Dead calm

17

“Flashlight!” he shouted to Rae, who was getting up now. He pushed himself off the cockpit seat and raised it to grope in the locker under it for a diving mask. Leaping to the rail, he looked down. None of them had come up. Bellew, even his tremendous strength powerless in Warriner’s cataleptic embrace, couldn’t break free, and Mrs. Warriner wouldn’t. She’d still be trying to separate them when she lost consciousness. Yanking the mask down over his face, he fell backward into the water.

He turned and peered downward but could see nothing. Farther out, the water was faintly illuminated from the spreader lights, but here directly under the side it was in deep shadow and it was impossible to see under the boat at all. He had only a minute or two at the most. Saracen was swinging around on the swell, and by the time he could dive twice there’d be no way of telling where they’d gone under. He kicked downward, swinging his arms in all directions, groping for them. He felt nothing.

Conscious of Saracen’s deadly mass plunging up and down on the swell within feet of him, he felt a moment’s panic. If he lost his bearings and came up under her he could be knocked unconscious. He swam to his right and started up, and at the same instant he heard them. They were under her, bumping and kicking against the hull in their struggle. Then a beam of light penetrated the water just in front of his face. His head came out of the water. Rae was leaning over the side with a flashlight, shining it downward.

“They’re underneath.” He gasped. “Shine it in under the counter.”

She ran back and threw herself flat on deck aft of the cockpit. Reaching an arm over, she threw the beam of light down and forward, past the rudder. He went under again. He was below the turn of the bilge now and could see the light angling down astern, but everything forward of it was in impenetrable shadow. Saracen plunged up and then down, rolling to starboard, toward him. He put a hand up and felt the planking, slick with marine growth, come lunging down against it. He shot downward. It stopped. Pain bit into his palm where it had been cut by a barnacle. As Saracen went back to port he swam down and in, raking the area with his arms. Then he saw Warriner and Bellew.

They were almost straight below him, falling away now and dropping into the beam of light. They were still locked together, but no arms or legs moved, and something like a plume of dark smoke was drifting upward and diffusing in the water above them. It was blood, either from Bellew’s broken nose or from some wound inflicted on one of them by the keel or hull. He kicked downward but knew at the same time it was impossible. He was already running out of breath, and they were nearly fifteen feet below him, still drifting down. But Mrs. Warriner must be still above them. He had to find her. Then his hand brushed something just below him, something soft and fern-like. It was her hair. He entwined his fingers in it and began swimming up and out, away from the hull above him. His chest hurt now, and he wondered if he would make it. He’d been a fool to come under here; his first responsibility was to Rae. Just before he blacked out, his head broke surface and he gulped hungrily at the air.

He was almost under the counter, still too near the rudder and propeller. He swam out, trying to get Mrs. Warriner’s head above the surface. Rae had seen him now. “Others—too far down—no use—” He gasped. “Ladder —” It would take too long to tow her around to the other side. Rae disappeared above him, and almost immediately the ladder was dropped over the starboard side, just forward of him. He swam up to it, towing the inert figure behind him. With the beating he had taken from Bellew, he was very weak now, and he wondered if he could get her aboard. Time was precious. She’d been unconscious for minutes.

He ducked under the surface and pulled her across his shoulder. When Saracen rolled down to starboard, he got one foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, caught a lifeline stanchion with his free hand, and heaved upward, with Rae helping from above to haul her in under the lifeline until her body was on deck. He came on up himself. They lifted her down onto one of the cockpit seats. Her hair was plastered to her face and she was bleeding from a half-dozen barnacle cuts on her bare legs and shoulders, but she appeared to be uninjured otherwise.

He turned her face downward and began applying artificial respiration. Water ran out of her mouth and drained from her hair, but there was no movement. A minute went by. Two. Three. He was on the point of turning her on her back to try the mouth-to-mouth method he’d read of when he felt her begin trying to breathe again.

She retched and began to gag from the salt water she’d swallowed. He stepped back. She was breathing regularly and without difficulty now. In a few more minutes she opened her eyes. She looked around, blankly at first, and then she screamed. She came off the seat, trying to get to her feet to lunge toward the rail where they’d all gone over. He’d been expecting it. He caught her and forced her back. She fought him, still screaming. Then just as abruptly all the strength went out of her again and she collapsed. She lay face downward while her whole body shook with sobs.

Rae had disappeared. She came running up the ladder now, carrying a glass. Between them they got her upright and forced her to drink. They eased her gently back on the cushion. In a few minutes the crying ceased and she lay still.

“What was it?” he asked.

“Codeine tablet,” Rae said. She fumbled a cigarette out of her pocket, but it fell from her fingers into the bottom of the cockpit. She made as if to reach down for it, then merely sighed and collapsed on the other seat. Ingram bent and picked it up for her, but with his wet hand and the water pouring off him and down his arm it was mush by the time he’d straightened. He tossed it overboard. Saracen rolled. They looked at each other in silence.

Then Ingram’s face twisted. “Maybe if I hadn’t hit him …”

She looked up. Her voice was thin and very near the edge as she said, “Stop it! And never say that again. He was going to do it, no matter what you did, and you know it. And you saved her, didn’t you?”

“I guess you’re right.”

She rubbed a hand across her face. Then she brought the hand down and looked at its trembling. She clenched it into a fist and opened it. “With luck,” she said, “maybe I can keep from thinking about it for ten minutes, and keep from hearing—from hearing—” She swallowed, and went on. “That should be—just about long enough—to get her into that forward bunk and into dry pajamas and wrap a towel around her hair. And then take one of those codeine things myself. Because if I don’t make it, you’re going to be picking up springs and cogwheels the rest of the night. Let’s go.”

* * *

Ingram awoke just at dawn. He ached all over, and his stomach muscles felt as if he’d been run over by a truck. He turned his head in the beginnings of light inside the cabin and looked at Rae asleep in the opposite bunk. She was wearing the same sleeveless short pajamas she’d had on yesterday morning, and the mop of tawny hair was spread across the pillow, encircled by her arms. The only thing different was the discolored and swollen area on her face where Warriner had hit her. Just beyond his feet the tea kettle slid and bumped gently against the rails that kept it on the galley stove. Dishes shifted minutely in their stowage above the sink. A timber creaked. It was hot. And it was still dead calm.

He rolled out of the bunk and donned khaki shorts, remembering he could no longer run about the boat naked or clad only in a towel. His eyes softened as he looked down at Rae, and as he put on water for coffee he was careful to make no sound. He went up on deck. It could be yesterday morning all over again, he thought; everything topside was wet with dew, and the surface of the Pacific was as slick as oil except for the heaving of the swell. It was full daylight now, and the few clouds overhead were already edged with pink. Wind or no wind, it was morning, it was beautiful, and it was good to be alive. Then suddenly he was thinking of Warriner and Bellew somewhere in the eternal darkness and the ooze two miles below, and he swore softly as he tried to wrench his mind away. He knew that for years it would keep coming back, leaping out at him in odd moments and without warning to hit him with that unanswerable question: Would something different, some other way, have worked?

No. Nothing could have changed it. He’d done everything he could, and in the only way it could have been done. If he’d let Bellew’s deliberate provocation go unchallenged, any control he might have had over the situation and any chance he’d have had of saving all of them would have been gone forever. Once authority was lost, you never got it back. And with Bellew doing as he pleased, Warriner would have been doomed anyway. And at some other time, particularly if they were under way, he might not have been lucky enough to save Mrs. Warriner.

He took a look around the horizon for squalls and went back below. He made the weather entries in the log