Gallatin Canyon

The Refugee

Errol Healy was going sailing to evade custody in one of the several institutions recommended for his care. He believed the modest voyage from his berth in Cortez across the Gulf of Mexico to Key West was something he could handle. All therapeutic routes in which he was described as having a labile affect and deficient insight had proved ineffective, and friends and professionals alike felt the trip might help him reconstruct events in a way positive to his well-being. In particular, his boss at the orange groves urged him to pull himself together or else, and he realized with a panic that losing his job would, under current circumstances, not be endurable. In contrast to the skepticism he directed at mental health professionals, he ascribed almost supernatural powers of healing to an old woman in Key West, Florence Ewing, whom he’d not seen for so many years that it was questionable whether she still lived in Key West or lived at all. In many of his plans these days, he was reduced to superstition, and the mestizos he managed in the groves, who had won his friendship and peculiar loyalty, were superstitious about all things, hanging their charms everywhere, from their old cars to the branches of orange trees. Errol, quite sensibly, thought it was absurd to describe someone who was drunk all the time as having “a labile affect and deficient insight.” Better to note that a do-or-die crisis seemed at hand and something had to be tried if body and spirit were to be kept together. His body was fine.

Years ago, he’d had a sailing accident. As a result, his closest friend, Raymond, was lost at sea, and the meaning of Raymond’s death, nagging and irresolute, continued to consume him. The customary remedies were unavailing, and he intended to resort to this soothsayer of his past. His employer, the owner of numerous large orange groves, had agreed to this final shot: after that, he was on his own. This ultimatum was not offered lightly: Errol, a fluent speaker of Spanish, had a loyal crew who would disperse in the event of his firing. The employer, a patrician cracker who also owned a large juice plant in Arcadia, Florida, said something that really caught Errol and made him see his plight more clearly. “I just can’t have someone like this. Not around here.”

It was evening before Errol boarded Czarina, unfurling her jib to gain enough headway to sail the few yards to her mooring. Not far away, a big ketch with the steering vane and ratlines of a long-range cruiser tugged politely at her rode. Otherwise the tideway, lit by stars, was empty. He went below to the galley, turned on a lamp, and made a drink, then carried it to the cockpit, where he sipped and watched the clouds make their way in a moon-brightened sky. He brought the bottle with him and refreshed his iceless drink from time to time, feeling the deep motion of the boat as the incoming tide lifted her against the weight of her keel.

Errol awoke as the sun crossed the side of the cockpit. As usual, he was sick and disgusted but with the rare luxury of not being guilty over something he’d done the night before. He declined to throw the empty bottle overboard and sentenced himself to live with it a few hours more. He had wisely provisioned the galley already — wisely because he hardly had the strength for a shopping trip now — but was in no mood for food. He remained stretched out, waiting for his mind to clear.

Errol made his way around the yawl, raising the mizzen first so that she swung on the mooring facing upwind. Raising the main seemed to take all his strength, the hard stretched halyard in his aching hands, but the sail went up and the halyard somehow found its way to a cleat and Czarina trembled under the steady luffing of the mainsail. Errol went forward and cast off the mooring, and Czarina began to drift backward toward the dock. Errol released the mizzen sheet and drew in the mainsail; Czarina bore off into the tideway. He trimmed the mizzen and the yawl sank down onto her lines and beat across the harbor, tacking here and there to avoid anchored boats. Errol was glad she had no engine: an oily bilge would have been disastrous in his current state.

He sailed south in shallow water past islands covered with winter homes and islands which had been declared wildlife refuges. There was occasional traffic on the Intracoastal Water-way and to the east, towering from the mangroves, a baseball stadium. Cumbersome brown pelicans sailed on air currents, suddenly becoming arrows as they dove into schools of fish. Czarina was moving well, rail down and tracking her course insistently. A northwest wind was building, and Errol planned to evaluate the seas once he reached the pass. He would venture out into the Gulf and make a decision. The leeward side of the foredeck had begun to darken with spray as the wind increased, and he could hear the telltales on the leech fluttering. Exultation at the little ship’s movement cheered Errol at last, and he went below to examine his larder. He cut up an apple into a bowl of dry cereal, then poured Eagle Brand condensed milk over it. Czarina had sailed herself contentedly in his absence, and he sat down to eat with an inkling of happiness.

The tide was falling through the pass, building up steep seas. A big new-moon tide, it sucked channel markers under and left streaming wakes behind them. Errol was anxious to begin his voyage and, nearly certain he would be turned back, he beat out toward the Gulf of Mexico and the dark sky to the west.

Because of the running tide, the faces of the waves were steep and the little yawl seemed to be ascending skyward before reaching their crests. The long slopes at the backs of the waves were almost pleasant as she ran down them, the centerboard humming in its trunk and a fine vibration coming through the tiller. But by the time he passed Johnson Shoals and began to contemplate a long trip in these conditions as opposed to the immediate sporting challenge, he grew apprehensive. There was green water on the deck racing toward the scuppers, the bottoms of the sail were dark and soaked, and he was getting shaky again. This development was something he meant to observe from afar.

He came about and headed downwind toward Cayo Costa, avoiding whatever temptation he might have had to press on in this small boat, and in the face of obvious peril that would have been the real loss of nerve. Better to shake himself miserable in a safe anchorage than abandon himself to the fatal and picturesque.

Pelican Bay was a protected anchorage in the middle of a state park, and its oceanic zephyrs were personalized with the smells of hot dogs and hamburgers from the many boats anchored there. Errol was ill equipped to cope with this banality, and he looked beyond the mouth of the bay to the increasingly raging seas of the Gulf with melancholy and regret. By tomorrow, the winds should have diminished and clocked around to the northeast, which would make the hundred-mile open-sea crossing to Key West one long reach. Meanwhile, the high-spirited shrieks of children made him furious. That the powerboats looked like huge tennis shoes only added to his general dissatisfaction with the world. Nevertheless, his belief that all his problems would go away once he reached Key West brought him a kind of grim cheer; recently and in an hour of unsurpassed bleakness, when the landscape of his failures seemed almost to afford death a dismal glamour, he’d had a kind of satori in which he’d either remembered or imagined an old woman of infinite wisdom who could see him on to a better place. In years past she’d done this for him and for several dissolute friends, among whom he remained the sole member whose life seemed to be slipping through his own fingers. The occasion of his vision was less than august: trying to please a new lady friend, he’d lost a toe while mowing her lawn at midnight, and the pain as he sat in a crowded emergency room, a bath towel around his foot, a tall to-go cup in his lap, seemed to summon forth a vision of a livable future spelled out by the old lady in Key West. He had to get there and he would, once the wind was in the northeast.

About fifty yards away, a man stood in the stern of a dilapidated launch, hands on his hips, playing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony from a boom box at high volume. He seemed to be challenging anyone who might wish to interrupt his attempt to educate waterborne vacationers. Errol was having difficulty ignoring this. Presently, a cigarette boat filled with young people pulled anchor and relocated near the loner in the old launch. They played rap music on their much more powerful sound system while mimicking the crablike moves of hip-hop. Errol ransacked his boat for booze and miraculously found a six-pack of warm beer made with water from the Rocky Mountains wrapped in a bundle of canvas in his sail-repair supplies. He tingled with the excitement of discovery as he remembered hiding it from a woman who’d come aboard one morning, an attractive woman who’d gone nuts, shouting invitations to a coast guard station in her underwear. Errol permitted himself to sample the beer. Feeling better, he mused over the old fellow’s persistence in playing Beethoven; and with the second can, he began to enjoy the undulations of the half-clothed youths in the cigarette boat. The arrival of a private helicopter overhead, ruffling the entire surface of the harbor and tossing the smaller craft merrily, made him bless whatever gods had dropped off the six-pack. He retreated to the cabin and assumed the cooler view that would become necessary if the hilarity continued to spread over Pelican Bay. His simple ambition — to avoid insanity — seemed in danger of deteriorating into misleading annoyance. Still, he was smart enough to know that the curtain would fall again. It was only a matter of time.

After a short and troubled nap, Errol rigged a hand line and small jig that he dangled from the side for only a short time before bringing a snapper aboard. He held it in front of him, its fins braced, bright eyes seemingly fixed upon his. He rapped it over the head with his cleaning knife, and as it stiffened, shivered, and died in his hand, tears filled his eyes. He cleaned it, placed the two fillets in a skillet on the single-burner alcohol stove, and, after examining the fleshless frame of the fish and thinking it looked like a good plan for a snapper, he threw it overboard. A seagull flew straight from the Beethoven boat, where it had been working the owner for snacks, and carried off the remains. The cigarette boat was now motoring slowly among the other anchored boats, treating them to the latest urban sounds. The helicopter was gone. “Why do we ‘clean’ fish?” Errol said aloud. “They are not dirty.” He chuckled as though he’d made this remark for genteel company, then grimly contemplated pulling anchor and sailing for Key West. The wind had not come around sufficiently but surely it would; staying in this public anchorage any longer would only put off the help he needed to avoid calamity and, more important, polishing off the beer would make it unavailable for the voyage, when its service to morale in stormy conditions would be invaluable.

Therefore, he raised the sails, pulling the halyards until they squeaked in the jam cleats. They luffed loudly as the boat drew back on the anchor rode, the boom bouncing against the main-sheet traveler, the tiller swinging from side to side as though the boat were being steered by a ghost. The anchor came up covered with turtle grass, and Errol laid it on deck, cleaning the weeds and throwing them overboard before lashing the anchor into its chocks and returning to the cockpit. He sat down and pushed the tiller to one side. The boat drifted backward and swung, until the sail filled and she reversed direction. Czarina then moved swiftly, rail down, toward the entrance to the bay.

As he sailed out the pass, he felt the slight easterly shift of the still-powerful winds. The faces of the waves were still tall but less abrupt and the rudder never lost its bite as it had on his first crossing. The sky was gray, but it was higher and faintly light-shot to the west. He trimmed the sails until, at due south, there was no pressure on the helm and the yawl sailed herself. His only job would be to adjust the sheets to keep this heading as the wind clocked around to the east.

The coast soon disappeared and he found himself making good progress in the open water; the Gulf of Mexico, and the greater regularity of the seas, uninfluenced by tide and shore, made the little boat lope along with a purpose. Errol had a few sips of his beer, but he could already tell he was not going to drink too much. He occupied himself with housekeeping, making up the pipe berth below, folding his oilskins and stowing them in their locker, draining the icebox into a bucket and pouring the water overboard. He pulled the floorboards and sponged out the salt water that had come on deck and gotten through the deck ventilator, which now poured fresh air through the cabin, arousing the smells of cedar and old varnish. On the bulkhead a framed photograph had discolored over time, a picture of himself much younger, a man, and a woman, the same age. Underneath, it said Pals.

