by Lou Cameron
The brunette sat on a hatch cover and gathered her skirt around her shins primly as she sniffed, “Not as friendly as Miss Chester seems to feel we ought to be.”
He leaned on the rail across from her with a crooked quizzical smile and said, “I thought Gaston was, ah, taking care of her friendlier feelings, Flora.”
Flora wrinkled her nose and sniffed, “Apparently not enough to satisfy her newest fad. You know I don’t approve of the way you men have been carrying on with that silly blond tart, but frankly, I was relieved last night when she tiptoed out of our shared quarters to be with one or the other of you.”
“Watch it, Flora.”
“All right, I was glad she was slipping out to sneak into Gaston’s cabin.” She repressed a giggle as she added, “I peeked.”
“I figured you had. But I’m missing something. How could old Phoebe possibly bother you if she was playing slap and tickle with somebody else in another room?”
“She came back to our quarters at dawn, of course. I gather, from the way she boasted, she’d had quite a night. But you see, she hadn’t had enough. She suggested she and I … oh, I can’t say it. It was all so beastly!”
“Oh boy! I’ve been worried about someone in the crew attacking one of you dames, I never expected you to attack each other!”
“Dammit, Dick, it’s hot funny! Wipe that silly grin off your face this instant!”
He didn’t. He couldn’t. But his voice was sympathetic as he said, “I can see you have a problem. What do you think we ought to do about it?”
“I was hoping you’d know. I’ve never dealt with a perishing lesbian before!”
He laughed and said, “They don’t bother me much, either. Damned if I see why. Some of them are nice looking, and it’s not that I’m unwilling.”
“Don’t be beastly. I can’t share quarters, even in daytime, with a madwoman who wants to commit crimes of nature with my body!”
He could think of some things he’d like to do with her body, too. Her tropic-weight white blouse and skirt hugged her curves nicely in the cool breeze across the deck. But he said soothingly, “Look, old Phoebe’s just sort of, let’s see, how can I put it?”
“Dirty?”
“That sounds fair. What I mean is that she’s not vicious. She’s just discovered, well, a new toy. So she’s acting sort of silly. I don’t think she’d try to force you to do anything you didn’t want to do.”
Flora shuddered and said, “I don’t care. I’m afraid!” Then she buried her face in her hands and began to weep.
He moved over to sit beside her. He put a comforting arm around her waist. She flinched but didn’t try to move away. So he said, “I’ll talk to her. Or, better yet, I’ll have Gaston talk to her. He has a way of explaining the facts of life to naughty children”’
She kept her hands over her face as she sobbed, “I don’t think anything will save me now. She’s a monster!”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Flora. She’s a harmless, bubble-headed sex maniac. You’re a couple of inches taller than Phoebe, and, hmmm, I see you’re both about the same weighty distributed different. You’re built tougher and in a fight you could take her. But there’s not going to be any fight, Flora. Phoebe’s nuts, but she’s not a real lesbian and she wouldn’t know how to play butch and fem with you if she wanted to. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. Like I said, I’ll have Gaston try to calm her down, and meanwhile you can just say no, can’t you? You seem pretty good at fending off advances from everyone else.”
“I do? In that case, sir, what is your perishing arm doing around my waist?”
“You want me to put it somewhere else?”
Before Flora could answer, the lookout Captain Gringo had sent up the main mast called out, “Sail ho! Off the starboard stem and closing fast!”
Captain Gringo let go of Flora and ran aft to join Rice in the cockpit. The Welshman had already moved inboard to keep the binnacle between him and the black dot overtaking them at astounding speed. Captain Gringo saw that the lookout had been wrong in calling “Sail ho!” That was the trouble with R.N. training. Nobody had taught him to yell “Speedboat ho!”
There was no sail. The craft didn’t even have a mast, and the thin funnel rising amidships wasn’t throwing enough smoke to see at this range. He knew it was powered by one of those new, internal-combustion engines. And it was powered good. The speedboat was about thirty feet long, painted a dull black, and moving with a real bone in its teeth as it parted the waves with its sharp prow. Despite its speed, it lay low in the water. The reason was obvious. There was one hell of a gang aboard her. They were crouched low for people enjoying a friendly social call, and he didn’t think those were fishing poles they were holding!
