The Curse of the “Star”

III

Wearing canvas shoes as protection against the searing heat of the deck plates, Mal walked in swimming trunks to the blue canvas cover of the main cargo hatch, raised a foot above the level of the deck. As usual at this time of day, both Sara and Gina were already there, spread lax on their blankets, their honey-tan bodies gleaming with oil, limp under the fist of the brute sun. In their two-piece suits Gina’s body was a token of abundance, Sara’s a more delicate promise.

Gina lifted her head and said sleepily, “Ah! The man who opens with a psychic two bid.”

“Worked, didn’t it?” he asked as he spread his own blanket between them.

“It worked that time. Next time you try it, Roger and I will clobber you and Sara.”

“It kept you two out of slam, didn’t it? And next time you are thinking I’m trying it, we’ll have a fistful, won’t we, Sara?”

“Of course,” Sara said distantly. Ever since that first breakfast aboard a week ago, Sara had had an impenetrable reserve. She smiled willingly enough, but the smiles never reached her eyes. She played competent unemotional bridge. Roger Temble was a plunger. Gina had natural card sense. The way they had divided it off made it a close interesting game.

Mal adjusted his sun glasses and lay face down, his chin on one clenched fist. From the stern came the intermittent snapping of the target rifle, now so familiar that it had become a part of the background. Welling and Branch had devised a game involving the plunking of stoppered beer cans and bottles in the turbulent wake of the Bjornsan Star.

They were one day out of Colombo, heading southeast toward Perth. There was a faint breath of coolness in the air. Soon they would get so far south that sunbathing would be out.

He had been planning this special moment for two days. He said idly, “Girls, have you noticed how much more cordial the good doctor has been these past two days?”

Gina rolled over onto her side and stared at him. “How do you mean?”

He felt Sara looking at him from the other side. “Now I am his buddy-buddy. Before that I was some sort of a menace. Reporters get so they can feel those things.”

“You’re working that old imagination overtime,” Gina said tightly.

“Am I, now? It seems that three days ago during our bridge game some inquisitive character, probably either Welling or Branch, neatly forced the door to my cabin and went through my stuff. In the bottom of my flight bag he found my credentials and a copy of one magazine carrying my picture along with the last article of the German series. So he tipped off the doctor that I was okay and the doctor has been beaming at me ever since.”

“Boy!” said Gina. “You’ve been taking it in the leg.”

“Gina, my lass, sometimes you bore me. And this is one of the times. You five people have your guard up so high that you’re all about to fall over backward. What is it, kids? Smuggling? Tell Uncle Mal.”

With an odd sound in her throat, Sara jumped up, picked up her blanket and walked quickly away. Mal laughed. “You see, Gina, you’ve got one weak sister in the group. The rest of you can play poker, but that’s not Sara’s game. She’s your giveaway.”

“Shut up!” Gina said.

“Why should I? It makes a long trip very interesting. The tough little doc and the frightened wife and the vivid widow and the two muscle boys. I guess one of the endemic diseases of the reporter class is an itching bump of curiosity and—”

She put her hand on his wrist and her fingers tightened down. Her dark eyes, looking into his, were hard and direct. “You talk a lot, Mal. That’s a disease, too. Now use your head. If this was a small matter, we could all carry it off so you’d never guess. But it’s big. It’s so big, Mal, and I want you to believe me because it may be pretty important to you — and you are a nice guy. It’s so big that it’s worth risking a shipboard... accident to protect it. Is that clear enough.”

“Am I to take it that you’ve just threatened me?”

“I thought it was pretty clear.”

“Come off it, Gina. That’s melodrammer. Is a threat supposed to scare me?”

He had turned onto his back. She was propped up on both elbows, her dark hair falling forward by her cheeks so that a long strand of it brushed his arm. She looked beyond him up the expanse of deck. Then, very deliberately, she lowered her head and covered his lips with hers. Her bared teeth were bruising. As he involuntarily grasped her upper arm, feeling the sun oil under his fingers, she pulled away.

“That,” she said, “is for being a guy who can’t be frightened.”

He saw that the sunglare had shrunk the pupils of her eyes to pinpoints. She was breathing shallowly. “Now I get the approach,” he said. “It comes in three levels. The first one is to scare me. I don’t scare. The second two levels are intermingled. An appeal to be rational about this, plus the promise of a bonus named Gina if I act like a good boy.”

