Long Voyage Back (56 page)

`You know,' Neil said to Jeanne, 'I've been thinking about how the war started.' He paused as if still thinking about it and then went on, 'I'm not sure that the Russians fired the first salvo of missiles.'

Holding his hand as she lay beside him, Jeanne turned to look at him in the grey light of the late afternoon.

`You believed those Venezuelan broadcasts?' she asked, referring to programmes they'd listened to more than a month earlier in which Venezuelan spokesmen had charged that the US had started the war.

`No, not that,' Neil replied. 'The thing that's always bothered me is that the Russians attacked American cities

and industries and military bases. We're told they attacked missile sites too, but one station way back at the beginning said something that I've never forgotten: they suggested people flee to North and South Dakota for refuge from fallout.'

Jeanne watched him as he paused, holding his gaze and waiting. Ì can't help concluding that if the Russians didn't hit South Dakota it was because they knew there was nothing there to hit: all our missiles based there had already been fired.'

Ìf the Russians had struck first,' Jeanne interpreted, 'South Dakota would have been a primary target.'

`Yes.'

`So you think that the President ordered the beginning of a nuclear war?' she asked quietly.

`He wanted his nation to survive,' Neil replied. 'He thought it was sit and get clobbered or strike first. He ordered the first strike for the same reasons that a Russian premier would have needed: fear that the enemy was desperate enough to do it so he'd better do it first.'

Jeanne felt a distant sadness. She hadn't really questioned the assumption of all American radio stations that the Russians had struck first. She realized that she felt it was only natural that they would do it; Americans had been fearing their attack for years. Yet she understood that that very fear, so pervasive, so hopeless, might have led to an American government doing what Neil now speculated it had done. She felt no anger, only the distant sadness.

`The missiles fired at South Dakota targets might have been intercepted,' she speculated,

'or might have missed on the first strike. And then after our Dakota-based missiles had been fired, the Russians ignored the area.' Even as she spoke most of her was accepting Neil's thesis.

`Yes, that's possible,' agreed Neil. 'I'd thought of that. But we know that the very first Soviet missiles hit American cities,

targets that would always be vulnerable, whereas missile silos are worth hitting only on the very first strike, before they're emptied of their missiles.'

Jeanne looked at him. 'How does it make you feel?' she asked.

'It doesn't make me feel much one way or another,' he replied. 'It doesn't change how many legs I have.' He smiled. `The two sides had got each other into a position where sooner or later someone was going to hit first. The fact that our government may have succumbed to fear first doesn't really horrify me.'

Jeanne stared out of the cabin window at the almost horizontal line of snowflakes rushing past. She thought of the violence directed at them and other Americans from the nations south of the equator.

`No wonder we're outcasts,' she concluded.

Later that same afternoon their talk brought them to a new subject. When Neil, still huddled under the covers with Jeanne, had talked with her about Lisa's continuing weakness, he had expressed concern that Lisa might be pregnant which, because the foetus might have been damaged by her high fever, would be an added burden on her health. Jeanne had responded that Lisa had had a period a few days before the plague struck her, and then, looking puzzled, suddenly looked with a flush of joy at Neil.

`What are you thinking?' Neil asked, aware of something special happening with her. Ì just realized that . . . /may be pregnant,' she said to him, looking half-joyful and halfawed. Neil felt stunned. Their lovemaking had usually had an end-of-the-world desperation that was outside the normal everyday reality. Pregnancy belonged to the old world, not the ugly, tenuous one they now inhabited.

`My period's overdue,' Jeanne went on, now looking uncertain. 'I suppose it might just be . . . my wound . . . my

worrying ... diet . . .' She frowned as she thought of the possibility of these other explanations for her absent menstruation. But then she smiled again: she and Neil had made love without contraception during her most fertile time. In those days the possible consequences seemed irrelevant. Now they seemed divine. Even the shadow of the possible effects of her exposure to radiation didn't dim her joy.

`Lovemaking does tend to create babies, I suppose,' Neil said to her, still somewhat dazed but with a grin on his face.

