Outerbridge Reach

Robert Stone

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780544357013
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

In this towering story about a man pitting himself against the sea, against society, and against himself, Robert Stone again demonstrates that he is "one of the most impressive novelists of his generation" (New York Review of Books). Inviting comparison with the great sea novels of Conrad, Melville, and Hemingway, Outerbridge Reach is also the portrait of two men and the powerful, unforgettable woman they both love - and for whom they are both ready, in their very different ways, to stake everything. As the San Francisco Chronicle said, "Robert Stone asks questions of our time few writers could imagine and answers them in narratives few readers will ever quite forget."

 

 

 

PART ONE

1

THAT WINTER was the warmest in a hundred years. There were uneasy jokes about the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect. The ambiguity of the weather made time seem slack and the year spineless. The absent season was a distraction. People looked up from their lives.

When the last week of February came in mild and spring-scented as April, Browne decided to deliver a boat to Annapolis. He passed under the Verrazano Bridge shortly after dawn on the last Wednesday in February. With Sandy Hook ahead, he cut his auxiliary and hoisted a mainsail and genoa. It was a damp, cloudy day with a gentle intermittent breeze just strong enough to raise a few whitecaps on the slate surface of the Lower Bay. Past Scotland Light, he brought her about and started for his first way point, twenty miles east of Cape May.

The boat under Browne was a forty-five-foot sloop of a type called the Highlander Forty-five, the latest and biggest representative of the Altan Marine Corporation’s standard stock-boat design. Although he had written extensively about the Forty-five, Browne had never sailed one before. He had undertaken delivery on an impulse, stirred by the weather and some obscure guilt.

During the afternoon the wind picked up but stayed warm. He had a few miles of visibility; beyond it a sickly haze brought in the horizons. Close by, threads and patches of fog rolled along on the breeze, the bank unraveling. It was dull, satisfactory weather, with regular swells.

Winter’s early darkness took him by surprise. He switched on the running lights and, planted on the companionway ladder, swept the indeterminate edge of sea and sky with his binoculars. There were no other craft in sight.

That evening he had a can of minestrone with crackers, cleaned the galley and settled down to listen for the marine forecast. The report was favorable. He set his radar scan for a radius of thirty miles; the scope recorded only the harbor traffic making for Ambrose Channel. For safety’s sake he decided to spend the first night on deck in the cockpit. He set the radar alarm, rigged his lifeline and settled himself on a cushion beside the helm. The arctic-weight foul-weather gear he wore was too warm. He took off the top and folded it against the hatch behind him to use as a pillow. The indifferent breeze was steady all night and the sea slight. He coasted along until dawn on a starboard tack.

Around mid-morning the sky cleared and the wind freshened to twenty knots, a wind from the northeast with a proper wintry edge. The boat, with its spade rudder and deep short keel, was wonderfully fast. He went below then and set an alarm clock for two hours hence. When he woke up the wind had changed. He came about and unreefed the mainsail.

After a few hours it began to seem to him as though his boat, so fleet all night, had gone sluggish. The wind was still fresh but his speed declined and the boat seemed to wallow, pitching more than she had in the higher seas of the morning. When he went below to put on a cup of coffee he saw that water had come up over the expensively carpeted cabin sole.

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

It took him a while to identify the problem, which was elemental but troubling. The Forty-five’s bilge pump was back-siphoning sea water into the bilge. He set the self-steering and applied himself to the pump but in the end there was nothing he could do. And though he was not the handiest of sailors, he had no reason to suspect another man might do better. The pump had no vents and no seacock. No manner of jury rig would keep the ocean out.

For want of a nail, he thought. A hundred grand worth of Flash Gordon curves and fancy sheer—hostage to a plastic tube.

After a few experiments at the wheel, Browne found a course on which he could keep the pump outlet clear of the water. But it seemed pointless now to try for Annapolis. That would take days of nursing the boat along and he would not really be able to count on the weather in the long term. He raised his office on the radiotelephone. Ross, the branch manager, was as sanguine as usual.

“Some kind of South Korean fuckup,” Ross told him. “We’ll just have to fix it.”

“Aren’t you glad I found it?” he asked Ross. A moment later he thought he had sounded a little forlorn.

“Damn right,” Ross said. “Good going. Keep it quiet, will you?”

The nearest Altan dealership with docking facilities was on the Jersey shore. He went on deck to lower his sails, turned on the engine and headed southwest.

On the way in he called his wife.

“Are you sure it’s under control?” she asked him.

“I’m watching it,” he told her. “I’ll call you again by nine.”

He made the estuary at Stone Harbor before dark and anchored off to clear the bilges. “Pump trouble,” he told the local dealer. When he had packed his gear and locked the boat, he booked himself into a motel on route 121. He called the broker in Annapolis and then rang his wife again.

