One for the Gods (The Peter & Charlie Trilogy) (26 page)

The peace that had been lulling him was instantly shattered. Peter mustn’t know he had overextended himself. He mustn’t know what he had been thinking. Above all, he mustn’t come this far. Charlie wasn’t sure that either of them could make it back. He summoned what strength he had left and forced his body into a slow breast stroke and headed for the boat. He should have known that Peter would come after him, just as he would come after Peter. If they were to drown, they would drown together. He would never leave Peter behind. When they met, Charlie shook his head to show that he couldn’t speak or stop. Peter looked drawn and tired. He circled round and adopted a breast stroke, too.

“You’re crazy to go so far,” he called.

Charlie didn’t attempt to answer. The boat still looked very far away, appallingly far away now that he wanted to return to it. Only his determination for Peter not to guess that he was in trouble drove him on. He could no longer feel his body moving. It had to move. He had to make it back to the boat. The last five minutes were a numbing trial of endurance. He could no longer see. When he bumped into the boat he fumbled for the ladder. Peter guided him to it and helped him hook his arms over a rung. He hung on it with his head bowed and waited for his senses to resume their function and air to heal his tortured lungs. He felt Peter trying to help him up the ladder and shook his head again. He heard voices, but didn’t know what they were saying.

At last, he heard Jack ask good-naturedly, “What were you trying to prove this time, Johnny Weissmuller? Did you think I’d turn the motor on to come rescue you? I know you can take care of yourself.”

Charlie felt laughter struggling up in his wracked body. The joke would have been on Jack if he’d drowned. As the owner of a boat with a missing passenger, he would probably have been tied up for weeks in the next port of call. He managed to pull himself up the ladder and fell onto his back on deck, his body still heaving, a smile on his open mouth.

“I always thought I was as good a swimmer as you, but Jesus,” Peter said from nearby. “What was the idea?”

“I wanted—a change of scenery,” Charlie managed to get out slowly between his panting. Martha knelt beside him and lifted his head and put a cushion under it. Her hands lingered on his shoulders.

“He’s completely exhausted,” she said sharply, presumably to Jack. “I told you you should’ve at least put the dinghy over.”

“I knew he wouldn’t attempt anything he couldn’t manage,” Jack replied.

Charlie lay on the deck without moving, still touched by death’s appeal. His brief flirtation with it left him curious. Did he want to die? He didn’t think so, yet the answer didn’t come as clearly and immediately as he would have expected it to half an hour ago. That moment of numb drifting peace had altered his perspective, added a scrap of knowledge to the sum of what he was learning about himself. He felt, oddly, better-equipped for life, as if he had discovered a new resource in himself, a new option. There was no need to have been so deeply hurt by Peter’s disloyalty. Love needn’t be the bondage he had made of it. There was an ultimate freedom.

A breeze rescued them from the doldrums that evening. It was favorably northerly, and by luck they entered the Straits of Messina the next morning when the current was right for them to go straight through. This required the help of the motor, which gave Jack an opportunity to point out that this was the sort of thing he was saving fuel for. The sea swirled around them oddly. Homer’s Scylla and Charybdis. It required no great effort of imagination to see how the myth was born. They put into Catania, not for fuel, but for water and ice and fresh food. Early one morning, they sailed out into the rising sun and set their course for Greece, which lay across four hundred miles of open sea.

They encountered some days of ideal sailing weather with brisk breezes and only light, choppy seas. They spent most of one day rolling helplessly in a heavy swell with only a light breeze to steady them. The great boom swung ominously above them, sometimes crashing out to the limits of the sheet with a great yank that shook the whole boat. The motor was obviously called for, but Charlie didn’t suggest it. If Jack wanted to lose his mast, that was his business. They would probably survive. And if they didn’t, worse things could happen to them.

One night, a storm flashed and rumbled away to the south of them, reviving uneasy memories of their first night out, but it stayed away. Martha remained on deck quite late, sitting close to Charlie and Peter, watching, clutching for Charlie’s hand when there was a particularly bright flash.

