The
Georgia Peach
was moored half a mile offshore, barely inside the protection of the stone inlet. Seventy-two feet, two masts, all teak. It had brass fixtures, new Dacron sails, two lifeboats, the best navigation system money could buy.
There was an ornate Parker double-barreled shotgun in a closet in the main cabin, a wedding gift from one of Alec’s attorneys— he’d bought the boat and married her all in the same week— but it had never been fired, or even loaded. He’d admired the weapon, thanked the attorney twice, and later, alone with her, he wondered out loud if he was supposed to buy a pickup truck to hang it in the window. He did not like guns, and would give an intruder whatever he wanted, up to and including the boat itself, before he’d shoot him over it.
He was twenty-nine years older than she was, and enjoyed watching her with younger men, or perhaps it was that he enjoyed watching the young men with her. For a long time now, it was the only sex they’d had, this watching her with younger men. She was never sure what he was thinking afterwards.
The boat had four cabins and slept eight, although the guests never stayed overnight. The captain was a taut, meticulous Mexican who spoke passable English and lived on board ten months a year, February through November, sleeping in the smallest compartment, which was in the bow. Each December, he returned home to Baja and his wife. They had no children. Once, when they were all drunk together, he’d recited the names: Pedrito, Maria, Gaspar, Hector, Veronica. He had begun crying then, and it took her a moment to understand that they had named them, all the babies his wife could not carry to full term. And she saw the reason for that, instinctively understood his attachment to those tiny things that had been alive once, and she also wept, as much for herself as the Mexican.
Later, they were both ashamed.
The Mexican maintained the boat— he had been working on a compression problem the day before, making a list of the parts he needed to replace a piston— and kept his small cabin spotless. He had an intrinsic understanding of the way mechanical things worked, and sometimes, when Alec was below, she felt him watching her on deck. His name was Pedro Ruiz, and they killed him first, shot him in bed.
The shot was not as loud as she would have imagined; no louder, on reflection, than the boat’s own noises at night, creaking and settling under its enormous weight, but it was somehow out of place, and she started awake, then lay still, trying to decide what had caused it. She listened for the Mexican, but there was no movement from the bow. Alec was awake too, propped up against half a dozen pillows— his habitual position in bed, as close to flat as he could get without setting off a certain chest pain that felt like a heart attack, even after all the visits to the doctor. “If you can cause it by lying down,” the doctor always said, “it’s not your heart.”
He had a peculiar, ironic expression on his face now, as if he knew what was coming, as if this was what he’d expected all along.
He was always a restless sleeper on the boat, up a dozen times a night to tinkle a few drops in the forward head— he did not use the one closer to their cabin, for fear of waking her— and then sometimes climbing the stairs to the deck to smoke a cigar and check the sky. Several years earlier, he had been upstairs at home in the bathroom when the plane hit, shaving for a fund-raiser they were holding for eight Negroes who had been sentenced to the electric chair in Waycross, Georgia, and was somehow uninjured, even as the famous Howard Hughes bounced his experimental XF-II off their roof, set a neighbor’s yard on fire, and half-killed himself in the process.
That was 1946, and Mr. Hughes, she had heard, was still recovering from his injuries. The Negroes were dead, and the carpenters had been up there on the second story of her house on and off ever since, trying now for the tenth or twentieth time to exactly match the lattice pattern along the roof line with the part that had gone untouched. Alec wouldn’t let it go until it was exactly right. He’d considered suing Mr. Hughes and his airplane company, but instead accepted a settlement and took the episode as a reminder that in this world you cannot buy safety— one minute you are studying your chin in the mirror; the next minute you are shaving in the outdoors— and in small ways over the years, he became more reckless in his behavior. He worked less and drank more, and was not as careful as he once had been of whom he invited to the boat. Which is to say he was not as careful of her, and she did not mind that at all. One way or another, men had been trying to protect her or save her all her life. She brought that out in them, even after she had stopped trying.
They lay still, listening. The boat yawned and creaked, and she heard uncertain footsteps, and then an angry whisper. He sighed and reached for the overhead lamp. The sheet fell off his chest and she could see the bones in his arms. Thin arms, for a man of his size. A happy red face beneath hair so white she could spot it across the room in the dark; loose breasts, like a bear.
There was another noise, something breaking in the galley. Alec found the light and stood up. “Stay here,” he said, and walked to the door and opened it.
“Pedro?”
There was no answer. He squinted out into the darkened galley and then turned to look back at her, his stomach casting an enormous shadow against the far wall, and then he raised his eyebrows in an operatic gesture, and she saw he was clowning and laughed out loud.