Back in the cockpit, he unspooled a hand line with a large silver spoon and single hook over the stern. It danced and dove a hundred feet behind the boat and seemed to raise Errol’s spirits further. He wished he had some sort of flag to raise and then remembered that he did have just the thing. He dug around in the cockpit locker among dock lines, fenders, and life jackets until he found the flag of the Conch Republic, the imaginary nation of Key West from its days of hippie utopianism, an era Errol seemed to have trouble escaping. He raised it to the masthead on the flag halyard and liked seeing its pink and yellow conch and sunburst against an increasingly blue sky.

The compass indicated he was now heading for Yucatán and so further adjustment to the sails would be necessary. This was the result of the steady easterly shift of winds and clearing weather. The seas were ever less violent, and within an hour the skies had cleared entirely and the Gulf had regained its characteristic dusty green placidity under towering white clouds. It occurred to Errol that his drinking days were behind him. Oh, joy! Not another shit-faced, snockered, plastered, oiled, loaded, bombed, wasted minute ever again! No more guilt, remorse, rehab, or jail! Free at last!

Calming down, he remembered that his hope lay in his visit to Florence Ewing, the good witch. She had seen right through him in days past and found something redeeming. She would again. He could have taken the bus and gotten there straight-away, but he had arrived by sea the last time she’d put him right, and though it was decades ago he was sure she could do it again. He knew better than to alter any of the details. His mestizos, trustworthy and industrious, would keep the cracker’s groves in order until he returned.

A frigate bird followed him at a great altitude, a perfect flier that barely needed to move its wings, an elegant black zigzag watching his wake for bait fish. He daydreamed about what it would be like to be a bird like that, a seabird with that great altitude and horizon. No big thoughts, of course, just “Where’s the fish?” Like being a fine athlete, everything vision and muscle memory, Ted Williams watching the ball compress on the bat, no attitude, a simple there-it-is. Roar of the crowd same as wind or traffic, just worthless noise. If I were a bird, that six-pack wouldn’t glow like radium, a screeching come-hither.

The yawl was making wonderful progress. With the slowly clocking wind and more moderate seas, she sped along on a controlled reach that might scarcely need adjustment before Key West. The coast soon disappeared beneath the eastern horizon, and for a pleasant half hour a pair of young dolphins surfed in the quarter wave before peeling off for more interesting games. Huge schools of bait, shadows in the pale Gulf green, erupted like hail falling on the water as predators coursed through and terns dove at them from above. The leeward deck was dark with spray all the way to the transom.

In late afternoon, he sailed through a congregation of Louisiana shrimp boats, nets draped from trawling booms as they awaited nightfall. And at dusk a big ketch rail-down passed a couple miles to the north of him, heading for Yucatán. Errol lashed the tiller and went below to warm some soup over the blue alcohol flame. He ate it slowly, sitting on the companionway step and looking at the clouds swaying back and forth above the cockpit, their undersides pink at the approach of sundown. As he gazed south, he wished he could do this forever. Maybe once he’d been saved, it would be possible. At least he could go to the islands for a spell, which islands it was hard to say. What difference did it make? he thought irritably, as though being cross-examined about the islands. For a moment, he fretted about islands all running together and being required to distinguish between them. Now his ears were ringing.

Then it was dark, a comfortable dark with stars coming up in tiers, and a quarter moon hung outlined in haze. The tiller throbbed gently in Errol’s hand and the lubber line on the compass rested quietly on his course of 180 degrees. It seemed that since his boat went in the water all things were sweeping him gently toward this destination. The hours slipped by until the loom of Key West lit the southwestern sky in a pale glow, calling for a “cocktail,” a cause for celebration even Errol found suspicious. He might have felt misgivings.

Sails had to be trimmed again as he beat his way past the sea buoy and up the ship channel toward the bright skyline of the city. He didn’t feel he had time to go all the way around Tank Island to get to Garrison Bight. Instead, he sailed on until he broke out into the Atlantic, and then broad-reached up Smathers Beach before turning in toward the desalinization plant and a dismaying number of bright lights and even automobile traffic. Dropping the mainsail, he lashed it to the boom, and crept up the channel under the jib and mizzen between small anchored boats backlit on black water. Spotting an empty slip, he dropped the jib and mizzen and glided very slowly to the dock. As he stepped ashore to secure the yawl, he suddenly felt frightened, but the feeling passed. He was briefly without momentum, a situation efficiently solved by one of the beers. Furthermore, last call was still hours away.

He kept inhaling deeply, surprised after his long absence at the familiarity of Key West night air, the particular humidity, the scent of more flowers than occur in nature, salt water, and faint indications of humanity: tobacco, perfume, automotive exhaust. It was a perennial aroma occasionally subsumed by a single smell, new house paint or Sunday-morning vomit. All in all, it made his heart ache.

Key West seemed a most appealing landfall. Old-timers used to tell him that before the aqueduct and plentiful fresh water, the place was a kind of gooney-bird island, not much greenery and plenty of exposed cap rock and coral. Now it was as lush as Hawaii, an easier sell.

The bartender had a deeply fissured, weathered face, a gold chain around his neck, de rigueur before Key West went literary; also, solidarity with the Cubans. He returned with Errol’s drink.

“I quit drinking over eleven thousand days ago,” said the bartender, whose name was something to do with dog: Coon Dog, Hound Dog, Blue Dog — Errol forgot. “And it was no mistake.”

Dog-something seemed to be studying Errol, probably remembered Errol no better than Errol remembered him. Errol clearly recalled that the bartender drove in one day from Boston about a quarter-century ago with a blue-eyed dancer he was very proud of and who wasted no time in absconding with one of the entrepreneurial hippies, a corrupt prep-school boy from Columbia, South Carolina, who was restoring a conch house.

“What about that Caroline? You still see her?”

“That was quite long-lasting, wasn’t it? No, I haven’t seen her in ages.” Caroline was from New Orleans, a beautiful girl with thick auburn hair who reminded everyone of Gene Tierney. She had a genuine New Orleans Brooklyn-Southern accent. She was languorous and virginal, with a promise of depravity so instinctive in New Orleans girls that it must have been devised by their ancestral mothers. Some logged feverish turns in town before going home, marrying Tulane doctors, and raising little magnolia aristocrats to replenish the Garden District. But Caroline was different from all the others; she and Errol had been engaged to be married. He hadn’t cared about anything else at all. He stood beside his stool and said, “Well, I suppose.”

“Nice seeing you.”

“Same.”

“You remember West Coast Anita?”

“I remember Anita.”

“There were two Anitas, Anita and West Coast Anita.” Errol was anxious to go. Looking toward the door, he asked, “Which one had the flag in her tooth?”

“West Coast Anita.”

“What about her?”

“Anita stayed too long at the fair. She had an out-of-body experience in the Turks and Caicos, and they had to take her down on the beach and shoot her.”

Errol said, “I must be missing something.” He counted out his tab on the bar. “Well,” he said, “I’m off to see Florence Ewing.”

He didn’t know why he was not cordial to Dog-something, one of those citizens you can’t quite remember, though he tells you that you and he go way back. Perhaps it was the sense that one was about to be drawn into something or discover that one had failed to recall a debt. A group strode in, three women and a man with low gray bangs who cried out, “But wait: right after the car crash, we come in with the Japanese flutes!” The women were awestruck as he swept his arm toward the table he had selected for them. One, forefinger to a dimple, hung back, contemplating the flutes in her imagination.

Night Dog! That was it!

From here he could see shrimp boats between the buildings on Lower Caroline Street. He and Raymond had backed the old ketch in here one winter to pull out the Vere diesel that had turned into a half ton of English rust in the bilge. They’d built a gallows frame of old joists they got when the Red Doors Saloon was remodeled, and all the wallets fell out of the walls from a century of muggings. They lifted the great iron lump on a chain fall and swung the dead engine to the fish docks. Thenceforth, they sailed her without the engine. She went that way into Havana, but Raymond was not aboard.

Florence Ewing lived on Petronia Street, a street frequently in the Key West Citizen for scenes of mayhem; but this was the more sedate upper Petronia, now part of a district renamed by realtors the Meadows, a tremendous leap of the imagination. Florence was born in the house over eighty years ago and, though Errol hadn’t seen her in some time, his every hope was pinned on her being still alive.

She had gone to sea with her father, a turtle captain, when she was eleven and could still describe the Moskito Coast of Nicaragua in detail. By sixteen, she was a chorus girl in New York; she married at seventeen back home and stayed married for over sixty years to her physician husband. A precondition was that they never leave the Petronia house. Dr. Ewing, an Alabaman and a sportsman, struggled with this, turning the old carriage house into a kind of dominoes hall for his cronies, building a stilt shack past Mule and Archer keys where he fished and played cards on weekends in his old Abaco launch. He delivered thousands of Key West babies, who stayed until the tourist boom pushed them up A1A to the mainland; some were even his own, begotten on lissome Cuban teens. When Raymond Fitzpatrick and Errol Healy went into partnership, they lived around the corner from Florence; and during some of the fraught hours of their business life, Errol found himself being quietly counseled by the very sensible and spiritual Florence Ewing. You could say they became close, cooking meals for each other or watching Johnny Carson. And it was not a matter of an old widow needing company. Errol needed the company; Florence was wholly selfsufficient. Errol was cautious about imposing on her, though he supposed he must at times have tested her patience. He never went there high, more consideration than anyone else got, and he tried to keep the more outrageous ladies from battening onto her and declaring her a role model. He didn’t know how she created such peace. Others noticed and sought her out; they believed she had the power to sanctify and heal those who had lost hope. He marveled that she didn’t run them all off, or even judge them, or, just once, tell them she was too tired. They were her subjects. For some she was an oracle; for a few a last chance. She had learned forgiveness and discovered its mighty power.

He made the trek from the bar in the fragrant early evening, taking enough time to gaze upon the Laundromat still lifes, those all-night getaways where girls of yore rode the tumblers and fornicated on the washing machines. Notions and grocery stores still open were nevertheless somnolent. Here and there among the renovated houses miraculously a few remained tumbledown as before, with gutted refrigerator kingfish smokers in the backyard. Many of the houses were tall and attracted the eye, making you look upward, at a sky that let you know that you were surrounded by the sea. Elsewhere, rainwater cisterns had been converted into atmospheric soaking tubs, leaves and rotting fruit were made to disappear, and services created to secure the things bound to fail when the city was astonished by some intrusion of nature, such as a storm. Life sometimes tested absentee owners. When, after a half year, remembering the fresh air and clean linens, the truce with vegetation, the ringless tubs and toilets, the owners returned to find fetor and mildew, the inconvenienced rats and fleeing roaches and bellicose fighting chickens who had moved into the lap pool, there was seldom anything so untoward as a demand for return of caretakers’ fees. Slaves of their own vacations, the owners began by negotiating.

He cut through a lane behind the library on Fleming to gaze at a house where Caroline’s friend Frances Mousseau had lived, working on a romantic play, a gnomish tale of Cajun high jinks set in the Atchafalaya Swamp. Errol thought Frances, a racist Creole from Plaquemines, too dull-witted for passionate folly; nevertheless, upon learning she’d been disinherited, she jumped off an ocean liner. Had a passenger watching the moonrise from a cheap cabin not seen Frances go by his porthole, her absence might never have been noticed. While characteristic notions of the day included a dreamy version of suicide, Frances was quickly forgotten.

