The Last Ship (70 page)

“Straight back to Berryville, North Carolina; to take over my father’s newspaper. I was smeared with printer’s ink from the time I was five; hanging around the place; working there from about nine. Setting type to start with. That was all I ever wanted.”

“To be a small-town newspaper editor?”

“I’d have been a good one.”

“I believe that.”

“I don’t know if there’s anything better to be. That and going everywhere: I would always have done that. ‘Faraway places with strange-sounding names.’”

“That’s close to mine I’d say. Sea life. Not quite the same though. The sea more important than the places to me.”

“But both: to go over the next horizon.”

“Oh, yes. That was the most important part of all. To go over the next horizon.”

I waited a moment. “One of them in the Navy being in your case . . . Well, you got what you always wanted. Combat systems officer.”

“Not that it means anything anymore. But still I’m glad. I got the damned title if nothing else. Also to do my own refresher course aboard on them—the guns, the missiles. The missiles,” she repeated, a meditative layer in her voice, as though trying to probe a riddle. “I’m like that goddamned Chatham in that. Always fussing around with them. Checking, rechecking, making sure everything’s all right. Over and over again. God knows why.” I knew she had been spending more time on the ship. “It’s almost a relief after dealing with the women. At least the missiles don’t talk back to you.”

“They won’t ever talk to anybody again, thank God.”

She seemed pensive, as if that had raised a question. “So it makes one wonder what they’re still doing there, doesn’t it?” The other, rather bright tone back. “But they do get to you. I understand Chatham a little better now, I’ll say that. That high and mighty air he always carried around. Sense of such a fantastic power they give you. One gets a bit . . . well, obsessed.
Très curieuse.
Third year in France. Children love firecrackers? They’re never very far away in my mind. I still feel that key on a lanyard under my pillow every night in the cottage. Right through the pillow.”

All this time I had been listening with only half an ear, much more attentive to something that had become a habit with me, a ritual esthetic, almost beautified in nature, that rather somber contemplation of her nude body as one might contemplate some painting of extraordinary beauty, in a rather analytical, dispassionate fashion, simply looking at it, not even dreaming that one could touch it, such an act being on the order of touching a Caravaggio in the Metropolitan, instant arrest by one of those alert-eyed guards always hanging so innocently about; the visualness become a supreme delight, the engrossed wonder at that great mystery of how here was the source of both an exaltation and a healing to be found nowhere else on earth, nothing remotely competing with it; in fact here what life was all about, I was coming to believe, anything else increasingly seeming a waste of time, or at best only time to be got through in order to get to what alone was important, this sight alongside me one would have thought reserved for the eyes of angels; all this, as I gazed, inspected, seeming absolutely apart from any carnality. I thought I may have missed her last words.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.” Bright tone now half-impudent. “Just about my key being under my pillow. That’s where I keep it.”

“You’re not supposed to tell me that,” I said, keeping my attentiveness and my concentration where they were. What long and lovely thighs, elegant, unflawed, all of a whiteness whose richness of texture seemed to reach into, tear at one’s soul in a glory almost painful, and as tangibly as that in the great painting, crowned by a flaxen diadem.

“Delaney knows it’s there. And Thurlow knows where yours is. Anyhow what difference does it make now? If none of us has gone bonkers by now, none of us is going to.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Then turnabout.” Sensed distantly in my other fixation, something almost teasing in her voice. “Where’s yours?”

Now what unfailingly happened in this liturgy, the esthetic, intellectual contemplation beginning to give way, or rather to announce its imminent conjunction with something quite other. When that occurred, I had discovered, the very best about to be. The guards had left the room. The impossible realization that one could actually . . . My fingers touched the inside of them, lightly as one might touch a bird’s wing, hoping it would not fly away.

“In that breadfruit tree,” I said, rather absently, as if answering a child’s question. “Just outside my cabin.”

She gave an abrupt laugh, itself like a child’s laugh of delight: playing hide and seek.

“In a breadfruit tree. Just imagine. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Sunday School class.”

Her voice came to me as from far away, strangely reflective. “Got the title. Got the control. One-half the control. We go halves? Just like this.”

Dampish thighs now. “Shall we forget the other halves? Shall we do something about these halves?”

Beginning to taste, slowly upward, dampness ever increasing, upward toward its source, thighs parting, the wondrous scent for which it seemed almost I had come to live merging with its identical twin, the scent of the sea reaching me from just outside the cave. Then that cry from her, words I had ever yet to make out, head buried there, the cry itself like none other I had ever heard; audible testimony to the great mystery.

