He had a difficult time breaking out, lifting and dropping the small anchor but he got it over, and paid out quite a lot of rope and the boat swung in against the mangroves so they came right into the cockpit. Then he went back and down into the cockpit. He thought the cockpit was a hell of a sight, all right.
All night after he had dressed the nigger’s wound and the nigger had bandaged his arm he had been watching the compass, steering, and when it came daylight he had seen the nigger lying there in the sacks in the middle of the cockpit, but then he was watching the seas and the compass and looking for the Sand Key light and he had never observed carefully how things were. Things were bad.
The nigger was lying in the middle of the load of sacked liquor with his leg up. There were eight bullet holes through the cockpit splintered wide. The glass was broken in the windshield. He did not know how much stuff was smashed and wherever the nigger had not bled he himself had bled. But the worst thing, the way he felt at the moment, was the smell of booze. Everything was soaked in it. Now the boat was lying quietly against the mangroves but he could not stop feeling the motion of the big sea they had been in all night in the gulf.
“I’m going to make some coffee,” he told the nigger. “Then I’ll fix you up again.”
“I don’t want no coffee.”
“I do,” the man told him. But down below he began to feel dizzy so he came out on deck again.
“I guess we won’t have coffee,” he said.
“I want some water.”
“All right.”
He gave the Negro a cup of water out of a demijohn.
“Why you want to keep on running for when they started to shoot?”
“Why they want to shoot?” the man answered.
“I want a doctor,” the nigger told him.
“What’s a doctor going to do that I ain’t done for you?”
“Doctor going to cure me.”
“You’ll have a doctor tonight when the boat comes out.”
“I don’t want to wait for no boat.”
“All right,” the man said. “We’re going to dump this liquor now.”
He started to dump it and it was hard work one-handed. A sack of liquor only weighs about forty pounds but he had not dumped very many of them before he became dizzy again. He sat down in the cockpit and then he lay down.
“You going to kill yourself,” the nigger said.
The man lay quietly in the cockpit with his head against one of the sacks.
The branches of the mangroves had come into the cockpit and they made a shadow over him where he lay. He could hear the wind above the mangroves and looking out at the high, cold sky see the thin brown clouds of the norther.
“Nobody going to come out with this breeze,” he thought. “They won’t look for us to have started with this blowing.”
“You think they’ll come out?” the nigger asked.
“Sure,” the man said. “Why not?”
“It’s blowing too hard.”
“They’re looking for us.”
“Not with it like this. What you want to lie to me for?” The nigger was talking with his mouth almost against a sack.
“Take it easy, Wesley,” the man told him.
“Take it easy, the man says,” the nigger went on. “Take it easy. Take what easy? Take dyin’ like a dog easy? You got me here. Get me out.”
“Take it easy,” the man said, kindly.
“They ain’t coming,” the nigger said. “I know they ain’t coming. I’m cold I tell you. I can’t stand this pain and cold I tell you.”
The man sat up feeling hollow and unsteady. The nigger’s eyes watched him as he rose on one knee, his right arm dangling, took the hand of his right arm in his left hand and placed it between his knees and then pulled himself up by the plank nailed above the gunwale until he stood, looking down at the nigger, his right hand still held between his thighs. He was thinking that he had never really felt pain before.
“If I keep it out straight, pulled out straight, it don’t hurt so bad,” he said.
“Let me tie it up in a sling,” the nigger said.
“I can’t make a bend in the elbow,” the man said. “It stiffened that way.”
“What we goin’ to do?”
“Dump this liquor,” the man told him. “Can’t you put over what you can reach, Wesley?”
The nigger tried to move to reach a sack, then groaned and lay back.
“Do you hurt that bad, Wesley?”
“Oh God,” the nigger said.
“You don’t think once you moved it it wouldn’t hurt so bad?”
“I’m shot,” the nigger said. “I ain’t going to move. The man wants me to go to dumpin’ liquor when I’m shot.”
“Take it easy.”
“You say that once more I go crazy.”
“Take it easy,” the man said quietly.
The nigger made a howling noise and shuffling with his hands on the deck picked up the whetstone from under the coaming.
“I’ll kill you,” he said. “I’ll cut your heart out.”
“Not with no whetstone,” the man said. “Take it easy, Wesley.”
The nigger blubbered with his face against a sack. The man went on slowly lifting the sacked packages of liquor and dropping them over the side.
While he was dumping the liquor he heard the sound of a motor and looking he saw a boat headed toward them coming down the channel around the end of the key. It was a white boat with a buff painted house and a windshield.
“Boat coming,” he said. “Come on Wesley.”
“I can’t.”
“I’m remembering from now on,” the man said. “Before was different.”
“Go ahead an’ remember,” The nigger told him. “I ain’t forgot nothing either.”
Working fast now, the sweat running down his face, not stopping to watch the boat coming slowly down the channel, the man picked up the sacked packages of liquor with his good arm and dropped them over the side.
“Roll over.” He reached for the package under the nigger’s head and swung it over the side. The nigger raised himself up and looked.
“Here they are,” he said. The boat was almost abeam of them.
“It’s Captain Willie,” the nigger said. “With a party.”
In the stern of the white boat two men in flannels and white cloth hats sat in fishing chairs trolling and an old man in a felt hat and a windbreaker held the tiller and steered the boat close past the mangroves where the booze boat lay.
“What you say, Harry?” the old man called as he passed. The man called Harry waved his good arm in reply. The boat went on past, the two men who were fishing looking toward the booze boat and talking to the old man. Harry could not hear what they were saying.
“He’ll make a turn at the mouth and come back,” Harry said to the Negro. He went below and came up with a blanket. “Let me cover you up.”
“ ’Bout time you cover me up. They couldn’t help but see that liquor. What we goin’ to do?”
“Willie’s a good skate,” the man said. “He’ll tell them in town we’re out here. Those fellows fishing ain’t going to bother us. What they care about us?”
He felt very shaky now and he sat down on the steering seat and held his right arm tight between his thighs. His knees were shaking and with the shaking he could feel the ends of the bone in his upper arm grate. He opened
