Hatteras Light Read online

  “Brian—come up here.”

  The boy complied. He is so easy to command, Alvin thought.

  “How’s she doing, boy?”

  “Holding all right, I guess. It was all the water we shipped in the hatches last night did it.”

  “I know that.”

  Brian was bearing up well, except that his eyes had assumed a sunken cadaverous quality, as if he were watching from deep inside himself. It was a way of looking that reminded Alvin of Malcolm Royal.

  Brian wrung his hands to get the stiffness out of them. Alvin took the boy’s hands into his own and inspected them, turning them over. It broke his heart to see them so raw and blistered. For all the hard labor Brian had done the past few years, he had never developed calluses. Alvin had them thick as bark on the undersides of his hands. When he would stroke Dorothy’s cheek in a moment of forgetfulness, he would leave a scuff of rash, as if he had scratched her. The hairline marks would swell pink and sometimes remain visible for days afterward—her skin was every bit as delicate as Brian’s. But Dorothy never minded, or if she did never said so. Alvin Dant wondered if other men made marks on their children by loving them.

  Without a word he salved the hands and wrapped bandages around them, binding them so they resembled boxing gloves.

  Brian threw mock punches.

  “You haven’t lost your spunk.”

  “And you have?”

  “I guess we know each other pretty well.”

  Brian laughed quietly.

  “You’re in an awfully good mood, boy, considering.”

  “How many times have I gone out with you, Dad? For an afternoon? For a three-day catch? For a week’s?”

  Alvin was blank. His mind had lost its edge. He was listening, but it was hard to figure things. Everything was moving, mixing, muddied.

  “How many? Fifty? A hundred? A thousand? And how many words did you ever say to me?”

  Alvin thought about that. The boy sounded glad. “I—I didn’t ever know what to say.”

  Brian held his father’s arm in his bandaged hands as the deck swayed under them with the motion of the sea. “Neither did I,” he whispered. “You see? Neither did I.”

  2

  PATCHY WAS feeling tired. It wasn’t easy being heroic, but if his muscles ached and his eyes burned, his determination did not flag. He had no choice anyway. To go back now, to quit, would just make him the object of more ridicule. He would drown out here alone before he would go home to that.

  The Proteus had scared hell out of him. But it had also confirmed him in his mission. Littlejohn’s wife could have interpreted it more exactly, he figured, but for the time being it was enough to recognize it as a sign. For once in his life, Patchy was in exactly the right place doing exactly the right thing.

  Maybe if he succeeded, his father’s memory would at last be admitted to the history of the island. They would know once and for all it was not duty but choice that mattered to a man. As long as there was choice there was hope. They had never granted his father the choice. There had been precious few choices for anybody, up to now. That was why they were all so scared: In this crisis there was no clear tradition to follow, and they must make up their own minds.

  For the past day he had zigzagged east. He knew he was heading north as well because the Big River had him. He could feel it under his keel, bearing him along at six knots above his own speed. So far, Hermes had held up well under the strain of the sea. He congratulated himself on that. But he felt the weight of water in the bilges, and he knew he had barely enough fiiel to get back to Hatteras Island, assuming he could break loose from the grip of the Gulf Stream.

  He drank a grog of his own concoction—rum and orange juice. His eyes were hard slits and his head was accumulating fever like a boil.

  As the wind freshened across his beams he hallucinated walls of dark steam that resembled rock, and when he had steered safely between these phantom cliffs he encountered more. On either side of him spun waterspouts, shrieking and hissing.

  He had entered a realm he had only heard about in the tall tales of fishermen, tales he had mostly discounted as the brag of the profession. Now he wasn’t so sure. Banks of colors sliced across the seascape like razors. Waterspouts died and then resurrected in his wake. Vaporous walls shifted and settled like glaciers. The noise was incredible and varied: rushing, hissing, shrilling, crackling, an unsettling cacophony. He drank steadily. There was no telling where his course might lead. He skinned his eyes, half expecting a giant nautilus or a plumed sea serpent to breach on his bows. He handled the helm, watching, hanging on. Dant was out there. He would cross this infernal place and find him, or he wouldn’t come back. One way or the other, Peter Patchett would become a legend.

