“Put on the coats and put the niños under them,” Ara said. “I have to take them down again tonight anyway.”
“I’ll help you,” Willie said. “We’re breathing down their necks, Tom.”
“There’s an awful lot of country and they have someone with local knowledge now.”
“You just keep thinking the way you are,” Willie said. “What local knowledge has he got that we haven’t got?”
“Certainly he’ll have plenty.”
“The hell with him. I’m going to wash on the stern with soap. Jesus, I want to feel that fresh water and that soap.”
It was raining so hard now that it was hard to see the ship as they came around the point. The squall had moved out toward the ocean and it was so violent and the rain so heavy that trying to see the ship was like looking at an object from behind a falls. Her tanks will fill like nothing with this, Thomas Hudson thought. She’ll probably be running off through the galley faucets and the head right now.
“How many days since it rained, Tom?” Willie asked.
“We’ll have to check with the log. It’s something over fifty.”
“It’s like the goddam monsoon breaking,” Willie said. “Give me a gourd so I can bail.”
“Keep the cover on your niño dry.”
“Her butt is in my crotch and her nose is under the left shoulder of my coat,” Willie said. “She never had it better in her life. Give me the gourd.”
On the stern they were all bathing naked. They soaped themselves and stood on one foot and another, bending against the lashing of the rain as they soaped and then leaning back into it. They were really all brown but they looked white in this strange light. Thomas Hudson thought of the canvas of the bathers by Cézanne and then he thought he would like to have Eakins paint it. Then he thought that he should be painting it himself with the ship against the roaring white of the surf that came through the driving gray outside with the black of the new squall coming out and the sun breaking through momentarily to make the driving rain silver and to shine on the bathers in the stern.
He brought the dinghy up and Ara tossed a line and they were home.
XI
That night after the rain had stopped and he had checked all leaks from the long dry spell, and seen that pans were put under them, and the point of actual leakage, not the drip, was pencilled, the watches were set, the duties apportioned, and everything discussed and agreed on with his mate and Ara. Then when the supper was ended and the poker game underway, he went up on the flying bridge. He had a Flit gun with him and his air mattress and a light blanket.
He thought that he would lie down and think about nothing. Sometimes he could do this. Sometimes he could think about the stars without wondering about them and the ocean without problems and the sunrise without what it would bring.
He felt clean from his scalp to his feet from the soaping in the rain that had beaten down on the stern and he thought, I will just lie here and feel clean. He knew there was no use thinking of the girl who had been Tom’s mother nor all the things they had done and the places they had been nor how they had broken up. There was no use thinking about Tom. He had stopped that as soon as he had heard.
There was no use thinking about the others. He had lost them, too, and there was no use thinking about them. He had traded in remorse for another horse that he was riding now. So lie here now and feel clean from the soap and the rain and do a good job at nonthinking. You learned to do it quite well for a while. Maybe you will go to sleep and have funny or good dreams. Just lie quiet and watch the night and don’t think. Ara or Henry will wake you if Peters gets anything.
He was asleep in a little while. He was a boy again and riding up a steep canyon. The canyon opened out and there was a sandbar by the clear river that was so clear he could see the pebbles in the bed of the stream and then watch the cutthroat trout at the foot of the pool as they rose to flies that floated down the current. He was sitting on his horse and watching the trout rise when Ara woke him.