The Turquoise Lament

by John D. MacDonald

  When it became serious, the whole village nodded and said that it was probably a good thing. Meyer and I appointed ourselves a two-headed daddy and grilled Howie.

  Meyer planted the needle beautifully. “What do you want to be, Howie? Who do you want to be? Or are you happy and satisfied just to fall into it?”

  This was aboard the Flush. Howie looked troubled and thoughtful and said, “We’ve talked about that a lot, Pidge and me. It comes down to this. I just haven’t got much work ethic. We talked it out. It certainly isn’t going to bother me if both of us live off what her dad left her. It isn’t as if it was money Pidge earned herself. If it was turned around so my dad had left it to me, it wouldn’t bother me living off it and doing nothing. I mean, how can you prove that anything a man does is really worth doing? She says it won’t bother her because there’s more than she needs, the way she wants to live. So what we want to do is get married, get the Trepid geared up for around the world, and then, by God, go around it, even if it takes three or four years. But it isn’t as if we’re closing the door on anything else. We could get restless. We could see something we think is worth doing, and then we could change our minds. The options are open. But neither of us is going to feel guilty if we don’t take any other option ever. We’ve talked this all out.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “you might want to pick up where Ted left off.”

  “I thought of that. He was getting geared up to go after something. We can’t find a clue. She told me she’d searched every inch of the vessel. He hadn’t left his research records at the bank, in the deposit box. We went over the boat together. We took three days, three whole days. Nothing. It’s just as well. What would I be doing looking for goodies in the ocean? What could I buy I haven’t got already?”

  So that made three searches, counting the one Meyer and I made that lasted from the time we heard Ted had been killed until dawn the next morning. Not for ourselves. For the daughter.

  Howie was plausible enough, and it was easy to see how happy they were just to be with each other. So there was a wedding, and there was a lot of work done on the Trepid, and a lot of intensive study of charts and celestial navigation and a lot of instruction in how to maintain and operate all the navigation aids and servomechanisms aboard that would go pockety-queek all the time she was trudging across the ocean blue.

  • • •

  And this was the first time I’d seen the Trepid since we all watched her take off one morning in November over a year ago, moving out into the tide run, tipping to the first ground swell, aiming southeast once past the sea buoy, about 105 degrees, the farewell champagne still cold in the glass.

  I roamed forward, squatted on a big cleat, and picked morosely at a clot of some kind of tarry guck stuck to the teak. When a boat carries you all those sea miles safely and well, she deserves better treatment. In the marriage row, the Trepid was the innocent bystander getting hurt. I wondered how much green beard was hanging from her bottom. I wondered if her engines would start without an overhaul. There was a good sting in the Hawaii sunshine.

  Howie came back aboard and I stood up and walked aft. He was sweating heavily and had lost some hide off the top of his right shoulder. He said the two of them had gotten the mast down on Jer’s boat. Sorry it took so long.

  “You were saying you don’t want to talk about your problem?”

  He flinched. “Not like that. Hell. I suppose why not? It’s just that it’s weird. Trav?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t even want to say it.”

  “Try hard.”

  “I think … shem wummul neminum.” He sat, big brown arms resting across his round brown knees, and he was staring down at the deck, huge hands hanging loose from his wrists.

  “I can’t hear you, Howie!”

  He lifted his head, contortion twisting his mouth, brown eyes agonized. “I think she’s flipping! Losing her head! Falling out of her tree. Oh, God damn it all anyway.”

  He popped up with that surprising, flexible agility, ducked out from under the tarp, and stood at the rail with his back to me. He made a single, gulping sob sound.

