“Gross me out!” But she laughed, then went back to her chores. She began singing, but her voice faded as she went forward to her own cabin. While we were in port I had taken over the stern cabin to give us both some privacy. At sea I could collapse onto a saloon sofa, but in port it was more difficult to preserve mutual modesty if I was sprawled in the boat’s main living space.
Silence settled on the boat, and I guessed Jackie was resting after the excitement of discovering organic stick-insect food in the middle of the Atlantic. I sipped my Bloody Mary and looked back to the charts of the Archipielago Sangre de Cristo. I assumed that if the von Rellsteb finca was indeed on the Isla Tormentos, then it must be built on the tangled eastern coast, facing the Desolate Straits, for in the nineteenth century, when the estate wanted to take its fleeces to market, or to ship its quarried limestone to the world, it would doubtless have used coastal sailing vessels to carry the produce north to Puerto Montt. Such ships could never have found shelter on the ocean-fronting western coast, so I could safely assume that the settlement, if it was on the Isla Tormentos, must stand on the eastern shore, where, if the old charts were accurate, several bays looked promising as possible harbors.
“Tim? What do you think?” Jackie’s oddly coy voice startled my somnolent researches. She had appeared on deck, but instead of using the main companionway she had climbed through the forward hatch into the bright sunlight of Stormchild’s foredeck. I looked up from the Estrecho Desolado to blink at the sudden brilliance of the tropical daylight, in which, to my considerable surprise, a very shy Jackie Potten was standing in a newly bought bikini. “You don’t like it,” she responded anxiously to my half second of silence.
“I think it’s very nice,” I said with clumsy inadequacy, and I knew I was not referring to the bikini, which was yellow and more or less like any other bikini I had ever seen, but to Jackie herself, who was unexpectedly revealed as sinuous and shapely, and I had to look quickly down at the charts as though I had noticed nothing out of the ordinary. “I hope you bought some good suntan lotion.”
“I did. Yes. Lots.” She sounded very chastened, and I guessed she had never worn anything as daring as a bikini before. “The Dutch lady made me buy it,” Jackie explained. “She said it was silly to wear too many clothes in the tropics. I’ve bought some shorts and a skirt as well,” she added hurriedly, “because the lady in the shop said that it’s kind of respectful to look pretty decent in the town, but that the bikini’s OK on the beaches or on board a boat. Is it really OK?” She asked very earnestly.
“Yes,” I said very truthfully, “it really is OK.” She needed still more reassurance. “It’s a very, very nice swimsuit,” I said inadequately, “and you look terrific,” and the realization that I had spoken the truth was suddenly very embarrassing because Jackie was only a year or so older than my Nicole, and I also realized that I was blushing, so I looked hurriedly down at my charts and tried to imagine the speed of the winds funneling through the Estrecho Desolado, but somehow I could not concentrate on winds and tides and currents. I looked back to the foredeck, but Jackie was lying down, hidden from me by the thick coils of halyards that hung from the cleats at the base of the mainmast. I sighed and shut my eyes. I told myself that bringing her on this voyage was a mistake, that it had always been a mistake, and that now it suddenly threatened to be an even bigger mistake, because I could feel the temptation to make a damn bloody great fool of myself over some crumpet from Kalamazoo.
So I poured myself a great drink instead.
We waited for the winds to take us away. My birthday came, and Jackie had somehow discovered its date and solemnly presented me with a book of Robert Frost’s poetry that she had miraculously discovered in a secondhand bookshop in Las Palmas, and that night she served me a birthday dinner of rabbit stew, the cooking of which was a real triumph of friendship over conviction, and she invited the Dutch woman, who had helped her shop, and whose boat was moored nearby, to join us with her husband. The four of us sat round a dining table under the cockpit’s awning, and three of us drank wine until, at last, Jackie decided that she would not die if she tried it too, after which four of us drank wine and told tall stories of far seas and I felt the subtly pleasurable flattery of being mistaken for Jackie’s lover.
“I didn’t realize,” Jackie said after the Dutch couple had left us, “that you were kind of famous.”
