ISLANDS IN THE STREAM

“I stay to make a living.”

“You could make a living in Nassau.”

“Nassau, hell. There’s more fun here. This is a good island for having fun. Plenty money been made here, too.”

“I like to live here.”

“Sure,” said Bobby. “I do, too. You know that. If I can make a living. You sell those pictures you paint all the time?”

“They sell pretty good now.”

“People paying money for pictures of Uncle Edward. Pictures of Negroes in the water. Negroes on land. Negroes in boats. Turtle boats. Sponge boats. Squalls making up. Waterspouts. Schooners that got wrecked. Schooners building. Everything they could see free. They really buy them?”

“Sure they buy them. Once a year you have a show in New York and they sell them.”

“Auction them off?”

“No. The dealer who shows them puts a price on them. People buy them. Museums buy one once in a while.”

“Can’t you sell them yourself?”

“Sure.”

“I’d like to buy a waterspout,” Bobby said. “Damn big waterspout. Black as hell. Maybe better two waterspouts going roaring over the flats making a noise so you can’t hear. Sucking all the water across and scare you to death. Me in the dinghy sponging and nothing I can do. Waterspout blow the water glass right out of my hand. Almost suck the dinghy up out of the water. God’s own hell of a waterspout. How much would one like that cost? I could hang it right here. Or hang it up at home if it wouldn’t scare the old woman to death.”

“It would depend on how big it was.”

“Make it as big as you want,” Bobby said grandly. “You can’t make a picture like that too damn big. Put in three waterspouts. I seen three waterspouts closer than that across by Andros Island one time. They went right up to the sky and one sucked up a sponger’s boat and when it dropped the motor went right through the hull.”

“It’s just what the canvas would cost,” Thomas Hudson said. “I’d only charge for the canvas.”

“By God, get a big canvas then,” Bobby said. “We’ll paint waterspouts that will scare people right out of this bar and right off the damned island.”

He was moved by the grandeur of the project but its possibilities were just opening up to him.

“Tom, boy, do you think you could paint a full hurricane? Paint her right in the eye of the storm when she’s already blew from one side and calmed and just starting from the other? Put in everything from the Negroes lashed in the coconut palms to the ships blowing over the crest of the island? Put in the big hotel going. Put in two-by-fours sailing through the air like lances and dead pelicans blowing by like they were part of the gusts of rain. Have the glass down to twenty-seven and the wind velocities blown away. Have the sea breaking on the ten-fathom bar and the moon come out in the eye of the storm. Have a tidal wave come up and submerge every living thing. Have women blown out to sea with their clothes stripped from them by the wind. Have dead Negroes floating everywhere and flying through the air—”

“It’s an awfully big canvas,” Thomas Hudson said.

“To hell with the canvas!” Bobby said. “I’ll get a mainsail off a schooner. We’ll paint the greatest goddam pictures in the world and live throughout history. You’ve just been painting these little simple pictures.”

“I’ll start on the waterspouts,” Thomas Hudson said.

“Right,” said Bobby, hating to come back from the big project. “That’s sound. But by God we can make some great pictures with the knowledge you and I’ve got and with the training you’ve put in already.”

“I’ll start on the waterspouts tomorrow.”

“Good,” said Bobby. “That’s a beginning. But by God I’d like us to paint that hurricane, too. Anybody ever paint the sinking of the Titanic?”

“Not on a really big scale.”

“We could paint that. There’s a subject that always appealed to my imagination. You could get in the coldness of the iceberg as it moved off after they struck it. Paint the whole thing in a dense fog. Get in every detail. Get that man that got in the boat with the women because he thought he could help because he was a yachtsman. Paint him getting into the boat stepping on a few women just as big as life. He reminds me of that fellow we got upstairs now. Why don’t you go upstairs and make a drawing of that one while he’s asleep and use him in the painting?”

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