Go Home, Stranger

Fourteen

Their plans were interrupted.

He was waiting when she emerged from her cabin early the next morning clad in white slacks and a long-sleeved blouse. They ate breakfast together in the restaurant under the cold eye of Delia, and walked down to the float. Mildred Talley was climbing from the water.

She regarded them with an arch smile. “Going to gang up on the poor bass, are we?”

“Something like that,” Reno answered briefly.

“But haven’t you forgotten your tackle?” she asked innocently.

He was about to make some curt reply and turn away to the job of bailing out the boat when he looked up suddenly, catching the sound of a motor. It was not an outboard. He looked down toward the bend below them, where the bayou ran up from the highway bridge and the ship channel, and at that moment it came into view, a trim cabin cruiser dazzling in the sunlight with new white paint. Off the float it backed down with a growl of power, coming to rest in mid-channel.

The man who had been at the wheel was Hutch Griffin, in white shirt and slacks, the reckless face grinning at them from under the rakish slant of a yachting cap. “Hi, men,” he called. “Let’s go for a ride.”

Reno was conscious of quick irritation. He had forgotten about the trial run in the new cruiser, but there was no way they could get out of it now without some explanation. He shot a quick glance at Patricia and saw her look of dismay.

As if he had been reading their thoughts, Griffin called across to them. “Only be two or three hours. I’m running down to the bar to take off a pilot, and we’ll be back by eleven.”

There was nothing to do but make the best of it. “We’ll be right with you,” Reno said.

“I can’t come alongside,” Griffin explained. “Not enough water there. Pull out in one of those skiffs. You can give it a shove back, and Mildred can tie it up. How about it, baby?” This last was addressed to Mildred Talley. “Or can you go too?”

“No,” she replied, pouting. “I’ve got to work.”

Reno caught the sidelong, icy look at Patricia, and was conscious that at last he understood the answer to something in this country. Mildred was jealous. She had her eye on Griffin, which accounted for the catty remarks about the dark-haired girl. Then, unaccountably, he was jealous himself. He angrily shrugged it off. What did he care?

He pulled the skiff alongside and Griffin helped her step up into the cockpit of the cruiser. He climbed aboard himself and shoved the skiff back toward the landing. He and Patricia sat down on leather-covered seats running along opposite sides of the cockpit, while Griffin pressed the starter.

Reno noted with surprise they did not turn around. The cruiser gathered speed, straight ahead up the channel. In a few minutes they had rounded the first turn and had passed the arm of the bayou that ran north, where he had gone yesterday.

Then he remembered the second highway bridge. “Can you get back to the ship channel up this way?” he asked Griffin.

“Yeah. About a mile up here. Bayou goes back across the highway.”

“Hutch, I like your boat,” Patricia said. “It’s lovely.”

“Handles like a dream,” Griffin said, glancing back over his shoulder and grinning. “When we get out to the ship channel you can take over.”

Her eyes were excited as she glanced across at Reno. “Do you think a landlubber could handle it all right?”

“Sure,” Griffin said easily. “Just like driving a car.”

In a few more minutes they had passed the old campground on their left, where he had discovered the trailer. Thinking of it reminded Reno that by now they would have been on their way up the bayou, and for a moment he was irritated and impatient. But whatever was up there could wait another few hours.

They swung left now and were headed south. As soon as they straightened out Reno could see the steel highway bridge up ahead. Whoever towed that trailer away, he thought, could have come right through here and dumped it in thirty-five feet of water in the ship channel itself.

Griffin looked around at them as they approached the steel span and said something Reno didn’t catch above the noise of the engine. He and Patricia got up and went over to stand beside him at the instrument panel, looking out ahead.

“I say there used to be a wooden bridge here years ago,” Griffin repeated. “Had a lot of piling under it, spans not over twelve feet apart, and Robert Counsel used to shoot it in those speedboats of his.”

At mention of the name, Reno and Patricia looked at each other. “Reckless, eh?” Reno said, hoping he would go on.

