Aground

12
Ingram let them fall into the gasoline. It’s all been for nothing, he thought, in some detached and icy calm that was beyond terror. That’s exactly the spot he was standing in that other morning three hundred years ago, and nothing has changed at all except he’s wearing a little less and he’s got a match in his hand instead of a Browning Automatic Rifle. Maybe there is no way you can defeat him; he’s a natural force of some kind. He’s waiting for me to panic, to scream. Don’t strike that match. Well, maybe I will; I don’t know.
He had to say something, but he was afraid his voice would crack. If he ever knows how near the edge I am, he thought, we’ve had it. And if he really is insane, we’ve had it anyway, but the only thing to do is try to wait him out. He pushed the cigarettes out of the gasoline with his foot, reached down, and tossed them onto the bunk. Then he heard Rae Osborne cry out. She’s even in the same place, he thought. Morrison didn’t bother to look up the hatch; he merely took a step up the inclined deck to starboard so as to be out from under it. Then he chuckled. “The gun, Herman.”
Ingram shook his head. Maybe he could speak now. At least he had to try. “When did you get aboard?” he asked. It seemed to sound all right.
“When you both ran back here to pull on the rope,” Morrison replied. “I ducked into that front cabin. About that gun, Herman. I don’t know whether you ever made a study of ‘em, but when you shoot one, some of the grains of powder that’re still burning come out behind the slug—”
“Yes,” Ingram said. “I know about that. Excuse me—” He raised his voice just slightly, and addressed the top of the ladder. “Rae, there’s a life ring on either side of the cockpit. Take one and go forward, right to the bow. And remember to go upstream, against the tide.”
Morrison shook his head. “You’re a pretty hard boy, Herman, but not that hard. Pass the gun over, and let’s get started to Cuba. It’s only a hundred miles. You land me—”
“Sure,” Ingram said. “We land you, and then we sail the boat back to Key West, the same way we were going to sail it back from Bahia San Felipe. As far as you’re concerned, I’ve had it, Morrison. I’m up to here. Go ahead and strike your match.”
Morrison’s eyes were cold. “You think I won’t?”
“I don’t know,” Ingram replied. “But if you do, don’t forget I’ll be the lucky one. I’ve got the gun.”
He saw that penetrate. Silence tightened its grip on the scene. The Dragoon rocked gently on some remnant of surge running in from the Santaren Channel and a little wave of gasoline slapped against the bulkhead and ran back to spread itself up across the steep incline of the cabin sole. He has to go with the bluff, Ingram thought; we’ve probably got less than a minute left before the fumes get us, and he knows he can’t take the gun away from me and get out of here alive. It would take longer than that. One of us has to crack.
He saw movement then in the hatch. A hand had reached in and lifted the fire extinguisher from its bracket on the bulkhead near the ladder, and was pointing it—quite steadily, he thought—down into the cabin. Something came up in his throat, and he didn’t know whether he was going to laugh or cry. She might as well try to put out hell with a damp Kleenex, but she was ready to tackle it.
“I don’t think you read me, Herman,” Morrison said. “In a deal like this, you’ve got to consider who has the most to lose. Now, you take you and Mama-san—”
Ingram breathed softly. He’s not quite so sure now, he thought; when he has to drive home his point by explaining the obvious. “Who’d you kill in Florida?” he asked. “Was it Ives?”
Morrison studied the match in his hand, and then looked across at him with a very cold smile. “That’s a good question, Herman. It was a cop.”
Ingram felt the dark fingers of panic reaching for him, and Barney’s flaming figure began to beat against the outer defenses of his mind. Here we go, he thought. Then suddenly, it was gone, and he was all right again; maybe the accumulated hours of bilge-diving in gasoline had earned him some sort of immunization against horror so that it no longer had the power to break him. He could feel himself growing drunk on the fumes, however, and knew that time was growing very short. Wait him out, he told himself. “What happened to Ives?” he asked.
Morrison grinned. “So you figured that out?”
“Sure.”
Everything seemed to be growing wine-colored, as if it were late afternoon. And he noticed now that the fire extinguisher no longer showed in the hatch. Rae Osborne had moved. Maybe she had fainted.
“This deputy sheriff stopped us on a back-country road just after we got the guns in the truck,” Morrison went on. “I think all he wanted was to give us a ticket because one of the tail lights was out, but that stupid Ives panicked and shot at him. The cop killed Ives, and I got the cop. I had to then. We dumped ‘em out in the swamp and took all of Ives’ identification so they couldn’t trace him back to us, but if he had a record they’ve probably got him made by now. So you figure out whether I’m going back or not.”
