ISLANDS IN THE STREAM

Thomas Hudson had walked the beach and gone back inland behind the lagoon. He had found the place where the flamingoes came at high tide and he had seen many wood ibis, the cocos that gave the key its name, and a pair of roseate spoon-bills working in the marl of the edge of the lagoon. They were beautiful with the sharp rose of their color against the gray marl and their delicate, quick, forward-running movements, and they had the dreadful, hunger-ridden impersonality of certain wading birds. He could not watch them long because he wanted to check in case the people they were looking for had left the boat in the mangroves and camped in the high ground to be clear of the mosquitoes.

He found nothing but the site of an old charcoal-burning and he came out onto the beach after the first squall hit and Ara had picked him up in the dinghy.

Ara loved running the outboard in the rain and a bad squall and he had told Thomas Hudson none of the searchers had found anything. Everybody was on board but Willie who had taken the furthest stretch of beach beyond the mangroves.

“And you?” Ara asked.

“Me, nothing.”

“This rain will cool off Willie. I’m going to get him when I put you on board. Where do you think they are, Tom?”

“At Guillermo. That’s where I’d be.”

“Me too. That’s what Willie thinks, too.”

“How was he?”

“He’s trying hard, Tom. You know Willie.”

“Yes,” said Thomas Hudson. They came alongside and he climbed aboard.

Thomas Hudson watched Ara pivot the dinghy on her stern and go off into the white squall. Then he called down for a towel and dried himself off on the stern.

Henry said, “Don’t you want a drink, Tom? You were really wet.”

“I’d like one.”

“Do you want straight rum?”

“That’s nice,” Thomas Hudson answered. He went below to get a sweatshirt and shorts and he saw that they were all cheerful.

“We all had a straight rum,” Henry said and brought him a glass half-full. “I don’t think that way if you dry off quickly anyone can catch cold. Do you?”

“Hi, Tom,” said Peters. “Have you joined our little group of health drinkers?”

“When did you wake up?” Thomas Hudson asked him.

“When I heard a gurgling noise.”

“I’ll make a gurgling noise some night and see if that wakes you up.”

“Don’t worry, Tom. Willie does that for me every night.”

Thomas Hudson decided not to drink the rum. Then, seeing them all having had a drink and being cheerful and happy on an uncheerful errand, he thought it would be pompous and priggish not to take it. He wanted it, too.

“Split this with me,” he said to Peters. “You are the only son of a bitch I ever knew that could sleep better with earphones on than without them.”

“That split’s nothing,” Peters said, entrenching himself in the retreat from formal discipline. “That split doesn’t give either of us anything.”

“Get one of your own, then,” Thomas Hudson said. “I like the goddam stuff as well as you do.”

The others were watching and Thomas Hudson could see Henry’s jaw muscles twitching.

“Drink it up,” Thomas Hudson said. “And run all your mysterious machines tonight as well as you can. For yourself and for the rest of us.”

“For all of us,” Peters said. “Who is the hardest-working man on this ship?”

“Ara,” Thomas Hudson said and sipped the rum for the first time as he looked around. “And every fucking body else on board.”

“Here’s to you, Tom,” Peters said.

“Here’s to you,” Thomas Hudson said and felt the words die cold and stale in his mouth. “To the earphone king,” he said, in order to recover something he had lost. “To all gurgling noises,” he added, being now a long way ahead as he should have been at the start.

“To my commander,” Peters said, running his string out too far.

“Any way you want to take it,” Thomas Hudson said. “There are no articles that cover that with us. But I’ll settle for that. Say it again.”

“To you, Tom.”

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