The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories Read online

  Glen Ellen in the Valley of the Moon. Who ever thought up such a saccharine name? But it was a pretty place. And his land was paid for long ago. In the hot sun, he could feel rather than see his five acres of fruit orchard and a cottage on the knoll. All was order, white picket fences, a bit of green lawn, flower beds and long lines of apricot and plum trees—squares, rectangles, parallel rows geometrically pleasing—all raked and tidy as it should be. On clear summer days he could look out from the veranda, with its profusion of purple bougainvillaea, and over the rolling hills of Sonoma, where live oaks daubed the yellow grasses and the ephemeral gray-green of olive groves lay here and there, lightly, like little smoke clouds at rest in the valley. Security? How often of late on dead cold ocean nights, at quarter speed off some fogbound coast, tense on the bridge with his senses straining against the hostile blackness, had the gentle warmth of Glen Ellen’s sun-washed hills touched him with a loving hand. Safety. Ah yes, sweet nepenthe. The sailor’s dream. Snug Harbor. God damn it. Euthanasia! And very soon, another trip or two, and he’d be retiring, leaving the sea, the great, restless sea, his sea that talked to him all day and all night in a thousand different voices. He’d be alone then in a painless purgatory, embalmed in blissful idleness. Something, he thought angrily, must be done about that, something to bring palpable reality into his paradise.

  Suddenly a happy thought came to him. Emily Henderson! Instantly the whole picture, finished and framed, presented itself like a fine painting. And, like something wonderful, exciting and new that one suddenly finds oneself in possession of, to see and to have as one’s own, his pulse began to beat more solidly. Why hadn’t he thought of her before? Damn the reflective life, resigning oneself to reading, thinking, becoming the knowledgeable philosopher, forever striving to stop striving, building, stone by stone over the long years, a tomb in which to reflect upon life and all the while denying life itself, the full physical side, a woman’s body.

  He felt thirty years younger. He chuckled out loud. When old Hoskins hears about this, he’ll be telling everyone “them Larsons never wear out.” Yes, life is good, he thought, and sighing contentedly, pulled his cap down over his eyes and prepared himself for another short nap in the sun.

  The high-pitched crying of gulls in startled flight roused him. From the dock came the rumble of tires over wooden planks. A car door slammed. Mingled with the whine of the wind he could hear a motor running. The Captain yawned, stretched, then rose reluctantly from his chair and walked to the rail.

  An ancient taxicab stood at the end of the warehouse. By the heavy chugging of the engine, the high, thin-tired wheels, the dull nondescript paint on the body, the Captain guessed it to be at least twenty years old. A man got out, paid the driver and started toward the gangway. In one hand he carried a black briefcase, over his other arm a dark topcoat. At the foot of the gangway he hesitated and looked up at the Caspar. The hot, dusty wind, sweeping across the dock, flapped the loose ends of the straps on his briefcase, lifted the collar of his suit coat up around his neck. The Captain, apprehensive and at once deeply curious, directed him to the forequarter.

  Sweat was running down the man’s face when he set his briefcase on the deck. He took a white handkerchief from the breast pocket of his dark, double-breasted business suit, removed his gray felt hat and wiped his face. On the dock, the Captain had judged him to be in his late fifties. On closer inspection, however, he appeared much older. How much, the Captain could not tell. He was gray-haired and thin with an angular face, a wide thin mouth and prominent cheek bones. His deep-set eyes moved restlessly, seeming to take in every detail with quick appraisal. He was quite pale and there was a nervous tightening of the skin about his eyes. He looked up at the stack then down at the gulls facing into the wind on the dock. Finally, his restless gaze paused as it met the Captain’s. And in that moment, a tiny current of recognition was generated in the Captain’s mind. But whether or not the passenger experienced a similar response, he showed no sign.

  “My name is Mueller,” the passenger said, “William Mueller.” His voice, though barely above a whisper, was clearly audible.

