The Wanderer

Chapter Thirty-eight

As Hunter steered the Corvette slowly down the next to the last hill to the Coast Highway, the emerald sun setting on the watery horizon was still bright enough to show what looked like at least a mile of new beach stretching out beyond the old one to the edge of a calm sea. He grinned around at the others, his nerves untouched by the eeriness of their green-lit faces. He had a childish impulse to shout to Hixon in the truck just behind: “What’d I tell you? Dead low or near it! — I hit it on the nose!”

“Look, Mommy,” Ann said, “a vine growing across the road¹.”

It couldn’t be that, Hunter knew, but it was some sort of vegetable debris, perhaps a branch torn down and blown there by yesterday’s rainstorm. There was the faintest popping sound as the tires rolled across it. The car skidded a little, and he straightened it and decreased speed. He did this quite automatically since like the others his attention was preoccupied by the degree to which the sea had receded. A mile now seemed a gross underestimate. He was at first amazed, then fascinated, finally plain awestruck.

Going downhill made the sun set faster. The green light grew gloomy. Although the ocean was so far away, its reek was strong and fishy. There was no wind, and save for the chug of the two motors there was a general hush. No cars were passing along the Coast Highway, he remarked to himself — and only then realized that the stupid part of his mind had still been expecting them.

They started down the last hill. Again the car skidded a fraction, and this time Hunter shifted into low as he straightened.

“I don’t remember that ruined house,” Rama Joan said thoughtfully.

“And I don’t remember the old boat out in the field,” Margo chimed in from behind her.

There was a sudden squawking. “Look at those white birds pecking on the hillside,” Wanda observed shrilly. “Why, I do believe they’re gulls.”

“Here comes another vine,” Ann informed them. “No, two. Oh, and a fish.”

At that word a horror gripped Hunter and the scene around him turned nightmarish, though for the moment he didn’t quite know why — there was something dreadfully obvious his mind refused to see. Hixon was honking behind him. Did the fool want to pass? One — two — three — four. Four honks meant something, but he couldn’t remember what, because now he realized that the horror was the illusion that they were traveling under the sea — the silence, the gloomy green light, the black road changing by imperceptible degrees to a feather-smooth slope of silty slime, the fishy reek ("…and a fish!"), the seaweed bladders popping as they drifted across the two “vines"…

Four means stop, Doc had said. Instantly, but very gingerly, Hunter put on the brakes. At first the car hardly slowed at all. Then gradually it came to a halt, slewing around in spite of all his steering — came to a stop because its tires were pushing up ridges of silt from a smooth coating an inch or more thick on the road.

He looked back along the road, simply because the car was now facing almost backwards, and he saw the truck, green in the last of the sunlight, stopped, unslewed, fifty feet or so behind. His hands were shaking on the wheel, and his heart was pounding.

It was Rama Joan who put the dreadfully obvious into words. She said, rather casually: “We must have passed the highwater mark a quarter of a mile back.”

That was what was jolting his muscles and drumming his heart, Hunter realized — and as he realized it, his body began to quiet — simply the thought of the salt water that had been everywhere here and dozens of feet overhead, only six hours ago, leaving behind its sea-life and its sea-earth and its wreckage, the salt water that would be here again six hours from now — the thought of the tides of a few feet now sinking at low beneath the continental shelves and rushing back at high over the foothills of mountains.

The women were taking it with an incomprehensible calm, he thought. It would have seemed more natural if they’d been screaming.

Hixon and Doddsy and Wojtowicz and McHeath were coming down to them from the truck. They were walking oddly — stiff-legged and with elbows out. But, of course — the mud-coated road would be very slippery.

Hixon and Doddsy stepped beside him, while the others walked on. The Little Man said, looking out to sea: “It’s…” and then words evidently failed him.

The last sliver of green sun went under, but the whole sky stayed green — pale as a transparent wave to the west, dark as a forest to the east.

There was a rhythmic throbbing. Hunter realized that the engine of the Corvette was still turning over. He twisted the ignition key.

Only then did he realize that everyone else must be as stunned as he was.

A couple of minutes later they were all pulling out of their shock. Most of them had got out of the cars and were standing gingerly in the muck.

Wojtowicz and McHeath came trudging back uphill. The latter’s pants were covered with mud and his shoes were big blobs of it. “You can’t take a car that way, Mr. Hunter,” he said cheerfully. “It gets feet deep on the highway.”

Wojtowicz nodded emphatically. “The kid went further than I did,” he averred. “Just look at him.”

“And all deposited in only three high tides,” the Little Man said, shaking his head. “Amazing.”

Hunter said bitterly: “There’s nothing else for it — we’re going to have to go back and take that other road with the sign saying it led to Vandenberg.” He looked at Hixon. “You were right.”

Hixon nodded. He surveyed the Corvette’s mired wheels. “I guess I can pull you out of this,” he said. “I got a towline, and where I’m stopped the mud’s a lot thinner and almost dry. I should have good enough traction. And I got chains if I need ’em.”