“Reckless? Mother, dear!” Griffin said, and whistled softly. “A lot of people used to have the idea Robert was kind of a mamma’s boy—I mean, all that money, private tutors, that kind of stuff—but they just didn’t know him. I was with him one day when he came through here in a souped-up job that could really get up and fly. There was a girl in front with him, and another in the back seat with me—we were all about sixteen, I guess—and when his girl saw that bridge ahead and the clearance we had to get through between the pilings she fainted. She fell right over onto Robert, and he took it through with one hand, trying to get her off him with the other. You could have reached out a hand and touched a piling on either side, and he was clocking around fifty-five miles an hour.”

“If you’ll pardon my saying so, Hutch,” Patricia said, “your friend Robert just doesn’t sound very bright to me.”

Griffin shook his head and grinned. “That’s the hell of it though. He was. Brilliant son-of-a-gun. But he was just easily bored.

“You take those speedboats and runabouts of his; he designed most of the hulls and propellers himself. Did it by feel, or instinct, or something, the way somebody else could write a symphony. There’s a hell of a lot of mathematics to hull design, even for a garbage scow, and when you start playing around with speed it gets rugged. Not that he didn’t know the math—he did; but I think he felt the answers instead of working them out.

“He had a nasty sense of humor, though,” Griffin went on. They passed under the highway bridge and in a moment came out into the ship channel. At this point it described a sweeping turn, leaving its course roughly paralleling the highway and running south for half a mile between high walls of trees. The dredged channel itself was marked by buoys.

“You want me to take it now, Hutch?” Patricia asked.

“In just a minute, honey,” Griffin replied. “As soon as we get past that dredge. It’s working around the next bend.”

What was that about Counsel’s sense of humor?” Reno asked.

“Oh.” Griffin leaned forward over the wheel and swung his head with soft laughter. “I wanted to tell you about that. Robert and I were in prep school together for a couple of terms, and about this time somebody started that goldfish-swallowing gag again. And there was this big blowhard of a joker who’d been trying to give Robert a bad time. Anyway, this joker was making a big name for himself swallowing fish and throwing his weight around, when Robert showed up from somewhere with one just a little bigger and bet him fifty dollars he couldn't swallow it. The joker gulped it right down, like a hungry pelican, and began hollering for his fifty. Robert gave it to him, real deadpan, and asked how he felt. ‘Fine,’ the joker says. ‘Why?’ So then Robert told him. It was murder. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Except I’d be careful about coughing. That goldfish had two dynamite caps inside it.’”

“Good Lord,” Patricia said, horrified. “What happened?”

“Nothing.” Griffin laughed again. “The joker just went limp and passed out. They eased him over to the infirmary and went to work on him with a stomach pump. They got the fish out.”

“But were there really two caps in it?”

“Nobody ever knew. The doctor and nurse wouldn’t say. But the joker’s family took him out of school the next week, and Robert’s mother took him to Europe. Personally, knowing Robert, I’d say there were.”

They rounded the turn and passed the busy rumble of the dredge just beyond. Some men on deck waved as they went past.

“What do they do with the mud?” Patricia asked. ‘”’I don’t see any pipes.”

“Hopper dredge,” Griffin explained laconically. “Fills up and runs back outside to dump the stuff offshore.”

“Does it work on the channel all the time?”

“No. They just started this section the first of the month. Going to dredge from here up five miles.”

They were past it now and the channel was clear. Griffin stepped back from the wheel and sat down on one of the leather seats, stretching out his legs and lighting a cigarette.

“Hey—” Patricia said, startled.

He grinned. “Honey, you’re driving now. Just keep to the right, and watch out for traffic cops.” He looked across at Reno and winked.

Reno felt the stirrings of jealous anger, but let none of it show on his face. Griffin was a likable guy, but there was just a little too much easy familiarity in the way he spoke to Pat. But hell, maybe he talked to all the girls that way.

A little over a mile below the dredge they passed a ferry and a small shrimp-freezing plant. Griffin nodded, “My place over there,” he said, indicating a dock at which two small diesel tugs were moored.

In a short while the heavy timber along the banks began to thin out and they were running through flat salt marsh. Reno could see the white tower of the lighthouse straight ahead. They ran on out between the twin rock walls of the jetties and past the light.

