The young man was stretched out on his back in a dinghy, ropes for his bed. His hands were locked behind his head, elbows winged out; bare-chested, in shorts, legs long and gangly, he was studying the starry sky with wide- eyed expectation.
“You always stand watch on your back?” I asked him.
“Mr. Heller,” he said, sitting up, his voice a breathy second tenor. “Is there a problem, sir?”
“Naw. Just thought I’d see if you wanted some company. Eight o’clock’s a little early to hit the rack for this Chicago boy.”
He swung out of the dinghy, bare feet landing lightly on the deck; he was aware that every movement up here was conveyed below, where the others slept.
“Would you like some coffee? I have a pot in the skipper’s deckhouse.”
Soon we were sitting on a bench on deck, sipping coffee from tin mugs, contemplating the stars scattered on a cloudless, richly pastel blue sky shared with a sicklelike slice of yellow moon. It was unreal, like an imitation sky in a Hollywood nightclub.
“The skipper says you’re a real sailor,” I said to the lad, “which I take to mean you’re not paying three grand for the fun of sailing around the world.”
“I wouldn’t mind having three grand,” he reflected. “I’d buy my own ship. No, I’m getting paid, one hundred a month. Johnson didn’t want to pay me anything, you know, said the experience of a voyage around the world would be pay enough. But I drove a harder bargain.”
Words tumbled out of this kid’s mouth without modulation, dropping off at the end of the sentence as his breath gave out. It was as if he were issuing the words to float before him for review.
“Yeah, you really held his head under the water on that deal,” I said.
He regarded me with steady eyes, his smile turned a sardonic shade rare in one his age. “The lure of this life isn’t money, Mr. Heller. It’s the utter simplicity.”
“Your skipper’s taking in a pretty penny for sharing this simple life with these spoiled brats.”
“Well-heeled vagabonds, I call them. You see, that’s why I’m probably destined to be a mate, not a master. Johnson doesn’t have to deal with just the ship, but with the land—finance, lectures, photographs for the
“They love you, you know.”
A grin blossomed. “Well, I pride myself on treating them harshly, and they thrive on the punishment. Maybe it’ll make men of them…if the war doesn’t do it first.”
The world, by way of the ocean, stretched endlessly before us, seeming empty, nicely empty. No people.
“It is coming,” I said, “isn’t it?”
“Oh, it’s here. It’s everywhere…back home they just won’t admit it.”
The gentle rolling of the ocean beneath the boat was lulling. The lapping of water splashing against the hull made a sweetly percussive music.
I asked him, “Do you know what you’re getting yourself into tomorrow?”
A smile twitched; he was gazing out at the waters. “I know where we’re taking you.”
“It’s a risk that isn’t worth a hundred a month.”
“The skipper asked me to go along, and I’m going.”
“For what it’s worth, I’m tellin’ ya, take a pass. There’s a motor on that dinghy; Johnson can take me by himself.”
“No, I think I’ll go along.”
“I thought you liked the lure of the simple life.”
“I do. But I like things lively, too.” He laughed, but it came out more like another word: Ha. “You know, the skipper seems immune to the finer things…tobacco and booze and these island girls.”
“He has a pretty wife.”
“Exy’s a princess, but me, I’d leave her home.” He sipped his coffee, stared out at the moon’s yellow reflection on the ocean. “This one time…we’d been sailing west and north of Tahiti…we lay to at a quay in a lagoon near Raiatea. This broad-beamed copra schooner draws up alongside—with a cargo of beautiful girls. Twenty of them or more, lining the rail nearest our ship, clinging to the rigging. Ravishing creatures.”
“You run across boatloads of babes out here frequently, do you?”
He shook his head. “Regretfully, no. This was a charter out of Papeete, a planter named Pedro Miller, friend of Nordhoff and Hall’s.”
They were the authors of the bestsellers about the mutiny on the
“They invited us aboard…wine, music, laughter, dancing. I met this black-haired girl who did this grass-skirt dance…. I was walking with her into the village when I glanced back and noticed the skipper standing on the
“Probably that he was going to get laid, too, but not have to worry about South Sea Island crotch rot.”
He bellowed a laugh, then suppressed it, not wanting to wake anyone below. “You’re a cynical one, aren’t you?”
