by John Hersey
* * *
—
“Would you take a crack at the pump, Flick?” And then, in response to the blank look that came from the one visible eye: “It’s right under you. Take off the seat cushion and lift up the seat flap.”
“Here, I’ll show you,” Audrey said.
Soon Audrey and Flick were shoulder-to-shoulder, leaning over, their backs to the cockpit, and they were evidently lifting all the items of Flick’s treasure off the seat cushions in order to get at the pump.
Tom dropped his eyes away from the hips and buttocks of those two, which, angled out toward him into the open area of the cockpit, were expressively responding to activities that their bodies screened from view, and to give his eyes something to do, he checked the compass; for some time he fastened his gaze on the little black lubber line and on the degree mark of his bearing on the floating card, and he tried to rivet the two together, steering Harmony down a railroad-track course.
He began thinking of Hamden’s reflex whenever he, Tom, gave a command; no matter how courteously he framed the order, Flick seemed at once to dissolve into a bearing of vagueness, evasiveness. He seemed not to be able to comprehend what Tom was saying. Even making allowances for Flick’s not being the experienced sailor he had made himself out to be at wintertime cocktail parties, this response of fogginess was obviously not based on his failure to understand words Tom spoke. Rather he seemed not to be able to believe that Tom, “idle” at the helm, could possibly mean to command him to jump about doing physical labor, and in a big hurry, too. Communication was not just a matter of what Flick kept calling “input,” it was not just a question of clear and faultless utterance—especially when it came to command; giving commands and acceding to commands required a thorough-going interdependence. Tom thought about skippers of boats who scream at their crews, men who suffer a metamorphosis on sitting down at their tillers or wheels—mild and courteous ashore; imperious, tyrannical, unreasonable, hysterical in command on the water. Tom flattered himself that he was not like that, for he saw himself as more gentle and patient, if anything, at Harmony’s wheel than anywhere else, but now he realized that one specific goad—this response of indefiniteness of Flick’s—might make an unpleasant commanding officer of him. Flick’s elusiveness was surely a veiled form of insolence. The pirate get-up, which he apparently had no intention of shedding, intensified the effect.
Now Tom, with eyes still glued to the compass, heard the gagging sounds of the pump’s beginning to draw, and after a half dozen strokes the first splashes of salty foam, then hard water, into the forward part of the cockpit, from where the bilgewater would drain away through the self-bailing cockpit’s scuppers. He was both soothed by the sound—for the command was after all being obeyed—and disturbed by it: There was a solid flow from the pump, in due course, which spoke of the extent of the seepage around the keel bolt.
Tom looked up and saw to his astonishment that Audrey, not Flick, was at the pump.
Flick was sitting across the cockpit, leaning back in grand piratical style, arranging his loot all around him.
Tom had not heard any words spoken while he had been gazing at the compass, but now he had the feeling that Flick had somehow conned Audrey into doing the work for him. Command, indeed!
“Hey,” Tom said in a sharp tone, “I asked you to bail.”
Flick’s uncovered eye turned slowly toward Tom. The pupil appeared to be in the process of melting; its look was going vague again. “She wanted to,” he said, and he pointed a long forefinger at Audrey as if she were an object.
Without breaking her rhythm, pulling up and pushing down, Audrey said, “I enjoy it.”
“That’s very damn funny,” Tom said. “You’ve never once told me in all the time we’ve had this boat that you got a charge out of pumping.”
“Well, I just started enjoying it.”
Was she making fun of him?
Dottie, sitting on the port side of the cockpit half way between Flick and Tom, suddenly broke in like a tattletale at a playground quarrel. “She wouldn’t let him.”
Tom began to tremble. “Listen, you lazy prick,” he said, “when you’re on a boat you have to do your share of the work.”
Flick, in his woman’s scarf and eye patch from Tom’s log book, bathed Tom with a one-eyed look that seemed to come from a thousand miles away, and he said, “Why?”
“It’s true,” Audrey said, still rocking up and down. “I wouldn’t let him.”
