Islands in the Stream Read online

  “It hurts across the shoulders and my tail,” David said. “Watch out, Mr. Davis, please.”

  “It’s where it’s chafed,” Eddy told him. “Your father’s going to fix your hands and feet with Mercurochrome. That won’t hurt.”

  “Get this shirt on, Davy,” Thomas Hudson said. “So you won’t get cold. Go get one of the lightest blankets for him, Tom.”

  Thomas Hudson touched the places where the harness had chafed the boy’s back with Mercurochrome and helped him into the shirt.

  “I’m all right,” David said in a toneless voice. “Can I have a Coke, papa?”

  “Sure,” Thomas Hudson told him. “Eddy will get you some soup in a little while.”

  “I’m not hungry,” David said. “I couldn’t eat yet.”

  “We’ll wait a while,” Thomas Hudson said.

  “I know how you feel, Dave,” Andrew said when he brought the Coke.

  “Nobody knows how I feel,” David said.

  Thomas Hudson gave his oldest boy a compass course to steer back to the island.

  “Synchronize your motors at three hundred, Tommy,” he said. “We’ll be in sight of the light by dark and then I’ll give you a correction.”

  “You check me every once in a while will you please, papa. Do you feel as awful as I do?”

  “There’s nothing to do about it.”

  “Eddy certainly tried,” young Tom said. “Not everybody would jump in this ocean after a fish.”

  “Eddy nearly made it,” his father told him. “It could have been a hell of a thing with him in the water with a gaff in that fish.”

  “Eddy would have got out all right,” young Tom said. “Are they synchronized all right?”

  “Listen for it,” his father told him. “Don’t just watch the tachometers.”

  Thomas Hudson went over to the bunk and sat down by David. He was rolled up in the light blanket and Eddy was fixing his hands and Roger his feet.

  “Hi, papa,” he said and looked at Thomas Hudson and then looked away.

  “I’m awfully sorry, Davy,” his father said. “You made the best fight on him I ever saw anyone make. Roger or any man ever.”

  “Thank you very much, papa. Please don’t talk about it.”

  “Can I get you anything, Davy?”

  “I’d like another Coke, please,” David said.

  Thomas Hudson found a cold bottle of Coca-Cola in the ice of the bait box and opened it. He sat by David and the boy drank the Coke with the hand Eddy had fixed.

  “I’ll have some soup ready right away. It’s heating now,” Eddy said. “Should I heat some chile, Tom? We’ve got some conch salad.”

  “Let’s heat some chile,” Thomas Hudson said. “We haven’t eaten since breakfast. Roger hasn’t had a drink all day.”

  “I had a bottle of beer just now,” Roger said.

  “Eddy,” David said. “What would he really weigh?”

  “Over a thousand,” Eddy told him.

  “Thank you very much for going overboard,” David said. “Thank you very much, Eddy.”

  “Hell,” Eddy said. “What else was there to do?”

  “Would he really have weighed a thousand, papa?” David asked.

  “I’m sure of it,” Thomas Hudson answered. “I’ve never seen a bigger fish, either broadbill or marlin, ever.”

  The sun had gone down and the boat was driving through the calm sea, the boat alive with the engines, pushing fast through the same water they had moved so slowly through for all those hours.

  Andrew was sitting on the edge of the wide bunk now, too.

  “Hello, horseman,” David said to him.

  “If you’d have caught him,” Andrew said, “you’d have been probably the most famous young boy in the world.”

  “I don’t want to be famous,” David said. “You can be famous.”

  “We’d have been famous as your brothers,” Andrew said. “I mean really.”

  “I’d have been famous as your friend,” Roger told him.

  “I’d have been famous because I steered,” Thomas Hudson said. “And Eddy because he gaffed him.”

  “Eddy ought to be famous anyway,” Andrew said. “Tommy would be famous because he brought so many drinks. All through the terrific battle Tommy kept them supplied.”

  “What about the fish? Wouldn’t he be famous?” David asked. He was all right, now. Or, at least, he was talking all right.