“I’m ashore,” he told her. “So that’s that.”

“What will they do about it?” she asked him.

“I don’t know,” Browne said. “It has to be fixed somehow.”

“Buzz and Teddy will be disappointed,” Anne said. In Annapolis he had planned to visit with two of his old Academy classmates.

“I’m going down anyway,” Browne said. “I feel the need of those guys.”

“Do you know what?” Anne asked as he was about to hang up. Her voice had a false note of careless gaiety that made him realize that she had been drinking. “The market fell seventy points yesterday.”

“Leaks everywhere,” Browne said to her. He decided to postpone worrying about it.

That night in his motel bed, with the weekend traffic roaring by on the road outside, he could still feel the unsound motion of the new boat. Its pitching took shape in dreams he would not remember. In the morning, he took a cab to the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst and talked his way aboard a hop to Patuxent.

Buzz Ward met him at the hangar.

“Some life you lead.”

“I haven’t sailed overnight in years,” Browne said. “I guess the weather got to me.”

The unnatural weather hung over the fields of Maryland. Dogwood was budding in the wintry forest. As they drove, Browne told Buzz Ward about the boat.

“Nothing works anymore,” he concluded.

“Yeah,” Buzz said, “I know what you mean, buddy.”

The Wards lived in a colonial house beside the Severn. Mary Ward, who did social work for the Episcopal Church, was away at a meeting in Virginia. Buzz and Owen Browne spent the afternoon walking the grounds of the Academy. Buzz was a professor of English there, with the rank of commander.

From the upper deck of the Crown Sailing Center, they watched midshipmen perform their seamanship drill aboard the mock-up warships in the river. It seemed to Browne that a third of them were women.

“Blue-collar kids,” Buzz told him. “The boys are conventional-minded. The girls are the opposite.”

“What’s that like?”

“It’s yet another form of torture,” Ward said. “They march or die.”

“As always.”

“We try to shake ’em,” Buzz said. “Also, we have the best black kids in the country.”

Two of the sailing trophies on display in Webster had been won by Browne during his years as a midshipman. Buzz led him past them.

“Sic transit gloria mundi,” Browne said, patting the glass.

“Amen,” Buzz said.

The false spring and the Academy walks filled Browne’s heart with ghostly promises. He and Ward went in silence past the chapel. Both of them had been married there, passing under swords into the June sunlight. It had been 1968 and the Navy at war. Both of them still lived with the same women.

Late in the afternoon, Browne borrowed the Wards’ car and drove over to the Altan dealership in Waldorf. To his relief, it had closed for the day. When he got back to Annapolis, he found Ward serving bourbon to their old classmate Fedorov, who was in town for a Slavic studies conference at St. John’s College, across the road from the Academy.

Fedorov was a Russian from western Massachusetts, the only son of a dispossessed kulak and his young Ukrainian wife. Two years before, he had taken early retirement and joined the faculty of a small Catholic college in Pennsylvania. He was tall and slope-shouldered, somehow priestly in his dark, ill-fitting suit. He appeared to be very drunk.

“Brother Browne!” Fedorov declared. His face was flushed.

Browne took a can of beer from the refrigerator and touched Fedorov’s glass with it.

“Na zdorovie!” Fedorov said to him.

Browne raised the can in salute.

“Hello, Teddy.”

Fedorov had always been singularly unmilitary in appearance. Now in middle age, he was jowly and bespectacled. His round, open face had an unfamiliar look that seemed to combine slyness and confusion. Brutalized by booze, Browne thought.

“Na zdorovie!” Fedorov repeated. In drink he became a professional Russian.

“Old Teddy’s so loaded,” Buzz Ward said, “he’s talking Polish.” He and Browne exchanged glances of resigned concern. Ward was a Kentuckian from a military family who had been a fighter pilot before taking his advanced degrees.

For dinner they went out to a restaurant in a restored colonial building near the state capitol. Their table was set by a bay storefront window overlooking Cumberland Street. The place was candlelit, herb-scented and mellifluent with Vivaldi. The wine somehow aroused Fedorov to a state of manic animation. He looked at his friends sidewise over his glasses, with a narrow-eyed crafty smile. Most of his adult life had passed in scholarly contemplation of the Soviet navy.

“Twenty years,” he said, “next June. Can you believe it?”

“Easily,” Buzz Ward said, and laughed at his own comment.

“I can’t,” Browne said.

His friends looked at him in silence.

“Well I can’t, I’m sorry. It’s impossible.”

“All the same,” Buzz Ward said, “there it is.”

“Tell him,” Fedorov said impatiently to Ward. “Tell Owen your plan.”