Errol walked to Fleming, where he had lived with Caroline and Raymond, at least one Anita, and a few others, sharing the rent and parceling out all the small rooms. He remembered believing this lack of privacy was assurance that his love for Caroline would remain undisturbed. But Caroline could make men find original ways to hurt themselves, even his late, great best friend Raymond. Holding the iron railing, he looked up at the old house, which had become a bed-and-breakfast, Fronds, with a sign in front: NO CHILDREN. NO PETS. In that house, Errol felt all he had left behind.

There was still light in Petronia, brighter along Georgia, and indeed in the garden at Florence’s house someone was toiling late, a middle-aged man in khaki pants and work shoes whom Errol did not recognize. The grounds were in ominously poor shape. Though infinitely polite, Florence had always gotten a lot of work out of her people, some of whom were of remarkably little account, reverting to their torpid ways as soon as they left her.

When Errol told the gardener that he had come to see Miss Ewing, the man stood back from him uneasily.

“She’s in there.” He made little secret of his inhospitability. But the gardener could not have known how much Errol had riding on this. “And who are you?”

“An old friend from Fleming Street.”

He gave this some thought. “You want to go in, go in.”

“Yes, of course.” So he went up the steps, and on the gardener’s peremptory “Don’t knock; she can’t get to the door,” he let himself in. He felt shaky.

Except for the soaring lines of the old shipwright’s staircase and the few glints of a high chandelier, he couldn’t see much of anything. Just this was enough to make him feel quieter as his soul expanded safely into Florence Ewing’s sanctum, the house that turtles built, furnished from wrecks, including a grand piano made of African mahogany, said to have killed a man as it came aboard. Here, nearly a century ago, Florence was delivered by a black midwife from Great Inagua who, she claimed, taught her to conjure, a tale the young people made her tell again and again. Compared to the conventional mummery with which they had arrived, conjury held great attraction. Florence owned dozens of lacquered boxes, little private containers of silver and enamel that could furnish coveted storage for secret things, and sometimes she made gifts of them. Secrets were everything in Errol’s circle, and they all worked at suggesting they were full of them. It was not for everyone and especially not for Errol and Raymond, who made a handsome living transporting souls from Cuba, their earnings disbursed not by driving big cars or hiring interior decorators, but rather by throwing banquets.

Dividing the foyer from the living room was an old theater flat with a great big moon sparkling on an empty sea that created an obstruction to direct entry. Errol called out, “Florence,” and got no reply. There was a blue spider with a body shaped like a pentagram lowering itself slowly on a single strand of silk; from afar came the sound of a ship signaling the harbor pilot. He stepped around the theater flat and wondered why he had waited so long. He felt weightless as he gazed, soaring and uncertain, at the ghostly figure of his redeemer.

The living room had become her bedroom and the chandelier that Errol had glimpsed from the other side was seen to hang over her bed, an old gas-burning model that had been converted to electric and was now a garland of mostly expired little bulbs. He remembered best her big ormolu bed, formerly on the second floor, a table beside it supporting a water pitcher, a vase of anemones, and several small bottles. Florence was propped against many pillows and covered by the palest blue counterpane. The room was fresh and the bedclothes looked buoyant and clean; someone must be looking after her. Errol wished he could have slipped in beside her, to begin pouring out his heart in crazy familiarity, to detach himself completely from his own story and watch it sail out into the air like a ribbon.

As he entered she gazed at him with eyes that were opalescent. He greeted her and told her who he was. She said nothing, and he drew up the only chair, one so straight-backed and uncomfortable that he wondered if she ever had visitors. Florence had grown so very old, with a diaphanous quality of something about to turn to powder. Yet she was as elegant as an ancient Spanish altarpiece. Errol almost wished some of the others were here, especially Raymond Fitzpatrick, of whom she was so fond. Or even Caroline, whom Florence disliked; here they could have all finally come clean. The last time Florence spoke to Caroline, she told her that she saw right through her, and Caroline gave her no chance to elaborate. Florence smiled until Caroline got up and left.

It didn’t seem to matter that neither of them spoke. Errol was fascinated that he could slip back into Florence’s house and feel that the fabric of consolation had never been torn. He decided then and there that he would just talk, just pour it out. He was far too desperate to do it conversationally, and she looked as though she might not have the strength. She could always ask him to stop, but it had been a long ride and he needed to talk.

“Florence,” he said, “I’ve been gone a long time.” He could see her eyes sharpen somewhat, and he wanted to get the mechanical tone out of his voice. “I moved up to Canada for a while.” That reminded him: there used to be a number of French Canadians around town, Separatists in Speedos, who told the girls they’d planted the mailbox bombs in Montreal. It was a very effective line and kept the bulk of the Separatists out of inclement weather. “Now I’m in citrus. I’m responsible for four huge groves in Hendry County, frost-free high ground, the best. Caroline and I split up quite a while ago.” He’d mistakenly thought this would induce a reply. “She’s up in New Orleans, three beautiful kids. They all swim. Remember how crazy Caroline was about swimming? Jumping off the White Street pier? And remember Jackie L. Dalton? Used to play his songs for you on the guitar? He’s a huge hit, just huge, got his own jet plane.” He caught himself mimicking with his hand the jet plane flying through the sky. “Fills big stadiums,” he added weakly.

For an instant his head was empty. Then he wanted to talk again.

“Those days seem so long ago. But that’s nothing to you, is it? Not when you’ve seen Cay Sal from the deck of a schooner. Really, I think all of us were just pitiful, just homeless and pitiful. Didn’t know anything. Worse came to worst, declare yourself a carpenter. There was that awful song, ‘If I was a carpenter and you were a lady,’ started all that mess. Then some people couldn’t get out of it, and after they left here they couldn’t ask you, so a lot of them took off more or less empty-handed. It wasn’t your fault and I don’t know what you got out of listening to all that, and here you are doing it again and I’m starting to feel better already. I’ll be honest with you; I had to come here. In a way, it’s my last chance. I said to myself, Miss Florence Ewing will not permit me to go on like this.

“I didn’t really move to Canada, I just said that. I didn’t move anywhere. I moved my body several times but nothing else moved. I was like that four-hundred-pound lady bouncer at the Anchor they called Tiny. We were there a thousand times and nobody ever saw Tiny move. I’m kind of like old Tiny, but in my case the body is the only thing that did move. Let me clear that up: I went to Canada, I went to Red Deer, Alberta, but it just didn’t work out, and anyway Canada won’t let me back in. It’s not like I meant to mislead you about that.

“By the way, it’s sure nice nobody smokes in here. I can smell all that longleaf pine just like the day your granddad nailed it up. When you used to get us to do a little work around here, we’d run into those gumbo-limbo joists and break our tools and you’d just laugh. I think me and Raymond pretty much covered that old turtle route in that black Nova Scotia ketch we had together, a real little ship. We probably saw as much of the tropics as anybody.”

He looked off to one end of the room where the tall windows had darkened and a breeze lifted the long curtains. The four live bulbs in the chandelier were little help and Errol was at the point of thinking Florence had passed away.

“That last trip, coming across the stream in a northern gale, a big wave took Raymond right off the helm and away. I came up for my watch and there was no one at the wheel. Not a soul.” He delivered a hearty laugh but there was a scream buried in it. “I realize there are plenty of people who said it didn’t exactly happen that way, and I hope you believe me. But I got the boat home, got her tied up at the desalinization plant, and walked to Caroline’s house. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t going to be there. Well, what do you know about that, Florence? I’ll bet you imagined you were through with all that. I kind of wish you’d answer me or say something. I’ll bet you figured we had used you about up. Surprise, surprise. You know what? Just goes to show you, Raymond is the legend we all knew he would be. I can tell you that I have failed to make — uh, to make an appropriate accommodation. I am a drunkard and I really felt I better get back down here for a little visit, see what you had to say about all this, help a person more or less sort of stand it.”

Florence Ewing did not say a word. Errol could feel her opal eyes enter his soul. He knew that if he did not tell the truth she would not offer him absolution, and even then there was no certainty, no promise, no assurance that her powers would work or that he would ever be whole again. It had been half his life since he’d known what hope felt like. In Florence Ewing’s face it seemed everything was accepted as morning accepted light. He was joyous that he’d had enough mother wit left to make the trip, to place himself in the way of this illumination.

“Florence, you don’t have to talk.”

He rose from his chair and sat at the corner of her bed and thought. Carter and Castro were going to show the world we could be friends and they declared a race from Key West to Cuba. Errol and Raymond entered the race with no hope of winning, and they agreed they wouldn’t try to bring any souls back with them. The manifest showed just the two of them in both directions: Errol Healy and Raymond Fitzpatrick.

Errol couldn’t tell if he was talking or just thinking. Florence’s eyes took him in with even greater opalescence, and he wondered whether she was reading his mind. He thought he could hear himself speaking, maybe just part of this dream, a disquieting dream that suggested the possibility that he wasn’t even here at all, that he would be awakened by an attendant of some sort, someone he would be unable to recognize. He never wanted to be in any form of custody.

All the boats knew a gale was predicted. Everyone leaving the ship channel at sundown thought they would reach the middle of the stream sometime after midnight. There was a crowd by the coast guard dock, all the sunset watchers and dogs and jugglers there to see them off, grand prix yachts and cruisers and local dope captains in anything they could lay hands on, from J24s to backyard trimarans. It had the feeling of a big parade, with Errol and Raymond’s the only ship customarily dedicated to profiteering at the misfortune of refugees.

They were going to Cuba! The sun set behind them kind of cold, and for a few hours right into the darkness they were on a beam reach in fifteen to eighteen knots from the north, and the ketch had her rail right at the water, pulling a quarter wave higher than the transom. They had an overlapping jib that was almost too much for her, but this was perfect sailing for a heavy English ketch, and her rock-elm ribs creaked under her. They had a bottle of Courvoisier to sip, and Errol chattered about all the good things in their lives, all their tax-free money, and about Caroline and sailing forever and someday settling down with her, with their own crabbing pier for the kids, with a flounder light and maybe a picture album of the days when Raymond and Errol were young in a dangerous trade, when everyone they did business with had a gun.

At some point, Errol realized that Raymond hadn’t said a word. He was a very direct man, an honest man. He never spoke for effect and Errol had long ago learned that something was coming when he was quiet like this. Well, something was coming. Raymond said that he had never intended to join this race. He came so he could talk to Errol man-to-man. And what he had to say was that when they got back to Key West, he and Caroline were moving to New Orleans. That by the time they got back she would already be gone.

“Raymond was at the helm and I was sitting in the foot well with my back to the companionway. I could see all the way to the last glow on the horizon, and Key West was under the western horizon except for the loom of its lights. I felt I should say something. I actually felt I should say something out of our friendship. But nothing would come. I kept trying to picture Caroline, and she would come to me all outlined; it’s hard to explain. But I couldn’t say anything. I guess I thought we should go back, but if I said we should go back, that would really make it. . really make it official. So I never said, Let’s go back, and we pushed on toward Cuba.

