Gulf Coast Girl aka Scorpion Reef

Fifteen

Even when you don’t have anywhere to go, you keep swimming. I swam toward the boat, disappearing now, and toward the coast of Yucatan a hundred and twenty miles away. The sun was on my left. It climbed higher.

I didn’t panic, but I had to be careful about letting the loneliness and immensity of it get hold of me or thinking too much about how near we had been to winning at last. I wondered if she had been killed, or badly hurt, and saw in a moment that wasn’t safe, either. I concentrated on swimming. Don’t think about anything.

It could have been an hour, or two hours, when I looked off to the right and saw the mast. It was at least a mile away and she wouldn’t see me, but even so a great surge of hope and thanksgiving went through me and I broke the rhythm of my stroke and went under and almost strangled. She was all right! She’d only been knocked out. I reminded myself realistically of the odds against her ever finding me in this immense waste of water, but just knowing she was alive and could reach land helped me to keep going.

I waved frantically each time I was lifted on a swell. She went on past, far to the westward, and was soon hull down to the north. I kept watching her, looking over my shoulder. Now she was swinging, heading east. I began to hope. I saw what she was doing. I loved her. God, she was wonderful. Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, she was wonderful. When she’d regained consciousness she didn’t have any way of knowing how long she’d been out or where we’d gone overboard, so she couldn’t go back and swing in a big circle. But she knew the sloop was on a 180 degree heading. So she was running offset north-and-south courses, cutting the whole area into a big grid. A girl who didn’t know anything about boats or compasses or the sea. I turned and started swimming toward the sun.

Far out, she turned, heading south again. I tried to estimate how far to the eastward she’d pass me. I couldn’t tell yet, but I swam faster. She steadied up, began to grow larger. She was passing three or four hundred yards ahead of me. I could see her. She’d lashed the tiller and was standing on the boom with an arm about the mast. I remembered the glasses again. Each time the ground swell lifted me I kicked myself as high as I could in the water and waved an arm. She was going on by.

Then I saw her jump down from the boom and run aft. The bow began to swing. I closed my eyes for an instant, and the breath ran slowly out of me.

The sound of engine died and she drifted down toward me and came to rest, rolling gently in the trough. Shannon was in the cockpit with a coiled line in her hand. She started to throw it. I shook my head. She watched me swim over. Her face was utterly still. She didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. I caught the rail when the boat rolled, and pulled myself up. She knelt on the cockpit seat to help me. She put a hand on my wrist and an arm about my shoulders and I came up on the seat beside her in the warm sunlight. She let go then. Everything went. They blew the dam.

Maybe you live your whole life for one moment. If you do, that was the moment.

She was all over me. She was crying. I started to cry. I couldn’ t help it. Tears ran down my face and I was holding her so tightly she couldn’t breathe and I was kissing her. I kissed her on the mouth and the boat rolled and it was the way it had been that other time with that sensation of falling through light-years of rose-colored space and the way it had been the first time with that feeling of drowning in her, of being overrun, submerged, lost, of never being able to come up again, nor ever wanting to. I kissed the tears on her face and kissed the closed eyelids, and at last I just held her in my arms with my face pressed to her throat, feeling her heart beat. Neither of us had said a word.

After a long time I raised my head so I could see her. Water had dripped out of my hair onto her face, mingling with the tears. I had got her dress all wet, holding her against me. There was a puffy and discolored bruise on her forehead, just at the hairline. The morning sun slanted across the closed eyes and the broad-cheekboned planes of her face, and with all of it she was so beautiful my breath caught in my throat.

Her eyes opened. They were wet and they were radiant, and the lashes looked darker, matted together with tears. She was somewhere between crying and laughing, and then the smile came and it trembled about the corners of her

“I—I didn’t think I was going to find you,” she whispered. “Oh, Bill! Bill—”

I leaned down and brushed the bruise on her forehead very gently with my lips. “You Swede,” I said. “You big, lovely, magnificent Swede. Hold still. I’ve got to look at you. I’ve got to touch you—”

It occurred to me I was both looking at her and touching her already and that I must be a little wild and not making much sense, but I didn’t really expect to. I was overloaded. I couldn’t handle any more right then. They were gone. We’d won. We were free. We were alone. The whole world was ahead of us. I loved her so much I choked up just looking at her. I tried to tell her all this, but I floundered and went dumb. I suppose you can take only so much of any emotion—even happiness—and then your circuit-breakers start to trip.

