Aground

10
Rae Osborne tried to look cheerful. “Well, there’s always tomorrow. Do you think the tide might be higher then?”
“It’s possible,” Ingram said. “But not necessary. We’ll get her off then. I’m going to haul her down on her side.”
“How?” she asked. “And what does that do?”
“It tilts the keel out of a vertical plane, so she doesn’t need so much water to float. That’s why I saved those boxes of ammunition. We’ll sling them on the end of the main boom and swing it out over the side for leverage. We’ll have to wait till after dark to rig it, though, so he can’t pick us off with that rifle.”
“Then there’s nothing that has to be done right now?”
He shook his head. “Why?”
She smiled. “At the moment, the thing that’d do more for my morale than anything else in the world is a bath. I think Morrison said they filled the fresh-water tanks—”
“Go ahead,” he said. “Use all you want. We may have to pump some of it overboard, anyway.”
“Wonderful.” She started to scuttle toward the ladder, but paused, her face suddenly thoughtful. “You don’t suppose any of those bullets are going through the hull? I don’t know why, but there seems to be something indecent about being shot at in the shower.”
He grinned. “Not at three hundred yards, and from the angle he’s shooting. They’re just gouging splinters out of the planking.”
She went below. He picked up the glasses and peered cautiously over the top of the deckhouse. Morrison was still lying behind his rest, smoking a cigarette while he casually reloaded the rifle. He’s got no food, Ingram thought, but he does have water; he could last for several days. But obviously he had to get back aboard; he might be able to swim that far, but not carrying a rifle or the BAR. However, if he managed to empty enough of those cases and could nail them together, he might make a raft of sorts on which to carry the gun. At any rate, he wouldn’t try it until dark, knowing they had Ruiz’ automatic. They’d have to stand watch all night.
He located the rod and sounded the two fuel tanks. As nearly as he could tell, the starboard one was still full and the port a little less than half. They had about two hundred gallons aboard. The fresh-water tanks were forward where he couldn’t reach them, but if they were even half full, they had at least that much water. Getting rid of some of it would help. The water could be pumped overboard, but there was no way to ditch the gasoline unless he could find a hose and siphon it out. He could, of course, start the engine and let it run, but the amount it would use up wouldn’t justify the noise. He disliked engines, anyway, and having to listen to them always irritated him. He went below and ransacked all the lockers, but could find no hose except a few short pieces that had been split for use as chafing gear. He heard the shower stop, and knocked on the door.
“Yes?” she called out.
“Just let it run and empty the gravity tank,” he said. That would help, and he could pump some more overboard later. He found a coil of new nylon line, gathered up an armload of the rope lashings, and went back to the cockpit to size up the job before it grew dark.
The topping lift probably wouldn’t hold it alone, not a half ton out there on the end of the boom; but if he backed it up with the main halyard and reinforced the halyard fall with this heavier line it should be safe enough. The awning would have to come down. He’d have to memorize the location of everything; it wasn’t going to be easy, having to do it all in the dark, by feel. He looked at his watch; it was a little after six now, and the tide was beginning to ebb off the Bank. A timber creaked as the Dragoon settled a little and began her slow, inevitable list to port. He began cutting the rope lashings to make slings for the ammunition boxes. A cat’s-paw of breeze blew out of the south, ruffling the awning and making it cooler for a few minutes. The sun was low in the west.
Rae Osborne came up the ladder. She looked cooler and much refreshed in spite of the fact that she had no other clothes to change into; her hair was neatly combed now, and her mouth made up. He looked at the handsome face with its spectacular shiner, and grinned. “You look wonderful.”
She touched the puffed eye with her finger tips, and smiled ruefully. “It’s a mess, isn’t it?”
“Well, as shiners go, there’s certainly nothing second-rate about it. It seems to match your personality, somehow.”
“You mean beat-up?”
“No. Colorful. Flamboyant. And undefeated.”
She laughed. “I’d better think about that. I’m not sure but what it sounds like some biddy in a barroom brawl.”