  “He’d be the most famous of all,” Andrew said. “He’d be immortal.”

  “I hope nothing happened to him,” David said. “I hope he’s all right.”

  “I know he’s all right,” Roger told him. “The way he was hooked and the way he fought I know he was all right.”

  “I’ll tell you sometime how it was,” David said.

  “Tell now,” Andy urged him.

  “I’m tired now and besides it sounds crazy.”

  “Tell now. Tell a little bit,” Andrew said.

  “I don’t know whether I better. Should I, papa?”

  “Go ahead,” Thomas Hudson said.

  “Well,” David said with his eyes tight shut. “In the worst parts, when I was the tiredest I couldn’t tell which was him and which was me.”

  “I understand,” Roger said.

  “Then I began to love him more than anything on earth.”

  “You mean really love him?” Andrew asked.

  “Yeah. Really love him.”

  “Gee,” said Andrew. “I can’t understand that.”

  “I loved him so much when I saw him coming up that I couldn’t stand it,” David said, his eyes still shut. “All I wanted was to see him closer.”

  “I know,” Roger said.

  “Now I don’t give a shit I lost him,” David said. “I don’t care about records. I just thought I did. I’m glad that he’s all right and that I’m all right. We aren’t enemies.”

  “I’m glad you told us,” Thomas Hudson said.

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Davis, for what you said when I first lost him,” David said with his eyes still shut.

  Thomas Hudson never knew what it was that Roger had said to him.

  X

  That night in the heavy calm before the wind rose Thomas Hudson sat in his chair and tried to read. The others were all in bed but he knew he could not sleep and he wanted to read until he was sleepy. He could not read and he thought about the day. He thought about it from the beginning until the end and it seemed as though all of his children except Tom had gone a long way away from him or he had gone away from them.

  David had gone with Roger. He wanted David to get everything he could from Roger, who was as beautiful and sound in action as he was unbeautiful and unsound in his life and in his work. David was always a mystery to Thomas Hudson. He was a well-loved mystery. But Roger understood him better than his own father did. He was happy they did understand each other so well but tonight he felt lonely in some way about it.

  Then he had not liked the way Andrew had behaved, although he knew Andrew was Andrew and a little boy and that it was unfair to judge him. He had done nothing bad and he had really behaved very well. But there was something about him that you could not trust.

  What a miserable, selfish way to be thinking about people that you love, he thought. Why don’t you remember the day and not analyze it and tear it to pieces? Go to bed now, he told himself, and make yourself sleep. The hell with anything else. And pick up the rhythm of your life in the morning. You don’t have the boys for much longer. See how happy a time you can make for them. I’ve tried, he said to himself. I’ve tried truly and for Roger, too. And you have been very happy yourself, he told himself. Yes, of course. But something about today frightened me. Then he told himself: truly, there is something about every day to frighten you. Go on to bed and maybe you’ll sleep well. Remember you want them to be happy tomorrow.

  A big southwest wind came up in the night and by daylight it was slowing with almost the force of a gale. The palms were bent w
ith it and shutters slammed and papers blew and a surf was piling on the beach.

  Roger was gone when Thomas Hudson came down to breakfast alone. The boys were still sleeping and he read his mail that had come from the mainland on the run-boat that brought ice, meat, fresh vegetables, gas, and other supplies once a week. It was blowing so hard he put a coffee cup on a letter to hold it when he laid it down on the table.

  “Want me to shut the doors?” Joseph asked.

  “No. Only if things start to break.”

  “Mr. Roger gone walking on the beach,” Joseph said. “Headed up toward the end of the island.”

  Thomas Hudson kept on reading his mail.

  “Here’s the paper,” Joseph said. “I ironed her out.”

  “Thank you, Joseph.”

  “Mister Tom, is it true about the fish? What Eddy was telling me?”

  “What did he say?”

  “About how big he was and having him right up to the gaff.”

  “It’s true.”

  “God Almighty. If that run-boat hadn’t come so I had to stay in to carry ice and groceries I’d have been along. I’d have dove right in after him and gaffed him.”

