And the Deep Blue Sea (2 page)

The
Shoshone
still lay in the trough, rolling heavily, but there was already a different feel to her, a reluctance to come back each time with the inertia of the water inside her. He threw the light into the surging mess of spars and cordage and Dacron along the starboard side and knew it would be suicide to go under it or between it and the hull. The plunging hull itself was dangerous enough without the broken mast battering into it. There was no time to fool with turnbuckles and shackles, working one-handed on a lurching deck while he tried to hold a light. He ran below again for the handax. The steel forestay was tough, and the ax only buried it in the wood, so it took a half dozen swings before he severed it. With nothing holding it forward of the shrouds, he was able to haul the whole mess aft along the hull and secure it back out of the way. The sailbag he’d brought up held a storm jib. He pulled it out of the bag and went over the side with it.

The dark mass of the bow heaved up and plunged down on him. He pushed clear, waiting, and when it steadied for a moment, came in against it. He groped, felt the jagged ends of broken planking and the water pouring through, and tried to stuff the jib into it. There was no clearly defined hole, only a great area of split and shattered planks and pushed-in frames, nowhere enough of an opening to get the cloth in far enough to hold. The
Shoshone
lurched to starboard and came down on him with stunning force, pushing him under the surface. He kicked backward and got clear, and when she steadied again the sail was gone. He threshed around with his hands, groping for it; they encountered nothing. The
Shoshone
rolled down again and hung there, wallowing sluggishly. He grabbed the rail and climbed back aboard. Just as he reached the companion hatch the cabin lights went out. Water had covered the batteries. There was no longer any hope. She was filling too fast for anything to save her.

The next half hour was never very clear in his mind. He had no precise recollection of how he had got the raft out of the cabin, found the pump, and inflated it—nor even why he had done it, except that the survival instinct was apparently basic and not to be denied by trifles like logic and realistic appraisals of the situation. It wasn’t even supposed to be a life raft; he had it aboard only for skin-diving forays along the reefs of the South Pacific which he would never reach now. There were no oars, no sail, and no food or water, but somewhere in the confusion he had grabbed up the Jack Daniels bottle he kept in the cockpit so he wouldn’t have to go below for water during long spells at the tiller. Each time the doughnut capsized and threw him he righted it and dragged himself back aboard, still clutching the neck of the bottle. After an eternity of this it was dawn, and he secured it to the oarlock tab with the lanyard cut from his shirt tail. At the same time he scooped from his pocket the sodden pulp which was all that remained of a pack of cigarettes and threw it overboard, thinking of the old gags about fighter pilots and lung cancer.

The sun rose. The glare began, eye-searing and brutal, broken only intermittently by the tilting planes of the swell. His skin itched and chafed inside his salt-saturated clothing, and as his face and arms began to dry they felt as though they were encased in a crust that would shatter when he moved. The only relief, which was temporary and merely an illusion, was to plunge overboard and wash it away with water that would leave its own accumulation. The swell was smaller now than it had been last night, and if it died out completely the sea would become the polished metal sheet of a reflector oven.

He searched the horizon again, and lay back, an arm across his closed eyes to shield them from the glare. He thought of mountain streams he had fished where the water was cold enough to make his teeth hurt when he drank it, and after a while he found himself remembering beer—beer in foaming steins and cold bottles beaded with moisture, Tüborg and Dos Equis and Budweiser and Lowenbrau, the gaseous and ecstatic sighs of punched cans, beer in waterfront dives and yacht club bars, in sidewalk cafés in Paris and the parlors of Texas whorehouses and the cockpits of sports fishermen off Cape San Lucas and Bimini.

There was the place in Tampico a long time ago, so cool and dim after the incandescent whiteness of the street, where draft beer was served in frosted earthen steins and there were saucers of olives on the polished mahogany bar with sliced limes to squeeze over them. That was on the other
Shoshone,
the first one, when he’d run away from home and shipped as ordinary seaman, and afterward he’d gone out to La Union where the girls sat beside the doorways of their cribs, and he’d got into a fight with the second mate of a Sinclair tanker over something he couldn’t even remember now, and the second mate had beaten hell out of him. He was only nineteen then and still filling out, but too cocky, and he probably deserved to have his ass kicked.

