Charles Williams: Gulf Coast Girl

It was beckoning. Toward the rapture. The rapture . . .

Fowey Rocks Abeam

The master of the Joseph H. Hallock closed the journal. The poor devil, he thought . The poor, tortured devil. Four o’clock—and we raised the sloop a little after five.

He sat for a moment, thinking with that vaguely puzzled frown on his face again. It was late, after 2 a.m. and very quiet in the dim seclusion of his office.

It was odd, he thought, still trying to come to grips with the disturbing factor, that it should have been the girl who realized there was no escape for them in that boat. Or any boat. It should have been Manning. It was something not likely to be known except by shipmasters and persons who had cruised on their own craft—and Manning had said he had cruised the Caribbean once for eight months.

Changing the name of the sloop was farcical. Painting out what was lettered on the stern didn’t alter the identity of any kind of seagoing craft. There were papers. And more papers. It was as futile as writing your own name on a borrowed passport. Manning should have known that, as he should have known it took about ten pounds of paperwork and red tape to enter any foreign port in the world with a boat, and that included fishing villages. They all had port authorities, and they all demanded consular clearances from the last port of call, bills of health from the last port, registry certificate, customs lists, crew lists, and so on, ad infinitum, and in the case of pleasure craft they probably required passports and visas for everybody aboard. They didn’t have a prayer of a chance of getting away with something like that, and Manning should have been the first to know it. Not the girl.

But from the evidence of the journal, Manning was certainly no utter fool, and not particularly given to wishful thinking. He appeared to be quite intelligent, in fact. Then was it sheer desperation, knowing there was no escape for them in the States with the police and a gang of criminals looking for them? Of course, the question was academic, since they had both died before they’d had a chance to flee anywhere, but the whole thing persisted in bothering him. And there was something else that nibbled at the edge of his mind.

He changed into pajamas and climbed into his bunk. He turned out the reading lamp on the bulkhead above his pillow, still puzzling over it. Then he sat upright. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly. “I’ll just be damned. It would be perfect.”

Just Manning? he wondered. Or both of them? He hoped it was both of them.

* * *

It was sunset again, two days after they had taken the Freya in tow. The Joseph H. Hallock. was waddling, full-bellied, up the coast of Florida just south of Fowey Rocks. She was well inshore from the main axis of the Stream, since they had made arrangements by radio to have a Coast Guard boat meet them off Miami and take the Freya off their hands. Or, at least, that was the master’s excuse to Mr. Davidson, the mate. He felt, actually, a little like Conrad’s master in The Secret Sharer, a story he was sure Manning had enjoyed.

He was on the bridge now with Mr. Davidson, who was waiting to catch Fowey Rocks light in the pelorus as it came abeam, to complete his four-point bearing. The master himself was staring astern in the afterglow where the Freya rode easily at the end of her long towline. He had been watching her as they passed each of the keys during the day, but this was the closest they would come inshore until they were off Miami itself and the Coast Guard came out to get her.

When you resolved the contradiction and acknowledged that Manning couldn’t possibly have believed any of that moonlit dream about escape to the tropics in a boat, he mused, what did you have left? You had left the twin facts that Manning was a writer, and that he was trying to save himself and that girl he was so much in love with.

They had nowhere to go, the girl had said. Nowhere to go, that is, as long as they were being sought by a gang of criminals and also by the police. But if they weren’t being actively sought by anyone, they could come back to their own country, where they would attract less attention than anywhere else on earth. And they would no longer be sought if everyone believed them dead.

There could be little doubt they’d be given up as dead. Not many people would have the specialized knowledge to cause them to wonder at that contradiction in Manning’s story. And certainly the facts were convincing enough. The boat was only 36 feet long, was on the open sea, and had been searched by three men. The entire area had been searched by the ship itself, and there had been no survivors and no other boat. The sloop had been under way, and its dinghy was still there on the cabin. The last person aboard had disappeared less than an hour before, because the coffee was still warm, and the sloop was nearly 150 miles from the nearest land.

And the clinching argument, the master thought, was that eighty-three thousand dollars lying there on the settee in its satchel. In a world where money mattered above everything, who would believe two people would deliberately and unhesitatingly give away an amount like that just to have each other for the rest of their lives? It was unanswerable, he thought, and he loved them both.

He wondered if they had found the plane. It was rather unlikely, he thought. The whole story was probably true except the ending. It almost had to be, for the benefit of the rest of that gang, who knew everything prior to the actual departure of the boat from Sanport. And if the circumstances of the plane crash were as Manning had set forth, finding it was obviously impossible.

But I don’t know any of this, he thought. I’m only theorizing. I don’t really want to know, absolutely and finally, because I’d be obligated to report it. They hadn’t committed any real crime, unless it was a crime to defend oneself, and he hoped they got away with it.

Mr. Davidson came out of the chartroom. “Fowey Rocks abeam at seven-oh-three, Cap,” he said. “Seven miles off. Pretty close in, for northbound.”

“Just keep a good lookout for fishermen and southbound tankers,” the master replied. “We’ll haul out as soon as we drop our tow.”

Then he saw what he had been watching for, astern and slightly inshore from the Freya . It could be driftwood, or it could be a head, or two heads. He peered aft in the gathering twilight, and almost raised the glasses.

No, he thought reluctantly; if I know, I have to report it. But nobody is interested in the unverified vaporings of a sentimental old man.

He wondered what Mr. Davidson would think of all this moonshine. The mate was a good man, who knew his job, and he had searched the sloop thoroughly. But being a sound and practical seafaring man not given to foolishness, he had, understandably, not bothered to look under it. It would have been easy for them to ditch the diving gear and climb back aboard on the offboard side just before the towline tightened.

They would make it ashore without any trouble, with the life belts. And they probably had enough money to buy some clothes to replace their bathing suits. Not that they would be likely to attract any attention in Florida, however, if they went around in their bathing attire for years.

But they were drifting back rapidly. Would he have to lift the glasses to satisfy himself? Then the objects separated momentarily for an instant before they merged again as one. And one of them had been definitely lighter in color than the other. The master sighed.

“Bon voyage,” he said softly. He turned and went into the chartroom with the glasses still swinging from his neck.