Джеймс Кейн - Root of His Evil [= Shameless]

“Belongs to some friends of mine.”

“Do all your friends have such places?”

“I hope not. Some of them actually have taste.”

“It’s very luxurious.”

“And very silly.”

Now all of this was a complete evasion, as you will see, and I put it in to illustrate once more that during this period Grant was never frank with me. Also, he at once changed the subject. “What do you want to do? Swim, sail or eat?”

“Well — can’t we do all three?”

“That’s an idea.”

He took me to what seemed to be a guest bedroom, showed me the bath and anything I might want, and went. I changed into my swimming suit, put on my slippers, and tied a ribbon around my hair. Then I put the bathing cap into the bag, slipped on my beach robe, and went out. I thought I looked very pretty, but I forgot about that when I saw him. He was ready and standing at a table flipping over the pages of a magazine. He had on a pair of faded blue shorts, big canvas shoes, and a little wrinkled duck cap with a white sweater over his arm. But he looked like some statue poured out of copper, and the few things he had on hardly seemed to matter. The deep sunburn was all over him, but that was only part of it. He was big and loose and lumbering, and yet he seemed to be made completely of muscle. The hunch-shouldered look that he had in his clothes came from big bunches of muscle back of his arms, and in fact his whole back spread out like a fan from his hips to his shoulders. His legs tapered down so as to be quite slim at the ankles and altogether he looked like one of the Indians he was always talking about. He turned, smiled and nodded. “Ready?”

“All ready.”

“Come on while we still have a breeze.”

He picked up a wicker basket and started for the veranda. I said: “Is that our lunch? Where did it come from?”

“We brought it with us.”

“I thought I’d have to fix it.”

“It’s fixed.”

I took hold of the handle too, we went out on the veranda, he picked up a paddle that was standing against a post, and we went down the steps of the bluff to the beach. The lunch he put in a little skiff that was pulled upon the sand, then he dragged the skiff to the edge of the water and motioned me into the bow. He gave it a running push and jumped in very neatly. Then he picked up the paddle and paddled out to a sailboat that was moored to a round white block of wood that he called a buoy. He made the skiff fast to a ring in the buoy, and we climbed into the sailboat. It had no bowsprit or any thing, just a mast that went straight up from the bow, with one big triangular sail. He set down the basket, un wound some rope from a cleat, and began to pull up the sail. I helped him, and it took about a minute to get it up, and the boat swung slowly around and the sail began flapping in the wind. It was quite exciting. Then he went to the bow and cast loose, but held onto the short mooring cable that was attached to the buoy. Then he made me come and hold it, first showing me how to hold onto a cleat with the other hand so as not to be pulled over board. Then he went back to the tiller. “All right, I’m going to put her over, and for just one second it’ll slack. When it does, let go.”

He put the tiller over, and the boat gave a lurch and all of a sudden I felt the cable slack. I let go, and when I looked up we were moving away from shore, toward the other side of the cove, with the sail out over the side, but still flapping. I climbed back to the middle of the boat. He kept watching and then he stood up. “Now I’m coming about. She’ll go into the wind, the sail will flap like hell, then slam over, and for God’s sake duck for that boom.”

Suddenly he put the tiller over, the boat began to swing around and the sail set up a terrible flapping. Then without any warning it slammed across the boat, and I saw the boom coming and screamed and ducked. Then the sliding pulley to which it was attached by some ropes slid as far as it would go and caught it, and it filled, and the boat heeled over so far I thought we were going to upset. Then I saw we were pulling out of the cove very rapidly. Then the first swell from the Sound hit us and lifted us, and all sensation of being afraid left me, and I realized that for the first time in my life I was sailing, the way I had read about in books. I clapped my hands, and he laughed. “You like it?”

“I love it.”

We sailed quite a little while, and then he came about, and payed out some of the rope that held the sail, and we began to move again, but we didn’t heel over. “Are we going back?”

“Just keeping in sight of home base.”

“Make it tilt. I like that.”

“We’re running before the wind. We only heel over when we’ve got it across us. And it’s a she.”

“Oh, yes, of course.”

It wasn’t exciting the way it was before, but the water was smooth and green, so it was still quite pleasant. After quite awhile, he said: “Now, how about that lunch?”

“I’ll get it ready.”

“We’ll both get it ready.”

“But you’ll have to steer.”

“Steer what?”

“Why — her.”

“You’re the funniest sailor I ever saw. Haven’t you noticed that for the last fifteen minutes we haven’t had even the sign of a breeze?”

“Oh, that’s why the water’s so smooth.”

“Yes, so now’s our chance to eat. She’ll drift, without much help from us.”

So he kept one hand on the tiller, and we opened the lunch, sitting in the shadow of the sail. It was marvelous, with little thin sandwiches, stuffed eggs, and iced tea in thermos bottles. Every sandwich was in a little paper envelope marked: Loudet, Caterer. “Do you always deal with a caterer?”

“Him? Oh, he’s just a Frenchman that puts up lunches.”

“Rather expensive, I imagine.”

“Is he?”

“So I judge. And I know about sandwiches.”

“They’re all right?”

“I’ll say.”

“Then eat ’em.”

So we ate them, and then he lay there with his arm over the tiller and his eyes closed, smoking a cigarette. It was so hot little beads of sweat were dotted all over his upper lip, and not far from us were several other boats, their sails just hanging there as motionless as we were. But the water looked green and cool, and I longed to be in it. I got up, took the bathing cap out of my bag and put it on, then slipped off the beach robe and dived off. It felt so nice down there, and looked so pretty, with the sunlight filtering down, that I began to swim under water, and stayed down until my breath gave out and I had to come up. I looked back to wave at him, and to my surprise I was quite a distance from the boat, and he was standing there, his hand still on the tiller, swearing at me in a way I wouldn’t have believed him capable of. He ordered me back at once, but I took my time, and finally he pulled me over the side. Then he explained that I had done a very dangerous thing in going so far, as a sailboat can’t be maneuvered like a motorboat, and especially requires that one person always remain aboard it. So if anything had happened, and he had had to go overboard after me, a puff of wind might drift the boat away, and there both of us would be, out there in the Sound, two miles from land. I knew he was right, but didn’t feel at all guilty, so I merely made a fresh remark: “And besides, the water is nice.”

He sulked for a time, then unwound a rope and dropped the sail, then took another rope and tied it to a small wooden grating on the bottom of the boat and dropped the grating overboard, so it trailed in the water. “What’s that?”

“That’s our lifeline, so we don’t get separated from our ship.”

“How would we get separated from our ship?”