She went below again and returned after a while with a plate of tuna sandwiches and a pitcher of water. They ate facing each other across the bottom of the cockpit while daylight died in a drunken orgy of color and the intermittent sound of Morrison’s gunfire. She gazed westward to the towering and flame-tipped escarpments of cloud beyond the Santaren Channel, and mused, “I know it sounds stupid under the circumstances, but I’m beginning to see what makes people crazy about the sea. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“You’ve never been around boats before?” Ingram asked.
“No. My husband just took the Dragoon in on a business deal; neither of us had ever owned a boat of any kind, or even wanted to. He planned to sell it to get his money out of it, but he died just a few weeks afterward—almost a year ago now. He was killed in the crash of a light plane he and another man were flying out to Lubbock to look at a cattle ranch.”
“What business was he in?” Ingram asked.
“Real estate.” She smiled softly. “Or that’s one way of putting it. Actually he was a speculator. A plunger. It’s a funny thing—he was the gentlest person I’ve ever known and he looked like an absent-minded math teacher in some terribly proper school for young girls, but he was one of the coldest-nerved and most fantastic gamblers you ever saw in your life. He was forty-eight when he was killed, and he’d already made and lost two or three fortunes. Actually, it never made a great deal of difference to me. Beyond a point, piling up money you don’t need seems like a waste of time, especially if you have no children to spend it on or leave it to, and most of the time I wasn’t even sure whether we were rich or in debt. He was away from home so much I had a business of my own, just to have something to do. I never was any good at that social routine. I’d worked most of my life, and women from better backgrounds and expensive schools always made me feel inferior, and I’d get defensive and arrogant and make a fool of myself. I’ve always been crazy about sports cars, so I had a Porsche agency, a little showroom in a shopping center near where we lived. I still have it.”
“Why were you so long trying to sell the Dragoon?” he asked.
“I couldn’t sell it. There was a tax lien on it. When Chris was killed, several deals he had pending fell through, and it developed he was overextended again and pretty shaky financially. On top of that, he’d just got an adverse ruling on an income-tax thing, so the government froze everything until it was paid. I didn’t want it sold at auction at a big loss, so I held on and the lawyers finally got it straightened out after about eight months. There wasn’t a great deal left other than the schooner and the house. Anyway, as soon as it was cleared up—I think it was in March—I came over to Miami to see some yacht brokers about selling her, and that’s when I ran into Patrick Ives. For the first time in thirteen years.” Her voice trailed off, and she stared moodily out across the water.
“That’s when he went aboard?” Ingram asked.
“Yes. Maybe I’d better tell you about him. It’s not very flattering, but since between the two of us we seem to have dragged you into this, you’re entitled to an explanation. I first met him in 1943 when he was an Army Air Force cadet at an airfield near the little town I came from. He was from Washington—the state, I mean. We were practically in flames over each other right from the first, and he wanted me to marry him before he went overseas. I would have, too, except that I still lacked a few months of being eighteen, and my parents put a stop to it. We carried on a torrid correspondence all the time he was in England, and did get married when he was reassigned to an airfield in Louisiana just before the end of the war. When he was discharged, he decided to go back to school. He wanted to study medicine. He’d already had two years at the University of Washington, before he went in the service. So we moved to Seattle. I got a job, and he tried to start over where he’d left off two years before. It just didn’t work out. Maybe we were both too immature, I don’t know. But that quonset-hut, GI-Bill, all-work-and-no-play type of college life, with another six long years of it staring us in the face before he could even hope to graduate from medical school, was just too much for us. We fought a lot, and he began to fail in all his subjects.” She fell silent for a moment. Then she made a weary gesture, and went on. “We split up. I came back to Texas, and we were divorced that summer—1946. I never saw him again, or even heard of him, until the afternoon four months ago when I was flying to Miami to see about selling the Dragoon. He boarded the plane in New Orleans, and took the seat next to mine.