“The reason why,” Tom said to Flick, “is that sometimes things have to be done in a hurry, or the whole crew gets in danger. Much as we might all enjoy it, you can’t have anarchy on a boat. There isn’t even time for democracy.” Tom realized that his anger was making him pompous.
“Surely no one’s in danger now,” Flick said from his great distance, waving a hand out over the level silver sea.
Tom felt very much in danger; his anger flamed into rage. “God damn it, Audrey,” he said. “I don’t like this. I ask this guy to do his first lick of work and—pumping’s man’s work!”
“A woman can do it. As I am demonstrating. Forty-eight. Forty-nine. Fifty.” She broke off to rest awhile.
Flick began shouting. “What do you mean, ‘first lick? I’ve been hoisting and dousing and furling and pitching the frigging anchor overboard and hauling it up again. I’ve been extremely co-operative. In my opinion. Anyway, the girls are right, as usual: Audrey wouldn’t let me bail.”
They were having fun with him. Tom could see that they were enjoying themselves no end. He wanted to cry out to Audrey that they weren’t being fair.
But it was Dottie who spoke next, and she was in a state. “He’s a parasite! Watch out, Audrey. He’ll suck your blood. He’ll drain you till there’s nothing left of you but dust, dust, dust.” Dottie leaned over toward Flick’s circle of pirate treasure and snatched a Kleenex from his box, and Tom saw that she was weeping.
At that moment Tom intercepted a look between Audrey and Flick that carried him over the brink into knowledge he would have given anything not to have had. He took in both faces, her two eyes and his one locked in an unguarded moment of conspiracy, false security and—what Flick preached for machines and humans alike—totally open communication. They gave themselves away. Was it a surging feeling of triumph over Dottie that had led them to be so incredibly reckless?
Tom had a momentary impulse to throw Harmony’s big bronze gear-shift lever (it sparkled! he polished it every evening!) into reverse. Couldn’t he move the boat, its now lost crew, his understanding, the terrible incaution of those two, backwards in space and time into the scene they had just been through, then push the lever forward again, so they could take a slightly different course out of it?
But he did nothing. He sat limp at the wheel. Harmony moved forward through the flat sea. It was all being printed in his mind with a dry-aired clarity: the huge sky with its reptilian eye-scale of gray mist winking up from below, the loom of Block Island now a dark heap along the horizon ahead, the molten-metal sea sliding past at an irretrievable rate—a scene, in all its parts, of immutability, the sharpness of sight itself seeming to say to the inner eye, “This is the way things are, there are no other possibilities”; Dottie snuffling into fluttering paper tissues, having lost far more by giving herself away than those two, being two, could ever lose; Flick projecting his enormous feelings right through that childish birthday-party disguise, immensely sincere in his absurdity, the one eye throwing an open shaft to Audrey, the other covered by the cutting from Tom’s beloved book, the lipstick-rouged nose a drunkard’s nose, the bristling skin about the mouth touched with the most enviable pain; and Audrey, leaning slightly forward, everything about her so utterly familiar, and most familiar of all the softened cheeklines, the eyes expressive of an almost pitying sympathy, the lips on the edge of a pout, and colors here and there of lightness, of humor, of whole-heartedness
, and of that same unbelievable pain of desire—the expression Tom had so long ago come to think he owned as his.
Something had to be done; the moment had to be ruptured. “Darling,”—the word leaped to his tongue—“would you take the wheel a minute?”
Audrey was on her feet, her face arranged almost too quickly; there was a crudeness not properly hers in her alacrity. “Sure, darling,” she said. That word flew again—to his ear, this time. It was firmly spoken, without a trace of awareness of irony, it seemed.
“Keep her as she goes.”
“How far do we have yet?” Was she holding him? Did she mean that she was…she was at least sorry?
“That’s what I want to check, among other things.”
