The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories (12 page)

He opened his book and turned to
Notes From the Underground
where he had underscored a number of passages for further consideration. With the recently washed-down
decks drying in uneven patches around him, he confronted certain thoughts of the author with ideas of his own, subjecting both to a kind of lazy analysis in the enervating heat of the noon sun.

Though the Captain had never enjoyed Dostoevsky, he had read his books, for the most part out of deference to his great reputation. Among the Russians, Tolstoy, Chekov and Gorky appealed to him more deeply because they gave him a feeling that life, despite its superincumbent difficulties and the imposition of an often ugly and unjustifiable fate, did have its bright side, its moments of tenderness and humor, as well as beauty; a feeling which, constitutionally, he was in agreement with. At the moment, however, a certain well-known line in
Notes
caught his interest. “To be too conscious is an illness.” But to be too anything could be an illness, he reflected, too ambitious, greedy, lazy, even to be too kind or too generous. He could think of numerous character traits, which, if overdone, could be claimed as an illness of some kind or other. Yet the quality of being too conscious seemed somehow different from the others, set apart, as though it bore upon some basic question, something deeply personal. He would have developed his line of thought, and perhaps written on it in his journal, only now a gentle drowsiness began to lull his mind into less ambitious paths.

He closed the book, placed it beside him on the deck, then lay back on his canvas chair. The heat felt good. It penetrated the heavy material of his uniform and went deep into his muscles. At the moment he could think of nothing more pleasant or desirable. He closed his eyes. The best things in life are free, he thought. And the simplest are the best. Both cliches. Or conventions? One way or another, there was something to be said for them. Or at least for conventions. They saved making decisions with their consequent
uncertainties. Why, it even exorcised the guilt of . . . lying in the sun. He smiled drowsily at his thoughts. How childish one becomes when falling asleep. He yawned deeply, luxuriously. And all the while, the dry north wind, hot and strangely tension-producing, continued to blow over the city.

The next moment he slept and in his sleep, the concerns of the day, shunted aside by more pressing thoughts, began to assemble in the shadowy action of dreams. A man who, by the tools weighting his pockets, was obviously a workman from below, appeared darkly on deck. Except for his eyes, which were startlingly white, the man was completely black. He stood in front of the Captain with his sooty hands stretched out as though he were holding something.

“What brings you up here?” the Captain asked. For a moment the man hesitated as though awaiting directions before replying.

“It was bound to happen sooner or later,” the man said finally, and the Captain knew the workman was telling him the boiler could not be repaired, that it was worn out like a rotten inner tube or an old man's heart and that the
Caspar
would sail no more. But, though he knew all this, also that the man's empty hands were conclusive evidence of the end of an era and the beginning of something that suddenly caused fear to swell in his chest, the Captain demanded to hear the facts.

The man just stood there, shaking his head.

“It's a difficult habit to break,” he said, finally.

“What is?” the Captain asked.

“Life is,” the man replied.

“Did you come all the way up from the engine room to tell me that?” the Captain shouted. But just then he remembered he had asked the man to come up.

The sun seemed hardly to have moved when the Captain woke up. His first thought was of the passenger. He looked down at the dock. Except for a few gulls stirring uneasily in the wind or occasionally flapping their wings in aborted take-off, nothing moved. Maybe the passenger had arrived while he slept and seeing no one about, had returned to the office for a refund. Or perhaps after one look at the
Caspar
, he had decided on another means of travel to get to wherever he was going. One way or the other, there was nothing that could be done now but sail without him.

Yet, despite the Captain's earlier suspicion of trouble on the passage north, the passenger's failure to show up disturbed him. Maybe, he thought, Mueller, Miller, whatever his name was, had taken sick, or been in an accident, or had even been picked up by the police. Possibly O'Hare would know. He'd rest a bit longer, then call the office.

All that remained of his dream was the shadowy figure of the man from below claiming he had been asked to come, and a feeling of loneliness that had grown into a vague kind of terror.

The Captain closed his eyes and tried to recall what else had taken place in the dream. Only the figure remained, amorphous, isolated and unreal, a vision of eerie familiarity but with a thousand masks, one for every thought, every action, every desire. Probably, he reflected, dreams were some kind of valving mechanism to let off pressures of one kind or another. Or again, the aura of fear in the dream might well have been conceived out of vestiges
of primordial fears of once real and life-threatening dangers, primitive fears long gone with the appearance of tools and weapons and the advent of civilized methods of mass security.

One way or the other, the Captain thought angrily, he'd like nothing better than a face to face confrontation with this illusive personality whose sole purpose seemed the creation of anxieties out of harmless events and capricious foreshadowings of dire things to come. He sighed dejectedly. Black thoughts in the bright light of the noonday sun.

A quick shadow passing over him interrupted his speculations. He looked up at Hoskins, his chief engineer, standing between him and the sun. His blue coveralls were streaked with grease but his hands and face looked recently washed.

“How is the engine?” the Captain asked.

“Be ready in a couple of hours, say about three,” Hoskins replied pleasantly. “Them Whitneys are great old mills.”

The Captain glanced at his watch, which showed twelve thirty-five.

“We'd like to knock off now,” Hoskins said, “and get some chow.”

“Go ahead,” the Captain said. But as Hoskins turned to leave he called after him.

“You say the engine is all right?”

Hoskins paused and looked back. “The engine?” he repeated, staring into the Captain's face. “Why sure, it's in great shape. Them Whitneys never wear out.”

