“Can you hear me, Captain?” the man asked.
“Yes, yes sir.”
“Swallow these. For fever and pain.”
The water was in a tall dark-blue plastic glass, with ice. He had never tasted anything as delicious.
The man took the empty glass and said, “I am not a medical doctor, Staniker. I’m a dentist. We have to know a certain amount of medicine. I’ve dressed your burns with what we could improvise. Your fever is running a hundred and three and a half. It was probably higher in the afternoon. We’re making a night run to Nassau. My name is Barth, by the way. Bert Hilger, my friend who owns this boat, couldn’t raise anything on the damned radio after we found you. So we’re running you in where you can get hospital attention. Do you understand, Captain?”
“How—how bad off am I, Doctor?”
“How long were you alone there on South Joulter?”
“What day is it?”
“Today? Friday, the—uh—”
“Twentieth,” the woman said.
“We—we blew up and burned last Friday night.”
“You are a superb physical specimen, Captain. If you don’t get pneumonia, I suspect you’ll snap back quickly with proper care. Can you answer some questions? In case you’re not conscious when we dock at Nassau.”
“Yes sir.”
“What happened?”
“It was—about nine o’clock. They were all below. They would have been topsides, it was such a nice night, except they were having dinner. They always ate late. Moonlight night, and we were heading for the Joulters. I was running her from the flying bridge, on pilot, and I’d turned the depth-finder on. When it began to pick up any bottom at all, I was going to cut down, take over, and find the passage I’ve been through before, place where there’s no coral heads to bother you. On that Muñeca, you’ve got—you had every control duplicated up on the fly bridge. I remembered how one bank of batteries was pretty well down, and from the running time I didn’t think we’d gotten the other bank charged full yet. Any boat I’m operating, I like to keep the batteries up. That would mean running the auxiliary generator after we anchored. And no reason at all why I couldn’t run it while we were under way. Spoils a quiet anchorage when you have to run it at night, like of course you have to when they wanted the air conditioning on. I remember every once in a while I could just barely hear Bix—Mr. Kayd—laugh. He had a loud laugh. So I switched the auxiliary generator to the spare bank, and I pressed the button wondering if it would catch right off—it was a little cranky sometimes—and there was a big flash and a whoomp, and the next thing I know I’m in the water, choking and strangling and thrashing around, with a funny orange light on the water and the back of my neck hot. I guess I was knocked out for a little while and the water brought me out of it. When I got turned around, she was fire from bow to stern, and burning to the waterline. I was sick to my stomach from swallowing water. I saw something in the water and I managed to swim to it. It was one of those styrofoam sort of surf-board looking things with a glass place to look through. Miss Stella had brought it aboard in Key West, and she liked to use it to float around over the coral reefs, looking down at the fish. She wasn’t a good swimmer on account of her leg. The board was scorched and melted along one edge, but when I pulled myself onto it, it held me all right. And about then, the Muñeca—that means doll in Spanish—went down like a rock, with a lot of hissing when the flames went underwater, and some bubbling and boiling on the surface for just a few seconds. Then it was quiet. When I could stop coughing, I started calling them. I guess I was out of my head. Maybe the only one I was calling was my wife, Mary Jane. But no answer at all.”
“But wasn’t the Muñeca diesel powered?” the dentist asked.
“Yes sir. But the auxiliary generator was gasoline powered, and my guess is that gas leaked into the bilge from its fuel tank or one of the tins stowed down there to fuel it with. The spark, when I tried to start it, blew the boat up, and the heat of the explosion was greater than the flash-point of the diesel fuel. Maybe I goofed. My God, sir, I’d never start gasoline marine engines without running the blowers first. But with an auxiliary, you don’t think of that so easy. And maybe Bix—Mr. Kayd—goofed too, not having a sniffer installed when he had the gas auxiliary put below decks. Using a blower is something you think of when you’re tied up, not running along at cruising speed.”
“No other survivors, Captain.”