He went below. He stayed a long time. He was sitting staring at the raped endpaper of his log book when Dottie came stumbling down the companionway. She stood for a moment at the end of the cabin table with a look on her face much like the one she had given him on waking up in her bikini the afternoon before: Help me! Change me! He wondered now exactly what she had meant then. Her warning to Audrey a few minutes ago had told Tom that she had intuited the whole truth long before he had understood a particle of it. How long had she known? And what did it matter how long she had known? And what if he had used her body under the sun in the cockpit while those two slept below? Would that have changed anything? Almost as if she understood his unspoken questions, Dottie vaguely shook her head and went forward; soon he heard her sobbing.
He turned on the radio to drown her out.
* * *
—
He was thinking—scarcely hearing whatever was being transacted on the radio; one endless marathon of commercials—thinking of his old theme, so often carelessly uttered over cocktails on Harmony, of escape and confrontation. That, he had said again and again, was the point of sailing. You got away from the world and faced the universe—your naked self in its relation to chaos. A cruising boat was where, disconnected from society, you could get down to rock bottom about your place in it, and in nature. Big chatter over drinks. Had he ever imagined that the talk would come home? Those two were alone up there now, free to exchange their telltale looks. What bothered Tom most of all was that he had been so opaque—so unwilling, or so unable, to perceive the loss he had obviously suffered some time since. How long had this been going on? Now confrontation had been rammed down his throat by a remark of Dottie’s and a vibrant glance traded by those two, and the paradox was that there was no escape. He was on a boat and could not run.
Slowly there began to trickle through to his mind something compelling about a sound on the radio. He focused his attention. A man was slowly reading. It was the hesitant meteorologist with the dry voice of the morning advisory. He was saying that just after dawn Esmé had suddenly begun gathering speed, and that she was veering again. She was rushing up the sea at nearly thirty miles an hour, northward. Tom turned off the radio without even hearing the man out, and he went above. Audrey’s face was pink and oblivious. Tom sat to one side, letting her go on steering. There was no escape.
* * *
—
It seemed to take forever to skirt the northern point and get around to the entrance to the Great Salt Pond. The sky and the sea and the bluffs were gray. Tom was back at the wheel again, and the concerns of the approach—watching the bearings on the creeping islandscape, light thoughts of navigation, checking the chart, ticking off the buoys, keeping the log—all those familiar mechanical rituals of boat life began to absorb him and save him. Flick had at last taken off the scarf and the eye patch, but the lipstick was still on his nose. He and Audrey appeared not even to have noticed that every aspect of existence was now changed; they were on guard, they were being discreet—and they seemed to have no idea that they had given themselves totally away and that their prudence now had an almost comical transparency. Dottie had made a disconcerting recovery; she was right back where she had been beforehand, cheerful, agreeable, trying to please everyone. Flick had casually dropped the oval of black cardboard with its laces of marlin on the seat cushion, not two feet from Tom, and Dottie had picked it up and kept twirling it around her index finger, as if in this way she could assert Flick’s being entwined, still, with her.
They bore down on the heavy jetty jutting out to the northwestward and swung in through the throat of the Pond; with a vague thought of Esmé, Tom noted the Coast Guard station to the right of the entrance. It was a fairly long pull across the wide sheet of Great Salt Pond. The place was crowded with sportsmen’s boats. Tom took Harmony to the end of Champlin’s pier to fill up with gas; standing on the dock after they had tied up, he quietly asked the attendant, a leather-faced man in khakis, whether any moorings were available.
“Are you serious?” the man said; he was loud and cheerful. “With this harrycane supposed to be coming, we was all filled up ten minutes after they switched the weather report around on us—what was that, the two o’clock?”
“What’s he saying?” Audrey, apparently having heard some interesting word, stirred in the cockpit. Dottie, sitting beside her, looked pale.
“About a mooring,” Tom called back over the ticking of the gas pump.
“Are you going to take a mooring?”
“They have none.”
“Oh.”