“It’s a very fading fame,” I said, “if it ever was really fame at all.”
The next day, still waiting for the trade winds, we took a ferry to Lanzarote where we hired a car to explore the famous black island. Jackie wanted to ride one of the camels that carried tourists up the flanks of the volcano, and I, who had taken the uncomfortable trip before, let her go on her own. The camels were rigged with curious wooden seats that accommodated three people abreast, one on each side and one perched high on the beast’s hump, and Jackie found herself sitting next to a young Frenchman. He was obviously attracted to her, and I watched the animation with which she responded to his remarks and felt a twinge of the most stupid jealousy, but nevertheless a twinge so strong that I had to turn away to stare across the landscape of black lava.
Joanna. I said my wife’s name to myself over and over, as though the repetition would prove a talisman to help me. I was tempted to insist that Jackie fly home, except now I did not want her to go. Things would be better, I told myself, when we could leave, for then we would become absorbed in the routine of sailing a boat. At sea, on a shorthanded yacht, a crew sees remarkably little of each other. I would be awake when Jackie slept, and she awake when I slept, and in those few moments when we might share the deck or a meal together, we would be far too busy with the minutiae of navigation and ship-keeping to be worried about my adolescent fantasies.
More and more boats left. I waited, not because I wished to draw out these lotus-eating days, but because the winds about the islands were still depressingly light, and I did not want to motor the heavy Stormchild all the way south to where the unvarying trade winds blew across the Atlantic. I was waiting for a northerly wind to take me away, and each day I haunted the splendid Meteorological Office in Mogan to study their synoptic charts. “Soon, Tim, soon!” one of the duty weathermen would greet me each morning.
Jackie translated my irritability as an impatience to leave the Canary Islands. She confessed to some impatience herself, declaring that she had developed an unexpected taste for sailing. “I mean I used to watch the yachts on Lake Michigan, right? But I never guessed I would ever be on one. I thought yachts were just for the rich, or at least for the middle class!”
“Aren’t you middle class?” I asked idly.
“Jeez, no! Mom works in a hardware store. My dad left her when we were real little, and he never sent us any money, so things have always been kind of tough.” Jackie spoke without any touch of self-pity. She was sitting in a corner of the cockpit with her bare, brown knees drawn up to her chin. It was evening, and behind her the sun was setting toward the high harbor wall, and its light imbued her untidy hair with a lambent beauty. She laughed suddenly. “Mom would be really knocked out to see me now.”
“Does that mean she’d be pleased?”
“Don’t be stuffy, Tim, of course it means she’d be pleased. Mom always said I should get more fresh air, because I guess I was kind of bookish as a kid. My brother was always out-of-doors, but I was the family’s nerd. Mom would be really astonished to see me now.” She turned to watch a graceful French sloop that was motoring slowly toward the harbor entrance. A lot of boats liked to leave at nightfall, thinking to use an evening breeze to spur them through the doldrums.
“It’s strange,” I said, “how we don’t really know our children. We think we do, but we don’t. I never thought Nicole would do anything stupid. Then, of course, her brother died, and she really went berserk.”
“She was fond of her brother?”
I nodded. “They were inseparable.” I paused, thinking about Nicole’s childhoo
d, raking over the ancient coals of guilt to discover whether I had caused her unhappiness. “The trouble is I was away a lot when they were little. I was sailing round the world, being mildly famous. And Joanna was always busy, so the twins were left alone a lot. But they were happy. They did all the things kids are supposed to do.” I poured myself another finger of Irish whiskey. “I was really proud of her. She was a tough kid, but I thought she was levelheaded.”
Jackie smiled. “And that’s important to you, Tim, isn’t it? Being levelheaded.”
“Absolutely.”
“And you think when Nicole ran off with von Rellsteb she wasn’t being levelheaded?”
“Of course she wasn’t,” I said firmly.
