the water, captain. Sorry as hell. You probably fulfill a pressing need. No pun. Official complaint to your lady governor, if I have to. And the premier. And the Miami Herald."
"McGee, I like you less and less. You are a bastard!"
"Only when I have to be."
"But, damn you, you could die on me!"
"Sort of a risk for both of us."
"Valerie? VAL! Get it on over here, girl. This big ugly son of a bitch going to die on me? She was a nurse, McGee."
Valerie was of that distinctive and very special mix you see in Honduras. Mayan, Chinese, and Spanish. She looked at my hands and she had me roll onto my belly while she checked the back of my head. Her touch was firm enough to hurt but gentle enough to let you know the hurt was necessary.
They helped me onto my back again, and she bent close and thumbed my eyelids up and looked gravely into one eye and then the other, back and forth, several times.
"Well?" Mickey said impatiently.
"Eet wass a terrible blow on the head. I don't know. The pupils are just the same size. Probably no fracture because the skull is solid and thick right there. Concussion. Could be bleeding in the brain, captain."
"How do we tell? What do we do?"
"One girl has to be with him every minute, and what she has to do all the time she is with him is count his pulse for one full minute and write it down. Count his respiration for one full minute. Write it down. Over and over. One hour is the most a girl can do that and be accurate. Half hour is better.
"So we set up half-hour shifts."
"Then she must write down a column of figures. Suppose it is like... 71, 70, 72, 69, 71, 70, 69. FYne. Then it is 70, 69, 67, 68, 66, 67, 65... right then the girl on duty finds me and finds you, and we get a seaplane alongside to take him to a hospital. They'll have to open his skull and see if the clot is shallow enough so they can take it out and keep him alive."
"My hands?" I asked.
"They'll hurt like hell," Valerie said. "Like living hell. But you'll be fine. No nerve damage. No dead tissue. Good circulation, so that even something that tight couldn't cut it all off."
The pain hit again as I was fading, but it just held me on the edge, and when it stopped, I went the rest of the way on down. Blurred memories of being carried, of choking on hot, pungent coffee, of hearing the hiss of water along the side of the hull. Then memories of it being
night time, feeling that slow swing and turn of an anchored vessel, hearing faint music from topside, of moving in and out of sleep and seeing girls, sometimes the same one, sometimes a different one, solemnly and intently taking my pulse, lips moving, writing on a pad, then staring back and forth from my chest to a watch, counting respirations, writing it down. A Coleman lantern was hung from the overhead with an improvised shade which left the bunk in relative shadow and filled the rest of the small cabin in harsh brightness.
I awoke to a gray morning light in the cabin. The lantern was out. A slender, dark-haired girl sat taking my pulse. She had a narrow, pretty face, sallow skin. Her forehead and the end of her nose were sunburned.
"Where are we?"
"I'm counting."
"Sorry. Tell me when you're through."
"You made me get mixed up."
I let her count, write it down. "We're at anchor in a cove by some pretty little islands north of Grenada. They're called the Sisters. Now I have to count your breathing."
"Who are you?"
"Joyce. I'm new. Hush, please."
"From Barbados, eh?"
It startled her. "How'd you know that?"
"I can even remember the words. You are Louise's 'cute little chum.' She flew up and talked to you,about the job."
She blushed. "Yes. Let me count, please."
"Dear girl, do your counting, and then I have to get up and use the head."
She wouldn't let me without going and bringing Valerie back to check me over and give permission. I felt shaky and frail. When I came back from the nearby head, clutching at everything handy, Valerie was sitting on the bunk looking at the notebook tabulations, and Joyce was standing near her. They got out of my way, and I sighed as I got in and lay back.
"Now we can take you off the continuous count, I think," Valerie said. "Do you feel dizzy? Do your ears hum?"
"No."
"I think we'll take a count every fifteen minutes. Joyce, your hour will be up in... ten minutes. Stay another hour, okay? I'll have Margot take over from you at seven thirty, and you can go help with breakfast then."
"You're a good nurse," I told Valerie. "Isn't there a shortage of nurses around the islands?"
She was so still for a moment her pretty face looked like a temple carving. Her Indian blood was more apparent. "Oh, yes. A shortage of nurses. And damn lots of patients. And not so many reasons for keeping them living, I think. The children die. The old ones come back over and over, trying to die."
She spun and left quickly. I tried to smile at Joyce. Maybe I managed it convincingly enough. I think she smiled back as her face tilted and blurred and faded into gray-black. I had to say something to assure Joyce and myself I was not going sour on them.
"What did you do in Barbados, dear?" My voice seemed to come from the bottom of a brass barrel.
"Does it matter?" she said from the far end of a hundred yard corridor.
"I'm interested. I'm curious. That's all."
She began to emerge out of the humming mists and the metallic distances. I saw her face again, shifting as if underwater, then firming up. "Are you all right?" she asked, frowning. I felt her fingertips moving on my wrists, seeking the pulse.
"I'm fine."
