The Last One Left

Chapter Two

Staniker, on an ever-lasting afternoon, fought off the dreams and the visions. There was some kind of a Thing, some tantalizing entity which kept launching them at him to see how he’d make out. That time in South America when they’d gone after those lunker trout in the mountain lake, those Indios had those light nets they could throw, float them out very pretty.

Dreams came like the nets, something throwing them at him, floating down to lay like cobwebs across his mind. So then each time he had to pluck off every strand. There was a way to do it. You focused on some real thing, close at hand. The sheath knife, rusting with an astonishing speed. Could you measure the days by the way the rust grew? Think of the knife and you could pluck away one strand. Look at the pile of empty shells of the sea-things you had eaten, had pried off the ragged black rocks at low tide, smashed with stones, trying to save the juice to suck before eating the creature. Look at the crude sticks and poles some forgotten Bahamian fisherman had assembled long ago for rough shelter on this empty island, and at your own additions, poles above and a clumsy thatch for shade from each day’s interminable passage of the sun. Roll over, wincing at the pain of it, and lift your head and look out across the hot white glare of the sand flats of South Joulter Cay, where you had tried to stamp the big arrow and the H E L P, because all the Nassau-Miami flights passed over here, just a little bit south, not too far south. But the white dry loose sand would not take a message, and when you put it in the packed wet sand, the tide would take it away. Look out toward the channel and remember that this was a popular place for the private boats which came flocking over from Florida in May, listed attractively in the Cruising Guide, and it was just one of those weird coincidences that not one had come by. Look over where those brackish pools are, and remember the oily and stagnant taste of the water, and wonder if the fever and the dreams came from the water or from the burns. Look at the outside of the right arm and shoulder, at the outside of the right thigh and calf where the deeply tanned skin had blistered, cracked, sloughed loose, and now suppurated and stank.

The pain of movement was a reality, as was the dull ache of the over-burdened kidneys.

These were realities, and the way he could find his way out of the bright and senseless shifting of the dreams which kept moving him to places he had been, with people who had never been there with him, people from other places who said all the ugly things from childhood. Static reality was something he could brace against, but the changing things, the birds, the airplanes, the quick lizards, he could not tell if they were part of here or part of the cobwebs.

When his teeth began to chatter, Staniker would hunch himself out into the sunlight. And then, brain a-boil, pull himself back into the shade. Time would slip and the sun would jump three diameters west and sometimes he would become aware of a voice and listen and hear himself talking to Crissy, talking loudly because he was sitting on the edge of her dock and she was swimming slow lengths with her face closed against all listening, all explanations.

Several times there was Mary Jane’s voice in that tired, whining, scolding, hopeless sound; but of course she was three sea miles away and a half a mile deep, her mouth at rest at last, down in the black-green of the Tongue of the Ocean.

The dreams came oftener, and most of the time he did not mind it, merely let them happen, and watched the colors and the changes. But then he would fight free of the strands, and find panic again, the awareness that everything had gone wrong, was continuing to go wrong, could end in a death that would make all the other parts of it meaningless.

When the sun was low, while he was in restless sleep, a Chris-Craft out of Jacksonville came cautiously in over the harbor bar, threading the unmarked channel, a vacationing dentist leaning over the bow rail, reading the channel by the color of the water, using hand signals to guide his friend, a plumbing contractor, owner of the boat, who had the helm. It was an hour or so past low tide. The wheels boiled up sand in the slow wake. The hull was skegged for this kind of shallow-water exploration. In the gentle chop, at the shallowest point, they bumped twice against the packed sand of the bottom, then moved on into the deeper water of the natural channel close to the key, towing the little glass dinghy astern. They came around the point into still water. The engines droned. The chattering wives were aft, fixing the cocktail snacks. The men were studying the chart, inspecting the water, discussing where to anchor. One of the wives turned a transistor radio to music from a Miami station.

These sounds awakened Staniker, and on hands and knees he crawled and looked around the edge of his shelter and saw the cruiser moving past, a hundred yards away. He pulled himself up, using his right arm in spite of the pain it caused him, and cawed at them as loudly as he could. The cruiser moved on.

The shelter was at a high point, perhaps twenty feet above the water. He tottered down the narrow winding path, terribly afraid that if he should fall, he might not be able to get up. He came down to the narrow band of sandy beach which was covered at high tide, cupped his hands around his mouth and cawed again, his voice cracking to a contralto scream.

