Dead calm

“The reason for our being there—for my being in Miami at all, and for his being in my hotel room—was a yacht, a big two-masted schooner named Dragoon. It was mine—or had been. It also had quite a bit to do with the lack of friendliness in the meeting. In the first place, there was probably a sensed difference of attitude as to what a sailing yacht really was. To me it was just a piece of property, like a parcel of land or a stock certificate, that I happened to own, mostly by accident, and which I’d been aboard only once in the two years I had owned it. To him a boat—a good one—represented something else. But besides this, and much more important, was the fact Dragoon had just been stolen, and he was suspected by the police of having helped to steal it. They’d picked him up and questioned him, and then released him because they didn’t have any actual proof, not enough to hold him. I gathered from the police they’d had a difficult time with him; he wasn’t a man who took kindly to being called a thief.

“But first maybe I’d better explain how I happened to own a two-masted sailing yacht in the first place, since I cared nothing at all about boats then. I was a widow, and not even a wealthy one—just a lonely one. I’d been married for a long time and very happily to a quiet and gentle man who was also one of the coldest-nerved and most fantastic gamblers I’ve ever known. His name was Chris Osborne, and I suppose you’d say he was in the real-estate business, though real-estate speculation would be more like it. By the time he was forty-five he’d already made and lost several fortunes. I’d been his secretary before we were married, but even with that edge I don’t think I was ever sure at any given moment whether we were very well off or in debt. Not that it mattered a great deal. Without any children—” She couldn’t bring herself to mention the son who’d died. To a boy as young as Warriner it would mean very little anyway, and there had to be a limit somewhere to the coin you were willing to spend to get his attention. “Without any children to leave it to, I could never see any point in piling up money you didn’t need. We were happy, which was the thing that counted. Except that of course he was away a lot. I wasn’t much good at the social routine, because I’d worked most of my life, and women from better backgrounds and expensive schools could always make me feel awkward and put me on the defensive—I mean the ones who wanted to. So I had a business of my own, just for something to do when he was away, a small sports-car agency. But none of that’s important.

“Chris was killed three years ago. He’d gone out to Lubbock to look at a cattle ranch he was interested in, and the plane he was flying went out of control in a thunderstorm and crashed. I won’t burden you with what it’s like becoming a widow just by picking up the telephone, but it’s one of those things you get through some way, then and afterward. It took nearly two years to straighten out his business affairs. He was overextended again and pretty thinly financed on several deals he was working on, and there was a tax case pending with the Internal Revenue Service. There wasn’t a great deal left in the end, but I worked it out as well as I could. And it was something to do.

“But to get on to Dragoon. Chris didn’t care anything about boats either; he’d simply taken it in as part payment on some deal in Florida real estate, intending to sell it later. Then he was killed, and during the two years it took to get the estate settled and pay off the tax bill it lay at anchor in Key West with a watchman living aboard. Then, just as I started advertising it for sale, it was stolen. Some men got the old watchman drunk ashore and took it out of the harbor one night. The police called me in Houston, and I flew down there. They had only two leads to work on. One was that Dragoon’s dinghy had been picked up at sea by a fishing boat southeast of Miami near the Great Bahama Bank. The other was a suspect.

“It seemed a man had been aboard the yacht just a few days before, looking it over, and told the watchman he was interested in it. The watchman remembered his name, and the police picked him up at the hotel where he was staying in Miami and questioned him. They’d found out who he was, and were satisfied with his references— he’d been a charter yacht captain in the Bahamas for a long time, and had operated a shipyard in San Juan, Puerto Rico, until he’d got badly burned in an explosion and fire that destroyed most of it—but they weren’t satisfied with his story as to why he’d been interested in Dragoon.

“He said he’d been hired to take a look at it by a businessman staying at one of the big Miami Beach hotels, the president of some pharmaceutical firm, who wanted to buy a boat for company entertaining and asked him for a professional opinion of Dragoon before making me an offer subject to final survey. But when the police checked, the businessman turned out to be a phony. There was no such company, and the man himself had checked out of the hotel the same night Dragoon was stolen. So it was obvious he was one of the thieves. The only thing the police still weren’t sure of was whether this man was also one of the thieves or just another victim.

