Islands in the Stream (46 page)

I’ll see if I can pass him without making him fly, he thought. But just when he was coming almost even with the heron, the school of mullet burst from the water jumping stiffly, big-eyed and blunt-headed, silvery in the sun but not beautiful. Thomas Hudson turned to watch them and to try to see the barracuda who was cutting into them. He could not see the predatory fish; only the wild leaping of the frightened mullet. Then he saw that the school was re-formed into a gray moving mass and when he turned his head the heron was gone. He saw him flying with his white wings over the green water and ahead was the yellow sand beach and the line of the trees along the point. The clouds were beginning to darken behind Romano and he walked faster to round the point and see where Ara had left the dinghy.

Walking faster gave him an erection and he thought there can’t be any Krauts around. That wouldn’t happen if there were any Krauts around. I don’t know, he thought. It could happen if you were wrong enough and didn’t know it.

At the end of the point there was a patch of bright white sand and he thought, I’d like to lie down here. This would be a good place. Then he saw the dinghy at the end of the long beach and he thought, the hell with it. I’ll sleep tonight and I will love the air mattress or the deck. I might as well love the deck. We have been around together long enough to get married. There is probably a lot of talk about you and the flying bridge now, he thought. You ought to do right by her. And all you do is step on her and stand on her. What sort of a way is that to act? And spill cold tea on her, too. That’s not nice. What are you saving her for anyway? To die on her? She would certainly appreciate that. Walk on her, stand on her, and die on her. Treat her really nice. One thing practical you can do now is cut out this crap and get this beach checked and pick up Ara.

He walked on down the beach and he tried not to think at all but only to notice things. He knew his duty very well and he had tried never to shirk it. But today he had come ashore when someone else could have done it just as well, but when he stayed aboard and they found nothing, he felt guilty. He watched everything. But he could not keep from thinking.

Maybe Willie’s side is hotter, he thought. Maybe Ara will have hit something. I know damn well this is where I would come if I were they. It is the first good place. They might have passed it and gone straight on. Or they might have turned in between Paredón and Cruz. But I don’t believe they would because somebody would see them from the light and they never could get in and through there at night, guide or no guide. I think they will have gone further down. Maybe we will find them down by Coco. Maybe we’ll find them right in behind here. There’s another key that we ought to work out. I must remember that they are always working on the chart. That is, unless they picked up a fisherman here. I haven’t seen any smoke from anybody burning charcoal. Well, I am glad we will get this key worked out before the rain. I love doing it, he thought. I just don’t like the end.

He shoved off the dinghy and stepped into her, washing the sand off his feet as he got in. He stowed the
niño
, in its rubber coat, where he could reach it and started the motor. He had no love for the outboard as Ara had and he never started it without remembering blowing out and sucking out clogged fuel lines and remembering shorted plugs and other delights of the small motor. But Ara never had ignition trouble. When the motor misfunctioned, he regarded it as a chess player might admire a brilliant move on the part of his opponent.

Thomas Hudson steered along the beach but Ara was far ahead and he could not see him. He must be halfway to Willie, he thought. But when he saw him he was nearly to the mangrove bay where the sand stopped and the mangroves grew heavy and green into the water, their roots showing like tangled brown sticks.

Then he noticed the mast sticking up out of the mangroves. It was all he could see. But he could see Ara was lying behind a small sand dune so that he could just see over the top.

He could feel his scalp prickle as it does when you meet a car coming fast, suddenly, on the wrong side of the road. But Ara heard the motor and turned his head, and waved him in. Thomas came in on a tangent behind Ara.

The Basque came aboard carrying his raincoated
niño
, barrel first, over the right shoulder of his old striped beach shirt. He looked pleased.

“Get as far out as the channel will let you,” he said. “We’ll find Willie.”

“Is it one of the boats?”

“Sure,” Ara said. “But I’m sure it’s abandoned. It’s going to rain, Tom.”

“Did you see anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Me either.”

“It’s a nice key. I found an old trail to water. But it wasn’t used.”

“There’s water on Willie’s side, too.”

