Charles Williams - Gulf Coast Girl

Once I went to sleep. She fell like poured quicksilver through a cloud, but I flew down and caught her. I took her by the arm and turned her around and kissed her and we went on falling through the cloud, but now the color was changing from blue to rose. We clung together.

“You didn’t let me explain,” I said. “You’ve got to listen. I can’t live without you, Swede. I didn’t make you understand the first time. Give me another chance—”

“Come with me,” she said. “We’ll live in raptures.”

I awoke and somebody was screaming. I shut my mouth and it stopped.

The current set me to the north and west. I ran back. I drifted. I ran back. I used up all the fuel and could beat my way back only when there was wind. I took star sights at dawn. I shot the sun at noon. I took star sights at dusk. None of them ever worked out exactly on 23.50 North, 88.45 West. I was always off a mile one way or three miles another.

I ran out on deck and looked across the miles of water glittering under the sun. Then the whole thing came to me at once. It was Macaulay. He’d been right all the time. He was the only one of us who was sane. And I’d been stupid enough to think he was mad. I, with my smug superiority and my cheap little bag of tricks like spherical trigonometry and azimuths and sun lines and hour angles and bearings from fixed points, having the effrontery to say a man was crazy because he thought he could go back and find something he’d lost in an ocean. Of course he could go back and find it. The whole thing was absurdly simple. It didn’t even take third-grade arithmetic.

When you got to the spot, you’d know. It was as simple as that.

I looked off to starboard. A seagull was sitting on a piece of driftwood.

That was it. That was the place.

I remembered. There had been a seagull sitting on a piece of driftwood just before we dived.

“Nice seagull,” I said, moving softly. “Pretty seagull. Don’t go away. I’ll bring you some bread crumbs. Don’t fly away.”

When I came back on deck he was still sitting on the piece of wood. “Nice seagull,” I said. I threw the bread crumbs. He flew away. I began to cry.

I threw some more. Maybe he would come back and mark the place again. He had to come back because the other piece of driftwood had a seagull on it. I could see her. She was beckoning, a flash of silver falling into blue.

“Swede, angel,” I said. “I didn’t make you understand. We can escape.”

I began to feel weak. I hadn’t eaten anything for a long time. I ran a hand across my face, and felt shaky all over, waiting for the seagull to come back.

Something heavy was on my shoulders. I felt the straps across my chest. I was wearing the aqualung. That was what I’d gone after.

I screamed.

I tore it off and ran below. I fell into a bunk and lay there, shaking. My mind was clear again. I covered my face with my hands.

Seventeen

It’s all past. I’m rational again, but it scares me to think how near the edge I was a week ago. The whole thing was morbid and neurotic, and it almost cost me my life. I’m ashamed, and she would have been ashamed of me.

The sense of loss is no less terrible than it was, but I can accept it now and go on, the way you’re supposed to. Instead of lacerating myself with all that morbid what-might-have-been I try to remind myself that we did have eight days and that there are millions of people who’ve lived out their entire lives without one hour of what we knew.

Writing it down has helped. What I wanted to do was see it all in one piece, and I did, and I think I see now that she couldn’t have done it deliberately. She was happy. Right to the end. The end was an accident. It had to be.

I’m going on to the Caribbean, the way we had planned. There is a little wind now. I’ve been steadily under way for two days. After I regained my senses there was no wind for a long time and I continued drifting to the westward, but I’ve regained nearly all that on my way into the Yucatan Strait. My sight at noon today put me eight miles northwest of the spot she died. It’s now one p.m., and if the wind holds steady I should pass somewhere over 23.50 North, 88.45 West just at four p.m.

I don’t know any of the service for burial at sea, and there’s no Bible aboard so I can’t do much, but I do intend to drop something of hers just to mark her grave. That white dress I liked so well, I think. I’ll weight it.

* * *

I’ve just lashed the tiller again and come back below. It’s 3:30 now, and the breeze is holding on, what there is of it. I don’t think I’m logging more than two knots, but at least I’m on my way and all the sickness has ended. It’s good to be clearheaded and well again. I still don’t understand why they had to take her away from me, but maybe you’re not supposed to understand it. Maybe you’re only supposed to learn to live with it.

I went to get the white dress ready, but while I was in her things I found the little flask of perfume. It would be much more appropriate; I don’t know why I didn’t think of it in the first place. There’s something personal about it. It’s so completely hers. It has a French name I’m not familiar with, and I never knew anyone else who used it.

It’s here on the chart table where I’m writing. I removed the glass stopper and held it under my nose for an instant, and in replacing it I spilled a drop on the chart under this book. It’s amazing how one drop of something so delicate could invade a whole compartment. It must be very expensive.

Of course, when I drop it the chances are I won’t be within a mile of the place she died, but she’ll understand. Navigation is never that exact. In the final analysis it’s only a human being measuring something with an instrument designed by another human being, and as such is subject to human error, however small. That’s one thing that scares me about the way I was—thinking, like Macaulay, that you could go back to a place on the ocean where you’d lost something. He was mad, of course, and I was very near to madness myself.

She had a habit of sometimes coming up behind me when I was working over the chart table like this and drawing her finger tips very softly up the back of my neck. It was a delicious, shivery sensation that made my whole back tingle, and then I would smell the good, clean, salt-water-and-sun smell of her and that faint suggestion of perfume, and I’d turn and the gray eyes would be laughing at me very near to mine because she was so tall, and silvery hair would be brushing shoulders as smooth as satin and beautifully tanned, and then we would look squarely into each other’s eyes and the teasing and that always precarious veneer of lightness would blow up in our faces.

“That’s not fair,” she would whisper shakily just under my lips. “You’re cheating.”

That’s just the way it always began, with that same sensation of finger tips being drawn ever so gently up the back of the neck, and before I turned I would be conscious of the fragrance of you. Remember?

Who am I to say Macaulay wasn’t right, after all? But, no. The whole thing is absurd. Science is one thing and madness is another, and Macaulay was mad. But, still—

You never understood. We can escape, darling. Give me another chance to show you. Let me tell you. We’ll go to all those places. They’ll never catch us. Antigua—Barbados—Martinique— The trades blow in the afternoons and the nights will almost make you drunk. We’ll look up at the stars.

Swede . You’re everywhere— That wasn’t the place the other time. I know it now, because the seagull flew away. But I’ll find it. I’ll tell you.

I can close my eyes and see the whole thing—the blue, and that last, haunting flash of silver, gesturing as it died.