It was a long way from the fo’c’sle of an old Hog Islander to skippering your own Cal 40 in the Acapulco race, but it had been a long time, too, and where did it go, that feeling of being nineteen, or twenty-three, or even thirty-six? You not only didn’t know what had become of it, you weren’t even sure what it was any more and couldn’t remember what it had been when you’d had it. Juice? Drive? Confidence? No, it wasn’t as simple as that; as close as you could come to it was caring. Stoically accepting the fact that within a few days he was going to die was no longer courage; it was merely apathy. The only real regret was that he’d suckered himself into such a hell of a sad way of doing it. He smiled now at the transparency of christening the sloop
Shoshone.
Did he think the nineteen-year-old Harry Goddard was still out here somewhere, to be searched for and reclaimed?

The sun reached the meridian. Reflected from the oily surface of the sea, it burned its way even through closed eyelids and felt like flame against his skin. Real thirst began, a foretaste of the agony to come, and he took a swallow of the water, rolling it around his mouth for long seconds before he let it trickle down his throat. A shark appeared from somewhere and circled the raft three or four times as though intrigued by the strange yellow bubble. Goddard watched its dorsal slicing the surface and, more to break the eerie silence than anything else, said to it, “Shove off, you silly bastard. That’s a low-budget routine.” The shark came closer on its next pass, and he took out his knife and opened it, ready to stab if it decided to roll up and take an experimental bite out of the fabric. The shark lost interest and went away. Around two
P.M.
a light breeze sprang up, riffling and darkening the surface of the sea and lessening the intensity of its glare. It continued until late afternoon, making the heat at least endurable, and died out only with the vast chromatic explosion of sunset. He watched the colors fade in the sudden velvet night of the tropics and wondered how many more he would see. Two? Four? After a while he slept.

When he awoke, shivering again, he saw from the positions of the constellations overhead that it was after midnight. The sea was still slick and almost flat now, and beyond his feet propped on the rim of the raft a shimmering path of light stretched away toward a waning moon hung low in the eastern sky. He sat up to stretch his cramped muscles, and when he turned he saw the ship, not more than a mile away.

His first thought was that he must be dreaming. He rubbed both hands across his face, feeling the beard stab his salt-ravaged face, and looked again. It was real. But there was something wrong. When he realized what it was he had to choke down the cry pushing up into his throat. He could see only a stern light. It was going away from him. It had already passed, only minutes ago, while he slept.

No! How could it? He looked around at the placid unruffled sea. It would have passed within a few hundred yards, and the bow wave would have tossed the raft end over end like a bit of flotsam. There wasn’t even a trace of wake anywhere. He was almost directly astern of the ship, but it hadn’t gone by him. The only answer was that it was lying dead in the water. It had stopped for something, and had swung around as it lost steerageway. Unless, he thought, his mind was already playing him tricks and there wasn’t any ship there at all.

M
ADELEINE DARRINGTON LENNOX WAS LYING
naked on her bunk in the sweltering darkness of Cabin C when she heard the engine stop and wondered what was wrong with the stupid ship now. She didn’t care particularly except to the extent the stoppage might affect the rendezvous whose anticipation had made it almost impossible for her to lie still since she had switched out the light a half hour ago and begun her nightly wait for Barset to slip down the passageway and into the cabin. It had been her experience that when anything happened to break the routine of a ship, even on the midnight-to-four watch, there were apt to be people abroad in the passageways either seeking information or trying to right the matter, whatever it was, and Barset was too shrewd to run the risk of being seen by one of the deck officers or perhaps the captain himself. Laying the passengers was no part of the steward’s duties, no matter how great his virtuosity in this field, and as he put it with his gift for unprintable vulgarity, Holy Joe would defecate a ring around himself. So he might not come. And if he didn’t, in the state she was in now she’d need three of the capsules to get to sleep.