“No sir. When I knew I was alone out there, I remembered the Muñequita. That means little doll in Spanish. It was the boat Bix picked up in Miami because the Muñeca was too big for fishing, with too much draft for some of the places they wanted to explore. She towed just fine on a long line. Snub her closer and she’d wallow and swing, but way back she rode like a church. I thought I spotted her quite a way off. I kept paddling until my arms ached, but if it was the Muñequita, she was moving as fast as I was. It’s possible. With those twin out-drive Volvo units tilted up, she draws fifteen inches, and she has about an average three feet of freeboard for the wind to catch.” He closed his eyes.
“Isn’t this tiring him too much, Bill?” the woman asked softly.
“I’m okay,” Staniker said.
“There’s been a big search,” Barth said. “Air and sea. I guess it started when Kayd didn’t radio Nassau Marine last Saturday morning for traffic, and there were some calls in for him, and the marine operator couldn’t raise him. The search has been tapering off. The focus was up around the Berry Islands.”
“That was where we were headed when we left Nassau. We got into nice dolphin a few miles out. Spent a lot of time. Everybody had fun. Mrs. Kayd had been reading the Guide. She wanted to see the Joulters, and kept teasing Bix until he had me lay out a new course. He said we’d cruise from there to the Berrys Saturday afternoon.”
“And on that float board you made it to South Joulter, eh?”
“I knew about where we were when—it happened. I got a rough estimate of my direction of drift from the stars, and it was too northerly and I was afraid it would make me miss the Joulters and take me on out northwest onto the Bahama Banks. I paddled due south to compensate. Paddled and rested. Maybe I passed out once or twice. At dawn I came to the bar. I let the board drift away. I walked until it got deep again, then swam ashore. Every day—I waited for somebody to come—felt worse—kept thinking about the Muñeca.…”
“Now there,” a gentle, crooning, comforting woman-voice said. “It’s all right. You’ll be all right.” He felt her dabbing gently at his face with some cool, scented, astringent lotion on a cloth.
He opened his eyes and saw her leaning over him in the lights of the cabin, saw it was the tall brunette, the better looking of the two, but at this closeness she was older than he had estimated.
“Do you know where you are and who I am, Captain?”
“Is it—Mrs. Barth?”
“Then you do know. But I’m Mrs. Hilger. A while ago you thought I was someone else. Somebody named Crissy. Or Christy. You scared me a little, you were holding my arm so tightly.”
He lay very still. He breathed slowly. “What did I say?”
“I don’t know, actually. You seemed to be trying to make Crissy or Christy understand something. You said something about it not being your fault. Pleading with her, or him.” Her laugh was nervous. “You got quite wild this time.”
“This time?”
“You just moaned and mumbled the other times. This time you rose right up and shouted. We should be tied up in another twenty minutes, Captain. Bert got through to Nassau Marine a little while ago. There’ll be an ambulance waiting.”
He closed his eyes. It was unfair that fever should make you talk and not know you were talking. Somebody might hear enough of the fever words to make their guesses about all of it.
You could not will yourself to be silent when the fever carried you off. But if you could make certain all they would hear would be a thickened mumbling …
He shoved his tongue
into his right cheek, between the strong molars. He bit tentatively at first, measuring the pain. Then, body rigid, snuffling and grunting with agony and effort, he began chewing his tongue, mashing the sensitive flesh, tasting the coppery flavor of his blood.
From far away he could hear the woman shouting at him, and then she ran out and called the others. When he felt them leaning over him he pretended to be asleep. God help us, Crissy. God help us. It went wrong. I tried, but it went wrong.
Three
THE THIRTY-EIGHT HUNDRED POUNDS of the Muñequita dipped and danced on into the Atlantic dusk. Little Doll. Under considerably more power this same T-Craft hull design had won some savage ocean races. Fiberglass, teak, aluminum, stainless steel, plastic, perhaps ten thousand dollars for such a special plaything. With the twin Chrysler-Volvo inboard, outboards, 120 horsepower each, she could scat at forty-seven miles an hour, the deep Vee hull slicing through the chop, the wake flat.
