Robert Stone - Bear and His Daughter

“Poor kid,” Gillian said. “Poor little baby.”

“Don’t listen,” he said.

Gillian kept coughing, sputtering. He stopped asking her if she was all right.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really cold now. I thought the water was warm at first.”

“We’re almost there,” he said.

Gillian stopped swimming and looked up at Gros Piton. Turning over again to swim, she got a mouthful of water.

“Like … hell,” she said.

“Keep going, Gillian.”

It seemed to him, as he rowed the sodden vessel of his body and mind, that the sky was darkening. The sun’s mark withdrew higher on the slopes. Marie kept screaming. They heard splashes far off where the boat was now. Marie and Honoré were clinging to it.

“Liam,” Gillian said, “you can’t save me.”

“You’ll save yourself,” he said. “You’ll just go on.”

“I can’t.”

“Don’t be a bloody stupid bitch.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I really don’t.”

He stopped rowing himself then, although he was loath to. Every interruption of their forward motion put them more at the mercy of the current. According to the cruise book it was only a five-knot current but it felt much stronger. Probably reinforced by a tide.

Gillian was struggling, coughing in fits. She held her head up, greedy for air her mouth open like a baby bird’s in hope of nourishment. Blessington swam nearer her. The sense of their time ticking away, of distance lost to the current, enraged him.

“You’ve got to turn over on your back,” he said gently. “Just ease onto your back and rest there. Then arch your back. Let your head lie backward so your forehead’s in the water.”

Trying to do as he told her she began to thrash in a tangle of her own arms and legs. She swallowed water gasped. Then she laughed again.

“Don’t,” he whispered.

“Liam? Can I rest on you?”

He stopped swimming toward her.

“You mustn’t. You mustn’t touch me. We mustn’t touch each other. We might…”

“Please,” she said.

“No. Get on your back. Turn over slowly.”

Something broke the water near them. He thought it was the fin of a blacktip shark. A troublesome shark but not among the most dangerous. Of course, it could have been anything. Gillian still had the Rasta bracelet around her wrist.

“This is the thing, Liam. I think I got a cramp. I’m so dizzy.”

“On your back, love. You must. It’s the only way.”

“No,” she said. “I’m too cold. I’m too dizzy.”

“Come on,” he said. He started swimming again. Away from her.

“I’m so dizzy. I could go right out.”

In mounting panic, he reversed direction and swam back toward her.

“Oh, shit,” she said. “Liam?”

“I’m here.”

“I’m fading out, Liam. I’ll let it take me.”

“Get on your back,” he screamed at her. “You can easily swim. If you have to swim all night.”

“Oh, shit,” she said. Then she began to laugh again. She raised the hand that had the Rasta bracelet and splashed a sign of the cross.

“ Nam, ” she said. “ Nam myoho renge kyo. Son of a bitch.” Laughing. What she tried to say next was washed out of her mouth by a wave.

“I can just go out,” she said. “I’m so dizzy.”

Then she began to struggle and laugh and cry.

“Praise God, from whom all blessings flow,” she sang, laughing. “Praise him, all creatures here below.”

“Gillian,” he said. “For God’s sake.” Maybe I can take her in, he thought. But that was madness and he kept his distance.

She was laughing and shouting at the top of her voice.

“Praise him above, you heavenly host! Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.”

Laughing, thrashing, she went under; her face straining, wide-eyed. Blessington tried to look away but it was too late. He was afraid to go after her.

He lost his own balance then. His physical discipline collapsed and he began to wallow and thrash as she had.

“Help!” he yelled piteously. He was answered by a splash and Marie’s screams. Perhaps now he only imagined them.

Eventually he got himself under control. When the entire mountain had subsided into dark green, he felt the pull of the current release him. The breakers were beginning to carry him closer to the sand, toward the last spit of sandy beach remaining on the island. The entire northern horizon was subsumed in the mountain overhead, Gros Piton.

He had one final mad moment. Fifty yards offshore, a riptide was running; it seized him and carried him behind the tip of the island. He had just enough strength and coherence of mind to swim across it. The sun was setting as he waded out, among sea grape and manchineel. When he turned he could see against the setting sun the bare poles of the Sans Regret, settled on the larger reef to the south of the island. It seemed to him also that he could make out a struggling human figure, dark against the light hull. But the dark came down quickly. He thought he detected a flash of green. Sometimes he thought he could still hear Marie screaming.

All night, as he rattled through the thick brush looking for a road to follow from concealment, Gillian’s last hymn echoed in his mind’s ear. He could see her dying face against the black fields of sugarcane through which he trudged.

Once he heard what he was certain was the trumpeting of an elephant. It made him believe, in his growing delirium, that he was in Africa — Africa, where he had never been. He hummed the hymn. Then he remembered he had read somewhere that the resort maintained an elephant in the bush. But he did not want to meet it, so he decided to stay where he was and wait for morning. All night he talked to Gillian, joked and sang hymns with her. He saved her again and again and they were together.

In the morning, when the sun rose fresh and full of promise, he set out for the Irish bar in Soufrière. He thought that they might overstand him there.

IN THE HOUSE on Noe Street, Big Gene was crooning into the telephone.

“Geerat, Geeroot. Neexat, Nixoot.”

He hung up and patted a tattoo atop the receiver, sounding the cymbal beat by forcing air through his molars.

“That’s how the Dutch people talk,” he told Alison. “Keroot. Badoot. Krackeroot.”

“Who was it?”

He lay back on the corduroy cushions and vigorously scratched himself. A smile spread across his face and he wiggled with pleasure, his eyelids fluttering.

“Some no-nut fool. Easy tool. Uncool.”

He lay still with his mouth open, waiting for rhyming characterizations to emerge.

“Was it for me?”

When he looked at her, his eyes were filled with tears. He shook his head sadly to indicate that her questions were obviated by his sublime indifference.

Alison cursed him.

“Don’t answer the fucking phone if you don’t want to talk,” she said. “It might be something important.”

Big Gene remained supine.

“I don’t know where you get off,” he said absently. “See you reverting to typical boojwa. Reverting to type. Lost your fire.”

His junkie mumble infuriated Alison. She snorted with exasperation.

“For Christ’s sake!”

“You bring me down so bad,” Gene said softly. “I don’t need you. I got control, you know what I mean?”

“It’s ridiculous,” she told him. “Talking to you is a complete waste of time.”

As she went into the next room she heard him moan, a lugubrious, falsetto coo incongruent with his bulk but utterly expressive of the man he had become. His needles had punctured him.

In the bedroom, lo was awake; her large brown eyes gazed fearfully through crib bars at the sunlit window.