  3

  CAPTAIN STRACKEN REVIVED for a few minutes in the afternoon. “Where are we?” he demanded.

  “Don’t worry,” Max told him. Kraft stood next to him with arms crossed, lips pursed.

  “We have come too far,” Stracken said. Then: “We must get the fisherman.”

  “Yes, my Captain,” Max said without conviction.

  4

  PATCHY COULD NOT REMEMBER when he had ever been alone for so long. That part of it he liked. He had a feeling that important things were always accomplished by men working alone.

  For the time being he had shed his wife and family, his personal history as a shiftless ne’er-do-well. He was forging a new identity for himself, and he liked that part, too.

  Truthfully, he was amazed that the boat had held. He had launched himself prepared to founder, drown, fail, do no one any good, and here it was all working out according to his hazy plan. Incredible.

  Patchy wished his children, Penny and Parvis, could see him now, being a good father. His own father, serious and reliable, had been a better family man. Still, where was his father’s treasure? The company had buried him, and all the man’s worldly possessions had fit into a cardboard box small enough even for a child to carry.

  Among the waterspouts now he glimpsed a new mirage, the dark bulk of something less vaporous.

  He sounded his fog bell and was unnerved to hear a reply.

  Or was it only echo? The timbre, the pitch, were the same. He tried again, and when two bells answered this time he said, “Praise the Lord.”

  5

  ALVIN HEARD THE BELL the same time Brian did. Startled, they looked at one another. They had been adrift so long they had really given up rescue as a real possibility.

  “You don’t think it’s the Huns?” Brian said.

  “I doubt it, boy. I think their greeting would be a little different. That’s a fisherman’s bell.”

  Alvin answered with one bell, then two. Once the idea of rescue had sunk in, Brian appeared nonchalant. “Boy,” Alvin said, “there’s something in you that takes a little getting used to.” Brian said nothing. “Ready the towline in case this is our day for a miracle.”

  The seas were slate gray and choppy. It would be tricky setting up a tow. Alvin squinted at the approaching boat. He didn’t recognize her until he saw the disheveled figure leaning out of the wheelhouse.

  “My Lord, it’s Patchy!”

  “Ahoy on the Pelican!”

  “Ahoy yourself, Patchy. Come in closer.”

  “Do you want a tow, or shall I take you off?”

  “We could use a tow, all right, Mister Patchett. Brian has a line.”

  It took all three men working two and a half hours to manage a line between the stern of Patchy’s Hermes and the Pelican’s bow.

  Patchy would have liked to confer with Dant about tides and direction and chart coordinates, but he did not dare risk drowning the man by hauling him across between the boats. They had no bosun’s chair, and the sea was just too rough.

  “If you start to founder, sound your bell,” Patchy shouted over the wind until Alvin got it. He nodded vigorously and then retired to the pilothouse to take the helm from Brian.

  “I hope to God he knows where he
’s going.”

  “He knows,” Brian said with so much conviction his father turned and stared at him, then dug his fists into the sockets of his eyes to clear them.

  “I never would have expected that one,” Alvin said. “I wonder why he came.”

  “It doesn’t really matter, does it. It only matters how bad this storm gets before nightfall.”

  There was no arguing with that. Now that safety was at hand, Alvin was terrified. Here was hope, a damnable thing.

  “When we get back, it won’t be the same,” Brian said. The bandages on his hands made him seem helpless.

  “What do you mean? What won’t be the same?”

  But Brian didn’t answer. Instead, he braced himself at the wheel beside his father and watched Patchy’s boat flog the sea.

  6

  PATCH PATCHETT HEADED HOME with the weight of his future trailing him on a two-inch hawser. He had never had anything so firmly in tow. He was slightly giddy with lack of sleep and too much grog, a little unsteady on his legs, but never mind. He had the wheel for balance, and by the time they neared Hatteras Island it would be dark. All he would have to do would be to steer straight on for the Light, then veer south by southwest until the harbor opened to receive them on the other side of Hatteras Inlet.

