The Last One Left

Chapter One

At the small bon voyage party at the Delmar Bay Yacht Club Kip and Selma had given Howard and Junie Prowt a little brass plaque to affix to one of the bulkheads of the HoJun. It read “Oh Lord, thy sea is so vast and my boat is so small!”

Pull off the backing paper and press the gummed back of the plaque to any smooth clean surface.

Out in the middle of the Gulf Stream, at ten o’clock on the bright morning of a windy and cloudless day in May, Howard Prowt, braced on the fly bridge of his thirty-four-foot Owens cruiser, knew the precise corner of the exact drawer where he had stowed the gift, and fought the absurd compulsion to go below and find it and peel it and stick it up.

The stacks and tan cubes of Fort Lauderdale were below the horizon astern. He had plotted his course exactly as he had been taught in the Power Squadron classes, making the proper allowance for the northerly run of the Gulf Stream, and for standard deviation and compass deviation. He had computed his time of arrival at Bimini on the basis of 2300 rpm on his twin 150’s. They had left Pier 66 at 8:30 and had passed the sea buoy at fourteen minutes before nine. At eleven minutes past noon the HoJun should reach the channel across the bar outside Bimini harbor.

Nobody told you how it would be. How it would feel. That was the trouble. They just said it could get a little dusty out there in the Stream. They didn’t tell you about the strangeness, the alone-ness, the strange blue color and the power of it. There was an indifference about it, a lack of interest in you and your little boat. It changed the way everything looked and felt.

Howard Prowt kept trying to scan the dials, to check oil pressure, temperature, rpm’s — and to check the performance of the automatic pilot against the compass, then would find himself staring, mind empty, braced for the next long lift of the hull, the teeter, the crash that would send water flashing white out to either side of the bow.

It’s a good day to cross, he told himself. They build them for this.

The HoJun had felt massive, ponderous, trustworthy in all the other places he had taken her since accepting delivery last November. She had looked large tied up at their backyard dock on Heron Bayou, sizeable in the yacht club boat basin. He had learned exactly how she would respond in all conditions of wind and tide, priding himself on that gentle touch on the throttles which would ease her so close to a dock that Junie, on the bow, could step ashore with the line and put the loop over a piling. There had been several short cruises, and one long one — up to Stuart and through the lake and down the river to Fort Myers, then down the Gulf Coast to Marathon, and back home through Florida Bay and Biscayne Bay. He had taken her into some ugly chop in the Gulf, and had handled her in a tricky following sea. In his navigation he had always double-checked his course and had the pleasure of seeing the target markers, after long runs, loom out of the sea mist.

But this was not the same. It made everything else seem like pretend. This was not the same sea they had watched two years ago from the recreation deck of the little Italian cruise ship which had taken them through the Caribbean, as far down as Curaçao.

They had stood at the rail and looked down onto that sea. This one lifted, rose, pushed itself up into great gleaming humps higher at times than his line of vision on the flying bridge, with one in ten foaming white against the incredible laundry-blueing blue as the wind toppled the tip of it. He tensed his stomach each time the HoJun seemed to hesitate before lifting to it. Atop those long silky bulges he could see for miles, see the random pattern of the waves breaking. Then she would tilt, smash — making a jangling and thumping and clattering below, and a moment of noise, vibration and cavitation from the twin screws — then glide down the far side of the hump to that point where, as she dug her nose deep and sent water slashing back against the pilot house windshield and the fiberglass which protected the fly bridge, he could not see more than fifty feet in any direction.

He held fast against the motion, telling himself that this was not some deadly and dramatic shift in the weather pattern. It was just as the man at Pier 66 had predicted. “Wind swinging very slow, Mr. Prowt, be almost direct out of the east in an hour, and a couple points north of east by the time you’re clear of the Stream. Be a pretty fair swell, nothing you can’t take okay; but once it’s swiveled all the way out of the north, the five-day forecast says it’ll be maybe three days before I’d want to take it across. So you go now, you’ll be fine. It won’t have time to build the Stream up to a chop. I’d say you’ll have a ten-knot breeze, freshening come evening. A pretty day to cross.”

But nobody had described the absolute indifference of these swells, and the way they dwindled the HoJun to a silly little toy, and its owner to a foolish, childish fellow who had wanted to play captain.

He had listened on the 100-watt ship-to-shore, heard nothing but nasal, casual, fishing-hunting talk on one channel, Miami marine placing phone calls on another, silence on the Coast Guard Emergency channel.

