“I ain’t going anywhere,” Parker said. “You son of a bitch. I don’t even know you. What the hell did you do that for?”
“You cheated me in a card game,” Kimmel said, and the whole thing appeared silly to Charley.
Men were getting sick all over the big cabin and the stench became bad. Kimmel disappeared, on the hunt for Oxley, the surgeon. Parker lay regarding his wounded leg with undiminished surprise. His lips worked together. Norval Douglas knelt to press a handkerchief against the wound and stem the bleeding. The smell of vomit in the room drove Charley to his feet. He put his coat on and went stumbling to the ladder, and climbed out of the cabin.
Coming on deck, he stood aside to let the doctor rush past, and looked out upon a heavy ocean. The clumsy packet, bracing the wind, fell into a trough, and Charley fell across the deck against the railing. When he pulled himself up he saw a lantern break loose and fall flaming to the decks. The ship pitched over and the lamp rolled down the slanting deck to be lost in the sea. High spray extinguished the sparks left behind. A man, trying to tighten some ropes, rolled off balance and ran yelling down the ship. Doors slammed and cabins emptied their occupants into the night. The Sea Bird wheeled ponderously over onto a precarious keel, and a cargo hoist abruptly broke loose and dropped into the cabin wall. There was a high sound of crushing wood, and then while the captain and mates came out on deck to observe the damage, the ship went over once more and the hoist slid back, smashing through the starboard rail and rolling into the ocean, immediately disappearing in foam.
The captain scaled the rigging and bawled, “Helmsman—helmsman—keep her into the wind, God damn it!” Figures came and went on the slippery deck. A freak turn of wind brought an unseen crewman’s voice to Charley’s ears: “Raise her up, now. Heave!” The ship bumped rock-hard water and the captain slipped from the rigging and landed hard on the tilted deck; he slid down the deck to the shattered cabin wall and pulled himself back from that and reeled toward the Texas ladder. When he came by, Charley heard him talking to himself in loud and angry terms: “I’ll keelhaul the man responsible for securing that hoist.” And went on up to the pilot house.
The saloon door batted open and two men—Crabb and Sus Ainsa—were outlined in the dizzy light; the door slammed shut. Helen Zimmerman came out of her cabin with a heavy coat over her dressing gown and screamed when the ship rolled. She fell to the deck, climbed to her feet and windmilled wildly to regain balance, trying to get back to her cabin. The ship went over still a few more degrees, and the girl slid across the deck against the rail, grabbing hold. Still heeling over, the ship maintained a precarious equilibrium against the port beam, and a wheeling spar spun along the mainmast to knock a heavy pole down. The pole skidded across the deck and Charley saw it lodge against the girl. On that sign Charley let go his hold and half-slid, half-fell down across the deck to the girl. He lifted the heavy wood off her and saw it drop into the hungry sea. For a moment he was staring horizontally into the whiteness of the ocean. The girl moaned and grasped him in a locked grip about the waist. Charley took her at the shoulders as the ship plunged into another trough. Slate-colored sheets of water swept the decks madly. The mate came into sight crazily lurching and bawling obscenities into the night, and lost his balance, falling against the rail and teetering on it for a long time; the boat lifted its side and the mate slowly tumbled over backwards, sliding across the slick deck and disappearing down an open hatch. He screamed as he went out of sight.
A whirling mass of men surrounded the braces of the starboard lifeboat, and when Charley noticed them they were trying to lower the boat. Some fool cut the cables, and the water lifted massively and came down all confusion over the freed lifeboat, capsizing it. The crowd backed up in horror, moaning loudly, and the captain shouted hoarsely from the Texas deck: “Get inside, you idiots!”
The girl spoke against his chest; Charley could not make out her words. He saw the bodies of struggling people battered about on the storm-tossed deck, and then a great plunging mass of water shattered over his head.