  After he settled down, he told me how it had begun. They had hopped the Caribbean islands on the way down, skipping some, hiding from bad weather, learning how much and how little they could expect from the Trepid, settling into the routines of who does what and when. Honeymoon voyage, masks and fins over the reefs, unnamed empty beaches, music tapes aboard, scream of the reel with the line being pulled out against all the drag one dared use, sail popping and tilting as a listless breeze freshened, salty, sandy lovemaking under improbable skies. Santo Domingo, Guayama, Frederiksted, Basse-Terre, Roseau, Fort-de-France, Castries, Bridgetown, St. George’s, San Fernando; and from there they hopped the coast of South America westward; La Asunción, Puerto La Cruz, Carenero, La Guaira, with a run up to Willemstad, then west and down to Riohacha, Santa Marta, Cartagena, and then across the gulf of Portobello and Colón and the Canal.

  Things broke and were fixed. Other things wore out and were replaced. Sometimes the bank had to cable money. Twice, he thought. Maybe three times, but he doubted it. He could remember just the two times. They had worked their way slowly up the Pacific coast of Central America, and I broke into his recital of the ports they had hit and asked again where the trouble had started.

  “Well, quite a way back. Anyway, we stopped at Mazatlán and got everything in top shape and stowed all the provisions aboard and … came here. Mazatlán seemed like a good place to start from because it is almost the same latitude as Honolulu, which is about thirty-two hundred miles due west. We’d had a lot of practice in navigation by then. No sweat. We knew we’d hit it and we did. One storm made me wonder, though. It was one big rough son of—”

  “Howie! Get on with it!”

  “Okay, okay. The first thing that seemed weird—it didn’t seem important at the time—all over the islands you’ve got these kids with rucksacks, guitars, and Granola, hitching boat rides. I don’t have to tell you. Tie up in Puerto Rico and pretty soon they’re at dockside with the sleeping bags, looking to go up to the Bahamas or over to the Virgins or down to the Grenadines. From the ones we used to get at Bahia Mar, Pidge and I know you have to watch it. Most are really great persons, but some of them, you’d be better off stowing nitro in the hold, or carrying lepers.”

  Again he was sidestepping the obligation to be specific about Pidge. I waited him out. Finally he got to it. At Frederiksted, on St. Croix, two blond girls wanted a ride down to Montserrat, where one of them had an older sister married to a lawyer in Plymouth. They’d been traveling with a boy who’d had to return to the States because of some kind of family trouble. Joy Harris and Celia Fox. They had the crew bunks forward available to loan the girls if they chose. The girls couldn’t afford to pay for the passage or the extra supplies, but they said they would work, really work, any kind of work aboard. They were tanned and pretty and young, trail-toughened to a watchful and skeptical wisdom.

  Pidge and Howie had talked it over and decided the girls were all right, and when they came back they would be invited aboard for the trip. Pidge made some jokes about exclusivity and about becoming one of the three Brindle women.

  But only one girl returned. The Harris girl, the smaller and prettier of the two. She said that she and Celia had decided not to travel together any more. She said she thought Celia was going back to the States, but actually she could not care less what Celia did, or how she did it.

  “We talked it over and it was still okay with me, but Pidge had a lot of second thoughts. She said two girls were okay, but one was something else. If it was one girl, she would be with us all the time, and dependent on us. Four was company, three was a crowd. I didn’t see it exactly that way. There were enough chores to keep three people busy. I told her she was being silly about it. She said she happened to own the boat. That wasn’t like her, to say something like that to me. I shrugged it off. Hell, if it meant that much to her, so be it.
So we sailed without the girl. We didn’t even let her know we’d decided not to take her.”

  I frowned at him. “I don’t see anything especially weird about her reaction.”

  “I haven’t come to it. She was very quiet for three days. I thought it was on account of the quarrel. Not really a quarrel, but close to it. Enough to shake me up. So that night at midnight she came and woke me up and I went up to the wheelhouse to take over. She was on pilot, rumbling along on the diesels. There was enough breeze to go onto canvas, and the direction was good, but it wasn’t steady enough to count on and it seemed a lot of trouble. She leaned against the bulkhead, right beside me, in the darkness. There were the instrument lights and some light from our running lights. I said that the stars were nice, and she said I was a cheap, dirty, sick bastard and then she went on from there, all of it in a low voice. I didn’t know what was wrong with her. I didn’t know what she was getting at. I kept asking her what her problem was. Finally she said, ‘Stop trying to kid me, Howard. How did you expect to get away with it? You smuggled that blond ass, Joy Harris, aboard, and she’s forward and keeps the door locked and the hatch dogged down. I know about the food you sneak to her, and I know about you balling her, and I’ve heard you two whispering and giggling and groaning.’ Those aren’t the exact words, but that’s what she said. So I asked her if she meant Joy was on board that minute, and she said I knew damned well she was. The way she said it, the back of my neck got all cold and prickly. We were so damned … alone! You know how it is. And we weren’t even going to Montserrat, where the girls wanted to go. I should have used reason, I guess.”