And then, another day, something that I think neither of us had counted on, something toward which I had no intention. No more did I believe had she.

That day she had spoken from that same position we liked afterward, my head in her lap, herself looking down at me.

“Confession time. You remember when we first did it?”

“You mean the time you seduced me?”

“I never noticed any great resistance. Never mind. Well, I did it because I simply had to have a man. Any man. And there was nobody else. You could have been King Kong’s first cousin. That was then. Now I want you to try being honest. Was it that way for you too? Any woman?”

“Yes,” I said helplessly.

“Then for both of us. That was then. Now I want you to listen. Are you listening?”

“I’m listening.”

I almost dreaded what I knew was coming. She was holding my face now and she pressed my head into her breasts so that, I think, we would not be looking at each other when she said it.

“Well, that’s all changed for me. Now I could not stand anybody else, even to touch my wrist. What I’m saying is . . . I like being with you . . . I feel safe when you are near . . . I love you . . .” A small, wry and ironic laugh. “How about that, Captain?”

I felt tears that stood in my eyes emerge, all across her naked breasts as she held me ever so tightly to them; the tears telling her that it was so with me; even though it was the last thing I wanted, knowing the endless difficulties sure to follow. Of these too, she would have known as well, known also that I was instantly thinking of them. There was nothing we could hide from each other. Her voice coming from above me.

“You’re so great at making decisions. Well, what do we do about that one, Captain? Because you know what? We’ve let happen to us the same thing that happened to Meyer and Barker. Only we wouldn’t let them do anything about it. Where does that leave us?”

 *  *  * 

It was another of our days. Love suddenly grafted to lovemaking, an immense new territory instantly entered. Lovemaking vastly sweeter. But also: the cave which we had once thought ourselves so fortunate to find now seeming increasingly inadequate, not a fitting measure of what we had. So easily is man spoiled. What I wanted was to move into her cottage with her, to be with her every night, to go to bed with her, to wake up and reach out and find her. My mind took off: I wanted us to be married: Either the Jesuit or Porterfield would do to perform the ceremony; mind going that far. When I suggested all this to her, this time it was she who hesitated; for the first time, real caution making its appearance in her.

“Let’s wait a little,” she said, her mind taking a keen look at it, that other woman, that professional naval officer, astute, attendant to a difficult problem. “Let me think. Let’s both of us think.”

“Will the others allow it, do you mean?”

“That’s part of it,” she said carefully. “But something else also.” She waited a moment. “Something like this: We don’t own ourselves, do we? Not completely. Not at all really.”

How long it had been so, that we could read each other before either spoke; and words spoken, only the fewest needed to lay bare the whole dilemma; risks so numerous, quite possibly dangerous ones. All of this I now reflected upon myself, taking her point, even as she put it into words.

“What we would lose with them. Giving ourselves something very, very special that they can never in their lives have. We can’t do that. We just can’t.”

“No, we can’t. What do we do then?”

“I don’t know. The cave isn’t enough anymore.”

“It isn’t enough. It doesn’t begin to be enough.”

“Let’s wait. Let’s think,” she said again. Came back to that thing I knew had been troubling her so. “We wouldn’t allow it for Meyer and Barker. How in God’s name can we allow it for ourselves? What would they think? Ship’s company.”

“I’m not sure I give a damn.”

“You can’t mean that. All right then, what would
we
think.” A bitter note touched her voice. “Shall we take a boat and go off like they did?”

Something new seemed all at once to approach, to hover over us, a moment of aching desperateness. It was almost as though two loves stood facing off to each other: my love for my ship’s company; my love for her; both—I had to have both. Stood around us also, as it were gazing at us in reproach even as we made love, two young figures like ghosts: Meyer and Barker. Unspoken between us, guilt had entered that cave. Our taking what they were not permitted to take; already doing that. From outside I could hear, in one of its repertory of cadences, playing against the rocks on the incoming tide, that sea where they had gone. Then I heard another sound.

