by Robert Stone
Jack laughed, as if at the very notion.
“I have guys who like to sail that work for me,” Campbell said dismissively. “They’re very taken with what he’s doing.”
“He’s not like the guys who work for you,” Anne said.
“Meaning what?”
“He thinks there are more important things than money.”
“Am I missing something?” Jack asked. “Isn’t money what you’re here about?”
“He believes there are other standards. Harry Thorne understands that, if you don’t.”
“I understand Harry favors him for your sake.”
She stared at him. “What do you mean? Where did you hear such a thing?”
“Around,” Jack said.
“You guys are a stitch,” she said after a moment. “You macho high rollers.”
“Your husband doesn’t make himself respected,” Jack Campbell said.
“What passes for respect around town lately?” she asked. “If I wanted to find out about human respect”—she made a gesture that took in his office and the world it overlooked—“would I come here?”
“You have a lot of nerve, kid.”
“In this place full of flunkies? Where no one knows the meaning of the word? Don’t you tell me about my Owen, Dad.”
“You’re a couple of assholes,” Jack said. “The two of you. You deserve each other.”
Playing by their own rules, they sat and sipped their good whiskey and waited to calm down. She had been at the point of threatening to keep him from Maggie. Eventually she walked to a south-facing window and looked out. The sight of the Narrows, through which Owen had passed, filled her with dread. Her father’s words about getting away from it all had stayed with her. She thought of Owen away from it all, lost to her.
“I can’t understand your attitude,” she said to her father at last. “I never could. I’ve been with him twenty years and I’ve never seen him do a cheap thing. He could have gotten out of combat. He could have gone to work for you in some overpaid no-show job like certain people I won’t mention. Why are you always putting him down?”
She had spoken facing the window. She heard her father’s laughter over her shoulder.
“It’s not fair, is it?” he asked. “Well, I don’t know.”
“I know he makes some people uncomfortable,” she said.
Jack laughed again, to her irritation.
“I know he’s a pretty good provider, Annie. And he doesn’t drink and he doesn’t beat you. But”—he looked at her in slight confusion as though he feared he would be unable to explain—“you know around the docks—how can I say this—a man had to carry himself a certain way. There was one way to walk the street. One way to handle yourself in a saloon. Christ, I don’t know, a way to handle yourself. He’s got it all wrong.”
“And that’s it?” she asked.
“I know he has good qualities,” Jack said. “But his best qualities don’t speak to me.”
“I hope you understand,” she said, “that I encouraged him every step of the way in this trip.” Saying it, she felt a flutter of panic in her throat. “It’s something he needs to do. For himself and for us.”
“Not something I would have chosen.”
“Look, he loves boats. He loves the sea. Those are clean, simple things. I love him because he loves those things.”
Jack’s tolerant mood seemed to contract slightly.
“Romance of the sea? Christ, the ocean is a fucking desert. Nothing out there but social cripples and the odd Filipino. You don’t find Americans out there anymore because we’ve come beyond that.”
“Yes, well,” Anne said, “Owen has a few things to say about the state of the country in that regard.”
“Jesus,” Campbell said, “spare me! I yield to no one in my patriotism. But spare me your husband’s reflections on the state of the Union.”
In a moment they were both laughing.
“Is he really that good a sailor?” Jack asked gently. “Does he have the temperament?”
“He has the smarts and the strength, Dad. Believe me.”
“Christ, he’s really put himself on the spot, hasn’t he? Do you really think he’s doing it for you?”
“Yes, I’m sure of it, Dad. To make us proud of him. That’s how he is.”
Content she had what she’d come for, Anne embraced Antoinette on the way out. Doing so, she suddenly imagined something predatory about the woman’s sympathy. She felt the suggestion of a waxen, widowy twilight the two of them might share, with windowless rooms for ballroom dancing in the afternoon. It made her straighten up abruptly.
Descending alone in the express elevator, she understood for the first time the nature of the solitude she would have to endure in the coming months. It would really be the two of them, each alone against the world, as it had been during the war. There was no support and no sympathy she could altogether trust. No one shared the risk finally.