Òh, Neil, I hope so, I hope so, I hope so,' Jeanne said, hugging him. Bright-eyed, he looked down at her and then out of the window at the snow swirling past. He had a boyishly happy faraway expression.

`Now, we'll have to live,' he said dreamily. 'Just to see if it's a boy or a girl.'

But an hour later!, as he struggled up on deck for the first time since his being shot, he knew that his puny aspirations would have nothing to do with it. Their lives, even the new one glowing within Jeanne, still hung by a thread.

14

By the time they were planning to try to sail past Puma Arenas at night, Philip and Neil had begun to have second thoughts. The absence of any sign of ships or life during their first five days in the Straits had made them suspect that there couldn't be a bustling town of forty thousand people only a little way off. As they neared the place in the Straits where their map showed the city to be and they still had seen no boats, no smoke, no planes, they decided that there couldn't be much of a military presence in the Straits and thus those in Punta Arenas might not be a threat, might, in fact, be helpful and sympathetic. So they ventured to try it by day.

Uncertain of their exact location, they had almost sailed past the town before Philip spotted through the binoculars three miles to the north the charred wreckage of buildings and a few small houses on the hillsides. Nervously they altered course to sail over and have a look. It was a relatively mild day with temperatures in the high forties, but the scene that grew towards them was bleak. All the buildings on the waterfront were blackened shells or burned to the ground. A large freighter and at least a half-dozen smaller ships lay half sunk along the waterfront. As they anchored off a burned-out wharf a few stray dogs scurried like overgrown rats between the blackened timbers of the wreckage. The hills above the town were brown and grey with only occasional patches of white from the recent snow. Nowhere were there signs of human life. So fearful of man had those aboard Vagabond become that the abandonment of the city was as much a relief as a source of sadness. Neil, who had joined the others on deck, felt the same sense of being an alien on another planet that he had felt at his last landfall. They had lowered their dinghy into the water and Jim, Lisa, and Sheila were preparing to go ashore when two, three and then half a dozen people appeared along one small section of unburned bulkhead fifty feet away. There were four men, a woman and a child. Two of the men were carrying rifles. All were dressed in woollen ponchos and several wore the distinctive bowler hats of the Andes. The Chileans stared at the trimaran and its occupants, who stared back. Then one of the men with a rifle shouted something. Jeanne, frowning, shouted back in Spanish a request that he say it again. The man shouted the same thing a second time. Jeanne remained frowning a moment and consulted with Sheila.

`What's he saying?' Neil asked from a cushion in the wheelhouse area. Às near as we can tell,' said Jeanne with a puzzled smile on her face, 'he's saying - roughly translated - "Hi, where the hell did you get that weird boat?"'

In the next two days, befriended by the few Chileans who still lived in Punta Arenas, they gradually learned that the city had been destroyed in a brief war between Chile and Argentina ten weeks earlier. No one was certain why the war had started, although the two countries had long disputed areas of Tierra del Fuego. It wasn't even certain who had won the war, but Argentinian jets had destroyed the city and sunk most of the Chilean ships during the four days of fighting. With the city mostly destroyed the Chilean government had ordered it evacuated, perhaps as part of a peace treaty, perhaps being unwilling to spend money supplying it with food and fuel during the winter. Thousands of people had sailed off in freighters and Navy ships for Santiago, leaving less than a hundred people who either chose to stay or got left behind out of ignorance. There was no phone, radio, road, or air contact between this part of Chile and the more civilized parts further north. A single Chilean Navy ship had returned a month ago, looked around, and disappeared.

They also learned that Vagabond was not the only ship to have arrived since the town's destruction. Six weeks before, an English sailing boat had arrived, made some repairs, reprovisioned as best they could, and then sailed on. A damaged Dutch sloop had arrived three weeks earlier and was beached a mile to the east. A Rumanian sailing boat had arrived only three days before Vagabond. The small wiry Chilean man in his thirties who became their unofficial guide joked that Punta Arenas was becoming the 'new French Riviera'.

