“Let’s have a look at him,” the captain said.
Leaving the quartermaster at the wheel, running the beacons down the channel, they went behind the wheel house into the captain’s cabin. Harry Morgan lay there on the iron pipe bunk. His eyes were closed but he opened them when the captain touched his wide shoulder.
“How you feeling, Harry?” the captain asked him. Harry looked at him and did not speak.
“Can we get you anything, boy?” the captain asked him.
Harry Morgan looked at him.
“He don’t hear you,” said the mate.
“Harry,” said the captain, “do you want anything, boy?”
He wet a towel in the water bottle on a gimbal by the bunk and moistened Harry Morgan’s deeply cracked lips. They were dry and black looking. Looking at him, Harry Morgan started speaking. “A man,” he said.
“Sure,” said the captain. “Go on.”
“A man,” said Harry Morgan, very slowly. “Ain’t got no hasn’t got any can’t really isn’t any way out.” He stopped. There had been no expression on his face at all when he spoke.
“Go on, Harry,” said the captain. “Tell us who did it. How did it happen, boy?”
“A man,” said Harry, looking at him now with his narrow eyes on the wide, high-cheek-boned face, trying now to tell him.
“Four men,” said the captain helpfully. He moistened the lips again, squeezing the towel so a few drops went between them.
“A man,” corrected Harry; then stopped.
“All right. A man,” the captain said.
“A man,” Harry said again very flatly, very slowly, talking with his dry mouth. “Now the way things are the way they go no matter what no.”
The captain looked at the mate and shook his head.
“Who did it, Harry?” the mate asked.
Harry looked at him.
“Don’t fool yourself,” he said. The captain and the mate both bent over him. Now it was coming. “Like trying to pass cars on the top of hills. On that road in Cuba. On any road. Anywhere. Just like that. I mean how things are. The way that they been going. For a while yes sure all right. Maybe with luck. A man.” He stopped. The captain shook his head at the mate again. Harry Morgan looked at him flatly. The captain wet Harry’s lips again. They made a bloody mark on the towel.
“A man,” Harry Morgan said, looking at them both. “One man alone ain’t got. No man alone now.” He stopped. “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.”
He shut his eyes. It had taken him a long time to get it out and it had taken him all of his life to learn it.
He lay there his eyes open again.
“Come on,” said the captain to the mate. “You sure you don’t want anything, Harry?”
Harry Morgan looked at him but he did not answer. He had told them, but they had not heard.
“We’ll be back,” said the captain. “Take it easy, boy.” Harry Morgan watched them go out of the cabin. Forward in the wheelhouse, watching it get dark and the light of Sombrero starting to sweep out at sea, the mate said, “He gives you the willies out of his head like that.”
“Poor fellow,” said the captain. “Well, we’ll be in pretty soon now. We’ll get him in soon after midnight. If we don’t have to slow down for that tow.”
“Think he’ll live?”
“No,” said the captain. “But you can’t ever tell.”
There were many people in the dark street outside the iron gates that closed the entrance to the old submarine base now transformed into a yacht basin. The Cuban watchman had orders to let no one in, and the crowd were pressing against the fence to look through between the iron rods into the dark enclosure lit, along the water, by the lights of the yachts that lay moored at the finger piers. The crowd was as quiet as only a Key West crowd can be. The yachtsmen pushed and elbowed their way through to the gate and by the watchman.
“Hey. You canna comein,” the watchman said.
“What the hell. We’re off a yacht.”
“Nobody supposacomein,” the watchman said. “Get back.”
“Don’t be stupid,” said one of the yachtsmen, and pushed him aside to go up the road toward the dock.
Behind them was the crowd outside the gates, where the little watchman stood uncomfortable and anxious in his cap, his long mustache and his deshevelled authority, wishing he had a key to lock the big gate and, as they strode heartily up the sloping road they saw ahead, then passed, a group of men waiting at the Coast Guard pier. They paid no attention to them but walked along the dock, past the piers where the other yachts lay to pier number five, and out on the pier to where the gang plank reached, in the glare of a flood light, from rough wooden pier to the teak deck of the
“Scotch and soda,” he said.
“You, Henry?”
“Yes,” said Henry Carpenter.
“What was the matter with that silly ass at the gate?”
“I’ve no idea,” said Henry Carpenter.
The steward, in his white jacket, brought the two glasses.
“Play those disks I put out after dinner,” the yachtsman, whose name was Wallace Johnston, said.
“I’m afraid I put them away, sir,” the steward said.