Above all, the thought of having to endure encouragement filled her with disgust. It was too much like consolation. Winning was all, she thought. It was the only revenge on life. Other people wanted reassurance in their own misery and mediocrity. She required victory.
PART TWO
30
JUST AFTER SUNRISE, forty-eight hours and over two hundred miles off Ambrose Light, Browne sat in Nona’s open cockpit and looked at the western horizon. Astern, the last fat white clouds of home were falling away. A northwest wind whistled in the rigging, force 5 and steady.
Months before, on the night of Harry Thorne’s first phone call, he had gone straight to the Admiralty charts and begun to plot his way around the globe. But he was not inclined now, watching the morning’s white horses roll by, to chart courses. In the last hours of darkness he had dozed off and then awakened to find himself on a sunlit ocean of sultry blue—the Gulf Stream. For such a long time, he thought, he had been promising himself unfamiliar skies. Leaning over the side, he dipped his hand in the quarter wave and felt it warm. The sensation made him smile.
At some level he felt involved in an escape. His impulse was simply to head out and put the land behind him. Beyond that, it made sense to keep on easting while the wind held and get across the Stream as quickly as possible. The first weather fax had carried nothing but sweet assurance; there were no tropical storms on the prowl and no threatening northers.
Browne had slept very little since clearing the Narrows. Propped up in the cockpit against a stack of foul-weather gear, he had drifted in and out of consciousness, fighting to outlast darkness. His radar alarm was set for a fifteen-mile radius. Through two nights in the coastal shipping lanes, he had stayed on deck, scanning the dark horizon. A few hours on the sky-bright waters of the Gulf Stream inclined him to rest easy. In the afternoon he went below, cleared the last-minute gear from his bunk and stretched out.
When he went on deck again, the sun was low and the pastel water overlaid with a puritan October light. The wind was steady and he kept Nona eastward. In the last daylight, he checked the screws in the self-steering vane and eased the lines against chafing. According to his knot log he had come 154 miles since the day before, a speed of close to seven knots.
For dinner he cooked a can of chicken broth and poured it into his usual coffee cup, a Navy mug in the Navy pattern. Anne had packed it for him in tissue with a blue ribbon. Inside was a note detailing the boat’s stowage plan. He needed only to glance around the main cabin to realize how much of the stowage she had overseen. Tossing the homely red and white Campbell’s soup can in the scraps gave him a momentary flash of incongruity. Home away from home.
On deck at dusk, he sipped his soup and listened to the accommodating wind. The loneliness he felt rather surprised him. Except for Anne’s presence, he thought of himself as a solitary. In his deepest recollections, it seemed to him, he was always alone.
Browne’s last solo passage over blue water had been five days spent between Florida and Cape Fear. It was a passage he had
trouble remembering. One time at sea blended into another when things went well, and that one had gone well enough. Some of the time, mainly at night, his mind had played tricks. It had been easy to get the wind in tune and start it singing. On the open sea, the eye tended to impose form on random patterns of wave and light. The same thing happened in deep woods. It happened to everyone.
After a while Browne found that trying to recall the Cape Fear trip made him uncomfortable. It reminded him of the lie he had told Riggs-Bowen about sailing around Queen Charlotte Island. Alone in his cockpit on the dark ocean, he rapped the heel of his hand against his forehead. The thing was so outrageous it made him laugh out loud. Of all the godforsaken fog-shrouded coasts on earth to claim, he thought, bound in killer rocks and floating fir trunks, of all outrageous lies! But there was no unsaying it. It had been a primitive spasm from some morally underdeveloped area of the nerves. Remembering it was very painful and strange.
A clear sky burned overhead, appropriate to the west wind. Altair shone radiant over the continent behind him, Betelgeuse and Orion over the farther ocean. It was a childish pleasure to have the stars to himself again. Before midnight, he went below. He woke up dizzy. Rising, he had to cling for a moment to the overhead bar. On deck the wind was warmer and tasting of rain but still steady from the northwest. The steering vane was carrying on, heading Nona due east on a port tack. The circling beam of his radar showed a clear horizon.
