The Last Ship (71 page)

M
oonlight fell across the cliffs that night. Full moonlight washed the cliffs, fell through the tall trees onto the main dwellings, farther on lanced through stilled branches onto the twenty-six smaller structures housing the women—five of these now vacant. Silence only answered the moon rays, all ship’s company, the island itself, asleep. Or apparently so, though down the cliffs terns awakened in their nests to a quickened rustle in the bush, gave forth their clipped irascible sound at the intrusion, this not being repeated returned to whatever sleep it is that terns enjoy. Silence resumed as a solitary figure stepped from the bushes and stood free of all noisy foliage, stood upon the long naked smooth rock ledge high above the sea; the moonlight defining the figure clearly as that of a woman; wearing Navy dungarees; no cap or hat; moonlight so full as to pick up the very color of the wheat-light woman’s hair.

She sat down upon the ledge, safely back from its plunging brink, hands clasped around drawn-up knees; sat as though in reverie, regarding the sea stretching in a vast glittering plain to distant horizons; moon and unnumbered constellations unloosed in a cloudless sky conspiring with the sea in an offertory of unutterable beauty, infinite loneliness; the woman’s figure seeming all relaxed, calmly poised, whatever tense alertness actually there cloistered. She had done this before. Four nights now, come to the ledge, sat upon it; as though waiting for someone; some unnamed one to come calling upon her; as a woman might wait for a lover.

The vigil kept again, after a while she got up, for some reason took a step or two nearer the edge, looked over the chasm as though pondering it, the awful drop onto the jagged moon-struck rocks far below upon which shipmates, sisters, had fallen and which seemed now to reach longingly high up to her, their shapes actually given a voice by the sea playing on them a metronomic low-pitched rhythm, the only sound in the silent night. She turned back toward the slope that led down from the heights, an air of disappointment conveyed at rendezvous not kept, departing, perhaps to come another time, perhaps to give up once and for all on her wanted visitor; had taken a dozen steps or so across the ledge. Saw him standing there, motionless in the moonlight, a silhouetted shape, perhaps thirty feet down the ledge. Seemed to take a breath, then come perfectly still, motionless as was he. Stood regarding him dispassionately across that space between them.

She must have known that rather delicate figure the very moment I myself did so; crouched in my guard post within the bushes, a fractional moment’s time allotted for the terrible shock of recognition, of identification. Then, instantly, a refusal to accept: Perhaps he himself was out for a stroll on a night so glorious; some wild absurd mistake to imagine that he, a man above all committed to the sanctity of reason, could have committed such acts; that almost frail body surely not even physically capable of doing so, the choking the doc had mentioned; mind insidiously then flashing back to a service record, to a scene on another faraway sea of a young officer hoisting himself with such effortless ease as to elicit a captain’s admiration aboard a French yacht full of the dead:
gymnast’s hands, stationary-rings-specialty hands 
. . . Mind then almost violently coming off of this, again rejecting; waiting for explanation, surely momentarily to come from him, from there: From within my own darkness the scene before me seeming as though cast in daylight by the brilliance of the moon; the long ledge gleaming, the two figures frozen in shadowy tableau, actors on a stage awaiting direction.

Then voices, low but crystalline clear in the windless night, the unearthly hush. His, first, as detached, yes, as reasonable as I had always known it to be in shrewdly explicating some perverse problem facing us, one only he could hope to solve, involving his recondite field; present even now that remote, self-confident tone which had unfailingly carried the assurance that he could deal with the situation, knew precisely what he was up to; now leavened with an almost courtly air; the words themselves, however oblique, ghastly certifying what one could not believe.

“Lieutenant Girard. I wouldn’t have hoped for yourself.”

Like a heart-quake, an instant of unbearable sadness and despair deeper than any known pain that the same young officer who stood there . . . without him and his skills, exercised often with heedless courage, seeking out the very air we could breathe, we would never have made it, none of us would be here. Then that was swept away by the urgency of concentration on the arranged tactics; body prepared to move instantly from those bushes; right hand reaching stealthily down to unfix the safety catch on the .45 caliber, hand remaining on the cool metal; waiting, unstirring, breathing itself kept down. With a relief seeing that he stood between the cliff’s edge and herself, myself a good deal closer to her than was he. Calculating: not quite at point-blank range for such a close-up gun, I would prefer him a step or two closer. Then the words from her heard after a pause, as though at some remarkable wonder; identity not enough, some puzzle that she still wished to solve, riddle to unravel; her voice as low as his but no reasonableness at all in it, rather a vast perplexity, laced with a strange cruelty.

