The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [314]
Then he tore off my skivvies to wipe the blood from my face and the sweat from his. He yanked the painter off and reinforced my bonds. Then he doused the smudgepot, and he stepped up the oar again with its piece of canvas and sat looking eastward for the shore he was so sure of while I lay naked and gasping, still on my side as he had left me. Later he picked me up and set me down under the tarpaulin because the sun was burning on me. When he laid hands on me I flinched and heaved. "Anything busted?" he said, doctorlike, and felt my person, my ribs and shoulders. I cursed him till my throat was raw. When it came time to eat he fed me; and he said, "Better let me know when you have to go to bathroom, otherwise there'll be a problem." I said, "If you untie me, I give my word of honor I won't send any signals." "I can't take chances with you," he said. "This is too important." Once in a while he'd chafe the arms and legs to help my circulation. I begged him now. I said, "I'll get gangrene." But no, he told me; I had made my choice. Besides, he said, we'd hit those happy isles soon. Late in the afternoon he declared he could smell the land breeze. He also said, "It's getting hotter," and took to shading his eyes. And when evening came on he stretched out. He did it with heaviness, and, while I watched and wished him the worst, stretched out those doughty big legs and that bowl of tireless contemplations from which the instructions had come to lam me and leave me tied for the night, and which might direct him to do worse yet. The moon shone, a damp fell, and the boat crept; it scarcely budged on the water. I wore out my wrists trying to pull free, and then I thought that if I could crawl that far I might find a corner of the metal locker on which I could saw myself free. I turned on my back and began to work toward it, using my heels. Basteshaw didn't wake. He lay like that great painted mummy case, his feet cocked out and his head like stone. He had made a big welt on my back, and this I scraped as I crawled, and I had to stop and take it out on my lip with my teeth. It didn't seem any use. Terrible deep sorrow came on me, and I wept to myself. So as not to wake him. It took me half the night to reach the locker and work my hands loose. But finally the shirt tore off and I flaked away at the painter, soaking it to make it expand. At last it came off. I crouched there and licked my raw wrists. My back was flaming from the beating it had taken, but there was one cool place in my body, which was where I kept murder in my heart toward Basteshaw. I crept over to him; I didn't stand up because he might wake and see me standing in the moonlight. I had my choice now of pushing him in the water, of strangling him, of beating him with the oar as he had done me, of breaking his bones and seeing his blood. I decided as the first step to tie him and take off his goggles. Then we'd see. Well, as I stood poised over him on my toes, full of revenge, holding the painter, I felt heat rising off him. I lightly touched his cheek. The guy was burning up with fever. I listened to his heart. Some kind of gunnery seemed to be going on there, hollow and terrible. I was gypped of revenge. For as a matter of course I took care of him. I cut a hole in a piece of canvas to make myself a poncho, my other clothes being ripped to tatters, and I sat up with him all night. Like Henry Ware of the Kentucky border and the great chief of the Ohio, Timmendiquas. He might have stabbed Timmendiquas but he let him go. I felt sorrow and pity for him too. I realized how much he was barren of, or trying to be barren of in order to become the man of his ideas. Didn't he, even if mainly from his head rather than from his heart, want to bring about redemption and rescue the whole brotherhood of man from suffering? He was off his rocker all the next day. It would have been the end of him if I hadn't sighted and signaled a British tanker late that day. It would have been the end of me too, for it turned out that we were way past the Canaries and somewhere off the Rio de Oro.