"You looked different. Your eyes were funny. I work in a boutique in Bridgetown. My husband worked at the desk in a couple of the good hotels. We could live on what we made if we were careful. Maybe he got tired of being careful. He left over a year ago, and I have no idea where he is. What else do you want to know? I'm English and Portuguese mostly with a bit of colored. I make about two hundred and seventy-five to three hundred, Biwi, a month in the season and a lot less when the tourists are gone. I can't quite live on it. I've sold the things Charles and I owned, like the music system we got on hire-purchase and was all paid for, and I let them come and take the things which weren't paid for. The last thing I let go, the last thing worth selling, was my little sailboat my father built for me before he died when I was twelve." Her words were coming faster and faster, and she had stopped searching for the pulse. Her thin fingers were wrapped around my lacerated wrist. "It was the only thing I could use to get away, to be someone else, and I took it out in a gale before I let it go, telling it to drown me, but it would not..."
"Hey, now," I said.
Her eyes had filled. "I mean there is no end to it, Mr. McGee. I've been a decent woman. I have no family at all. A fat political gentleman wants to give me a cottage in a development he owns. There has been one girl every two years, I understand. He is quite old. They each end up with a cottage and some sort of small pension. I imagine a long street of them with the years marked on little signs in the little yards, with all of us sitting on our little porches..."
"Joyce, honey. There, honey."
Kind words started the flood. She put her forehead down into the bend of my elbow, and the stifled sobs wracked her thin body. I stroked her hair and made soothing sounds. I identified my own feeling of guilt. I had not really wanted to know about her life and her problems. I had been talking in an effort to keep the brassy mists from sucking me under. But the words had opened her up, and it had come spilling out.
She pushed herself away, stood with her back to me, blew her nose. "Why should you give a damn?" she said in a choked voice. "Why should anybody?"
"Is this cruise what your friend Louise described?"
She turned, snuffled, sat wearily in the chair. "Oh, yes. Louise didn't lie. She called a spade a spade. It's a ten-day trial, you might say. I will do deck duty, scut work, help with the food, drinks, laundry, scrubbing, and all that. But I don't have to be... available unless I decide to be and tell Captain Laneer first. The men really seem quite nice. I can keep my clothes on, thank God. Louise said it took her three days to get used to pottering about the decks and below decks entirely starko. I think it would take me forever, and even then I couldn't adjust. The girls are so much nicer than I imagined. But an entirely naked woman is not really erotic, do you think? Of course, in a cold wind or offshore insects or one's time of the month or coming into port, clothes are definitely required." She had a brooding look frowning down at her knuckles. "It's rather difficult for one to imagine being quite ready for it. I mean if one has taken a bucket of scraps aft after cleaning fish, it is so abrupt to be suddenly tweaked, then taken by the hand, and led below." She roused herself and looked slightly startled. She had been voicing her internal monologue. "I go on, no?" She forced a wan smile. "At any rate, once the ten days are ended, I shall either go back to the boutique to stay or go back to quit my job and pack. I shall fret about it later, not now. Valerie told me that it would be good for you to get as much sleep as you can now. Can you sleep, dear?"
I could. I slept and slept and slept. The dull ache in hands and feet and head did not inhibit it. In too many of the sleep periods Lisa was way down below the velvet black, waiting for me on the bright beach, the severed head propped on the delicate bones of the jaw, smiling at me.
It was another morning, and Mickey Laneer brought me a stone mug of coffee, nudged me awake, and put the coffee in my hand after I had hitched up, knuckled grainy eyes.
"You are some kind of a sleeper," she said.
"A long swim with your hands and feet tied will do it every time. We moved again, didn't we? Where are we, and what day is it?"
"Anchored in the lee of Frigate Island at eight o'clock on the morning of Thursday, April twenty-ninth."
"Thursday! But couldn't you get in touch with-"
"He'll be off to the west of here about opposite us at fourteen hundred. We'll make a radio check on him an hour beforehand. No sweat. We'll run out and intercept and put you aboard Dulcinea."
"I've been a lot of trouble to you and your crew, Mick."
Her smile was sour. "Better this kind than the kind you were going to lay on me if I ran you back in.
"Hard feelings, captain?"
She grinned, punched me on the side of the thigh. "My four passengers haven't mad
e any complaints. Maybe because I run the only game in town. The gals have loved playing nurse. By doing it your way-with you having the grace not to die on me-I've kept my friendship with Rupe. And I put a high value on it. No, McGee. Except for having to give up my own cabin, no hard feelings. How do you feel anyway? Strong?"
I checked and tested. "Better than I should."
"You look good. If you feel strong enough, I can send you down a little sample of our recreation program here aboard the Hell's Belle. Courtesy of the management. Name your favorite nurse, man."
"Joyce?"
The taut smile was gone. "Now you really are a smartass, you know that? I know damned well you know that girl's arrangement aboard, because she told me about talking to you."
"I thought maybe she'd made her decision."
"And you were curious? I wouldn't want you aboard long. You'd make too much mischief. Nobody puts any kind of pressure on that kid. She works it out for herself. She makes her own decisions."