“There’s Willie,” Ara said. He was sitting on the sand. His legs were drawn up and his
niño
was in his lap. Thomas Hudson ran the dinghy in to him. Willie looked at them, his black hair down over his forehead and wet with sweat and his good eye blue and mean.

“Where you two fuck-offs been?” he asked.

“When were they here, Willie?”

“Yesterday by the turds,” Willie said. “Or should I say their excrement?”

“How many?”

“Eight that could execremenate and three of these with the bubbleshits.”

“What else?”

“They got a guide or a pilot or whatever his rating is.”

The guide they had picked up was a fisherman who had a palm-thatched shelter and had been salting barracuda strips on a rack to sell them later to the Chinese who bought fish for the Chinese retail grocers who would sell the dried fish in their shops as codfish. The fisherman had salted and dried a good quantity of fish by the looks of the rack.

“Krauts eat ’em plenty codfish now on in,” Willie said.

“What language is that?”

“My own,” Willie said. “Everybody has a private language around here, like Basque or something. You got an objection if I speak mine?”

“Tell me the rest.”

“Sleepum here one smoke,” Willie said. “Eatum pig meat. All sameee from Massacre Key. Kraut master no gottum tin goods or save ’em.”

“Cut out the shit and tell it straight.”

“Ole Massa Hudson going to lose all afternoon anyway due huge rainfall accompanied squall winds all along same. Might as well listen alongside Willie all same famous scout of the Pampas. Willie tell his own way.”

“Cut it out.”

“Listen, Tom, who found Krauts twice?”

“What about the boat?”

“Boat all same finish. She alongside too many rotten planks. One drop out by stern.”

“They hit something coming in with a bad light.”

“I guess so. Well, I’ll cut out the shit. They’ve gone on into the westward sun. Eight men and a guide. Maybe nine if the captain couldn’t shit on account of his great responsibilities like our own leader himself has trouble sometimes and now it is starting to rain. The boat they left was stunk up and beshat with pigs and chickens and that comrade we buried. There’s one other guy is wounded but it doesn’t look bad from the dressing.”

“Pussy?”

“Yeah. But clean pus. You want to see it all or you take my word for it?”

“I take your word on all of it but I want to see it.”

He saw everything, the tracks, the fire, where they had slept and cooked, the dressing, the part of the brush they had used as a latrine, and the groove the turtle boat had made in the sand when they beached her. It was raining hard now and the first gusts of the squall were coming.

“Put on the coats and put the
niños
under them,” Ara said. “I have to take them down again tonight anyway.”

“I’ll help you,” Willie said. “We’re breathing down their necks, Tom.”

“There’s an awful lot of country and they have someone with local knowledge now.”

“You just keep thinking the way you are,” Willie said. “What local knowledge has he got that we haven’t got?”

“Certainly he’ll have plenty.”

“The hell with him. I’m going to wash on the stern with soap. Jesus, I want to feel that fresh water and that soap.”

It was raining so hard now that it was hard to see the ship as they came around the point. The squall had moved out toward the ocean and it was so violent and the rain so heavy that trying to see the ship was like looking at an object from behind a falls. Her tanks will fill like nothing with this, Thomas Hudson thought. She’ll probably be running off through the galley faucets and the head right now.

“How many days since it rained, Tom?” Willie asked.

“We’ll have to check with the log. It’s something over fifty.”

“It’s like the goddam monsoon breaking,” Willie said. “Give me a gourd so I can bail.”

“Keep the cover on your
niño
dry.”

“Her butt is in my crotch and her nose is under the left shoulder of my coat,” Willie said. “She never had it better in her life. Give me the gourd.”

On the stern they were all bathing naked. They soaped themselves and stood on one foot and another, bending against the lashing of the rain as they soaped and then leaning back into it. They were really all brown but they looked white in this strange light. Thomas Hudson thought of the canvas of the bathers by Cézanne and then he thought he would like to have Eakins paint it. Then he thought that he should be painting it himself with the ship against the roaring white of the surf that came through the driving gray outside with the black of the new squall coming out and the sun breaking through momentarily to make the driving rain silver and to shine on the bathers in the stern.