“Those things when you’re very young are apt to be pretty intense, but no bitterness lasts for thirteen years, and after the first shock wore off it was more like a meeting of old friends than anything. It took us all the way to Tampa to get caught up. I told him what I was going to Miami for, and I’ll have to admit it didn’t lose anything in the way I said it: I was running over to see about disposing of my late husband’s yacht. That was a little childish for a woman almost thirty-five years old, but for some reason I seemed to think I had to impress him—maybe because he was so obviously successful himself. But anyway, that’s probably when he began to form the picture of the wealthy widow.
“He told me about himself. He’d got his M.D. from the University of California medical school and had quite an extensive surgical practice in the San Francisco hospitals—specializing in chest and heart surgery. He was also connected with the medical school as a part-time lecturer on surgical techniques, which brought him to the subject of this trip he was on. It seemed he and some scientist from Cal Tech had worked out a new and more simplified type of heart-lung machine for use in operations where the heart had to be by-passed. I didn’t understand any of it, of course, but it sounded very impressive to me. He was demonstrating it at a series of operations that had been scheduled at a number of medical schools. He’d just been at Tulane, and he was on his way to Miami, and he was as tickled as a young boy when he learned I was living in Houston, because he was going to be in Galveston in another week or so, at the University of Texas medical school.
“You’ve met him. You know what he’s like. He’s a very handsome man with a world of drive and charm, and frankly I was flattered by all the attention he gave me. He took me out for dinner and dancing both nights I was in Miami, and rented a car to drive me down to Key West to look at the Dragoon. We were aboard her most of one afternoon. He gave me a lot of advice about what price to hold out for, and said he had a thirty-five-foot yawl of his own on San Francisco Bay. I knew he had sailed small boats on Puget Sound when he was a boy. He was very sharp with Tango for not keeping the cabins and the decks cleaner, and they got in an argument, which is probably the reason he was sure Tango would remember him if he saw him again.
“Well, to cut a long and humiliating story down to a short and humiliating story, about a week after I got home he showed up in Houston. He was busy down in Galveston during the day, of course, but he took me out somewhere every night, and told me a lot more about himself. He was a lonely and unhappy man. He said he’d been married again but it hadn’t worked out, and he was divorced now. Of course, by this time I’d dispelled the myth of the wealthy widow, but still one of the most infuriating parts of the whole thing was the precise way he sized up just exactly how much he could take me for. Seven thousand, five hundred dollars. Any more and I might have balked because I couldn’t afford it. Any less and it might not have been worth all his trouble. Apparently he must have spent his days appraising everything I owned, like a professional weight-guesser.
“The actual mechanics of the swindle were simple enough. He and the Cal Tech scientist were forming a small company to produce around a hundred of the heart-lung machines already contracted for by hospitals all over the country, and one of the original five stockholders had dropped out. And while there was no question that the company would make a great deal of money, the main thing was to be careful about letting control fall into the hands of sordid businessmen who might try to cut corners and cheapen the machine. So for the sake of having the odd share in the hands of somebody with sympathy and understanding, and for old times’ sake . . . You can take it from there. I gave him a check for seventy-five hundred dollars. After two days went by without any word from him, I called the dean’s office at the medical school, and of course they’d never heard of anybody named Patrick Ives. I hired a private detective agency to find out if there was any truth in anything he said. There wasn’t. He was wanted in several places on the Coast and in the Middle West for cashing worthless checks, always posing as a doctor. This was probably the first time he’d used his real name for years, and then only to me. And when the Miami police told me about that watch found in the Dragoon’s dinghy I had a feeling it must be his.”
Ingram nodded. “And you thought if you could catch up with him you might get some of the money back?”
“No. It was four months ago, and the way he lives he’d have spent it all by now. I just wanted to try to get the schooner back, to salvage something out of the mess. I’d been kicked where it hurt—right in the pride—and I was pretty bitter about it. I think I even took some of it out on you, that first night. When you said you weren’t going to charge me anything for helping me find her, I didn’t believe you, frankly. I thought you had an angle too. Great little judge of character, this Osborne girl.”