At the chart table, he idly opened his copy of Ocean Passages for the World. In the morning, he decided, he would take a sighting and set a provisional course. Ocean Passages, for the time of year, directed him to 34° north, 45° west, from which point he might set out against the northeast trades. Browne thought he might east it even farther if the wind held. For the first time, he turned on the monitor of his satellite navigation device. Then he switched on his Icom receiver, tuned in the Naval Observatory time signals and set his watch and the boat’s chronometers. At the edges of the cabin, all the wizardry, the electronic telltales with their knobs and gauges, sat dark and dusty. Browne suspected he might never even try to use them.
After a while, he felt thirsty. He went to the galley, helped himself to a few cups of water and lay down in his rack. When he closed his eyes, the dizziness returned. Browne had been seasick only once in his life, bouncing up and down off Little Creek in the beachmaster’s boat during a mock invasion nearly twenty years before. It seemed perverse of things to visit the condition on him now.
He got up and dialed some progressive jazz on shortwave and turned off all the cabin lights except the one over his chart table. Then he settled back to listen to the music and tried to sleep. Shortly he was sweating. When he pushed his sleeping bag aside he felt cold. Then all at once he became aware of the wound in his leg where he had cut it on the dock at the boatyard. He sat up and turned on his overhead light.
The sight of the cut, just above his ankle, gave Browne a rush of alarm. It was covered with a scab the color of New York harbor and the skin around it was a bright red that faded by inches. Pressing beside it, he felt a dull muscular sort of pain from ankle to thigh. The wound appeared to be deep although it had not bled much. At the yard, when he had cut himself, the tide had been at ebb. So the spike that had caused the wound was one set below the low-tide line, never exposed to air. It was a classic example of the sort of puncture wound that developed tetanus. Over five years had passed since his last shot and it had not occurred to him to get a new one. Cuts were usually clean at sea.
“Bloody hell,” Browne said.
Gathering himself under the down bag in his rack, he read from The Complete Home Medical Encyclopedia, which was part of his medical kit:
“Onset usually begins with headache, low-grade fever, irritability, apprehension, and restlessness. The first real sign of tetanus is a stiffness of the jaw and difficulty in opening the mouth. Muscular stiffness can develop in the neck and elsewhere. Most agonizingly, the patient remains alert. He cannot open his mouth or swallow; his eyebrows become raised; the corners of his mouth become upturned, giving the appearance of a perpetual grin . . .”
The radio faded out as Browne sat down on his bunk. It was extremely unlikely, he thought, that he had tetanus. But not out of the question. He got some aspirin and penicillin from the sick chest and took them with water. The more he thought about his jaw, the stiffer it seemed to him.
He slept for a while after that. When he awoke, he was sicker than before. His mouth tasted foul, his neck was sore and there was a band of pain around his temples. He felt so plainly feverish that he never bothered with a thermometer.
“Early hospitalization is essential,” said the Home Medical Encyclopedia. “Much depends on the early administration of tetanus antitoxin.”
Even if it was not tetanus, Browne thought, there were other deadly dangers. Gangrene. Botulism. He looked up each one in the medical text. Later he felt too sick to read or even get out of his bunk. Each time he moved, his body was racked with chills. Eventually, he forced himself up to check the radar screen. All was still clear. He staggered out on deck and looked into the dark haze of his own sickness. The wind was dry and cool again and blowing from the same quarter.
When he went below, his gaze fell on the radio transmitter. The obvious course, it seemed, was to turn around and head for land. If it got worse he might raise the Coast Guard. As soon as he pictured himself being rescued, he felt a moment’s certainty that aborting the trip was the right thing to do. He was plainly too sick to go on. The image of his own illness overpowered him. He sat on the bunk with his chin on his chest, too sick to see straight, wanting to start back but too addled to commence coming about. All he was aware of in the cabin was the transmitter. He had the urge to ring up his wife. He wanted to recruit her into his dilemma, but still more he wanted to hear her voice. He felt whipped and frightened. In the end, he simply took more aspirin and more penicillin and went back to sleep.
