Upstairs, they had begun to argue. “I thought you said you drove one of these motherfuckers, man.”
“I told you I seen how they did it; I didn’t say I been driving it myself.”
They tried the starter again, but she knew they hadn’t primed the engine, and knew it wouldn’t catch. Especially not with the bad piston. She noticed light in the porthole to her right and then, turning left, saw it was still dark there. So she was facing north. There was a certain comfort in that, in any kind of bearings at all, but then, turning her head, she saw him again on the floor, and felt herself begin to break.
“The lady got to know something about this,” the mulatto said.
There was no answer.
“What’s wrong with that, man? You depressing me now with your attitude. . . .”
“Bring her up here where people can see her is what’s wrong.”
She stared at her husband’s body, unable, for some reason, to look anywhere else.
“They ain’t nobody gone see nothing.”
“Man, the sun coming up, and sailing people get up early to catch the breeze.”
It was quiet a little while and then the mulatto said, “Well, we either got to sail it or sink it.”
It was quiet again, and she imagined them studying the maze of stays and ropes and wenches and pulleys, the size of the hull. It would be dawning on them now that they couldn’t sail it or sink it.
They came back downstairs, and without a word the mulatto began slapping her again, back and forth. Her ears rang and blood dropped off the end of her nose onto her breasts. The other one reached down, just out of sight, and pulled once, violently, as if he were starting a lawn mower, and came up with the knife that had been buried in the bone of her husband’s neck.
She tried to beg them not to do that to him, not to do anything more.
He gave the knife to the mulatto. The mulatto reached into her mouth and pulled out the panties. Her cheeks and the roof of her mouth were dry and her jaw had cramped. “We all ears, sweetheart,” he said.
She couldn’t speak. He touched one of her breasts, smoothing blood over the nipple, and then pinched it hard between his thumb and the knuckle of his index finger. He looked up at her, as if asking for permission.
She looked back, not knowing what he wanted. And nodded anyway.
“You sure now,” he said.
“What?”
And then his hand moved, so fast she didn’t really see it, and then she felt him let go of her nipple, and then she saw the knife, and the blood, and realized he hadn’t let go at all.
He put it into his shirt pocket, and then she lost her hold and begged them for things that she couldn’t even name. The room was lighter now, the sun peeking through the portholes in the west wall of the cabin. The other man stood huge and black in the background, watching.
They gave her a towel for the bleeding, and a shirt, and then a speedboat came past, engines screaming, its hull slapping the water. They waited until the sound had faded away and then the mulatto spoke again, sounding calm.
“You had time to think this over now?” he said. She didn’t answer. “Because now I gone ast you one question: You want to start this boat for me or not?”
She looked back at the floor. From this angle, she could see the wide black yawn in his neck. “You wondering, What good is that? Right?” the mulatto said.
He was afraid of something. Maybe the motorboat, or maybe someone had seen them up there trying to start the engines. Or maybe that he was this close to something and losing it. “Well,” he said, sitting down beside her, “the situation here is different than it look. You know how sometime you don’t like somebody, but then you do? Like fighters after the big match.”
She heard herself laugh out loud. He smiled again, surprised, and then he laughed with her and nodded toward the huge Negro in the door and pretended to shiver. “You heard him ast me could he have the other titty, didn’t you?” he said. And she stopped laughing.
The one at the door moved closer and sat down on the other side of the bed, so that she was between them. She felt the heat off the second one’s body, smelled baby powder. And grass. He smelled like grass.
“I believe she beginning to like us,” the mulatto said. The big one was not in a joking mood, though. They heard another boat and went quiet until it passed, their eyes moving everywhere, meeting sometimes across the bed, sometimes looking at her. The air was thick with the odor of grass and baby powder and the mulatto’s cologne and their sweat and hers.
“Now here’s what we gone do,” the mulatto said. “We gone all go upstairs and start up the engines.” The big one looked at him, surprised, but didn’t argue. “And then, once we on the road, we gone put you in one of them little boats up there and take this one for ourself.”
He studied her as he said this, to see how he was doing. “Unlest you want to come along.” The big one moved then, but she didn’t see it clearly. One of her eyes was swollen shut.
“You see the situation here?” the mulatto said.
She waited. He looked quickly at his partner.
“Like
Mutiny on the Bounty,
” he said. “You been to that, right? Where they left off the captain and took the boat themself?”
She wondered again where they were going to kill her, if they would carry her back down here to do it.
“C’mon, man,” the big one said. He wanted to do what he wanted to do.
The mulatto couldn’t make up his mind. “I just gone give her a chance to collaborate to start this motherfucker,” he said, “let her think it over.” Then he seemed to think it over too. A few seconds passed; the boat rocked up and back, as if it were breathing.
“The doctor they got at Vacaville?” he said. “I had to talk to him every Monday morning, ten-thirty, and then group session at four, every damn week, even after he already diagnoses I was a classic psychopath, without the ability to feel remorse. Said I couldn’t put myself in nobody else’s place. Thirty months, I had to do every day, on account I couldn’t feel remorse.”
