Stormchild (18 page)

“I didn’t realize,” Jackie said after the Dutch couple had left us, “that you were kind of famous.”

“It’s a very fading fame,” I said, “if it ever was really fame at all.”

The next day, still waiting for the trade winds, we took a ferry to Lanzarote where we hired a car to explore the famous black island. Jackie wanted to ride one of the camels that carried tourists up the flanks of the volcano, and I, who had taken the uncomfortable trip before, let her go on her own. The camels were rigged with curious wooden seats that accommodated three people abreast, one on each side and one perched high on the beast’s hump, and Jackie found herself sitting next to a young Frenchman. He was obviously attracted to her, and I watched the animation with which she responded to his remarks and felt a twinge of the most stupid jealousy, but nevertheless a twinge so strong that I had to turn away to stare across the landscape of black lava.

Joanna. I said my wife’s name to myself over and over, as though the repetition would prove a talisman to help me. I was tempted to insist that Jackie fly home, except now I did not want her to go. Things would be better, I told myself, when we could leave, for then we would become absorbed in the routine of sailing a boat. At sea, on a shorthanded yacht, a crew sees remarkably little of each other. I would be awake when Jackie slept, and she awake when I slept, and in those few moments when we might share the deck or a meal together, we would be far too busy with the minutiae of navigation and ship-keeping to be worried about my adolescent fantasies.

More and more boats left. I waited, not because I wished to draw out these lotus-eating days, but because the winds about the islands were still depressingly light, and I did not want to motor the heavy
Stormchild
all the way south to where the unvarying trade winds blew across the Atlantic. I was waiting for a northerly wind to take me away, and each day I haunted the splendid Meteorological Office in Mogan to study their synoptic charts. “Soon, Tim, soon!” one of the duty weathermen would greet me each morning.

Jackie translated my irritability as an impatience to leave the Canary Islands. She confessed to some impatience herself, declaring that she had developed an unexpected taste for sailing. “I mean I used to watch the yachts on Lake Michigan, right? But I never guessed I would ever be on one. I thought yachts were just for the rich, or at least for the middle class!”

“Aren’t you middle class?” I asked idly.

“Jeez, no! Mom works in a hardware store. My dad left her when we were real little, and he never sent us any money, so things have always been kind of tough.” Jackie spoke without any touch of self-pity. She was sitting in a corner of the cockpit with her bare, brown knees drawn up to her chin. It was evening, and behind her the sun was setting toward the high harbor wall, and its light imbued her untidy hair with a lambent beauty. She laughed suddenly. “Mom would be really knocked out to see me now.”

“Does that mean she’d be pleased?”

“Don’t be stuffy, Tim, of course it means she’d be pleased. Mom always said I should get more fresh air, because I guess I was kind of bookish as a kid. My brother was always out-of-doors, but I was the family’s nerd. Mom would be really astonished to see me now.” She turned to watch a graceful French sloop that was motoring slowly toward the harbor entrance. A lot of boats liked to leave at nightfall, thinking to use an evening breeze to spur them through the doldrums.

“It’s strange,” I said, “how we don’t really know our children. We think we do, but we don’t. I never thought Nicole would do anything stupid. Then, of course, her brother died, and she really went berserk.”

“She was fond of her brother?”

I nodded. “They were inseparable.” I paused, thinking about Nicole’s childhood, raking over the ancient coals of guilt to discover whether I had caused her unhappiness. “The trouble is I was away a lot when they were little. I was sailing round the world, being mildly famous. And Joanna was always busy, so the twins were left alone a lot. But they were happy. They did all the things kids are supposed to do.” I poured myself another finger of Irish whiskey. “I was really proud of her. She was a tough kid, but I thought she was levelheaded.”

Jackie smiled. “And that’s important to you, Tim, isn’t it? Being levelheaded.”

“Absolutely.”

“And you think when Nicole ran off with von Rellsteb she wasn’t being levelheaded?”

“Of course she wasn’t,” I said firmly.

