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