One of these ponderous wallowing tumbles will tear a gas line loose and one engine will die and the spark from the other will ignite the loose gas in the bilge. Or a battery will shift and pull a cable loose and the engines will both die. Or some seam will give way in the hull, bringing in more water than the bilge pumps can handle.

Another painful abdominal cramp made him gasp and hunch himself. Great time for food poisoning. That lobster last night?

And, Oh God, here comes the biggest one yet!

She lifted up and up, toppled over the crest with an uneasy corkscrewing motion, the cavitation lasting longer, glided down the blue hill and smashed her bow deep enough to send solid water streaming back along the side decks.

Exactly what the hell am I doing out here?

“I think, honey, that next May we’ll cruise the Bahamas. Get Kip and Selma to go along. Take a whole month pooting around. Maybe go over as far as Eleuthera. How about it?”

When you have enough boat to get to the Bahamas, and when you live so close, and when maybe next year they’ll make you Fleet Captain of the Delmar Bay Yacht Club, then you go. Or they’ll think you incompetent or timid.

So I’m timid, he thought. Outboards they bring over here. They race from Miami to Nassau when the seas are higher. Any boat has a lot of safety factor, and this one was new six months ago. But I came out past that sea buoy feeling like Horatio Hornblower, and right now I am one scared, retired wholesale grocer from Moline out in the middle of all this tumbling blue indifference that doesn’t care whether I sink, blow up or make it across.

Always wanted a cruiser.

God, just get me there!

Junie, fighting for balance, clutched at his arm, startling him. She tottered away with a jolly whoop of dismay, grabbed at the pilot seat, settled into it and grinned at him. Her grin was uncharacteristically broad, her gray eyes not properly focused, her sandy-blonde hair matted damp with sea water, her color so bleached under her deep tan it gave her flesh an odd saffron tone. Above her denim halter her skin had a plucked-chicken look, so pronounced were the goose pimples.

He knew that she was both nauseated and terrified, and trying with a touching gallantry not to show either. But terror had to be stronger than the nausea, because she hated the increased swing and dip of the flying bridge, avoiding it except when it was dead calm.

Neither of us belong here, he thought. It’s all some kind of pretend. She’s a fifty-eight-year-old housewife and mother from Moline, and since we moved down here she’s dieted and exercised and trimmed herself down, and baked herself brown, turned from gray to blonde, wears these play clothes, even talks in ways which would puzzle the placid Moline matron of two years ago. But it is all pretend for both of us — damn fools out of a yachting magazine ad, tricked finally into playing our game out here where all of a sudden it’s all turned real.

“Getting rougher, darling?” she called over the sound of wind and sea and engines.

“Staying about the same. You feel better?”

“A little.” The fixed smile stayed in place, even when she stared ahead.

Full fuel tanks, he thought. Full water tanks. And that damned couple of tons of provisions we carried aboard and stowed. Riding lower in the water than she ever has, and we have to get into this.

He made a businesslike routine of reading all the gauges, wearing his seamanship frown.

“Something wrong?” she called, the smile gone, her mouth pinching tight, bloodless lips sucked in, looking suddenly like an old, old woman garbed for some vulgar ingenue role.

“There’s not a damn thing wrong!”

“You don’t have to shout at me, Howard. I mean — I don’t understand the engines and things. And it just seems to get — worse and worse.”

He patted her on the shoulder. “Everything’s fine. Really fine.”

“Will — the whole trip be like this?”

“WE ARE CROSSING THE GULF STR—” He caught himself, changed his tone. “Honey, this is the only rough part.”

“If you aren’t nervous, why do you act so cross?”

“I am not nervous. I am not cross.”

He wondered if it would be different — better — if Kip and Selma had been able to cross with them instead of flying over day after tomorrow to Bimini. Most of their gear was aboard. Kip had some kind of meeting at the last minute. Of course Kip didn’t know item one about seamanship, piloting and small-boat handling. Nor did Selma. But maybe four people wouldn’t get as...

He peered ahead from the top of a crest, saw a white object far ahead, too fleetingly to determine what it was before the glide into the trough cut off his view.

When they lifted again, he could not spot it. But the next time it was there again, and Junie said, “Isn’t that a little boat?”

“I think so.”

He took the binoculars out of the rack, couldn’t get focused on the object on the next lift, but managed a swift glimpse on the succeeding one.

“Small open boat,” he announced.

“Out in this!”

The spoked wheel kept turning as the automatic pilot kept searching and correcting. The distant boat would appear first a little off the port bow, then off the starboard bow, and he realized it was dead on course. He rehearsed the procedure he would follow, lock the pilot on a new course five degrees more southerly, check the time he made the change, and then when they were opposite it, return to course by giving it ten degrees more north for the same elapsed time, then put it back on his plotted compass direction. Or were you supposed to correct just five degrees and then...

