“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 on the heron again.