There was no air-conditioning, and the cabin would have been stifling in any event here in the tropics, but it was made worse by the fact she had closed the porthole, as she always did in anticipation of these delights, because it opened onto a deck outside, with no privacy at all if anybody happened to be out there. The door was closed all the way, too, instead of being on the hook, because he could open it and slip in a fraction of a second faster that way rather than having to fumble with the hook. The electric fan mounted on the bulkhead beyond the foot of her bunk was an oscillating type, sweeping an intermittent flow of air across her perspiring body, but there was nothing cooling about it; it was merely in motion. She didn’t mind the heat a great deal, however; it merely excited her, as did the vibration of a ship. Face it, she thought, what doesn’t?

There was complete silence except for the faint whirring of the fan and now and then a muted clanging sound from somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship. Suppose he didn’t come? How the hell was she going to get through the night like this, sleeping pills or no sleeping pills? Sometimes she could bring herself to orgasm by thinking about it, but she couldn’t always depend on it, and going that far without the final release always left her half crazy. She started twisting on the bunk again, but at that moment the door opened quickly and he was framed in it for an instant against the lighted passageway. It closed, and the darkness was complete again.

He said nothing. She flicked on the lighter and reached for a cigarette with a show of nonchalance she was aware didn’t fool him any more than it did her. With no more than an amused and condescending glance in her direction, he unbelted and slipped out of the seersucker robe which was the only thing he had on aside from the slippers. The flame cut off, but she could still see him in her mind’s eye, a bony middle-aged man with a sharp face and thinning blond hair combed diagonally back over a bald spot. She’d told him once that he reminded her of a ferret, to which he’d merely laughed and said it took one to know one; ferrets and mink were of the same family.

He walked over and stood naked beside the bunk, only a pale blur in the darkness. She put out a hand, touching his hip, and slid it diagonally downward. God, who would ever believe it? She took another shaky puff of the cigarette, fighting herself, and asked, with beautifully simulated indifference, “Why are we stopped?”

“That shaft bearing again,” Barset replied. “So the chief says.”

“Whatever a shaft bearing is,” she said idly. With another movement of the hand, she murmured, “You’re so accommodating, darling.”

“Have you decided yet?” he asked. “Whether it’s me or not?”

“I’m not annoying you, am I, Steward?” She couldn’t resist the “Steward,” even though it was risky. Once he’d merely turned and gone back to his own cabin, leaving her in torment, knowing she would apologize the next day for whatever snotty remark she’d made, that she’d crawl if she had to. But how much of that lordly condescension could you take? “I assure you I’m filled with all the awe to which you’re accustomed, but this is the only way I can express it. Being by nature shy and inarticulate—”

“Turn it off,” he said.

We come to bury Caesar, not to praise him, she thought, but didn’t say it. The chances were he’d not only never heard the joke, but hadn’t even heard of Shakespeare. He lay down beside her and slid a hand between her thighs to spread them.

“And put out that stupid cigarette,” he added.

She stubbed out the cigarette with a shaky hand, hurriedly, scarcely able to breathe now. The widow, she thought, of a man who was eleventh in his class at the Academy and commanding officer of a cruiser when he retired. Oh! Oh!
Oh, God!

In Cabin D, Karen Brooke had been asleep, but she awoke when the engine stopped and the ship’s vibration ceased. She lay for a moment wondering what had happened, but decided it probably wasn’t serious. Her door was on the hook and the porthole open, and she could hear no running footsteps or voices which might indicate an emergency of some kind. She could remember her father telling her when she was a little girl that a ship’s engines stopping at sea, while rare, wasn’t particularly alarming, but if she ever heard them go abruptly from full ahead to full astern to get on deck and away from the bow as fast as she could. No doubt it was just another breakdown in the engine room; there had been two stoppages, one for twelve hours, since their departure from Callao six days ago.

She had the wind-scoop out the porthole, but now that the ship had come to rest it picked up no air at all and it was suffocatingly hot inside the cabin, even with the whirring of the fan. It would be some relief to take off the cotton pajamas she was wearing, but that would mean drawing the curtains over the porthole. They scrubbed down the deck outside’ very early in the morning, and five feet seven of sleeping nude blonde might cause God knows what havoc among seamen wielding forgotten fire hoses. Even a thirty-four-year-old blonde, she thought; sailors a week at sea were notoriously generous critics.