“Maybe she was, Tim.” Jackie stirred the ice cubes in her glass, then added a shot of diet cola. One of the advantages of being alongside a pontoon was that we could connect the boat’s refrigerator to shoreside electricity and thus satisfy Jackie’s insatiable American appetite for ice cubes, though Jackie, with her terror of ingesting anything that might harbor a microbe, insisted on freezing only bottled water, and not the perfectly good stuff that came out of the pontoon hose. The pontoon not only had electricity and water, it even had television cables so that the more lavishly equipped boats could watch “Dallas” in Spanish, French, or English. Jackie, her drink suitably chilled into tasteless-ness, frowned at me. “Just because we both believe that Caspar von Rellsteb is a weird guy, it doesn’t mean that his group hasn’t achieved some good things. They’re surely right to try and stop drift netting and whaling, aren’t they?”
“They are,” I agreed, “if that’s all they do.”
Jackie heard the tension in my voice and stared gravely at me over the rim of her glass. “You’ve really convinced yourself that von Rellsteb planted the bomb that killed Joanna, haven’t you?”
I shrugged. “I can’t think who else would have done it.” That was not the most convincing proof of von Rellsteb’s guilt, but it was the only explanation I could find for Joanna’s death, and the explanation convinced me. We knew that von Rellsteb had made himself independent of his Canadian benefactress by means of his father’s legacy and it made cruel sense to me that, if von Rellsteb found himself in need of more money, he would seek a further inheritance: mine. I also believed Nicole to be in von Rellsteb’s thrall, a victim of his malevolent hierarchy, and that she had consequently been unable to prevent his machinations. “We know von Rellsteb uses criminal violence,” I began to justify my suspicions, “and we.”
“Once!” Jackie interrupted to reprove me. “We know he committed one crime in Texas, Tim, and that was over ten years ago and no one was hurt.” She frowned, thinking. “We’re going on a journey of discovery, that’s what we’re doing. We’re going to find out just what von Rellsteb is, because we don’t really know anything about him. We don’t really know if he keeps people against their will, or if he uses violence. We might even discover that he’s running a really legitimate operation, a bit fanatical, maybe, but straight.”
“Balls,” I said.
Jackie laughed. “You’re so full of shit, Tim!”
“Listen.” It was my turn to speak earnestly. “I’m not sailing halfway round the damn world with an open mind. I’m sailing because I think von Rellsteb is an eco-terrorist. His aims might be good, but you don’t approve of terrorists just because you agree with their political aims. That’s the mitigating plea offered by every terrorist in the world! The innocent have to suffer so that Ireland can be united, or the whales saved, or Israel destroyed, or apartheid dissolved, or whatever else is the cause of the month, and the terrorist claims exemption from civilized restraints on the grounds that his cause is too noble. In fact he claims not to be a terrorist at all, but a freedom fighter! But if you disagree with this freedom fighter, then he’ll murder you or kidnap your wife or blow up your children.” I had spoken with a more venomous anger than the conversation had deserved, and in doing so I had said more than I probably believed, for I did not know whether von Rellsteb was a terrorist or not. For all I knew he might be nothing more than a holy fool, though I suspected he was considerably more dangerous. At best, I imagined, Caspar von Rellsteb was a manipulative man who sheltered his activities behind the virtuous smokescreen of environmental activism, giving even his survivalist notions a dubious respectability by a green antinuclear stance, but, as Jackie had maintained, I had no direct proof that he was a terrorist. I saw that my anger had disconcerted Jackie and, as the fury ebbed out of me like a foul tide, I apologized to her.
Jackie dismissed my apology with a shake of her head. “You’re thinking of your son, right?”
“Of course. And of Joanna.”
“Oh God, I’m sorry.” She stared across the harbor to where a bright painted fishing boat was chugging toward the sea. “Is this a crusade for you, Tim?”
“A crusade?” I asked.
“I mean have you condemned von Rellsteb already? Is that why you’re going to Chile? To punish him?”
It was a shrewd question, and I almost answered it unthinkingly by saying that of course I wanted to shoot the goatlike bastard. I remembered that moment on Sun Kiss Key when I thought he was laughing at me and I wondered, as I often did, whether the reason he had agreed to meet me in Florida was just so he could gloat over the fool he had bereaved and whose daughter he had bedded. Of course I wanted to kill him, but, instead, I just said I was going to Patagonia to find my daughter.
