Charles Williams - Gulf Coast Girl

“I’m going to make some sandwiches and coffee,” I said. “Feel up to it?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Fine. Stay right where you are for a minute.” I went into the after part of the cabin and drew a basin of fresh water. Setting it on the little stand between the forward ends of the bunks, I went back and picked up the cardboard carton of clothes and personal effects she had sent aboard. It was on one of the settees where Barfield had been pawing through it as we were coming down the channel.

“You’ll feel better,” I said.

She sat up on the bunk, clutching the sheet, with her hair falling about her shoulders.

“Big, beautiful Swede with an Irish name,” I said.

She smiled wanly. “I am half Irish,” she said. “But my mother was a Russian Finn nearly six feet tall.”

“And beautiful.”

“Very beautiful.”

I grinned at her. “Don’t ask me how I knew. I might tell you.”

I went out and drew the curtain.

Thirteen

While I was firing up the primus stove and starting coffee I could hear her moving around beyond the curtain. It was wonderful, just knowing she was there. Then I thought of those two in the cockpit and the wonder of it became torment. I damned Macaulay. He had done this to her.

He must have been a little mad there at the end. He should have known there was no hope of finding that plane. It must have become an obsession.

What he had done was pass her the baton in a rat race that could never end any way other than in her death. His stupid belief that he could find the plane again had convinced them, and now after Barclay’s off-beat piece of genius she was assumed to have all the facts and was supposed to run and hide until they hauled her down and killed her. I cursed them all for a bunch of fools. It was a game. It was “button, button.” The rules were simple. You dropped a cuff link in two hundred thousand square miles of empty ocean and then went back and found it. If you didn’t find it, you killed somebody. You didn’t know much about the odds on finding cuff links dropped in oceans, but you were hell on wheels at killing people.

What chance did we have of getting away from them? And if we got away, where did we go? With not only the police after us but the rest of the “button, button” crowd as well. The two we had on our backs now were only part of them. The game never really ended. It just took them a while to find you, and then it started all over again. Macaulay had never been able to shake them, had he?

I was measuring coffee into the percolator when the idea began to take form. I stopped dead still, so abruptly I spilled the coffee from the spoon, enthralled with the beauty of it. Half of our problem didn’t even exist. Go back?

Who wanted to go back?

Here was the Ballerina, the answer to any blue-water sailor’s dream. There she was, beyond that curtain, the girl I’d never had out of my mind since the moment I met her. And behind me, in a black satchel, was eighty thousand dollars. I stood there holding the coffee can in my hand, feeling the deck heel down and hearing the sound of water along the hull while I rolled the names around on my tongue: Grand Cayman, Martinique, Barbados, Guadeloupe, Granada—Not the big places, not San Juan or Port-au-Prince or Havana, where we’d be caught, but the little ones, the small tropical islands with long golden beaches and native villages in sheltered bays where the water was blue and still.

They’ll never find us. That much money would last us a lifetime. I thought of it and could feel the intense longing take hold of me. Just the two of us . It was like looking at paradise. And on the other side of the world—Borneo, Java, Sumatra, Tongareva, the Marquesas—all those names out of Conrad and Jack London that made your mouth water. Go back? With all that tropic, coral-reefed, blue-watered world there waiting for us, and the boat and a fortune right here in our hands? Why in the name of God hadn’t I thought of it before? We’d change the name of the sloop, and her port of registry. Change our own names, and be married by a priest in some out-of-the-way native village.

* * *

Aboard the American tanker Joseph H. Hallock, the master looked up from the thick journal and frowned. It was past midnight. He sat in a leather-upholstered easy chair in the dim and well-ordered seclusion of his office with the book in his lap in the glow from the single reading lamp. There was only the faint vibration from the big diesels aft to indicate he was at sea.

His eyes were thoughtful, as if something puzzled him. Slipping a finger between the pages to mark his place, he flipped back, looking for something. When he found it he reread the passage. With the thumb and forefinger of his left hand he pinched his lower lip in a gesture that was characteristic of him when he was thinking, and sat for another minute staring at the page. Then he shook his head and went on reading, a little faster now, forgetting he was up long past his bedtime.

* * *

I came abruptly back to earth, and the dream faded. All that was waiting for us, but knowing it and yearning for it only made reality worse. You couldn’t dream Barclay away, nor escape from Barfield by imagining he wasn’t there.

But there must be a way. There had to be.

I put the coffee away and began slicing bread for sandwiches. I took salami and cheese from the icebox. What were the chances at any given moment? Last night Barclay had mockingly handed me his gun, knowing I wouldn’t use it because Barfield could kill her. But now she was behind me, and they were both in the cockpit, Barfield unarmed. Suppose—

Suppose I went out there, came close to Barclay on the pretext of handing him a sandwich, and slugged him. He was slender, fine-boned, and probably easy to hurt, and he had two guns in his pockets. I might get one. But what would happen? For a fraction of a second I was off guard as far as Barfield was concerned, and he didn’t have to be armed if you didn’t have your hands up. He’d belt me from behind and I’d be lying in the cockpit having my face kicked in. He was built for it, and he knew his business.

But they had to sleep sometime. So what if they did? They slept one at a time, and the other was watching me. And there was always the threat of what they could do to her. If I got hold of a gun they could make me give it up if they had her. Anything I tried had to work the first time, and all at once, or it was no good at all.

But five days! Maybe a week. They had to slip up sometime. If I kept watching them, and waiting—

I was stacking sandwiches on a plate when the curtains parted and she came out. She was wearing a summery blue cotton dress and sandals, and her legs were bare. She had put her hair back up, but it was still faintly damp and a little of its fine, soft sheen was lacking. Salt water was poor for a shampoo. She wore no make-up.

She came over beside me. Self-consciousness was still like a wall between us. “Feel better?” I asked.

She nodded. “I’m hungry, too.”

She glanced beyond me, toward the companionway. They couldn’t see down here unless they were in the forward end of the cockpit. Sunlight streamed in the open hatch and slid along the deck as we rolled slightly in the sea.

The big eyes were grave, and her lips scarcely moved. “You’re pretty wonderful,” she said. “Thanks for understanding.”

Then she went on, in a louder tone: “Shall I help you carry something up to the animals?”

“Sure,” I said. I handed her the sandwiches. “Take these, and I’ll bring the coffee and some cups.”

We went up. Barclay was at the tiller, and Barfield lounged on the port side, his legs outstretched. He drew them in, and grinned. “Going for a swim, honey?” he asked.