  “I’m Captain Larson. Your cabin is right over there.” The Captain pointed toward the small stateroom he’d made ready that morning. “It’ll be hot in there, but it’ll cool off as soon as we leave the channel.”

  “I do not mind the heat,” Mueller said. He spoke with a slight trace of an accent, possibly Scandinavian, but with precision, as though he had acquired the language by careful study. After picking up his briefcase, he hurried to the cabin, stepped inside and closed the door behind him. A moment later the Captain heard the port snap shut and the toggle screw click against the brass frame.

  The Captain returned to his deck chair, but Mueller did not come out. He waited awhile thinking that perhaps Mueller might change from his business suit into something more comfortable and get out of the stuffy cabin. Still he did not come out. Nor did he open the port.

  There was no change at all in the wind. Through the black trusses of the drawbridge astern, the Captain could see the blue expanse of bay stippled with whitecaps, and all of it, like a great dark river, crawled steadily southward. He could not recall having seen the sky so clear. He picked up the Collected Works of Dostoevsky and turned to Notes From the Underground. But the provocative lines he’d underscored only a short while before, which had so absorbed his attention, seemed completely irrelevant and without purpose. He could think of nothing but the passenger.

  Where had he come from? Why had he chosen such an antiquated and uncomfortable mode of travel when he could just as easily have taken a train or even a bus? Why did he have that odd feeling of having seen him before when there was no one in all his life he could remember who bore even a faint resemblance to the pallid nervousness of the man now occupying the passenger’s cabin? A peculiarly urgent desire to know more about him possessed the Captain, a desire that was tinged with mistrust and a vague sense of fear. He lay back on his deck chair and, with the now unreadable Dostoevsky open before him, began to lay tentative plans on how he would approach this stranger, tactfully, cautiously to be sure, to draw him out.

  A big gray gull, tired of fighting the upper currents, swung down over the deck, screamed shrilly and swooped away over the channel. With his thoughts still taken up with the passenger, the Captain closed his eyes. A deep and unexplainable weariness came over him. How strange, he thought, that he should be so sleepy at that time of day. As far back as he could remember, he had avoided sleep, often reading until early morning or just fussing around doing little things to keep from turning in. Now, though he much preferred to stay awake, if for no other reason than to amuse himself with these errant thoughts of his, his body, warm and relaxed in the sun, could not be coerced. Nor could his brain. So once again that afternoon, he drifted off into a light but restless sleep through which filtered a steady flow of oddly familiar faces and essences of old and half forgotten experiences.

  And through it all, now near, now far, came the low sound of sobbing that, except for intermittent breaks as after quick exhalations, could have been the atonal sighing of the north wind through the rigging.

  A slight sound, or perhaps it was an awareness of some unusual presence close by, awakened him. He yawned, brushed a weathered hand across his mouth and opened his eyes. To his surprise, Mueller was sitting in a deck chair beside him. He was dressed in the same dark, double-breasted suit with his gray felt hat pulled down over his eyes very much like the Captain’s. But Mueller was wide awake, gazing down at the deck in front of him. How long he’d been there, the Captain had no way of knowing. Yet, by the position of the sun, which the Captain noted was standing at about the same angle, very little time must have passed.

  “You were sleeping,” Mueller said in his clear whisper. “I did not wish to disturb you.”

  “It’s not my habit to sleep in the afternoon,” the Captain said gruffly to cover the embarrassment of what he was certain must appear as g
rossly unseamanlike behavior to this stranger aboard. “The combination of hot sun,” he went on apologetically, “and this damned north wind must have gotten to me.”

  “It was very close in the cabin,” Mueller said, unmindful of the Captain’s apology. “I thought we might talk awhile out here.”

  The lines of tension about his eyes were more pronounced and he seemed to the Captain to have aged considerably in the brief time since he had come aboard. He looked anxious, as though time were running out. Again a feeling came over the Captain of having seen him before. He scrutinized Mueller’s features carefully, but as a result of the glare of sunlight, or from a slight dizziness that had come over him on waking, both the face and the figure in the adjoining chair seemed blurred and darkened. Perhaps, he thought, it was merely Mueller’s clear, whispery voice with its overtone of worldly sadness that stirred his feeling of recognition. Yet whether he had met the passenger at some previous but forgotten time, or whether he was a total stranger, concerned him less at the moment than where he might be bound.