“At about two in the morning, the gale was rising and we put a double reef in the main, a real adventure because she had an old-fashioned boom that overhung the transom by ten feet, and getting the bunt tied in all the way to the leech was dangerous.” Again, the thought returned that he was not actually speaking and this was only a dream, but Florence’s gaze seemed to indicate absorption and whether he was thinking or speaking seemed not to matter. In fact, this is how he remembered it was with Florence Ewing. It was what they’d all looked for: the trance she’d cast from her past mysteries.

“The wind really came up fast, and since it was blowing against the direction of the stream the seas were bad. At first we could see the spreader lights of the other yachts, and then we couldn’t even see that and all around us it was just the black wave faces in our running lights. Without saying anything, I changed places with Raymond and took the wheel. He went below and stayed there for a long time as the seas built and the ketch began to groan under the strain and yaw worse and worse, especially as we came down the faces. Several times I could feel her try to broach, but I was able to head up and keep her on her feet. I later heard the seas had been over twenty feet. Boats were dismasted and Black Magic, a Great Lakes yacht, killed her helmsman in a standing jibe. One of the dope captains on a Stone Horse disappeared entirely, the only boat out there without a self-bailing cockpit. No one ever found the tin cans full of money he’d buried all over Key West, but his girlfriend went around in a haze, carrying her shovel and knocking on doors, trying to get in people’s yards.

“Raymond came partway up the companionway and I could barely hear him over the storm. He said, ‘The jib’s got to come off before we lose control.’ I knew it was true, but all this time I had been thinking, and I wasn’t sure if I cared whether we controlled the boat or not. As it was, I had trouble. Even twenty-five tons of oak and lead seemed to lose traction in those seas.

“Typical Raymond, he went forward hand over hand toward the foredeck. I kept her on course until he eased the halyard and the jib started down. I turned her upwind and the jib collapsed, Raymond on top of it lashing it with wild, violent exertions of his arms. I bore off, and as I did so we were lifted on a huge wave. We stayed atop it for a long moment, Raymond facedown on the foredeck, and then we started into the trough, which was just a long, bottomless hole. What had made me change direction? I felt the boat pick up speed as we went down and it had begun to yaw as the sea hissed out behind the keel. It seemed like it yawed harder and harder. The spokes on the wheel just tore at my hands, and either I lacked the strength or I — or I — it got away from me. The wheel got away from me. . and we broached. The next wave buried us from starboard and the bow went under, beyond the forward hatch, then over the brow of the house. She stayed like that for a long time, and when she came up, the ocean was pouring off the crown of the foredeck. There was no one there.

“The Cuban came aboard in Havana and read the crew manifest. He said, Where’s the otro hombre? I said I came by myself. He left and came back with another guy in a green uniform with a machine gun. He spoke English. I said there had been a language problem with the first guy. I told him the otro hombre washed overboard on the western edge of the stream where it changed color. He believed me. I don’t think it’s that unusual to Cubans to wash overboard.”

The gardener came quietly into the room. Errol couldn’t tear his gaze away from Florence, because he felt any second now she might speak. He was hoping she would. She pulled herself up and looked at him intently, all phosphorus gone as her eyes blackened and some beads rolled off the counterpane and tinkled to the floor. Errol could tell she was going to say something.

“Are you with the termite people?” she asked. Errol didn’t reply and Florence repeated her question, this time with some agitation.

The gardener pushed past him and leaned over Florence so she would be sure to hear him. “They can’t come without they tent the place,” he said to her. “And they can’t tent the place if you in it, ’cause they pump it full of poison.” She let out a moan. The gardener spoke in a more conciliatory voice. “The exterminator been every week,” he told her, as if he was singing her a song. She seemed crushed at the news.

“Is he the one with his car all fixed up like a rat?” asked Florence urgently. “Has big ears on it like a rat?”

The old house on Fleming was the obvious choice, as long as they had a room with a tub available. He stopped first at Tres Hermanos for some supplies. The front door was wide open to the air, and a desk had been set up in the front hall. Here sat the clerk reading the newspaper, his treated blond hair swept forward from a single spot. Without looking up, he asked how he could help and Errol told him he wanted a room with a tub.

“No can do.”

“No rooms?”

“Not with a tub.”

“There’s a tub in the last room on the second floor.”

“That’s a suite. You said you wanted a room.”

“I’ll take the suite.”

“It’s not the same price as a room.”

“I understand.”

The clerk looked up finally. He regarded the paper bag from the Cuban tienda. “Is that all you have to your name?”

“Yes.”

“Usually, when we rent the suite, it’s to someone with a suitcase.”

“I’ll bet that’s right.” The clerk had no idea what a problem lay before him.

Despite all the heavy, almost operatic furniture and tasseled drapery, the room was recognizable. He remembered its old bare wooden bones, the sparse secondhand furnishings of that time, the Toulouse-Lautrec poster and its rusty thumbtacks. The names were streaming at him. The gardener had told him he was wasting all that noise on Miss Ewing; he declared that Miss Florence Ewing had upped and cleared out during a previous administration and wouldn’t know him from Adam.

The water made a deep sound in the old tub. Errol pulled a chair next to it and placed the bag where he could reach it. He filled the tub, calculating how deep it could be without the mass of his body overflowing it. The water looked so still, so clear, with light steam arising. He undressed and got in, sliding down until the water was as high as his throat. Errol remembered taking bread scraps to the birds in the small town where he grew up; and when he reached toward the chair next to the tub, he saw the birds again, how they rose in a cloud. He was alert enough to enjoy this slide into oblivion, to picture a million oranges rotting on trees as his mestizos dispersed into Florida barrios, and at first he confused the shouts he heard with those of his boss, the cracker, the juice king of Arcadia and citrus oligarch who made his life so wearisome. A cloud of blackbirds rose from the rotting oranges around a small man shouting in the grove. .

It was the desk clerk and two police officers, but the desk clerk alone, soaking wet, was doing all the shouting. “He ruined my beautiful hotel!”

One of the officers, a small portly Cuban, asked, “You call this a hotel?”

“Get him out of here! Pump his stomach, do something!”

To the skeptics in the emergency room, Errol said, “Must be some kind of bug.”

Grisly days at Keys Memorial passed slowly. The nurses knew what he had done and several considered it a mortal sin, a view that produced grudging service and solitude beside otherwise busy corridors. At checkout, the accounting office having assumed indigence expressed surprise at his Blue Cross. He started to explain but all that came out was citrus. He was too numb to speak and wondered whether he had done himself permanent harm. Perhaps I am now feeble-minded, he thought. But really his heart was lighter for having survived the outcome of a long obsession.

He spent the rest of the morning buying provisions. The yawl was just as he had left it, but for a light coating of ash from the island’s heroic burning dump. A fishing boat was being swabbed down by two Cubans in khakis and white T-shirts who from time to time tossed a fish from the scuppers to a pelican waiting modestly on the transom. The tide had dropped, leaving a wide band of barnacles around the pilings, and Errol moved his spring lines until the boat stood away from them. Provisions were stowed in the galley; the water he had acquired on the mainland was still in good supply. He washed the deck down with seawater, sweeping the ash over the stern, and checked his watch. The bars had just opened. He stepped off the boat and headed uptown, stopping at a phone booth to call his employer, the owner of the groves and juice plant. He told him he’d gotten a much-needed rest and would be back among the oranges in no time flat. He’d left the Latino crew detailed instructions sure to see them through every waking moment. “I’ll just bet,” the grove owner said, adding, “You’re the damnedest feller I ever met.”

“Anyway, you said you’d go along with me on this,” said Errol.

“To a point,” said the cracker. “There’s a limit to everything.” All he remembered was walking through the door of the Bull and Whistle Saloon and not much of that. He had sufficiently conquered disgust to realize he was in the Gulf Stream, the sun just rising, and he felt a bleak pride that he could manage the yawl in his present condition. He sank and rose among the ultramarine troughs and saw golden strands of sargasso weed at eye level. Flying fish skittered off breaking wave edges, and the three that landed on deck he gutted and laid in the sink. By the end of the ten days promised him by the cracker, the mestizos would be gone and jobless. The oranges would fall and fruit wasps would rise in a cloud. He couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t let himself put words to his dismal pride in belonging to the manager class, but he clung to it nonetheless.

Wherever it was going, the little yawl was sailing well. Errol stood on the deck hanging onto the backstay and looked down into the Gulf Stream and the almost purplish depths. The rudder made a long trailing seam at the surface; he could see all the way to the end of the blade as it vibrated under the force of the boat’s progress. The sun had dried the decks, and only the leeward side remained dark with sea spray.

Errol started to search out details of the previous night but nothing came. He had a good many of these blanks now, trailing into the past. Sometimes they unexpectedly came to life, filled with detail. He called them “sleeping beauties” in an attempt to assign some value amid what he realized was simple creeping oblivion. He even knew that his current behavior — indifference to where he might be headed — was customary following a blackout, and not unrelated to his frivolous attempt to do away with himself; the feeling would soon give way to extreme concern for his situation and all-round fearfulness. As strength returned he would be amused by these comical swings, even a bit jubilant, and the cycle would begin again, its force undiminished by familiarity. His excuse was that life was repetitious anyway, without quite realizing that the source of despair’s enduring power was that it was always brand-spanking-new.

The yawl climbed each swell toward its breaking crest with steady progress, its thin wake like a crack in glass, until a moment when the view from the helm was blue sky and the whitest sea clouds; then hissing down the back slope into the trough to begin the climb again. In one ascent, he saw in the thinnest part of the rising wave a big iridescent fish that vanished as the sea swelled around it.

He merely wondered where he was going.

By afternoon, he more than wondered. The pleasant breeze from the southeast had gone round to the southwest and picked up considerably. Moreover, his spirits had sunk and he began to picture his restive mestizos, the towering cracker unfurling from his Mercedes to shout dismay at the ground covered with rotting oranges. But there was still time before all that happened, before the mestizos dispersed to the work camps at Okeechobee and their cramped prospects. He hadn’t really been their friend but he spoke their language and they shared his whiskey, and that was enough, relatively speaking.

The blue of the sea was still reflected by the clouds, but instead of gliding down the backs of waves, the yawl seemed now to push its way down them, the wind driving the bow deeper and deeper until only inches remained before seawater came aboard. It was time to reef.

Errol turned the yawl into the wind and she stopped, wallowing in the rolling ocean, the boom jumping from side to side until he sheeted the mizzen in and she held quietly, nose to wind. With eagerness and relief, Errol went from thinking to doing this work: releasing the main halyard to lower the mainsail, securing the first reef at the luff cringle, and then drawing down the leech until the sail was a third smaller. By tying in each of the fifteen reef points, he secured the loose stretch of decommissioned sail hanging below the boom in a tight, efficient bunt. The main halyard was raised until it hardened; he eased the mizzen, trimmed the jib and main, and the yawl resumed her course for an unknown destination, once again gliding down the waves with her nose up and her decks dry.

