Hard, was all he said. Me sleep on mesh wire.
Another day he said, There was a man with two rows of teeth, like a shark.
And another day: Good. Fish was biting.
And, When you see the bluff you know you are home. Even before that you can smell the land.
After Luke went to sea, there were many mornings when I was the only boy in the house. When he and Lewis left the bed we shared, half asleep I would change my position, move from the bottom of the bed to put my head on the only pillow and stretch out my limbs. The nights were often hot and the tangle of boy limbs sweaty and full of hard angles. When the others left, I fell into a deep and undisturbed sleep. My mother would wake me and ask if I planned to sleep the day away. It was a luxury, to sleep in such comfort, but it was lonely too, and when I woke, I hardly knew what to do with myself.
I had been left at home, in the world of women. I felt a small knot of anger under my breast bone, like a dried almond, hidden in the sand. I spoke to the Arawak prince in my mind. If only I had been born a prince. I wanted to name him. I asked our teacher, Miss Carlton, about the Arawaks and she sent me to one of the dusty encyclopedia volumes on a shelf in the tiny, nearly empty room that was called a library. She read out loud about a chief called Hatuey from Hispaniola, who led a rebellion in Cuba and was burned alive. I named my prince after him.
The water level in the plastic bottle is going down too quickly—I must be more careful. I find a new pool with a few whelks—much bigger than the sea snails, but their thick black and white shells are harder to crack. I long for a tool, any tool. I find a cavity in the rocks that is a little smaller than a whelk and I wedge one there and hit it with the sharpest rock I can find, trying to hit the same spot with every blow. Breaking the shell takes a long time and while I hit the whelk I wonder how it made its way to this rock in the sea with deep water all around. There were many whelks in Treasure Beach when I was a boy and sometimes my mother made whelk soup. She put the broken shells along our fence line, made with wild coffee sticks, and the shiny insides of the shells glistened in the sun.
The whelk’s shell breaks. I scrape off the bits of shell with my fingernails, taking my time, and when I put it in my mouth, it feels as meaty as a good oxtail. I must ration the little colony of whelks—I will eat one per day when the sun is at its highest. But the need for fresh water is now urgent. I search the sky for rain clouds but the sky is clear. I search the sea but there are still no fishing boats.
8
They waited almost an hour. Jules seemed comfortable on the dock although she did take a baseball cap out of her backpack and put it on, apologizing because she only had one hat. Lloyd saw there was a quietness about her; a patience, a willingness to wait as long as was necessary. Maybe this came from studying the sea. Fishing needed patience too. He wondered what she would have been doing if he had not called to her from the Port Royal dock. He watched her out of the corner of his eye. She sat braced against her hands, her legs moving back and forth, and he longed for her patience. All the same, it is not her grandfather lost, he thought. Maybe she would be on the Surrey already if it was her grandfather.
A ray jumped in front of them and she said, “Spotted ray. Bottom feeder. Lot of them live in the Harbour.” Lloyd thought all rays were stingrays. He wished he knew as much as she did about the sea. Did she know more than Gramps? She studied dolphins, but did she love them? Would she believe Gramps’s stories about dolphins helping people?
He gazed at the Surrey, moored to their right. The end of the dock was about two thirds of the way along the ship’s length. Jules had said he would not be allowed to go to Pedro, but maybe there was a way to get on board. The Surrey was large in comparison to a canoe, but it was not that high. He thought he could climb aboard on a rope. The weather rail that lined the deck was solid gray steel, but it had square holes with rounded edges along its length, and there was a hole at the prow of the ship where the anchor rope went through. Lloyd thought he could fit through any of the holes.
It was harder to imagine what he would do once on deck and he had no idea what was below deck. He could see an open hatch on the forward deck, into which the anchor rope disappeared. He thought about the coiled anchor rope of Water Bird, under her bow cap, and the way Gramps stowed things he did not want to get wet, right up against the V of the prow. He could still easily fit inside that small triangle. Perhaps there was a hiding place where the anchor rope of the Surrey was stored. Lloyd saw two men on the flying bridge watching them.
Behind the men, a uniformed sailor stood at a gap in the weather rail—a sentry, he assumed, there to stop people like himself from boarding. The two men on the bridge climbed down the ladder to the lower deck and approached the sentry, who saluted
