cold. It's for something else. I'll show you when I see one.' He rolls the suit up and stuffs it beneath one of the benches, then straightens and shades his eyes, although the day's not bright, and squints up at the sky, dark gray in places but with one or two small, tattered patches of blue. 'We left the rain in Bangkok.'
'Maybe later,' Rose says, watching him as she takes the first puff. He's right; the smoke makes her feel smoother. Howard, on the other hand, seems even more energetic than he has the past couple of days, as though his blood is carbonated, bubbling in his veins. There's something bristling, something sparky about him that reminds her of the first day she drank Nescafe. That buried kernel of energy. If she could see through Howard right now, she wouldn't be surprised to find a flame at his center.
In all the months she's known him, she's never seen him do a muscleman exercise like the one he just did with the water bottles. His body tells her he exercises often, but it's something he does privately, and although they've been together for three and four weeks at a stretch, she has no idea when.
Howard steps up onto the edge of the boat and makes the leap to the dock. The boat's stern swings outward behind him, but the prow stays put, anchored by a thick rope that's been passed over one of the vertical timbers that supports the dock. He pulls the loop of rope off the timber, tucks it under his arm, and jumps back onto the boat, which rocks alarmingly. He holds the rope out to Rose.
'Coil this,' he says.
She says, 'What?' This 'coil' is not a word she knows.
'Circles,' Howard says with an edge of impatience. 'Just-' He makes a circular motion with his index finger, pointing down. 'The rope,' he says. He makes the gesture again, giving her the wide eyes she sometimes gets when she's too slow for him.
'Fine,' Rose says, getting up tentatively. The boat is still rocking, and she has to put out a hand to steady herself. 'Coil.' She goes to the place where the rope has been knotted inside the boat and begins to feed the loose rope onto the deck in a circle. 'Coil,' she says again experimentally.
At the wheel, Howard mutters something and takes a long drink off a smaller bottle of water.
Rose says, 'What?'
Without looking back, Howard says, 'I said, Jesus Christ.'
'Oh.' She finishes making rope circles and drops the end, then nudges the rope with the toe of her flip-flop to make it rounder. 'Why Jesus Christ?'
Howard screws the cap onto his water bottle, but he doesn't look at her. 'Something I always say when I go out to sea,' he answers without turning. She has to cup a hand to her ear to hear him. 'Like a prayer.' He turns a key beside the wheel and pushes a button, and the engine growls to life with a racketing sound, spewing gray smoke. 'Sit down,' Howard says, almost pushing past her. He goes to the back of the boat and releases a little catch that lets the engine drop into the water. The noise is cut in half, and the dock begins to slide by beside them. He returns to the wheel, and the boat points itself away from the dock. She grips the edge of the bench in both hands and turns back, seeing the widening V of their wake, churned greenish white in the center behind the propeller, seeing the island fall away behind them. It seems to get smaller very quickly.
'That way is India,' Howard says, pointing west. He's at the wheel, and he zigzags right and left. The boat's sudden wobble makes Rose dizzy. 'The old Thai boats had the engine at the end of a pipe,' he says. 'The long-tail boats were steered by pushing the pipe right or left.'
'I see before.'
He gives her a lengthy look before he replies. 'Am I boring you?'
'No. Just… cold.' She glances at the sky, which has turned darker, partly because the clouds have thickened and partly because the day is beginning to dim. The island is far behind them now, although she can still see it rising, pale and irregular, on the horizon.
'So get a jacket. That's why we brought the suitcase, remember?' He passes a loop over the wheel. 'Do you see this?'
She gets up, feeling the wind hit her, and finds the handle of the suitcase. 'Yes,' she says. 'See.'
'You're not looking. This holds us on a straight course.'
Rose says, 'Yes.'
'Born to be on the water,' he says. 'The wheel makes the keel under the boat go side to side.' He demonstrates by holding his right arm straight out, pointed toward the engine, dead center in the water. 'When you turn the wheel to the right, the keel goes this way'-he shifts his arm-'and the boat goes right. Turn it the other way, et cetera.'
Rose says, 'Et cetera.' She shivers. 'Cold.'
Howard shakes his head. 'So open the suitcase. Oh, never mind.' He picks up his water bottle, unscrews the cap, and drinks. Then he pulls the suitcase away from her, puts it on the bench, and rips the zipper open. He paws through a couple of layers until he comes up with the bright pink windbreaker Rose had bought the day before. 'Put it on.'
'Why you angry today?'
'All I want,' Howard says slowly, 'is for us to have a good time. I don't want to have to say everything ten times, I don't want you shivering with cold when it's eighty fucking degrees, and I don't want you arguing with me all the time.'
Rose's stomach muscles tighten the way they would if she were afraid of being punched there. 'Not argue.'
'Good. You steer.'
'Okay,' she says, holding up both hands. 'I steer.'
She shoves her arms through the windbreaker's sleeves and goes to the wheel. When she has both hands on it, Howard says, 'Turn starboard.'
'Star-'
'Right, right, for Christ's sake.' He clamps his hands over hers and twists the wheel, and the boat lurches severely enough that Rose has to sidestep to remain standing. 'Starboard,' he says, pointing right. 'Port.' He points left. 'Now turn to port.'
'Port,' Rose says, easing the wheel around. 'Port, okay?'
'You know,' he says, 'I don't have to show you anything. I could just skip the whole fucking thing. Or do you want to learn something?'
'Want.'
'Bow,' he says, pointing to the front of the boat. He points back, toward the motor. 'Stern.'
'Bow,' Rose repeats with a clamping around her heart that she almost doesn't recognize as fear. 'Stern.' 'COME HERE,' HOWARD says. He's at the wheel. They are traveling in a straight line, at an angle to the island, now a hazy break on the far surface of the sea. While they were headed directly away from Phuket, they had taken the swells head-on, but now the swells are hitting the boat from the side, and the two movements-the boat churning forward, the relentless rocking from side to side-are making Rose uneasy. She can feel her lunch, a hard, heavy ball in her stomach. It's a little like the first three or four times she'd smoked a cigarette and the room had begun to spin.
Howard locks the wheel and moves to the other side of the boat. He makes a curt 'hurry up' gesture with his hand, leaning over to look down at the water. Rose gets up unsteadily, feet spread wide, and waits for the boat to do its sideways rock, then hurries across and grabs hold before the next swell rises up beneath them. She knows she doesn't want to look down at the water. She has an instinctive feeling that watching it stream by will be the final ingredient in a mix of motion that's likely to bring her lunch back up into the light of day.
'Down there,' Howard says, pointing. 'See them?'
She looks down and then, immediately, up again. 'I can't,' she says.
'What do you mean, you can't?' The words sound barbed to her.
'I get sick.'
'No you won't. Just look for a minute, and then I'll give you something to make you feel better.'
'What?'
'A pill. I should have given it to you before we left. You're getting seasick, is all. The pill will fix it.'
'Seasick,' Rose says.
'This isn't a language lesson,' Howard says, 'and those fucking things aren't going to be out there forever.