Back at the tiller, he regarded the sweat pouring off his body as a result of his exertions and knew it carried poison away. He first thought it behooved him never to land, but awareness of his limited stores made him reject this foolishness. As misery approached, the romance of annihilation seemed to recede, and he wondered why his bouts of self-destruction always occurred on a rising tide of self-love. He knew that the worse he felt the harder he would try to get somewhere and survive. First he had to find out where he was. He had missed his chance at a noon shot of the sun with the sextant and would have to wait for the stars.

The erasure of the previous night left him with no information about his departure; all he knew for certain was that he was in the Gulf Stream, heading for either Cuba or the Bahamas. At this rate, he would reach one or the other during the night, and he really ought to find out which one it was.

He lashed the tiller and went below to cook the flying fish on the alcohol stove, frying them until they were crunchy and taking them back to the cockpit on a tin plate, where he watched the white top of each wave racing along a blue edge before turning into white spume and blowing away. Terns hunted fish overhead and sometimes rained down onto baitfish pushed to the surface by predators beneath, mostly unseen but sometimes showing a dark fin slicing through the turbulence.

Lying back, Errol watched the mast move against the sky, a repeated crossed loop, the infinity sign. He had begun to feel sick. It started as pain just behind his forehead and spread down his spine; as the pain moved into his limbs over the next several hours he began to tremble. By sundown his entire body was shaking and he began dragging things from the cabin — sail bags, an army blanket, the canvas cockpit cover — covering himself with these to the height of the coaming so that only his face showed and the arm that connected him to the tiller. These too were shaking, and unless he kept them locked his teeth rattled audibly. His course was taking him to some part of the vast world of rum and his mind traced a path between this universe and a wallet still fat with banknotes. This wallet, pressed uncomfortably against his buttock, could have been left in the cabin, but the prospect of misplacing it on arrival in the land of rum was such that he wished to verify its whereabouts continuously by the discomfort it produced. Sunken-eyed and desolate, he watched the stars rise from the sea, and he knew he was meant to find out where he was. But the sextant in the far end of the cabin with the sight tables might as well have been on the moon; he knew he couldn’t hold it steady enough to take a fix. Instead, he made a crude estimate in his mind of where he might be. The wind was in the first part of the southwest shift; hence the building seas after the quiet of the prevailing southeasterly. He knew he sailed on a starboard tack perhaps ten or fifteen degrees east of the wind, which meant only that he was headed for islands of various sizes, histories, and languages and not the open Atlantic. Beyond that he couldn’t say how far he’d gone since he’d departed from a hole in time somewhere behind him.

He vomited the flying fish onto the sole of the cockpit and moaned as malodorous drool poured from the corner of his mouth. His hand on the tiller was a claw by now and the shaking had grown sufficiently violent that he heard himself thump against the cockpit seat, where he stretched out under the heap of things he’d brought from the cabin. He recognized that he wouldn’t be able to steer much longer and wished that, while he’d had the strength, he’d heaved to and stopped the boat until a better hour. It was too late now. He lashed the tiller in place and let the wind pick his course out of a hat. The one advantage of this much misery was that he could quit caring, a welcome detachment from his suffering, suffering that would end in the Isles of Rum. At this point, he heard a bitter laugh fly from his mouth, a raspy bray that produced another just like it, then another as they fed off each other, and finally a picture of himself braying at a colossal rum bottle, which inspired bleak masturbation on the cockpit floor. After that, he could only hold his head up by resting his teeth on the seat.

A calming spell of defeat overtook him as he lay on his back looking up at the sail as it passed the stars. Though he recognized them all, he was somewhat absorbed as they flowed in one side of the sail and out the other with a purpose — though not his, of course; he had no purpose. He was not purpose, he was pulp. He cast about for consolation, grimly congratulating himself for being childless. But he remembered that his mestizos trusted him. Of course, they were grateful to anyone who learned their language in this coldhearted nation. But more. He worked beside them, made sure they were paid, while the cracker often inclined to contrive withholdings. The mestizos knew Errol was not so devious, and a working alcoholic appealed to their sense of shared desperation and defensible self-destruction. Indeed, they shook their heads in sympathy when he came to the groves sick, picked things up when he dropped them, carried his ladder. In the depths of his misery, this was all Errol could find, but under the circumstances it seemed quite a lot. Perhaps he was beginning to turn the corner, but first there was more vomiting to be done and the last of the flying fish went over the side. Miguel, Delfin, Juan, Machado, Estevez, Antonio, were their names. Good men.

He slept, but lacked the humanity to dream.

The yawl sailed on into day without his attendance. For hours the decks shone bright with dew and then dried as the sun arose. The telltale streamed from the masthead in the freshening breeze and the water was no longer purple as she had crossed the stream; now she pulled her thin seam of wake across the blue water of a new sea, one that grew steadily paler until the yawl’s own speeding shadow on the bottom preceded her, then rose to meet her when she ran aground.

Unavailing curses poured from the companionway as Errol emerged to view his misfortune. The jib, the main, and the mizzen displayed their same wind-filled curves and emphasized the sheer peculiarity of the boat’s lack of motion. Looking in every direction, he could see only more bars and the dark shapes of coral heads, any one of which would have sunk the boat. Noon was rapidly approaching, and he dug out his sextant to take a sight of the sun, though he mirthlessly noted the irony of having two pieces of information, latitude and the proximity of the bottom.

The sight reduction from his battered book of tables gave him to conclude that he was somewhere in the western Bahamas. He should pride himself on his effortless crossing of the stream, he thought sardonically. Once he’d accepted that he was immobile, he felt an unexpected wave of security at the calm translucent waters around him, the coral gardens that were pretty shadows beneath them, and he marveled at having sailed so far into this gallery before going aground on forgiving sand. The full moon was a few days away. If he was not too surely embedded on this bar, he had an excellent chance of floating free on a spring tide. He had enough food and seemed to exult in this absence of choices; he explored the idea that he was content to be stuck.

The days began to pass, each more peaceful than the last. He had begun to think of his boat as an island, and in fact he could walk all around it or swim among the coral heads where clouds of pretty reef fish rose and fell with him in the gentle wash. He caught lobsters and boiled them in salt water while Radio Havana played from the cabin. He stretched out in the cockpit and read Frantz Fanon, experiencing pleasant indignation. After the first night, he had dragged a mattress from atop the quarter berth into the cockpit, and he slept there, watching expectantly as the moon grew full to bring the big tides that would float him off. Then, for better or worse, his life would resume. The boat had begun to float tentatively, lifting slightly at the bow only to ground again when the tide fell, but release would come soon.

The last day Errol knew that at high tide, a few hours from now, the yawl would float, free to sail away. He took the opportunity to give the bottom a good scrubbing, breaking down the new barnacles with the back of his brush and then sweeping them off. Down tide, hundreds of tiny fish gathered in a silver cloud to eat the particles of barnacle. With the full moon, the weather changed and dark clouds gathered against the western sky. He would have to look for shelter as soon as he was under way, or at least find enough seaway to heave to. A storm was coming.

He waited in the cockpit into the afternoon, and around three, with a light grinding sound, the yawl lifted off and turned into the wind. The anchor line, which had hung slack when he’d walked the anchor out into the shallows, rose and grew taut. If this were a safe anchorage, he would wait out the storm, but the anchor wouldn’t have to slip much under the force of the wind to put him atop the coral. He reduced the mainsail before ever departing, taking the sail down at the second reef to a cleat on the mast. The line leading to a cringle on the leech he wrapped onto the reefing winch and drew that down until the main was little more than a storm trysail. He brought the anchor aboard, hand over hand, the rode dropping into the anchor locker until the anchor was at the stemhead, streaming turtle grass and small snapping creatures; there he secured it and returned to the mast to raise sail before the yawl could make much sternway.

Once sail was up, the yawl began to move obediently. Errol stood at the tiller, carefully conning his way through the dark coral heads in their white circles of sand. The shadow of the boat scurried alongside him on the rippled bottom. Gradually the shadow shrank, then vanished, as he found blue water. With a rising thrill, Errol set sail for the unknown. He knew that any piece of land at all was on the trail to hell, and that this ocean road put a good face on oblivion. A bad storm was coming; he meant to embrace it. The first passage would be fear, but the other side — if he could get there — was what interested him as being the country of death or freedom, unless it turned out they were the same thing.

It was the season of equinoctial storms, and the halo around the sun made Errol see in this something of a larger plan for him. Still, the little yawl was indifferent to such things, a thought whose absurdity he recognized without quite believing. Like most sailors, he did not regard his ship as inanimate and extended his senses out to all her parts the better to understand the whims of the sea. This impulse came of a great desire to survive that he was not sure he owned. Nevertheless, he believed his ship wished to live, and perhaps he would defer to her out of respect for the adage that a good ship is one which, when her master can no longer take care of her, takes care of her master.

Her purposeful obedience let Errol work his way through the coral heads to the dark blue of deeper water. Once she had way on, she never hesitated in stays — unless the man at the tiller was entirely lacking in skill — and moved from tack to tack like one of the domino players at the Cuban-American Hall in Key West. She’d been built forty years ago by a tidal creek in St. Michaels, Maryland, with a bottom of yellow pine from a church made by slaves, the marks of whose axes could still be found inside a hull so thick and hard that screws had to be drilled first; the topsides were single-length planks of Atlantic white cedar, the deck of native pine and canvas, Sitka spruce spars that had come on a train from Oregon a long time ago. When he reviewed her various attributes, as he often did, Errol began to feel responsible for her, and he recognized its absurdity without believing it. Whatever juju he believed her to possess was not mitigated by the fact that her previous owner was shot in a card game and she had sunk into desuetude at Garrison Bight until Errol rescued her for past-due dock fees and a modest bribe to the city council. He’d never find another boat with the marks of slaves’ axes in her timbers. She went up on jack stands at Stock Island, neglected sculpture among the shrimp boats, slowly returned to life by Errol and friends until launching day, when in an alcoholic crisis he sailed her away to the Dry Tortugas, anchoring in Mooney Harbor under the shadow of Fort Jefferson, to await a new day. His gratitude toward his little ship was evident in his belief that she had treated him like a cherished dependent and hung on her anchor, keeping a fresh breeze across his bunk until such time as he could return to the tiller like a man. When that day came, he sailed right past Key West and all his previous sins, and fetched up at Cortez, his current berth, where he met the cracker at a party on the latter’s sixty-foot Hatteras; and there he began his apprenticeship in the orange groves, where his command of Spanish was put to service exploiting the cracker’s laborers. Errol suffered no more than most over the plight of his fellow man, yet this was a bit of a problem. Some of the men were refugees from violence, and their children, though occasionally visited by well-meaning social workers from the State of Florida, clearly expected massacres at any time and so avoided anyone who was not obviously a mestizo peasant. One way or another, the oranges continued to head for the juice plant at Arcadia, and Errol came to be trusted by these lost souls, who forgave his being a perro infermo or perhaps even liked him because of it.