“Well, you couldn’t be blamed too much for believing him,” he said. “After all, he wasn’t a thief when you knew him before.”
“Don’t be so modest, Ingram. I was talking about how wrong I was about you.”
“Apparently there was an epidemic of it that night. I was wrong too. In fact, I was convinced I wasn’t going to like you, so I may have set a new record for being mistaken.”
Her face was a pale blur across from him in the thickening dusk. “Thanks, Skipper.”
He came alert then, suddenly aware it had been twenty minutes or more since they’d heard a shot from Morrison. Goofing off, he chided himself; they could get themselves killed. “We’d better get on the ball,” he said. “There are two ways Morrison can get aboard now—up the bobstay under the bowsprit, or up this anchor warp. Either way, though, he’ll make enough noise so we can hear him if we’re listening. I’ll be working back here, so you go forward. Lie down on the port side of the forward deckhouse and just listen. If you hear anything at all, sing out.”
“Right.” She disappeared into the darkness forward.
He sat still for a moment. The vast silence was unbroken except for another creak as the schooner lay over a little farther on the outgoing tide. He stood up and began taking down the awning. He rolled it up, deposited it on the deckhouse out of the way, and freed the main boom from its supporting gallows. The mainsail was jib-headed, so there was only one halyard; he unshackled it from the head of the sail, bent a piece of line to it, and hauled down on the fall at the base of the mast until he could reach the wire. He made the new nylon line fast at the thimble, hauled down on the other end again, carried it aft, and shackled it to the end of the boom. He also made two pieces of light line fast to the end of the boom for use as guys, since he was going to need the main sheet to hoist the ammunition boxes. He freed the lower end of the sheet.
After raising the boom with the topping lift until it was well clear of the gallows, he secured it, and hauled on the halyard until—as well as he could tell in the dark by feel—the strain was evenly divided between the two. This was important, because if either one had to take the load by itself it might part, in which case the other would carry away too. He swung the boom over a little to port to get it away from the gallows, and secured it with the guys. He stopped then to listen, and to put a hand on the tackle holding the anchor warp. There was only silence, and no vibration of any kind on the line. “You all right?” he called out softly in the darkness.
“Just fine, Skipper,” her answer came back.
The worst of it, he thought, was that there was no way to guess what Morrison would do, or what he might be planning out there in the dark. He was dangerous, and would be as long as he was alive and anywhere near. Even if there were no longer any hope of escape, he’d still kill them if he got the chance, just as pointlessly as he had killed Ruiz for trying to cross him. The shots at his head while he was taking out the kedge anchor proved that; if Morrison couldn’t escape, nobody was going to.
He muscled the five boxes of ammunition aft along the deck until they were under the outer end of the boom. Locating the rope slings he had cut, he put one about each box with a double wrap, crossing at right angles, and tied it off with a free end about eight feet long. He shackled the lower block of the main sheet to the sling where it crossed and hoisted away until the blocks were jammed and would go no farther, caught the free end of the sling, and made it fast about the boom and the furled sail several feet inboard from the end so as to have room to suspend all five of them. Then he slacked off with the tackle, and disengaged it. The second box went up, and the third. He stopped to listen for Morrison, and then cautiously hoisted the fourth. He was working right under the boom, and if anything carried away now he’d be crushed. Before he hoisted the fifth, he stood on it and reached up to push a hand against the twin wires of the topping lift and the halyard. It was all right; they appeared to be taking an equal strain. He hoisted the fifth box. Everything held. He sighed with relief and gently hauled the boom outboard just enough to suspend the boxes over the water a few feet off the port quarter. If it gave way now, at least they wouldn’t come crashing down on deck. He tied off the guy and secured the main sheet again to hold it in position. Ducking down into the cockpit, he flicked on the cigarette lighter and looked at his watch. It was 9:35. Low tide in about two hours, he thought; the deck was listing sharply to port now.
He slipped forward along the port side and knelt beside her. She sat up. “We’re all set,” he said. “Nothing to do now until high tide.”
