Charles Williams - Aground

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.

11

He thought of her, and hoped she hadn’t heard him come up. He needed a few minutes alone to pull himself together; he couldn’t face her this way. But still he was going to have to tell her; there was no way to avoid it. Their chances of escape were almost gone now, and until he got the last of that gasoline out of there they were living on a potential bomb. A pint of gasoline in the bilge could form an explosive mixture in the air inside a boat, and they had two hundred gallons of it. Just one spark from anything—static electricity, a light switch, even a short circuit in the electrical system from one of Morrison’s bullets—and the Dragoon would go up like a Roman candle.

Using the engine was out of the question. Even if any fuel remained in the tanks when the schooner righted herself, trying to start it would be an act of madness when the slightest spark at the starter brushes or the generator could blow them out of the water. And even after he pumped the bilges dry, it wouldn’t be safe; not for days.

They had to be washed out, and ventilated. But the mere consideration of these technical matters was beginning to have its calming effect; potentially ghastly as they might be, they were still technical, and fear receded as the professional mind took over. They didn’t need the damned engine to get back to Florida, if they could only get her afloat. And there was still a chance of that—a slight one, but a chance. Pumping the gasoline out would lighten her by another thousand to fifteen hundred pounds, and they might be able to pull her off with the kedge alone now that he had the gear rigged to haul her down on her side. At that moment another bullet slapped into the hull up forward and the sound of Morrison’s rifle came to him across the water. That completed the job. He had hated few people in his life, but right now he hated Morrison, and he thought of him with a cold and implacable anger. They wouldn’t be defeated by him. If it’s the last thing I ever do on earth, he thought, I’m going to beat him.

He slipped forward along the deck. When he knelt beside her, she said, “I smell gasoline.”

“It’s on me, a little on my trousers.” He told her about it. She took it well, as he should have known she would. “I don’t think it’s going to change things too much. We may still get off on this tide. Just remember, don’t smoke. Don’t turn on a light. Don’t even go below. And that means even after I get it pumped overboard.”