“Good.”
“The boy will look after you. He can do any pressing for you and you can use any clothes of mine or anything you find around.”
“Good. Will you try to love me, Tom, and not let anything like that last one ruin it?”
“Sure. They don’t mean anything and you pointed out I couldn’t help it.”
“Try and not be able to help it.”
“It’s out of my hands. Take any books you want or anything you find around the joint and give my eggs or one anyway to Boise. He likes them cut up small. I better shove. There’s been a time lag on this already.”
“Goodbye, Tom,” she said.
“Goodbye, devil, and take good care. This is probably nothing anyway.”
He was gone out the door. But the cat had slipped through it with him and was looking up at him.
“It’s all right, Boise,” he said. “I’ll be back before we shove.”
“Where do we go?” the driver asked him.
“Town.”
I can’t believe there’s any business with this heavy sea. But maybe they found something. Maybe one is in trouble somewhere. Christ, I hope we make it this time. I want to remember to make out one of those pocket wills and leave her the joint. Must remember to get it witnessed at the Embassy and leave it in the safe. She certainly took it awfully well. But then it hasn’t really hit her yet. I wish I could help her when it hits her. I wish I could be some real good to her. Maybe I can if we get by this one and the next one and the next one.
Let’s get by this one first. I wonder if she’ll take the stuff. I hope she will and that she’ll remember to give Boise the egg. He gets hungry when the weather’s cold.
The boys won’t be hard to find and she can take another beating before we haul her out. One more anyway. One for sure. We’ll gamble on it. There are spares for nearly everything. What’s one more beating if we get to close? It would have been nice to have stayed in. Maybe it would have been. The hell it would have been.
Get it straight. Your boy you lose. Love you lose. Honor has been gone for a long time. Duty you do.
Sure and what’s your duty? What I said I’d do. And all the other things you said you’d do?
In the bedroom of the farmhouse, now, the room that looked like the Normandie, she was lying on the bed with the cat named Boise beside her. She had not been able to eat the eggs and the champagne had no taste. She had cut up all the eggs for Boise and pulled open one desk drawer and seen the boy’s handwriting on the blue envelopes and the censor stamp and then she had gone over and lain face down on the bed.
“Both of them,” she said to the cat, who was happy from the eggs and from the smell of the woman who lay beside him.
“Both of them,” she said. “Boise, tell me. What are we going to do about it?”
The cat purred imperceptibly.
“You don’t know either,” she said. “And neither does anyone else.”
Part III
AT SEA
I
There was a long white beach with coconut palms behind it. The reef lay across the entrance to the harbor and the heavy east wind made the sea break on it so that the entrance was easy to see once you had opened it up. There was no one on the beach and the sand was so white that it hurt his eyes to look at it.
The man on the flying bridge studied the shore. There were no shacks where the shacks should have been and there were no boats anchored in the lagoon that he could see.
“You’ve been in here before,” he said to his mate.
“Yes.”
“Weren’t the shacks over there?”
“They were over there and it shows a village on the chart.”
“They sure as hell aren’t here now,” the man said. “Can you make out any boats up in the mangroves?”