“How far out do we go?” Patricia asked.

“Sea buoy,” Griffin said. “Last one out there, about a mile.” He got up and opened the small door going forward, and the sound of the big marine engine increased. “Just keep her on course, Skipper,” he called back, grinning over his shoulder. In a moment he emerged with a trolling rod and a big reel. He set them up, attached a white feather jig to the leader, and began paying out line.

“All right,” he called, “who wants to catch the first mackerel?”

“Ladies first,” Reno said.

Griffin took the wheel and throttled the engine back to slow trolling speed. Patricia settled into the seat at the rear of the cockpit and held the rod. In a few minutes she had a strike, but lost the fish. She landed the next one, a mackerel slightly over a foot long.

Reno enjoyed watching her. Any other time the cruise would have been fun and he would have been reluctant to see it end, but now he was conscious of a gnawing impatience to get back.

He took out cigarettes and offered Griffin one. “This pilot on his way down on a ship now?” he asked.

“Yeah.” Griffin craned his neck, looking astern. Then he glanced at his watch. “Should be showing any time now. Said he’d be down to the bar around ten.”

“Don’t the pilots have a boat of their own?” Reno asked curiously.

“Yes, but it’s in for overhaul. When they go to the yard they give most of the business to me. I usually use one of the tugs, but thought I’d try this one today, since it’s smooth out here.”

In another twenty minutes the ship was in sight astern. Patricia reeled in her line while Griffin advanced throttle and changed course to intersect the ship’s course as it cleared the sea buoy. They came up alongside and Reno could see the name. It was the SS Silver Bay. His eyes narrowed reflectively. Wasn’t that the one—? No, he remembered. The one Counsel had been on was the Silver Cape. It must be the same line, however. Probably all named Silver something.

They bumped against the side. In a moment he heard the rattle of a Jacob’s ladder and the pilot stepped down onto the foredeck of the cruiser. He slid around the’ outside of the cabin and dropped into the cockpit.

Griffin introduced them with a sweeping wave of the hand as he advanced the throttle and spun the wheel to break contact with the ship. “Breaking in a new crew, Cap,” he called over his shoulder.

Captain Shevlin was a salty little gamecock with a merry eye. He regarded Patricia Devers appreciatively. “Smartest-looking deckhand you ever had. I’m going to sign her on the pilot boat.”

It developed almost immediately he was a talker with an almost unstoppable flow of awesome language. He sat down, pushed back the battered felt hat with its turned-up brim, stuck a long cigar in his mouth, and set sail on an enchanting voyage of reminiscence, which ranged from typhoons in the Indian Ocean to water-front brawls in Liverpool, and from torpedoings in the First World War to intrigues with Oriental dancing girls, all of it delivered in highly pungent language and with an incomparable gift for imagery.

It was interrupted only twice in fifteen miles. Once, as they passed the Griffin dock, Hutch looked back over his shoulder and laughed. “You see why they call him Silent Shevlin?” he asked Reno. Then he broke in on the flow of words. “Say, Cap, I’m going all the way in to town to have a couple of things on here looked at in the boat yard. You want to stay aboard, or get off and catch the bus?”

“I’ll stay aboard,” Captain Shevlin waved an offhand paw. Then he turned back to Patricia. “Now, where was I? Oh, yes. So I says to the Mate, ‘Go down there and tell . . .”

Reno forgot some of his impatience in listening. As they came up past the dredge they met a small tug coming down towing two deep-laden oil barges. One of the barges was swinging, and Griffin had to back down quickly and pull in behind the dredge to avoid collision.

Captain Shevlin bounded up in the cockpit, cupped his hands, and yelled across to the towboat captain. “Hey, Ernie, why don’t you keep steerageway on that bedpan? You think you’re herding cows to pasture, or something?”

The towman waved good-naturedly. “Relax, Cap. You’re flipping your lid.”

They eased out from behind the dredge and proceeded around the next bend of the channel, which opened into the half-mile reach below the highway. “Always something,” Captain Shevlin complained bitterly. “You know, a man that’d pilot on this channel for a living when he could just as easy have been a pimp or a one-legged panhandler must enjoy torturing himself.”