With her fuel capacity increased by the two saddle tanks to over eighty gallons, at her cruising speed of thirty-two miles an hour, the engines turning at 4500 rpm, her maximum range was almost three hundred miles, without safety factor.
From the forward lift-ring a hundred feet of half-inch nylon line trailed upwind. She had been bought on whim and loaded with extras—convertible top, now folded and snapped into the boot, searchlight, rod holders, windshield wipers, bow rails, anchor chocks, electric horn, screens, a transistorized Pearce-Simpson ship-to-shore radio tucked under the Teleflex instrument panel, pedestal helmsman’s seats, two bunks and a head fitted into the small area forward.
Salt had crusted on her, and had then been rinsed away when she had drifted through the rain squalls. At times when the wind and the chop were at odds and the waves broke, she would falter in a moment of awkwardness, take water, then shake herself free with almost an air of apology for such flawed grace. The automatic bilge pump had been turned on when she was rigged for towing, and when the rain and the chop brought enough water aboard, the pump would drone, working off the batteries, until the bilge was again empty.
The graceful hull was a medium Nassau blue, her topsides white with just enough trace of smoke blue to cut the sunglare.
She had lifted and dipped and danced her way with an agile grace which matched her name. Muñequita. Little Doll. The out-drive stern units were uptilted and locked in place. The long line trailing from the bow steadied her, keeping her bow facing into the wind. Yet now movement was less graceful because the northeast wind was freshening, lifting the Gulf Stream into a chop. In that balance of forces the Muñequita moved due west, stern first, into nighttime.
Even in that posture, she seemed to anticipate and avoid the uglier motions, almost as if she were aware of the look of death aboard, aware of the naked body of the girl, face down on the cockpit decking, responding, slack as a pudding, to each variation of that long and lonely dance across an empty sea.
The boat drifted into the path of a brief hard shower that moved swiftly, dimpling the swells, then spattering against the topsides and against the sun-raw, blistered back of the girl. It soaked her hair and when it ran across her parted lips she made the smallest of sounds, licked with a slow tongue, moved one hand slightly.
The rain ended. The bilge pump started up, droned for two minutes and clicked off.
By midnight the boat had reached the western edge of the Stream where current and chop were diminished. The Muñequita’s motion eased. She began to drift in a more southwesterly direction.
Four
ON SUNDAY MORNING, the fifteenth of May, just before noon, Sam Boylston sat in a booth by the tinted plate-glass windows of a roadside restaurant on the outskirts of Corpus Christi, looked across at the somber, pretty and intent face of Lydia Jean, his estranged wife, and knew that all the things he had said—all so carefully planned—had been the wrong things after all.
They kept their voices low. A group of idle waitresses prattled and snickered twenty feet away.
“What it all adds up to, Lyd—check me if I’m wrong—you’re still in love with me in a kind of sad dramatic way … but we haven’t got a chance in the world because I am the kind of a person I am.”
She frowned. “You sum things up so they sound so neat and complete and final. But it’s sort of a trick. It’s argumentation, really. If you could understand what it is about you that made things wrong, and if you could—see yourself doing it, and if you could understand why you do it then maybe you could … Now you have that terribly patient and tolerant look.”
“You think I need help?”
“I don’t know what you need.”
“I need you. I need Boy-Sam. I need the home we had five months ago, Lyd.”
She shook her head in a puzzled way. “I wish I could explain it. I really do. You crowd people. You use them up, and the nearer and dearer they are to you, the more mercilessly you spend them.”
“Overbearing monster, huh?”
“You are a very civilized man, dear. You are polite. You are considerate. You are thoughtful. But you demand of yourself an absolute clarity, total performance, complete dedication. There is something almost inhuman about it, really. What is lacking, I think, is the tolerance to accept—the inadequacies of others.”
“Lyd, be fair. Did I ever tell you you weren’t meeting some kind of standard?”
