The Last One Left Read Online Free PDF

pedestal helmsman’s seats, two bunks and a head fitted into the small area forward
.
    Salt had crusted on her, and had then been rinsed away when she had drifted through the rain squalls. At times when the wind and the chop were at odds and the waves broke, she would falter in a moment of awkwardness, take water, then shake herself free with almost an air of apology for such flawed grace. The automatic bilge pump had been turned on when she was rigged for towing, and when the rain and the chop brought enough water aboard, the pump would drone, working off the batteries, until the bilge was again empty
.
    The graceful hull was a medium Nassau blue, her topsides white with just enough trace of smoke blue to cut the sunglare
.
    She had lifted and dipped and danced her way with an agile grace which matched her name. Muñequita. Little Doll. The out-drive stern units were uptilted and locked in place. The long line trailing from the bow steadied her, keeping her bow facing into the wind. Yet now movement was less graceful because the northeast wind was freshening, lifting the Gulf Stream into a chop. In that balance of forces the Muñequita moved due west, stern first, into nighttime
.
    Even in that posture, she seemed to anticipate and avoid the uglier motions, almost as if she were aware of the look of death aboard, aware of the naked body of the girl, face down on the cockpit decking, responding, slack as a pudding, to each variation of that long and lonely dance across an empty sea
.
    The boat drifted into the path of a brief hard shower that moved swiftly, dimpling the swells, then spattering against the topsides and against the sun-raw, blistered back of the girl. It soaked her hair and when it ran across her parted lips she made the smallest of sounds, licked with a slow tongue, moved one hand slightly
.
    The rain ended. The bilge pump started up, droned for two minutes and clicked off
.
    By midnight the boat had reached the western edge of the Stream where current and chop were diminished. The Muñequita’s motion eased. She began to drift in a more southwesterly direction
.

Four
    ON SUNDAY MORNING , the fifteenth of May, just before noon, Sam Boylston sat in a booth by the tinted plate-glass windows of a roadside restaurant on the outskirts of Corpus Christi, looked across at the somber, pretty and intent face of Lydia Jean, his estranged wife, and knew that all the things he had said—all so carefully planned—had been the wrong things after all.
    They kept their voices low. A group of idle waitresses prattled and snickered twenty feet away.
    “What it all adds up to, Lyd—check me if I’m wrong—you’re still in love with me in a kind of sad dramatic way … but we haven’t got a chance in the world because I am the kind of a person I am.”
    She frowned. “You sum things up so they sound so neat and complete and final. But it’s sort of a trick. It’s argumentation, really. If you could understand what it is about you that made things wrong, and if you could
—see
yourself doing it, and if you couldunderstand
why
you do it then maybe you could … Now you have that terribly patient and tolerant look.”
    “You think I need help?”
    “I don’t know what you need.”
    “I need you. I need Boy-Sam. I need the home we had five months ago, Lyd.”
    She shook her head in a puzzled way. “I wish I could explain it. I really do. You
crowd
people. You use them up, and the nearer and dearer they are to you, the more mercilessly you spend them.”
    “Overbearing monster, huh?”
    “You are a very civilized man, dear. You are polite. You are considerate. You are thoughtful. But you demand of yourself an absolute clarity, total performance, complete dedication. There is something almost inhuman about it, really. What is lacking, I think, is the tolerance to accept—the inadequacies of others.”
    “Lyd, be fair. Did I ever tell you you weren’t meeting some kind of standard?”
    She was silent as she