“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.”
X
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