She was silent as she refilled her empty coffee cup and warmed his cup from the Thermos pitcher. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I think it was because you were so young when your parents were killed in that accident, and you felt responsible for Leila, and your father had left everything in such a dreadful foolish muddle.”
“Oh, come on!”
“No, really. Try to understand. You are only thirty years old, Sam. What did we get married on when you got out of law school? That old car. And barely a hundred dollars. That was only seven years ago! You are worth a lot of money.”
“Simple ruthless greed, darling.”
“Don’t make jokes, please, when I’m trying to explain something. It’s because you have this terrible impatience with carelessness and muddy thinking and laziness. You drive yourself so hard. It isn’t money hunger. You just seem to want to go around neatening up the world. It exasperates you to see somebody operating in a sloppy way. For goodness sake, just look at Gil and that car-wash thing. He came to you as a client. Nearly bankrupt. Patent suits, wasn’t it?”
“Mostly. Offered me a one-third interest if I could salvage it and get it back on its feet, help arrange refinancing.”
“Now he has scores of those coin things all over the southwest, and what is your interest worth, Sam?”
“Considerable. So?”
“You neatened it up like a compulsive housekeeper. And what you demanded of me, dear, was that I be the loveliest, smartest, most charming young housewife and matron and hostess in all Texas. You were perfectly sure that because you love me, and because I had to be willing to give a hundred and ten percent to the program, I would be just that. Boy-Sam had to be the smartest, merriest, happiest, gutsiest little kid in the world, because he was yours and all he’d have to do would be live up to his potential. You demand just as much of your sister, Leila, in another way. But, right up until recently, she’s had the spirit and the toughness to ignore the pressure. Boy-Sam and I, we just weren’t strong enough. We had to get out.”
“Pressure on the kid?”
“He adores you. He strained every nerve and muscle to please you, to do what he thought you wanted him to do. But he’s just a little guy. He’s only five years old. Oh, you wouldn’t criticize. But when he’d fall short of what you expected of him, you’d give him a little pat and say, ‘Well, kid, you gave it a try,’ and walk away. He is sensitive to every nuance of your voice. You never glanced back and saw his eyes filling with tears because he felt he’d failed to measure up to the impossible standards you set him. You set impossible standards for yourself, and then you meet them, God knows how. You expect it of yourself. You
take your own total performance for granted. I tell you, it discourages the hell out of us fallible types.”
“You are everything I want you to be, Lyd.”
“When I was little we had an old brown dog. He smiled at you. He’d get in a chair with you and when he was asleep he’d start to push. Just a little bit. He’d take up all the slack he could get. When you shoved back, he’d wake up and smile at you and go back to sleep and start pushing again. And finally it was his chair and you had no more room in it, so you moved.”
“Maybe he liked closeness.”
“Believe me, I could have endured. I could have kept striving to achieve perfection, kept falling short, kept seeing that puzzled yearning behind your polite smile, dear. But he’s my only chick. What right have I to let him grow up with the feeling that nothing he can do is quite good enough? By eighteen he would have been a crashing neurotic, full of despair and self-hate. I hug him a lot, Sam. I give him extravagant compliments. And I don’t tell him I love him because he can do this or do that. I tell him I love him because he is Boy-Sam.”
“What’s so damned unnatural about a father wanting his son to excel, Lydia Jean?”
She made a face, and a gesture of resignation and despair. “Why do I keep trying to get through to you?” She leaned forward. “Here is a perfect example of what I mean, dear. Your sister is nineteen. Leila knows her own mind. She has been going with Jonathan Dye for a long time. He is twenty-one, a fine, sensitive, dedicated boy. His teaching job in Uruguay begins in September, and I think he will be a very good teacher. They want to be married and honeymoon on the ship to Montevideo. So big brother comes onto the scene, demanding they prove it’s the real thing by spending months apart, and you finally wore them down, dear. Congratulations! So there is Leila batting around the Bahamas on Bix Kayd’s yacht, and Jonathan working as a hired hand on the ranch of some friend of yours. To make a man of him? What are you trying to prove, pushing those kids around?”
The Last One Left Page 3