Captain Gringo whipped the tarp off the stem machine gun as Rice pleaded, “Shoot them, look you! They’re showing no colors, and I don’t think they’re looking for a friendly race, do you?”
“When you’re right you’re right, Rice. Hold her steady as she goes.”
“When are you ever going to shoot that gun, Yank?”
“Let me worry about that. You just hold this fucking stem steady for me!”
Gaston came out, attracted by the commotion, took the situation in at a glance, and dropped beside Captain Gringo, saying, “Let me know when you need a fresh belt, Dick.”
Captain Gringo said, “I can manage. Run up in the bows and get Flora Manson below, muy pronto!”
“Aha! And what have the two of you been doing up there, enjoying a sun bath?”
“God damn it, Gaston!”
“I am going. I am going. Does everyone have to be so surly just because more pirates are attacking?”
Captain Gringo didn’t know if the speedboat closing fast was a pirate or a patrol boat. This far from shore, the point seemed academic. Whoever those other guys were, the two vessels had the sea to themselves. But he held his fire for the moment. There was an outside chance that they had some innocent reason for overtaking Nombre Nada. He’d given them a chance to hail him, if they wanted to.
They didn’t. As the speedboat got within rifle range, someone aboard opened up on Nombre Nada with a machine gun and proceeded to chop hell out of her mahogany transom with hot lead!
Rice screamed in terror, abandoned the wheel, and dived for cover. So of course the schooner swung into the wind, broadside to the attacking speedboat, as Captain Gringo called Rice’s mother something awful and opened up with his own machine gun to return their fire.
The unexpected lurch of the schooner threw the enemy gunner off, and his next burst tap-danced slugs along the fortunately cleared deck. Before he could lower his elevation and sweep the waterline, Captain Gringo opened up again and sent a stream of Maxim rounds through the speedboat’s bow, raking her from stem to stem. Better yet, Gaston, up in the bows, opened up with the other machine gun aboard Nombre Nada at the same time. The results were dramatic. Gaston wasn’t as good a machine gunner as Captain Gringo, but that didn’t mean he was bad with a Maxim. The two soldiers of fortune traversed their separate streams of automatic fire like the blades of massive garden shears and pruned the speedboat and its crew like a hedge. Captain Gringo released his hot trigger and called out, “Hold your fire!” as he saw that the speedboat was dead in the water and sinking.
He looked over his shoulder to curse Rice back to the wheel. But he couldn’t see him. One of Carmichael’s other men came on deck, followed by Carmichael. So he snapped, “Somebody grab the fucking wheel!” and the burly Carmichael did so, calling back, “What’s the course?”
“Tack about and let’s see if any of those slobs are still afloat.”
There was at least one survivor aboard the speedboat as it went under. They heard him scream, “Ay, tiberones! Por favor! Ayudeme en la nombre de Maria!”
But by the time they got Nombre Nada back under control and tacked back to the floating wreckage, the sharks the poor bastard had been bitching about had reached him. As they hove to and scanned
the oily water for signs of life, all they saw were some floating black planks and the fins of some late-arriving sharks, circling to see what all the fuss had been about. The ones who’d gotten there in time for breakfast were doubtless already on the bottom, picking, their teeth.
Carmichael asked, “Coo, who were they?”
Captain Gringo said, “I don’t know. They weren’t on our side. They might have been the guys who smoked us up in Corozal. The sudden dash and machine-gun fire fit.”
The girls and most of the others came up on deck and had to have the deal explained to them, too. It didn’t make much sense the second time Captain Gringo heard it.
Phoebe Chester asked, “How could they have known we were aboard this new boat? Wasn’t changing boats supposed to fool everybody?”
It was an amazingly good question when one considered who’d asked it. Captain Gringo said, “You can fool some of the people some of the time, like Abe said. That Mexican gunboat we passed a while back bought our ruse. Whoever these guys were, they didn’t. Like Abe said, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
Flora said, “I’ll bet someone in Esperanza’s crew betrayed us.”