Then Ward explained to Browne that he was leaving the Navy to take up religion. As soon as he retired, he and his wife were removing to northern California so that Buzz could attend a seminary there.

“That’s incredible,” Browne said. In fact, he was not particularly surprised at Ward’s decision. “What about your fourth stripe?”

“I can retire with it,” Ward said.

Browne shook his head.

“You were supposed to make flag rank, Buzz. We were counting on you.”

“Twenty is plenty,” Buzz Ward told him. “My kids are grown. I’m not about to divorce Mary. I need some love in my life.”

Each of them had gone to Vietnam during the war and each had faced some combat. All three, as it turned out, saw their naval careers destroyed through the events of the war. Ward’s fate had been particularly heroic and complicated. He had started out as one of the Navy’s F-14 aces. After twenty-five missions he had been forced to eject over the Dragon Jaw Bridge. Then he had spent five years as a prisoner of war.

Fedorov rocked in his chair, arms folded, his face gross and saturnine.

“Anything to stop the clock,” he said. “Extraordinary measures. Anything to break the treads of time.”

Ward laughed self-consciously.

“You got it, buddy,” he said. “You done put your finger on it, my friend.”

“Everybody wants to be happy,” Fedorov told them. “They’re not happy if they’re not happy. It’s America. Remember the people who threw shit on us?” he demanded. He turned to look about the room as though he might find some antiwar demonstrators there. There were only a few elderly tourists. “Where are they now? Not happy, poor babies. Well, fuck them. They have their reward.”

“An excellent analysis,” Ward said. He turned to Browne. “Wouldn’t you say, doctor?”

“I don’t know,” Browne said. “I’d have to think about it.” Their lives were bound in irony, Browne thought. Not one of them had chosen the Navy on his own. Each had been impressed into the Academy by the weight of someone else’s expectations. In the case of Ward, it had been family tradition. Browne and Teodor were the sons of ambitious immigrant parents. If they had all graduated from high school only a year or two later they might have resisted. He and his friends had been the last good children of their time.

“Our enemies are confounded,” Fedorov declared, “that’s the good news. The bad news? So are we.” He raised his glass of wine. “Na zdorovie.”

They raised their glasses with his. Both Ward and Browne were drinking soda water.

Afterward, they went back to the house beside the river. Browne decided to stay the night, do his business in Waldorf the next morning and take an afternoon train home.

In the Wards’ living room, Buzz poured a small glass of wine for Fedorov, who took it without complaint. He made coffee for Browne and himself. Ward had always been a tireless coffee drinker, Browne remembered, a very naval thing to be.

“Maybe it was me who should have stayed in,” he told Buzz Ward, “instead of you. Sometimes I wish I had.”

“I always thought so, Owen. You instead of me. But you made a lot of money in the boat business. You damn well couldn’t have done that in the Navy.”

Browne shook his head quickly. “It’s always risky. You can’t count on anything one season to the next. Anyway,” he told Ward, “I never cared about money.”

Fedorov, who had appeared to be sliding into sleep, sat up straight on the sofa.

“You had better not go around saying that, Owen. You’ll be locked up.”

“None of us cared about money,” Ward said. “That’s the truth of it.”

“Absolutely,” Fedorov said. “Blitz was right about us.”

Fedorov’s reference was to an upperclassman named Bittner who had persecuted Browne and his two friends during their plebe year. Bittner had decided that the three of them were sodomists. He had gone beyond hazing, to the point of setting loose one of the Academy’s periodic homophobic inquisitions. The charges had badly shaken Browne and Ward, who were not homosexual and who had been slightly more naive about sexuality than the average midshipman. Fedorov had been driven to the lip of suicide. The experience had served to bond them. Bittner had turned out to have sodomy on the brain and been dismissed from the service. But he had been right about Fedorov.

“Well, I didn’t stay in,” Browne said, “and you guys did. That’s one decision at least that’s behind us.”

“Wait until you see life in the economy, Buzz,” Fedorov said to Ward. “It’s terrifying! People pay for everything!”

“Speaking of which,” Browne asked them, “did you guys register the market yesterday?”

Both Fedorov and Ward looked at him blankly.

“Ch...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Map
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• PART ONE
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• 15
• 16
• 17
• 18
• 19
• 20
• 21
• 22
• 23
• 24
• 25
• 26
• 27
• 28
• 29
• PART TWO
• 30
• 31
• 32
• 33
• 34
• 35
• 36
• 37
• 38
• 39
• 40
• 41
• 42
• 43
• 44
• 45
• 46
• 47
• 48
• 49
• 50
• 51
• 52
• 53
• 54
• 55
• 56
• 57
• 58
• 59
• 60
• 61
• 62
• 63
• 64
• 65
• 66
• 67
• 68
• About the Author