The job now was to get to deeper water and plenty of it before getting knocked around by the storm. He had no destination other than the knowledge that in this ocean you could not go far before striking some community or another, a bit of shelter, perhaps some refreshments. The problem was that his slowly clearing mind wasn’t sure it wished to arrive. The gradual illumination — cramps, headaches, and diarrhea notwithstanding — was a substantial reward in itself, and the reattachment to reality bore a religious quality, or at least rootless excitement. He imagined the storm as a cascade of invigorating challenges.

A set of line squalls formed across the horizon, driving columns of seabirds before it, a thunder-filled cross-winded trough of weather. He traversed five miles of broken sea to sail right into them, lightning jumping around over the spar, an uprush of fragrant supercharged sea in omnidirectional winds. Each cell had its own weather and light, from near darkness and pandemonium to a fluorescent stillness walled by rain. Thus far, a pleasant exercise, for he sailed right through the squalls for a better view of the gray sky beyond, scudding clouds and building seas where a barometric trench made the rules.

Foresight suggested that he feed himself in the time available. He lashed the tiller and went below to light the alcohol stove, dumping a can of chicken noodle soup into a pot. The yawl’s steady progress had acquired a kind of leaping motion, and he stirred the soup impatiently, as though that would shorten the time it took to heat it. He raised and lashed the weather cloths beside the bunks and stowed the few loose objects in their Pullman nets: a bottle of aspirin, a notepad, a dead cell phone, the Frantz Fanon book, a Key West telephone directory, spare winch handle, and flashlight. When he returned to the stove, a wisp of steam rose from the soup, but there was no time to enjoy it as the yawl was knocked onto her beam ends by the crush of wind, imprisoned in a bad angle by the lashing on her tiller. When Errol looked up through the companionway, a graybeard arose in the dim light, its top blowing off into spume, and subsided. It was a grim black-and-white movie, Down to the Sea in Ships, Clara Bow the It Girl, and dying whales. This sort of respite from reality had previously been his accommodation; but for better or for worse, reality would be back plowing irony before it.

Errol half crawled into the cockpit from the companionway and snapped on his lifeline. Once the tiller was free again, the boat rose to the gusts and relieved some of the lateral pressure that had her on her side. The pool of water in the self-bailing cockpit roared through the scuppers and emptied quickly. The frontal storms that had met his requirements for a manageable challenge were beyond him now; in their place, the wind came in an unimpeded fetch from open ocean in a scream. The incessant movement of the boat gave him the sense that they were being chased by the increasingly enormous waves, whose breaking crests gleamed unpleasantly. A cabinet burst open in the galley, discharging all his canned goods, and when Errol looked below he could see the food racing about on the floor.

The yawl rose as each great sea swept past with an uncanny hiss. His steering the boat now consisted entirely in keeping the stern presented to the waves and preventing the yawl from broaching as she sped down their backs. Thankfully, he detected a rhythm in this and, being able to feel the rise of sea without looking, made the proper adjustments through the memory of his muscles. Though reefed to a fraction of its original size, the mainsail seemed hard as iron and its leech buzzed like an electric saw. The black faces of approaching waves were so steep that Errol quit looking back; they were at the height of the spreaders and it seemed another degree or two of pitch and they must fall on him. If they did, they did: he wouldn’t watch that.

A rain began, and then a pelting rain, which after a time flattened the sea. Now the yawl whistled along, seeming to enjoy its velocity undeterred by the recent mountains of water, the speed of wind for the moment little more than an inconvenience. Errol took this opportunity to go below and confront the disorder of the cabin. It was mostly canned goods and he stowed them frantically, knowing the calming rain wouldn’t last.

When the violent motion of the ship resumed, he was reluctant to go above. He pretended the cabin was insufficiently tidy and lingered over trifles, the charts that needed rolling, the celestial tables that had somehow landed on the wrong shelf; he even renewed the paper towel on its roller. All this housekeeping betrayed a grim comedy as he was flung about performing it.

A boarding sea fell with a thud on the cabin top. He watched the water roar through the cockpit, overwhelm the scuppers, and pour over the transom and the untended helm. He felt the weight of it press against the little yawl’s buoyancy in repeated attempts to overwhelm it. Recognizing a plausible run-up to drowning, Errol was swept by lethargy, not the same as peace but fatalist stupefaction. He was not afraid to die but very frightened of drowning, of filling his lungs with seawater and sinking to the bottom of the ocean; nothing could be more alien unless it was on another planet. That of course was just how his friend Raymond had departed, having once remarked that it would be an appropriate end for anyone who had trafficked in refugees. This thought produced in Errol an unexpected return of the heebiejeebies. He forced himself into the cockpit, and there he saw that the great waves had begun to cascade and he was sure the end was at hand. This gave him some peace at least. Now he went about his business managing the ship, exercising what few options remained.

He replaced the reefed main with a storm trysail, now the only sail on the boat. He’d thought that the double-reefed main would be good enough but it wasn’t. If it had loaded up with seawater, it would have been big enough to take out the mast. Amid gusts that sounded like gunshots, he sheeted the trysail to leeward, lashed the tiller in the opposite direction, and produced a plausible version of heaving to: the yawl drifted and forged slightly into the wind, fell off, forged, and fell off again. The sea was now covered by flying spindrift, a gruesome fuzz that extended to the glittering wave tops. Errol could bear to see no more and went below and crawled into a bunk but was soon flung onto the floor where the oozing bilge emerged between the planks. He crawled in again, lashed up his weather cloth so he was secured in the bunk, laced his fingers behind his head, and entertained himself with ideas of death while disdaining those of drowning, fish eating his flesh, descent to a lightless sea bottom, et cetera. In the Pullman net beside him was a Cuban statuette of the Madonna, the gift of a refugee physician; he turned it until it faced him. “Our Lady,” he said. He liked her face. She looked a bit Cuban, actually; he was pleased she was not so universalized as to seem inhuman. He stared into the tiny face as the senseless chaos of the sea tried to destroy his home. The face grew larger and came toward him. He was falling in love.

It was time to go topsides once again. He didn’t realize how peaceful the cabin had been until he was in the cockpit. The hove-to yawl seemed to follow a cycle. At the bottom of the troughs there was a kind of peace. This created a leeward eddy that moderated some of the more fearsome violence. At the same time, the troughs were so deep they actually protected him from the wind. Once the yawl rose to the crests again, the full force of the wind and its attendant shrieks could be felt.

It was with welcome detachment that he observed the behavior of his boat and concluded that there was no more he could do for her; she had managed thus far, and to be ready to cope with any great change in conditions he would have to sleep. He hoped that the cooler sea temperatures outside the stream would restrain the storm, but there was as yet no sign of that. He went below once again and secured himself in his bunk, feeling, as he fastened the weather cloths that kept him from rolling out, an odd coziness that he guessed came from his now-rapt gaze upon his Madonna. It was not that he possessed a single religious conviction, but knowing millions worshiped her was consoling. He wished now to be among the millions, and this was a start. If he lived till daybreak, he would address his gratitude to Allah as well as Our Lady, and to their millions of worshipers, his fellow humans.

First, he asked Her forgiveness for not helping Raymond back into the boat. True, he had not pushed Raymond overboard. The ocean had done that: the jib boom had come adrift and was beating a hole in the deck; Raymond had gone forward without his lifeline; the bow buried in a green sea and when it came up, in a white cloud of spindrift, Raymond was no longer there. He floundered alongside the passing hull, reaching toward Errol. The split second of ambivalence — as though Raymond were being swept to New Orleans with Caroline — was all it took, and Raymond was gone. Caroline had had her fling with pirates and was careful the next time to latch on to someone with a future and an office.

He asked to be forgiven. Caroline was raising beautiful children in the Garden District, driving them to their swimming lessons from her home on Audubon Street, and Raymond, who had not known home ownership, was at the bottom of the sea. Errol understood that he was being shriven by the same sea and held the statuette in his fist, praying for forgiveness. Expecting his boat to crack open at any time and release him to his fate, he believed his request was legitimate. Certainly he’d never felt anything quite like it before. Such sobbing pleas were something he’d never heard from himself, as though he were being disemboweled by his own voice. His grief was possession and infancy, far more urgent than the storm and something of a deafening joyride. At one odd moment, he burst into laughter.

He wished to live. He stared into the face of the little statue, absorbed by her high Latin coloring and carmine lips; she was devouring him with her eyes. He felt himself sink further into his bunk supinely awaiting her kiss. “You gorgeous bitch,” he murmured.

If he could tell by the weight in his limbs, he had awakened from a long sleep. He moved his eyes and took in his surroundings warily. It required some time for him to understand what had changed so completely: the boat was still. As the cabin was sealed against breaking seas, he could not see outside, and the air within had become sultry and fetid. He untied the weather cloths and swung his feet out onto the sole, glancing at the gimbaled lamps that had swung so violently in the night. They were motionless, though their oil was splashed around underneath him, indicating to his relief that he had not imagined the storm. He reached a hand gratefully to the cedar planks of the hull, still cool, still fragrant, perhaps still trees. Pines and oaks and cedars had carried him safely.

He was always given one more chance: it was frightening. The sight of the Madonna, moreover, gave him a queasy feeling. It reminded him of awakening in the bed of a woman who clearly didn’t remember meeting him. But the Madonna didn’t say a word. He got to his feet, startled that he was wearing no clothes; he looked around and discovered them tossed on the opposite bunk. He pulled on his shorts and went topsides.

“The Dawn of Creation,” he thought, with a giddy impresario’s flourish: the sea, ultramarine and pierced by sunlight, was still in every direction, no birds, no fish, no clouds, just the blue of heaven as it awaited completion. It crossed Errol’s mind that by existing he intruded upon all this vacant magnificence. He preferred this more solemn view of so heroic and empty a vista. He considered his pill-gobbling episode in Key West with shame as trivializing the question posed by this empty sea, where eternity had stored the materials for a fresh start.

Errol went below and directed his optimism toward feeding himself. He had a beautiful round Macintosh apple, which he sliced carefully on the galley sideboard, and a piece of Canadian cheddar. He disguised the staleness of a hunk of Cuban bread by toasting it over the alcohol flame of his stove and basting it with tinned butter. The coffee soon bubbled in the percolator and filled the cabin with its wonderful smell. As he pictured Raymond sweeping past the hull, he could nearly imagine forgiving himself. But when he speculated on how many miles astern Raymond might have been before he drowned, he failed to add relief or prospects for forgiveness to his detachment.

His mood didn’t last as he discovered how wide-ranging his hunger was. He gazed about at his breakfast and inventoried the other things he might eat. The tea cake, in the cabinet under the sink, excited him, as did the small tinned ham whose container he vowed to respect as long as necessary. The cornucopia of food that he had stowed here and there — even the pineapples under the floorboards! — unconsidered during the storm began to reform in his mind.

Admiring Caroline as she hung her bathing suit on the line behind the house on Petronia, Raymond had said, in a reflective tone, “I love ’em with that hunted look, don’t you?”

After a moment, Errol had said, “No.”