Charlie laughed at her. “You know perfectly well the storm’s nowhere near unless the lightning and thunder come practically at the same moment.”

“Yes, but if the lightning’s brighter, that means it’s getting closer, doesn’t it?”

“Not necessarily. It has to do with clouds and things. Come on, Pete. Don’t you know any meteorological lore? We mustn’t let Martha be frightened.”

Peter laughed in the dark. “With me, it’s easy. If Charlie says the storm’s not coming. I believe him. You gotta have faith.”

“I know,” Martha agreed. “What would we do without him? I’m not really frightened any more.” She clung to Charlie’s hand and he left it in her keeping.

Because he had ceased to discourage her, she had quickly fallen into the habit of touching him frequently, a hand on his arm when he passed, a hand on his shoulder or back when they were moving about each other. Only when the hand became discreetly caressing did he look her in the eye with an admonishing glance to tell her to stop it. Their eyes spoke openly of the situation she had created, hers hopeful and submissive, his noncommittal since the slight significant nod he had offered her several days ago. He was growing increasingly fond of her and found her enormously pleasing physically but he wasn’t going to let her entice him into a meaningless little sexual encounter. Nothing would happen unless it became essential to some grand design that seemed to be vaguely taking shape somewhere just beneath his consciousness. She might play a part in it; at times, he hoped she would, though he couldn’t imagine how she could.

He was wedded to the sea. Sea and sky offered few exciting forms; but the fine, constantly shifting gradation of grays and blues was a challenge to his eye. His intent study of them sharpened his sensibilities and developed in him an acute weather sense. He knew from the changing colors around him that conditions would alter some time before the event. A milky-gray sea with curious deeper-gray shadows beneath it, seas streaked with blue on paler blue, the run of indigo at the horizon all had their meaning for him. Sunrises and sunsets were fascinatingly spectacular, great color organs in full voice, but it was the delicate shading of gray to blue to deep-midnight hues that excited him endlessly and told him most.

Peter was amazed at the varied satisfactions Charlie derived from the sea and their journey on it. For Peter, as he grew more expert, there was the simple joy of sailing and the more intense joy he found in the harmony between them when they handled the sails and the helm together. He was vastly impressed when Charlie predicted a shift in the wind that took place an hour later. When he told stories from Thucydides about the doomed Athenians in the pits of Syracuse or pointed out with awed excitement that Odysseus must have passed this way on his long voyage home to Ithaca, which lay somewhere ahead of them to the north, Peter felt the extra dimension that he was finding in the trip and was excited for him. It had turned into a big experience for him and they were sharing it. Another imperishable link forged for the future.

Except for Jack, who doubtless knew, none of them bothered to remember what day it was or how long they had been out. On the morning of the fifth or sixth day, Charlie was on the wheel when the sun rose out of distant, jagged peaks. For an instant, he thought it might be a cloud formation and then he knew it was land. He leaped to his feet, his heart pounding with excitement. Jack had told him to expect it, but the reality of Greece, the distant blue mountains in the dazzling morning light, was a thrill nothing could have prepared him for. He leaned over and ruffled Peter’s hair.

“Wake up, baby. Look!” he cried triumphantly.

Peter immediately sat up. When he saw Charlie standing, he stood, too, and looked forward. “My God. Is that it? We’ve really made it?” He turned a radiant face to Charlie.

“Unless it turns out to be Africa or something. I guess we can hand it to Jack’s navigation. Isn’t it fabulous? My God. Greece.” As the sun climbed the sky, the land mass acquired dimension. It rose in tiers behind what appeared to be twin headlands much closer to them. He knew from the charts that two islands guarded the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth. If these were the islands, Jack had really done his job. When he emerged for his watch, Charlie greeted him with an exultant smile, all differences forgotten for the moment.

“How about that?” Charlie demanded, waving ahead.

