“I don’t think I could ever have come up between the logs.”
“I didn’t think I could for a long time.”
“How long were you underwater?”
“I don’t know. I know I rested a long time with my arms on the logs before I tried to do anything else.”
“I like that story. But it will make me have bad dreams. Tell me something happy, Tom.”
“All right,” he said. “Let me think.”
“No. Tell one right away without thinking.”
“All right,” Thomas Hudson said. “When young Tom was a little baby—”
“¡Qué muchacho más guapo!” Honest Lil interrupted. “¿Qué noticias tienes de él?”
“Muy buenas.”
“Me alegro,” said Honest Lil, tears coming into her eyes at the thought of young Tom the flyer. “Siempre tengo su fotografía en uniforme con el sagrado corazón de Jesús arriba de la fotografía y al lado la virgen del Cobre.”
“You have great faith in the Virgen del Cobre?”
“Absolutely blind faith.”
“You must keep it.”
“And she is looking after Tom day and night.”
“Good,” said Thomas Hudson. “Serafín, another of these big ones, please. Do you want the happy story?”
“Yes, please,” Honest Lil said. “Please tell me the happy story. I feel sad again.”
“Pues el happy story es muy sencillo,” Thomas Hudson said. “The first time we ever took Tom to Europe, he was only three months old and it was a very old, small, and slow liner and the sea was rough most of the time. The ship smelled of bilge and oil and the grease on the brass of portholes and of the lavabos and the disinfectant they used that was in big pink cakes in the pissoirs—”
“Pues, this isn’t a very happy story.”
“Sí, mujer. You’re wrong as hell. This is a happy story, muy happy. I go on. The ship also smelled of baths you had to take at regular hours or be looked down on by the bath steward and of the smell of hot salt water coming out of the brass nozzles of the bath fixtures and of the wet wooden grate on the floor and of the starched jacket of the bath steward. It also smelled of cheap English ship cooking which is a discouraging smell and of the dead butts of Woodbines, Players, and Gold Flakes in the smoking room and wherever they were dropped. It did not have one good smell, and as you know the English, both men and women, all have a peculiar odor, even to themselves, much as we have to Negroes, and so they have to bathe very often. An Englishman never smells sweet as a cow’s breath does and a pipe-smoking Englishman does not conceal his odor. He only adds something to it. Their tweeds smell good and so does the leather of their boots and all their saddlery smells good. But there is no saddlery on a ship and the tweeds are impregnated with the dead pipe smell. The only way you could get a good smell on that ship was when your nose was deep in a tall glass of dry sparkling cider from Devon. This smelled wonderful and I kept my nose in it as much as I could afford. Maybe more.”
“Pues, it is a little more happy now.”
“Here is the happy part. Our cabin was so low, just above the water line, that the port had to be kept closed all the time and you saw the sea racing by and then you saw it solid green as the sea went past the porthole. We had built a barricade with trunks and suitcases roped together so that Tom could not fall out of the berth and when his mother and I would come down to see how he was, every time we ever came, if he was awake, he was laughing.”
“Did he really laugh when he was three months old?”
“He laughed all the time. I never heard him cry when he was a baby.”
“¡Qué muchacho más lindo más guapo!”
“Yes,” Thomas Hudson said. “Very high-class muchacho. Want me to tell you another happy story about him?”
“Why did you leave his lovely mother?”
“A very strange combination of circumstances Do you want another happy story?”