“I don’t want to be a bird of ill omen,” the Little Man said, “but when we go back there’s the danger of running into those young goons from the Valley.”

Hixon shrugged. “That’s one of the chances we got to take. There’s no other road. We’ll hope Ross’s roadblock held ’em and they headed for Malibu. I’ll get the towline.”

Margo said to Hunter, “It’s only four miles to Vandenberg. Couldn’t we walk it? Even with the mud it shouldn’t take more than a few hours.”

Hunter said to her in a harsh whisper: “Use your head. In less than a few hours the coast road will be under water. Even this spot’ll be fifty or more feet deep.”

“Oh, I’m getting stupid,” Margo sighed wearily. “I wish…” She didn’t say what.

He inquired, rather bitterly: “Isn’t living by yourself in the new reality so much fun any more?”

She looked up at him. “No, Ross,” she said, “it’s not.”

The Little Man interrupted: “And when it comes to walking, we’ve got to remember we’ve got Ray Hanks to carry. I don’t like his condition, Ross. I’ve given him all the barbiturates I think I should. He fell asleep as soon as the truck stopped, but he’ll probably wake when it starts again. He’s in a lot of pain.”

Just then Pop came limping up. “Mr. Hunter,” he said, “I can’t stand riding the back of that truck any more. I’m all bent up.”

Hunter was about to give him a hot answer when Ida said: “You can have my place in the cab. You men don’t know how to care for Mr. Hanks, and it’s my job anyway.”

Hixon tossed down the end of the towline. “Hitch it on your front end,” he directed Hunter. “Think you can?”

“I’ll do it,” said Wojtowicz, grabbing hold of it first.

“I imagine the Corvette’s getting low on gas,” the Little Man said to Hunter.

“It is, Mr. Dodd,” Ann called from beside her mother. “I was watching the needle and it said empty.”

“I’ll get one of the reserve cans,” the Little Man said.

Hunter nodded. He felt simultaneously furious and impotent. Everyone was taking charge for him. Doc would have found something humorous to say at this point, but he wasn’t Doc. He looked at Margo, who was looking at the distant sea, and he felt a sullen hunger.

Sally Harris and Jake Lesher, blanket-wrapped, hooked their elbows for extra safety over the low ridge of the penthouse roof. Two feet below the eaves, the wavelets glittered richly with the beams from the Wanderer’s needle-eye face, which Jake alternately called the Clutching Hand — for the coiled Serpent — and Pie in the Sky — for the Broken Egg.

“And we thought we could make a play of this,” Sally said softly.

“Yeah,” Jake echoed. “We thought we could — a supercolossal spectacle. But we were still thinking indoors.”

Sally looked around at the black waters over Manhattan and at the few low, lonesome towers poking up from it here and there.

“Imagine, some of them still got lights,” she commented.

“Gas engines in their attics,” Jake explained. “Or maybe batteries.”

“What’s that one way down there?” Sally wondered. The Singer Building or Irving Trust?”

“What’s the difference?”

“But I want to be able to remember exactly…or anyway, know exactly, if I’m not going to be able to remember.”

“Forget it, Sal. Look, I brought a flask of Napoleon. How about a snort?”

“You’re sweet,” she said, touching his cold hand lightly with her own, no warmer. And then she sang very softly, as if not to disturb the mounting wavelets:

Oh, I am the Girl on Noah’s Raft And you are my Castaway King. Our love is not as big as a wink Or one single hair from a silver mink — But you stayed with me and you found me a drink; Our love is a very big thing.

Richard Hillary and Vera Carlisle lay a distance apart on green hay taken from a small stack they’d found high in the Malvern Hills. Richard thought restlessly, Last night straw, tonight hay. Straw, seedless and dry, for death. Hay, sour and sweet, for life.

The Wanderer glared down on them from the west, again in its bloated-X face. The planet was becoming as dreadfully familiar as the face of a clock. Some three quarters of an hour ago, Vera had said: “Look, it’s half past D.”

It wasn’t chilly. There was an almost warmish breeze from the southwest — eerie, unnatural, agitating.

One might well think that watching the bore of the Severn rush up its valley, like some white thunder-wall released by the tearing of an eighth seal in the Book of Revelation, would utterly outweary the senses. But, as Richard was now discovering, the senses do not work that way. Experiencing the almost unimaginable only makes them more acid-bittenly alive.

Or perhaps it was simply that they were both too tired, too aching with fatigue poisons, to sleep.

Vera had earlier told him her story. A London business-machine typist, she had been rescued from the roof of an office building during the second high, and had come all the way to the valley of the Severn in a small motorboat, which had navigated the standing highs as Richard had tramped and cadged rides across the muddy lows, only to be wrecked in the edge of the bore near Deerhurst, she alone of the boat’s company surviving, as far as she knew.