 *  *  * 

From far away it came, pealing, blaring over the island, its raucousness much diluted here, but its idiosyncratic pulse and timbre at once familiar to any sailor, its source as known to us as though we stood next to it: the launch General Quarters klaxon I had recently had installed on the high Lookout Tower to alert all hands, wherever on the island, to any danger that might approach us from the sea; or of other, unforeseeable emergency or peril. Sailor’s sure knowledge: It is never sounded lightly; its call instantly heeded, whatever else in progress dropped, for it had but one meaning: Harm has come calling. Without a word we scrambled out of the cave and started climbing hard up the hill to the ridge that would take us back to the settlement. Cresting it, hearing the sound much more clamorously now, the pulsating blast-pause, blast-pause pouring out insistently over the trees, reaching everywhere, the sound louder with every step we took. We were running now. At a controlled pace, knowing the distance, rating ourselves. No thought of going separately, as was our custom, we moved across the ridge, down the hill and along the stream bed. We ran on, myself outdistancing her, entering the settlement, breathing heavily, the common in front of the main dwellings filling with hands, Thurlow marching directly toward me even as Lieutenant Girard came up behind. “Captain,” he said, taking time only to give me the essential facts, myself telling off coxswains for two boats, bearers for stretchers; these, the doc, the Jesuit, Thurlow, Girard, Delaney, myself, moving rapidly down the ladders which descended from the settlement to the beach.

We sat in silence in the boats as they took us past the apron of beach, Thurlow beside me, Delaney facing us reporting that he had been studying the plants in that area when he spotted them far below; the boats bearing off northwesterly, parallel to the forbidding cliffs which constituted the shoreline; having proceeded some distance until we were standing directly off a distinctly higher cliff with the characteristic great jagged rocks below, these now immediately ahead of us. The coxswains took us in at dead slow; no place to beach, we debarked into the shoaling water, thigh-deep at first, wound our way through underwater rocks. By the time the water had dropped to our knees we could see the crumpled forms of them up above us, come to rest a certain distance back from the sea. We scrambled with some difficulty, helping one another, up the rocks and across them; were halted by the sight.

We stood a few feet away looking down in the terrible silence of all hands. The mutilation was horrible, the bodies broken, the faces all but obliterated. I recognized them chiefly by the differing colors of their hair, woman’s hair. The doc stepped up, knelt, hands moving professionally. Not even needing a shake of the head. I was distantly aware of the Jesuit also kneeling there, of the Sign of the Cross, the murmur of Latin words over them. Then of Girard kneeling, running her fingers in a moment’s caress through the hair of each, seeming to pause a moment to wrap a curl of Talley’s around her finger. I reached down and pulled her away. Without being told to do so, three of the sailors took off their dungaree shirts and placed them over them. Storekeeper Talley; Radioman Amy Walcott—“Ears” to all; Lieutenant (jg) Rollins, anti-submarine warfare officer. No one spoke. No one said it. The men got the bodies onto the stretchers and, taking a considerable time to do it, we carried them over the rocks and managed them, wading, into the boats. No one said it. Not said then, but to be said very soon. Someone was killing off the women.

W
e sat alone, Lieutenant Girard and I, in my cabin above the sea, those other customary formal selves of ours—not the woman and the man of the cave—that had dealt so long with problems of ship’s company now presiding.

The days following the discoveries of the bodies of Talley, Walcott, and Rollins had brought over the settlement like darksome clouds many things, in varying portions, one or the other chiefly holding reign at various times, switching about: a great fear, an unutterable rage, a sense of just-suppressed panic, all tangible as are objects one touches. There had been tough sessions in this cabin, differing groups, combinations, present at different times as we drew upon every resource, every idea to get at it, that any hand might have: the doc, Thurlow, Selmon, the Jesuit, Girard, Porterfield, Bixby, Delaney, Preston . . . in time literally every member of ship’s company included in one session or another—and not only for ideas, but for another immensely secretive reason of my own, that one of them being the killer, he might by some betraying gesture, some slip of word, give himself away; a minimum of hope there as to anyone so accomplished thus far in his own secrecy and stealth. A multiplicity of thoughts and explanations held forth. One even that they could have been suicides, women finding out that they were unable to do, or continue doing, what they were asked to do: a thought earlier brought up about Rollins now being applied to all three. The suggestion—from Selmon—had outraged Girard, who had turned fiercely on him. “Jesus-God, that seems to be the party line for all of these women. I won’t have it.” Backed by every single one of the remaining women, in unanimous agreement that there had been not the slightest indication of such a thing from any of the dead women. Even, in discreet sessions with Girard and myself only present, the men assigned to each of the three women and interviewed separately by the two of us further confirming—in discreet language—quite the opposite (in addition, she and I alert in particular for suspects in these). And finally, the doc not present at that session, still performing his autopsies, the matter settled at the next one where he was, in a brief exchange.

