“I’m sorry, Tom,” Henry said. “I’ll watch what I say and what I think.”
Willie was back up with the empty rum bottle full of tea wrapped in a paper towel and with two rubber bands around it to keep the towel in place.
“She’s cold, skipper,” he said. “And I have insulated her.”
He handed a sandwich, wrapped in a paper towel segment, to Thomas Hudson and said, “One of the highest points in the sandwich-maker’s art. We call it the Mount Everest Special. For Commanders only.”
In the calm, even on the bridge, Thomas Hudson smelled his breath.
“Don’t you think it’s a little early in the day, Willie?”
“No sir.”
Thomas Hudson looked at him speculatively.
“What did you say, Willie?”
“No sir. Didn’t you hear me, sir?”
“OK,” Thomas Hudson said. “I heard you twice. You hear this once. Go below. Clean up the galley properly and then go up in the bow where I can see you and stand by to anchor.”
“Yes sir,” said Willie. “I don’t feel well, sir.”
“Fuck how you feel, you sea lawyer. If you don’t feel well you are going to feel a damned sight worse.”
“Yes sir,” Willie said. “I don’t feel well, sir. I should see the ship’s surgeon.”
“You’ll find him in the bow. Knock on the door of the head and see if he’s there as you go by.”
“That’s what I mean, sir.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“He’s skunk-drunk,” Henry said.
“No, he’s not,” Thomas Hudson said. “He’s drinking. But he’s closer to crazy.”
“He’s been strange for quite a while,” Ara said. “But he was always strange. None of us has ever suffered as he has. I have never even suffered at all.”
“Tom’s suffered,” Henry said. “And he’s drinking cold tea.”
“Let’s not talk morbid and let’s not talk wet,” Thomas Hudson said. “I never suffered and I like cold tea.”
“You never did before.”
“We learn something new all the time, Henry.”
He was coming up well on the light and he saw the rock he should keep outside of now, and he thought this was a worthless conversation.
“Go up forward with him, Ara, and see how he’s doing. Stick around with him. You get the lines in, Henry. George, get down and help Antonio with the dinghy. Go in with him if he wants you to.”
When he was alone on the bridge he smelled the bird guano from the rock and he rounded the point and anchored in two fathoms of water. The bottom was clean and there was a big tide running. He looked up at the white-painted house and the tall old-fashioned light and then past the high rock to the green mangrove keys and beyond them the low, rocky, barren tip of Cayo Romano. They had lived, off and on, for such a long time within sight of that long, strange, and pest-ridden key and knew a part of it so well and had come in on its landmarks so many times and under such good and bad circumstances that it always made him an emotion to sight it or to leave it out of sight. Now it was there at its barest and most barren, jutting out like a scrubby desert.
There were wild horses and wild cattle and wild hogs on that great key and he wondered how many people had held the illusion that they might colonize it. It had hills rich in grass with beautiful valleys and fine stands of timber and once there had been a settlement called Versailles where Frenchmen had made their attempt at living on Romano.
Now all the frame buildings were abandoned but the one big house and one time when Thomas Hudson had gone in there to fill water, the dogs from the shacks were huddled with the pigs that had burrowed in the mud and dogs and pigs both were gray from the solid blanket of mosquitoes that covered them. It was a wonderful key when the east wind blew day and night and you could walk two days with a gun and be in good country. It was country as unspoiled as when Columbus came to this coast. Then, when the wind dropped, the mosquitoes came in clouds from the marshes. To say they came in clouds, he thought, is not a metaphor. They truly came in clouds and they could bleed a man to death. The people we are searching for would not have stopped in Romano. Not with this calm. They must have gone further up the coast.