He lay on his side and then, as the boat rolled, the moonlight came in and he could see everything in the cockpit clearly.
It’s crowded, he thought. That’s what it is, it’s crowded. Then, he thought, I wonder what she’ll do. I wonder what Marie will do? Maybe they’ll pay her the rewards. God damn that Cuban. She’ll get along, I guess. She’s a smart woman. I guess we would all have gotten along. I guess it was nuts all right. I guess I bit off too much more than I could chew. I shouldn’t have tried it. I had it all right up to the end. Nobody’ll know how it happened. I wish I could do something about Marie. Plenty money on this boat. I don’t even know how much. Anybody be O.K. with that money. I wonder if the Coast Guard will pinch it. Some of it, I guess. I wish I could let the old woman know what happened.
I wonder what she’ll do? I don’t know. I guess I should have got a job in a filling station or something. I should have quit trying to go in boats. There’s no honest money going in boats any more. If the bitch wouldn’t only roll. If she’d only quit rolling. I can feel all that slopping back and forth inside. Me. Mr. Bee-lips and Albert. Everybody that had to do with it.
These bastards too. It must be an unlucky business. Some unlucky business. I guess what a man like me ought to do is run something like a filling station. Hell, I couldn’t run no filling station. Marie, she’ll run something. She’s too old to peddle her hips now. I wish this bitch wouldn’t roll. I’ll just have to take it easy. I got to take it as easy as I can. They say if you don’t drink water and lay still. They say especially if you don’t drink water.
He looked at what the moonlight showed in the cockpit.
Well, I don’t have to clean her up, he thought. Take it easy. That’s what I got to do. Take it easy. I’ve got to take it as easy as I can. I’ve got sort of a chance. If you lay still and don’t drink any water.
He lay on his back and tried to breathe steadily. The launch rolled in the Gulf Stream swell and Harry Morgan lay on his back in the cockpit. At first he tried to brace himself against the roll with his good hand. Then he lay quietly and took it.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The next morning in Key West Richard Gordon was on his way home from a visit to Freddy’s Bar where he had gone to ask about the bank robbery. Riding his bicycle, he passed a heavy-set, big, blue-eyed woman, with bleached-blonde hair showing under her old man’s felt hat, hurrying across the road, her eyes red from crying. Look at that big ox, he thought. What do you suppose a woman like that thinks about? What do you suppose she does in bed? How does her husband feel about her when she gets that size. Who do you suppose he runs around with in this town? Wasn’t she an appalling looking woman? Like a battleship. Terrific.
He was almost home now. He left his bicycle on the front porch and went in the hallway, closing the front door the termites had tunnelled and riddled.
“What did you find out, Dick?” his wife called from the kitchen.
“Don’t talk to me,” he said. “I’m going to work. I have it all in my head.”
“That’s fine,” she said. “I’ll leave you alone.”
He sat down at the big table in the front room. He was writing a novel about a strike in a textile factory. In today’s chapter he was going to use the big woman with the tear-reddened eyes he had just seen on the way home. Her husband when he came home at night hated her, hated the way she had coarsened and grown heavy, was repelled by her bleached hair, her too big breasts, her lack of sympathy with his work as an organizer. He would compare her to the young, firm-breasted, full-lipped little Jewess that had spoken at the meeting that evening. It was good. It was, it could be easily, terrific, and it was true. He had seen, in a flash of perception, the whole inner life of that type of woman.
Her early indifference to her husband’s caresses. Her desire for children and security. Her lack of sympathy with her husband’s aims. Her sad attempts to simulate an interest in the sexual act that had become actually repugnant to her. It would be a fine chapter.
The woman he had seen was Harry Morgan’s wife, Marie, on her way home from the sheriff’s office.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Freddy Wallace’s boat, the Queen Conch, 34 feet long, with a V number out of Tampa, was painted white; the forward deck was painted a color called Frolic green and the inside of the cockpit was painted Frolic green. The top of the house was painted the same color. Her name and home port, Key West, Fla., were painted in black across her stern. She was not equipped with outriggers and had no mast. She was equipped with glass windshields, one of which, that forward of the wheel, was broken.
There were a number of fresh, wood-splintered holes in the newly painted planking of her hull. Splintered patches could be seen on both sides of her hull about a foot below the gunwale and a little forward of the center of the cockpit. There was another group of these splintered places almost at the water line on the starboard side of the hull opposite the aft stanchion that supported her house or awning. From the lower of these holes something dark had dripped and hung in ropy lines against the new paint of her hull.
She drifted broadside to the gentle north wind about ten miles outside of the north-bound tanker lanes, gay looking in her fresh white and green, against the dark, blue Gulf Stream water. There were patches of sun-yellowed Sargasso weed floating in the water near her that passed her slowly in the current going to the north and east, while the wind overcame some of the launch’s drift as it set her steadily further out into the stream. There was no sign of life on her although the body of a man showed, rather inflated looking, above the gunwale, lying on a bench over the port gasoline tank and, from the long seat alongside the starboard gunwale, a man seemed to be leaning over to dip his hand into the sea.
His head and arms were in the sun and at the point where his fingers almost touched the water, there was a school of small fish, about two inches long, oval-shaped, golden-colored, with faint purple stripes, that had deserted the gulfweed to take shelter in the shade the bottom of the drifting launch made in the water, and each time anything dripped down into the sea, these fish rushed at the drop and pushed and milled until it was gone. Two gray sucker fish about eighteen inches long, swam round and round the boat in the shadow in the water, their slit mouths on the tops of their flat heads opening and shutting; but they did not seem to comprehend the regularity of the drip the small fish fed on and were as likely to be on the far side of the launch when the drop fell, as near it.
They had long since pulled away the ropy, carmine clots and threads that trailed in the water from the lowest splintered holes, shaking their ugly, sucker-topped heads and their elongated, tapering, thin-tailed bodies as they pulled. They were reluctant now to leave a place where they had fed so well and unexpectedly.
Inside the cockpit of the launch there were three other men. One, dead, lay on his back where he had fallen below the steering stool. Another, dead, lay humped big against the scupper by the starboard aft stanchion. The third, still alive, but long out of his head, lay on his side with his head on his arm.
The bilge of the launch was full of gasoline and when she rolled at all this made a sloshing sound. The man, Harry Morgan, believed this sound was in his own belly and it seemed to him now that his belly was big as a lake and that it sloshed on both shores at once. That was because he was on his back now with his knees drawn up and his head back. The water of the lake that was his belly was very cold; so cold that when he stepped into its edge it numbed him, and he was extremely cold now and everything tasted of gasoline as though he had been sucking on a hose to syphon a tank.
He knew there was no tank although he could feel a cold rubber hose that seemed to have entered his mouth and now was coiled, big, cold, and heavy all down through him. Each time he took a breath the hose coiled colder and firmer in his lower abdomen and he could feel it like a big, smooth-moving snake in there, above the sloshing of the lake. He was afraid of it, but although it was in him, it seemed a vast distance away and what he minded, now, was the cold.
The cold was all through him, an aching cold that would not numb away, and he lay quietly now and felt it. For