“That’ll be about dawn, won’t it?”
“Right around there.”
“Do you think we’ll make it then?”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “We’ll get off this time. But why don’t you go back to the cockpit and get some sleep? I’ll watch for Morrison.”
“You can’t watch both places at once.”
“Yes. I can sit here where I can keep a hand on this tackle holding the anchor warp. If he tries to climb it, I’ll feel the vibration.”
“I’d rather stay up and talk,” she said. “We can talk, can’t we?”
“Sure. As long as we keep a lookout.”
They slid aft until they were beside the cleat holding the tackle, and sat down on the sloping deck with their backs against the deckhouse in the velvet night overlaid with the shining dust of stars. There was no breath of air stirring, and no sound anywhere, and they seemed to be caught up and suspended in some vast and cosmic hush outside of time and lost in space. They sat shoulder to shoulder, unspeaking, with Ingram’s left hand resting lightly on the taut and motionless nylon leading aft, and when he put the other hand down on deck it was on hers and she turned hers slightly so they met and clasped together. After a long time she stirred and said in a small voice, “This is a great conversation, isn’t it? I hope I didn’t promise anything brilliant.” He turned and looked at the soft gleam of tawny hair and the pale shape of her face in the starlight and then she was in his arms and he was holding her hungrily and almost roughly as he kissed her. There was a wild and wonderful sweetness about it with her arms tight around his neck and the strange, miraculous breaching of the walls of loneliness behind which he had lived so long, and then she was pushing back with her hands against his shoulders.
“I think maybe we had better talk,” she said shakily.
“I expect you’re right,” he agreed. “But you’d better get started.”
“Two platoons of Morrisons in full pack and dragging a jeep could walk right over us and we wouldn’t even notice it.” She took a hurried breath, and went on. “And as to whether Morrison is the only hazard, I admit nothing. I plead the Fifth Amendment. But what do they do to these damn stars down here, anyway? Polish them? Now it’s your turn to say something, Ingram. You can’t expect me to carry on a conversation all by myself.”
“I think you’re magnificent,” he said. “Does that help?”
“Not a bit, and you know it. As a matter of fact, it can’t be much of a secret that I think you’re pretty wonderful yourself, but at least I told you so under perfectly ordinary, everyday circumstances, in bright sunlight with a man shooting at me with a rifle. I didn’t pull a sneaky trick like silhouetting my big square head against a bunch of cheap, flashy stars that anybody can see are phony. . . .” Her voice trailed off in a helpless gurgle of laughter, and she said, “Oh, I’m not making any sense. Why don’t I just shut up?”
When he raised his lips from hers she drew a finger tip along the side of his face and said softly, “You never have to hit Ingram twice with a cue. Not ol’ Cap Ingram. Do you think I’m pretty horrible?”
“Hmmm. No-o. That’s not the exact word I’d use.”
“I am, though. I’m as brazen as a Chinese gong and about as subtle as a mine cave-in. I’ve been sitting here for twenty minutes wondering when in Heaven’s name you were going to accept the fact you had to kiss me. All escape was cut off, and there was no honorable way to retreat.” He touched his lips gently to the puffed and battered eye. “Shut up,” he said.
“The only thing I didn’t realize was how fast it might start to get out of control. I should have, though. I worked so hard at trying to loathe you I was worn out to begin with. Did anybody ever tell you you’re a hard man to detest, Ingram? I mean, at a party or something, where there was one of those pauses in the conversation when everybody’s trying to think of something to say—”
She gasped as a bullet struck something above their heads and screamed off into the night. On the heels of it came the whiplash sound of the gun from somewhere directly behind them. They slid down and lay flat on deck against the side of the house. The rifle cracked three more times in rapid succession, two of the bullets striking the hull on the other side. She lay pressed against him; he could feel her trembling.
“I’m scared,” she whispered. “It’s gone on too long.”
“We’ll be away from here in the morning. And we’re perfectly safe down here.”