“You intend to get us all?”

If she wished to elicit, he seemed all ready to supply answers: an old habit. To supply even a history. I could almost feel the soft unseen smile. Then hear the familiar mild loftiness.

“Actually, the undertaking began in that passage through the dark and the cold. The three women . . .”

A catch of breath from her, the felt surprise.

“You mean . . . Salinas, Kramer, Stoughton.” She said their names, shipmates long since gone, resurrecting their memories.

“They were the easiest. After all, men were going over the side with some frequency.” His voice uninfected, routine . . . rational; entirely unreluctant at the revelations; even, now, the faintest touch of vanity in it. “I believe I can say that no one ever suspected.”

“No one did.” A kind of mordant bitterness in hers. Proceeding, as though wishing, for some reason unknown, to extract confession from him, perhaps to make sure of each beyond all doubt, a prosecutor not content with one count of murder, or with three, but wanting the last one.

“Then the first one of the island? Austin. What did you do with her?”

“I buried her in a cave,” said matter-of-factly.

“Dillon?”

“Her also.”

“You killed the woman you were sleeping with.”

“What does that have to do with it? Just screwing.”

“Then the three more here. Talley . . . Walcott . . . Rollins. Over this cliff,” she said. The first dim savage intention in her voice. “Onto those rocks down there.”

At that, as if for the first time affected by this orderly recall of the sequence of events, or by the reference to the immediacy of scene of the most recent ones, he took a couple of steps toward her. I rose slightly in the bush, myself as much at hair-trigger as the weapon where my hand rested. I was astonished to hear her, still standing her ground, continue this dialogue, in her voice now a tone of curiosity, lethal curiosity I was beginning to feel . . . Myself hesitating, somewhat baffled, beginning to be fearful for her safety. Then seeing perhaps her purpose, as he came to a halt: to make him do so. Perhaps, I thought, with the intention also of bringing him step by step nearer to me. Holding back, trusting in her decision as to the necessity of what she was up to. She, as if she vitally required further information still; he, as before, recovered quickly, quite willing to reply with impeccable elucidation to any questions she might have; her continuing the interrogation now, pressing harder, more relentlessly.

“Why, in God’s name?”

He had stopped his advance, as if, as always, fascinated himself by any abstruse matter, challenging the intellect, any in the higher realm, and glad in particular that she had asked that question, as if justifiability was the easiest part of all.

“Plain enough.” I could sense the shrug. “What we had seen. Seen on the beaches of Italy. Those creatures at Amalfi—seen what my own specialty had done to them. Africa. Seen in the Kenya bush. Seen India, seen black sooty skies, night at noonday . . . All that aggrandizement of horrors, don’t you remember? The unendingness of it, the perfection of the job man had done! Done coldly, almost carelessly. Yes, I think that puts it accurately—or as much so as I can rightly convey.” It was as if he were questioning himself, trying as always to accomplish his prided precision. “I simply came to know that anyone who had managed to do all that didn’t have the slightest claim to continue.
Shouldn’t
continue. Even for his own sake, don’t you know? Something so elementally deviant, warped, in him; some deep, irreparable fissure in his psyche. Doesn’t belong here. Not constructed quite right for this world. In all of creation the only evil thing. The only one to destroy for the sake of it. Much better for him to go. Give some other species a chance—couldn’t possibly do worse.
Mutatis mutandis.
”

He spoke in tones of earnest persuasion, as if it were important to him to convince her of the inescapable logic of both his decision and his actions.

“The very fact I can do what I’m doing—murdering the innocent: Doesn’t that tell you how hopelessly flawed man is? If you should ask me what one thing . . . pushed me over the edge, you would doubtless say? Made me see reason I would put it. I’m not entirely certain. Usually in these cases it’s a little thing.” I heard an actual laugh, one of self-amusement, falling eerie on that moonlit stage. “Maybe the exact moment was when I saw snow begin to fall on the equator.”