  Hermes was pitching in the storm now, and there was so much spray between the two boats that he would lose sight of the Dant boat for minutes at a time. He had laid a fire ax handy to part the line if it came to trouble. If it came to trouble, they could swim for it and he’d pluck them out of the drink with his gaff.

  He thought about his father as he rode the sea home. He couldn’t understand how a man who had tasted this could settle for a riveter’s job in some shipyard. Maybe it was God’s mercy that peeled him off that scaffold, Patchy thought. Maybe his father had waited and prayed for that day ever since he left the island and the Life-Saving Service.

  Patchy had not waited or prayed for this moment, but now that it was here he felt more like himself than he had ever felt; a strange thing, he reflected, since this new man who had taken control of him bore no resemblance to the Patch Patchett he had played all his life.

  “Steady as she goes,” he said to no one.

  Under him, he could feel the powerful current of the Gulf Stream fighting the wheel. He knew his direction unerringly because it was the hardest course to steer. As long as the Big River resisted, he was homing.

  The waterspouts were starting up again, and walls of spume like the bluffs of icebergs closed in on either side. The Stream, the wind, the waves, the forward thrust of the engine, made the Hermes shudder with tension that threatened to pull her apart with each trough gained.

  Patchy swigged at his grog and plowed a course for Hatteras Light.

  7

  A WIRELESS MESSAGE came into Littlejohn’s store from Portsmouth. A transport, unescorted, was heading south from Jersey to reinforce the garrison at the Panama Canal. It would pass off the Hatteras Light sometime after midnight. The captain had been instructed to stay well clear of the shoals, especially with the weather turning and the submarine menace unchecked. The transport would be running without lights, but all life-saving crews were being alerted just the same. On board were more than fifteen hundred men.

  “Well, that’s the one,” Littlejohn said. “I knew it wouldn’t take long.”

  “I wonder if the Hun has a wireless.”

  “No doubt, but he’d have to be on the surface to pick it up, and he won’t be, not on a night like this.”

  Fetterman was finally getting to the detailing of his model. It was curiously unlovely, not at all like the schooners on the back shelf, but held a fascination all its own.

  “What’s that lump there?” Littlejohn asked.

  “That? Oh, that’s the conning tower.”

  “I think you’re losing your touch, that’s what I think.”

  “Think what you like. I’m an old man and I don’t have to answer to anyone, least of all a storekeeper. I’ll do my answering soon enough.”

  “You may have company.”

  Fetterman fiddled with the model. The work of the knife was done. Now it was a matter of smoothing, fitting, arranging, then painting. That would be easy, but he would do it in the light.

  “Do you think they’ll go through with it?”

  “They’ll need Malcolm,” Fetterman said. “He’s the only one that can work the whole apparatus.”

  “That’s not so. The Chief can do it, so can Jack and Toby. Or Seamus, for the matter.”

  “No telling what the Chief will do. I can’t read him at all.”

  “No,” Fetterman agreed. “He’s a cagey one, but I can guess.”

  “Toby will go along. He lost a brother in all this and he’s got a right, I guess. As much as anyone has.”

  “They’ll need Malcolm,” Fetterman repeated.

  Littlejohn pondered that.

  Seamus Royal came in, the barrel of his Krag sweated with rain. “Seems like we’ve got a show tonight, boys,” he said.

  “Mind if I warm myself at your stove?”

  Littlejohn nodded.

  “You’ve heard about the troopship, eh, Seamus?”

  “Bad news travels fast.”

  “He might miss him altogether in this storm,” Littlejohn offered.

  “Might. Might not.”

  “What makes you think the Hun will be close enough in for it to matter?”

  “Nobody can know a thing like that.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But he always goes to the shallows after a kill. Like he has to digest it.” Seamus loosened the leather sling and stood his rifle against the counter. He drew his pipe and filled it and didn’t say anything until he had it going good and steady.

