The Turquoise Lament

by John D. MacDonald

  “Then they are on their way?”

  “Why not? It was a firm deal, I heard. They’ll be here by the tenth, according to their estimate. Is there any chance you might change your mind about buying her?” I raised my voice. “Can you come up with the hundred and thirty thousand?”

  He glanced over toward the bar. “Maybe they won’t want to sell when they get here.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He explained his situation. If they moved the decimal point two places to the left, he still couldn’t buy the Trepid. He had met Howie on the docks. They’d had some long talks. Howie was really a beautiful person. He told Luther his problems. Howie felt that one more long sea voyage together would mend the marriage, and then they could go on around the world as they planned. But she wanted to fold up the trip and the marriage, sell the Trepid right there in Hawaii, and fly home. If Luther would just agree to buy it if they’d deliver it to Pago Pago, that would be a big help. Luther had told Howie that Pidge wouldn’t believe he could buy that much boat, and Howie said that if he just told Pidge he was in land development in Samoa, she’d believe it. Howie said it was a little white lie. Howie said he would be doing Pidge a fantastic favor because she was a very nervous and neurotic person and her behavior was very erratic and frightening lately, and she was at her best after long days at sea. Howie said he was very worried about her.

  Luther said, “Maybe it didn’t work, and you can buy the vessel. I got the idea that if she still wanted to split, she’d fly home from here and he’d take it on alone to Suva, Auckland, Sydney and so on, picking up crew for short hops. He said maybe he’d write a book. But if he changed his mind about that, the Trepid could be for sale here. This might be the best place in this part of the Pacific, because there’d be import duties other places, maybe. I was just doing the guy a favor. You know how it is. I mean a person should get a last chance to fix up the marriage. Right?”

  “Absolutely. Thanks for leveling with me.”

  “No stress, Mr. McGee.”

  “So I’ll hang around and see them when they get in.”

  “If they made up and they want to go on, they might head for someplace else. Apia. Suva maybe, if they’ve got the range and supplies. I mean it might be easier for Howie to do that than explain to her that he talked me into a setup.”

  “Possible,” I said, with a smile that hurt my teeth. “What would be the situation for setting up radio contact with them?”

  “Go toward the malae from here and you’ll come to the Communications Office. It’s open every morning, eight to eleven thirty. We’ve got direct teletype to Honolulu and San Francisco. Did you know that? They’ve got a big radio setup, broadcast the weather and all that. They’d know.”

  After my solitary dinner, where the only entertainment was a retired admiral and his lady on the other side of the dining room, on tour, I went yawning to bed. They were both deaf. He kept roaring at her that the hotel was right on the site of the good old Goat Island Club, and she kept shrieking at him that she didn’t have to be told the same damned thing fifty times running.

  Heavy rain awakened me in the night, and for a half a breath I did not know where I was. Where is a product of who. And identity seems raveled by jet lag. To the tune of “Who Is Sylvia?” we sing “Who is McGeevia?” I was on the wrong side of the world, and my heart was a stone.

  Seventeen

  All creatures seem to seek comfort in routine. The cows bawl at first light for the milker. In Ireland the cows are milked at ten, a more reasonable hour, and begin their bawling then, if the ceremony is delayed. The cat comes to the kitchen at five, sits to wash, knowing it is time for supper. (Take a note: Check with Chookie and see how fares the cat name of Raoul I turned over to her after somebody strangled the lady who owned him.)

  We put on the same shoe first every time and take off the same one first every time, and feel obscurely uneasy when we vary our dumb little pattern. We start the shave at the same place every time, put on a hat at the angle that feels right because it feels like all the other times.

  Patterns hold us in place, give us identity. And patterns are a kind of freedom, because if all the little motions of life vary each time, they require thought. When the memories are imprinted in the fibers of the nerves and muscles, the shoes are on, the face shaved, the belt latched, with no conscious awareness of how it happened.

