The Drift Read online

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 68-17792

  COPYRIGHT © 1969 BY LLOYD KROPP

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81496-8

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1 Drifting North

  2 Tabor

  3 Pao

  4 The Outlanders

  5 The Seafields and The Mary Strattford

  6 The Caravel

  7 Images

  8 Shadowgames

  9 Rose

  10 The Scarfaced Man

  11 Driftsend

  12 The Dance of The Nine Islands

  13 A Marriage and a History Lesson

  14 The Shark

  15 Nightsongs

  16 Raven

  17 Echoes and Loomings

  18 The Hatchmaker

  19 White Flowers in a Bowl

  20 The Dream

  One

  DRIFTING NORTH

  There is a great sea within a sea, two thousand miles long and a thousand miles at midpoint, that lies near the center of The Atlantic Ocean. Until the nineteen twenties it was still considered by some to be a hazard to boats because of the weeds and vast quantities of debris that gathered there, a consequent of the calm water trapped within a circle of giant trade winds and currents. Old sailors sometimes say that if one drops a cork anywhere in The Pacific or Atlantic Ocean, it will eventually find its way to the center of The Sargasso Sea.

  A type of fish lives there that lives nowhere else in the world. Through hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of evolution, it has learned to crawl across the mats of weeds and bits of flotsam that circle endlessly in the slow-moving water. Its shape is curious. It is festooned with long spines or quills and wormlike fingers that obliterate its outline and make it difficult to see as it half crawls, half swims across the swampy patches of vegetation where other fish cannot see it or reach it. It lives on smaller fish and on other life forms that make their home among the gulfweeds on The Sargasso Sea. It has no natural enemies except when it ventures away from its swampy home and swims in the open water.

  Some people who have seen them think that Sargasso Fish are very beautiful. Their coloration is brilliant and varied. Their shape is exotic and unearthly. One might say that their beauty springs from the fact that they have given up the natural habitat of fishes and have become denizens of a strange world where they themselves have become strangely beautiful.

  After six days of sailing, Peter Sutherland began to drift north toward The Sargasso Sea. He could never have known then what lay ahead, nor could he have understood that the events before him were an extension of his own drifting, an extension of something that was already happening inside him. In his own understanding of things it all began when the old man standing on the deck of the schooner shouted a single word into the morning wind.

  “Storm,” said the old man.

  Peter raised his hand against the sun and squinted along the angle of the long sail that pointed into the sky. Stratus and cirrus clouds drifted in long strands and wisps thousands of feet above him. He closed his eyes. The boards of the old ship felt hard and substantial beneath his back. They creaked when the boat rolled from side to side. Miles away he heard the cry of an ocean bird.

  It had been a long time since he had known peace, so long that he could not really remember when there had not been a feeling of being hunted, of being pursued by a world he did not really understand. He smiled now as he thought of how bored he had been and how foolish it had all seemed the first day of the voyage. He could not think why he had come or what he was doing in the middle of an ocean. And then very slowly The Caribbean began to hypnotize him. The clouds hovered and moved in an enormous drama of silence, and his past life with its pains and humiliations seemed remote and unreal. On some days he would fish. On others he would simply watch the sky and the water. Occasionally a ship would pass at the horizon and he would peer at it through his binoculars for a half hour or so until it disappeared.

  Never in his life had things been so simple, so easy. He wanted only to be at peace and listen to the water and let his mind wander in circles. Slowly he was beginning to feel young again. His senses seemed more open and receptive, his mind aware of everything and yet thinking of nothing. It was as if he were waiting at the edge of some profound but unimaginable event, something in the drift of the ocean that would show itself in good time.

  “Storm,” said the old man.

  Storm? Peter glanced at the fourteen-foot aluminum dinghy that was lashed with ropes near the stern of the ship. He had meant to have it stowed with emergency rations and a flare gun and a sail. Perhaps tomorrow he would get around to that.

  The aluminum dinghy, he remembered, was Miriam’s idea. Out here on the ocean it was his one concession to the civilized world. Miriam had always been vaguely afraid of storms at sea and had insisted that he buy a metal lifeboat with air-tanks. Even then she had been apprehensive. The schooner was too big for three men, she had said, and too old. And Puerto Rican deckhands? Why not hire a boat in Miami where he knew people? And why an old sailboat? Why not a nice new cabin cruiser with outriggers and an auxiliary engine? In short, why not something sensible? But of course that was the whole point. He was thirty-six years old now, a teacher in a small but respectable New England college, a sensible and practical sort of man who had worked hard for everything. Aside from Miriam, this trip was the first real indulgence he had ever permitted himself. He glanced again at the dinghy. In a way it reminded him of Miriam. It was very shiny and very sleek and unsinkable.

  Miriam of course had become a kind of symbol for all his failures in that cloudy world that was now two thousand miles away. His marriage had ended in boredom and divorce, his career in routine and drudgery, his friendships in cool acquaintances. But it was the divorce that had made him wonder for the first time in years what he was doing with his life. His youth was gone now, not traded for something valuable, but given away for a song. For a while the thought of all his losses, both real and imaginary, had been paralyzing, a kind of avalanche that tumbled across his mind and made it impossible to move on blindly as it seemed he had been moving for so many years.

