Islands in the Stream (45 page)

Before it was light his mate got in the stern anchor and then with Ara brought
in
the starboard anchor and they and Gil hoisted the dinghy aboard. Then his mate pumped the bilges and checked his motors.

He put his head up and said, “Any time.”

“Why did she make that much water?”

“Just a stuffing box. I tightened it a little. But I’d rather she made a little water than run hot.”

“All right. Send up Ara and Henry. We’ll get going.”

They got in the anchor and he turned to Ara. “Show me the tree again.”

Ara pointed it out just above the line of beach they were leaving and Thomas Hudson made a small pencilled cross on the chart.

“Peters never did get Guantánamo again?”

“No. He burned out once more.”

“Well, we are behind them and they have other people ahead of them and we’ve got orders.”

“Do you think the wind will really go into the south, Tom?” Henry asked.

“The glass shows it will. We can tell better when it starts to get up.”

“It fell off to almost nothing about four o’clock.”

“Did the sand flies hit you?”

“Only at daylight.”

“You might as well go down and Flit them all out. There’s no sense our carrying them around with us.”

It was a lovely day and looking back at the bight where they had anchored and at the beach and the scrub trees of Cayo Cruz that they both knew so well, Thomas Hudson and Ara saw the high, piled clouds over the land. Cayo Romano rose so that it was like the mainland and the clouds were high above it with their promise of south wind or calm and land squalls.

“What would you think if you were a German, Ara?” Thomas Hudson asked. “What would you think if you saw that and knew that you were going to lose your wind?”

“I’d try to get inside,” Ara said. “I think that’s what I’d do.”

“You’d need a guide for inside.”

“I’d get me a guide,” Ara said.

“Where would you get him?”

“From fishermen up at Antón or inside at Romano. Or at Coco. There must be fishermen salting fish along there now. There might even be a live-well boat at Antón.”

“We’ll try Antón,” Thomas Hudson said. “It’s nice to wake up in the morning and steer with the sun behind you.”

“If you always steered with the sun behind you and on a day like this, what a place the ocean would be.”

The day was like true summer and in the morning the squalls had not yet built. The day was all gentle promise and the sea lay smooth and clear. They could see bottom clearly until they ran out of soundings, and then far out and just where it should be was the Minerva with the sea breaking restfully on its coral rocks. It was the swell that was left from the two months of unremitting heavy trade wind. But it broke gently and kindly and with a passive regularity.

It is as though she were saying we are all friends now and there win never be any trouble nor any wildness again, Thomas Hudson thought. Why is she so dishonest? A river can be treacherous and cruel and kind and friendly. A stream can be completely friendly and you can trust it all your life if you do not abuse it. But the ocean always has to lie to you before she does it.

He looked again at her gentle rise and fall that showed the Minervas as regularly and attractively as though she were trying to sell them as a choice location.

“Want to get me a sandwich?” he asked Ara. “Corned beef and raw onion or ham and egg and raw onion. After you get breakfast, bring a four-man watch up here and check all the binoculars. I’m going outside before we go in to Antón.”

“Yes, Tom.”

I wonder what I would do without that Ara, Thomas Hudson thought. You had a wonderful sleep, he told himself, and you couldn’t feel better. We’ve got orders and we are right on their tails and pushing them toward other people. You’re following your orders and look what a beautiful morning you have to follow them in. But things look too damned good.

They moved down the channel keeping a good lookout, but there was nothing but the calm, early morning sea with its friendly undulations and the long green line of Romano inland with the many keys between.

“They won’t sail very far in this,” Henry said.

“They won’t sail at all,” Thomas Hudson said.

“Are we going in to Antón?”

“Sure. And work all of that out.”

“I like Antón,” Henry said. “There’s a good place to lay to, if it’s calm, so they won’t eat us up.”

“Inside they’d carry you away,” Ara said.

A small seaplane showed ahead, flying low and coming toward them. It was white and minute with the sun on it.

“Plane,” Thomas Hudson said. “Pass the word to get the big flag out.”

The plane came on until it buzzed them. Then it circled them twice and went off flying on down to the eastward.