Breaking over him, the force of the sea tore loose his hold on the rail. He heard a scream. The water carried him away from the deck and he had the awful sensation that he was going to drown. He felt the girl’s hands hooked into his belt. The sea slammed them down onto the deck, whirled them about, pulled greedily at them; they bobbed and flattened against the ship. The foam rippled away leaving the deck high-sloping in the air. Head hanging down, Charley gasped in gulps of air and spray. He saw the girl lying across the deck and, beyond her, the eerie whiteness of a man’s face, the correspondent, her brother. Zimmerman grinned widely at him and shouted, “Hang on!” And just as Charley sought a handhold the water swept over them.
He lurched about and when the water receded again he could not lift hishead to see the sky, but he knew by the gray light reflected from the deck that the dawn was coming up somewhere; he could see only the ocean and the glistening deck. The boat dropped stem-first. His hands were locked on a hatch wheel. Charley pulled in his breath. His legs were numb. The sea flashed over them again, impetuously angry but now in retreat, and when its fingers slid away he looked at the corpse-hue of Zimmerman’s face and the dead-stubborn way Zimmerman was hanging on to his sister, and Charley wondered how it was that a man could give up a fist fight so easily and yet brave a storm at sea with level courage.
The Sea Bird plunged up and down. Charley’s nose hit the deck. He felt the warmth of blood in his nostrils and heard the muffled run of his own oaths. Zimmerman’s voice shouted faintly across the few feet between them:
“Let’s try and get inside.”
“Go ahead,” Charley said, forcing his tongue to form the words.
“Can you make it?”
“I don’t know if my legs will work. Go on—go on.”
“Jesus,” Zimmerman shouted, “I hate, heroes. Come on, Evans.”
He felt the correspondent’s hand tight on his arm and saw Zimmerman’s other hand supporting the girl; he threw all his concentration into climbing onto the precarious stilts of his legs and hobbling on them across the swinging deck. Graysleet pummeled his cheeks; the world rocked underfoot and water dashed the boat with massed energy.
CHAPTER 9
The Sea Bird swayed deliberately. He found himself drifting fitfully into aimless dreams. There was a vast bright desert and a single staggering form, and he was thirsty; there was a high forest and the bounding white haunches of an antelope. Then it was dark, and the spray came over him, and water lapped at his feet on a beach somewhere.
A hand touched his arm and he sat bolt upright.
“Bad dreams?” Zimmerman said.
“Not so bad.” Charley blinked, finding himself on Zimmerman’s bunk, naked and wrapped in a blanket. Zimmerman stood by the stove holding Charley’s coat toward the heat, standing with feet braced wide against the ship’s heavy rolling. The storm, apparently, had dissipated. “Your sister all right?” Charley said.
“Yes, she’s fine. In her cabin. We owe you a lot of thanks for getting that spar off her—she might have been knocked over-board.”
Sunlight came in through the open port. Zimmerman swayed slowly back and forth with the motion of the floor. “How do your legs feel?”
Charley moved his legs. “All right. What time is it?”
“Noon. I guess you’re hungry.”
“I guess I am,” Charley said. “Thanks for putting me up.”
“Your clothes are dry. Let’s go down and get something to eat—if the food wasn’t washed overboard.”
“Did we lose anybody in the weather?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Lucky,” Charley said, and climbed out of bed.
“One of the sailors got a bump on the head from falling through a hatch. And one of your men—Parker—was shot accidentally in the leg last night.”
“I know.” Charley felt no particular pity for Chuck Parker. As Kimmel, who had shot him, had said, Parker had
it coming.
His expression was dour when he followed Zimmerman into the mess hall. The room was crowded with a noon-meal crowd. At the captain’s table sat General Crabb and Sus Ainsa and the officers. Charley recognized Oxley, the surgeon, and Captains McDowell, Holliday, and McKinney. There were half a dozen other officers whose names he did not know. Charley had seen most of them only at a distance.
Norval Douglas and Jim Woods sat at the first officer’s table. That was where Zimmerman and Charley sat down. A heated conversation was in progress; Woods was talking: “—you can settle it, Norval. You were with the Walker expedition in ’Fifty-four.”
