Islands in the Stream (47 page)

Think about something cheerful. Think about how you start with the sun at your back. And remember they have local knowledge now, along with all that salt fish, and you are going to have to use your head. He went to sleep and slept quite well until two hours before daylight when the sand flies awakened him. Thinking about the problems had made him feel better and he slept without dreaming.

They left before the sun was up
and Thomas Hudson steered down the channel that was like a canal with the gray banks showing on either side. By the time the sun was up he was out through the cut between the shoals and he steered due north to get into blue water and past the dangerous rocky heads of the outer reef. It was a little longer than running on the Inside but it was much safer.

When the sun rose, there was no wind and not enough swell for the sea to break on any of the rocks. The day would be hot and muggy, he knew, and there would be squalls in the afternoon.

His mate came up and looked around. Then he looked carefully at the land and along it to where the high, ugly tower of the light showed.

“We could have run down easily on the inside.”

“I know it,” Thomas Hudson said. “But I thought this was better.”

“Another day like yesterday. But hotter.”

“They can’t make much time.”

“They can’t make any time. They’re becalmed somewhere. You’re going to check with the light whether they went into the cut between Paredón and Coco, aren’t you?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll go in. I know the keeper. You can lay just inside the little key at the tip. I won’t be gone long,” Antonio said.

“I don’t even need to anchor.”

“You’ve got plenty of strong-backed people to get anchors up.”

“Send up Ara and Willie if they’ve eaten. Nothing should show here this close to the light and you can’t see a damned thing looking into the sun. But send up George and Henry, too. We might as well do it right.”

“Remember the rocks make right up to your blue water here, Tom.”

“I remember and I can see them.”

“Do you want your tea cold?”

“Please. And a sandwich. Send the men up first.”

“They’ll be right up. I’ll send the tea up and have everything ready to go ashore.”

“Be careful how you talk to them.”

“That’s why I am going in.”

“Put out a couple of lines, too. It will look better coming in on the light.”

“Yes,” his mate said. “We might get something we could give them at the light.”

The four came up and took their usual posts and Henry said, “Did you see anything, Tom?”

“One turtle with a sea gull flying around him. I thought he was going to perch on his back. But he didn’t.”

“Mi capitán,”
said George, who was a taller Basque than Ara and a good athlete and fine seaman, but not nearly as strong as Ara in many ways.

“Mi señor obispo,”
said Thomas Hudson.

“OK, Tom,” George said. “If I see any really big submarines do you want me to tell you?”

“If you see one as big as you saw that one time keep it to yourself.”

“I dream about her nights,” George said.

“Don’t talk about her,” Willie said. “I just ate breakfast.”

“When we closed I could feel my
cajones
going up like an elevator,” Ara said. “How did you really feel, Tom?”

“Scared.”

“I saw her come up,” Ara said. “And the next thing I heard Henry say, ‘She’s an aircraft carrier, Tom.’ ”

“That’s what she looked like,” Henry said. “I can’t help it. I’d say the same thing again.”

“She spoiled my life,” Willie said. “I’ve never been the same since. For a nickel I’d have never gone to sea again.”

“Here,” said Henry. “Take twenty cents and get off at Paredón Grande. Maybe they’ll give you change.”

“I don’t want change. I’ll take a transfer.”

“Would you really?” Henry asked. There had been a certain amount of bad blood between them since the last two times they had been in Havana.

“Listen, expensive,” Willie said. “We’re not fighting submarines or you wouldn’t have come up without sneaking a quick one. We’re only chasing Krauts to kill them in a decked-over half-open boat. Even you ought to be able to do that.”

“Take the twenty cents anyway,” Henry said. “You’ll need it some day.”

“To stick up—”

“Cut it out the two of you.
Cut it out
,”
Thomas Hudson said. He looked at both of them.

“I’m sorry, Tom,” Henry said.

“I’m not sorry,” Willie said. “But I apologize.”

“Look, Tom,” said Ara. “Almost abeam inshore.”

“That’s the rock that’s just awash,” Thomas Hudson said. “It shows further to the eastward on the chart.”

“No. I mean further in about a half a mile.”

