Long Voyage Back (6 page)

Some of the locals came up as the boat approached the dock and took the two mooring lines. A skinny little man was at the wheel and a young kid put out the fenders. When the launch was secured, the little man came out of the wheelhouse, puffing on a pipe. After Frank had walked back to where he had set his dufflebags and then transferred himself and his stuff on to the ferry, the captain helped a woman he apparently knew to climb on board.

`You folks heah about the woah?' he asked her and the two men with her.

'What war is that, Cap?' one of the men boarding asked in return. Ì don't know as whether they've-named it yet,' he answered, a quizzical frown on his round face. 'But it's another one of our woahs.'

`What do you mean?' the woman asked nervously, seating herself next to Frank on a middle bench.

`My radio says theahs going to be a woah. With the Russians.'

Òh, that,' said Frank, feeling the tension that the captain's vague statements had created beginning to lessen.

"When'd you hear this?' another man asked.

`Five minutes ago, I'd guess,' the captain said. 'Made it seem pretty important. National emergency or something. Like an air raid wahning.'

Àir raid warning for where?' Frank asked irritably. `Well, I guess for just about the whole country,' the little man replied.

`What are you going to do about it, Cap?' the first man asked.

`Not much I can do till I finish this last ferry trip,' he said, motioning to the young kid to free the mooring lines.

`Has anyone been killed yet?' the woman asked.

`Not that they mentioned,' the captain replied as he went through to the wheelhouse. He turned back to them halfway to the wheel. 'They just kep' saying emergency,' he concluded.

The forty-five foot ferry swung out of the dock area and began its hour and a half trip through the darkness to Tangier. Frank leaned back on the bench, hugging his right knee for balance, and sensed the anxiety rising within him. It was one thing to have a war scare but quite another to declare some sort of national emergency so that people began telling their neighbours there was a war.

He stared unseeingly off to his right and began to consider the effect an escalation of the panic might have on his business fortunes when something caught his attention. There was a strange increasing glow across the bay like the lights of a huge city being slowly turned on. It didn't seem to him to be a fire; the light was too diffuse, too much just a glow. Unless it were a long way off.

`What's that?' the woman next to him asked the man on her other side. Along with the seven or eight other passengers Frank watched in fascination as the light, like the slowly rising head of a deadly cobra, gradually rose with increasing intensity. He felt a stab of horror and stood up.

`Looks like a fire,' someone said.

Frank pushed past the knees of the two people next to him and strode forward to the wheelhouse.

`What's our heading?' he asked the little captain in the dimly lit wheelhouse.

`Heading?' the little man asked, squinting up at him.

Frank looked at the compass binnacle lit with a soft reddish light. Their course was southwest. The glow then was to the northwest, perhaps a little north of northwest. He tried to visualize the map of the Chesapeake which he'd been studying the day before, then looked back at the spreading and intensifying glow.

Washington. There were no cities along the Chesapeake northwest of Crisfield. The first city northwest of Crisfield was way inland - Washington. A hundred miles away. A hundred miles away. Holy Sweet Jesus. The light glowed more brightly. Frank staggered out of the wheelhouse.

Captain Oily was dozing in his faded and worn overstuffed chair, the television set gleaming in front of him, the sound turned down low, though still audible. Hours before, his son had gone out to a Smith Island bar, but 0lly had decided to stay home, bushed as usual.

The face of a newscaster on the screen was intoning in tense, anxious tones but Olly didn't hear. Then with a gentle popping sound the screen went dark and the lights Olly had left on behind the set and in the kitchen also went out. Olly stirred, awakened by the change, and opened his eyes.

`Chris?' he said into the darkness.

He began feeling for the thin blanket that Chris sometimes put over him when he'd fallen asleep in his chair and Chris didn't want him to wake up. But his lap was bare. It didn't feel like he'd been sleeping that long but if Chris were home and had turned out all the lights it must be damn late.

He shuffled slowly to the bathroom and, without bothering to turn on the light, pissed into the sink - no problem with aiming at such close range. Then he shuffled off to his small bedroom at the rear of the house. He hesitated for a moment at his bedroom door, a vague feeling of uneasiness nagging at him. In years at sea and in the bay he'd learned to be responsive to such intuitive twinges of concern, but he was in his own little house, anchored solidly to Smith Island which was anchored less solidly to Chesapeake mud. It was the moonlight streaming in the bedroom window that bothered him, but he couldn't tell why.

