going through? Could anyone, except Fred Noonan?
Finally she looked at me with wide red-rimmed eyes, her lightly powdered face streaked with tears, and said, “I feel so guilty. Nathan. So guilty…I’ve had it so easy, compared to Fred.”
“Nothing to feel guilty about,” I assured her. “It was out of your control.”
“I didn’t fight them, like he did. He was brave. I was a coward.”
“You were in prison, too.”
She shook her head, no, violently, no. “Not like him. Not like him.”
“Well, he’s free now. Be happy for him.”
She blinked some tears away. “You really look at it that way?”
“I saw how he was living. He was glad to go. Believe me. Wherever he is, it has to be a better place than that.”
Thinking that over, she lay down, resting her head in my lap, pulling her knees up, like a fetus, and I stroked that curly head of hair while she quietly cried and snuffled and even slept for a few minutes.
Finally, with her head still in my lap, she looked up and asked, “Can we really get out of here?”
“Yes. The schooner that brought me here, the
“When?”
“When else? Midnight.”
Two escape routes had been arranged for me: Captain Johnson and his dinghy, tonight; or if I needed more time, in two days (as I’d told the
“Is this rain going to be a problem?” she wondered.
The storm was rattling the window.
“It could be a help,” I said. “What fools but us will be out in it?”
She sat up. Hope was back in her eyes. “We’ll just…walk out of here?”
I cupped her face in my hands. “Baby, we’ll just slip out the window in my room. Don’t those native watchdogs usually camp out in the lobby?”
“Yes.”
I slipped my arm around her shoulder and drew her to me. “Well, they won’t even know we’re gone, till tomorrow morning sometime. They don’t watch the back door, ’cause there isn’t one, right?”
She nodded. “Originally, there was a side exit, but it was blocked off…this hotel
“So they only watch the front door.”
She nodded again. “Where will your schooner captain pick us up?”
“Right on the dock. Right where he dropped me off.”
The sky cracked like a whip, then a low rumble followed.
I asked her, “Do they check on you? Bring you meals or anything?”
“They hardly bother me. I take my meals at that restaurant across the street.”
“Then all we have to do is sit tight for a few hours.”
“Well…after all, we do have some catching up to do.”
“We really do.”
“Nathan…. Turn off that light.”
“All right….”
I got up and switched off the reading lamp and when I turned she was standing beside the padded quilts, unbuttoning the white blouse; beneath it was a wispy peach bra with (she revealed as she unzipped the rust trousers) matching silky step-ins. Her flesh took on cool tones of blue, as the reflected rain streaking down the window projected itself onto the walls, shadow ribbons of darker blue making abstract flowing patterns along the lanky curves of her body. She undid the bra and let it fall, baring the small, girlishly pert breasts, then stepped from the step-ins, standing naked, shoulders back, unashamed, legs long and lean and even muscular, clothing pooled at her bare feet, her slender shapely body painted with the textures of the storm, arms held out to me beseechingly.
It was time for Father O’Leary to take his pants off.
We made love tenderly, we made love savagely, we made up for lost time and laughed and wept, and when she rode me, her preferred posture, strong-willed woman that she was, her ivory body washed in the blue shadows of the streaky rain, she made love with an abandon and joy that she otherwise must have found only in the sky. I will never forget her lovely face hovering above me, gazing down with heartbreaking fondness, her face bright with joy, then lost in passion, drunk with sensation, and finally aglow with the bittersweet sense of loss fulfillment exacts.
Later, since we were after all in an unlocked room in the political “hotel” of our hosts, Father O’Leary and a fully
