Charles Williams - Aground

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.”