“I love you,” I finished lamely. “Maybe some day I’ll be able to make you understand how much—”

She nodded, and whispered, “I know. It’s the same with me. I have all the time, even before I knew what he’d done. I couldn’t help it. Don’t you see now why I couldn’t go off and leave him? The rest of my life I’d have felt I was the one who deserted him. And I couldn’t let it show in front of those two—pigs. I’d have died. I’d have felt naked.”

“They’re gone. Forget them.”

Her eyes grew suddenly grave. “There isn’t anywhere left in the world we can go, is there? But right now I don’t care. We’re alone. They’ll never take this away from us. We’re more alone than any two people have ever been in the world.”

I sprang up and caught her hand and pulled her erect. “What do you mean, there’s nowhere left we can go? Come here; I want to show you something.”

She looked at me as if I’d gone crazy, but let me hurry her down the companionway. I suddenly remembered I had nothing on but my shorts, but there was no time to worry about that now. I had to show her.

“Here,” I said. “Look.” I snatched away the top chart, the one of the Gulf of Mexico. The one below it was a chart of the whole Caribbean from Cuba down to the Windward Islands. “Look, Shannon. Honey. Look at it! That’s where we’re going. Nobody will ever catch us. We’ve got the boat. It can go anywhere. I could sail it around the world. All that money in that bag is yours—”

I put an arm about her and pointed at the chart, talking faster now, carried away with it, wanting her to see it. “Barbados—Antigua—Guadeloupe—Martinique. The small islands. Fishing villages. Just the two of us. Going places and doing things even millionaires just dream about. Think of it, honey: mountains and jungles rising straight out of the sea, water so blue you won’t believe it when you’re looking at it, beaches you never saw before, the trade winds blowing, and nights that almost make you drunk. And just us. They’ll never find us. Not the police, or anybody. They’ll forget us. We’ll change the name of the boat. Change her port of registry to—to—” I stabbed at the chart with a forefinger. “To San Juan. When we get tired of the Caribbean we’ll cross the Atlantic on the southern track and go through the Mediterranean and Suez to the Indian Ocean and down to the East Indies and the South Pacific. Java. Borneo. Tahiti—”

I stopped. She was watching me with the expression of someone listening to the babbling of a child.

“What is it, honey?” I asked. “Don’t you want to try it?”

“Oh,” she said. “Why—yes. Want to? Bill, I’d give anything on earth. Do you really think we can do it?”

“Do it?” I put my hands on each side of her face. “You big, beautiful Swede, of course we can do it! We’ll forget the whole world. You’re going to learn to sail a boat, and navigate, and swim, and fish off the reefs, and dive for lobsters, and you’re going to be tanned by every tropic sun there is, and made love to by moonlight off Trinidad and in the Malacca Strait and the Solomons and in tropical lagoons—”

“Bill—” She stopped. She couldn’t talk.

◊ ◊ ◊

At noon a little whisper of breeze blew up. We hoisted sail and I laid a course southeast toward the Yucatan Strait. We logged a scant two knots, but we were on our way. Toward sunset it dropped to dead calm again. I put the dinghy in the water and went around under the stern with a pot of white paint. I put a coat over the name and port of registry. When it dried I’d add a second, and a third, and then letter in the new name with black.

While I was working she came on deck in a rubber cap and a bathing suit that was just a brief pair of trunks and a bra. She dived over the side and swam around to hang onto the stern of the dinghy and watch me. When I had finished she helped me put the dinghy back on the cabin, and we sat in the cockpit and smoked, watching the afterglow fade.

“We’ll have to think of a name,” she said.

“It’s forgone,” I said. “Inevitable. It’ll be Freya.”

“Who was Freya?”

I grinned. “Another Swede. A goddess. The Norse goddess of love, to be exact.”

Her eyes were soft. “Bill, you’re sweet. And I hope you never change. But I’m just a big blonde.”

“So was Freya,” I said. “And Juno. And the Milan cathedral is a pile of rocks.”

She stopped me in quite the nicest way there is to stop anybody.

The last of the flame died in the west and there was a half portion of moon just past the meridian in the sky. The masthead swung in a lazy arc against the stars and we lay in the cockpit on a mattress from one of the bunks and looked up at it and made love and slept, and waked to whisper again.