It came to him now: here resided one of the roots of hesitation as Raymond swept past the ketch. A boat that weighed almost fifty thousand pounds would not stop on a dime; there was that. Or turn in fewer than several of its own lengths. Even luffing up, the ketch would forereach farther than a man could swim in those seas. That knowledge could have been embedded too— couldn’t it? — the sort that produces indecision, and indecision produces hesitation, and hesitation produces unfortunate accidents as opposed to murder.

At noon, he took a perfect sight of the sun. The boat was un-moving and the horizon a hard clean line. With the sextant to his eye, he measured the elevation and then went below to try for a signal on the radio direction finder. Haitian Baptist Radio was in its customary spot, and by combining its direction from the boat with the noon sight of the sun, he knew for the first time where he was. The information was sickening.

When Raymond was lost over the side, Errol reported the accident to the coast guard and gave them his position. Was it not right here? He went back to the cockpit and looked around the yawl at the stillness of the sea and its plum blue depths under a quiet sky as though he would recognize the scene of many years ago. This, he knew, was absurd. Surely he had simply superimposed the two pieces of information in an unreliable mind. He pounced on the idea that the accident had happened in the stream, and clearly this was not the stream. He had the celestial fact that the stream lay to the east of his current position, information that should have protected him from the sense that he had been directed to revisit the site of the misfortune. But the Gulf Stream moves like a great blue snake and there were times when this spot on the planet was indeed in its trail. Still, he didn’t believe it.

Recently, Errol had become more superstitious, and as he was at base a practical man he ascribed the change to two things: alcohol and hanging around with peasants who buried things at work sites as health talismans or to ward off accidents. On occasions of birth and death, his workers tied ex votos in the orange trees. He had twice visited a palm reader in an old strip mall on the Tamiami Trail, a service he took sufficiently seriously to pay for it. Dressed in a bronze-colored gown decorated with sequins and designs from the horoscope, she had a snubby Scandinavian face and the flat As of Minnesota. When he pointed out that her interpretations of his lifeline were diametrically different on separate occasions, that his heart line on one visit indicated that he was devious and unreliable while on another that he was courageous in the face of impediment, she called him a “motherfucker” without a moment’s hesitation, then, relenting, told him his barred sun line made him vulnerable to jealousy and that he must always exercise caution. He paid her grudgingly but thought about her remarks as he stood before the tattoo parlor next door while tourists battled for position on Route 41.

He was prepared to consider that he was back at the scene of the accident, and only recently this would have been enough to cast him into a black hole. But his guilt was changing. His superstition had begun to be attached not to the consequences of Raymond’s being swept away but to the belief that trafficking in refugees had given rise to Raymond’s death and his own long slide toward the abyss. When he remembered the myriad plastic Madonnas in the jalopies at his groves, like little scenes of lynchings, hanging from rearview mirrors or from the branches of orange trees, and the impure thoughts aroused by the little chicas who brought food to their men in the groves as well as a tremor of excitement among them, feral gusts of flesh and spirit, he began to realize that you pay for all your sins, and if that was superstition then so be it. It was the implied lesson of the mestizos. What he should have done for his friend no longer mattered; he was guilty of everything. The wish to be forgiven poured from him as a moan directed to the sea; he could think of no one else. Still, there was a glimmer of solace in acknowledging his superstition that every bird, every cloud, every flash of light had a message for him, now and in eternity.

A light breeze, a zephyr, arose from the southeast, and Errol could smell some sort of vegetative fragrance, some hint of land. He untied the reef nettles and reefing lines and raised the main. Its folds were full of freshwater from the storm, and it showered down on him as the sail went up. There was just enough air to pull the boom into position and the jib barely filled, but a serpentine eddy formed behind the transom and the boat was moving once again.

He sailed half the day at this slow pace and the water grew paler blue as the bottom beneath the hull came near. There were more birds now, and when the horizon thickened with the mangrove green of land it was as he expected. He kept on in this direction, now recognizing that he couldn’t live on the open sea. He would have to make his way home to his grove workers, who would fare less well without him under the cracker and to whom he owed his last allegiance. In this, time was running out: he would reprovision, look for a hole in the weather, and sail home, determined to find there the strength to withstand evil.

A scattering of cays lay before him, Cuban, Bahamian, it didn’t matter; both were far from empire. As he drew nearer, he was surprised to see stands of coconut palms emerge from the mangrove shoreline. These cays were more substantial than he had guessed they’d be — a better chance to take on some water, a nicety he’d overlooked during his Key West tear, a better chance of finding some helpful souls. He stopped the boat before he was much closer, as a bar arose before him bright with its reflective sand bottom. Beyond it he could see a protected turtle-grass sound but, at first, no way through to what would be a superb anchorage. Where the palms were concentrated at the shore, boats were drawn up, and after he’d tacked back and forth for an hour, unsuccessfully looking for an opening, he saw two figures at one of the boats pushing it into the water. One of the men sat in front, elbows on his knees, face in his hand, while the other sculled vigorously from the stern with a long oar.

Errol watched with rising apprehension, not so much at what these two might have in mind for him but at the fact they were humans at all. In a short time, they were alongside, two tall black men, shirtless, barefoot, in a crude plank skiff with a coconut-shell bailer, a grains for catching lobster. Errol bade them good afternoon, as the man in front reached a hand to the rail of the yawl to keep the skiff from bumping. This man replied inaudibly and Errol determined only that he’d said something in Spanish and that rather shyly. Errol decided he would not let on that he too spoke Spanish until he had a better idea of what these fellows had in mind for him. The man holding the rail, with the refined features of an Indian, kept his eyes downcast while his companion boldly boarded the yawl. The miserable detachment with which Errol had long encountered people he didn’t know had somehow disappeared — perhaps during the storm — and he greeted his uninvited guest somewhat heartily as he asked in English what he could do for him. Putting his hand on the yawl’s tiller and wiggling from side to side, the man explained in pidgin Spanish, which Errol pretended not to understand, that if he wished to land he would have to be piloted over the bar. For an instant, Errol thought of revealing his Spanish but thought better of it. Instead, he made some obtuse gestures indicating the boat, the land, the water; at which the man at the tiller — a dignified and classically African-looking man, older, Errol now saw, than he’d first thought, even maybe the father of the other man — at which the older man said in exasperated Spanish to the man still in the skiff that he didn’t know what this white man wanted but that if he wanted to go to the inside anchorage, he would need their guidance. At this, with disconnected and resolute stupidity, Errol gestured around at the boat in general and then pointed to the island, where water and some of the consolations of dry land awaited him. He could stay on the boat and incur few obligations by mingling with these people.

The two men understood, and at this the fellow in the boat secured the painter of the skiff to a stern cleat of the yawl and came aboard with a shy nod to the owner. The older man glanced about the deck of the boat to determine how the rigging ran and then drew the jib sheet in and cleated it. The yawl eased into motion once more, not much as the wind was faint, swung around, and, as the man at the tiller made several more adjustments with a smile and a shrug directed at Errol, sailed straight at the bar, tugging the skiff behind. As Errol stiffened, the helmsman shook his head and measured a distance to the floor with his hand, suggesting plenty of water, then waving into space as if to shoo all cares away. Errol could see nothing but the gathering shallows, changing color alarmingly as they sailed forward. He resigned himself that they would be aground in minutes, hoping his ship-mates knew of a rising tide.

At the moment of impact, a miraculous thread of dark green appeared in the bar, barely wider than the yawl, and the man at the helm followed it quickly and efficiently like a dog tracking game as he crossed the bar into the small basin. He continued sailing nearly to the shore and then rounded up, stopping the boat. Errol went forward and let go the anchor. Czarina dropped back slowly until the rode tightened and she hung in the light breeze. “A well-behaved vessel,” said the helmsman in Spanish. Errol gave him a puzzled smile. The three went toward shore, passing a post driven into the bottom to which was tethered a huge grouper, arriving at a long dock so decrepit it resembled part of a Möbius strip. The black men led, waving Errol along, and he followed on a path between old shell mounds, and soon came to a clearing with several houses made of salvaged timbers and monkey thatch, then around those houses to a well. “Wada,” said the older man with a smile. Errol looked down the well, not more than fifteen feet deep, with a bucket on a wooden windlass contraption and various ladles, two of which were cut down Coca-Cola bottles and the other coconut shells like the bailer in the skiff. When they went back to the clearing, Errol following obediently, several people, probably family members, had appeared from the houses, two women of indeterminate age, a very old man, and a teenage boy with dreadlocks. All smiled. At this, Errol turned to his hosts and told them in Spanish that he was quite comfortable speaking Spanish. The two men laughed and pounded his back.

“You were espying on us!” said the younger.

On reflection, the older man seemed less pleased with this deception. “What besides water do you wish from us?” he asked rather formally.

“I’m not sure I even need water. I was looking for a place to rest. I’ve been in that storm, you see.”

“Yes, that was a storm.”

“I’m a bit tired.”

“Of course you are tired. One hardly drifts about in such a situation. Great exertion is called for.”

“I have to admit, I nearly lost my nerve.”

“Evidently you didn’t, for here you are. You have a safe anchorage, and this place is good for rest if nothing else.”

Caught up in this colloquy, Errol was reduced to a small bow.

“You’re our only guest,” said the younger man. “We ate the others.”

General laughter.

“Wrong ocean,” said Errol. General appreciative laughter except from the old man, who seemed a bit disoriented. Errol had a whorish need to include all in admiring his wit and rested his glance on the old man long enough to determine that he was blind.

It was agreed that he would go on sleeping on the yawl and borrow the skiff for transport. One of the women, tall and Indian-looking, with a bright yellow-and-black cloth tying her hair atop her head, informed him in English that when dinner was ready someone would come to the shore and make a noise. Noting his pause at her choice of language, she said, “I from Red Bays.”

The older of the two men who’d brought him said, back in Spanish, “You’ll come, of course.”

Errol bowed all round and said, “Enchanted.”

All replied, “Equally.”

Errol returned to his boat, rowing past the great fish swimming slowly around its stake, tying the skiff alongside and climbing back into the yawl and the security it offered, especially after its latest and probably worst storm. He found himself disturbed and so particularly dreading the dinner that he made himself sit in the cockpit and puzzle over his aversion to such companionable people, an aversion so strong that he only abandoned the thought of sailing off when he admitted he’d never find the way back over the bar. Isolation seemed to have the attraction of a drug, and he reluctantly intuited that he must not give in to it. He’d have been less apprehensive about that dinner if it had been at the White House, but he believed, if he could pass this small social test, he could begin to escape the superstitions and fears that were ruining his life.

He had a short rest on the quarter berth with its view of blue sky over the companionway. The stillness of the yawl was a miracle, and he laid his palms against the wooden sides of the hull in a kind of benediction, or at least thanksgiving. For now at least it gave him the feeling of home.