“It was a bloody mess,” Douglas said imperturbably. His eyes acknowledged Charley’s presence.
“There,” said Woods. “You see? None of them are easy, O’Rouke.”
O’Rouke, a commonplace man with a ragged beard, said, “Just the same, this is different. We’re going down there to protect them, not invade them.”
“It will be fine,” Woods said, “if the Mexicans see it the same way you do. Hell, do you think we’d be gettin’ such high pay if we wasn’t going to be taking risks?”
“We haven’t been paid so high yet,” Charley said.
Woods turned a mock-angry glance on him. “Leave that kind of talk be,” he said with a friendly tone. “There’s always one joker like you in the crowd, Charley. You’re a God-awful pessimist.”
“What I see makes me that way,” Charley said, and bit into his meal.
The conversation continued between Woods and O’Rouke. Norval Douglas paid little attention to it. After a while his yellow eyes came around to Charley and he said, “I understand you did a nice piece of work last night. Didn’t get hurt, did you?”
“No.”
“That was a mean blow.”
“I hope I don’t see another one like it,” Zimmerman said.
“We lost a cargo hoist,” Woods put in. “That’ll make unloading pretty slow at the dock tomorrow.”
“There’s no hurry,” Douglas said, and got up to leave, a tooth-pick in hand. His lean form ambled out of the room and soon the tables emptied.
When he came out on deck into the warming sun of the early afternoon, Charley found a youth lounging at the rail. He remembered that old John Edmonson had told him there was another young man in the party; restless, Charley went toward the youth, who was tall and very thin with tousled dark hair and an underslung chin. Charley said, “You in the Crabb outfit?”
The youth gave him a stare of evident discomposure and said nervously, “Yes—yes.” His eyes were fever-bright.
“I’m Charley Evans.”
“Carl Chapin.” The thin youth accepted Charley’s handshake and once more turned his troubled glance out to sea. Out there he seemed to be seeing the darkness of his own future. The paddlewheels churned with steady grunts and regular splashes. A tall column of smoke drifted away aft of the stack. Charley found himself in a mood commensurate with Chapin’s silence, a sleepy kind of mood with his mind clothed in a mist of uncertainties; the ocean’s impenetrable vastness made for a silent, threatening loneliness that no amount of human company could offset. Out beyond the grinding paddles, not a single sound broke the stillness for hundreds of miles. He shook himself and looked at the pallid youth beside him; he said, “You look kind of young for this kind of business.”
“So do you.”
“That’s different,” Charley said. “I’m forty years older than I look.”
The youth gave him a strange glance and, like a dog bristling against a faint unfamiliar scent, lifted his guard, pushing Charley out of his presence. It irritated Charley; he gave Chapin a deliberate glance and when the youth put cool, almost indifferent eyes on him, Charley said, “I’m in McDowell’s company.”
“So am I.”
“We ought to stick together,” Charley said. “You and me, we’re the only ones in the bunch not old enough to vote.”
“I don’t want to vote,” Carl Chapin said, and swung abruptly from the rail toward the hatch that led down by ladder into the cabin in the hold. Charley watched him go, angered a little by the youth’s rebuff, but presently forgot about it and rested his lazy attention on the gray-green infinity of the sea. Fine short wrinkles converged around his eyes and he thought he could see, just on the eastern horizon, the rise of a blue strip of land. It was hard to tell; it might have been clouds.
He felt weight behind him and turned to see a heavy figure standing with a cool smile—Bill Randolph. Sudden apprehension went through Charley’s nerves. A chill ran down his back and Bill said, “All healed up, kid?”
“I reckon so,” he said, remembering a recent beating he had suffered at Bill’s hands.
“That’s good,” Bill said. “I didn’t mean you no harm. You made me kind of mad and I was in a lousy mood that day.”
“Sure.”
Charley had worked under Bill at the Triple Ace for a long time. He had come to know the big bartender’s tempers. Some-times Bill became loquacious. Today he seemed in one of those turns of mind; he said, “You know, it’s a funny thing.”
“What is?”