  “What did you do?”

  “It scalded me. It really did. It hurt to have her think I could do a jerk thing like that. So I told her she was absolutely right and I was going to keep an extra piece stashed aboard wherever we went. So she went below. She was crying. Right away I was sorry I’d been smart-ass about it. I stayed on watch right on into the sunrise and past it. It was hot and calm. I’d figured out how I should handle it. I cut the power off and in minutes we drifted dead in the water. I woke her up and told her to take her time looking around. I told her all the keys were on the cork board in the lounge. When she was satisfied, she could hail me and I’d come back aboard. So I tossed a raft over—that little one there—jumped after it and climbed aboard, freed the little paddle, and went off a hundred yards and stretched out on my face and went to sleep. It took a lot of yelling over the bullhorn to wake me up. By then it was ten o’clock. I went aboard. She was very quiet and strange. She agreed we were alone aboard. She wouldn’t agree we had been alone the day before. She was jumpy. She had a way of looking at me. She didn’t want me to touch her.

  “For a lot of days we were very polite to each other. It wasn’t much fun. We tied up three days at Fort-de-France, and the third day when she came back from one of her trips ashore, she was really in a weird mood. She kept trying to grin, but her teeth were chattering. She wanted to hang onto me. She was a very scared person. But she wouldn’t say why. I was glad to have her want to be close to me again. I didn’t push it. In her own time she finally told me. I guess I should say she showed me. At Fort-de-France she’d found a place where she could get a roll of film developed and printed. Twelve prints. It was the last three prints on the roll that scared her. I didn’t understand why at first. They were shots of the bow taken from aboard. Dumb pictures, really. Empty-looking. She said she had taken three pictures of that girl, of Joy Harris, two of her sunbathing and one of her standing, holding onto the bow rail. She was sure she’d had proof I’d brought the girl aboard. She wanted to … you know, wave them in my face and ask me to explain. But there wasn’t any girl in the pictures. I told her there’d never been any girl aboard. I told her she’d had some kind of hallucination. I told her that what we ought to do was head back and get her a good workup. She said she was okay. She said nothing like that had ever happened before and it would never happen again. So … we kept on. And sort of forgot it. Tucked it away. And things were great again.”

  I pried the second episode out of him. It started during the run from La Guaira to Willemstad. He’d wanted somebody to work on the generator at La Guaira, but the political situation was such no mechanic would touch the Trepid. It was a ticklish problem just to buy stores and get them aboard. The generator was getting noisy. Lubrication didn’t seem to help.

  “We were under sail, and at dusk I turned on the generator and she like had some kind of a fit. She kept asking me to listen. All I could hear was the noisy generator. She made me turn it off and on again. Every time it was off, there was no sound at all aboard. Every time it was on she could hear, sort of mixed in with the noise, that Joy Harris girl talking and laughing. Trav, she could really hear that. I know. It was hallucination. But it was so damn real to her she almost made me hear it too. All the way up to Willemstad I ran it as seldom as possible. The only way she could stand it was to shut herself in the forward cabin, with rubber plugs in her ears. She lost weight. She got very jumpy. At Willemstad I got some parts replaced on the generator. It quieted down. She couldn’t hear the voices and laughing any more after that. But it had changed her somehow. It made her quieter. She doesn’t laugh a lot the way she used to.”