Doc: “Rollins had been on those rocks some time. Talley and Walcott more recently. All had been choked first.”

Captain: “Enough so to die before they hit the rocks?”

Doc: “No way to tell.”

An exchange which sent something unspoken but terrible moving through that quiet group of shipmates present.

Various measures proposed to deal with the immediate threat. One struck down fast at the very first meeting: The doc had raised the idea of moving all the women into the empty dormitory.

“You mean stop the Arrangement?” I had said.

“At least temporarily.”

The Jesuit had exploded in a manner unexperienced from him, with an overt rage at the softly proffered proposal.

“What’s going on in the cottages must continue.
Has to continue.
”

I turned. “Lieutenant Girard?”

We had all looked at her, some absolute air of authority in these matters holding us, compelling us toward her, whatever her decision might be; deferring to her at every turn.

“The chaplain is correct,” she said coldly, and in the tones of command-giving. “To do what the doctor suggests would be to give in to whoever it is. Absolutely not.”

Her having spoken, it was as if that was that. “Very well,” I said. “The Arrangement will continue. Meantime, no woman to go alone on walks.”

I was referring to the walks all of us from time to time took in our ceaseless fascination of exploring the island. “Every woman to be accompanied at all times by an armed man of ship’s company. You will see to that, Mr. Thurlow.”

Looking at the navigator I remembered those highly successful interrogations he had accomplished in the Bixby matter, this rather gentle officer able to get answers from men when something turned obdurate inside him; as had happened now.

“I want every man, every officer questioned, Alex,” I said. “By yourself. And when you’ve gone through them all, start over again. As many times as may be necessary. Understood?”

“Aye, sir,” he said with a sort of grim satisfaction. “Understood.”

Thurlow’s questioning of ship’s company had turned up nothing. He kept at it. A tenseness had settled over our community. Something intolerable; an inner rage felt in oneself, one’s shipmates. A sense of evil having taken up abode amid us. Nevertheless the outer life continuing as before. The settlement battened down . . . waiting.

All of this time I had felt something was gathering, taking shape in Girard, something she was holding back. Now, alone with me, the feeling came true, and the reason. The death of Talley in particular had changed her; though those of Walcott and Rollins also. It was just that the storekeeper had worked directly under her for as long as they both had been aboard the
Nathan James.
She was a different woman, the sense of a terrible ferocity—brutal, cold, inexorable, almost emotionless—felt just below the surface, sometimes sending a chill even through me; mother lion whose cubs were being snatched away, killed, slaughtered; companion with it, a terrible resolve, felt like a field of force from her, to get whoever it was. Altogether that most dangerous kind of heartbreak and violation, one that never sheds tears.

“Yes, I have a plan,” she said, her voice coming as quietly as ever but a hardness in it that had not been there before. If she had been feminine before, she was now female, cruelly female. “First, I don’t trust anyone. What I want to do . . . If we tell everybody in one of those sessions it will get out, alert him. Anyone could be the killer. The only way to do it is alone. Myself. I don’t trust anyone else. No one.”

“Let’s have it,” I said briskly.

She told it to me. I was appalled, suddenly rock-hard myself.

“You alone? Absolutely not,” I said. “Far too much danger to yourself. I wouldn’t consider it. Aside from that, I can’t imagine whoever it is would show himself on that cliffside again.”

She was relentless. “Maybe not. But maybe so. Arrogance goes with that kind of murder I would think. Or maybe killers do return to the scene of their crimes. Especially that kind of killer. The kind who’s hungry for more.” Her voice came at me like an attack. “We’ve got to do something, for God’s sake. We’ve got to try anything. We can’t just sit here.”

“The other point remains.” My voice meeting hers unbending. “We can’t have you the next one. The answer is no.”

She waited a moment, yielding not an inch; pushed then against the absolute rejection, right through it. Softly, insidiously, this time.

“Then you come along. You’re a marksman, Captain. Like myself.”

I sat silent. She leaned forward a little, moved craftily into that opening.

“Here’s how we do it.”

She laid it out, briskly, precisely; working out the plan to the finest detail; the tactics; the timing. I listened to it with great suspicion. Finally she sat back, not just unyielding—demanding.

“Do you come along? Or do I do it some night on my own?”

“You wouldn’t dare. Not against my direct order.”

“Captain, in this matter I don’t give balls about your orders. You try me.”

Something hard and cold as diamonds in her eyes, looking unflinchingly into mine.

“I’ve got to get him. That’s the beginning and the end of it.”

“I’ll come along,” I said.