  It was ironic, perhaps, that Miriam had taught him to love boats and to love the water. It was the only thing she had given him, the only thing he had taken from her when they had parted six days earlier, still good friends, and he had sailed out of The Condado Lagoon, away from the island of Puerto Rico, through The Windward Passage, and finally into the open sea.

  “Storm,” said the old man. “Bad storm.” He waved his white sombero above his head, gathering hatfuls of air. Suddenly the sail began to flap. The two Puerto Ricans, the old man and his young helper, lowered the jib, one loosening the jib sheet while the other stood on the bow of the ship gathering and folding the sail in his brown arms. Peter sat up and looked around him. The sun was still bright and there were still no storm clouds anywhere in the sky. It had been that way for six days. He could not imagine that the sky or the huge, formless world of the sea could ever change from what it was at that moment.

  An hour later it was raining. Two hours later the boat rocked and heaved as heavy waves broke across the bow, sending white sheets of water seething across the length of the deck. He watched the mast tilting back and forth, once or twice almost touching the high crest of a wave. For a while he tried to go below, but the rolling of the boat made him seasick and he returned to the deck where the spray of water and the waves and the desperate necessity of holding onto something made sickness impossible. The young man was shouting now; the old man was silent and baleful as he stared out into the stormdark water.

  Suddenly the wind rose to a howling shriek and th
e mast tilted until it touched the white edge of an enormous wave that rolled toward the boat. Very calmly and with a profound sense of detached curiosity, he watched the boat turn farther into the water. It was as if everything moved in slow motion. For a moment it seemed that nothing at all would happen, that time was gradually coming to a stop at the edge of that giant wave.

  Then the world was a chaos of green water and hissing foam. The deck of the boat disappeared somewhere beneath him or above him. He struggled for a moment against that disorientation, that sense of nowhere being up or down, and then surrendered to the water that roared in his ears and turned him over and over. Something struck him on the back of the head. The water went dark and he could no longer feel or hear the storm that raged above him.

  A few moments later he felt the deck of the boat come up beneath him. Suddenly he was coughing violently and clutching the guardrail. For a long time it was all he could do to breathe and cough the water out of his lungs and hold on when the waves smashed against the side of the boat.

  Finally the storm settled into a heavy rain, and for a while he lay on the deck unable to move. He had a vague awareness now that the schooner was sinking, sliding down into the water. He crawled to the stern and after a great deal of fumbling managed to unlash the aluminum dinghy. Five minutes later the stern was awash and the waves quickly carried him out into the open sea. Dimly he wondered about the two Puerto Rican sailors. Had they escaped in another boat or had they gone down in the storm? Then he thought of Miriam and his comfortable, monotonous life at the university. His thoughts began to disintegrate into fragmented images, flashes of memory and desire, until finally he was aware of nothing but an immense loneliness, a sense of helpless isolation that made him tremble. He closed his eyes and listened to the sound of the rain.

  When he awoke, the sky was very dark and very silent. He could not tell if it was morning or evening, and he had no idea how long he had lain there. He sat up and blinked at the water, wondering what to do. Then he remembered the emergency box clipped to the underside of the rear seat. He reached under and tugged at it for a moment until it came free. Inside was a quart canteen of drinking water, some bandages and sunburn ointment, a small vial of antiseptic, and a compass. The water, he thought, was at least something. It would be enough to keep him alive for two or three days. He hitched the canteen to his belt, emptied the remaining contents into his shirt, and began to bail, using the emergency box as a scoop. In an hour he had emptied about a third of the water. After another twenty minutes he fell back against the aluminum slats and almost immediately fell asleep.

  When he awoke again it was sunrise. Had a whole day passed or had it been near morning when he fell asleep? The water everywhere in the east had turned yellow and red, and the shifting colors were reflected in the giant cumulus clouds that hung motionless near the horizon. It was a beautiful sight, he thought dimly. He drank three swallows of water and then set to bailing out the rest of the boat.

  For the first time since the storm, he began to take stock of things: there was a bruise on his left shoulder and a bump on his head, but aside from that he seemed to have no real injuries. There was nothing to eat, but the ocean was full of fish and perhaps he could contrive some sort of net out of his shirt and pants. In the meantime there was at least the drinking water, and with a little luck, he now thought, he might survive for a week or more. There was even a chance that he would drift into a trade lane and be picked up. But then, he reflected, he had never in his life been lucky in anything. More probably he would be dead in four days. It was, he thought bitterly, a rather stiff price to pay for a few days of peace in his noisy, meaningless life.

  But his head was clear now. He began to look at things more carefully. The sea was fairly calm and the waves rolled in long, gentle swells. An hour later a light wind began to follow them, occasionally roughening the surface with skittering patches of shadow. He felt the slow drifting of the boat and sensed again the vastness of everything around him. He was moving northeast, somewhere in the blue streams of The North Equatorial Current.