He brought the dinghy up and Ara tossed a line and they were home.

That night after the rain
had stopped and he had checked all leaks from the long dry spell, and seen that pans were put under them, and the point of actual leakage, not the drip, was pencilled, the watches were set, the duties apportioned, and everything discussed and agreed on with his mate and Ara. Then when the supper was ended and the poker game underway, he went up on the flying bridge. He had a Flit gun with him and his air mattress and a light blanket.

He thought that he would lie down and think about nothing. Sometimes he could do this. Sometimes he could think about the stars without wondering about them and the ocean without problems and the sunrise without what it would bring.

He felt clean from his scalp to his feet from the soaping in the rain that had beaten down on the stern and he thought, I will just lie here and feel clean. He knew there was no use thinking of the girl who had been Tom’s mother nor all the things they had done and the places they had been nor how they had broken up. There was no use thinking about Tom. He had stopped that as soon as he had heard.

There was no use thinking about the others. He had lost them, too, and there was no use thinking about them. He had traded in remorse for another horse that he was riding now. So lie here now and feel clean from the soap and the rain and do a good job at nonthinking. You learned to do it quite well for a while. Maybe you will go to sleep and have funny or good dreams. Just lie quiet and watch the night and don’t think. Ara or Henry will wake you if Peters gets anything.

He was asleep in a little while. He was a boy again and riding up a steep canyon. The canyon opened out and there was a sandbar by the clear river that was so clear he could see the pebbles in the bed of the stream and then watch the cutthroat trout at the foot of the pool as they rose to flies that floated down the current. He was sitting on his horse and watching the trout rise when Ara woke him.

The message read CONTINUE SEARCH CAREFULLY WESTWARD with the code name at the end.

“Thanks,” he said. “Let me have anything else.”

“Of course. Go back to sleep, Tom.”

“I was having a fine dream.”

“Don’t tell it to me,” Ara said. “And maybe it will come true.”

He went to sleep again and when he went to sleep he smiled because he thought that he was carrying out orders and continuing the search westward. I have her pretty far west, he thought. I don’t think they meant this far west.

He slept and he dreamed that the cabin was burned and someone had killed his fawn that had grown into a young buck. Someone had killed his dog and he found him by a tree and he woke sweating.

I guess dreams aren’t the solution, he said to himself. I might as well take it the same as always without any hope of anesthetics. Go on and think it out.

All you have now is a basic problem and your intermediate problems. That is all you have so you better like it. You will never have good dreams any more so you might as well not sleep. Just rest and use your head until it won’t work any more, and when you go to sleep, expect to have the horrors. The horrors were what you won in that big crap game that they run. You put it on the line and made your point and let it ride and finally you dragged down the gift of uneasy unpleasant sleep. You damned near dragged down not sleeping at all. But you traded that in for what you have so you might as well like it. You’re sleepy now. So sleep and figure to wake up sweating. And what of it? Nothing at all of it. But do you remember when you used to sleep all night with the girl and always happy and never woke unless she woke you to make love? Remember that, Thomas Hudson, and see how much good it will do you.

I wonder how many dressings they have for that other wounded character? If they had time to get dressings they had time to get other stuff, too. What stuff? What do you think they have besides what you know they have? I don’t think much. Maybe pistols and a few machine pistols. Maybe some demolition charges they could make something out of. I have to figure that they have the machine gun. But I don’t think so. They wouldn’t want to fight. They want to get the hell away and on a Spanish ship. If they had been in shape to fight they would have come back that night and taken Confites. Maybe no. Maybe something made them suspicious and they saw our drums on the beach and thought we might be basing there nights. They wouldn’t know what we were. But they would see the drums and figure there was something around that burned plenty of gas. Then too they probably didn’t want to fight with their wounded. But the boat with the wounded could have laid off at night while they came in and took the wireless station if they wanted to get off with that other sub. I wonder what happened with her. There’s something very strange about that.