“You don’t think we ought to go back to the cockpit?”
“No. This is fine. We’ve got so much list now he couldn’t hit us if we were sitting up.” He was thinking of those boxes of ammunition suspended back there and wondering what would happen if they were hit. They probably wouldn’t explode, but some of the cartridges might fire. There were five evenly spaced shots then. Two of them struck the schooner’s hull.
“He’s nearer, isn’t he?” she asked.
“Yes. The tide’s gone out, so he’s waded out on the flat south of the sand spit.”
“How close can he get?”
“Not under a hundred and fifty yards. That channel is still over his head, even at dead low tide.” I wonder how he’s carrying the ammunition, he thought. Probably made a pack of some sort out of the blanket.
“How can he see to shoot in the dark?”
“He can’t, very well. You’ll notice he’s missing a lot. But he’s right down on the surface, firing at the silhouette, and he probably has something white on the muzzle of the rifle. Maybe a strip of his shirt.”
Another bullet struck the hull. Two apparently missed. Another hit. Subconsciously, he was counting. They would probably go through the planking from where he was firing now, and with the list the schooner had some of them would be below the water line, which was probably what Morrison had in mind. It wouldn’t matter, though, unless there were a great number of them; she had two bilge pumps, one power-driven, and could handle a lot of water.
“I’m tired of being shot at,” she said. “And sick to death of being so stinking brave about it. I want to have hysterics, like anybody else.”
He held her in his arms and spoke against her ear. “Go ahead.”
“It was mostly just blackmail. But keep talking there.”
“Do you know when it first dawned on me that I was probably crazy about you? It was when Ruiz came after you this morning, and I watched you wade out to the raft, torn pants, black eye—”
“Well, it figures, Ingram. Who could resist a vision like that?”
“No.” He groped for words to express what he had actually seen, the crazy honesty of her, the insouciance, the blithe and unquenchable spirit. “You were so—so damned undefeated.”
“Let’s don’t talk about me. I want to hear about you.”
The firing went on. They talked. He told her about Frances, and about the Canción, and Mexico, and the boatyard in San Juan. He mentioned the fire only briefly but she sensed there was more to it, and drew the rest of the story from him.
“That’s why you limp sometimes, isn’t it?” she asked quietly. “And what you were dreaming about when you were beating at the sand.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Ingram, I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right now.”
The schooner’s list increased as the tide approached dead low, and it was difficult clinging to the sloping deck. The shooting stopped for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then started again. He had to go back after more ammunition, Ingram thought. If he’s going to swim out here, he’ll do it on the flood so if he doesn’t get aboard he can make it back. He wouldn’t tackle it on the ebb because he might get carried out to sea. Flicking on the lighter for an instant, he looked at his watch. It was a few minutes past midnight. The tide should have turned already. There was another shot. I’d better go below and check now, he thought, while I’m still sure where he is. He told her.
“You think water’s coming in?” she asked.
“Maybe a little. If there is, we’ll pump it out.”
“You won’t be long?”
“No.”
“If anything happens to you—”
He kissed her. “What could happen?” He crawled aft and dropped into the cockpit just as Morrison shot again. Somewhere in the blackness below there was the sound of running water. That didn’t make sense. It couldn’t run in, not that way. He started down the crazily slanting ladder and even before his head came below the level of the hatch he smelled it, and the old nightmare of terror reached up to engulf him. He lost his grip on the handrail and fell, and wound up against the port bulkhead under the radiotelephone, on his hands and knees in the cold lake of gasoline that extended up out of the bilge as the boat lay over on her side. He could hear it still running out of the punctured tanks in the darkness behind him as he fought against the whisperings of panic. If he lost his head completely and ran into something the fumes might kill him before he could get out. He pushed off the bulkhead and reached upward, groping for the ladder. His fingers brushed it. Then he was up in the cockpit, stretched out on the cushions on the port side, shaking all over and trying to keep from being sick. His hands and his legs from the knees down were very cool from the evaporation of the gasoline.