I had all the papers in a bunch that the broker had given me and I paid the bill and walked out of that café and across the square and through the gate and I was plenty glad to come through the warehouse and get out on the dock. Those kids had me spooked all right. They were just dumb enough to think I’d tipped somebody off about that other lot. Those kids were like Pancho. When they were scared they got excited, and when they got excited they wanted to kill somebody.
I got on board and warmed up the engine. Frankie stood on the dock watching. He was smiling that funny deaf smile. I went back to him.
“Listen,” I said. “Don’t you get in any trouble about this.”
He couldn’t hear me. I had to yell it at him.
“Me good politics,” Frankie said. He cast her off.
I waved to Frankie, who’d thrown the bowline on board, and I headed her out of the slip and dropped down the channel with her. A British freighter was going out and I ran along beside her and passed her. She was loaded deep with sugar and her plates were rusty. A limey in an old blue sweater looked down at me from her stern as I went by her. I went out the harbor and past the Morro and put her on the course for Key West; due north. I left the wheel and went forward and coiled up the bowline and then came back and held her on her course, spreading Havana out astern, and then dropping it off behind us as we brought the mountains up.
I dropped the Morro out of sight after a while and then the National Hotel and finally I could just see the dome of the Capitol. There wasn’t much current compared to the last day we had fished and there was only a light breeze. I saw a couple of smacks headed in toward Havana and they were coming from the westward, so I knew the current was light.
I cut the switch and killed the motor. There wasn’t any sense in wasting gas. I’d let her drift. When it got dark I could always pick up the light of the Morro or, if she drifted up too far, the lights of Cojimar, and steer in and run along to Bacuranao. I figured the way the current looked she would drift the twelve miles up to Bacuranao by dark and I’d see the lights of Baracoa.
Well, I killed the engine and climbed up forward to have a look around. All there was to-see was the two smacks off to the westward headed in, and way back the dome of the Capitol standing up white out of the edge of the sea. There was some gulfweed on the stream and a few birds working, but not many. I sat up there awhile on top of the house and watched, but the only fish I saw were those little brown ones that use around the gulfweed. Brother, don’t let anybody tell you there isn’t plenty of water between Havana and Key West. I was just on the edge of it.
After a while I went down into the cockpit again, and there was Eddy.
“What’s the matter? What’s the matter with the engine?”
“She broke down.”
“Why haven’t you got the hatch up?” “Oh, hell!” I said.
Do you know what he’d done? He’d come back again and slipped the forward hatch and gone down into the cabin and gone to sleep. He had two quarts with him. He’d gone into the first bodega he’d seen and bought it and come aboard. When I started out he woke up and went back to sleep again. When I stopped her out in the gulf and she began to roll a little with the swell it woke him up.
“I knew you’d carry me, Harry,” he said.
“Carry you to hell,” I said. “You aren’t even on the crew list. I’ve got a good mind to make you jump overboard now.”
“You’re an old joker, Harry,” he said. “Us conchs ought to stick together when we’re in trouble.”
“You,” I said, “with your mouth. Who’s going to trust your mouth when you’re hot?”
“I’m a good man, Harry. You put me to the test and see what a good man I am.”
“Get me the two quarts,” I told him. I was thinking of something else.
He brought them out and I took a drink from the open one and put them forward by the wheel. He stood there and I looked at him. I was sorry for him and for what I knew I’d have to do. Hell, I knew him when he was a good man.
“What’s the matter with her, Harry?”
“She’s all right.”
“What’s the matter, then? What are you looking at me like that for?”
“Brother,” I told him, and I was sorry for him, “you’re in plenty of trouble.”
“What do you mean, Harry?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I haven’t got it all figured out yet.”
We sat there awhile and I didn’t feel like talking to him anymore. Once I knew it, it was hard to talk to him. Then I went below and got out the pump- gun and the Winchester 30–30 that I always had below in the cabin and hung them up in their cases from the top of the house where we hung the rods usually, right over the wheel where I could reach them. I keep them in those full-length, clipped sheep’s wool cases with the wool inside soaked in oil. That’s the only way you can keep them from rusting on a boat.