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.