Jackie nodded at that answer, then frowned as she swirled her melting ice around her glass. “What if Nicole doesn’t want to leave von Rellsteb?” she asked after a while.
“Then she can stay, of course,” I said, “so long as she tells me that herself, and so long as I’m convinced von Rellsteb isn’t forcing her to say it, or isn’t forcing her to stay in Patagonia against her will.”
“And what will you do if you think he is forcing her to do what he wants?”
For an answer, and because I remembered her extravagant reaction to the revolver in Key West, I just dismissed the question with a wave of my hand.
But Jackie would not be so easily fobbed off. “You’re not thinking of fighting von Rellsteb, are you?” She waited, but got no answer. “You’d better not, Tim, because I told you he used to be into survivalism, and I’ll bet he still is, which means he’s bound to have a lot of guns.” She shuddered at that thought, then shot me a penetrating look. “You don’t have a gun, do you?” Her tone was indignant, as though she had already guessed the true answer.
“No,” I said too hurriedly, then, like a fool, compounded the lie. “Of course I don’t have a gun. I’m English! We don’t carry guns like you mad Yanks!”
“You did in Key West,” she accused me.
“That was because of Charles. He just wanted me to take care of his precious car.”
“Because I really hate guns.” Jackie’s suspicions were subsiding. “They’re just a stupid statement of intent, right? People claim guns are only for defense, but that’s bullshit, I mean, you can defend yourself without using a mechanism designed to kill people. Don’t you agree?”
“Sure I agree,” I said dismissively, because I did not want to talk about guns. I leaned my head on Stormchild’s lower guardrail and stared past the awning’s edge at the first bright star that was pricking a hole of light in the softening sky. Then, because the sun had dipped below the harbor wall and because I ran an old-fashioned boat, which meant that our bomb-scarred ensign only flew during the hours of daylight, I stepped past Jackie and took the flag off its staff, then reverently folded the faded and torn cotton.
“Are you OK, Tim?” Jackie must have sensed a sudden saddening in me.
“I’m fine.” I told another lie, because I was not fine, but rather I suddenly felt lonely, and I told myself that the attack of self-pity had been triggered by the memories that lurked in the sun-warmed weave of the cotton I held in my hands. “I’m fine,” I said again, yet that night, lying sleepless in the stern c
abin, I heard a couple making love on the next boat and I felt insanely jealous. I heard a woman’s warm soft laughter, unforced and full of pleasure, a sound to aggravate puritans and feminists and loneliness, a sound old as time, comfortable, and full of enjoyment. The gentle laughter died into contentment and I consoled myself with the sour thought that it did not matter for we would all die one day, then I tried to sleep as the water slapped petulantly at Stormchild’s hull.
The next morning, unable to bear the idle frustration any longer, I sent a fax to David, telling him our next destination and my estimated arrival date, then I slipped Stormchild’s mooring lines. Jackie, knowing that the winds were not yet propitious, was puzzled by our precipitous departure, but her respect for my sailing experience made her accept my muttered explanation that, despite the depressing forecast, I was expecting a northerly blow at any minute. We motored our way offshore and suddenly, five miles from land, and against all the careful predictions of the weathermen, a steady northeaster did indeed begin to blow. I killed the motor, trimmed the sails, and let Stormchild run free. The unexpected wind proved to Jackie that I was a genius, while I knew I was merely a fraud. Two days later we found the trade winds and turned our bows west and thus we ran in Columbus’s path, bound for the Americas.
We furled the big mainsail, lashed the boom down, then whisker-poled our twin headsails, one to port and the other to starboard. The wind came from dead astern, the twin sails hauled us, the wind vane guided us, the flying fish landed on our deck, and Stormchild crossed the Atlantic, rolling like a drunken pig, just as every other boat had run the unvarying trade winds ever since Columbus’s Santa Maria had first wallowed along these same latitudes under the command of a man who insisted he was sailing to the Orient and who, to his dying day, angrily denied that he had ever discovered the Americas.
Stormchild Page 14