He smelled buttonwood smoke. The sun was going down and he had to close the companionway screen to keep out the mosquitoes that always seemed particular to their own area: these were small and quick, produced a precise bite that was almost a sting, and couldn’t be waved away. Presently, he heard someone beating on a piece of iron. Poking his head out the hatch, he saw the younger of the two men announcing dinner with two rusty pieces and gave him a wave, upon which the man retired up the path between the shell mounds. A fog of buttonwood smoke lay over the water at the mangrove shoreline.

He pulled the skiff onto the beach and secured its painter to a palm log, which, judging by the grooves worn in its trunk, was intended for that purpose. He pulled his belt tighter and straightened his shoulders before heading up the path for dinner. Excepting the woman from Andros, the group, including the blind old man, were sitting by the fire watching strips of turtle roast over the glowing coals; which the older of the two men raked toward him. The remains of the turtle were to one side, heaped within its shell, and seemed to have concentrated a particularly intense cloud of mosquitoes. When Errol saw the rum being passed around, he reassured himself that the supply would be limited. No liquor stores out here! he thought, with creepy hilarity.

The unhesitating first swallow made everything worthwhile and was followed by an oceanic wave of love for his companions. When the Andros woman came to the fire with plantains to be roasted, he reached the rum out to her. The younger of the two, Catarino, seized his hand, said, “No,” and took the bottle himself. The woman from Andros cast her eyes down and went on preparing the plantains. At Errol’s bafflement, Catarino explained. “She is our slave.”

Looking at the bottle of rum and wondering why Catarino was so slow in raising it to his lips, Errol asked, “How can that be?” He wondered if he had misunderstood the Spanish word but he repeated it, esclava, and had it confirmed. He reached for the rum but it went on to the old blind man.

Catarino patiently explained further. “As you can see, she is black.”

Errol emitted a consanguineous giggle lest his next statement give offense and dispel the convivial atmosphere and — he admitted to himself — result in the withholding of the rum. “But all of you are black, aren’t you?”

The blind man threw his head back and in a surprising rumble of a baritone asked incredulously, “Black and Spanish?” Catarino looked at him sternly.

“We are as white as you, sir. I hope this is understood.”

“Oh, it is, it is,” said Errol, with rising panic.

The older of the two men, Adan, gazed at him with a crooked smile and said, “You must be hungry.”

Not seeming to hear him, Errol asked, “Will she eat with us?”

“Clearly not,” the blind man rumbled. “The American would do well to turn to our repast and that which makes all men brothers.” He held up the bottle. Errol decided not to express his thought, Except the slaves, again less out of principle than a fear of causing the rum to be withheld. When the Andros woman came back to the fire, Errol asked her in English what her name was and she told him Angela. The others nodded their incomprehension but encouraged this foreign talk with smiles.

“I’m told you’re their slave.”

“They believe that,” she said complacently.

“And it’s because you’re black?”

At this, she stopped and gave voice to what was evidently dispassionate consideration. “How amusing I find this. I am a Seminole Indian. My great-grandfathers came to Red Bays in cayucos. Why else would the University of Florida send us so many anthropologists? We are all Indians in Red Bays. Why else would they bring us T-shirts from the Hard Rock Cafe and expensive tennis shoes to earn our trust, if we were not Indians?”

The others nodded happily; they were enjoying her indignation and seemed to understand that it was based on a discussion of her slave status.

“These disgraceful Spaniards don’t understand that they are blacks. They think their language protects them. How they’d love to be Indians!”

“Were you captured?”

Angela couldn’t control her mirth. She held the turban around her head with both hands and jiggled from head to toe with laughter. The others united in what seemed to be real pleasure, and she looked at them and rolled her eyes at the absurdity of the white man. This rather calmed things because, as his fellow whites, the Spanish-speaking blacks did not want to throw in their lot with their slave too emphatically. They wished to project that they were compassionate slaveholders who followed the dictates of humanity.

The rum landed back in Errol’s hands, and all the others, including Angela, generously relished his enthusiasm as he raised it to his lips and kept it there for a long time, not fully understanding how ravenous he was. But when he lowered the bottle something in his gaze caused them to fall silent. The moment passed as interest turned to the turtle and plantains. Noticing that Angela sat by herself on the step of one of the driftwood shacks, Errol asked her if she thought of herself as a slave.

She replied, “Don’t be a fool.”

“Oh, well,” said Errol, in odd contentment. Confusion could be pleasant when you were drinking; it kept the mind whirring agreeably. He began to eat, taking pieces of turtle from spits over the sputtering buttonwood coals. The teenager with dreadlocks was wholly focused on the food and neither laughed with the others nor in any way seemed to know he was not alone. The only other woman, a heavyset Spanish-speaking black, watched Errol with sullen attention as though he were there to present a bill or a summons. The blind man staring with white eyes across the fire into the darkness cupped his hands in front of him, into which Adan and Catarino placed pieces of food. Catarino asked Errol if he was enjoying his meal.

“I certainly am!”

“And the rum suits you, does it not?”

“Very agreeable.”

“Sometimes it is more important than food, no?”

“Sometimes,” said Errol.

Adan smiled at his food and asked, “Sometimes?”

Errol waited before answering. “I believe that is what I said.”

Catarino gave Errol a jovial thump on the back and returned the bottle to him. The wind had shifted slightly, and Errol moved closer to the buttonwood smoke to be free of the vicious little mosquitoes. When he glanced at Angela, sitting away from the fire, Catarino explained that mosquitoes didn’t bother black people.

“How is it that she is your slave?” Errol asked. At this, the blind man spoke in a surprisingly firm voice.

“Her man drowned.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, that is so,” said Adan. All except Angela seemed quite sad to reflect upon this event. “We didn’t take her back to her country. That would be against the law. Those blacks have laws no one can understand. With her man dead, she wished to throw in with us, but we were barely surviving as it was. You see how it is. We offered to let her come and be our slave, as that is entirely natural and appealing to blacks. As you see, she accepted.”

“Which only proves our point,” Adan added.

Errol took another slug of rum and gazed around at his companions, who seemed to him, as best as he could tell, to all be black. Then he thought of something. “What color do you think I am?” The three looked at each other. It was Catarino who finally spoke, his smile full of accommodation.

He said, “We haven’t decided.”

“I can’t take mosquitoes at all,” said Errol nervously. “Never could. They drive me nuts!”

The blind man said, “Have some more of that aguardiente. To enjoy your meal, you must calm your nerves.”

Adan looked pensive. “They served wine at the Last Supper. If we had not been prepared to offer refreshment to our guests, perhaps the turtle would not have offered himself to us. All things are connected. Even you, sir, are connected to us, if only in that we share a clearing which we made of sufficient size with our machetes as to offer you a place at our meal.” He smiled pleasantly. “Surely we knew you were coming.”

Errol’s expression of gratitude was interrupted by a burp, which brought a change of mood and all went about eating with a purpose, all except Angela, who paced about, desperately waving away the mosquitoes.

The sun must have awakened Errol, balled up next to the extinguished fire, the sun that caused the mosquitoes to retreat into the mangroves. Errol didn’t seem to remember where he was, and indeed his body was disagreeably unfamiliar. No parts of it seemed to fit together any longer and all were consumed by burning and itching. He felt his face with swollen fingers. His lips were drum tight, his eyelids so thick he could see them, and his cheeks lumpy with bites. He had lost his shoes, then remembered they’d been laced. Someone had taken his shoes. In any case, his swollen feet would no longer be contained by them. He lay back, let his mouth fall open, and gazed at the sky.

Once there was sufficient water in his boat, he could call it provisioned and begin the voyage home. He had hand lines and a shoebox full of diamond-shaped silver spoons: he would have fish and freshwater and that was enough. All this horror, this misshapen body, was temporary. Steps toward atonement had been taken; more could be promised. He remembered his mestizos and the groves. He tried reckoning how long he’d been away, but no exact answer was required. The cracker’s deadline had come and gone: he had broken his covenant with the mestizos and by now they were dispersed, thrown once again to fate, to wander the labor camps at Immokalee or Belle Glade, offering the days of their lives for sugar, citrus, and white men. His, like theirs, were the inconveniences of hell.

Certainly it lay in his power to arise, thank his hosts, sail away, and, against the cadences of wind and sea, sort through his many failings and the invoices for atonement that accompanied them. There was no mess so great it could not be broken down into a manageable sequence, a bill of lading for debts to oblivion.

As he stood, his buttocks abraded each other in special misery. My God, he wondered, how did they get in there? He began scratching himself all over. He hurried from one place to another as no sooner did he palliate some mad insistence than it appeared in another place. He was writhing and dancing without leaving his small spot in the dirt.

Something caught his eye.

Angela, arms wrapped around her sides, was lost in shaking, silent mirth. He stopped and stared at her through indignant, swollen eyes. He walked over to her, the pressure of edema squeezing up his calves with every step. She smiled at him when he arrived. She had unwound her turban and twisted it around her hands, allowing her hair to spring out in all directions. In his present condition, that hair struck him with its terrible vitality. There was something thrilling about it. She said, “I tink it will rain. And dis is my great day. Dey have freed me.”

“That’s nice,” said Errol sarcastically. His disfigured lips distorted this offensive speech but Angela seemed not to notice. “Are they still sleeping?”

“Oh, dey gone.”

Errol could not lose his snide tone. “Where exactly is there to go?”

Angela answered him imperturbably. “Miami.” Errol considered this for a remarkably short time.

“They took my boat?”

“Oh, yes.”

Errol seemed unsurprised. He considered levelly that he was without choices. His despair was such that the possibility of solace could only lie in the evaporation of all his options. Never before had he sensed himself greeting his destiny with so little resistance. It was an odd luxury to contemplate this, pants unbuttoned to accommodate his itches, spread fingers hanging at his sides, and a face whose risibility could now be enjoyed only by Angela, who had the upper hand of observing him.

An implement of sorts leaned against the shack. A corner of salvaged iron had been secured to a hardwood limb from which the branches had been removed with many wraps of rusting wire. Angela handed this to Errol and ordered him to follow her up the path through the mastic and wild palms. As they walked, Angela told him of the brothers’ dream of taking their father, the blind man, to Miami, where they had been told you could buy eyeballs on the black market. There had been much in the air about family values, but Errol had never imagined they’d be honored at his expense. Perhaps he didn’t really mind as he followed Angela with his new implement. Musing on the current arrangement, he wondered whether she was his owner and what color they each were, since the evidence of his eyes had proved insufficient.

Bright-hued birds flashed through the opening made by the path; near the flowers of tall vines, clouds of hummingbirds rose and sank, competing for nectar with surprising ferocity. A bananaquit, an urgent little yellow bird, danced down the path ahead of him, landed, and then scurried off like a mouse.

The path opened atop what Angela said was an old burial mound, and there he saw a garden under the morning sun. Errol briefly wondered what sorts of people were buried here but doubted that Angela knew. She showed him how things were arranged, the peppers, the tomatoes, the staked gourds, the new melons concealed under dark leaves glistening with dew. A pleasant smell arose from the tilled ground. A tall palm hung over the scene, and from its crown of leaves the sound of parrot nestlings descended.

At the still-shaded end of the garden, wild vegetation had encroached on the perimeter. She showed him where he must start.