Savage Bride

Chapter Five

He woke up, and the motionlessness of the ship told him they were in port. The stillness seemed unreal. He missed the slow fluctuation, the creak of woodwork.

This was Puerto Santo, he remembered. That midway stop, going up the west-coast leg of the trip, the one between Panama and Acapulco. The one they’d decided not to go ashore at.

She wasn’t there. She’d dressed and left the stateroom ahead of him. Probably to go up and take a look from the rail.

During the whole time he was dressing, he expected to see her back any minute, bubbling over with rail-like descriptions of the place, but she failed to appear.

He emerged on deck into a wilting heat. The ship lay becalmed in what felt like an oven. The usual breezes were totally lacking now. Even the water had changed color. The deep blue of other days had changed to the light green of a shallow harbor basin. Across it, in the distance, was a thin crescent of flat tin and tile rooftops, like driftwood or accumulated refuse pushed into the joint between sea and sky by tidal action. Behind these was traced a hazy blue line of mountains, thin as cigarette smoke or azure sky writing, clearer at their tops than at their bottoms, as though they had no bases, hung suspended in mid-sky.

A few native skiffs and rafts were being slowly poled about, close up against the side of the ship, piled with fruit that carried its own flies even this far out, Panama hats, and assorted curios and trinkets.

His first, indifferent look was at all this, broadside to him as he came down the deck, without breaking stride. His second, far more concerned one was for her.

All down the rail ahead of him stood little groups of his fellow passengers looking out over it, some in twos and threes, some singly. Very few seemed to have gone ashore. His eyes kept seeking her out as he passed along behind them. She wasn’t included in any of them. Nor was she in any of the chairs either. Nor was she on the upper deck. Nor was she on the one below. Nor was she by the pool, nor was she in the lounge, nor had she — when he took a quick look back into their cabin — returned there.

“Has anybody here seen my wife?” he finally had to ask one of the railside groups of passengers.

“She went ashore, didn’t she?” a woman answered.

“Without me? No, of course not.” And yet if she were anywhere on the ship, why hadn’t he found her?

He accosted the first officer he caught sight of and put the inquiry to him.

“No, she didn’t,” the man said. “I remember asking her. She was standing by as they were getting into the tender, but she said she wasn’t going, the two of you had decided not to.”

Another passenger had joined them, and he contributed, “I think I did see her go, after the others had already left. She was sitting in one of those little native skiffs. All by herself in it too, just with the boatman and the small boy that most of them seem to carry along for supercargo.”

Jones was thunderstruck. “Why should she go in one of those things, when she turned down an offer to go in the tender? You must be mistaken!”

“I know your wife when I see her, Mr. Jones,” the man insisted. “I stood there by the rail looking right down at her.”

They were both staring at him a little curiously. The shock must have shown quite plainly on his face, he supposed. He didn’t care about that so much; what shook him was that she’d gone off like that without a word of warning.

“They’ll be coming back soon, and then you’ll see for yourself,” the man suggested.

Jones stood there for a while by the rail with him, pretending to talk of other things. He heard hardly a word that his companion said; he couldn’t think of anything but this incalculable defection of hers.

“Here comes the tender now.”

It had an awning over it, so those in it couldn’t be seen from overhead until they had emerged. He shifted farther over, to a position directly above the foot of the Jacob’s ladder, and looked down on their heads as they bobbed into sight one by one.

There weren’t very many of them. And she wasn’t with them, she hadn’t come back.

He hovered there on the outskirts of the little group as they stood on the deck. Some woman greeted him, and he instantly asked her the question that was really needless, since he could see the answer for himself. “Didn’t my wife come back with you?”

“No, she wasn’t with us.”

He found himself immensely relieved for a moment. “Somebody claimed they’d seen her going ashore. I didn’t think she—”

She promptly gave the report devastating confirmation. “She was. I caught sight of her myself, some distance off, in the town, when we were being led about by the nose. There was no sign of her when we gathered to get back in the tender again, so we thought maybe she’d come back ahead of us in that same little boat she hired.” Then, noting the strain in his face, “Hasn’t she?”

“No.”

“You’d better go back after her yourself! She may have been left stranded on the—”

He didn’t need to be told that by now. He was already at the ladder head, roaring down in advance of his own floundering descent, “Wait a minute, hold that thing! I’m coming with you. My wife’s still ashore.”

“We’re sailing in three quarters of an hour, Mr. Jones! Don’t stay too long!” one of the officers called overside to him as the tender nosed along the heat-blistered hull and then veered off landward.

Jones subsided uneasily into the pit of the boat. The heat was unbearable down this close to the water; it was like cutting through boiling tar. He instinctively withdrew his hand to avoid touching it, as if afraid of being scalded, though that was only a sensory illusion.

The age-old verdigris-coated stone quay slowly reared itself above the water line before them. Jones jumped out and ran up the slimy slabs that formed the stairs, his foot skidding from the Up of one and striking the one below in momentary misstep that failed to slow or throw him down save for a momentary lurch.

She wasn’t in sight anywhere. There was no sign of her. He turned to one of the idlers lounging about. “Señora.” he said, dredging up one of the few Spanish words he knew.

The fellow pointed out to the ship and said something that probably meant, “They all went back a few minutes ago.”

“Not the one I mean,” Jones muttered. He didn’t loiter there bothering to translate it, but struck off the landing stage and into the town proper without wasting any more time.

One of the sailors called out some warning about returning in time, but he paid no heed. His mind was intent on one thing and one alone: on finding her.