“Now that’s a dumb idea from somebody I thought had more brains,” he said. “Nobody gives away a plan when their life depends on it working, Flora. If anybody suspected we’d swapped vessels, those Colombian gunboats hunting Esperanza and company would be after the Flamenco Lass, not the Nombre Nada.”
Gaston ambled aft and, having overheard the last few words, chimed in, “Merde alors, it is all so obvious, mes infants. These mysterious attackers were the same ones who hit us in Corozal and deprived us of Captain Boggs’s services. Their craft was black and low in the water, so it was invisible at night and, hugging the coast, invisible by day as well.”
Captain Gringo nodded and said, “Gotcha. They shot up Flamenco Lass, lay doggo, watching, as a nondescript bump on the water, then followed us when we left the harbor. Both schooners’ sails were outlined for them against the night sky.”
Carmichael asked, “In that case, why did they wait so long before their second attack?”
“Easy. They probably did intend to hit us just outside Corozal. Then they saw us join forces with Esperanza, and if they knew enough Spanish to worry about sharks in the lingo, they knew better than to mess with old Esperanza and her boys. They shadowed us, waiting for a chance, see?”
“You mean, into that hidden cove?”
“Hell, no—would you follow two armed vessels into a cove with the shoreline behind them and the open horizon at your back? They waited out whatever we were doing. Then when they spotted our sails putting out to sea again, they must have spent some time talking over their next move.”
“Oh, right. We and the Flamenco Lass were both going the wrong way. Must have confused them a bit, what?”
“Yeah. They decided to follow us, in the end, because we were headed the way a British mission would. They probably lost some time shadowing Esperanza long enough to make sure she was really headed south. Anyway, they had to stay close to shore so we wouldn’t see them. The surf is rougher, closer in. That cost them more time. Then they had to wait out that Mexican gunboat when they spotted its smoke as well as our sails to seaward.”
Flora smiled and said, “Then they couldn’t have been Mexicans!”
“Not Mexicans the Mexican navy might approve of. That still leaves a lot of people for them to have been working for. Damn, I wish we could have taken at least one of them alive. Where’s that Goddamn Rice?”
One of the enlisted crewmen said, “I saw him headed for the hold, sir. Do you want me to fetch him for you?” Captain Gringo started to say yes. Then he asked Carmichael, “Is Rice any good to you at all?”
Carmichael said, “He’s my pump man. Why?”
Captain Gringo shrugged and said, “Skip it. If I can’t kill him, I don’t want to see him just now.”
*
As the day wore on, the sun of course got higher, and even out on the water it got hot as hell. Despite Gaston’s bones, the sky was a big cloudless bowl with a white-hot, baleful sun glaring down out of it. The trades stayed brisk and steady. But, despite all the miles of open sea they’d blown across, the trades were notoriously warm for sea winds. As the tar began to bubble from between the deck planks of Nombre Nada, Captain Gringo went to Esperanza’s quarters, now his, to have a sensible siesta. Some of his British companions, being greenhorns, regarded la siesta as a ‘perishing native custom,’ and tried to cool off on deck in the fetid breeze. As an old tropic hand by now, Captain Gringo knew that the secret of survival under a tropic sun was shade.
He opened the windward port and that helped a little. But Esparanza’s recent quarters were muggy and, worse yet, still haunted by the earthy aroma of Esperanza. He slid open the drawer to see if she’d taken along her love toy. She had. He was sorry he’d peeked. It was bad enough to spend the next few hours alone on a cot while waiting for the sun to sink past four. A guy could wind up jerking off, lying naked on sheets that still smelled of Esperanza’s exciting musk!
He took off his duds anyway. After shade, that was the second secret of la siesta. It didn’t matter if one slept or not. In the tropics, even priests and nuns stripped to the buff and flopped across the nearest bed, alone or otherwise. He didn’t feel like sleeping. He had nothing to read.