She pushed herself back onto her haunches. Her face was suddenly ugly. She called him a name which he had never before heard a woman use. For a moment he thought she was going to leave. But she lay down again, on her back and shielded her eyes with her forearm.

“Naughty, naughty,” he said. “Such language.”

Her voice was far away. “Have you ever tried to live on what our fine colleges pay an assistant professor? You wouldn’t understand that, would you? You wouldn’t understand watching the years go by. You wouldn’t know what it can do to a woman.”

She sat up again and leaned toward him. “Mal, I mean this. If anybody... anybody... tries to take away from me what I’m going to have, I’ll kill them. I’ll get something sharp and I’ll kill them with it. And if they- take it away from me, I’ll spend the rest of my life finding them and killing them for doing it to me, even if I have to do it on a busy street.”

Then she did get up, picked up the bottle of lotion, the towel and her blanket and left in the direction Sara had taken. He watched her leave. Her flanks moved solidly under the thin trunks. The black hair, spilled down to her shoulders, glinted blue in the sun.

The Bjornsan Star churned and waddled placidly down through the blue seas. Routines became more fixed. Mal knew from Temble’s unchanged attitude that neither of the girls had spoken to him about the conversation in the sun. Their motives in keeping silent were not clear to him. Routine brought with it an emotional and intellectual lethargy — precisely what he had sought for in taking passage on the ship. It was a time for healing. Later would come re-evaluation. He had been filled with a hundred springs wound tight. Each day more of them relaxed.

During the daily bridge sessions it became easier for him to forget that there was a mystery about the five which he had not unraveled. Then he would look over and see Gina’s dark eyes and he would remember again.

He sunbathed until it grew too cold. He played chess with MacLane, talked football with Torgeson, talked ships and the sea with Bob Dolan. Each night he fell immediately into dreamless sleep. Slowly he regained the weight he had lost, and he kept it from settling around his middle by a series of exercises in his cabin that took a half hour each morning and a half hour each night.

There were odd little incidents. One night he could not sleep. He went up onto the boat deck with such unconscious lack of noise that Temble and his wife did not hear him. Mal went to the far side of the boat deck. He could hear Temble’s hoarse angry tones, but he could not make out the words. Finally Temble passed him ten feet away, went down the ladderway to the main deck.

When Mal walked over to the other side he saw that Sara still stood there, looking out across the placid sea, clad in a pale robe. The hem whipped in the wind as did her hair, glowing faintly in the starlight.

She turned as she heard his steps. “Nice night,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep.”

He stood beside her. “Neither could I,” she said. The silence between them was not awkward.

“It seems too bad,” he said, “that trips must have an end.”

Her response startled him. She turned into his arms with a sob in her throat. She was trembling. He held her closely, her head against his shoulder. She cried with almost perfect silence. When the interval between the racking sobs grew longer, he put his knuckles under her chin and gently forced her to look up at him. He kissed her on the lips, meaning it for a gesture of kindliness, doing it without conscious thought. He heard her breath catch in her throat as her arms went strongly around his neck and she pressed herself closer to him, responding to the kiss with a silent ferocity that turned it into something not at all like the gesture he had planned.

Then he kissed her cheeks and tasted the salt of tears on his lips.

He tried to make a joke of it. “A fine thing,” he whispered. “This would look just fine to the honorable doctor.”

“If he thought anything about it, he would probably find it amusing,” she said.

“I don't think I understand.”

“Don't try to. There’s been nothing between Roger and me for... for a very long time, Mal.” She pushed away from him, almost roughly. “But that’s no reason for this. You caught me when I was feeling sorry for myself. Please, Mal. Let’s both forget it.”

“That might be a difficult thing to do, Sara.”

“Don’t try to be gallant, Mal. I’m not in the mood. Just forget it happened. That ought to be simple enough, hadn’t it?”

“If you say so, Sara. Good night.”

“Good night and... thank you very much, Mal.”

That was one incident. It did not quite end there. The next afternoon Gina came to him where he stood alone on deck and said, with waspish humor, “Let’s both try to forget, darling.”

“Couldn't you sleep?”

“Not with you comforting our solemn girl about six feet from the porthole over my bed, I couldn’t. It was a sweet scene, dear. You played it well. But don’t try to follow it up.”