  “Eddy dove in,” Thomas Hudson said.

  “He didn’t tell me,” Joseph said, subdued.

  “I’d like some more coffee, please, Joseph, and another piece of papaw,” Thomas Hudson said. He was hungry and the wind gave him even more appetite. “Didn’t the run-boat bring any bacon?”

  “I believe I can find some,” Joseph said. “You’re eating good this morning.”

  “Ask Eddy to come in please.”

  “Eddy went home to fix his eye.”

  “What happened to his eye?”

  “Somebody balled their fist in it.”

  Thomas Hudson believed he knew why this might have happened.

  “Is he hurt anywhere else?”

  “He’s beat pretty bad,” Joseph said. “On account of people not believing him in different bars. People ain’t never going to believe him that story he tells. Certainly is a pity.”

  “Where’d he fight?”

  “Everywhere. Everywhere where they wouldn’t believe him. Nobody believe him yet. People took to not believing him late at night that didn’t know what it was about even just to get him to fight. He must have fought all the fighting men on the island. Tonight, sure as you eating breakfast, men’ll come up from Middle Key just to doubt his word. Couple real bad fighting men down at Middle Key now on that construction.”

  “Mr. Roger better go out with him,” Thomas Hudson said.

  “Oh boy,” Joseph’s face lighted up. “Tonight’s the night we got fun.”

  Thomas Hudson drank the coffee and ate the cold papaw with fresh lime squeezed over it and four more strips of bacon that Joseph brought in.

  “I see you were in an eating mood,” Joseph said. “When I see you like that, I want to make something out of it.”

  “I eat plenty.”

  “Sometimes,” Joseph said.

  He came in with another cup of coffee and Thomas Hudson took it up to his desk to answer the two letters he needed to get off in the mail boat.

  “Go up to Eddy’s house and get him to make out the list of what we need to order by the run-boat,” he said to Joseph. “Then bring it to me to check. Is there coffee for Mr. Roger?”

  “He had his,” Joseph said.

  Thomas Hudson finished the two letters at the work desk upstairs and Eddy came over with the list of supplies for the next week’s run-boat. Eddy looked bad enough. His eye had not responded to treatment and his mouth and cheeks were swollen. One ear was swollen, too. He had put Mercurochrome on his mouth where it was cut and the bright color made him look very untragic.

  “I didn’t do any good last night,” he said. “I think everything is on here, Tom.”

  “Why don’t you lay off today and go home and take it easy?”

  “I feel worse at home,” he said. “I’ll go to bed early tonight.”

  “Don’t get in any more fights about that,” Thomas Hudson said. “It doesn’t do any good.”

  “You’re talking to the right man,” Eddy said through the scarlet of his split and swollen lips. “I kept waiting for truth and right to win and then somebody new would knock truth and right right on its ass.”

  “Joseph said you had a lot of them.”

  “Till somebody took me home,” Eddy said. “Big-hearted Benny I guess it was. He and Constable probably saved me from getting hurt.”

  “You aren’t hurt?”

  “I hurt but I ain’t hurt. Hell, you ought to have been there, Tom.”

  “I’m glad I wasn’t. Did anybody try to really hurt you?”

  “I don’t think so. They were just proving to me I was wrong. Constable believed me.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes sir. Him and Bobby. Only people believed me, all right. Constable said any man who hit me first he’d lock him up. Asked me this morning if there was anybody hit me first. I told him yes but I hit at them first. It was a bad night for truth and right, Tom. Bad night all right.”

  “Do you really want to cook lunch?”

  “Why not?” Eddy said. “We’ve got steaks on the run-boat. Real sirloin steak. You ought to see her. I figured to have it with mashed potatoes and gravy and some lima beans. We got that cabbage lettuce and fresh grapefruit for a salad. The boys would like a pie and we got canned loganberries makes a hell of a pie. We got ice cream from the run-boat to put on top of it. How’s that? I want to feed that goddam David up.”

  “What did you figure to do when you dove overboard with the gaff?”