  Occasionally he saw small greenish minnows skittering a foot or two below the surface of the water. How far down, he wondered, could he actually see? The water seemed very clear, but there was no way of judging the limits of his vision in that emptiness. He leaned over the edge of his boat, dipped his face into the water, and opened his eyes. For a few moments he saw nothing, and then, quite suddenly, half obscured in the shifting deeps, there appeared the pale form of an enormous gray fish, a shark or perhaps a dolphin, nosing back and forth perhaps a hundred or two hundred feet below him. The sudden perspective was very alarming. There was nothing between him and all that infinite depth of water with all its shadowy carnivores, nothing but the thin aluminum hull of his dinghy. Suddenly he was very much afraid of death.

  He brushed the seawater off his face, leaned back against the slats of the boat, and closed his eyes. He felt very tired now, and as the hours passed, the breadth and the sound of the ocean began to grow in his mind and ears like a chorus of voices. Voices in an enormous room. A ballroom where Miriam was dancing with Harry Ranton at The Connecticut Inn. Her back and shoulders were brown from hours of tennis and swimming and boating at her father’s country club, and with her arms lifted and her body turning there on the dance floor, she was a dark star amid the blaze of white lights.

  “Peter?” she was saying. “Of course I remember Peter. I adored him and thought the world of him, but unfortunately we nearly bored each other to death. Our divorce came just as I was going into Cheyne-Stokes.”

  Harry Ranton laughed pleasantly.

  “I don’t think he ever talks to anyone,” she continued. “That’s his real problem. At parties he’s like a clam.”

  “A simple bivalve,” said Harry Ranton. “That’s Peter all over.”

  “Did you know that no one knows him even in his own department? They all call him Mr. Sutherland. Of course,” she added, “he is kind of distinguished looking—so dark and athletic looking and quiet. I used to think he was kind of mysterious.”

  “Yes,” said Harry Ranton. “He’s a fascinating man to know slightly.”

  “You never liked him, did you?”

  “No. But then I never like college professors, and besides, he was married to you and I found that rather inconvenient,” he said, smiling.

  “Poor Peter,” she said. “He’s always been so helpless. He never knows what to do about anything. What do you suppose he’ll do now that his boat’s sunk?”

  “He’ll drown,” said Harry Ranton. “And he’ll do that badly.”

  And then it seemed that all the dancers were floating in green water and Peter found himself floating among them in his aluminum dinghy.

  “Look!” said Miriam. “There’s Peter! Peter! We’re over here!”

  “He’s come back,” said Harry Ranton dismally.

  “Over this way, Peter!” cried Miriam.

  Now his boat was bearing down on them. Vaguely he wondered if his aluminum prow was sharp enough to split Harry Ranton in two.

  Suddenly he awoke. The images and whispers of the dream were dark and strange against the sound of the water lapping at his boat. He opened his eyes. It was morning again. Apparently he had slept another eight or nine hours. He was very hungry now and his head felt light and unreal. He drank another three swallows from the canteen and then sat up. Water had washed into the boat again and for a few minutes he made a desultory attempt to sweep it over the side with his hands and arms. It was a painful effort, for his head ached and his back was stiff from hours of lying in the bottom of the boat.

  He was very hungry now, but the idea of making a net no longer seemed very practical. He would never catch anything that way unless he ran into a school of small fish and could simply scoop them out with his shirt. For a while he tried chewing on the occasional pieces of seaweed and kelp that passed by the boat, but finally spit them out in disgust. Perhaps, he thought, seaweed would taste
better when he got hungrier.

  He wondered why he was not frightened. Fear had come only for a single moment, like a flash of light in his brain, when he had seen the shark swimming below him. He felt instead a sense of peace, a kind of certainty about things. Perhaps, he thought, this was simply the mind’s defense against the near certainty of death, but he did feel as if he were going somewhere, drifting north to some new world he had never seen, a world that lay just beyond the horizon of water. Then it occurred to him that all this might very well be the first step toward hallucination. Today it was only a sense of anticipation. Tomorrow when there was no more drinking water it would be green islands, mermaids, and treasure ships.

  For a long time he simply watched the movement of the water around him, sometimes looking for fish, sometimes dreaming into space. Dimly he wondered why there was so much vegetation. Every few minutes he saw a patch of something floating in the water. It didn’t seem reasonable that he could be anywhere near land. The equatorial current, he knew, was taking him slowly toward the United States, but that would still be nearly a thousand miles away. There were of course many small islands to the south in The Caribbean, but every hour carried him farther away from them. He seemed to be floating in the midst of an oceanic wasteland, a broad sweep of current in which he would drift for weeks. And then in his mind he saw a map of The Atlantic Ocean and tried to visualize just where he might be. A black speck on the blue map paper, somewhere northeast of The Bahamas and perhaps a thousand miles southeast of Cape Cod. Perhaps he was somewhere near Bermuda. Perhaps eventually someone would pick him up. But no, he reminded himself, that kind of luck would for him be atypical, even unthinkable.

  And then he saw the currents of The Atlantic, broad yellow lines superimposed upon the gridded blue. Suddenly he thought again of the clumps of vegetation. Of course! He was somewhere in The Sargasso Sea.