He grinned at her. “Jealous?”

“That might be a good word for it, now that you mention it, Mal.”

And there the incident ended.

When they docked in the narrow channel at Perth, he went to a book store in Freemantle and bought a heavy bundle of books. After one day and one night in harbor they pulled out, headed east for Melbourne. The winds became bitterly cold. There were frequent cold slanting rains that left the decks gray and glistening. Sara stayed out on deck during the rains whenever she could, with a borrowed coat on. He noticed that when she went back to her cabin after a rain, the red-brown hair pasted tight to the clean lines of her skull, there was more peace in her expression than at any other time.

They had been partners long enough so that their partnership play became far better than that of the Roger-Gina combine. Both Roger and Gina grew sulky about it, and there was not as much fun in the game as formerly. Mal suggested that they change the set match so that he and Gina would be partners. As he suggested it, he looked at Sara and found no flicker of disappointment in her eyes. Roger and Gina put up only a token argument. Once again the match was on an even keel.

As they docked at Melbourne, Gina came up to him and said, “I want an evening out, and you are the lucky boy. Thrilled?”

“Through and through.”

They went out together and he tried to give her enough liquor so that it would loosen her tongue. Her face slackened and her eyes grew dulled, but she gave him no information at all about what he wished to know. She clung to him all the way back to the Bjornsan Star, but once they reached the deck she passed out. He managed to get her up onto the boat deck to the door of the captain’s cabin and there he turned her over to an unstartled Sara who thanked him and asked him to please put her on that bed over there and good night. I’m enjoying the book you loaned me.

When Mal awakened the next morning they were heading south around Tasmania into a heavy blow. Gina was at breakfast, bright-eyed and apparently unabashed.

At Wellington the cargo winches were broken out again and the bulldozers were hoisted, one by one, and swung over onto the pier. A large tonnage of food was taken on for Pago Pago.

The sky was a dim unbroken gray when the doll-houses on the slopes or the hills encircling Wellington harbor faded back into the distance.

Gina stood beside Mal and said, “My tan is about gone. How long before we can start the sunbaths again?”

“Four days or so, I should judge.”

“Let’s round up the bridge experts and whup them again, man.”

It was near the end of the bridge game that the pitch and roll of the ship grew more pronounced. Doctor Temble began to look a bit gray around the mouth. It was Dr. Temble who broke up the game.

When Mal went out onto the boat deck he was startled by the hard force of the wind blowing out of the south. He had heard the whine of it in the rigging, but the actual personal violence of it was completely unexpected — as was the sudden feeling of awe. Huge swells, flattened by the wind, came driving steadily out of the south. Their large foamless crests were very far apart.

Mal had difficulty with his footing. At last he reached the ladderway at the after part of the boat deck. He looked down onto the main deck and saw Dolan supervising the stringing of life lines. The ship’s carpenter was working with timbers and spikes, strengthening the hatches.

Mal felt his way cautiously down the ladderway and went close to Dolan. “Storm coming?” he yelled over the sound of the wind.

Dolan put the red beard close to Mal’s ear. “The old fool wouldn’t lay over in Wellington the way I wanted him to. Don’t worry though. The old lady makes work of it, but she’ll ride it out. It’ll take us off course, though. Good thing you’ve got your sea legs, Mal. We’ll start taking water over the decks in another couple of hours. Then you’d better stay below. And eat hearty. It may be the last hot meal for a while.”

By the time of the evening meal it was almost as dark as night outside. Mister Gopala, for the first time, seemed to have lost his happy spirits. Even the mercurial Torgeson seemed subdued. He ate rapidly, seeming to flinch each time the pitch of the ship lifted the screw half out of water so that the entire vessel shuddered as the screw flailed the air astern.

Captain Paulus did not appear for the meal. The mess boy’s durable smile was a trifle strained. “Where’s Gina and Roger?” Mal asked, leaning forward to speak across the silent Tom Branch.

“Both ill,” Sara answered.

“So’s Welling,” Branch said. It was the second time Mal had ever heard the man speak.

Dolan came in and sat down. The mess boy brought a plate heaped with food to him. The pitch was slowly growing more pronounced. The Bjornsan Star seemed to coast down at a steep forward angle for an interminable time, before slowly lifting her bows, creaking and complaining as she did so.

