Islands in the Stream (19 page)

Then he had not liked the way Andrew had behaved, although he knew Andrew was Andrew and a little boy and that it was unfair to judge him. He had done nothing bad and he had really behaved very well. But there was something about him that you could not trust.

What a miserable, selfish way to be thinking about people that you love, he thought. Why don’t you remember the day and not analyze it and tear it to pieces? Go to bed now, he told himself, and make yourself sleep. The hell with anything else. And pick up the rhythm of your life in the morning. You don’t have the boys for much longer. See how happy a time you can make for them. I’ve tried, he said to himself. I’ve tried truly and for Roger, too. And you have been very happy yourself, he told himself. Yes, of course. But something about today frightened me. Then he told himself: truly, there is something about every day to frighten you. Go on to bed and maybe you’ll sleep well. Remember you want them to be happy tomorrow.

A big southwest wind came up in the night and by daylight it was slowing with almost the force of a gale. The palms were bent with it and shutters slammed and papers blew and a surf was piling on the beach.

Roger was gone when Thomas Hudson came down to breakfast alone. The boys were still sleeping and he read his mail that had come from the mainland on the run-boat that brought ice, meat, fresh vegetables, gas, and other supplies once a week. It was blowing so hard he put a coffee cup on a letter to hold it when he laid it down on the table.

“Want me to shut the doors?” Joseph asked.

“No. Only if things start to break.”

“Mr. Roger gone walking on the beach,” Joseph said. “Headed up toward the end of the island.”

Thomas Hudson kept on reading his mail.

“Here’s the paper,” Joseph said. “I ironed her out.”

“Thank you, Joseph.”

“Mister Tom, is it true about the fish? What Eddy was telling me?”

“What did he say?”

“About how big he was and having him right up to the gaff.”

“It’s true.”

“God Almighty. If that run-boat hadn’t come so I had to stay in to carry ice and groceries I’d have been along. I’d have dove right in after him and gaffed him.”

“Eddy dove in,” Thomas Hudson said.

“He didn’t tell me,” Joseph said, subdued.

“I’d like some more coffee, please, Joseph, and another piece of papaw,” Thomas Hudson said. He was hungry and the wind gave him even more appetite. “Didn’t the run-boat bring any bacon?”

“I believe I can find some,” Joseph said. “You’re eating good this morning.”

“Ask Eddy to come in please.”

“Eddy went home to fix his eye.”

“What happened to his eye?”

“Somebody balled their fist in it.”

Thomas Hudson believed he knew why this might have happened.

“Is he hurt anywhere else?”

“He’s beat pretty bad,” Joseph said. “On account of people not believing him in different bars. People ain’t never going to believe him that story he tells. Certainly is a pity.”

“Where’d he fight?”

“Everywhere. Everywhere where they wouldn’t believe him. Nobody believe him yet. People took to not believing him late at night that didn’t know what it was about even just to get him to fight. He must have fought all the fighting men on the island. Tonight, sure as you eating breakfast, men’ll come up from Middle Key just to doubt his word. Couple real bad fighting men down at Middle Key now on that construction.”

“Mr. Roger better go out with him,” Thomas Hudson said.

“Oh boy,” Joseph’s face lighted up. “Tonight’s the night we got fun.”

Thomas Hudson drank the coffee and ate the cold papaw with fresh lime squeezed over it and four more strips of bacon that Joseph brought in.

“I see you were in an eating mood,” Joseph said. “When I see you like that, I want to make something out of it.”

“I eat plenty.”

“Sometimes,” Joseph said.

He came in with another cup of coffee and Thomas Hudson took it up to his desk to answer the two letters he needed to get off in the mail boat.

“Go up to Eddy’s house and get him to make out the list of what we need to order by the run-boat,” he said to Joseph. “Then bring it to me to check. Is there coffee for Mr. Roger?”

“He had his,” Joseph said.

Thomas Hudson finished the two letters at the work desk upstairs and Eddy came over with the list of supplies for the next week’s run-boat. Eddy looked bad enough. His eye had not responded to treatment and his mouth and cheeks were swollen. One ear was swollen, too. He had put Mercurochrome on his mouth where it was cut and the bright color made him look very untragic.

“I didn’t do any good last night,” he said. “I think everything is on here, Tom.”

“Why don’t you lay off today and go home and take it easy?”

“I feel worse at home,” he said. “I’ll go to bed early tonight.”

