Charles Williams - Aground

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.”