I awoke late at night and the moon was gone and the deck was wet with dew. She lay very quietly beside me in the darkness, but in a moment I began to feel somehow she was awake. I put a hand on her bare thigh, and all the muscles were taut, and she was shaking. She was making no sound, but she was tight as violin strings.

“Shannon, honey,” I said. “What is it?”

It was a moment before she answered. “It’s all right, Bill,” she said. “I’m just a poor sleeper.”

I wondered if she had been thinking of Macaulay again, but I couldn’t ask her. I could feel the tenseness and rigidity flow out of her after a while and she lay quietly beside me. The stars began to fade.

“Let’s go swimming,” she said. “Last one in’s a landlubber.”

I sat up, and she was pulling the rubber bathing cap over her hair. We stepped onto the seat and dived, hand in hand, over the side. When we came up I caught her in my arms and she laughed. The shadowy form of the Ballerina rocked on the swell beside us and there was a splash of pink across the eastern sky. It was so beautiful it hurt, and so wonderful you wanted to tear it out of the context of time and put it in an album.

I kissed her, and stopped treading water with my feet, and we sank down through the water with our arms tight about each other and our lips together with that beautiful sensation of falling through space.

We came out. “I love you,” I said. “I love you. I love you.”

“Let’s don’t ever go to land again,” she said. “Let’s stay out here forever.”

I had reached that overloaded condition again, where I could no longer express myself. “You’d miss television,” I said.

We swam in a circle around the sloop. “We’d better get out,” she whispered. “It’s growing light.”

I grinned at her. “That wouldn’t bother the other goddesses. Where’s your union card?”

She laughed. “Freya was probably never paid for parading half-naked in a night club. She’d have got self-conscious, too.”

I climbed out and helped her up. She was a tall blond gleam in the pre-dawn darkness as she hurried past me and down the companionway. She clicked on the light and I heard her draw the curtain. I went below and dressed in dungarees and put on some coffee. I lit a cigarette and sat listening to her moving around beyond the curtain.

It had been a thousand years since yesterday. It seemed impossible the two of them had been here in this cabin just one dawn ago, with their guns and their cold-blooded deadliness, and that we had been so near to dying. I tried to figure out what I felt about being responsible for their deaths, but I couldn’t run down any feeling about it at all. They lived by violence. They had died the same way. It was just an industrial accident.

I thought of the police looking for me. And for her. But if our luck held they would never know we had left there in a boat. Nobody would know except Barclay’s gang. They knew we had all gone to sea together and the boat had never been heard of again, and they’d be looking for us, thinking we had killed the two of them and tried to run with their lousy diamonds. But how could they ever find us? Nobody could find us.

She came out. She had put on a short-sleeved white summer dress. She smiled. “The last of my traveling wardrobe. If I don’t get to wash something pretty soon I’ll be down to a swimsuit.”

“Maybe we’ll get a rain squall and catch some fresh water,” I said. We had plenty yet, but you never used it for washing or bathing at sea.

We took cups of coffee and sat down in the cockpit. It was light now, and the sea was empty and blue to the horizon.

“Do you think anybody could ever find that plane?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think there’s a chance. What he saw may have been a tide rip instead of a shoal. And even if he was right and he crashed in shallow water near surf, on the weather side of a reef or shoal the plane would break up in a matter of weeks and be covered with sand.”

“You wouldn’t have looked for it any more, anyway, would you?”

“No,” I said. “I haven’t lost any diamonds. Have you?”

She shook her head.

“I’ve already got what I wanted,” I said.

“Thank you, Bill.”

She was gazing off to seaward. I’d never get tired of just looking at her, I thought. There was variety in her, and contradiction. The generally smooth humor was balanced by that flash-burn of a temper I’d seen twice, when she was provoked or pushed too far, and the definite hint of sexiness in her face by the straightforward honesty of the eyes.

She turned and saw me looking at her. I grinned at her. “You don’t mind my calling you Swede, do you?”

She smiled. “Of course not. But my mother was a Russian Finn, not a Swede.”

“Hush. All squareheads are Swedes. And you’re all the big, beautiful Nordics in the world rolled into one. If they ever consolidate into one Scandinavian country, I suggest they put you on their money.