  “What made you take the Caspar on your trip north?” the Captain asked.

  “An impulse,” Mueller said. “An impulse with no thought whatever.” He paused as if considering whether or not to go on. “I’d been walking all night,” he said, finally. “It’s a good feeling to walk through the streets at night. There is always the chance that something might happen. Also one takes a certain risk.”

  “A considerable risk, I’d say,” the Captain interjected. “But how did you happen on to the Caspar?”

  “As I said, I was walking, from the hills down toward the bay. Not a straight course, mind you, but erratic and unpredictable. My life has always been that way, like those planets the old astronomers called the Wanderers. A strong wind was blowing and the sky was clear. Above me, and somewhat to the north, stood the Seven Stars of Ursa which the ancient Pythagoreans called the Hands of Rhea, the Lady of Turning Heaven. Scattered about like a collage of early Greek family portraits and concealing the deeper blackness beyond, I could make out Andromeda, Cassiopea, Cepheus, Perseus, and then the dimly perceived swath of the galaxy, the Bridge Out of Time.

  “Yet though the sky was filled with action, the city was quite dark in spite of the street lamps and the stars. I probably covered a dozen miles walking this way and that, through alleys and little parks and along deserted streets. Yes, action and all those stars!” Mueller turned his shadowed face toward the Captain. “But there was nothing,” he added slowly.

  “Nothing?” the Captain repeated. “What were you looking for?”

  “Change,” Mueller said quickly, as if he had anticipated the question. “Change like a narcotic bringing temporary forgetfulness.” He paused again and breathed in softly. “Of course,” he said, “you know what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you,” the Captain murmured, probing the indistinct features of the man next to him from the shade of his visor, and wondering what he should do if this passenger of his should prove to be what he was beginning to suspect, some kind of psychopath.

  “I have a theory,” Mueller went on, “that all of us, the most rational and hard-headed of men as well as the softest and most malleable, the pious believers as well as the dedicated practitioners of the responsible life, share a common fear which is either active or passive but always there like one’s heartbeat or . . .”

  “You were walking about in the middle of the night,” the Captain interrupted impatiently. “How did you stumble onto the Caspar?”

  “That came later,” Mueller said, undisturbed by the Captain’s intrusion. “I thought you would understand.”

  “Understand!” the Captain muttered. What goes on with this man with his “of course you know what I mean” and now his “I thought you would understand”? Is he sane or some kind of crackpot? And what is he doing aboard this nearly defunct lumber schooner dressed up like an A-deck passenger on a Pacific liner? Maybe he’s an insurance investigator or possibly a government agent and has mistaken me for someone else. He might even be an escapee from some mental asylum! But whoever he is, he’ll be here for a whole week and I’ll have to put up with him. Well, at least he doesn’t seem dangerous.

  No, there was certainly nothing dangerous about Mueller, the Captain reflected, nothing at all vicious, nor even malicious. He’d had enough experience to judge that. In fact, he thought, there was something rather pathetic about him. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been so abrupt with him. He looked again at Mueller. Only his eyes, set in hollows of deepest shadow and looking back at him as though from a long way off or through a great distance of time, were visible.

  Whether the expression of tragic resignation in Mueller’s eyes mixed with the enduring pain of some very old injury was due to the blurring of the Captain’s vision or whether, as he was beginning to suspect, it was the projection of some concealed trouble of his own being mirrored back to him, he could not tell. But it was at that moment he felt again the same feeling of recognition as before, only stronger now, like a dark wind out of his past, but for which he could find no support whatever from his conscious recollections.

  “I’m sorry for the interruption,” the Captain said. “As I said, it’s probably that damned sun and the wind up there blowing a gale that’s making me a bit irritable.”

