“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.
The houseboat ran up the harbor a little further to anchor and Thomas Hudson and Bobby watched her from the doorway, all white and brass and everyone that showed on her in whites.
“Customers,” Mr. Bobby said. “Hope they’re nice people. We haven’t had a full-sized yacht in here since the tuna run was over.”
“Who is she?”
“I never seen her before. Pretty boat, all right. Certainly not built for the Gulf, though.”
“She probably left at midnight when it was calm and this hit her on the way over.”
“That’s about it,” Bobby said. “Must have been some rolling and some crashing. It’s really blowing. Well, we’ll see who they are shortly. Tom, let me make you something, boy. You make me nervous not drinking.”
“All right. I’ll have a gin and tonic.”
“No tonic water. Joe took the last case up to the house.”
“A whisky sour then.”
“With Irish whisky and no sugar,” Bobby said. “Three of them. Here comes Roger.” Thomas Hudson saw him through the open door.
Roger came in. He was barefooted, wore a faded pair of dungarees, and an old striped fisherman’s shirt that was shrunken from washings. You could see the back muscles move under it as he leaned forward and put his arms on the bar. In the dim light of Bobby’s, his skin showed very dark and his hair was salt- and sun-streaked.
“They’re still sleeping,” he said to Thomas Hudson. “Somebody beat up Eddy. Did you see?”
“He was having fights all last night,” Bobby told him. “They didn’t amount to anything.”
“I don’t like things to happen to Eddy,” Roger said.
“Wasn’t anything bad, Roger,” Bobby assured him. “He was drinking and fighting people who wouldn’t believe him. Nobody did anything wrong to him.”
“I feel bad about David,” Roger said to Thomas Hudson. “We shouldn’t have ever let him do it.”
“He’s probably all right,” Thomas Hudson said. “He was sleeping well. But it was my responsibility. I was the one to call it off.”
“No. You trusted me.”
“The father has the responsibility,” Thomas Hudson said. “And I turned it over to you when I had no right to. It isn’t anything to delegate.”
“But I took it,” Roger said. “I didn’t think it was harming him. Neither did Eddy.”
“I know,” Thomas Hudson said. “I didn’t think it was either. I thought something else was at stake.”
“So did I,” Roger said. “But now I feel selfish and guilty as hell.”
“I’m his father,” Thomas Hudson said. “It was my fault.”
“Damn bad thing about that fish,” Bobby said, handing them the whisky sours and taking one