“Don’t get in any more fights about that,” Thomas Hudson said. “It doesn’t do any good.”

“You’re talking to the right man,” Eddy said through the scarlet of his split and swollen lips. “I kept waiting for truth and right to win and then somebody new would knock truth and right right on its ass.”

“Joseph said you had a lot of them.”

“Till somebody took me home,” Eddy said. “Big-hearted Benny I guess it was. He and Constable probably saved me from getting hurt.”

“You aren’t hurt?”

“I hurt but I ain’t hurt. Hell, you ought to have been there, Tom.”

“I’m glad I wasn’t. Did anybody try to really hurt you?”

“I don’t think so. They were just proving to me I was wrong. Constable believed me.”

“Did he?”

“Yes sir. Him and Bobby. Only people believed me, all right. Constable said any man who hit me first he’d lock him up. Asked me this morning if there was anybody hit me first. I told him yes but I hit
at
them first. It was a bad night for truth and right, Tom. Bad night all right.”

“Do you really want to cook lunch?”

“Why not?” Eddy said. “We’ve got steaks on the run-boat. Real sirloin steak. You ought to see her. I figured to have it with mashed potatoes and gravy and some lima beans. We got that cabbage lettuce and fresh grapefruit for a salad. The boys would like a pie and we got canned loganberries makes a hell of a pie. We got ice cream from the run-boat to put on top of it. How’s that? I want to feed that goddam David up.”

“What did you figure to do when you dove overboard with the gaff?”

“I was going to get the gaff hook into him right underneath his fin where it would kill him when he came taut on the rope and then get the hell away from there and back on board.”

“What did he look like underwater?”

“He was as wide as a dinghy, Tom. All purple and his eye looked as big as your hand is long. It was black and he was silver underneath and his sword was terrible to see. He just kept on going down, settling slow, and I couldn’t get down to him because that big haft on the gaff was too buoyant. I couldn’t sink with it. So it wasn’t any use.”

“Did he look at you?”

“I couldn’t tell. He just looked like he was there and nothing made any difference to him.”

“Do you think he was tired?”

“I think he was through. I think he’d decided to give up.”

“We’ll never see anything like that again.”

“No. Not in our lifetimes. And I know enough now not to try to make people believe it.”

“I’m going to paint a picture of it for David.”

“You make it just like it was then. Don’t make it comic like some of those comic ones you paint.”

“I’m going to paint it truer than a photograph.”

“That’s the way I like it when you paint.”

“It’s going to be awfully hard to paint the underwater part.”

“Will it be like that waterspout picture down at Bobby’s?”

“No. This will be different but I hope it will be better. I’m going to make sketches for it today.”

“I like that waterspout picture,” Eddy said. “Bobby, he’s crazy about it and he can make anybody believe there was that many waterspouts that time when they see the picture. But this will be a hell of a one to paint with the fish in the water.”

“I think I can do it,” Thomas Hudson said.

“You couldn’t paint him jumping, too, could you?”

“I think I can.”

“Paint him the two of them, Tom. Paint him jumping and then with Roger bringing him up on the leader and Davy in the chair and me on the stern. We can get photographs took of it.”

“I’ll start the sketches.”

“Anything you want to ask me,” Eddy said. “I’ll be in the kitchen. The boys still asleep?”

“All three of them.”

“Hell,” Eddy said. “I don’t give a damn about anything since that fish. But we’ve got to have a good meal.”

“I wish I had leech for that eye.”

“Hell, I don’t give a damn about the eye. I can see out of it fine.”

“I’m going to let the boys sleep as long as they can.”

“Joe, he’ll help me when they’re up and I’ll give them breakfast. If they wake up too late, I won’t give them too much so as not to spoil lunch. You didn’t see that piece of meat we got?”

“No.”

“Goddam she sure costs money but it’s beautiful meat, Tom. Nobody on this island has eaten meat like that in their whole lives. I wonder what those beef cattle look like that meat comes from.”

“They’re built right down close to the ground,” Thomas Hudson said. “And they’re almost as wide as they are long.”

“God, they must be fat,” Eddy said. “I’d like to see them alive sometime. Here nobody ever butchers a cow till just before it’s going to die from starving. The meat’s bitter. People here’d go crazy with meat like that we got. They wouldn’t know what it was. Probably make them sick.”

“I have to finish these letters,” Thomas Hudson said.

