The Last One Left Read Free Page B

gray. To the southeast he saw a southbound tanker. They were out of the Gulf Stream. The motion was easing. They were on course.
    She seemed very subdued, and he glanced sidelong at her from time to time to see how angry she was. But it was a remote expression he could not read.
    “Junie, honey, it’s only by a freak of chance we ever came close enough to that boat to see it.”
    “I suppose.”
    “I mean, we wouldn’t be
expected
to see it.”
    “Howard, what are you driving at?”
    “Honey, on a thing like this, there can be a lot of red tape. I mean it could get us hung up in Bimini, or maybe even having to go back and fill out a lot of reports. You understand, if I was absolutely
convinced
you saw what you thought you saw, wild horses couldn’t have kept me from getting to that boat.”
    “Yes, Howard.”
    “And I can’t help what happened to the transmitter.”
    “I guess not.”
    “All in all, I think the wisest course is that we forget we ever saw that boat. We wouldn’t want to spoil anything, you know, like for Kip and Selma.”
    “We wouldn’t want to spoil anything,” she said, and went over to begin a careful descent of the open ladderway.
    “Is that okay with you?” he called.
    “Is what okay?”
    “To just forget it happened?”
    “Sure. Sure,” she said and backed out of sight. A moment later her face reappeared and she said, “I busted the binoculars.”
    “Accidents will happen aboard ship. Don’t give it a second thought. I got the old ones aboard, those surplus ones.”
    Later, in calm water, he called her up to the flying bridge. When she stood beside him, he said, “Land Ho, and right on the button. Look at that range marker on shore. By God, we could damn near run that channel without taking her out of pilot.”
    “Very good, dear.”
    “Look at all the crazy colors in that water off the bar there.”
    “It’s beautiful.”
    Her lean hand rested atop the instrument panel. He covered it with his and said, “That’s Bimini, old lady. And bank on this—the Prowts and the Heaters are going to have one hell of a month of fun.”
    For a long time she did not answer. She slowly withdrew her hand. “It’s going to be a ball,” she said without smile or inflection. “Tell me when you want me to take a line forward.” She climbed back down to the cockpit deck.
    Howard Prowt cut off the pilot and took over manual control, cutting his speed another increment as he headed for the channel.Always, coming into harbor after a good job of navigation, he had that Horatio Hornblower feeling, grizzled and sea-tough and with a look of far places.
    He reached for that feeling, and for an anticipation of all the courses he would run, all the expertise he would bring back to Delmar Bay one month hence, but he could find neither.
    He merely felt old. And his legs felt tired. And his gut felt uneasy. And he wished he were back sitting on the bank of Heron Bayou with a cold beer in his hand, and the HoJun tied to his own dock in that tricky way he had devised all by himself.
    Damn her anyway.

Two
    STANIKER , on an ever-lasting afternoon, fought off the dreams and the visions. There was some kind of a Thing, some tantalizing entity which kept launching them at him to see how he’d make out. That time in South America when they’d gone after those lunker trout in the mountain lake, those Indios had those light nets they could throw, float them out very pretty.
    Dreams came like the nets, something throwing them at him, floating down to lay like cobwebs across his mind. So then each time he had to pluck off every strand. There was a way to do it. You focused on some real thing, close at hand. The sheath knife, rusting with an astonishing speed. Could you measure the days by the way the rust grew? Think of the knife and you could pluck away one strand. Look at the pile of empty shells of the sea-things you had eaten, had pried off the ragged black rocks at low tide, smashed with stones, trying