Jack looked. “Would you mind hanging on there for another few minutes?” He went below and returned with binoculars and the pilot book. The book had profile sketches of the entrance to the gulf. Jack scanned the land with the binoculars and checked the book.

“Bang on it?” Charlie asked with pride in Jack’s achievement.

Jack turned back with a satisfied smile. “That’s Cephalonia and the other’s Zante. We go between them.”

“Fantastic. Right on the nose. You couldn’t have done better if we’d had road signs.”

They all laughed together. Jack took the wheel, but Peter and Charlie didn’t go below. They sat together in the bow and watched Greece take shape before them.

At dawn the next morning, they motored into Patras, their first Greek port, and tied up to Greek soil. They were all on deck for the event. Martha broke out the American flag astern.

“Just a week from Sicily. Not bad,” Jack said, when he had cut the motor.

A week was no measure of time to the rest of them. It was a moment or an eternity. Charlie felt as if they had been journeying back in time, so that for him it was like entering a new and mythical world. As the sun rose, a crowd of children and young men gathered at the foot of the gangplank and stared silently at them. They were having some breakfast coffee when a group of officials, some uniformed, some not, mounted the gangplank, saluting and bowing and speaking volubly a language they presumed was Greek. Jack took them below. They had had official visits in Italy, and Jack had mentioned something about an officer coming aboard at Calvi, but this conference lasted almost two hours, while the three on deck sat and paced and wondered what it was all about.

“The port is pretty hideous, but I want to go ashore,” Charlie said. “The town might be worth seeing. I suppose we ought to wait for the crowd below.”

“I think you have to,” Martha said. “Passports and all.”

The boarding party finally emerged, beaming and dropping bits of English. “How do you do?” one said to each of them as he left.

Jack shook hands with all of them at the gangplank and dropped back into the cockpit. “They were all very nice. But slow! God!” he explained. “They looked at all the papers at least sixteen times. I had to keep turning them right side up for them. It seems we’re the first American yacht to put in here since the war.” They all felt pleased with themselves and vaguely historical.

Charlie and Peter pulled on trousers and shirts and waved to the Kingsleys and walked down the gangplank. They stepped off it and stood on Greek soil. A youth moved out of the crowd that still lingered there and confronted them. “You want,” he informed them.

“Money. Bank,” Charlie said, showing traveler’s checks.

The youth took Charlie’s hand and led him off. Charlie was briefly startled but, once adjusted to it, found it rather sweet. “I’ve got myself a new boyfriend,” he murmured. They laughed. They both felt slightly drunk, their heads reeling with the motion of the boat. They crossed broken ground to the road that ran around the port. They skirted a huddle of mean-looking buildings and climbed steps up to busy streets. They saw other men holding hands as they strolled.

“Do you suppose it means anything?” Peter wondered.

“God knows. Maybe Socrates didn’t die in vain.”

They came to a forlorn-looking square. There were a great many cafés with a great many shabby men sitting at tables. Women passed, some with scarves over their mouths and noses; none were sitting at the cafés. There was a great din of talk but little other noise. Loaded donkeys padded by in the street. They noticed older men with great, baggy trousers and thick woolen cloths wound around their waists. They came to a building with indecipherable gilt letters on a glass door and their guide said, “Bank.”

Charlie thanked him and started to reach for a tip, but the youth held the door open and entered with them. Was he going to wait till they’d changed some money and try to rob them? He led them to a counter and they found themselves launched on an endless transaction. Six men gathered behind the counter, passing the checks and Charlie’s passport from hand to hand. They discussed them at length. They went in search of forms and put them down and forgot where they were. People came in off the street and joined in the discussion. In the midst of it, coffee was served them with glasses of iced water and plates with little dabs of something sweet on them. When it was all over and Charlie had recovered his passport and uncashed checks with a handful of
drachma
, they all shook hands and beamed at each other. The Greeks repeated “Amerika” and “Amerikani” a good deal. Charlie and Peter tried to thank them, and their guide led them out. “You want,” he told them again.