The boat lay almost steady in the tide and the breeze, and he slipped the sling over one of the levers of the topside controls so that the rifle hung there handy, and lay down on the sunning mattress on the flying bridge. Lying on his belly to brown his back, he looked out to where Roger and the boys were spearfishing. They were all diving, staying down varying lengths of time and coming up for air to disappear again, occasionally coming up with fish on the spears. Joseph was sculling from one to another to take the fish off the spear points and drop them into the dinghy. He could hear Joseph shouting and laughing and see the bright color of the fish, red or red with brown speckles or red and yellow or striped yellow as Joseph took them off the spears or pulled them loose and tossed them back into the shade under the stern of the dinghy.
“Let me have a drink, Eddy, will you please?” Thomas Hudson called down over the side.
“What’s it to be?” Eddie stuck his head out of the forward cockpit. He was wearing his old felt hat and a white shirt and in the bright sun his eyes were bloodshot and Thomas Hudson noticed he had Mercurochrome on his lips.
“What did you do to your mouth?” he asked him.
“Some sort of trouble last night. I just put that on. Does it show bad?”
“It makes you look like some back island whore.”
“Oh hell,” said Eddy. “I put it on without looking at it in the dark. Just by the feel. Do you want a drink with coconut water? I got some water coconuts.”
“Very good.”
“Want a Green Isaac’s Special?”
“Fine. Make it a Special.”
Where Thomas Hudson lay on the mattress his head was in the shade cast by the platform at the forward end of the flying bridge where the controls were and when Eddy came aft with the tall cold drink made of gin, lime juice, green coconut water, and chipped ice with just enough Angostura bitters to give it a rusty, rose color, he held the drink in the shadow so the ice would not melt while he looked out over the sea.
“Boys seem to be doing all right,” Eddy said. “We’ve got fish for dinner already.”
“What else will we have?”
“Mashed potatoes with the fish. Got some tomato salad, too. That potato salad to start with.”
“Sounds fine. How’s that potato salad?”
“It isn’t cold yet, Tom.”
“Eddy, you like to cook, don’t you?”
“Damn right I like to cook. I like going in a boat and I like to cook. What I don’t like is rows and fights and trouble.”
“You used to be pretty good at trouble, though.”
“I always avoided it, Tom. Sometimes you can’t avoid it but I always tried to.”
“What was it last night?”
“Nothing.”
He didn’t want to talk about it. He never talked about the old days either when there had been plenty of trouble.
“All right. What else is there to eat? We have to feed them up. They’re growing boys.”
“I made a cake at the house and brought her and there’s a couple of fresh pineapples cold in the ice. I’ll slice them up.”
“Good. How will we have the fish?”
“Any way you want it. Let’s see what the best is of what they get, then cook it how they and you and Roger want it. David just got a good yellowtail. He had another one but he lost it. This one’s a big flaggy. He’s getting far out, though. He’s still got the fish and Joe’s the hell over toward Andy with the dinghy.”
Thomas Hudson put the drink down in the shade and stood up.
“Jesus Christ,” Eddy said. “There it comes!”
Out across the blue water, showing like a brown dinghy sail and slicing through the water with heavy, tail-propelled, lunging thrusts, the high triangular fin was coming in toward the hole at the edge of the reef where the boy with the mask on his face held his fish up out of the water.
“Oh Jesus,” Eddy said. “What a son of a bitching hammerhead. Jesus, Tom. Oh Jesus.”