“OK, Tom. Do you want me to go In with the burial detail?”
“No. Ara and Gil are going in. Letter the board and take it easy and have a drink.”
“As soon as Peters gets Guantánamo, I’ll send it up. Don’t you want to come down?”
“No. I’m taking it easy up here.”
“What’s it like on the bridge of a big ship like this, full of responsibility and horseshit?”
“Just about the same as lettering that board.”
When the signal came from Guantánamo it read, decoded, CONTINUE SEARCHING CAREFULLY WESTWARD.
That’s us, said Thomas Hudson to himself. He lay down and was asleep immediately and Henry covered him with a light blanket.
IX
An hour before daylight he was below and had checked his glass. It was four-tenths lower and he woke his mate and showed it to him.
The mate looked at him and nodded.
“You saw the squalls over Romano yesterday,” he whispered. “She is going into the south.”
“Make me some tea, will you, please,” Thomas Hudson asked.
“I have some cold in a bottle on the ice.”
He went astern and found a mop and a bucket and scrubbed the deck of the stern. It had been scrubbed before but he scrubbed it again and rinsed the mop. Then he took his bottle of cold tea up on the flying bridge and waited for it to get light.
Before it was light his mate got in the stern anchor and then with Ara brought in the starboard anchor and they and Gil hoisted the dinghy aboard. Then his mate pumped the bilges and checked his motors.
He put his head up and said, “Any time.”
“Why did she make that much water?”
“Just a stuffing box. I tightened it a little. But I’d rather she made a little water than run hot.”
“All right. Send up Ara and Henry. We’ll get going.”
They got in the anchor and he turned to Ara. “Show me the tree again.”
Ara pointed it out just above the line of beach they were leaving and Thomas Hudson made a small pencilled cross on the chart.
“Peters never did get Guantánamo again?”
“No. He burned out once more.”
“Well, we are behind them and they have other people ahead of them and we’ve got orders.”
“Do you think the wind will really go into the south, Tom?” Henry asked.
“The glass shows it will. We can tell better when it starts to get up.”
“It fell off to almost nothing about four o’clock.”
“Did the sand flies hit you?”
“Only at daylight.”
“You might as well go down and Flit them all out. There’s no sense our carrying them around with us.”
It was a lovely day and looking back at the bight where they had anchored and at the beach and the scrub trees of Cayo Cruz that they both knew so well, Thomas Hudson and Ara saw the high, piled clouds over the land. Cayo Romano rose so that it was like the mainland and the clouds were high above it with their promise of south wind or calm and land squalls.
“What would you think if you were a German, Ara?” Thomas Hudson asked. “What would you think if you saw that and knew that you were going to lose your wind?”
“I’d try to get inside,” Ara said. “I think that’s what I’d do.”
“You’d need a guide for inside.”
“I’d get me a guide,” Ara said.
“Where would you get him?”
“From fishermen up at Antón or inside at Romano. Or at Coco. There must be fishermen salting fish along there now. There might even be a live-well boat at Antón.”
“We’ll try Antón,” Thomas Hudson said. “It’s nice to wake up in the morning and steer with the sun behind you.”
“If you always steered with the sun behind you and on a day like this, what a place the ocean would be.”
The day was like true summer and in the morning the squalls had not yet built. The day was all gentle promise and the sea lay smooth and clear. They could see bottom clearly until they ran out of soundings, and then far out and just where it should be was the Minerva with the sea breaking restfully on its coral rocks. It was the swell that was left from the two months of unremitting heavy trade wind. But it broke gently and kindly and with a passive regularity.