“It’s not that I don’t love the Irish half of you, too,” I went on. “But the Irish are supposed to be very dark, when they’re beautiful. Every time I look at you I half expect Thor to come running up and hit me over the head with a short-handled hammer and say, ‘Hold up thar, you polecat, where you a-goin’ with my gal?’ ”

She laughed. “Who’s going to miss television?”

We went below and cooked breakfast. We had bacon and eggs and set up the table between the settees and had paper napkins and were very proper.

A light southeasterly breeze came up at midmorning. We hoisted sail and tacked up against it all day. It died again in the late afternoon. I put another coat of paint over the sloop’s name. It was the same the next day, and the third. We’d beat up against a whisper of air all day and lose what we’d gained when it died and the current set us to the westward. We began to joke about it. We’d never get into the Yucatan Strait. And we didn’t care.

We swam. She sun-bathed—in the two-piece swimsuit at first and later in just the bottom part of it. We rigged a hand line and caught fresh red snapper for dinner. I lettered the new name and port of registry on the stern of the sloop: Freya of San Juan, P.R.

I began to teach her seamanship and navigation. She protested she couldn’t learn the latter because she’d never been any good at mathematics, but I assured her the math involved was predigested when you used the tables and that the thing that took skill was the sight itself. We practiced each day at noon, shooting the sun, and took star sights at dusk and dawn. We were still over the Northern Shelves, not more than twenty miles to the eastward of the point where Barclay and Barfield had drowned. The current was setting us back when we weren’t under way.

She loved it all. That was the thing that made it finally complete. I had thought at first she might merely tolerate it because I liked the sea and boats and sailing and because it was our only escape, but she took to it as naturally as the Vikings she was descended from.

She was watching me take a sight one noon. “I’m so happy,” she said. “We’ll remember this always, as long as we live, won’t we?”

I glanced at her. “Sure. But don’t forget, this is only the beginning.”

“Oh,” she said. “Yes. Of course.”

We were lying becalmed again the next afternoon when the rain squall hit us. She was sun-bathing on the forward deck in the half bathing suit and I was reading aloud to her from a paper-bound edition of The Heart of Darkness I’d had in my gear when we saw it darkening to the eastward. We both ran below. I left the book and took off my dungarees and shoes. It burst over us without too much wind but with a tropical deluge of rain. As soon as it had washed the salt from the deck I blocked the scuppers and opened the filler cap to the fresh water tank and let it run full. When I had topped it off and put the cap back on, I turned, and she was coming forward again with a small bottle of shampoo in her hand, grinning at me through the deluge.

“Here, let me help, too,” I said.

We gravely sat down in opposite directions on deck, as if in a love seat, and unpinned the roll of ash-blond hair. Rain fell over us in sheets. I poured some of the shampoo into my hands and we rubbed it on her head, trying to work up the foam against the beating of the rain. She was naked from the waist up, and well tanned now, and she looked like an Indian in a white turban. Our eyes met and she started to laugh. Soap ran down her face. I kissed her and got soap in my mouth. We held onto each other and strangled with laughter while the rain rinsed her hair clean. We could never pin down afterward what had been so funny about it.

When the sun came out we sat in the cockpit with towels, drying it. It gleamed like freshly burnished silver against the smooth, tanned skin of her face and shoulders. If I live until I’m ninety and never see anything beautiful again, they don’t owe me a thing.

That night when we prepared dinner she changed into the white dress again, and when she came out of the forward end of the cabin she had a small bottle of perfume in her hand and was touching the glass stopper to the lobe of an ear.

She smiled, a little shyly. “I know it’s ridiculous,” she said. “But it was there in the things I sent aboard—”

“No,” I said. “It’s not ridiculous. On this ship the mate comes to dinner every night with just a suspicion of Tabu behind her starboard ear or she’s logged a day’s pay. Put it in the night order book.”

“Night order book?” she asked, and it was the first time I had ever seen that particular roguishness in her eyes. “Things are simplified on ships, aren’t they?”

We were ecstatically happy, and we didn’t care how long it took us to get into the Yucatan Strait. But twice more I awoke at night with that strange feeling she was going through some hell of her own there beside me. She would be lying perfectly still, staring up at the sky, as rigid and tense as someone petrified with fear.

I couldn’t get to it. Whatever it was, she never let me come near it.