A little while ago Richard had asked her to tell her story in more detail, but she had protested that she was much too tired. She had listened to the static on her transistor wireless for a while, and Richard had said: “Throw that away.” She hadn’t, but she’d turned it off. Now she was saying softly: “Oh, I shall never sleep, never. My mind’s revving and revving…”

Richard rolled over and put his arm lightly around her waist, his face above hers, then hesitated.

“Go on,” she said, looking up at him with an oddly bitter smile. “Or do you have sleeping pills?”

Richard thought for a moment, then said rather formally: “Even if I did have them, I should much prefer you.”

She giggled. “You’re so stiff,” she said.

He pulled her to him and kissed her. Her body was tense and unyielding.

“Vera,” he said. Then hugging her determinedly, “For a pet name I shall call you Veronal.”

She giggled again, more at him than appreciatively, he thought, but her body relaxed. Suddenly her fingers clutched at his back. “Go on, try me,” she whispered throatily in his ear. “I’m strong, strong sleeping medicine.”

Barbara Katz had first been depressed by the lowness and narrowness of the one little cabin of the “Albatross,” but now she was glad of those dimensions because it meant there was always a surface close at hand to brace herself against when the boat rocked or pitched farther than she’d been expecting it to. And the slightly-arched roof being so low somehow made it seem more secure whenever a solid wave-top banged down on it deafeningly.

The cabin was pitch dark except when lightning blazed in whitely through the four tiny portholes, or when Barbara used her flashlight.

Old KKK lay blanket-tied to one of the little bunks with Hester sitting braced at his head and holding the unknown baby. Helen stretched out in the other bunk, moaning and retching with seasickness, while Barbara was scrunched in at the foot of that bunk like Hester across from her. Every once in a while Barbara felt through a trap in the planking of the floor for water. So far she hadn’t felt any to amount to much.

The “Albatross” had almost foundered before the west-rushing tide lifted it out of the grip of the mangroves. Then it had almost been keeled over by a taller tree. After that it had been rather fun, until the storm waves had got so high and wild that everyone except Benjy had been forced below.

After a long silence — that is, a long space of listening to nothing but the baby crying and the timbers straining and the waves and the wind hitting the boat — Barbara asked: “How’s Mister K, Hester?”

“He die a little while back, Miss Barbara,” the other replied. “Hush now, baby, you had your canned milk.”

Barbara digested the information. After a while she said: “Hester, maybe we should wrap him in something and put him up front — there’s just enough room — and you should lie down in that bunk.”

“No, Miss Barbara,” Hester replied positively. “We don’t want to chance his hip get bust again or anything. He in good shape now, except he dead, and if he lie soft he stay that way. Then we got evidence we took the best care of him we could.”

Helen started up, crying: “Oh Lord, there’s a deader in the cabin! I got to get out!”

“Lie down, you crazy nigger!” Hester commanded. “Miss Barbara, you hold her!”

There was no need. A fresh attack of seasickness stretched Helen out again.

A little later the motions of the “Albatross” became less violent. Solid water no longer thumped the roof of the cabin.

“I’m going to take some coffee up to Benjy,” Barbara said.

“No you not, Miss Barbara.”

“Yes, I am,” Barbara told Hester.

When she’d cautiously slid aside the little hatch at the back of the cabin and stuck her head out, the first thing she saw was Benjy kneeling spread-legged behind the little wheel. The clouds had broken overhead, and through the narrow rift the Wanderer shone down in its bull’s-head face.

She crawled out. Wind tore at her from the bow, but it wasn’t too bad, so she slid the hatch shut and crawled back to Benjy.

He swigged coffee from the small thermos she’d brought and thanked her with a nod.

She peered around over the low coaming of the cockpit. The Wanderer, vanishing behind the clouds again, showed nothing by its last light but waves that looked very high indeed.

“I thought it was getting calmer,” she shouted to Benjy over the wind.

He pointed toward the bow. “I find a mattress,” he shouted back, “and tie one end of a rope to it and the other to the front end of this boat and throw her over. It hold the boat so she head into the wind and the waves steady-like.”

Barbara remembered the name for that: a sea anchor.

“Where do you think we are, Benjy?” she shouted.

His laughter whooped over the wind. “I don’t know if we in the Atlantic or the Gulf or what, Miss Barbara, but we still on top!”

Sally Harris and Jake Lesher climbed down from the penthouse roof. Despite the activity, they were shaking with cold. Beyond the balustrade the wavelets were sinking at a rate almost visible.

Sally looked into the living room by the light of the Wanderer in its jaws face, which she called Rin-Tin-Tin.

“It’s a mess,” she told Jake. “The furniture’s tumbled every which way. The piano’s got its legs in the air. The black rug’s got waves in it, and all those soaked black drapes make the place look like a storm-tossed mortuary. Come on, let’s hunt for driftwood or candles or something to make a fire. I’m freezing.”