“Well, that's a relief,” the Captain thought and, sighing comfortably, drifted into his former languor. Hoskins' surprise at being asked twice about the engine caused him to chuckle softly. The old fellow didn't realize I was half asleep, he thought. Probably thinks I'm losing my mind. And that will worry him. He chuckled again. Great guy
though, that Hoskins. And a good friend. Must be getting close to seventy himself. Came on in '14. No, 1915. World's Fair was on then. Let's see, that makes twenty years. Christ, twenty years here, twenty years there. God damn, all those years. They sure add up. Thirty, forty, fifty years. Psssst. Gone. Well, so they go and we grow old. And die. Good riddance to old garbage. Life is good, but once is enough, which is a lie, he thought bitterly. Life is good and there'll never be enough of it. But maybe the next ten years will go slower. There are ways of slowing up time, ways of manipulating it. Yes, ten good years, maybe even twenty up at Glen Ellen.

Glen Ellen in the Valley of the Moon. Who ever thought up such a saccharine name? But it was a pretty place. And his land was paid for long ago. In the hot sun, he could feel rather than see his five acres of fruit orchard and a cottage on the knoll. All was order, white picket fences, a bit of green lawn, flower beds and long lines of apricot and plum trees—squares, rectangles, parallel rows geometrically pleasing—all raked and tidy as it should be. On clear summer days he could look out from the veranda, with its profusion of purple bougainvillaea, and over the rolling hills of Sonoma, where live oaks daubed the yellow grasses and the ephemeral gray-green of olive groves lay here and there, lightly, like little smoke clouds at rest in the valley. Security? How often of late on dead cold ocean nights, at quarter speed off some fogbound coast, tense on the bridge with his senses straining against the hostile blackness, had the gentle warmth of Glen Ellen's sun-washed hills touched him with a loving hand. Safety. Ah yes, sweet nepenthe. The sailor's dream. Snug Harbor. God damn it. Euthanasia! And very soon, another trip or two, and he'd be retiring, leaving the sea, the great, restless sea, his sea that
talked to him all day and all night in a thousand different voices. He'd be alone then in a painless purgatory, embalmed in blissful idleness. Something, he thought angrily, must be done about that, something to bring palpable reality into his paradise.

Suddenly a happy thought came to him. Emily Henderson! Instantly the whole picture, finished and framed, presented itself like a fine painting. And, like something wonderful, exciting and new that one suddenly finds oneself in possession of, to see and to have as one's own, his pulse began to beat more solidly. Why hadn't he thought of her before? Damn the reflective life, resigning oneself to reading, thinking, becoming the knowledgeable philosopher, forever striving to stop striving, building, stone by stone over the long years, a tomb in which to reflect upon life and all the while denying life itself, the full physical side, a woman's body.

He felt thirty years younger. He chuckled out loud. When old Hoskins hears about this, he'll be telling everyone “them Larsons never wear out.” Yes, life is good, he thought, and sighing contentedly, pulled his cap down over his eyes and prepared himself for another short nap in the sun.

The high-pitched crying of gulls in startled flight roused him. From the dock came the rumble of tires over wooden planks. A car door slammed. Mingled with the whine of the wind he could hear a motor running. The Captain yawned, stretched, then rose reluctantly from his chair and walked to the rail.

An ancient taxicab stood at the end of the warehouse. By the heavy chugging of the engine, the high, thin-tired wheels, the dull nondescript paint on the body, the Captain guessed it to be at least twenty years old. A man got out, paid the driver and started toward the gangway. In one
hand he carried a black briefcase, over his other arm a dark topcoat. At the foot of the gangway he hesitated and looked up at the
Caspar
. The hot, dusty wind, sweeping across the dock, flapped the loose ends of the straps on his briefcase, lifted the collar of his suit coat up around his neck. The Captain, apprehensive and at once deeply curious, directed him to the forequarter.

Sweat was running down the man's face when he set his briefcase on the deck. He took a white handkerchief from the breast pocket of his dark, double-breasted business suit, removed his gray felt hat and wiped his face. On the dock, the Captain had judged him to be in his late fifties. On closer inspection, however, he appeared much older. How much, the Captain could not tell. He was gray-haired and thin with an angular face, a wide thin mouth and prominent cheek bones. His deep-set eyes moved restlessly, seeming to take in every detail with quick appraisal. He was quite pale and there was a nervous tightening of the skin about his eyes. He looked up at the stack then down at the gulls facing into the wind on the dock. Finally, his restless gaze paused as it met the Captain's. And in that moment, a tiny current of recognition was generated in the Captain's mind. But whether or not the passenger experienced a similar response, he showed no sign.

“My name is Mueller,” the passenger said, “William Mueller.” His voice, though barely above a whisper, was clearly audible.

“I'm Captain Larson. Your cabin is right over there.” The Captain pointed toward the small stateroom he'd made ready that morning. “It'll be hot in there, but it'll cool off as soon as we leave the channel.”

“I do not mind the heat,” Mueller said. He spoke with a slight trace of an accent, possibly Scandinavian, but with
precision, as though he had acquired the language by careful study. After picking up his briefcase, he hurried to the cabin, stepped inside and closed the door behind him. A moment later the Captain heard the port snap shut and the toggle screw click against the brass frame.

The Captain returned to his deck chair, but Mueller did not come out. He waited awhile thinking that perhaps Mueller might change from his business suit into something more comfortable and get out of the stuffy cabin. Still he did not come out. Nor did he open the port.

There was no change at all in the wind. Through the black trusses of the drawbridge astern, the Captain could see the blue expanse of bay stippled with whitecaps, and all of it, like a great dark river, crawled steadily southward. He could not recall having seen the sky so clear. He picked up the
Collected Works of Dostoevsky
and turned to
Notes From the Underground
. But the provocative lines he'd underscored only a short while before, which had so absorbed his attention, seemed completely irrelevant and without purpose. He could think of nothing but the passenger.