“No. Chances are I just get nervous. Bad night last night anyway. I’m fond of them like they’re my boys and I worry the hell about them.” He put the pot of potatoes down. “Tell you what let’s do. Start her up and I’ll get the anchor up and we’ll run in closer to the reef and anchor. She’ll swing clear with this tide and the wind. Let’s put her right in.”
Thomas Hudson started the big motor and went up to the flying bridge and the topside controls. Ahead, as Eddy got the anchor up, he could see them all in the water now and, as he watched, David came up from underwater with a fish flopping on his spear that he held high in the air and Thomas Hudson heard him shout for the dinghy.
“Put her nose right against the reef,” Eddy called from the bow where he was holding the anchor.
Thomas Hudson came up slowly to almost touch the reef, seeing the big brown coral heads, the black sea urchins on the sand, and the purple sea fans swaying toward him with the tide. Eddy heaved the anchor and Thomas Hudson came astern on the engine. The boat swung off and the reef slid away. Eddy paid out line until the rope came taut and Thomas Hudson cut the motor and they swung there.
“Now we can keep an eye on them,” Eddy said, standing in the bow. “I can’t stand worrying about those kids. Ruins my damn digestion. Bad enough the way it is now.”
“I’ll stay up here and watch them.”
“I’ll pass you up the rifle and get the hell back to those potatoes. The boys like potato salad, don’t they? The way we fix it?”
“Sure. Roger too. Put in plenty of hard-boiled egg and onion.
“I’ll keep the potatoes good and firm. Here’s the rifle.”
As Thomas Hudson reached for the rifle it was chunky and heavy in its clipped sheep-wool-lined case that he kept saturated with Fiend-oil to keep the sea air from rusting it. He pulled it out by the butt and slid the case under the decking on the flying bridge. It was a .256 Mannlicher Shoenauer with the old eighteen-inch barrel they weren’t allowed to sell any more. The stock and forearm were browned like a walnut nutmeat with oil and rubbing, and the barrel, rubbed from months of carrying in a saddle bucket, was oil-slick, without a spot of rust. The cheek piece of the stock was worn smooth from his own cheek and when he pulled back the bolt the revolving magazine was full of heavy bellied cartridges with the long, thin, pencil-shaped metal-cased bullet with only a tiny exposed lead tip.
It was really too good a gun to keep on a boat but Thomas Hudson was so fond of it and it reminded him of so many things, so many people, and so many places that he liked to have it with him and he found that, in the sheepskin case, once the clipped wool was well impregnated with Fiend-oil, the rifle was not harmed at all by the salt air. A gun is to shoot anyway, he thought, not to be preserved in a case, and this was a really good rifle, easy to shoot, easy to teach anyone to shoot with, and handy on the boat. He had always had more confidence shooting it, as to being able to place his shots at close and moderate range, than any other rifle he had ever owned and it made him happy to pull it out of the case now and pull back the bolt and shove a shell into the breech.
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.”