Mitch’s gut still twisted at the thought. Great, just fucking great! Russian roulette would be quicker and a lot less painful to those who must sit and wait. Homework had become impossible. Sucking at a forbidden pipe, Mitch anesthetized himself with fiction, night after night and week after week. Esquire, Bluebook, Adventure Magazine were all too full of the war. So he turned to Melville, Sabatini, Conrad, Jack London, and Slocum. Typee, Wake of the Red Witch, Lord Jim, he sucked in with the smoke. Rationally, he knew that the islands he was adventuring were dead, or would be ruined by the war, but he saw himself among them anyway, skippering a trading schooner, with a slim Polynesian mistress, outwitting pearl-traders and rescuing heiresses.

It had all been harmless, and comforting. No South Sea island adventure between the covers of a book was half as lethal as what his old man must be facing further west. Mitch had spoken to no one of his reading tastes, not his mother, not his friends. He was isolated enough already on the hill, when half his buddies lived in shoulder-to-shoulder flats in North Beach. Who read Melville, except under duress?

That was when their cruise had really started. But he could not tell Lindy this. He had held to his South Sea fantasy through his own war in Korea and two years of college, pragmatically changing his self-image to that of a Pacific Island Schweitzer doctoring grateful natives on deck, all back-lit by the sun sinking into the golden west.

Lindy already blamed herself because twenty-two years ago he had quit premed for law. To lay the death of the adolescent dream on her too would have been cruel then, and foolish now. He wasn’t going to jab at old wounds when the object was to close them. Promises or not, on that he took the Fifth.

“I am leveling,” he said flatly. “The cruise started when we saw the boat.” He reached for her glass. “Another blast?”

She shook her head. In the light from the cabin hatch he could see her eyes holding his. She was not buying it. Uncomfortably, he went below.

The South Seas might have rested forever between the covers of Melville if it had not been for an unemployed housepainter with a paralyzed wife, and the sturdy Atkins ketch, painted red.

The housepainter had shambled into his law office four years ago, and the ketch had crossed his path two years later.

For the housepainter’s wife, Mitch had filed the largest medical malpractice suit in the history of California law. In the South Pacific, where he no longer got even the California Bar Journal, he had no way of knowing whether the ridiculous million-five judgment had been exceeded since. From his ex-partner’s letters, he thought not.

Without the judgment, he could not have retired at 43. He might not, in fact, have been uncomfortable enough about his law practice to want to.