He was reluctant to touch or change anything. He had tried some careful alterations in the rpm’s to see if she would ride easier, but succeeded only in alarming himself. At slower speed she had a tendency to fall off course. Faster, she merely made a more sickening crashing sound when she came off the crest. And he could not guess how she would react to even a minor course alteration. He decided to wait and see how close they might come to the smaller boat.

Soon he could see it at every crest, an open boat, a power boat twenty feet long, or a little longer, with a sleek hull, windshield, white topsides, and a green-blue hull lighter in shade than the strange blue of the Stream. The high sun made bright gleams on the metal fittings, the controls, the chromed windshield frame. She appeared to be floating light and high, bow to the wind, moving with a carefree grace to the long steep passage of the swells.

But it was dead in the water. With the glasses he saw it was equipped with two stern-drive units, both uptilted. He could not make out the name on the transom. The boat appeared to be empty. To his immediate relief, he saw that with no course alteration, it would go by on his port at least a hundred feet away. The wind and the Stream combined to drift it northwest.

“Hadn’t we ought to do something?” Junie asked.

“Do what? So it’s some drunk. He rigged a sea anchor and he’s sleeping it off. Or young lovers.”

She reached quickly and pressed the air horn button on the control panel. That sound, so huge when he would make the turn from the yacht club basin into the channel, sounded frail out here. In intense annoyance, he slapped her hand away.

“It’s a vessel in distress, isn’t it?” she demanded, her face pinched into an expression of indignant anger. “Or a derelict? Aren’t we supposed to do something? What if somebody is sick, like a heart attack?”

“Honey, you started the Power Squadron course. You didn’t finish the Power Squadron course. I finished the Power Squadron course. I am in command of this vessel.”

“Oh dear Jesus, Captain Bligh. I just mean...”

“I can see that she’s dragging some kind of bow line. I’d say it was an anchor line that maybe frayed, maybe right down at the anchor ring so she’s dragging enough so the line itself keeps her bow into the wind. So some careless damn fool loses his pretty little boat. So what if we try to come about? Ever think of that? Crossways on these swells, we’ll roll everything loose, and maybe coming about we get one of the breakers just right off the corner of the stern and we broach. Then what, baby? And do you want to be the one to try to get that line with a boat hook? And what if I judge it wrong and she punches a big son of a bitch of a hole in our hull? What I’ll do is report her position, and they’ll send a helicopter out of Lauderdale, or a cutter or something.”

“That name on it, Howard! Muñequita. Out of Brownsville, Texas?” Money-quit-ah, she pronounced it.

“What about it?”

“Howard, I swear I read something about that boat or heard something about that boat. Something in the news. Last week, maybe.”

“For God’s sake, June, you always want to make some kind of a big thing out of every little thing that happens.”

“An empty boat out here in the middle of the ocean? That’s such a little thing it’s practically nothing?”

It was abeam of them and they both stared at it. She took the binoculars from the rack, braced herself with one arm hooked around the back of the pilot seat. “Gee, Howard, it’s a pretty little boat, it really is. Like new.”

“I’ll go down and report it,” he said. He went down the ladderway carefully, anticipating the now-familiar movements of the HoJun. In the pilot house he checked the chronometer, figured the distance traveled, and, with his dividers, made an exact little prick mark on the penciled course line. He drew an X at that mark, then measured over to the chart border to get the exact position, latitude and longitude in degrees and minutes.

He rehearsed exactly how he would report it on the emergency channel. But he did not want to report it. He could guess that any skipper familiar with the Stream would have taken the boat in tow without a second thought. This was supposed to be a good day for a crossing.

“All right, Captain, why didn’t you take a look and see if anybody aboard needed help? That’s your obligation, you know.”

“Well, I was having a little trouble myself.”

“Indeed? What sort of trouble?”

“I... I was losing a little pressure on the starboard engine. Anyway, we went close enough to it to be certain there wasn’t anybody aboard.”

“Certain there was no one in the bunks below?”

But it probably wouldn’t be like that at all. It was just a boat that had slipped its moorings somehow. And how much could they ask of you anyway?

As he turned he saw June come scrabbling dangerously down the ladderway, clutching and lurching. She had the binoculars hung around her neck. He winced as he saw them swing and whack solidly against the hand rail. He was about to tell her exactly what they had cost when he saw the frantic expression on her face.

“A hand! We’ve got to go back, darling! We’ve got to do something.”

“A what? Make sense!”