Dolan grinned behind his beard. “Decks awash now, people. She’s riding hard, Stay off the weather decks.”

“But I have to go on deck,” Sara said, “to get up to our cabin.”

“Not tonight,” Dolan said firmly. “You stay below.”

“But Gina’s up there alone,” Sara said.

“She’ll be fine. I’ll look in on her on my way to the bridge,” Dolan answered.

After Sara finished her meal she left the room. She was back again in ten minutes. She sat down across from Mal in the chair Welling usually occupied. She smiled wanly at Mal. “Roger’s really ill. Mr. Gopala’s being very sweet. He insisted that he could take care of him and practically forced me out of the room... Oh, that was a big one!” The Bjornsan Star slowly came up and they heard the sound of tons of water roaring along the deck overhead. Water sloshed over the weather sill into the room and then began to wash back and forth with each movement of the laboring ship.

Only Sara, Tom Branch and Mal were left in the room. Mal glanced at Branch and was surprised to see that the husky man was pale, that he licked his lips continually.

“Not my racket,” Branch said solemnly. “Not my racket.”

He left the room. He was back within a few minutes, peeling the plastic from the top of a bottle of Irish whiskey. He sat down heavily and lifted the water glass out of its slot in the false top that had been fitted to the table.

“Want some?” he asked of Sara and Mal.

She shook her head. Mal held out a glass. “Two fingers,” he said.

The bottle neck chattered on the rim of the glass and Branch sloshed about three inches of liquor into it. He poured himself more than half the tumbler full. Keeping a firm grip on the bottle he tossed it down in about five thick swallows; then coughed and shook his head.

Mal took his time with his potion. It had a pleasant smokey flavor. Branch took his bottle and glass and moved cautiously over to a corner table. He sat with his wide back to them.

“How long will it last?” Sara asked.

Mal shrugged. “These things sometimes last for a full week. I don’t know. We’re running with it.”

There was a long convulsive shudder of the ship and the screw was lifted out of the water.

“I ought to get up to Gina.”

“She’ll live through it, that one,” he said.

They sat for a long time. He remembered the kiss on the boat deck and tried to capture her eyes. She would not look at him. She wore a thick tweed skirt, a white fuzzy turtle-neck sweater. She had fashioned the ripe hair into two braids which gave her a school-girl look. He wanted her to look at him. There was something about a storm and its flavor of catastrophe that broke down reserve and inhibitions, sent a heady excitement pounding along the pulses.

A long time passed in silence. The motion of the ship grew choppier, more abrupt, harder to anticipate. One violent heave slid her half out of the chair. She smiled at him apologetically.

The bottle smashed on the floor. They both turned and looked at Branch. It was obvious that the bottle had been emptied before it fell. Branch turned and focused his eyes on them, grinning, and his underlip sagged away from strong yellow teeth.

“Come talk to me, baby,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Sara asked coldly.

He gave here an exaggerated leer. “Don’t tell me it’s over your head, baby. Right along you’ve known how it’s been with me. But the old man is laid up now. C’mere, kid. Sit over here where I can sweet-talk you.”

Sara started to get up. Mai tried to restrain her. She shook off his hand. “It’s all right, really. He’s just drunk. There won’t be any trouble.”

She had to hold onto the table for a moment until the ship steadied. Then she went toward Branch in a half run, urged on by a new tilt of the ship. He laughed loudly, caught her by one wrist and swung her into his lap. The chairs had been bolted to the floor. Sara gave a shrill cry of fright as Branch wrapped his big arms around her, saying huskily, “You know how it’s been with me right from the beginning, baby. With a little luck we can keep the whole works for just you and me.”

As Mai jumped toward them, the first roll of the Bjornsan Star flung him in the other direction. He fell against one of the fixed chairs, but on the next surge he went uphill toward Branch, moving like a man breasting waist-deep water. Throughout the ship unfastened doors banged and equipment thudded.

Branch looked up as Mal was upon him. He pushed Sara off his lap and she fell, rolled hard against the wall. Branch came up out of the chair and clubbed at Mal with a fist like an oak knot, but the movement of the ship destroyed his aim and they fell against each other. Mal brought his knee up hard and tried to rush Branch against the bulkhead, but the bigger man twisted easily and it was Mal who hit the steel, his head snapping back hard against a row of rivet heads, the shock and pain dazing him.