In a way, in those elevated tones of his, it came out as a masterpiece of cogency, closely reasoned, imperviously rational: Someone had to take on this essential chore. Finished with a notation of the obvious.

“And of course the only possible way to achieve the objective, once defined, was to do away with the one means that could continue him.”

“Like me?” spoken almost softly.

“Like you and the other twenty-nine—was it?—I started with. Unfortunately.” The sentiment actually came through as heartfelt, honest regret at their necessary disposal.

“One by one. So that we are now only twenty-one. You have quite a few to go.”

“Yes . . . yes.” Abruptly a distinct tone of impatience had entered his voice, as if there being that many remaining it were necessary now to get on with the job, that they had given quite enough time to this colloquy, however fascinating to the mind the intellectual exercise.

He took a step forward. “But presently to be twenty . . .”

“You like to choke them first, don’t you, Mr. Selmon?”

She said it brutally, as a taunt. From across the ledge the rage came almost tangibly from him, as though at the unfairness of this caviling at his use of tools that after all were indispensable to his purpose. Now slowly, steadily on he came. She did not move, not even to step back; holding her ground, as though wanting him to come on; welcoming him. A wild thought tearing suddenly at my mind, a ship’s captain’s thought, that while we must not lose her, or another one of them, was there any way not to lose him whose skills we might yet mortally require—a moment’s idea that I might actually step forward onto that stage and reason with him. Then the insanity of the thought itself was obliterated as I emerged from the bush, knelt, took point-blank aim at the advancing shadow.

A gunshot, not my own, shattered the night air.

For a horrible moment I thought it had come from him. I looked quickly at her, with an immense relief saw her still standing there, saw moonlight glint as off something metallic, something she was holding. My eyes flashed back across the space between the two of them. The terns had awakened with a furious squawk into the night, this time exploding in a frenzy of white from their nests, beginning to swoop upward into the moonlight. He stopped, appeared to stagger, took another step toward her, even as she moved toward him, as she came on firing again and again in an orgasm of savagery, six shots bursting on the air until the clip was emptied; the body sometime during them seeming somehow caught in a convulsion of surprise, of total inexpectation, a spastic reflex appearing to jerk it upward, tremble it a moment on the cliff’s edge, where it pitched forward as though in flight, plunged high over the cliffs.

I came up by her, at the moment feeling in all that torrent of emotions rushing through me principally a hard anger; looked down at the .45 caliber she was still holding.

“I didn’t know you were carrying that.” I spoke harshly. I was shaking. “You never told me. You should have done so. Something could have gone wrong.”

She waited a moment, spoke in a quiet viciousness that sent a chill like ice crawling down my spine in the warm night.

“I wanted to do it myself.”

A shrill sound reached us from below. We looked over into the chasm. Under the moonlight we could make out the crumpled shape splayed across the great jagged rocks quite as three other shipmates had been, a flight of white terns circling as though in bafflement high over it, their shrieks piercing the peaceful night.

She ejected the clip methodically and stuck it in the pocket of her dungarees. We turned and started down the slope to the settlement. We had not gone far, crossing under the shadows of some trees, when a vibration seemed to go through her, bringing her to a halt, her body caught suddenly in a paroxysm of trembling. I put my arm around her. She stood there a moment, the tremor beginning to subside. My arm still lightly there, we continued, coming out from under the trees and into the moonlight lighting our way.

I
had made up my mind to give him a decent Navy burial, the same as his victims, anticipating perhaps a mild demurral in a few. I was surprised therefore at the depth of the opposition from Girard and from some of the other women. Girard faced me off with it in a session in my cabin the day after the event on the ledge under the moonlight, during which time Noisy Travis was building the coffin, the funeral service set for the following day. She came on hard.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “Putting their killer right alongside them. Jesus-God, Captain, he
choked
those women to death—or near enough to it before he tossed them over the cliff onto those rocks. He’s to lie right next to them?”

I tried first explaining. “Yes, he is, and let me tell you why. For seven months, no one aboard put himself at such risk to bring us through. The first man always to walk ashore—at how many dozens of beaches?—into radiation unknown when he did so. My definition for that is courage: uncommon valor, if you like. Something else. He is the one, more than anybody else, whose knowledge and skills determined why this island might be here, free of contamination, had a good chance of turning up. He found us the air we could breathe. We would never have made it without him.” I came down hard enough myself. “I don’t know what you have in mind, Miss Girard: taking him out to sea and feeding him to the sharks . . .”