“So that’s when he came to see me at the hotel, just after he’d been questioned by the police, this hard- bitten and disagreeable man with the limp. His name was John Ingram, he said, and he was going to help me find my boat. I offered to pay him and was curtly brushed off. There would be no charge, he said. I was glad to have his help, but I still wasn’t any fonder of him. I could be stubborn too, and I didn’t like having favors tossed at me in that manner.

“But at the same time I began to have a very funny feeling about it. We’d find the boat. We’d find it if he had to sift the Atlantic Ocean with a tea-strainer. Maybe the thieves had made a mistake stealing it in the first place, but their really sad mistake was ever getting this man involved in it.

“He had an idea it was in trouble, probably out there somewhere near where the dinghy had been found, so we chartered a seaplane in Nassau to search the area from the air, and we finally located it aground on a sandbar on the edge of the Great Bahama Bank, about a hundred and fifty miles southeast of Miami. The pilot landed us, with a rubber raft, and we went aboard. Two of the men who’d stolen it were still on it. They’d been trying to run a cargo of guns to one of the Central American countries, when they’d run up onto the Bank from poor navigation.

“John got the boat away from them, refloated it—without a towboat—threaded it through all those shoals and sandbars into deep water again, and sailed it back to Miami. I watched him do it; otherwise I probably wouldn’t have believed it. But that isn’t what I started out to tell you, not just a story of watching an indomitable man do the impossible against a background I didn’t even know existed, nor even the fact that I got my boat back. Long before we reached Florida I didn’t care whether we ever did, and Dragoon had ceased to be important at all. I was just terrified he was going to sail it into Miami, tie it up, step off onto the dock, and say, ‘Now, Mrs. Osborne, there’s your goddamned boat,’ and turn around and walk away without even looking back. And if he did I knew I couldn’t stand it. It was as simple as that.

“I realize you can’t even become acquainted with somebody in five days, let alone fall in love with him. But it happened. Maybe it was the slow-motion effect of time and that increased sensitivity to everything you have in an unusual situation. Maybe it was from being with him every minute there in his own element, this world that was so strange and so utterly fascinating to me, as if I were actually seeing him for the first time. As I was. He wasn’t an arrogant and disagreeable man at all, but just a very proud one who felt he’d been made a fool of. And a very lonely one. He tried to hide it under all that armor of self-sufficiency, the way he fought the limp from those burns, but it was as clear to me as if he’d been carrying a sign.

“The same thing was happening to him, and he didn’t walk away when we got to Miami, but naturally it wasn’t as hasty and impulsive as all that, not with either of us. It took some time to clear myself of the suspicion of being some wealthy and socially prominent man-eater who was trying to buy him for a pet, and to convince him that I didn’t have any more money than he did. Then he pointed out that I’d seen him only in his own environment, and he’d look entirely different in mine—that is, living and working ashore. That wasn’t true, of course, but I knew he would be unhappy. But it was a dead issue anyway; there was nothing in my old life I wanted to go back to. I was as in love with this exciting new world of his just as much as he was, and I had a simpler approach to the subject of environment anyway. Mine was any place that included him. But then I warned you this was sentimental and probably corny.

“We were married six months later, after I’d wound up all the loose ends in Houston and sold everything I didn’t want to be burdened with any more. I sold Dragoon, which was too big for two people to handle, and we bought Saracen. Some day we expect we may go into the charter business in the Bahamas or West Indies, but that’s in the future. Now we’re on our honeymoon. We’re on our way to Tahiti. We realize it has jet runways now, but there are places beyond that don’t. We don’t know how long the cruise will last nor how far we’ll go. Maybe we’ll simply go broke. We don’t really care. I suppose you could call it a juvenile dream, or flight from responsibility, or refusal to accept the challenge, but everybody doesn’t have to listen to the same drum. I like ours. I fell in love with it the first time I heard it, one night on a grounded schooner on the Great Bahama Bank, when I discovered what he was listening to and