“There was a woman back in Sonora. You recollect the barmaid?”
“Gail? I remember her.” Charley kept a seal on his expression.
“Night before we left, she damn near clawed me to death. See that scab on my neck?” Bill thrust his head forward, turning it, peeling back his dirty shirt collar with a finger.
“I see it.”
“She’s a bitch,” Bill said, and hooked a bootheel over the lower rail. “All women are bitches. Good for one night at a time. You know that, kid?”
“Maybe,” Charley said.
“Ain’t no maybe about it. Ain’t nothing so treacherous as a Goddamned woman.” Bill turned and walked away. Five paces distant he paused and turned, and seemed about to speak. But he held his tongue. Charley looked curiously at him and Bill turned twice around, then said, “No hard feelings, hey, kid?”
Charley just looked at him. Bill said, “I mean it. I ain’t got nothing against you. The bitch had me in a lousy mood and I took it out on you.”
“All right,” Charley said. “Forget it.”
“You’re a good kid,” Bill said, and went.
Charley wondered what had prompted him. It didn’t make much difference. Gail was a long way behind him, no more than a memory of brief friendship and brief pleasure. Perhaps Bill was right. The sea was all chopped up in little pieces and had a flinty glitter. The smell of it was part of everything. He stood with somber gravity, touched the small handful of coins in his pocket and knew that privation had at least taught him the unimportance of most of what he did not have. He wondered why he had come here and why the sea was.
He turned and went around to the starboard side and faced the west, the ocean without limits, and put his back to that when he knocked on Helen Zimmerman’s door.
The first thing she said was, “I wanted to thank you.”
“Never mind. How do you feel?”
“I feel fine,” she said. “Come in, Charley.”
She let him in and, he noticed, left the door open when she came around and sat on the edge of the bunk. Charley said, “Now that we’ve known each other two days, we ought to be old friends.”
“What do you mean?”
He went to the door and put his hand on it as if about to close it; he looked across the deck at the gentle lift and drop of the sea, and he left the door as it was, turning around toward her.
She wore a dove-gray dress with a high collar and her slim, smooth hands were folded in her lap, oddly delicate against the heaviness of her body. Her face still showed high color, the mark of last night’s adventure. Her eyes were round and smiled a little. The throb of engines kept the place vibrating. He sat down on the bunk with a space between them and looked sideways at her. He remembered a place he had seen once in the Sierra Nevadas where the trail passed through a rich meadow of deep tangled grass, and in the s
hallows of a creek clear water chuckled. He said, “Don’t you get scared?”
“I was scared last night.”
“I don’t mean that.”
“Then what?”
“You’re the only woman on this boat. A hundred-odd men and damned few of them honest.”
“You’re honest, aren’t you?”
He felt his nerves string tight. “No,” he said. “Three days ago I stole a miner’s poke.”
Her glance drifted away. She had nothing to say, but he knew she was disappointed.
He studied his fingers, the grain of wood in the floorboards, the metal hasp of her trunk on the floor. “I gave the money back to his wife—his widow, I guess you’d say. He would have been robbed anyway. I just beat him to it.”
“Who?”
“Another thief. The man who killed him. The one who got shot last night.” He flicked a fast look, but her eyes were averted. She displayed a kind of brooding indifference. “Hey,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
He had no ready answer. “For saying anything. For rolling the miner. Maybe for giving the gold back. Hell, I don’t know. I wish you didn’t know about it—I wish it hadn’t happened.”
“You saw this man kill him?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t report it.”
“No. I guess that wasn’t right, was it?”
“I guess not,” she said. Then he saw her eyes lift, full of something he could not identify, perhaps interest and perhaps fear, or something else altogether. He said, “I made a bad guess. Why is it you can be good all your life, and then do one bad thing, and be marked bad from then on?”
“You’re only bad if you think you are.” She was watching him earnestly but he didn’t believe her. “You’re not bad, Charley. Not after what you did last night.”
“That was selfish.”
“Was it?”
“Sure. I did it for myself. I like you.”
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