“I wouldn’t mind that,” she butted in, unflinching.

“Well, I would. He went off the rails at the end but before that he damned well did as much as any hand to see that the ship didn’t. Before that he was a hell of a Navy man. A Navy officer. I aim to see him given a proper Navy burial.”

“You could do that,” she said slyly, “by taking him out to sea on the
James.
No burial more Navy than that.”

I was not about to fall for that, the act for him alone a pointed exclusion. I decided to use another reason, also valid.

“We can’t spare a drop of fuel.” I settled that.

The Jesuit had been present at that meeting; he had simply sat off to the side letting us go at it. She turned to him, seeking an ally.

“You see what I’m saying, don’t you, Chaplain?” A hectoring tone. “And it’s what most of the women feel. I haven’t taken a poll on it—I thought that would be obscene. And frankly I had no idea the captain would take this position. Well, what do you say, Chaplain?”

I cut that off before he could answer.

“It isn’t for the chaplain to say, Lieutenant. It isn’t the chaplain’s decision. It’s mine.”

“The women won’t attend the funeral service.”

I looked at her, something beginning to bristle in me. I tried to allow for her being overwrought, but I had to put a stop to this.

“Listen carefully, Miss Girard.” I could hear that familiar tone of mine, a captain’s voice, cold and hard when I had reached a decision and now expected all hands to shut up and obey it.

“They will not only attend it,” I said. “They will behave themselves as Navy officers and bluejackets are expected to when the captain issues an order. You will pass that word. Is that fully understood, Lieutenant?”

There was not an ounce of willingness in her answer. But I knew she would obey and see that they did so.

“Understood. I will pass the word.”

I dismissed her, curtly enough. “Now that that’s settled, that’s all for today, Miss Girard. The chaplain and I need to go over the Navy arrangements for the funeral. We needn’t detain you.”

She had snapped to her feet and turned to leave as fast as possible, before she did simply looking at me, eyes flashing, a kind of loathing in them, saying but the one word: “Sir.”

So it was that Storekeeper Talley, Radioman Walcott, Lieutenant (jg) Rollins, alongside in their individual graves, and Lieutenant (jg) Selmon, in the fourth grave next to them, lie forever now on a plot atop the cliffside, a pretty spot overlooking the island one way, the sea the other.

 *  *  * 

The following month went a long way to get us back to a measure of normalcy in the settlement, the ineluctable reverberations of the awful deeds, however, but very slowly beginning to diminish in the face of the lifted restrictions: women able to go about unaccompanied by armed men, the island once again a free and safe place. I suppose it would never leave our memories, what had happened to make those cottages now stand empty in the woods. The cottages themselves were there to remind us, the small gardener’s crew of men and women continuing to tend and maintain them, lest the bush reclaim them, along with the remaining occupied cottages. For my part I tended to avoid coming near them; so also I felt did most of the rest of ship’s company.

So it was I sensed us beginning to put that horror behind us, as we had found it essential to our survival to put behind so many other horrors—Girard, surprisingly, with all her exceptional ability in the earlier ones to do so, having the greatest difficulty at it now of any of ship’s company. The deaths of her sister shipmates, Talley’s death in particular, seemed to have left a permanent scar deep in the soul, some inner change felt in her, myself deeply concerned. Meanwhile, in the cottages, that profound undertaking that Selmon had attempted to interrupt and bring to an end, and succeeded to the extent of making a considerable dent in our mathematical chances to accomplish it, continued, itself helping as much as anything to temper the immediate past, as we faced ahead to that most urgent of all considerations occupying the community: Would babies come?