  There was so little to do, my days became the same very quickly. An early breakfast of tropical fruit and bad coffee. A slow uphill stroll in the relative cool of morning to the station, from which the cable car took off for the summit. This was far up the slope of Solo Hill, because when you want to go from here to there by cable car, you have to get high enough to allow for the deep sag of the cables.

  Service started at eight in the morning. Two dollars and a half for the round trip. The Samoan fare taker bore a slight resemblance to Satchmo, was exceedingly jolly, and, if you didn’t give him the exact fare, never failed to go through his little act. Great flustered consternation. He could not make change. Oh, dear. Then his face would light up. Ah! I will have it for you when you return! I saw him work it on the tourists. When the cable car would return, he would hop about and point and cry, “The taxis are leaving!”

  It was a harmless little larceny. He tried it on me every time. Every time I said I would wait right there for change, because I was walking down the hill. Each time he told me I shouldn’t walk in the heat. I should take a taxi. Each time I said I enjoyed walking. Then he would slap his pockets, show sudden pleased astonishment and produce my fifty cents, and say, “I had it all the time!”

  Each morning I would take my ride in the little cable car. There was just the one car, rectangular with rounded corners, about nine feet long, five feet wide and seven feet high. It was painted dark maroon with two gold horizontal stripes. It dangled from the cable by a device that looked like a miniature oil-drilling derrick about eight feet high. This was fastened to a long housing with internal wheels and a brake system which clamped it securely to the cable. Underneath were two big skids made of heavy bent pipe on which it rested in the cable house on Solo Hill and on the arrival pad atop Mount Alava. Going up, there were three windows on the port side, two windows and a central door on the starboard, said door locked from the outside on takeoff, and opened by the attendant at the top. There were two windows in each end. All the windows could be opened by pulling the top half down. They were double-hung, with a fixed lower pane.

  Some mornings I rode alone. The capacity of the car was eleven persons, and I never saw it full, though I was assured that in season there was sometimes a wait of over a half hour for the ride. I rode with ships’ officers, with German tourists in hiking boots, some young Japanese girls, fresh and delicate and lovely as spring garden flowers, some gigantic Indiana schoolteachers in flowered pants suits, honeymoon couples from Nevada, Montreal and places unmentioned, Samoans from the other islands, an Italian travel agent, two vulcanologists from Yugoslavia.

  Some people would take a look at the cable, take a look at the distant destination, blanch, and back away, shaking their heads, smiling in the nervous apology of sudden terror. The aerial cable car is, after all, the safest mechanical form of transportation ever devised by man. Uncounted hundreds of millions of passenger miles are logged without incident. When the rare incident occurs, the setting is so dramatic, the whole world knows it the same day.

  Most of the women made little squeals and yelps of delighted alarm. Most of the men would have done the same, but for tradition. Had some sadist replaced the floor with a thick plate of Plexiglas, there would have been a lot more volume to the screaming. The car rode downhill on the cable from Solo Hill to a low point about a hundred and fifty feet over the dock area, where the freighters and the big passenger ships (in season) tied up. And from there it climbed nearly fifteen hundred feet, passing directly over the canneries, so high above them the long buildings with the tin roofs looked like freight cars jammed onto
parallel sidings, seven or eight rows side by side. You could see the corroding vessels docked in front of the cannery, some of them barely afloat, some resting on the bottom. You could see a big rusty water tank behind the cannery. From high above, when the conditions were right, out beyond the slots where the incoming Jap vessels were unloaded, you could see the unfolding clouds of glop staining the harbor, browning the blue.

  Then up and up the slope, the car hanging level, greenery close below. That fantastic greenery of total tropics, with a thousand lush hungry varieties jammed in so close no scrap of bare ground was visible. Giant ferns, flowering vines, plants with huge green leaves, choking, reaching, clasping each other and climbing over each other, strangling and quarreling, elbowing and complaining.

  About fifty feet below the platform, the cable car would always stop while they changed the clutch, or something. It would swing gently and the passengers would stare at each other wide-eyed and ask questions nobody could answer. They would sigh and smile and hug each other when it continued.