  “I was going to get the gaff hook into him right underneath his fin where it would kill him when he came taut on the rope and then get the hell away from there and back on board.”

  “What did he look like underwater?”

  “He was as wide as a dinghy, Tom. All purple and his eye looked as big as your hand is long. It was black and he was silver underneath and his sword was terrible to see. He just kept on going down, settling slow, and I couldn’t get down to him because that big haft on the gaff was too buoyant. I couldn’t sink with it. So it wasn’t any use.”

  “Did he look at you?”

  “I couldn’t tell. He just looked like he was there and nothing made any difference to him.”

  “Do you think he was tired?”

  “I think he was through. I think he’d decided to give up.”

  “We’ll never see anything like that again.”

  “No. Not in our lifetimes. And I know enough now not to try to make people believe it.”

  “I’m going to paint a picture of it for David.”

  “You make it just like it was then. Don’t make it comic like some of those comic ones you paint.”

  “I’m going to paint it truer than a photograph.”

  “That’s the way I like it when you paint.”

  “It’s going to be awfully hard to paint the underwater part.”

  “Will it be like that waterspout picture down at Bobby’s?”

  “No. This will be different but I hope it will be better. I’m going to make sketches for it today.”

  “I like that waterspout picture,” Eddy said. “Bobby, he’s crazy about it and he can make anybody believe there was that many waterspouts that time when they see the picture. But this will be a hell of a one to paint with the fish in the water.”

  “I think I can do it,” Thomas Hudson said.

  “You couldn’t paint him jumping, too, could you?”

  “I think I can.”

  “Paint him the two of them, Tom. Paint him jumping and then with Roger bringing him up on the leader and Davy in the chair and me on the stern. We can get photographs took of it.”

  “I’ll start the sketches.”

  “Anything you want to ask me,” Eddy said. “I’ll be in the kitchen. The boys still asleep?”

  “All three of them.”

  “Hell,” Eddy
said. “I don’t give a damn about anything since that fish. But we’ve got to have a good meal.”

  “I wish I had leech for that eye.”

  “Hell, I don’t give a damn about the eye. I can see out of it fine.”

  “I’m going to let the boys sleep as long as they can.”

  “Joe, he’ll help me when they’re up and I’ll give them breakfast. If they wake up too late, I won’t give them too much so as not to spoil lunch. You didn’t see that piece of meat we got?”

  “No.”

  “Goddam she sure costs money but it’s beautiful meat, Tom. Nobody on this island has eaten meat like that in their whole lives. I wonder what those beef cattle look like that meat comes from.”

  “They’re built right down close to the ground,” Thomas Hudson said. “And they’re almost as wide as they are long.”

  “God, they must be fat,” Eddy said. “I’d like to see them alive sometime. Here nobody ever butchers a cow till just before it’s going to die from starving. The meat’s bitter. People here’d go crazy with meat like that we got. They wouldn’t know what it was. Probably make them sick.”

  “I have to finish these letters,” Thomas Hudson said.

  “I’m sorry, Tom.”

  After he finished the mail, answered two other business letters that he had intended to put off until the next week’s boat, checking the list of the next week’s needs and writing a check for the week’s supplies plus the flat ten percent the government charged on all imports from the Mainland, Thomas Hudson walked down to the run-boat that was loading at the government wharf. The captain was taking orders from the islanders for supplies, dry goods, medicines, hardware, spare parts, and all the things that came into the island from the Mainland. The run-boat was loading live crawfish and conches and a deck load of conch shells and empty gasoline and Diesel oil drums and the islanders stood in line in the heavy wind waiting their turn in the cabin.

  “Was everything all right, Tom?” Captain Ralph called out the cabin window to Thomas Hudson.

  “Hey, get out of this cabin, you boy, and come in your turn,” he said to a big Negro in a straw hat. “I had to substitute on a few things. How was the meat?”

  “Eddy says it’s wonderful.”

  “Good. Let me have those letters and the list. Blowing a gale outside. I want to get out over the bar on this next tide. Sorry I’m so busy.”