 *  *  * 

It was an exceptionally pretty island day. It had rained the day before, the island entombed in a mist which cut off visibility to the Pacific to no more than a cable’s length. Work ceasing for that day, the farming and fishing details kept in, the men mostly giving themselves over to that project Girard had initiated in the mess hall, and which continued to fascinate them to an astonishing absorbed degree, of everyone putting down everything possible as to whatever specialty he was knowledgeable in, or for that matter anything else he thought of importance or interest about man and his history, to pass on to those children we all so fervently hoped would soon announce their presence in the wombs of women. The sun had returned after its day off, shining down out of cloudless skies of azure. Delaney’s people were back at the Farm. Silva’s had gone off to their fishing, and one could look out over the island and see it all freshened by the rain, the greens in their wide spectrum seeming more vivid, a glorious sweetness in the island. Thurlow was in my cabin looking out over the sea, not much business to attend to, ourselves chatting on sundry topics as they might occur. We had begun to spend more time together, why I was not sure, other than that I was coming to find in him, and perhaps he in myself, an audience, a kindred soul, for any and whatever reflections that either of us might want to engage in.

“As a ship’s captain,” I said, “I can swear to you, Alex, that not the least of blessings of our situation is that I no longer have to make out those damned officer’s fitness reports. Or go over those enlisted personnel evaluations. I never imagined that simply taking the paperwork out of a man’s life would be such an ecstasy. Would it be an exaggeration to say that of all man’s chains, paperwork more than any other kept him from . . . well, living?”

Thurlow laughed softly. “A defensible hypothesis, certainly. Now that you mention it, looking back I think people spent more time in shuffling papers than in any other single activity.”

Our manner in these conversations had become one in equal parts badinage and seriousness. “And would you further agree,” I continued, “that the greater portion of it was entirely dispensable; no one a mite worse off if, oh, say, nine-tenths of it had been simply jettisoned?”

“We’ve found it true here, that’s for sure. I guess we’re all becoming islanders, sir. It hasn’t taken all that much time, has it?”

“No, it hasn’t. I wake up thankful, go to sleep thankful, for that. I think that contentedness in the island, of having made such a good place of it—good to start with, of course—is one thing that makes the last hand of us long for success in the cottages.” Long since we had been able to speak frankly, in plain language, in almost routine fashion, to that matter, almost as to any Navy operation in progress whose outcome was of vital interest to us. “To have someone to pass all this onto—pass on the island and what we’ve done to make it a home.”

“Aye, there’s nothing everyone—the men, the women—want more.”

“To have children to hand things down to: Could it be that that’s the chief source of man’s happiness, well-being? Is there any stronger drive in man?”

“Especially this time,” he said, a bit of the lightness gone.

“Aye. Especially this time, Alex.” Myself reflecting his more sober tone. “To pass on whatever may be left on . . .”

I grinned, breaking that spell, too serious, a bit of grimness in it, that had suddenly come over us.

“Nature doesn’t change, does it, Alex?” Himself a man much interested in the large permutations of existence, the planet itself, the stars, weather . . . and of course, man and his place in all of this.

“Aye, sir. If we could all just learn to heed Nature, follow the directions she points us to . . . most of our troubles surely would go away. And they’re rather simple directions actually . . .”

Bixby, that day’s messenger on the Lookout Tower, burst into the cabin. These sailors knew to knock, someone like Bixby especially.

“Captain,” she said, steady enough but the most absolute urgency in her voice. “Porterfield on the tower. He’s raised what he thinks is a ship. Far out . . .”

I was already on my way, sweeping past her, feeling her and Thurlow right behind me, running toward the Tower, scrambling up it. Porterfield raised up from Big Eyes.

“Bearing two five eight, sir.”

I bent to it. At first only the vast nothingness of waters, the view to the horizon immense, nineteen miles from that Tower. We were long since accustomed to mirages—all of us had at one time or another seen something on some horizon that he thought was a ship, was not, not once. My eyes, fixing hard, then seeing her, on the very edge of the horizon line, just the shape of her, no other identification I could make out. Then her coming nearer, distinctly with the intent of closing the island. How fast she came on! I was about to give the order to Porterfield to sound the general alarm (the drill of action if ever occurred what was now occurring, a ship approaching, long since worked out, part of it being the quick manning of the
Nathan James
to go out and meet her in case she held hostile intentions toward us and our island) . . . about to order the GQ when I made out the long black configuration, possessed by no other ship I had ever known, and last seen what seemed an age ago on a distant sea; coming on, closing the island. As she did, the blinker light atop her sail area began to flash across the waters. Through the scope I read the letters one by one:
T-U-R-G-E-N-E-V.