He saw them staring at him. The cruiser slowed, and the man at the helm gave it a single burst from both engines in reverse to lay it dead in the water. The dinghy came up and thumped the transom. The engines were turned off. Staniker went down onto one knee and rested his fists against the sand at the water’s edge.

“What do you want?” a man called across the stillness.

“Staniker,” he replied. “Off the Muñeca. Burned. Sick. Help me.”

He heard their excited jabbering, and he let his head sag and closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Soon he heard the familiar snoring sound of a Sea Gull outboard, looked up and saw the dinghy coming toward him with one man aboard. The man, making clucking sounds of dismay at his condition, helped him aboard and took him out to the cruiser. In helping him aboard, they hurt him so badly he screeched and the world tilted into grayness but came slowly back. With many instructions to each other, they helped him below and got him into a bunk.

Time slipped again, and in the next instant he could feel the movement of the hull, hear the engines at cruising speed, identify the hull motion as a deep-water motion with a following sea off the port quarter. The cabin lights were on. A thin leathery man in his fifties, wearing steel-rimmed glasses, was staring appraisingly at him. Behind him, in the shadows, was a tall woman standing braced against the motion of the boat.

“Can you hear me, Captain?” the man asked.

“Yes, yes sir.”

“Swallow these. For fever and pain.”

The water was in a tall dark-blue plastic glass, with ice. He had never tasted anything as delicious.

The man took the empty glass and said, “I am not a medical doctor, Staniker. I’m a dentist. We have to know a certain amount of medicine. I’ve dressed your burns with what we could improvise. Your fever is running a hundred and three and a half. It was probably higher in the afternoon. We’re making a night run to Nassau. My name is Barth, by the way. Bert Hilger, my friend who owns this boat, couldn’t raise anything on the damned radio after we found you. So we’re running you in where you can get hospital attention. Do you understand, Captain?”

“How — how bad off am I, Doctor?”

“How long were you alone there on South Joulter?”

“What day is it?”

“Today? Friday, the... uh—”

“Twentieth,” the woman said.

“We... we blew up and burned last Friday night.”

“You are a superb physical specimen, Captain. If you don’t get pneumonia, I suspect you’ll snap back quickly with proper care. Can you answer some questions? In case you’re not conscious when we dock at Nassau.”

“Yes sir.”

“What happened?”

“It was — about nine o’clock. They were all below. They would have been topsides, it was such a nice night, except they were having dinner. They always ate late. Moonlight night, and we were heading for the Joulters. I was running her from the flying bridge, on pilot, and I’d turned the depth-finder on. When it began to pick up any bottom at all, I was going to cut down, take over, and find the passage I’ve been through before, place where there’s no coral heads to bother you. On that Muñeca, you’ve got — you had every control duplicated up on the fly bridge. I remembered how one bank of batteries was pretty well down, and from the running time I didn’t think we’d gotten the other bank charged full yet. Any boat I’m operating, I like to keep the batteries up. That would mean running the auxiliary generator after we anchored. And no reason at all why I couldn’t run it while we were under way. Spoils a quiet anchorage when you have to run it at night, like of course you have to when they wanted the air conditioning on. I remember every once in a while I could just barely hear Bix — Mr. Kayd — laugh. He had a loud laugh. So I switched the auxiliary generator to the spare bank, and I pressed the button wondering if it would catch right off — it was a little cranky sometimes — and there was a big flash and a whoomp, and the next thing I know I’m in the water, choking and strangling and thrashing around, with a funny orange light on the water and the back of my neck hot. I guess I was knocked out for a little while and the water brought me out of it. When I got turned around, she was fire from bow to stern, and burning to the waterline. I was sick to my stomach from swallowing water. I saw something in the water and I managed to swim to it. It was one of those styrofoam sort of surf-board looking things with a glass place to look through. Miss Stella had brought it aboard in Key West, and she liked to use it to float around over the coral reefs, looking down at the fish. She wasn’t a good swimmer on account of her leg. The board was scorched and melted along one edge, but when I pulled myself onto it, it held me all right. And about then, the Muñeca — that means doll in Spanish — went down like a rock, with a lot of hissing when the flames went underwater, and some bubbling and boiling on the surface for just a few seconds. Then it was quiet. When I could stop coughing, I started calling them. I guess I was out of my head. Maybe the only one I was calling was my wife, Mary Jane. But no answer at all.”