“Maybe she was, Tim.” Jackie stirred the ice cubes in her glass, then added a shot of diet cola. One of the advantages of being alongside a pontoon was that we could connect the boat’s refrigerator to shoreside electricity and thus satisfy Jackie’s insatiable American appetite for ice cubes, though Jackie, with her terror of ingesting anything that might harbor a microbe, insisted on freezing only bottled water, and not the perfectly good stuff that came out of the pontoon hose. The pontoon not only had electricity and water, it even had television cables so that the more lavishly equipped boats could watch “Dallas” in Spanish, French, or English. Jackie, her drink suitably chilled into tasteless-ness, frowned at me. “Just because we both believe that Caspar von Rellsteb is a weird guy, it doesn’t mean that his group hasn’t achieved some good things. They’re surely right to try and stop drift netting and whaling, aren’t they?”

“They are,” I agreed, “if that’s all they do.”

Jackie heard the tension in my voice and stared gravely at me over the rim of her glass. “You’ve really convinced yourself that von Rellsteb planted the bomb that killed Joanna, haven’t you?”

I shrugged. “I can’t think who else would have done it.” That was not the most convincing proof of von Rellsteb’s guilt, but it was the only explanation I could find for Joanna’s death, and the explanation convinced me. We knew that von Rellsteb had made himself independent of his Canadian benefactress by means of his father’s legacy and it made cruel sense to me that, if von Rellsteb found himself in need of more money, he would seek a further inheritance: mine. I also believed Nicole to be in von Rellsteb’s thrall, a victim of his malevolent hierarchy, and that she had consequently been unable to prevent his machinations. “We know von Rellsteb uses criminal violence,” I began to justify my suspicions, “and we.”

“Once!” Jackie interrupted to reprove me. “We know he committed one crime in Texas, Tim, and that was over ten years ago and no one was hurt.” She frowned, thinking. “We’re going on a journey of discovery, that’s what we’re doing. We’re going to find out just what von Rellsteb is, because we don’t really know anything about him. We don’t really know if he keeps people against their will, or if he uses violence. We might even discover that he’s running a really legitimate operation, a bit fanatical, maybe, but straight.”

“Balls,” I said.

Jackie laughed. “You’re so full of shit, Tim!”

“Listen.” It was my turn to speak earnestly. “I’m not sailing halfway round the damn world with an open mind. I’m sailing because I think von Rellsteb is an eco-terrorist. His aims might be good, but you don’t approve of terrorists just because you agree with their political aims. That’s the mitigating plea offered by every terrorist in the world! The innocent have to suffer so that Ireland can be united, or the whales saved, or Israel destroyed, or apartheid dissolved, or whatever else is the cause of the month, and the terrorist claims exemption from civilized restraints on the grounds that his cause is too noble. In fact he claims not to be a terrorist at all, but a freedom fighter! But if you disagree with this freedom fighter, then he’ll murder you or kidnap your wife or blow up your children.” I had spoken with a more venomous anger than the conversation had deserved, and in doing so I had said more than I probably believed, for I did not know whether von Rellsteb was a terrorist or not. For all I knew he might be nothing more than a holy fool, though I suspected he was considerably more dangerous. At best, I imagined, Caspar von Rellsteb was a manipulative man who sheltered his activities behind the virtuous smokescreen of environmental activism, giving even his survivalist notions a dubious respectability by a green antinuclear stance, but, as Jackie had maintained, I had no direct proof that he was a terrorist. I saw that my anger had disconcerted Jackie and, as the fury ebbed out of me like a foul tide, I apologized to her.

Jackie dismissed my apology with a shake of her head. “You’re thinking of your son, right?”

“Of course. And of Joanna.”

“Oh God, I’m sorry.” She stared across the harbor to where a bright painted fishing boat was chugging toward the sea. “Is this a crusade for you, Tim?”

“A crusade?” I asked.

“I mean have you condemned von Rellsteb already? Is that why you’re going to Chile? To punish him?”

It was a shrewd question, and I almost answered it unthinkingly by saying that of course I wanted to shoot the goatlike bastard. I remembered that moment on Sun Kiss Key when I thought he was laughing at me and I wondered, as I often did, whether the reason he had agreed to meet me in Florida was just so he could gloat over the fool he had bereaved and whose daughter he had bedded. Of course I wanted to kill him, but, instead, I just said I was going to Patagonia to find my daughter.

Jackie nodded at that answer, then frowned as she swirled her melting ice around her glass. “What if Nicole doesn’t want to leave von Rellsteb?” she asked after a while.

“Then she can stay, of course,” I said, “so long as she tells me that herself, and so long as I’m convinced von Rellsteb isn’t forcing her to say it, or isn’t forcing her to stay in Patagonia against her will.”

“And what will you do if you think he is forcing her to do what he wants?”