  “We have our storm, Ham.”

  “We sure as hell have that.”

  “Are you with us?”

  “What about Malcolm?”

  “Malcolm will do the right thing when the time comes.”

  Littlejohn said: “Seems to me you’re gambling on it a lot.”

  “Even if we do nothing, it’s a gamble.”

  “So you say.”

  “I’m not alone in this.”

  Jack Royal came in and flapped the water off his sou’wester.

  “It’s blowing up a gale out there. Going to be a bad one.”

  “The weather’s all cockeyed,” Fetterman said.

  “It’s because of those big railroad guns they’re shooting off in France. They’re breaking down the stratosphere, mark my words.”

  “Aw, Seamus.”

  Fetterman limped over to the counter and sat on two stacked crates of tinned meat. “You reckon it’s time?”

  Seamus looked at Littlejohn. “It would be better if we all went along, together. That would keep the Government from asking a lot of questions.”

  “I haven’t seen any of you tonight. I haven’t heard any of this.” Littlejohn disappeared through the door to the back room and scraped out the back way to his house, where Mrs. Littlejohn said, “It’s an evil night, Littlejohn.”

  Despite himself, Littlejohn felt a chill. “And who says?” he demanded.

  She said: “This morning, the moon was drowned in blood.”

  1

  LOOKING FOR KEITH, Jack went to the Keeper’s house, where he found Keith and Mary sitting a little too intimately around a dice game. Jack snorted to clear his sinuses. “Come on, little gambler,” he said. “We’ve got work to do.”

  Mary was quiet as Keith put on his sou’wester and stepped into his boots. She watched him with her arms folded across her chest the way she always watched Malcolm when he left her. Whatever she might have said, she wouldn’t say in front of Jack.

  “Are you all right, Mary?” Jack said, putting a hand on her cheek. “You look too pale.”

  She blushed under his hand. “I’m all right. It’s considerate of you to ask.”

  Jack lingered a moment, frankly appraising her and Keith.
She did not look away from him. Keith shuffled his feet. Jack nodded disdainfully and went out.

  “Tell me the truth, boy,” he said over the rain. “Are you warming her nights?”

  “Knock it off, Jack. Just stop it now.”

  “Then it is true. It’s not such a secret anymore. By God, one of these fine days even that squarehead Malcolm will figure it out.”

  Keith clubbed Jack on the temple with a fist, but Jack didn’t go down. He rocked unsteadily for a second, then shrugged off Keith’s grasping hand.

  2

  VIRGINIA ROYAL WAS WORRIED about Dorothy. That was the excuse she gave herself for braving the storm to her house with the fixings for supper in her covered basket. She knocked on the salt-bleached door and then out of habit turned at the handle and pushed. The door rebuffed her arm. It was locked, an unheard-of thing.

  “Dorothy?” she called, more out of curiosity than alarm. In these islands, even when a body wasn’t home she left her door unlocked in case her neighbors needed baking powder or milk or shelter from the weather. Keys were often misplaced in old drawers, lost for good, though the doors were always hung with locks. “Dottie? You home? It’s Ginny.”

  She leaned close to the rain-streaked pane of the door glass and scanned the kitchen for movement. She saw none, but heard human shuffling indoors and knew Dorothy was at home. Virginia Royal did not go away. She knocked again, patiently, knowing Dorothy would eventually answer.

  “What do you want?”

  “Let me in, Dottie. It’s blowing awful out here.”

  “I’m not feeling well. Please go away.”

  “Then you need me. Please open the door. I want to chat with you. I brought fixings.”

  A few minutes passed. Virginia heard muffled noises at the back of the house, then the creak of a window opening, sliding against wet wood, and thudding closed. She heard movement outside, and what she had suspected all along was suddenly so visible she did not immediately believe it: Lieutenant Tim Halstead was retreating over the sand, his collar turned up against the rain, his back hunched to lower his profile in the wind.

  Dorothy shot back the bolt and Virginia greeted her with a face rosy from embarrassment.