  The third episode was murky because he apparently did not understand just what had happened. After coming through the Canal in a convoy of freighters, after going under the high swing bridge of the Pan American highway, they made the eight-mile final leg to Balboa Harbor. It was suffocatingly hot. A launch took the pilot and the Panamanian line handlers off the Trepid. It was an hour before sunset, and they decided to keep moving and so they headed out into the Pacific, dipping and lifting in the long slow swells. The chart looked clean. He figured the heading at 190 degrees after adjusting for deviation. That would give them good water down through the Gulf of Panama, staying well clear of Las Perlas, passing them well to the west. And that heading would bring them within visual range of the light on Punta Mala to the west of them, and he drew a line on the chart to intersect the 190-degree line and told Pidge that they should be directly abeam of Punta Mala at about four thirty in the morning, if the wind held, giving them eight knots, and then they would change to 230 degrees. By daylight he hoped to take visual bearings of the coast and set the new course for the long run to Puntarenas, tucked snugly into the Gulf of Nicoya.

  Pidge went forward to make certain everything was secured. The stars were beginning to come out. He caught a glimpse of her as she went over the side.

  With no hesitation he yanked a life ring free and slung it into the dark sea as she slipped by. “It was a fresh breeze, almost abeam, heeling us over to port. No time and no chance to get her onto power. God, you know how small the chances are! I turned to starboard and into the eye and smacked her around, trying to count time, estimate speed, draw the lopsided circle in the back of my mind, and use dead reckoning to come all the way around and up and lay the Trepid dead in the water at where she ought to be. It had to be right the first time because the boat wasn’t going to stay there very long. You know how she’s set up. Under sail you use that wheel back aft, in the forward part of the cockpit, and under power you can run her from there or the wheelhouse. I came back up, trying to be downwind from where she went over. I was counting time and distance, and then I took my shot. I headed into the wind and yelled to her, and tried to hear something over all the gear slapping and creaking and banging. I was straining to see while she was in irons. Then, as the wind started to push the boat backward, I saw the white life ring back off the stern quarter. I didn’t know if she was in it at first. Then I could make her out. The Trepid was swinging about and the wind popped the main full and heeled her over, but there was no way on her yet, no answer to the helm. I ran up to the bow and threw a line to her and could just make out the way it fell across the ring. I made it fast to a bow cleat and yelled to her to make it fast to the ring. When I got back to the wheel, there was enough way on her so I could t
urn her back up into the wind, and this brought Pidge swinging in alongside near the transom. I got the line with a boathook and pulled it up, got hold of the line, pulled her up inside the ring, skinned her knee on the hull. I was laughing and crying. It was such a hell of a long chance. And we’d made it. Know what she thought really happened?”

  “What?”

  “She thought I was watching her after she went forward and saw her lean way over the rail to free a line, and I turned sharp to port to flip her overboard. She thought I came back around and tried to run her down, for God’s sake! And then for some damned reason, changed my mind and rescued her!”

  “She get over that too?”

  “I’d have to say not completely. I’m sorry I have to say it. If she’d just … give me a chance. Or if she’d get professional help. But as soon as we tied up, she got the hell off and won’t even talk to me. It’s a month. I don’t know what to do.”

  “What were you planning to do?”

  “The next leg? It was sort of open. It’s a hell of a jump from here. You’ve got to want three thousand miles of open ocean and be ready for it. We’d planned to drop on south—Tahiti, American Samoa, then maybe Fiji to Auckland to Sydney—and decide there if we wanted all the rest of it, or if we’d had the best of it. If so, then we thought we’d probably sell the Trepid there and fly home.”

  Perhaps I let too much show as I looked around the deck.

  “I know, I know,” he said. “I just haven’t had the heart to do the chores. Everything has just been meaningless.”

  “Maybe you’d feel better if you turned to, Howie.”

  He sighed and nodded. “You’re probably right. I guess I would. This is a nice machine, and she’s beginning to look like a slum. Yes, I guess I’ll do that, Trav. I shouldn’t have needed somebody to tell me.”