“He wouldn’t have it so good if he found one,” Henry said. “They’d shoot him down.”

“He could send the location and Cayo Francés would pick it up.”

“Maybe,” Ara said. The two other Basques said nothing. They stood back to back and searched their quadrants.

After a while the Basque they called George because his name was Eugenio and Peters could not always say Eugenio said, “Plane’s coming back to the eastward between the outer keys and Romano.”

“He’s going home to breakfast,” Ara said.

“He’ll report us,” Thomas Hudson said. “So in a month maybe everybody will know where we were at this time today.”

“If he doesn’t get the location mixed up on his chart,” Ara said. “Paredón Grande, Tom. Bearing approximately twenty degrees off the port bow.”

“You’ve got good eyes,” Thomas Hudson said. “That’s her, all right. I better take her in and find the channel in to Antón.”

“Turn port ninety degrees and I think you’ll have her.”

“I’ll hit the bank anyway and we can run along it until we find that damned canal.”

They came in toward the line of green keys that showed like black hedges sticking up from the water and then acquired shape and greenness and finally sandy beaches. Thomas Hudson came in with reluctance from the open channel, the promising sea, and the beauty of the morning on deep water, to the business of searching the inner keys. But the plane working the coast in this direction, turning to run over it with the sun behind it, should mean no one had picked the boats up to the eastward. It could be only a routine patrol, too. But it was logical that it should mean the other. A routine patrol would have been out over the channel both ways.

He saw Antón, which was well wooded and a pleasant island, growing before him and he watched ahead for his marks while he worked in toward the bank. He must take the highest tree on the head of the island and fit it squarely into the little saddle on Romano. On that bearing, he could come in even if the sun were in his eyes and the water had the glare of a burning glass.

Today he did not need it. But he did it for practice and when he found his tree, thinking, I should have something more permanent for a bearing on a hurricane coast, he eased along the bank until he fitted the tree carefully into the slot of the saddle, then turned sharp in. He was in the canal between many banks that were barely covered with water and he said to Ara, “Ask Antonio to put a feather out. We might pick up something to eat. This channel has a wonderful bar on the bottom.”

Then he steered straight in on his bearing. He was tempted not to look at the banks but to push it straight through. But then he knew that was one of the things of too much pride Ara had spoken of and he piloted carefully on the starboard bank and made his turn to starboard when it came by the banks and not by the second bearing that he had. It was like running in the regular streets of a new subdivision and the tide was racing in. It came in brown at first, then pure and clean. Just before he came into the part that he thought of as the turning basin where he planned to anchor, he heard Willie shout, “Feesh! Feesh!!” Looking astern, he saw a tarpon shaking himself high in the sun. His mouth was open and he was huge and the sun shone on his silvered scales and on the long green whip of his dorsal fin. He shook himself desperately in the sun and came down in a splash of water.

“
Sábalo
,” Antonio called up disgustedly.

“Worthless
sábalo
,” the Basques said.

“Can I play him, Tom?” Henry asked. “I’d like to catch him even if he is no good to eat.”

“Take him from Antonio if Willie hasn’t got him. Tell Antonio to get the hell forward. I’m going to anchor.”

The excitement and the leaping of the big tarpon continued astern, with no one paying attention to it except to grin, while they anchored.

“Do you want to put out another?” Thomas Hudson called forward. His mate shook his head. When they swung well to the anchor, his mate came up on the bridge.

“She’ll hold in anything, Tom,” he said. “Any kind of a squall. Anything. And it doesn’t make any difference how she swings, we can’t have any motion.”

“What time will we get the squalls?”

“After two,” his mate said, looking at the sky.

“Get the dinghy over,” Thomas Hudson said. “And give me an extra can of gas with the outboard. We have to get the hell going.”

“Who’s going with you?”

“Just Ara and Willie and I. I want her to travel fast.”

In the dinghy the three of them
had their raincoats wrapped around the
niños.
These were the Thompson submachine guns in their full-length sheep-wool cases. The cases were cut and sewn by Ara, who was not a tailor, and Thomas Hudson had impregnated the clipped wool on the inside with a protective oil which had a faintly carbolic smell. It was because the guns nestled in their sheep-lined cradles, and because the cradles swung when they were strapped open inside the branch of the flying bridge, that the Basques had nicknamed them “little children.”