He’d trained himself to worry about the future as it arose, since nothing in his line of work ever seemed to go according to plan in any damned case. They were headed the right way, and it was up to Carmichael to dive for the damned cable and up to Phoebe and Flora to listen in and record the messages. He just had to worry about keeping them all alive while they did so. Up to now, he’d done okay. So, what the hell. If the Mexicans were not maintaining a heavy guard on the cable, they’d get away with it. If Mexico had the cable guarded, they wouldn’t. There was no way to guess at what they’d find when they reached the Mujeres, and they wouldn’t be there for the rest of the day and the night. Nobody could plan the unplannable. The smart thing would be to catch some shut-eye. A knock-around guy never knew when he’d have a chance to take a nap or a piss. So he slept and pissed when he got a chance to, right?
Nothing happened. He didn’t have to take a leak and he wasn’t the least bit tired. But he forced himself to lie there naked on the bed, as the breeze through the port cooled his flesh at least a little.
There was a knock on the door. He muttered, “Shit,” as he sat up and hauled on his pants. But he wasn’t really sorry for any distraction as he went to unbolt the door. With any luck, it could be Phoebe.
It wasn’t. It was Flora Manson. She was fully dressed, being a greenhorn. She looked dismayed at his naked chest and gasped, “You’re not properly dressed!”
He frowned and asked, “Properly dressed for what? Are you coming in or going out, Flora?”
“I wanted to talk to you. But if you’re in bed …”
“I’m not in bed, I’m standing here talking to you. Meanwhile, the deck’s rocking under us and I’m gonna sit down. You do whatever you want.”
He moved back to his bunk and seated himself, automatically starting to reach for a smoke, then deciding not to. It was already pretty gamy in here.
Flora hesitated, then stepped inside. Either she or the sway of the schooner shut the door behind her. She asked, “Aren’t there any chairs in here, Dick?”
He laughed and said, “Hey, if you find any, take them with you when you leave. It’s sort of crowded in here.”
She said, “So I notice,” as she sniffed, then she perched on the end of the bunk, crossing her legs discreetly as she added, “Spanish people must have odd notions about perfume. Was this that Esperanza’s room, Dick?”
“I guess it must have been. I never bought her any perfume. What’s the story, Flora? You didn’t come here to borrow a chair or perfume, did you?”
She lowered her eyes and said, “We were talking about my problem when that spee
dboat attacked us, remember?” Actually, he’d forgotten about her troubles with Phoebe, if one wanted to call them troubles. But he said, “Oh, right. Phoebe keeps attacking you. This may not be delicate, but I’ve been wondering about that. Just what in hell do lesbians do to each other, Flora?”
“My God, how should I know? Do I look like a lesbian to you?”
“I’d have to study on that. Like I said, I’ve never been in bed with a real lesbian.”
She jumped to her feet and ran over to stand with her back to the door and one hand on the latch as she gasped, “I wasn’t in bed with you! I was only sitting down!”
He laughed, patted the mattress beside him, and said, “Sit down some more, then. Look, kid, I know what’s eating you. So I’ll tell you up front that I won’t make a lesbian advance, okay?”
“What about … other advances?”
“Hey, if you don’t want me to leap on your bones, I won’t, okay?”
She laughed despite herself and said, “That’s a very grotesque way to reassure a lady, Dick. Is that American slang for not getting cheeky with a lass?”
“Close enough. Look, if you’re afraid I’ll rape you, go someplace else. I’m getting a little tired of your insulting attitude.”
“I’ve been insulting you? My God, how?”
“Your whole dumb attitude. Ever since we met, you’ve been assuming I’m lusting for your fair white body. Aren’t you being a little arrogant, Flora? Who says I’m lusting for your fair white body at all? I wish dames like you would give a guy a little choice in the matter. You meet a guy and right away you think he’s drooling over you, like you were the real bee’s knees. It’s always struck me as a bit presumptuous.”
She moved back to the bunk and seated herself again as she sighed and said, “I stand corrected. I suppose next to the busty Phoebe and your fiery Esperanza, I must appear a mousy drab to you, eh, what?”
“Let’s not get sickening about it. You’re okay. Let’s talk about old Phoebe. Are you sure this idea that she’s lusting for you, too, isn’t some more presumption on your part? I mean, even a lesbian has the right to pick and choose, right? What makes you so sure she’s after you?”
