run over in traffic.
I had to hurry. They’d be coming up any minute. I slipped forward and stood on the deck, looking down the hatch.
“Surf!” I yelled. “Surf, ho!”
When they were both on the steps I’d dive down on top of them. All three of us would go down in one tangle in that narrow space between the settees, three of us with two guns in an area not quite as wide and a little longer than a casket. Then, in all the foaming craziness some detached part of my mind wondered quite calmly how a girl alone would ever get us out of there. She’d be a week reaching land, maybe ten days. She’d go mad. They were starting up. Barclay was coming first. I didn’t dive.
“Surf!” I yelled again. I pointed.
He came up on deck, his head starting to turn in the direction I was pointing. I swung. It kept on turning, and I felt his jaw break, and then his whole body pivoted and went off balance and the sloop rolled to starboard and he went over the side. I was falling, too, across the open hatch, across the head and shoulders of Barfield emerging from the hatch, like dropping across the arms of a rising grease rack or the top of an ascending freight elevator that didn’t stop or even slow down at the impact but just kept on coming up.
He was a bull. He came erect on the top step before he toppled at last and fell. We crashed to the deck and when the sloop rolled down to port we hung poised over the rail with blue water slipping by just under my face. For some reason we didn’t go overboard, but rolled in one straining tangle onto the cockpit seat and then down onto the grating. A big fist beat at my face. I tried to get my hands around his throat. He heaved upward and we rolled over in the space between the seats. The gun was in his hip pocket. He had it out and was swinging it at my face. I caught his wrist. The gun went off as I got my other hand on his wrist and twisted. It slid out of his hand and kicked along the grating.
He hit me on the temple and my head slammed back against the planks. He was coming to his knees, groping behind him for the gun. I tried to push myself up, and then beyond him I saw her. She ran along the deck and dropped into the cockpit. I opened my mouth to yell at her, but nothing came out. Or maybe I did yell and my eardrums were still paralyzed by the crashing of the gun. Everything was happening in an immense silence and slow motion, as if we were three bits of something caught and held suspended in cooling gelatin. She picked up the gun and was swinging it at his head. He should have fallen, but it had no more effect on him than a dropped chocolate Eclair. He heaved upward, lashing out behind him with one big arm. She fell, and her head struck the coaming at the forward end of the cockpit. I came to my feet and lunged at him and we fell over and beyond her onto the edge of the deck just as the sloop rolled again and we slid over the side into the water.
We went down through warm greenness, still struggling and almost completely oblivious to the fact of having moved our hatred from one element to another. The propeller rumbled past, scattering white bubbles like dust. One of his arms was still locked around my neck and he was trying to swing with the other, the blows softened and slowed down by the water. Neither of us made any attempt to break and swim to the surface. I could see the flat slab of a face inches from mine, and tried to get my hands back at his throat. We went on down, turning slowly like a big pinwheel. Then he jerked with sudden spasm and the arm around my neck clamped tighter, with something wild and frantic about it now. I brought my feet up and put them against him and pushed. It felt as if my head were being pulled off. My lungs hurt. I knew I was going to inhale in a minute, and that he already had. I kicked at him once more and my