Patricia looked at Reno and laughed, and the Captain shook his head with the unmistakable and dreamy expression that signaled another story. “It reminds me, Hutch, of one night this spring, right in this exact spot. I was bringing one of the Silver line ships up—and that was a trip to land you in the Happy Ward.

“When I climbed aboard out on the bar I landed right in the middle of a fight. Two of the stewards had got gassed up on paint-thinner or compass alcohol or something and was trying to choke each other’s eyeballs out in a tangle in the forward well deck and the poor Mate was running around unscrambling ‘em.

“Well, they finally get things quieted down and we start up, and everything is fine except the Old Man has to stay on the bridge and has the Third Mate up there, and the Second Mate, and would have had the Mate and bosun except they had brains enough to stay on the fo’c’sle head where they belonged. And the helmsman was one of them correspondence-school AB’s that didn’t know his foot from his elbow, and every time I’d tell him to ease the helm he’d steady her up.

“It’s as black as the inside of a blind muley-cow, and just about the time we make the swing right here and start readying her up on the next range it starts to pour rain. Then I spot running lights poking out from that next bend above here, and remembered there was a Mid-Gulf tanker due to come down loaded about that time. You know how they are, loaded, sway-bellied and dragging bottom all the way. They’re drawing thirty feet by the time they get through filling everything on board, and they need all the room they can get in this channel.

“Well, we both get lined out on the ranges and we’re only about six hundred yards apart and closing fast and the Old Man and I are hanging over the port wing of the bridge trying to see enough of the tanker’s running-lights through the rain to tell whether we’re lined up red-to-red or whether we’re about to run between ‘em, when right here about a hundred yards south of this Number Fourteen buoy there is the damnedest ker-splash you ever heard, right under us. Sounds like at least two men have fallen overboard.

“So of course the same thought hits everybody right at the same time. It’s them two chowder-headed messboys at it again.

“Well, Captain Wilbur starts to wave his arms and foam out orders like a soda fire-extinguisher.

“ ‘Cap,’ I says, ‘if you think I’m going to lose steerage-way on this bucket with a hundred and fifty thousand barrels of high-test gas booming down on us just because your pot-wallopers are throwing each other over the side, you’re as nutty as I am. Steady as she goes.’

“So, by God, when we get out of the bind he sends somebody down to see which one threw the other over the side, and I’m damned if they’re not both still there.”

Griffin looked back over his shoulder at them. “What ship did you say that was, Cap?” he asked casually.

“Hell, I can’t remember, Hutch. Silver Line, anyway.”

Reno had started to light a cigarette. He held the match now, and stared thoughtfully out across the water, conscious of something that had disturbed his thoughts. Then he shrugged. Whatever it was had gone now. Windy old character, he thought amiably, looking at Shevlin again.

“But what was the splash?” Patricia asked.

“Miss, you’ve got me. But you haven’t heard all of it yet. About twenty minutes later, just about a half mile above the old Counsel landing, there’s some lousy puddle-jumping motorboat right in the middle of the channel. He can’t seem to make up his mind where he wants to go, and I’m trying to ease past him without tearing down all the timber along the bank, when all of a sudden I’m damned if there ain’t another ker-splash there under us in the same place!”

Griffin whooped with laughter. “Skipper,” he called back, “some day you’re going to start believing those stories yourself. Then you’ll be tough to live with.”

“It’s the Gospel, Hutch—”

“I’ll bet it is! But listen. I want you to check something for me. I keep thinking I’ve got some kind of phony vibration period here. As if the wheel was off balance. You feel it? Wait’ll I rev her up .”

He advanced the throttle. Captain Shevlin listened, his head cocked to one side. “Sounds as smooth as an eel to me.”

Griffin shook his head, frowning. “Maybe so. But I’ll have the yard put her through the vibration test again.” He glanced suddenly around. “Hello. We’re off Seabreeze. We got to duck in here and unload your audience, you sea-going Uncle Remus.”