Branch set his feet and, grunting with each swing, he drove his big fists into Mai’s middle. Then the roll of the ship carried him backward out of range. He went back, off balance, until the backs of his thighs struck a chair back. He toppled over with a surprised look frozen on his face. He was on his feet immediately, blood flowing from a cut across his left cheek. Sara, off to Mal’s left, had pulled herself to her feet.

“He’ll kill you!” she screamed.

The tip of the floor brought Branch on in a blundering rush. Mal barely had time to get his foot up. He kicked Branch in the pit of the stomach but the big hands clamped on his ankle as Branch’s mouth sagged open. Branch twisted hard and Mal fell heavily. A hard fist thudded against his head just over the ear and the room spun.

Then suddenly Branch was gone. Mal rolled onto his hands and knees and, peering up, he saw Dolan standing there, feet planted, red beard matted, braced against the sway of the ship, holding Branch by the nape of the neck with, effortless strength.

As branch tried to kick him Dolan laughed, a laugh which merged with the roar of the storm. Dolan was like a creature out of the sea. He held Branch with his left hand and drove his right fist against the man’s jaw with such a cat’s quickness that there seemed almost to be no interval between blows. Branch fell. He lay on his back and his head lolled back and forth on his limp neck with each movement of the ship.

Dolan reached over and fingered the jaw. “Didn’t break it,” he said with satisfaction. He straightened up. His eyes suddenly held a weary look. “We’ve lost a man. Swept overboard. We saw him go and we couldn’t do a damn thing. And we’ve lost a passenger.”

“Who?” said Sara in a tone barely audible.

“Welling. Broken neck. The way I see it, he must have started out of his cabin and lost his balance and got thrown against the rail that protects the ladderway down to the engine room. He toppled over. Torgeson found him down there. I tied the body back in the bunk.”

“Can I get to my cabin?” Sara asked.

“No. I can’t let you take the risk and I can’t spare the men to take you on a rope. You stay below.”

He turned and went out, cat-footed, steady as a rock against the wild pitch of the floor. Mal looked at the unconscious Tom Branch and then over at Sara.

“Sooner or later,” he said, “He’s going to come out of it and make trouble. I think we’d better go to my cabin. I won’t bother you.”

She nodded. Once they reached the companionway leading from the mess room the going was easier as the swing of the ship merely knocked them from side to side of the narrow corridor.

Water was ankle-deep in the corridor, sloshing back and forth, wetting them midway to the knees. At the turning where his cabin was off to the left, Sara stopped, clung to a wall brace and stared off to the right where the door to the deck was open, the pin in the wall slot holding it open.

The noise was louder here. “Can we look?” Sara called.

He shrugged. “No harm in looking.”

They went cautiously down to the open doorway. The weather sill was a foot high. With each swell the Bjornsan Star was burying her nose as she came up out of the trough and the water, waist high, was roaring down the weather decks. There was a fascination in the sight of the wild sea. The wind was still strong, stronger than before, but each mountainous wave was crested with white froth that streamed away in the wind. The sea and the sky were the color of gray metal.

As a massive angry roar of water went by the door, seething and bubbling, Sara stepped quickly out over the weather sill and ran for the amidships ladderway leading up to the boat deck.

Mal was frozen for a moment, and then he gave a great cry and plunged after her. He saw that she could not possibly make it. Nor could he reach her. He got as close as he could and then clamped his right hand on a round metal rail support. As the wave brought her tumbling back to him he reached out and managed to catch her by the arm. He took a deep breath and shut his eyes. The hard weight of the water closed over him, roaring in his ears. He felt the popping and crackling of his shoulder muscles, felt the slow slip of his fingers down her wrist to her hand. Then, as he thought he would lose her, the pressure eased. When the water dropped away, he let go of the rail support, grabbed her other wrist and ran backward away from the next wave already breaking over the bow. She was unconscious. He tumbled her in over the weather sill and, barely in time, with the water pulling at his legs, he fell in on top of her.

He dragged her back toward the brandling of the corridor, rolled her onto her face, kneeled straddling one slim leg and pushed down with his hands against her small waist for a slow count of three, then took the pressure off, counted to three again before reapplying it. After he had done it twenty times she coughed and retched up a gout of sea water. She moaned just loud enough for him to hear her.

He picked her up and stumbled heavily toward his cabin.