“That’s a man crawfishing or hauling fish traps.”

“Do you think we ought to speak to him?”

“He’s from the light and Antonio’s going in to talk with them at the light.”

“Feesh! Feesh!” his mate called and Henry asked, “May I take him, Tom?”

“Sure. Send Gil up.”

Henry went down and in a little while the fish jumped and showed he was a barracuda. Then, a little later, he heard Antonio grunt as he hit him with the gaff and then he heard the thunking knocks of the club on its head. He waited for the splash of the fish being thrown back and looked at the wake to see his size. There was no splash and he remembered that barracuda were good to eat on this stretch of the coast and Antonio was saving him to take in to the light. Just then he heard the double shout of “Feesh!” and this time there was no jumping and the line was singing out. He turned out further into the blue water and slowed down both engines. Then as the line kept going out he threw out one motor and made a half-turn toward the fish.

“Wahoo,” his mate called up. “Big one.”

Henry brought the fish in and they looked down over the stern and saw him long and oddly pointed, his stripes showing clearly in the blueness of the deep water. When he was nearly within reach of the gaff he turned his head and made another fast deep run that took him out of sight in the clear water in less time than a man could snap his fingers.

“They always have that one run,” Ara said. “It goes like a bullet.”

Henry brought him in fast and they watched over the stern as he was gaffed and brought aboard rigid and trembling. His stripes showed a bright blue and his jaws, that could cut like razors, opened and closed with spasmodic uselessness. Antonio laid him in the stern and his tail beat against the deck.

“¡Qué peto más hermoso!”
Ara said.

“He’s a beautiful wahoo,” Thomas Hudson agreed. “But we’ll be out here all morning if this keeps up. Leave out the lines but take the leaders off,” he said to his mate. He steered for just outside the light on its high point of rock and tried to make up the time they had lost and still act as though they were fishing. The friction of the lines
in
the water bent the rods.

Henry came up and said, “He was a beautiful fish, wasn’t he? I’d love to have had him on light tackle. Don’t they have an extraordinarily shaped head?”

“What will he weigh?” Willie asked.

“Antonio said he’d weigh about sixty, Willie. I was sorry I didn’t have time to call you. He really should have been yours.”

“That’s all right,” Willie said. “You caught him faster than I could and we have to get the hell along. I bet we could catch plenty good fish all along here.”

“We’ll come sometime after the war.”

“I’ll bet,” said Willie. “After the war I’m going to be in Hollywood and be a technical adviser on how to be a horse’s ass at sea.”

“You’ll be good at it.”

“I ought to be. I’ve been studying it now for over a year to train me for my career.”

“What the hell have you got so much black ass about today, Willie?” Thomas Hudson asked.

“I don’t know. I woke up with it.”

“Well, go down to the galley and see if that bottle of tea is cold and bring it up. Antonio’s butchering the fish. So make a sandwich will you, please?”

“Sure. What kind of sandwich?”

“Peanut butter and onion if there’s plenty of onion.”

“Peanut butter and onion it is, sir.”

“And try to get rid of your black ass.”

“Yes sir. Black ass gone, sir.”

When he was gone Thomas Hudson said, “You take it easy with him, Henry. I need the son of a bitch and he’s good at his stuff. He’s just got black ass.”

“I try to be good with him. But he’s difficult.”

“Well try a little harder. You were needling hurt about the twenty cents.”

Thomas Hudson looked ahead at the smooth sea and the innocent-looking deadliness of the reef off his port bow. He loved to run just off a bad reef with the light behind him. It made up for the times when he had to steer into the sun and it made up for several other things.

“I’m sorry, Tom,” Henry said. “I’ll watch what I say and what I think.”

Willie was back up with the empty rum bottle full of tea wrapped in a paper towel and with two rubber bands around it to keep the towel in place.

“She’s cold, skipper,” he said. “And I have insulated her.”

He handed a sandwich, wrapped in a paper towel segment, to Thomas Hudson and said, “One of the highest points in the sandwich-maker’s art. We call it the Mount Everest Special. For Commanders only.”

In the calm, even on the bridge, Thomas Hudson smelled his breath.