“What was it?” she said.
He stepped up, as if to move through the threshold, and then stopped suddenly, bent at the waist, and shivered. And then she saw something dripping from his nipple, and then from his elbow, and then he sat down carefully on the floor, back inside the main cabin, and then lay down. He tried to speak, but that’s where they had cut him.
His legs were thin and hairless, and he kicked at the men as they walked in. He made another noise, trying to say something, to maintain a place for himself in the room, but they stepped over him, paying no attention.
The first one through the threshold was light-skinned, perhaps a mulatto. The second was enormous, as black as the open door. She pulled up the sheet to cover her breasts, and her husband moved on the floor, turning halfway over, knocking the mulatto off balance. The mulatto steadied himself and looked down at him for a moment with the same interest he might have had in a dying fish flopping around on the deck with the lure still in its mouth. She saw it clearly, they’d left the knife in his throat. It seemed to be lodged in his spine. He jerked again, and this time the mulatto moved a step away and waited for him to die.
The bigger one stood just inside the threshold, watching her. In no hurry at all. There was a line of sweat beneath his hair, and he was breathing through his mouth. She caught glimpses of his tongue.
The mulatto looked around the cabin as if he were thinking of buying it. Alec moved again, more up and down than sideways, and a different noise came out of him, this entirely from the opening in his throat. They had been married eleven years. The mulatto smiled. “I thought you be screamin’ and all by now,” he said. He nodded quickly at the floor, as if to remind her what was there.
Behind him, the big one nodded too, as if he were thinking the same thing.
“Let me ast you something,” the mulatto said. “He still get it up or not?”
She wasn’t looking directly at the floor now, but she still saw the movements there, which were smaller all the time, and the noises he made as he tried to breathe had turned wet.
She thought of the shotgun in the closet.
The big one picked up her panties off the dressing table. He held them up, as if he were trying to decide which side was the front and which side was the back, and then a moment later he was on top of her, pressing her into the mattress. He was twice as thick as Alec; his fingers stunk and pushed into her mouth, pinching her lip against her teeth, and then cutting it, and she opened a little, trying to reason with him, and he forced the panties in, first into her cheek and then between her teeth until they had filled her mouth and propped it open. Then he rolled her over and tied her hands with one of her husband’s belts. She thought the bones in her arms would snap under the weight.
He pushed off her and stood up. She turned herself on the bed and saw that the mulatto had already taken off his pants. Alec was still now, and the wash of blood had stopped and pooled, moving gradually back and forth with the rocking of the boat. She wondered if that is where they would leave her when they had finished, lying on the floor with Alec.
“Man, this ain’t the time,” the big one said.
The mulatto was older, though, and seemed to be in charge. “I live for the day,” he said, and came onto the bed.
Her heels dug into the sheet and she walked herself back to the headboard and then up it a foot or two. He moved suddenly, slapping her face. Her head rolled and she kicked out at him, and he caught her leg and lifted it, and for a brief moment they felt each other’s strength, staring into each other’s eyes, and then he jerked at the leg, turning her over again. His arms pressed into her neck and she felt the other one take her ankles, pulling one leg away from the other until there was enough space between them for the mulatto to force in a knee. She tried to kick, but the one holding her ankles tightened down until she thought again of snapping bones.
And she stopped fighting then and cried out into the panties, a muffled, dry sound, and felt her legs spread wide apart, so wide that the muscles cramped, and then there was a noise, a soft pop, like a bit of tendon as you cut through a steak.
She couldn’t see Alec now, and there was no sound at all from that side of the bed. She was alone; she saw that more clearly than anything in the room. The mulatto reached beneath her and she cried out again.
“Come on, now,” he said, as if he were trying to talk her into this. As if he were courting. She rose up, trying to stop the pain, and that seemed to please him. “That’s it, sweetheart,” he said. “Give it up.”
She took the second one in that same position, lying on her face, but with all his weight pressing against the points of her shoulders. He had been reluctant to rape her— the mulatto talked him into it: “Man, you got to ask yourself, you pass on this, when it gone come along again?”— but once inside, he seemed to be trying to kill her.
Afterwards, they went above to start the engines. The engines were diesels, though, nothing like a car’s. She heard the starter turning over, again and again. She guessed they had never stolen a boat before. She sat up, remembering an outraged letter she had written to the
Times
regarding the paper’s coverage of the eight Negroes from Waycross, saying that even if they were guilty of the specific crime of murder, any act of violence between the Negroes and the white race had to be understood in a political context. She could remember the words, the exact words.