  “Feelings are unruly and have a way of transgressing upon order as we would like to have it,” Mueller said.

  “Perhaps that’s true,” the Captain said, though he was not in the least sure what Mueller meant. “But tell me,” he asked, “who are you and why have you taken passage on the Caspar?”

  Mueller was silent, dead silent in his dark retreat. Finally his shadowed gaze turned slowly upon the Captain.

  “I thought by now you would surely know,” he replied.

  The Captain sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I haven’t the slightest idea who you are,” he said wearily.

  “But it was you who wanted me to come,” Mueller said.

  4

  In spite of the Captain’s increasing suspicion concerning Mueller’s sanity, this last statement so unnerved him that momentarily he could think of nothing but to wish for old Hoskins, with his homely chatter, to appear and reestablish his contact with reality, which in Mueller’s presence was fast taking on the aspects of a distressing dream.

  But Hoskins was nowhere about. And there was no sound from below. Certainly, the Captain thought, Hoskins and the men must have long since returned from lunch. Or perhaps they had returned while he slept, finished their work on the engine, and gone off again. He glanced at the sky. The sun, with its lower limb just above the black, tarred mizzen shrouds, seemed fixed at a permanent angle. No smoke came from the stack. In fact, there was no motion of any kind except the very slight oscillation of the mastheads against the sky and the almost visual surge of the wind above. The engine could have been repaired, run for awhile, then shut down. On the other hand, the men could still be at lunch. The smokeless stack and the silence told him nothing. He wondered about the time but somehow lacked the energy to look at his watch, which he could hear ticking away in its gold-plated case in the vest pocket of his uniform.

  He turned again to Mueller hoping that by some magic he would have vanished, or that he had never been there in the first place. But the dark figure of the passenger remained as before, indistinct and motionless, like the shadow of a man, leaning slightly forward on his white canvas deck chair. He was still talking, and in the same low whisper.

  “I’ve come a long way, from the ends of the earth, you might say. But the most distant places do not seem very far once you have been there and returned.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” the Captain murmured, at a loss how to respond to these perplexingly elusive statements, which on the surface seemed meaningless, yet somehow imparted a feeling of motion toward some distant and nebulous goal. Perhaps Mueller was trying to tell him something!

  In spite of the burning sun, the Captain felt cold inside.
Was Mueller an hallucination, he wondered, the distorted product of some breakdown in his overtired mental machinery, or was he, as he was beginning to fear, the visitation of Death? Probably neither, he consoled himself. Though he was unusually tired, his mind was as clear as ever. And Death, at least in human form, he knew was a gross superstition. Moreover, Death, as he understood it from popular mythology, was impassive, taciturn and silently adamant. Mueller, though cryptic, was uniquely verbal. And despite his lack of logical continuity, he seemed possessed of profound feelings that seemed to rise, like random bubbles from the darkest chambers of his being, feelings as well as insights charged with hidden meanings but entirely devoid of laughter and love, and remarkably like those of a troubled dream. It was as if Mueller’s assessment of reality had been conceived in the subterranean gloom of the Captain’s own mind.

  The thought stirred the same hollow feeling that had come over him after his dream of the mysterious black figure from the depths of the engine room.

  “It’s a difficult habit to break.”

  “What is?”

  “Life is.”

  In Mueller’s presence, faceless as a dream persona, elucidating in his eerie whisper dark and ineluctable truths fomented in primitive regions beyond the pale of sunlight and blue sky, the Captain sensed with foreboding the advent of a confrontation far worse than his own demise.

  But what could Mueller possibly have to say? His whole life was clean. He had wronged no one. In fact, for the most part, it had been rather dull, fearing nothing really, and as far as he knew, feared by no one. Or was it all, he wondered, some weird kind of joke being played on him by some old shipmate with a macabre sense of humor? If so, to hell with him and his bastard accomplice. Yet, no matter how he reasoned, he could not rid himself of the unpleasant feeling of being drawn in.