“There are always a few ships from the Norfolk naval base either coming or going,” Neil said quietly, but even as he said this he recognized still another reason he was depressed: the slow, awkward, terrifying way the U.S. and Russia seemed to be trying to frighten each other into war. For the last three days the radio news reports had been increasingly disturbing. Wednesday an American reconnaissance plane was downed by an Iraqi missile, probably fired from a launcher manned by Russians; yesterday the U.S. had rejected the Soviets’ bilateral troop-withdrawal proposal, denouncing it as extortionate; today the U.S. government had reinforced its Marine units in Saudi Arabia. Neil had listened to these radio reports alone.
“You ever serve in ships like those?” Jim asked, lowering his binoculars and smiling, still excited about the recent landfall.
“No, I was lucky,” Neil replied, turning back toward Jim. “They put me in the smallest combat vessels the Navy had—coastal patrol boats.”
“You ever get sunk?” Jim asked next.
Neil smiled, his stern face suddenly lit up, his blue eyes crinkling. Jim’s boyish curiosity about things compensated for some otherwise annoying habits: his penchants for listening to loud rock music at every opportunity and for leaving food, towels, dishes, and clothing strewn around the boat as if they were precious jewels he was magnanimously bestowing upon the poverty-ridden ship. But Jim’s enthusiasm redeemed him in Neil’s eyes—that, and the important fact that he’d turned out to be an excellent sailor.
“No, I can’t say I did,” Neil replied, standing up and watching the distant warships. “In fact, most of the war I and some of my men were thoroughly depressed that no one ever fired at us.”
“But dad said you were wounded,” Jim said.
“Oh, yes,” Neil agreed. “Occasionally we got lucky.”
“And you sunk a lot of ships.”
“So they say,” said Neil, feeling himself getting tense about the direction the conversation was taking. He walked toward Jim and began doing chin-ups from the edge of the wheelhouse roof. He had a muscular gymnast’s body, browned by the sun like Jim’s, but thicker, more mature, that of a well-conditioned athlete in his thirties. Like Jim he held his six-foot frame with military erectness. But his face, unlike Jim’s, was weathered and lined, a light scar running into his hairline at his right temple. His blue eyes often pinned people with distracting coldness but could suddenly light up and crinkle with the warmth of his smile. His shock of thick brown hair was uncombed and stiffly awry from the salt water and wind.
“Well?” insisted Jim.
Neil lowered himself from the last chin-up and moved into the wheelhouse and stood beside the eighteen-year-old. Two empty glasses sat on the wheelhouse shelf, reminders of the whiskey they’d drunk at dawn when they’d sighted land for the first time since northern Florida. Neil picked up one and drained it.
“It was a push-button war, even for the smallest ships,” he said slowly. “We killed at long range. If we ever happened to see what havoc we had wrought, it was always a little disconcerting to find that the ‘enemy gunboat’ or ‘Cong supply ship’ looked suspiciously like a fishing boat, and the dead and dying like bony fishermen.”
Neil paused, staring through the windows of the wheelhouse, forward past Vagabond’s wide white deck and mainmast to the gray waves stretching out ahead.
“Some of them must have been… Cong,” said Jim.
“Oh, sure,” said Neil.
“Is that why you resigned your commission?”
“That and a dozen other reasons.”
He didn’t go on. He walked back out of the wheelhouse to end the conversation. He knew he’d been the wrong man for the job. When he’d graduated from Annapolis, he’d been fully prepared to stand on the quarterdeck and fight to the last man. But he wasn’t prepared to stand and blast away, not knowing whether he was killing good guys or bad guys, rarely being fired at in return, and forbidden by standing orders to pick up the wounded survivors.
Resigning his commission had been both a protest against a specific war, and an acknowledgment that for him, even if the war could be “justified,” the technological and impersonal means of fighting it could not. For years after resigning he’d been a loner, unsuited to either the unregimented chaos of civilian life or the companionship with his old Navy friends. A woman had brought him back to life, but after a year and a half, with the abrupt arbitrariness of battle, she had been killed in an auto accident. Since then he’d found a healthier solitude as professional captain of wealthy men’s yachts, reestablishing some of the order that he’d liked in military life, and finding a closeness with the sea and sky that seemed to heal.
Staring up at the set of the mainsail he noticed two trails of jet vapor inching across the sky, the thin cotton lines tinged with pink and seeming to emerge from nowhere in the west and to be disappearing into nowhere in the east. The planes themselves were invisible. When a loud sonic boom broke the stillness of the early morning, Jim turned quickly toward Neil.
“What was that?!” he exclaimed.
Neil pointed to the vapor trails in the sky.
Jim seemed momentarily frightened, but then grinned.
“I thought the destroyers had opened fire on us,” he said.
Neil watched the cotton trails disappear into the brightness to the east.
“Welcome back to civilization.”
Throughout the morning Vagabond sailed up the bay at a little over seven knots, and Neil went over the boat, making sure it would be ready for its owner’s inspection that night. Vagabond was a fast, roomy trimaran that moved through the water like a strange three-legged insect skipping from wave to wave. You entered the cabins in the side hull from the two side cockpits and went down steps to the long narrow floor area. The berths were up in the “wing” area over the water, separated from the main cabin by a plywood and veneer partition. Vagabond was steered from the enclosed wheelhouse that was a little aft of the center of the boat, between the main cabin with its galley and dinette area and Neil’s aft cabin. On either side of the wheelhouse were the open cockpits with settee seats and the sliding hatchway leading down into the side cabins. All this space meant that people could get away from each other at sea, and Neil, being a private man, found that important, almost as important as Vagabond’s ability to go fast, without heeling, in almost any kind of weather.
At noon he relinquished the helm to Jim in order to put through a call to Frank at his office in New York City. Jim turned on the transistor radio to catch the news, which was unusual, since he usually preferred to listen to music on his cassette tapes.
Neil’s aft cabin contained only twelve square feet of standing room between his double berth dead aft and the bulkhead that separated his cabin from the ship’s engine compartment. Although it was not as spacious as the cabins in the two side hulls, Neil preferred it to anyplace else aboard. The radiotelephone, a shortwave radio, and a chart table had all been installed here; his books were crammed onto two long shelves. With the large gray radio, the navigational equipment, and the sparse furnishings, it was a very masculine room, “about as pretty as the inside of a tank,” as one woman had described it.
When the marine operator put the call through to New York, Neil was glad to hear Frank’s husky voice.
“This stupid war stuff is screwing up everything,” Frank announced loudly. “I can’t get a flight to Washington; they’re booked solid. You think you could meet me today in Crisfield? I can get a flight to Salisbury, Maryland, and then rent a car.” Crisfield was a small fishing town about twenty-five miles across the bay from Point Lookout.