He was old and he was tired. He fell on to his bed fully

clothed and closed his. eyes. Something was wrong but damned if he could think of anything that wouldn't wait till morning. Soon he was asleep in the empty house, the half-moon not yet risen in the east, but light streaming in his window from the northwest. Jeanne was driving the stationwagon through the darkness on Route 5 south towards Point Lookout, having already travelled more than forty of the seventy miles from Washington. Lisa was sitting silently beside her in front, Skippy sprawled asleep in the rear with the dog, when a flash of bright light filled the car from the rear as if a vehicle with its headlights on had suddenly come up fast behind them. When Jeanne glanced in her rear-view mirror the brightness was more like a gigantic diffuse searchlight on the horizon aimed at her. Lisa turned to stare back out the rear window, and then, her face glimmering in the light, looked fearfully at Jeanne.

`What is it, Mother?' she asked.

Jeanne, following fifty yards behind .a blue pickup truck, didn't reply. The inexplicable and terrifying brightness had numbed her mind.

Then her car was suddenly out of control, picked up by an invisible giant hand and flung forward at ten or fifteen miles faster than she'd been going, the rear end swinging sickeningly to the left then gliding back as if they'd hit a patch of ice. The pickup truck had swerved into the ditch on the right, then careened back on to the two-lane highway and across it until finally, wobbling as if all four tyres had gone flat and still speeding forward at sixty miles per hour, it steadied in the centre of the highway. Jeanne followed it, almost oblivious of what was happening to her own car. When the pickup's brakelights glowed, she began to brake her wagon, both vehicles quickly slowing to fifty, then forty, then driving on at that speed.

Jeanne glanced at Lisa who was staring speechlessly at her in wide-eyed horror. Still not thinking, she slowed her car, letting the pickup disappear ahead of her into the eerily lit night. When she saw a pulloff space in front of a fruitstand she pulled the car off the road and stopped.

I'm trembling, was the first thought she had, and she gripped the steering wheel more tightly, trying to control her shaking hands. Yes, 'trembling' was what it was called, she thought stupidly.

Òh, Mommy, Mommy, what's happening?' Lisa cried and Jeanne felt her daughter press against her, clutching her arm, her face against Jeanne's shoulder. The rear-view mirror was filled with light. Two cars sped by, lit by the eerie brightness from behind. Then Jeanne turned to look back: a light was ballooning outwards and upwards into the sky, the central brightness becoming dimmer, but the area of light growing. Lisa's fingers dug into her still trembling arm and Jeanne thought simply: A nuclear bomb has struck Washington. There was no conscious terror or fear, only the bland fact. And this is what it's like forty miles away.

Two more cars sped past towards Point Lookout. No one was now travelling back towards Washington. She closed her eyes and slowly lowered her head to the wheel.

`Mommy . . . Mommy . . .' Lisa pleaded beside her, but Jeanne couldn't seem to function, couldn't seem to think anything. She had a sudden image of the house in Alexandria being shattered into tiny pieces by some blast but she felt nothing. The wheel was cold against her forehead. From the back seat the dog barked twice nervously, apparently disturbed by the light.

Jeanne raised her head and straightened up, staring forward. She turned the car's engine back on. She shifted into forward, swung the car in a U, and began to drive back towards Washington.

Beside her Lisa began to whimper. 'Where are we going, Mommy?' she gasped out between low moans.

Ahead of them a bell-shaped clump of light expanded into the sky, its upper parts rising but growing dimmer, the lower parts spreading out horizontally and retaining their brightness. When the car headed straight towards it Jeanne had trouble seeing the road. When an oncoming car honked its horn at her and she swerved to the right, her right wheels slid off the shoulder, skidded, then climbed back on to the road. Òh, Mommy, Mommy!'

How long it's been since Lisa has called me Mommy, she thought, driving unthinkingly onwards.