“I saw it with the glasses. It came up and held onto the edge and then it let go. A little hand. A child’s hand. We’ve got to do something.”

Howard Prowt clambered heavily but swiftly up to the fly bridge. She was beside him when he took it out of automatic pilot. Try to get it around quickly, or ease it around? Maybe a little of both. Ease it slowly until it begins to wallow in the trough, then reverse the port engine and kick it around and gun it to get out of the way of the following wave.

Twice he brought it almost parallel with the swells, but the alarming motion caused him to head back into the wind. He resolved to do it on the third try. He got it into the trough and when she heeled over further than he would have thought possible, and when he heard a thudding and crashing below, he ran it back up into the wind again.

“At that distance, with both boats jumping all over the goddam ocean, you saw one hand?”

“I did!”

“You saw an end of a rag flap over the gunnel for a moment. Something like that.”

“Can’t we turn around?”

“It isn’t a case of can’t. Sure. But why crash a lot of gear around below because you’ve got that imagination of yours?”

Suddenly she turned away from him, lurched, grabbed the rail, hunched over it and was spasmed by nausea, the sea wind whipping at her damp hair. He eased the HoJun back onto course and locked it into pilot, checked his gauges. He looked at her, at the brown hide and slender legs of his life-long wife, at the regular pulsations of nausea which shook her body, and, to his mild astonishment, felt desire for her. It was an obscure and shameful pride that at a time and place so incongruous, this notion, impossible to fulfill, should come to him. Maybe it can happen from being scared, he thought, of thinking of yourself drowning and dying here in this big blue mess, and it’s a way of telling yourself you’re alive.

When she was through, he went below to put his call in. In the main cabin the television set had fallen out of its brackets and lay face down on the carpeting. The radio set had shifted. He turned it on. It would not light up. He could not send. Then he saw where the cable had been pulled out of the chassis.

Howard Prowt went up and told her. He looked astern, and he could not spot the drifting boat. The water was changing to a new color, to a blue that was mixed with green and gray. To the southeast he saw a southbound tanker. They were out of the Gulf Stream. The motion was easing. They were on course.

She seemed very subdued, and he glanced sidelong at her from time to time to see how angry she was. But it was a remote expression he could not read.

“Junie, honey, it’s only by a freak of chance we ever came close enough to that boat to see it.”

“I suppose.”

“I mean, we wouldn’t be expected to see it.”

“Howard, what are you driving at?”

“Honey, on a thing like this, there can be a lot of red tape. I mean it could get us hung up in Bimini, or maybe even having to go back and fill out a lot of reports. You understand, if I was absolutely convinced you saw what you thought you saw, wild horses couldn’t have kept me from getting to that boat.”

“Yes, Howard.”

“And I can’t help what happened to the transmitter.”

“I guess not.”

“All in all, I think the wisest course is that we forget we ever saw that boat. We wouldn’t want to spoil anything, you know, like for Kip and Selma.”

“We wouldn’t want to spoil anything,” she said, and went over to begin a careful descent of the open ladderway.

“Is that okay with you?” he called.

“Is what okay?”

“To just forget it happened?”

“Sure. Sure,” she said and backed out of sight. A moment later her face reappeared and she said, “I busted the binoculars.”

“Accidents will happen aboard ship. Don’t give it a second thought. I got the old ones aboard, those surplus ones.”

Later, in calm water, he called her up to the flying bridge. When she stood beside him, he said, “Land Ho, and right on the button. Look at that range marker on shore. By God, we could damn near run that channel without taking her out of pilot.”

“Very good, dear.”

“Look at all the crazy colors in that water off the bar there.”

“It’s beautiful.”

Her lean hand rested atop the instrument panel. He covered it with his and said, “That’s Bimini, old lady. And bank on this — the Prowts and the Heaters are going to have one hell of a month of fun.”

For a long time she did not answer. She slowly withdrew her hand. “It’s going to be a ball,” she said without smile or inflection. “Tell me when you want me to take a line forward.” She climbed back down to the cockpit deck.

Howard Prowt cut off the pilot and took over manual control, cutting his speed another increment as he headed for the channel. Always, coming into harbor after a good job of navigation, he had that Horatio Hornblower feeling, grizzled and sea-tough and with a look of far places.

He reached for that feeling, and for an anticipation of all the courses he would run, all the expertise he would bring back to Delmar Bay one month hence, but he could find neither.

He merely felt old. And his legs felt tired. And his gut felt uneasy. And he wished he were back sitting on the bank of Heron Bayou with a cold beer in his hand, and the HoJun tied to his own dock in that tricky way he had devised all by himself.

Damn her anyway.