Had he and Audrey come to this kind of inconsequence? He was not interested any more in forecasts, portents; nor did he wish to discuss them. He and Audrey talked about a mooring without a word about the meaning of taking a mooring. The concept of precaution was no longer a serious one for them to discuss; he had a moment of wondering, for he could not clearly remember, what his insurance policies on Harmony actually covered. He took on water and a thirty-pound chunk of ice, and he tipped the man with a weathered face a dollar on a total charge of less than four dollars. Was he, he wondered, paying off a kind of debt to the Edgartown garbage woman? The indifference of the marina attendant as he stuffed the bill into his trouser pocket was sufficient rebuke to his folly. There was no one for Tom to impress—least of all himself.
He cut up the ice into chunks, which Flick handed down to him as he fitted them into the ice chest. After handling each piece, Flick loosely tossed his fingers this way and that to shake off the chill. Flick was acting somewhat put-upon; perhaps, Tom bitterly thought, he felt that Audrey should do this ice work.
They cast off. For an anchorage Tom eased over toward the old steamer pier. There seemed to be hundreds of power boats of all sizes moored and anchored in the Pond. Tom looked for an open place, for he remembered that the water was deep here and he wanted plenty of scope on which to swing in backing winds. But everywhere he went there were stinkpots, and as the other three, a team again, picked out names on transoms—Ma’s Mink, Edannboblu, Magic Carpet with dinghy Throw-Rug—he went in widening circles, as if searching for something dropped overboard. There was no good place. Finally he anchored, shaking his head, in twenty-odd feet of water not far from the nun buoy nearest the steamer pier. He noticed that a light breeze had come in from the southeast.
They went ashore to Deadeye Dick’s for dinner; it seemed to be understood that the cabin of Harmony was too cramped to contain them that evening. They rowed to the New Harbor pier and climbed ashore and soon entered a room steamy with seafood smells.
After three drinks and a half-eaten swordfish steak with beer Flick got the idea that he wanted to rewrite his will. He borrowed a stub of a pencil from the waitress and he began to scribble on a grease-spotted doily with lobsters and jellyfish printed in red on it.
“Don’t worry, Dottie,” he said. “I’m going to take care of you. I just want to give old Skipper here my inventions, you know, my thought on fixing up sailboats, all the rights and royalties and perquisites attaining thereto.” He wrote in a scrawl, apparently setting down “perquisites attaining thereto.” “My idees. I don’t know how much they’re going to bring in if anyth
ing. Might be nothing, might be a potful. Can’t tell yet. How many witnesses you need?”
Tom said, “Never mind all that. We can do without your boat gimmicks.”
“How many witnesses for a last will and testamen’? Audrey? Dear Audrey, how many?”
Tom said, “I don’t want any part of your thinking-and-talking God-damn machines. Leave me out.”
Audrey said, “I think it’s three.”
“Got just the right number.”
“Christ,” Tom said, shifting ground, “you can’t use the people you’re giving it to for witnesses.”
“Miss. Miss!” Flick snapped his fingers at the waitress.
The girl, a frowsy-haired fat fisherman’s daughter in a dress of synthetic fabric through which the pattern of the lace of her slip showed, and through that the white outlines of her bra, came to the table giggling at the sight of Flick, as she had giggled earlier: the streaks of lipstick still ran down his big nose.
“Sign on the dotted line. It’s jus’ a legal statement, do us a favor, honey.”
The girl shook her head and backed away. “Uh-uh. None of that,” she said, turning as if to run.
“What’s the matter, baby, don’t you want to get involved?” Then Flick turned limpid eyes on Audrey. “ ’Mericans don’t care any more. They’ll hear a woman scream on a street, she’s right under the street lamp; they can see these guys frisking her—nobody liffs a finger.” Flick stood up and, bumping one table, went into the kitchen. There were shrieks of laughter from two women out of sight. Soon he came out again, waving the doily. “O.K., honey,” he said to the waitress, “your Momma signed, and the other lady. Come on, just your John Q. Hancock. You can read it. Here. Look. It’s harmless.”