She sat still; they sat still. It came to her that she was supposed to say something now, but she didn’t know what might save her. “Tell me the truth about something,” the mulatto said softly.
She nodded again. She looked quickly at the big one, and then away. He wanted to do what he wanted to do.
“You ever knowed anybody like that, that felt remorseful over what they done? I don’t mean if they got caught. Just sit around cryin’ over something that’s already past? What is your opinion on that?”
She felt him watching her, waiting to hear her lie. Whatever she said, he would hear the lie, and that would be it. That was what he was waiting for; then he’d let the other one do what he wanted.
“I don’t like doctors,” she said.
And that stopped him cold, and then he started to smile. She didn’t know what else to say, and so she only nodded, and her skin stuck to itself where the blood was drying on her neck, and then pulled loose.
The mulatto kept smiling, and in some way believed he had won her over. “You see that, Arthur? I told you, man. She gone start the motherfucking ship.”
They untied her, and when she stood up the towel fell from beneath the shirt, and as they went up the narrow stairway she felt fresh blood on her stomach. She was behind the big one, and smelled the baby powder on his pants. He stopped, halfway through the threshold, checking for other boats, and a moment later he reached down and picked her up by the arm, lifted her the way you lift a child, and it hurt her breast, but then the air was clean again, and cool, and she felt the sun.
The mulatto appeared a moment later and had a look around. There were other boats, but none of them close by. No one would see what happened; the only record would be what these two remembered themselves. The unfairness of that stirred her, that all that would be left of this was what they remembered.
She pulled herself to her feet, and stumbled over a rope. She would have fallen, but the big one caught her by the hair from behind and pulled her upright. She touched her face— she had been touching her face all her life; even as a child, she’d known she was beautiful— and did not recognize the shape.
He let her go, but stayed so close she could hear noises in his stomach. She walked to the back of the boat to the wheel. They both followed her, but unsure of their footing, afraid of the edges. The wind came up a little and there were whitecaps beyond the wall protecting the inlet.
She sat down at the pilot’s deck and saw that they’d left the ignition key on. Red lights all the way across the control panel. She left the key where it was and pushed the button on the other side of the panel, the one that warmed the fuel.
“What you doing there?” the mulatto said. He was standing to the side, watching, throwing a shadow over her arms.
“It’s a diesel,” she said. “You have to prime it.”
The mulatto looked across the water. There was movement on the decks of two of the sailboats. One of them a ninety-footer out of Seattle that had been moored there since before she and Alec came on the boat. “How long this gone take?” he said.
“Not too long.”
The big one towered behind her, his head a few inches from the boom. The boom was metal and she had once knocked herself out, bumping into it as she came up from below in the night.
She held the button down until her finger ached, using all the battery she could. “It don’t take this long,” the mulatto said.
The big one stared at him.
“I watched them before,” the mulatto said.
The big one said, “How come you ain’t watch
how
they do it when you watching how long it took?”
“How the fuck you gone see what people doing with those little switches, man?”
“All I know,” the big one said, “you said you could drive it.”
“Shit, nigger, you the one supposed to be mechanically inclined.”
Then the big one bent over to see what she was doing. “It don’t take this long,” he said, repeating what the mulatto had said, and she felt his breath on her scalp.
Then his hand was in her hair again, closing down, pulling out little pieces of her scalp. “You gone do it soon,” he said, “or else we going back downstairs.”
“I was you, I’d do what I could,” the mulatto said. “Arthur got a general resentment of white girls.”
He let go of her hair, and she moved her hand to the starter button. The engine turned over slowly, right on the edge, and then caught. The mulatto smiled, relieved. He looked around again, and none of the boats was coming over for a closer look; no one was watching.
She got up and went back to the wheel and pushed the throttle all the way up, moving the tachometer needle up past three thousand, past the red line, until the engine sounded like it was screaming. She saw the look on the mulatto’s face. “Charging the batteries,” she shouted over the noise; her voice was dry and caught on the words. She turned away, as if to go back down.
There was movement from the other side. The sun came through the swollen tissue of her eye the same way it would come through a shade, and she could just make out the shape of the big one’s head.
“Where you going?” he said.
“The toilet,” she said. “I have to do my toilet.”
“No, ma’am,” he said. Something formal in it, like a remembered courtesy from before, when things were different. The engine was still screaming; Alec never ran it over two thousand in his life.
“I have to,” she said.
He shrugged.
It was easier than she thought. She felt it on her legs, and then on her feet. She wasn’t sure if she’d done it on purpose, or if it had just happened. Some of it splashed, and that was what drew their attention.
The boat moved and she reached up and grabbed the boom to steady herself, the puddle growing at her feet, both of them still watching, the mulatto beginning to smile, and then she pushed against the boom with all her weight.
