When Olly was in charge everything proceeded as quietly as a silent movie, the only sound being Olly’s soft crooning to the fish. Olly never told the man with the rod or the helmsmen what to do, but by talking to the fish—“Come on in a little closer, fella, my back hurts and I don’t like leaning down none”—the man with the rod would know exactly what to do. When he had gaffed the fish, Olly would say something like “Up you go, sonny, easy does it,” as if the fish wanted to come aboard, and all of them were involved in a cooperative enterprise. Then, after the fish was flopping on the deck, Olly would take a minute to praise the fish to all the onlookers. “Look at those colors, will you? I ain’t seen anything as pretty as that since my second wife bought herself that new dress,” or “Now isn’t that a big fella. Must weigh twenty-five pounds and not an ounce of fat. Bet he was an Olympic champ down below…”
And when Olly killed, he always began talking to the fish again.
“Okay, big fella, afraid we got to quiet you down. I gave you time for your prayers but if you got anything else you want to say you better say it now…” The fish would flop violently in response to this, or once, so everyone agreed, made some distinct grunting sounds, and then Olly with one neat slice would quiet the fish forever.
“Don’t he look beautiful?” Olly would conclude. “Just hope I look half as good when the Big Fisherman hauls me in and lays me out. I’m damn sure I won’t taste as good.”
Conrad Macklin on the other hand gaffed and killed a fish with a fierce scowl, as if he were involved in a life-and-death combat with a lifelong enemy.
When Jeanne participated in the fishing, Neil found himself focusing more attention on her than on the fish. Her glistening dark skin and full lithe body distracted him considerably from the problem of boarding the fish, especially as she wrestled with the rod and reel or stuck her behind in the air to lean down to gaff a fish, clad as she usually was only in shorts and a bikini top. She and Katya seemed to have the same effect on Tony, Macklin, and Frank. Lisa’s budding body, perhaps because of her shy dignity, was less observed, except by Jim.
They were adapting to a world of scarcity. Neil had decreed that their remaining two gallons of diesel fuel could only be used to charge the three batteries. Oil was unavailable everywhere now except to the military. To avoid having to charge the batteries any more than necessary, Neil used them solely for the shortwave radio. For illumination they used kerosene lamps and, if necessary, flashlights. They had only four gallons of kerosene, and that too might never again be easy to obtain. The two dozen candles aboard Neil stored as light of last resort. Even matches were scarce. Fortunately, no one smoked except Jim, who smoked marijuana and was abstaining, and Macklin, whose cigarettes had been confiscated by Neil to use in the West Indies as barter.
But the bleakness of the land world and of shortages Neil and Frank and Olly kept to themselves. For all of them the sea represented a haven, a relief from the terrors and suffering they had experienced on land, and Neil wanted to try to keep it that away. For the first time there began to be casual joking among them that had been missing before.
On the second afternoon Neil had overheard Captain Olly teasing Frank about Vagabond.
“Yep,” Captain Olly was saying. “You got a good ship here, Frank. All you got to do is take off those two side boats you got, and unstep the masts, and put a bowsprit on her and paint her black, and she’d be right pretty. Might not even have to paint her.”
Frank laughed as he sat down in the wheelhouse with a small cup containing his daily ration of beer.
“Thanks,” he said to Olly, who was at the helm with his own cup.
“Don’t be embarrassed your boat don’t look like a boat,” Olly went on. “Brazen it out. Pretend you got yourself a beginner’s boat. You know, a three-wheeler so you won’t tip over.”
Frank laughed again, and Neil realized that it was the first time since the war had begun that he had laughed.
“I tell people I got a special three-for-the-price-of-one deal that I couldn’t pass up,” Frank said.
“Yep. Good story. Good story. Got to tell them something, that’s for sure, so they won’t know you’re nuts,” Captain Olly concluded.
While Neil assumed responsibility for the sailing of the ship, Jeanne began to assume responsibility for the way they interacted with each other. At dinner their second day out she suggested that at every evening meal they observe a half-minute of silence before eating, and if anyone wanted to offer thanks for the food or for life, he or she might. Jeanne usually spoke, occasionally mentioning some specific individual she wanted to acknowledge. Often Katya or Jim or Frank would also add a brief word, more rarely Tony or Neil.
That night too she embraced and kissed each of the others who were still topside before she went below to her berth. Although all she said was “Good night” and the person’s name, Neil could see the physical contact breaking through the isolation each of them tended to feel. Even Conrad Macklin flushed and looked pleased. Among the men, at Jeanne’s insistence, there were more “Good job, Frank,” and “Thanks, Jim,” and “That’s good, Tony,” where before there had been either cold correctness or nothing.
Captain Olly had the most trouble adapting to the more affectionate routine that Jeanne kept urging upon them. When Neil relieved him at the helm at the change of watch and said “Nice job, Olly,” he testily replied, “Can’t expect me to run aground in five thousand feet of water.” When Jeanne gave him a goodnight kiss the second night, he grimaced and grinned. “’T warn’t much of a kiss,” he said. “If you want to get laid, you got to do better than that.” Jeanne looked surprised and then smiled. “Don’t worry,” she had said, her eyes flashing. “When I want to get laid, the man will know it.”
Most of them found the meals repetitious and skimpy. They were rationing themselves severely on the last of their canned foods and some remaining fruits and vegetables, and salting and drying some of their fish steaks for later. They were cooking in salt water and had cut their fresh water intake to a quart per person per day. The six adults were experimenting with drinking a cup or two of sea water every day.
To help avoid unnecessary gloom Neil became a censor. He permitted only Frank and Olly to listen to the shortwave and transistor radios with him. The violent antiwhite, anti-Americanism he was picking up from stations in the West Indies they kept to themselves. The probability of mass starvation within a month on many of the islands they did not mention. Officially they were sailing for a chain of islands that were still untouched by the war. In his heart Neil knew that no place and no one and nothing would ever be untouched by this war.
Shortwave and AM reports from the U.S. mainland raised a new specter on the third day at sea. A summer flu that seemed to be afflicting many people in the west and southwest had already caused an unusually high number of fatalities. One ham operator speculated that a biological warfare laboratory had been destroyed, and that part of its stockpile of disease germs was responsible for the epidemic. In any case it now seemed to be killing more people than fallout. Typhoid had also become a problem. Of the fighting itself there was little news. The superpowers were still technically at war, but now they were more like two exhausted and glassy-eyed fighters who had landed such devastating blows in the first round that they now seemed barely capable of standing up, much less hitting each other. Thus it seemed that each day the ramifications and elaborations of the world disaster spread a little further, like a spilled bottle of black ink slowly soaking along a paper towel. Cuba had been heavily bombed with conventional ordnance early in the war, and when the Cubans tried to take the naval base at Guantanamo, the U.S. had used a tactical nuclear weapon to destroy most of the enemy forces. Cuba’s air force and navy had allegedly been destroyed, but no effort made to invade the island. Guantanamo was being evacuated.