And then she saw a fire: two cars tangled off the opposite side of the road, one of them engulfed in flames. She slowed as she passed them and then after a minute brought her car to a halt off the side of the road. They were on a slight rise overlooking miles of land ahead. She could see several other small fires burning in the half-darkness of this night, whether cars or houses she couldn't tell. Off to the right a whole village seemed to be burning. The landscape was otherwise dark.

you're in shock. Get the children to safety. You're in shock, get the children to safety, you're in shock . . . Her mind was like some alien machine functioning mechanically and improperly, she herself dumb, helpless.

`Mommy, let's go the other way,' Lisa whispered against her shoulder.

`Yes, sweetheart,' she found herself saying calmly, her arm still trembling. 'We'd better get down to Point Lookout.'

She swung the car a second time in a U, almost colliding with a van that was already speeding southwards and which she had seen and yet not seen. Then she was in line with the other vehicles, speeding through the night away from Washington. Neil ran down the dock and began untying Vagabond, feeling vulnerable, naked. Leaving the Tangier bar he'd seen the glow to the northwest and known what it meant, but had not broken stride towards the boat. As Jim leapt on to Vagabond and ran aft to descend into the inflatable dinghy tied off between the hulls, Neil could sense that now that Jim's nightmare had come true he was acting with unpanicked calm. With the wind still light out of the east Jim would have to tow them out to the bay before the ship would have a proper slant to sail to Crisfield and pick up Frank. But even as Neil acted to get the boat one way, a part of his mind was focused on getting the boat south, out of the Chesapeake into the open sea.

When Jim came sliding between the hulls in the dinghy Neil dropped him the towline. The glow to the northwest was worse, and a surge of panic forced Neil to steady himself, holding on to the forestay and staring at the glow on the horizon.

`Get going,' he said sharply and ran aft to raise the sails. Five minutes later Vagabond was out of the cove and sailing northward behind her dinghy at almost four knots. Neil knew Frank might be on some late ferry coming to Tangier, so he was keeping his boat in the buoyed channel. As they moved through the night he became aware of the total darkness on Tangier and Smith Islands and on the eastern shore. The battery-operated buoy lights were working but the rest of the world was in darkness.

Some twenty minutes out into the bay he spotted the ferry, the lighted launch closing on them fast and bearing away. He put the spreader lights on so that Frank, if aboard, would be certain to recognize his trimaran. When he trained his glasses on the passengers, some of whom were visible in the launch lights, he saw Frank standing on the stern waving his arms at them like a drowning man.

Neil signalled Jim to drop the towline and get over to the launch. When he looked back through the binoculars he saw Frank standing on the ship's side, a dufflebag in each hand; after staring dubiously at the widening gap between the ferry and Vagabond and then at the water, the tall, gangly figure stepped awkwardly off the boat and disappeared into the blackness, the ferry speeding on to Tangier. While Neil watched - feeling both fear and, admiration for Frank - it took Jim only a half-minute to reach Frank and another two to bring them both back to the trimaran. As Neil let Vagabond come up into the wind and rushed over to the port cockpit, Frank tossed his two wet bags aboard and prepared to swing himself up.

`Thank God we found you,' Neil said, grabbing Frank's hand to pull him aboard.

`There's a war, did you know?' Frank shot back. `Yes,' Neil answered.

`You got a towel for me? I'm freezing to death.'

Neil carried the two dufflebags into the wheelhouse and found a towel Jim had left on a settee. As Frank began undressing and vigorously drying his body, Neil went back to speak to Jim.

`Come back aboard,' Neil shouted to him. 'We'll tow the dinghy and sail.' As Jim began to obey, Neil went back to the wheel to get Vagabond turned around and headed down the bay towards the Atlantic Ocean.

`Where the hell are you going?' Frank asked, pausing in drying his legs to look up at Neil winching in the mainsail.

`We've got to escape this madness,' Neil said, taking Vagabond off the wind on a starboard tack. 'The Chesapeake will soon be nothing but a saltwater burial ground. The whole east coast is probably doomed.'

Frank stared at him.

`We've been at war less than an hour,' he snapped back to Neil. 'Are you surrendering already?'

The question startled Neil. He was ready to surrender in some sense, not to an invading army - that he'd be willing to fight - but to the invisible anonymous destruction which he knew was being unleashed.