Ingram saw the nozzle of the fire extinguisher then at the porthole just above and to the right of Morrison’s head. So that’s where she went, he thought dully, as the cabin began to eddy slowly around him in the gathering darkness.
Morrison flourished the hand holding the match. “You call it, Herman. Toss me the gun, or up we go. And I mean now.”
The stream from the fire extinguisher hit his hand, and, as the soggy and harmless match dropped from it and he turned, he caught the carbon tetrachloride full in the face. He threw up an arm to cover his eyes. Ingram leaped, swinging the .45. He felt the shock as it connected with the side of Morrison’s head, and they were both falling, with Morrison on top of him. He clawed his way out from under the inert mass and tried to climb to his feet. His legs gave way under him and he fell, but one of his outstretched arms was across the bottom rung of the ladder. It was all dark now. He held his breath and started up. Don’t breathe till you’re off the ladder, he told himself. You’ll fall back. It’s the first breath of fresh air that knocks you out. Don’t breathe—
He felt a pair of arms catch him and pull him forward into the cockpit just as he fell.
* * *
Late the following afternoon, the Dragoon, under all working canvas, lay over gently on the starboard tack in a light northeasterly breeze as she stood up the Santaren Channel toward the coast of Florida. The breeze had come up shortly after ten that morning, and the treacherous sand bars and pastel blues and greens of the Great Bahama Bank were already over the horizon to starboard and astern as their course gradually took them farther offshore into the comforting indigo and the ageless heave and surge of deep water. Ingram was dead tired, but content. It had been a period of back-breaking labor at the pump, but there had been time for a little sleep and a bath and a shave. He stood now on the foredeck and took a quick look at the trim of the sails and the ventilating lash-up he had rigged. Everything was drawing beautifully. He ducked down the forward hatch, squeezing past the canvas throat of the wind chute. The air was sweet below.
Morrison lay in one of the bunks in the forward cabin with the air from the ventilator washing over him. His hands and feet were tied, and made fast to the head and the foot of the bunk. There were bad rope burns under his arms and across the naked chest from the sling and the tackle they’d rigged to get him up the hatch into the cockpit, and a lump on the side of his head, but otherwise he was all right. After the gasoline was overboard and the ventilator rigged, they’d brought him back down here. He lay now with his eyes closed. Ingram didn’t know whether he was asleep or merely faking it. He leaned over the bunk and checked his hands and feet for circulation. They were warm, and a healthy flesh color; the ropes were all right.
“Get lost, Herman,” Morrison said, without opening his eyes.
Ingram looked down at him in the waning light of afternoon. There was no feeling about him at all any more—no hatred, nothing. “Who was the man that drowned? He have any name besides Herman?”
The lips scarcely moved in the big, rugged face with its brown splotches of freckles. “Reefers.”
“Reefers what?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Judson, Jensen—something like that. Everybody just called him Reefers. He smoked ‘em.”
“Marijuana?”
“Sure. Tea. Pod, the Beats call it.”
“Did you know he used heroin?”
“No. So that’s the reason he kept his shirt on all the time.”
“I guess so,” Ingram said. “You want to go to the head?”
“No. Get lost, will you?”
“If you ditched all of Ives’ identification, why’d you let Reefers keep his watch?”
“I didn’t know the dumb clown had it. He must have kept it in his pocket.”
Ingram walked back through the galley and the passageway to the large after cabin. The air was fresh and clean here too, with good circulation from the ventilator forward and no odor of gasoline at all. Since pumping the last of it overboard shortly before noon yesterday they’d flooded the bilges twice with sea water and pumped them out. Then he’d used fifty gallons of fresh water and a half case of soap powder to scrub down the cabin and engine compartment, everything the gasoline had touched, letting the soapy water run into the bilge and pumping it overboard. They were taking some sea water through a few bullet holes below water line, but a few minutes at the pump every four hours took care of it.
He stepped quietly up the first two rungs of the ladder and his eyes softened as he paused with his head just above the level of the hatch. She hadn’t seen him. She was perched on the helmsman’s seat in back of the wheel, wearing a pair of his khaki trousers rolled up to the knees and gathered in folds about the slender waist with a piece of line, and one of his shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Her mouth was nicely painted, but the tawny hair was windblown, and there was an expression of pure joy on her face. Or maybe you’d call it half an expression, he mused with tender humor. Some of the swelling was gone from the eye now, but it still retained all its startling and chromatic grandeur with its blues and blacks and purples splashed so spectacularly against the blonde and handsome face.
She looked happily around the sea for a moment, and when her eyes returned to the binnacle he could tell she was off course. Her face took on the sudden and furious concentration of a child’s and her tongue protruded from the corner of her mouth as she wrestled with the problem of which way to turn the wheel. He could almost hear her repeating to herself: Don’t try to move the compass, move the lubber-line. Don’t try to move the compass, move the lubber-line.