For an answer, and because I remembered her extravagant reaction to the revolver in Key West, I just dismissed the question with a wave of my hand.

But Jackie would not be so easily fobbed off. “You’re not thinking of fighting von Rellsteb, are you?” She waited, but got no answer. “You’d better not, Tim, because I told you he used to be into survivalism, and I’ll bet he still is, which means he’s bound to have a lot of guns.” She shuddered at that thought, then shot me a penetrating look. “You don’t have a gun, do you?” Her tone was indignant, as though she had already guessed the true answer.

“No,” I said too hurriedly, then, like a fool, compounded the lie. “Of course I don’t have a gun. I’m English! We don’t carry guns like you mad Yanks!”

“You did in Key West,” she accused me.

“That was because of Charles. He just wanted me to take care of his precious car.”

“Because I really hate guns.” Jackie’s suspicions were subsiding. “They’re just a stupid statement of intent, right? People claim guns are only for defense, but that’s bullshit, I mean, you can defend yourself without using a mechanism designed to kill people. Don’t you agree?”

“Sure I agree,” I said dismissively, because I did not want to talk about guns. I leaned my head on
Stormchild
’s lower guardrail and stared past the awning’s edge at the first bright star that was pricking a hole of light in the softening sky. Then, because the sun had dipped below the harbor wall and because I ran an old-fashioned boat, which meant that our bomb-scarred ensign only flew during the hours of daylight, I stepped past Jackie and took the flag off its staff, then reverently folded the faded and torn cotton.

“Are you OK, Tim?” Jackie must have sensed a sudden saddening in me.

“I’m fine.” I told another lie, because I was not fine, but rather I suddenly felt lonely, and I told myself that the attack of self-pity had been triggered by the memories that lurked in the sun-warmed weave of the cotton I held in my hands. “I’m fine,” I said again, yet that night, lying sleepless in the stern cabin, I heard a couple making love on the next boat and I felt insanely jealous. I heard a woman’s warm soft laughter, unforced and full of pleasure, a sound to aggravate puritans and feminists and loneliness, a sound old as time, comfortable, and full of enjoyment. The gentle laughter died into contentment and I consoled myself with the sour thought that it did not matter for we would all die one day, then I tried to sleep as the water slapped petulantly at
Stormchild’s
hull.

The next morning, unable to bear the idle frustration any longer, I sent a fax to David, telling him our next destination and my estimated arrival date, then I slipped
Stormchild’s
mooring lines. Jackie, knowing that the winds were not yet propitious, was puzzled by our precipitous departure, but her respect for my sailing experience made her accept my muttered explanation that, despite the depressing forecast, I was expecting a northerly blow at any minute. We motored our way offshore and suddenly, five miles from land, and against all the careful predictions of the weathermen, a steady northeaster did indeed begin to blow. I killed the motor, trimmed the sails, and let
Stormchild
run free. The unexpected wind proved to Jackie that I was a genius, while I knew I was merely a fraud. Two days later we found the trade winds and turned our bows west and thus we ran in Columbus’s path, bound for the Americas.

W
e furled the big mainsail, lashed the boom down, then whisker-poled our twin headsails, one to port and the other to starboard. The wind came from dead astern, the twin sails hauled us, the wind vane guided us, the flying fish landed on our deck, and
Stormchild
crossed the Atlantic, rolling like a drunken pig, just as every other boat had run the unvarying trade winds ever since Columbus’s
Santa Maria
had first wallowed along these same latitudes under the command of a man who insisted he was sailing to the Orient and who, to his dying day, angrily denied that he had ever discovered the Americas.

Jackie and I sailed through sunlit days and phosphorescent nights. We saw no other boats. Hundreds of craft were out there, strung and scattered across the conveyer belt of the trade wind latitudes, but we sailed in apparent solitude, lost in an immensity of warm sea and endless sky under which we fell once more into our watch-keeping routine. I took the first watch from midnight until four, then Jackie would take the deck until ten in the morning. She then slept until nearly six o’clock in the evening, when she would join me in the cockpit for our main meal of the day. At eight I would go below and try to sleep until midnight, when Jackie would wake me for the first watch with a cup of coffee. I was always on call in case of an emergency, but she never needed to rouse me; she claimed that the hounds of hell could not have woken me, so deeply and well did I sleep at sea. My snores, Jackie claimed, began the moment I went below.