They met the crews of both ships and for Neil and the others, friendly people were unreal. The absence of threat was vaguely unnerving. The chance to live on land, perhaps in the shell of a house, seemed too good to be true. Food here was very scarce. Spring, although it officially arrived on 21 September, the day they arrived, was still almost a month away. The friendly Chileans had no provisions to spare but they did show the sailors where they might hunt wildlife -mostly rodents and wild dogs - and where they might gather shellfish.

It was unreal, too, to meet the three Dutchmen and one woman and her eight-year-old child who were creating a winter home a mile east of the centre of Punta Arenas while they tried to repair their holed thirty-eight-foot fibreglass sloop. Two of the Dutch spoke good English, as did one of the Rumanians, who, with six others, two of them women, had sailed a forty-eight-foot fibreglass ketch all the way from the Black Sea. It was also anchored east of the wrecked town. Each of the crews was wary and suspicious of the others for a day or two. It wasn't until they had shared the stories of their long voyages of survival that they all began not only to trust but to feel a brotherhood. The Rumanians, like those aboard Vagabond, were still in shock at being greeted with friendliness by human beings.

The Dutch had fled Amsterdam on the first morning of the war, landing briefly in Portugal and again in the Canary

Islands for supplies. They hadn't experienced the resentment and violence which fleeing Americans had experienced; no one blamed the Dutch for the war. But conditions were harsh in the Canaries, the islands crowded with European refugees and food so scarce aristocrats with millions of dollars worth of gold found it almost useless; food couldn't be easily obtained at any price. The Dutch decided to sail across to Argentina which, they thought, had plenty of food and would welcome them. When they had landed in a small Argentinian fishing village they learned they would lose their boat and be interned. They opted to try for the South Pacific.

The Rumanian story was more harrowing. Working in the Black Sea when the war began, they had all, including the three members of the Communist Party aboard, decided that the war was a meaningless disaster and chosen to run. By the time they got to the Bosphorus a nuclear explosion had blocked the Straits to all big ship traffic but they were able to sail through. They touched on North Africa only once, losing two of their shipmates in an attack by natives, then escaped out of the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. They stopped in Cape Verde to reprovision but found food so scarce they could obtain almost nothing. Sailing on, they'd been dismasted in a storm off Brazil, spent three weeks in a jungle south of the Amazon building another mast, and then sailed on. They too had been fired on by a jet, a Brazilian jet, but it had fired just once, missed by a literal mile and then flown off.

Both the Dutch and the Rumanians seemed surrealistically skinny and bony at first, until Neil realized that he must look even worse.

It took Neil and Jeanne and the others only two days to decide that their plan to sail on soon to the South Pacific was madness created by their desperation. They had no food and little prospect of getting much until the summer season offered a chance to plant and harvest crops; Jeanne was pregnant; Lisa and Olly still in weakened condition, although both now out of bed. Sheila and Jeanne had pulled two of

Olly's rotting teeth a week earlier and his strange low-grade fever and weakness were disappearing. He had recovered sufficiently to pinch Sheila's behind and begin entertaining himself and others again with monologues.

On their third day they moved Vagabond east to beach her closer to the other sailing boats. The terrain was desolate: the few trees twisted like grotesque cripples by the fierce westerly winds. Aboard Vagabond as Philip and Sheila and Lisa began preparing to cook some of the last of their beef, Olly suggested a barbecue. Philip said that of course that was the easiest way -to cook, the only way, but Olly shook his head. 'I mean a real barbecue,' he said. 'With people, talk, laughter. You know, like they do on Smith Island.'

`You mean . . . invite other people?' asked Jeanne. `Sure,' said Olly. 'Shit, let's cook up all the rest of our meat.' They all stared at him. Share all their remaining food? `Who'll we invite?' asked Jeanne.

`Well, those fellas with the funny round hats for one,' said Olly. Èveryone,' said Neil.

`What?' said Philip.

`We'll invite everyone,' Neil repeated almost dreamily. `We'll invite everyone . . .

`By God, that's a jolly good idea, Neil,' Philip said, grinning. `To share with friends again, even if it leaves us back with dried grasses and barnacles.'

`Don't criticize barnacles, dear,' said Sheila. 'Lisa and I are concocting a marvellous barnacle salad.'