Now that he was in the midst of it the place had condensed itself still further, so that it looked even smaller than when seen from the ship out in the roadstead. A main street of sorts ran up straight before him from the quayside plaza. A few lesser ones crossed it at uneven intervals, like misplaced ties on a railroad track. And that, seemingly, was the whole sum and substance of it. It seemed unbelievable that anyone could lose himself in a place such as this for any length of time; that is, fail to find a way back to the starting point. But then — where was she, what had become of her?

He chose this spinal thoroughfare first, up one side, down the other, trying the interiors of the handful of shops that might have attracted her. She was in none of them, she had been seen in none of them. Everywhere heads shook, hands widened.

He returned to the quay again, still without her. One of the sailors from the tender again shouted a warning to him, pointed out to the ship. There wasn’t much time. It spurred him to an added frenzy of distracted searching.

He ran into one of the side streets. Cheap little drink shops, tawdry booths, all the effluvia of tropical barter. She wouldn’t be in any of these. What was there here for her? For that matter, what was there for her in this entire place? He turned, went back again.

He was good and frightened now, and in a deplorable state of breathlessness, dishevelment, and cumulative perspiration brought on by his own efforts.

He discovered a hotel of sorts, probably the only one the place boasted, but again all he got were shrugs and splayed hands.

He even looked inside a crumbling pink-sandstone church he came across, glossy-coated buzzards nestling along its peristyle and cornices like lacquered sentinels of corruption. The cavernous place was empty. Candle flames fluttered with the disturbance of his entrance, in a serried line ascending one side of the altar, descending again on the other; first all leaning over one way, then bending back again to lean the other, before they righted themselves again.

He took off his hat, withdrew backward, less cyclonically than he had entered, dropping a coin into the alms box for amends as he turned and went out.

Outside, he tottered down the steps again, palm flat to his forehead in a sort of salute to bewilderment. Where, then? Where else? Where was there left? He’d been all over the confounded little place.

There must be a police station of some sort, even in this benighted little backwater. That was it. He’d have to go there for help.

And then, well on his way to it, and already almost there, the need for it was suddenly done away with.

She was in a shop of sorts, scarcely a shop, a booth set back into the walls like a niche. The white of her dress gleamed out palely from the dimness of its interior. She was standing motionless, her back to the roadway outside.

His sudden appearance at the single-file entrance darkened over the little light there was, blotting out the interior for a moment.

“Mitty!” he exclaimed hoarsely.

She seemed not to hear him, she was so absorbed.

He stepped quickly over to her and took her by the arm. “Mitty are you crazy? I’ve been frightened half out of my skin! I’ve been hunting everywhere for you, all up and down this town!”

She turned to him as though she didn’t know him for a minute.

Then, as though his presence had finally registered, she exclaimed belatedly, but with perfect composure, “Oh, it’s you, Larry! How did you get here?”

“Mitty, d’you know what I’ve been through?”

“Have I been in here very long?” she asked vaguely. “I’ve been trying to remember something.”

She turned and followed him docilely enough out into the open once more. The shopkeeper trailed behind her, saying something in tactful insistence. Jones turned in time to see her give him back one of the curios, a grotesque little clay figurine of a squatting human form, arms laced about its knees, head disproportionately large, which she had unknowingly retained in her hand.

“What possessed you?” Jones was saying disjointedly, as they struck back in the direction he’d just come from.

She looked behind her; whether at the shop itself, or the shopkeeper standing there in its opening looking after them, or at the little clay figure, he couldn’t be sure.

“I was roaming around, I happened to pass by there, and I looked in. I caught sight of those things on the shelf, those rows of little stone figures he had, and I don’t know — every time I picked one up, I got the funniest feeling, I couldn’t seem to tear myself a—”

He had no time to hear her out. Some blurred remark in postscript swept glancingly past his attention. “It’s like when you open an old trunk, and see things that you haven’t seen in a long time, and try to remember where and when you—”

“We’re going to lose that ship if we don’t hurry.” He began to beckon violently.

A little hooded carriage turned, toiled laboriously up to them — the street was on a sharp incline — turned once more, and drew up. Jones helped her in.

“El puerto. The water front. Understand? Quick!”

They clattered, noisily over the cobbles, on an acute downgrade, the strips of street scene going by now fast on each side of them, like film whirring through a projection machine. His head and shoulders were held slanted out at one side of the carriage, while he stared down ahead of their own course.

“There it is, I see it at the end of this street. We’re finally getting there!”

Suddenly he stood bolt upright in the carriage as the enclosing buildings fell back and it swept out onto the quayside plaza.

“I don’t see the launch! It’s not here any more!”

He jumped down without waiting for the vehicle to slacken and swing broadside, and ran out onto the landing stage. The same black cur with yellow undersides was lolling there, the same somnolent loungers, backs to warehouse walls, hats over their eyes, legs out before them on the ground. Everything the same as before.

But down at the bottom of the steps the water heaved green and glassy and empty.

Out beyond the harbor roadstead, black smoke trailed like a scar across the translucent sky, from a rodlike attenuation that crept in misleading sluggishness along the line where sea joined sky.

He came back to her finally. It seemed like a long time after. It no doubt was. She had stayed in the carriage.

Even the ship’s smokestack was gone now. The black smoke hung disembodied, unraveling on the air like yam, a symbol without a visible cause below it.

There was nothing to say. Words were superfluous to add clarity to the situation, impotent to remedy it. An occasional slap from the green water lapping emptily against the understones of the quay was the only sound there was.

Two people standing silently, wonderingly, side by side; at the edge of nowhere, poised at the brink of the sea, in a strange place.

The sea and the place alike began to darken rapidly around them, as night came down like a black roller shade.