When he awoke again it was still dark. A cloud of fever dreams had held him down, each one depicting some anxiety. It took him a moment to remember what the actual trouble was supposed to be. Then he could only lie there, pondering his condition, meditating on symptoms. To be sure, his neck was stiff, his jaw ached; he was still very feverish. But this time the accompanying panic failed to strike him. It was as though he had not the energy for panic.
If I die of tetanus, Browne thought later, or gangrene or botulism or whatever else, then I will simply die of it. I will lie here as long as it takes to die and call no one. I will not run puking home to her or the Coast Guard or anyone else.
He realized then that he would have to relearn, in soft, advancing middle age, the sense of suspended fortune that had been mother wit and second nature when he was young and in the war. Such things did not simply come back. In spite of all the conscious preparation, he was unprepared for sea.
It was so much in the mind, Browne thought. The logic of ordinary life was the logic of weakness and fear. The imperatives of weakness and fear were persuasive. His helpful medical book was a busy encumbrance. The time to treat the cut had been before the race began and he had chosen to ignore it. He would live with his own decision, excused from further responsibility. There were ways of coping with everything, even despair.
And it was useful to think of the dividing world overhead, the gates of Altair sliding closed, Orion leading on. He was in a zone of transit between his lost world and the one beginning to take hold. He swallowed another penicillin tablet and turned over.
Just before first light a strange signal came in on shortwave. A man with a West Indian accent was reading aloud:
“. . . a man riding a red horse an’ he stood among de myrtle that were in de bottom
“And behind him were dere red horses, speckled and white.
“Then said I, Oh”—and here the man moaned softly and in such a sad way that Browne would never forget it—“oh, my Lord, what are dese?”
Browne opened his eyes in hope
of daylight but there was none to see. He was still sick enough. The signal faded out then. Browne pulled the bag close around himself. He had enough trouble, he thought, without mystery sky pilots.
Later on, he awoke to a sound that cheered him. The sun was high in the sky and Morse code was coming over the Icom, loud and clear at over thirty words a minute. As a midshipman, in the autumn before he was commissioned, Browne had spent some months at the Navy’s radio school in Norfolk. He had been taught to receive at the typewriter; typing a sentence still brought ghostly electronic echoes to his inner ear. Trying to follow the Morse on his receiver, Browne sat up and realized he felt better.
Hand-transmitted Morse had practically disappeared from the sea lanes in the days since Browne had been a midshipman. Nearly everything was faxed or automated. Listening more closely to the signals, he understood that there were two operators on the line repeating each other’s signals. The sending speed was incredibly fast for hand transmission but distinctly that. Then it came to Browne that what was being sent back and forth were variations on the phrase BEN’S BEST BENT WIRE. In Morse the words were pure rhythm and used by old-time operators to demonstrate the quality of their fist, their skill with the key. After about five minutes of electronic syncopation, the operators signed off.
“GL, OM.” Good luck, old man. A marine operator’s sign-off from Conrad’s time. Roger. Out.
“Bless you, Sparky,” Browne said aloud. “Both of you.”
He climbed out of his bunk and felt his sickness had passed. It was early afternoon and he was hungry. Later, he decided, he would take a sighting.
He made himself a cheese omelet for breakfast and ate it with fried ham and, as things did at sea, it tasted marvelous. When he had washed the dishes he went on deck.
The day was fine, the wind steady and the ocean still and blue. As a bonus, four gray bottlenose dolphins were leaping with Nona’s bow, as good an omen as could be. He hurried back below to get the camera Strickland had given him. For whatever reason, the dolphins disappeared, declining to be recorded. Just for practice, Browne focused his lens on the horizon and shot the empty sea.