“Give us a bottle of water,” Thomas Hudson said to his mate. When Antonio brought it, heavy and cold with the wide, screw-on top, he passed it to Willie, who stowed it forward. Ara loved to steer the outboard and he was in the stern. Thomas Hudson was in the center and Willie crouched in the bow.

Ara headed her straight in for the key and Thomas Hudson watched the clouds piling up over the land.

As they came into the shallow water, Thomas Hudson could see the grayish humps of conches bulging from the sand. Ara leaned forward to say, “Do you want to look at the beach, Tom?”

“Maybe we’d better before the rain.”

Ara ran the dinghy ashore, tilting his motor up just at the last rush. The tide had undercut the sand to make a little channel at the point and he drove the boat in, slanting her up onto the sand.

“Home again,” Willie said. “What’s this bitch’s name?”

“Antón.”

“Not Antón Grande or Antón Chico or Antón El Cabrón?”

“Just Antón. You take it up to that point to the eastward and then keep going. We’ll pick you up. I’ll work along this beach fast and Ara will leave the dinghy down somewhere past the next point and work on ahead. I’ll pick him up in the dinghy and we’ll come back around for you.”

Willie had his
niño
wrapped in his raincoat and put it on his shoulder.

“If I find any Krauts, can I kill them?”

“The Colonel said all but one,” Thomas Hudson said. “Try to save a smart one.”

“I’ll give them all IQ tests before I open up.”

“Give yourself one.”

“Mine’s goddam low or I wouldn’t be here,” Willie said, and he set out. He walked contemptuously and he watched the beach and the country ahead as carefully as a man could watch.

Thomas Hudson told Ara in Spanish what they were going to do and then shoved the dinghy off. He started down the beach with his
niño
under his arm and he felt the sand between his bare toes. Ahead, the dinghy was rounding the small point.

He was glad that he had come ashore and he walked as fast as he could go and still check the beach. It was a pleasant beach and he had no forebodings about it as he had had earlier in the day on the sea.

It was spooky this morning, he thought. Maybe it was just the calm. Ahead he could see the clouds still building up. But nothing had started to come out. There were no sand flies now in the hot sun and no mosquitoes and ahead of him he saw a tall white heron standing looking down in the shallow water with his head, neck, and beak poised. He had not flown when Ara passed with the dinghy.

We have to search it carefully even though I do not believe there is anything here, he thought. They are becalmed today so we lose nothing and it would be criminal to overrun them. Why don’t I know more about them? he thought. It is my own fault. I should have gone in and looked at the hut they built and at the tracks. I questioned Willie and Ara and they are both truly good. But I should have gone in myself.

It is the repugnance that I feel toward meeting them, he thought. It is my duty and I want to get them and I will. But I have a sort of fellow death-house feeling about them. Do people who are in the death house hate each other? I don’t believe they do unless they are insane.

Just then the heron rose and flew further up the beach. Braking widely with his great wings, and then taking a few awkward steps, he landed. I am sorry I disturbed him, Thomas Hudson thought.

He checked all of the beach above high tide. But there were no tracks except where one turtle had crawled twice. She had made a wide track to the sea and back and a wallowing depression where she had laid.

I haven’t time to dig for the eggs, he thought. The clouds were beginning to darken and to move out.

If they had been on this side of the key they certainly would have dug for them. He looked ahead but he could not see the dinghy because there was another curving point.

He walked along just where the sand was firm from the dampness of the high tide and he saw the hermit crabs carrying their shells and the ghost crabs that slipped across the stretch of sand and into the water. To his right, in the shallow channel, he saw the grayness that a school of mullet made and their shadow on the sand bottom as they moved. He saw the shadow of a very big barracuda that was stalking the mullet and then he saw the lines of the fish, long, pale, and gray, and seeming not to move. He walked steadily and soon he was past the fish and was coming up on the heron again.