  Once at the top, I would walk to the right, through the big television studio, where a dozen monitor screens showed a dozen programs being beamed into classrooms, and walk on up a small slope past the big red legs of the base of the television tower, past the big star I could see by night, fashioned of light bulbs hung on high, and up a walk with a railing on each side made of two-and-a-half-inch steel pipe, out to the little round pavilion at the end, open, with a thatched roof.

  It was always cooler on top of the mountain. There I would take out the ten-power monocular I had purchased at the store near the Pacific Trading Company. It was a Japanese item. The proprietor and I had a long discussion about the narrow field of vision, about a small dent in the barrel, a flaking away of the blue lens coating, and a patch of fungus visible on the inside of the large lens, and compromised on a price of eleven dollars. Including imitation leather case.

  I would stand beyond the pavilion and brace myself and slowly sweep the horizon in all the likely and unlikely directions. I had a chart of Tutuila and knew that if their navigation was sound, they would come down on a course that would keep them east of the island, well off Cape Matatula. Once south of the small, close-in island of Aunu’u, they could come due west, staying well in, skirting the harsh shore with its flat black shelves of ancient lava rock, the mist of sea spray from the waves breaking on rock. Off Laulii the harbor entrance would open up for them and they would turn north northwest, past that ridiculous little round tall cake of eroded land with palms on top of it, and come into the quiet of the protected harbor.

  The power of ten pulled the distant dots close, and usually they were the Japanese tuna boats coming or leaving, high bow with a boom, low amidships, and red rafts stacked up on top of the high and ugly aft. I could see weather moving across the sea. And from the pavilion, without the monocular, I could read the knife edge of the rim of the old crater, an irregular curve out toward the harbor entrance.

  Sometimes I walked over to look down into the harbor and use the lens to check the little flotilla of lovely schooners and sloops and yawls at anchor along the shoreline beyond the commercial docks, wondering if the Trepid could have sneaked in by first light. And then I would remember I had taken my look from the cable car on the way up. Across the way, there were private homes climbing the slope, invisible in all the greenery, except for their pale roofs in a shallow pyramidal angle, like Chinese hats. In contrast, the roofs of the hotel buildings were bulging and rounded, somehow like beehives, set on the promontory just to the left of the two sets of commercial docks. The cables dipped down toward the harbor and finally were too far away to be seen, and thus seemed to disappear into nothingness. The tourists did not like to look at that optical illusion. It made them feel dizzy.

  When I had satisfied myself that the sea was empty, I would take the next trip back down. I would look at the wind textures on the harbor surface, like crinkled foil from the cable height. Once I saw something on the dock I could not identify. Tiny gray-white things in a neat line, dozens of them. On my way back into the town, I went over to take a close look. They were used golf carts from the Crestridge Golf Club in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I decided not to ask why they had been consigned to Pago Pago. It seemed one of those things it is best not to know. The rear ends of the power establishment of Scranton had been cradled in these whining contrivances for the five years’ estimated life allowable for depreciation purposes and the men had ground up hill, down dale, uttering glad cries of triumph, loud groans of consternation, shouting wagers back and forth. It is difficult not to anthropomorphize the elderly battered golf cart swung suddenly up out of the black hold and lowered to the dock in the hot sunshine. Where am I? What am I doing here? The more human reaction would be, What did I do wrong?

  I went from Solo Hill to the Communications Office. Yes, sir, we have had the call for the Trepid on all the traffic lists. No, sir, no response. We’ll keep trying. If there’s any word at all, we’ll get in touch with you at the hotel.

  Then the slow walk back to the hotel, if it wasn’t raining. I would pause at a small boatyard and see how much they had done since the last stop. Never very much. There was a small cruiser, a workboat with a broad beam, heavy construction, that I liked. It was named Au A Manú. I never asked what it meant. I was afraid it would turn out to mean Windward or Kitty Kat or Buster’s Folly or Me Too.

  Change to swim trunks and go down to the pool area and sit with a book at a table under an umbrella and have two very good rum drinks. They were good because I was finally able to convince the house that I wanted no sugar at all in them.