“Don’t you think it’s a little early in the day, Willie?”

“No sir.”

Thomas Hudson looked at him speculatively.

“What did you say, Willie?”

“No sir. Didn’t you hear me, sir?”

“OK,” Thomas Hudson said. “I heard you twice. You hear this once. Go below. Clean up the galley properly and then go up in the bow where I can see you and stand by to anchor.”

“Yes sir,” said Willie. “I don’t feel well, sir.”

“Fuck how you feel, you sea lawyer. If you don’t feel well you are going to feel a damned sight worse.”

“Yes sir,” Willie said. “I don’t feel well, sir. I should see the ship’s surgeon.”

“You’ll find him in the bow. Knock on the door of the head and see if he’s there as you go by.”

“That’s what I mean, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“He’s skunk-drunk,” Henry said.

“No, he’s not,” Thomas Hudson said. “He’s drinking. But he’s closer to crazy.”

“He’s been strange for quite a while,” Ara said. “But he was always strange. None of us has ever suffered as he has. I have never even suffered at all.”

“Tom’s suffered,” Henry said. “And he’s drinking cold tea.”

“Let’s not talk morbid and let’s not talk wet,” Thomas Hudson said. “I never suffered and I like cold tea.”

“You never did before.”

“We learn something new all the time, Henry.”

He was coming up well on the light and he saw the rock he should keep outside of now, and he thought this was a worthless conversation.

“Go up forward with him, Ara, and see how he’s doing. Stick around with him. You get the lines in, Henry. George, get down and help Antonio with the dinghy. Go in with him if he wants you to.”

When he was alone on the bridge he smelled the bird guano from the rock and he rounded the point and anchored in two fathoms of water. The bottom was clean and there was a big tide running. He looked up at the white-painted house and the tall old-fashioned light and then past the high rock to the green mangrove keys and beyond them the low, rocky, barren tip of Cayo Romano. They had lived, off and on, for such a long time within sight of that long, strange, and pest-ridden key and knew a part of it so well and had come in on its landmarks so many times and under such good and bad circumstances that it always made him an emotion to sight it or to leave it out of sight. Now it was there at its barest and most barren, jutting out like a scrubby desert.

There were wild horses and wild cattle and wild hogs on that great key and he wondered how many people had held the illusion that they might colonize it. It had hills rich in grass with beautiful valleys and fine stands of timber and once there had been a settlement called Versailles where Frenchmen had made their attempt at living on Romano.

Now all the frame buildings were abandoned but the one big house and one time when Thomas Hudson had gone in there to fill water, the dogs from the shacks were huddled with the pigs that had burrowed in the mud and dogs and pigs both were gray from the solid blanket of mosquitoes that covered them. It was a wonderful key when the east wind blew day and night and you could walk two days with a gun and be in good country. It was country as unspoiled as when Columbus came to this coast. Then, when the wind dropped, the mosquitoes came in clouds from the marshes. To say they came in clouds, he thought, is not a metaphor. They truly came in clouds and they could bleed a man to death. The people we are searching for would not have stopped in Romano. Not with this calm. They must have gone further up the coast.

“Ara,” he called.

“What is it, Tom?” Ara asked. He always swung up onto the bridge and landed as lightly as an acrobat but with the weight of steel.

“What’s the score?”

“Willie’s not himself, Tom. I took him out of the sun and I made him a drink and made him lie down. He’s quiet now but he looks at things too fixedly.”

“Maybe he had too much sun on his bad head.”

“Maybe. Maybe it is something else.”

“What else?”

“Gil and Peters are sleeping. Gil had the duty to keep Peters awake last night. Henry is sleeping and George went in with Antonio.”

“They should be back soon.”

“They will be.”

“We must keep Willie out of the sun. I was stupid to send him forward. But I did it for discipline, without thinking.”

“I am disassembling and cleaning the big ones and I checked all the fuses from the dampness and rain of last night on the other stuff. Last night after the poker game we disassembled and cleaned and oiled everything.”

“Now, with the dampness, we have to make a daily check, whether anything is fired or not.”

“I know,” Ara said. “We ought to disembark Willie. But we can’t do it here.”