He grinned, erased it from his face, and said sternly, “How’s your course, Mate?”
She glanced up at him, her face alight. “I’m off five degrees to—to—Oh, the devil.” She gave up and pointed to windward. “That way. That’s not too bad, is it?”
He smiled. “Not too bad, considering we don’t even know whether the compass is within ten degrees of being right. Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about it. From a hundred miles out, North America’s a pretty big target.”
He came up the ladder and sat down beside her. “We should raise Miami sometime after daylight in the morning if this breeze holds.”
“I’m not in any hurry,” she said. “Are you?”
“No.”
She glanced up at the great curving expanse of white dacron cutting across the sky. A little dollop of spray blew back and spatted against the cushions. “How long has this been going on?” she asked.
“Several thousand years,” he replied.
They fell silent for a moment. Then he asked, “You want me to take it for a while?”
She shook her head. “No. Just watch, and tell me when I do something wrong.” She brought the wheel up a couple of spokes. “Ingram?”
He turned. She was staring fixedly, and a little self-consciously, into the binnacle. “What?” he asked.
“Do you have any great desire to get rich?”
“Not particularly,” he said.
“Could two people sail this boat? Very far, I mean?”
“Hmmm. Under some circumstances. But most of the time they’d have their hands full.”
“But what about two people who’d just as soon have their hands full of each other, at least a good part of the time?”
“I’d recommend something a little smaller. Say a forty- to forty-five-foot ketch. Why?”
“That would still be large enough for the charter business?”
“Sure.” He grinned. “At least, for somebody who didn’t care whether he got rich or not.”
She continued to stare at the compass. “Well, say you knew two people like that who had a forty-five-foot ketch. And they wanted to go in the charter business—maybe in Nassau—but one of them didn’t know anything about boats and sailing at all. Wouldn’t you think the ideal solution would be for them to sail the boat from Miami to Nassau so this second party could learn all about it?”
He gave her a thoughtful glance, wondering what she was up to. “Sure,” he said. “It’s at least a hundred and fifty miles, and if this hypothetical joker of yours is as brilliant as he is lovely—”
“I was thinking of another route. By way of the Indian Ocean.”
“What?”
“That’s the reason I asked you if you really cared much about making money. I don’t think you do. I don’t either.”
“It’d take two or three years.”
She removed her attention from the binnacle long enough to give him a delighted, low-comedy leer. “I know. I know.”
He started to reach for her.
“Hands off, sailor. I’m at the wheel. And I want to talk to you.”
“All right. But talk fast, Mate.”
“We’ve kicked this around quite a bit already. I mean, how adult we are and how we’ve got sense enough to know that people don’t fall in love with each other in four days, and you’ve told me at least six times that I’ve seen you only in your own special environment, doing the things you do best, and all the rest of that wisdom-of-the-ages routine, and how we have to be sensible, and so on. But I also know what you told me when you were coming to here in the cockpit yesterday with your head in my lap, trying to get your breath through an overcast of large, soggy blonde. You said you loved me. And, in between raising the mean annual rainfall of the Bahamas, that was what I was telling you. But we’re going to be sensible about it, aren’t we?”
“Yes. I think so. Or I mean, I did think so.”
She went on, still staring intently into the binnacle. “You bet we’re going to be sensible, Ingram. This way. When we get into Miami, I’m going back to my own environment, and take a long, slow look at it—as you suggested—while you do another of these technical jobs you never let me pay you for. I want you to put the Dragoon in shipyard, have her replanked in those places you said she needed it, overhauled, and repainted, and then sell her. You’ll have my power of attorney. Then you buy a forty- or forty-five-foot ketch—”
“Sure, but—”
“All right, all right, if you insist on being stuffy about it, you can pay half of it. But let me finish. You put this second boat in the shipyard and have everything done to it that has to be done to put it in absolutely perfect condition. And if you keep watching the shipyard gate, some afternoon you’re going to see a car with Texas license plates pull up in front of it and stop. Inside will be a big fading blonde with a big fading black eye, and if you happen to be close to the car door when it opens you’re going to think somebody just dynamited a log-jam of blondes somewhere upriver without warning the settlers to get out—”
He still had one knee against the wheel even after they both forgot about it, and after a long time when he had raised his lips from hers just to look at her again he became conscious at last of the rattle of slides against the tracks and the rolling slap of canvas as the Dragoon came up into the wind. “Mate, I think you’re off course.”
She drew a finger tip very thoughtfully along the fine of his jaw. “Don’t you believe it, Skipper. Don’t believe it for a minute.”