“I’m sorry, Tom.”

After he finished the mail, answered two other business letters that he had intended to put off until the next week’s boat, checking the list of the next week’s needs and writing a check for the week’s supplies plus the flat ten percent the government charged on all imports from the Mainland, Thomas Hudson walked down to the run-boat that was loading at the government wharf. The captain was taking orders from the islanders for supplies, dry goods, medicines, hardware, spare parts, and all the things that came into the island from the Mainland. The run-boat was loading live crawfish and conches and a deck load of conch shells and empty gasoline and Diesel oil drums and the islanders stood in line in the heavy wind waiting their turn in the cabin.

“Was everything all right, Tom?” Captain Ralph called out the cabin window to Thomas Hudson.

“Hey, get out of this cabin, you boy, and come in your turn,” he said to a big Negro in a straw hat. “I had to substitute on a few things. How was the meat?”

“Eddy says it’s wonderful.”

“Good. Let me have those letters and the list. Blowing a gale outside. I want to get out over the bar on this next tide. Sorry I’m so busy.”

“See you next week, Ralph. Don’t let me hold you up. Thanks very much, boy.”

“I’ll try to have everything next week. Need any money?”

“No. I’m all right from last week.”

“Got plenty of it here if you want it. OK. Now, you, Lucius, what’s your trouble? What you spending money on now?”

Thomas Hudson walked back along the dock where the Negroes were laughing at what the wind was doing to the girls’ and the women’s cotton dresses and then up the coral road to the Ponce de León.

“Tom,” Mr. Bobby said. “Come in and sit down. By God where’ve you been? We’re just swept out and she’s officially open. Come on and have the best one of the day.”

“It’s pretty early.”

“Nonsense. That’s good imported beer. We’ve got Dog’s Head ale too.” He reached into a tub of ice, opened a bottle of Pilsner, and handed it to Thomas Hudson. “You don’t want a glass, do you? Put that down and then decide if you want a drink or not.”

“I won’t work then.”

“Who gives a damn? You work too much as it is. You got a duty to yourself, Tom. Your one and only life. You can’t just paint all the time.”

“We were in the boat yesterday and I didn’t work.”

Thomas Hudson was looking at the big canvas of the waterspouts that hung on the wall at the end of the bar. It was a good painting, Thomas Hudson thought. As good as he could do as of today, he thought.

“I got to hang her higher,” Bobby said. “Some gentleman got excited last night and tried to climb into the skiff. I told him it would cost him ten thousand dollars if he put his foot through her. Constable told him the same. Constable’s got an idea for one he wants you to paint to hang in his home.”

“What is it?”

“Constable wouldn’t say. Just that he had a very valuable idea he had intention to discuss with you.”

Thomas Hudson was looking at the canvas closely. It showed certain signs of wear.

“By God, she sure stands up,” Bobby said proudly. “The other night a gentleman let out a shout and threw a full mug of beer at the column of one of the waterspouts trying to break it down. You wouldn’t have known she’d ever been hit. Never dented her. Beer run off her like water. By God, Tom, you sure painted her solid.”

“She’ll only take about so much though.”

“By God,” said Bobby. “I ain’t seen nothing faze her yet. But I’m going to hang her higher just the same. That gentleman last night worried me.”

He handed Thomas Hudson another bottle of ice-cold Pilsner.

“Tom, I want to tell you how sorry I am about the fish. I know Eddy since we were boys and I never heard him lie. About anything important, I mean. I mean if you asked him to tell you something true.”

“It was a hell of a thing. I’m not going to tell anybody about it.”

“That’s the right way,” Bobby said. “I just wanted you to know how sorry I was. Why don’t you finish that beer and have a drink? We don’t want to start feeling sad this early. What would make you feel good?”

“I feel good enough. I’m going to work this afternoon and I don’t want to get logy.”

“Oh well, if I can’t break you out maybe somebody will come in that I can. Look at that damn yacht. She must have taken a beating coming across with that shallow draft.”

Thomas Hudson looked out the open door and saw the handsome, white, houseboat type craft coming up the channel. She was one of the type that chartered out of a Mainland port to go down through the Florida Keys and on a day such as yesterday, calm and flat, she could have crossed the Gulf Stream without incident. But today she must have taken a beating with her shallow draft and so much superstructure. Thomas Hudson wondered that she had been able to come in over the bar with the sea that was running.