  Swim hard for thirty minutes. Go up and change. Take the book to the dining room. A light lunch. Back to the room. Siesta time from two thirty to four. Afternoon swim. Then a walk to the park and the waterfront, if it wasn’t raining or about to rain, back to the upper-level bar for one of Henry’s drinks. A late dinner, in no hurry. More of the book. Early to bed.

  When my head cleared, when the jet lag was gone, I was repositioned on the underside of the earth, and everything around me became ever more real and ever more unremarkable.

  On Saturday, the twelfth day of the new year, as the first trip of the cable car moved out over the bay, I looked down in my habitual, methodical search of the harbor and saw the Trepid tied up to a floating platform around the corner of the larger commercial dock. I had been looking for her so long, I had to look at her three times before I could believe that I was seeing her. The slight side-to-side movement of the cable car plus the movement along the cable made it difficult to hold the ten-power lens on her deck. Sails all neatly furled and lashed. Fenders in place. No one on the deck. And I was heading away from it.

  It was an interminable trip up and back. I waited by the cable car. The only other people aboard had been a Japanese couple, with a basket of lunch. The attendant topside felt he had to keep the car for his full allotted time, and he kept holding up fingers to tell me how many minutes were left. I stood leaning on the hurricane fencing which enclosed the huge pulley wheels for the great length and weight of braided wire cable. One turned constantly. There was some sort of clutch arrangement to disengage the other one. At last he called to me and I went down and got in, and he sent me down through the air, down to the final knowing. And suddenly it seemed that it was happening too quickly. I needed more time up there at the top, thinking about it.

  I started in sunlight. The last third of the descent was through heavy rains, and winds that tugged at the car. Five minutes after I got out of the car, the rain stopped, but by then I was soaked through and I was halfway down Solo Hill, taking long strides in my sodden spongy sandals.

  There was a man sitting on a keg on the floating platform. He was beefy and authoritative. He had a blue cloth cap and a Spiro T. Agnew wristwatch. No sir, the boat was private property and nobody was to go aboard except official persons. It had come all the way from Hawaii. Where the rail is smashed, there and there, a bad storm did that.
The launch was washed away. The windows of the pilothouse are smashed. There is bad weather out there on the sea, and this is a small boat.

  “How many people were aboard?”

  “I think he did not turn to. I think with a sea anchor she would have been fine. No damage.”

  “Was there a woman aboard?”

  “The lines are good for a sea boat. What? Yes, the woman is ill. He helped her off. They went in a taxi to the clinic after the inspector looked at their papers.”

  He told me where to find the clinic. They were doing a good morning business in pregnant women. There were two sturdy young Samoan women in white. They looked like identical twins, but one was a nurse and the other was the doctor. Dr. Alice Alasega.

  Dr. Alasega could not spare a minute for anyone who was not either unwell or with child. I waited forty minutes before she could see me in her small office.

  “You were asking about Mrs. Brindle?”

  “Yes. What is wrong with her?”

  “What’s your relationship to her?”

  “A friend.”

  “Then shouldn’t you ask her husband?”

  I hesitated. “I am going to ask Howie about it, of course. But I want to make sure that … he isn’t kidding himself.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Do you think Linda Brindle should continue this kind of deep-sea cruising? The Trepid really took a beating on this run. I mean, is she well enough, in your opinion?”

  She studied me, while I tried to look earnest and reliable and concerned. At last she said, “I am not a psychiatrist. I don’t know what to say. She seems to me to be in an acute depressive state. She’s listless and unresponsive. Blood pressure low. Reflexes minimal. She made a determined effort to do away with herself a week ago today. Cut her wrist before her husband caught her. He did a good job of dressing it. It’s healing nicely. She doesn’t really remember very much about it. But she seems to believe she’d be better off dead. She said she would rather be dead than crazy. I put her on a psychic energizer, an amphetamine compound recommended for persistent depression. I told him I want to see her again on Monday. They seem to have all the money they need. I said it would be better for her to stay at the hotel than aboard their yacht.”