Gulf coast girl: original title, Scorpion reef - By Charles Williams Page 0,67

and Barfield went below and sat in the cabin, talking. After a while I heard them turn on the radio. It had short wave in addition to the marine bands, and they got an Argentine station playing Latin American dance music. Sunset was a great splash of salmon and orange and pink, fading slowly while the sea stretched out like a rolling, dark prairie.

I was about to call Barclay to take the tiller so I could light the running lights when Shannon came up through the hatch. After I’d shown her briefly how to handle it, she took over while I attended to them.

When I came back she slid forward and sat there near enough to touch, but not touching, saying nothing. Sunset was a bad time of day if you had trouble, but I could sense she didn’t want any help with it, at least not yet. There was an odd awkwardness between us. It would go away after a while, but until it did there was nothing we could do about it. I tried imagining that this was the Java Sea and we were alone aboard, two people who had forgotten the rest of the world and had been forgotten by it. For a moment it was very real, and the longing was almost unbearable.

There was just enough light in the afterglow to see her face, and when I looked around again she was crying. She was doing it quite silently with her head tilted back a little and not trying to put her hands up to her face or wipe away the tears or anything. The crying just welled up in her and overflowed.

“I’m sorry, Bill,” she said after a while. “This will be the last time. I got to thinking of him all alone there in that big house, with it getting d-dark outside. He was afraid of the dark. For months he was terrified of it. B-But always before I was there with him—”

He was leaning on her. She held him up and kept the sawdust from leaking out while he planned to double-cross her and leave her. And when it blew up in his face he went back and leaned on her some more. I didn’t feel anything for him, nor care a damn if it did get dark outside, but it was a gruesome picture if you couldn’t keep your mind off it—a dead man lying there alone in all that Swedish modern with one bridge lamp burning day in and day out and a phonograph still going if it hadn’t shut itself off. He probably wouldn’t be found for over 24 hours yet. She’d said Tuesday and Friday were the days the maid came. When they did, they’d pick up her car out at the airport almost immediately and know they had it made, all except finding her.

There was nothing I could do. I let her cry. It was a helpless feeling.

After a while she got it under control, and she said quietly, “I wonder why nothing is ever simple and clear-cut. Why can’t things be completely black or completely white, instead of all mixed up? What he did amounted to deliberate betrayal; so that should make it easy, shouldn’t it? There’s your nice, pat answer. It’s routine. It’s a cliché. She was in love with him, but he wasn’t in love with her. That’s fine, except it was the other way around. He was a heel. That’s simple and easy, except it wasn’t true.”

I waited, saying nothing. She was trying to tell me about it, or maybe trying to straighten it out in her own mind, and she didn’t want me mixed up in it. Not yet, anyway. She was talking to a psychiatrist, or a priest, or to herself.

“He was driven to it. It’s easy to say it was his own fault, that he was old enough to know it was wrong, and that he began it deliberately. But people have been tempted by easy money before, and it’ll go on happening as long as you have people and have money. What I’m trying to say is that in the beginning there was no question of running out on me. Maybe he even thought he was doing it partly tor me. He liked to give me things. Expensive things.

“You don’t dive or fall into something like that all at once. It’s gradual. It was simple at first, and then it failed and it was more difficult, and in the end