“But wasn’t the Muñeca diesel powered?” the dentist asked.

“Yes sir. But the auxiliary generator was gasoline powered, and my guess is that gas leaked into the bilge from its fuel tank or one of the tins stowed down there to fuel it with. The spark, when I tried to start it, blew the boat up, and the heat of the explosion was greater than the flash-point of the diesel fuel. Maybe I goofed. My God, sir, I’d never start gasoline marine engines without running the blowers first. But with an auxiliary, you don’t think of that so easy. And maybe Bix — Mr. Kayd — goofed too, not having a sniffer installed when he had the gas auxiliary put below decks. Using a blower is something you think of when you’re tied up, not running along at cruising speed.”

“No other survivors, Captain.”

“No sir. When I knew I was alone out there, I remembered the Muñequita. That means little doll in Spanish. It was the boat Bix picked up in Miami because the Muñeca was too big for fishing, with too much draft for some of the places they wanted to explore. She towed just fine on a long line. Snub her closer and she’d wallow and swing, but way back she rode like a church. I thought I spotted her quite a way off. I kept paddling until my arms ached, but if it was the Muñequita, she was moving as fast as I was. It’s possible. With those twin out-drive Volvo units tilted up, she draws fifteen inches, and she has about an average three feet of freeboard for the wind to catch.” He closed his eyes.

“Isn’t this tiring him too much, Bill?” the woman asked softly.

“I’m okay,” Staniker said.

“There’s been a big search,” Barth said. “Air and sea. I guess it started when Kayd didn’t radio Nassau Marine last Saturday morning for traffic, and there were some calls in for him, and the marine operator couldn’t raise him. The search has been tapering off. The focus was up around the Berry Islands.”

“That was where we were headed when we left Nassau. We got into nice dolphin a few miles out. Spent a lot of time. Everybody had fun. Mrs. Kayd had been reading the Guide. She wanted to see the Joulters, and kept teasing Bix until he had me lay out a new course. He said we’d cruise from there to the Berrys Saturday afternoon.”

“And on that float board you made it to South Joulter, eh?”

“I knew about where we were when — it happened. I got a rough estimate of my direction of drift from the stars, and it was too northerly and I was afraid it would make me miss the Joulters and take me on out northwest onto the Bahama Banks. I paddled due south to compensate. Paddled and rested. Maybe I passed out once or twice. At dawn I came to the bar. I let the board drift away. I walked until it got deep again, then swam ashore. Every day — I waited for somebody to come — felt worse — kept thinking about the Muñeca...”

“Now there,” a gentle, crooning, comforting woman-voice said. “It’s all right. You’ll be all right.” He felt her dabbing gently at his face with some cool, scented, astringent lotion on a cloth.

He opened his eyes and saw her leaning over him in the lights of the cabin, saw it was the tall brunette, the better looking of the two, but at this closeness she was older than he had estimated.

“Do you know where you are and who I am, Captain?”

“Is it — Mrs. Barth?”

“Then you do know. But I’m Mrs. Hilger. A while ago you thought I was someone else. Somebody named Crissy. Or Christy. You scared me a little, you were holding my arm so tightly.”

He lay very still. He breathed slowly. “What did I say?”

“I don’t know, actually. You seemed to be trying to make Crissy or Christy understand something. You said something about it not being your fault. Pleading with her, or him.” Her laugh was nervous. “You got quite wild this time.”

“This time?”

“You just moaned and mumbled the other times. This time you rose right up and shouted. We should be tied up in another twenty minutes, Captain. Bert got through to Nassau Marine a little while ago. There’ll be an ambulance waiting.”

He closed his eyes. It was unfair that fever should make you talk and not know you were talking. Somebody might hear enough of the fever words to make their guesses about all of it.

You could not will yourself to be silent when the fever carried you off. But if you could make certain all they would hear would be a thickened mumbling...

He shoved his tongue into his right cheek, between the strong molars. He bit tentatively at first, measuring the pain. Then, body rigid, snuffling and grunting with agony and effort, he began chewing his tongue, mashing the sensitive flesh, tasting the coppery flavor of his blood.

From far away he could hear the woman shouting at him, and then she ran out and called the others. When he felt them leaning over him he pretended to be asleep. God help us, Crissy. God help us. It went wrong. I tried, but it went wrong.