Look.' He points toward the water at about a forty-five-degree angle, and Rose searches the dark surface.
She sees nothing but the Andaman. The day is on the way out now, the clouds an angrier, deeper gray that verges on black, and the surface of the water is powder gray and oily-looking. And then she sees rounded shapes, as though the water has thickened into spheres that are barely floating, only the very tops exposed to the air.
She rips her eyes away from the water and looks up at Howard, to find him studying her intently. 'Like this?' she says, and she makes a little curved motion with her hand, as though running it over the top of a ball.
'Right,' Howard says. 'You can only see the top, but what you need to worry about is what's underneath. They're jellyfish.'
'I know jellyfish,' Rose says. 'I eat. You have pill?'
'In a minute. These jellyfish are different. They're sea wasps. The tentacles are a couple of feet long-'
Rose says, 'Tenta…'
'Tentacles,' Howard says between his teeth. 'You know.' He holds up his hand, curved, with the fingers pointing down, and wiggles the fingers. 'Tentacles.'
'Okay, okay,' Rose says. 'Why you yell at me?'
'Can't even have a fucking conversation.'
'I speaking English,' Rose says, suddenly angry herself. 'You no speaking Thai.'
'Why the fuck would I speak Thai? English is the world's language. Nobody speaks Thai.'
'I speak Thai.' She's furious enough to forget she's feeling sick. 'Maybe we go home.'
'When I say we go home, we go home. The sea wasps,' he repeats with a bad imitation of patience. 'When you brush the tentacles, they break off and stick to you, okay? They're poisonous. You know poisonous?'
Rose says, 'Not stupid.'
'No point in taking a vote about that, since there are only two of us. The sea wasps. You get stung once, you're going to get sick. Two or three times, you're dead.'
Rose says, 'Pill.'
'They'll kill you.'
'So I not go in water. They cannot jump in boat, na? Give me pill. Now.'
Howard says, 'In a minute.'
'I do on you.' Rose sticks a finger down her throat to make it clear, and Howard jumps back. He's swearing, she can tell that, but she doesn't know the words. He goes to the suitcase, opens the zippered compartment on the outside, and pulls out a small, foil-backed blister card with pills in it. He pushes two of the pills through the foil and hands them to Rose, and Rose grabs his water bottle to wash them down.
'No,' Howard says, but it's too late. Rose takes a gulp, and then her eyes grow enormous, and she spits all of it, pills included, over the side. Then she leans over and is shudderingly sick, losing everything she ate into the Andaman. When she's finished, she wipes her chin and rounds on Howard, her fists clenched.
'You crazy? Drink vodka?'
Howard snatches the bottle from her hand, plants a hand in the center of her chest, and pushes. Rose stumbles backward until the backs of her knees hit the bench, and then her legs collapse and she falls on her rump.
'Sit the fuck down and stay there,' Howard says. He points a finger at her, his eyes tiny with fury. 'And shut up.'
It begins to rain.
The searchlight on the front of the boat is like a finger pointing forward, making a long silver streak through the rain. They haven't spoken in more than an hour, and it's almost completely dark now, the sea barely darker than the sky, except for the trail of luminescence that's churned into a cold green glow in the boat's wake.
They're both soaked. Rose is huddled in a ball, shivering, her jacket and T-shirt a cold weight on her back and shoulders. Howard seems not to have noticed the rain.
He has drained the first bottle and is a third of the way through a second.
'Slow it down,' he says aloud, and pulls back on the throttle, a handle positioned to the right of the wheel. Rose has been watching him whenever he's been turned away from her. Pushing the throttle down slows the boat. Pulling up makes it go faster. Throttle, wheel. Engine on the end of the pipe. Switch for the searchlight.
Off to the right-starboard, Rose thinks irrelevantly-is what looks like a small floating palace of brilliant white light. And behind it, or at least smaller, so probably more distant, is another. She has no way of knowing how far away they are, but they look like angels of safety out there in the dark, luminous points of refuge.
'Squid fishermen,' Howard says, following her gaze. 'Lanterns hung out all over the boat. Squid come to light like whores come to money.' His tone is conversational, reasonable. He might be talking about the wedding. With his eyes on the distant lights, he takes another drink and looks at the glowing green navigational screen set into the wooden panel beside the wheel. Then he looks left and scans the dark surface of the sea. 'Ought to be there,' he says. 'Don't want to find them before we see them.'
He puts the water bottle down and leaps up onto the boat's side. Then, moving sideways, he edges around the plastic windscreen until he's next to the searchlight. At precisely the moment Rose gets her feet under her, her eyes on the throttle, Howard says, 'Give me any kind of trouble at all, any kind, and I'll break your neck. Understand?'
Rose nods.
'Say it.'
'Understand.'
'She's learning,' Howard says, as though there were a third person present. 'She's actually learning.' He sits on the deck beside the light, which is sending up ropes of steam where the rain hits the hot metal housing, and grabs the frame that surrounds it. He twists the light left and sweeps it back and forth. He says, 'Damn, I'm good.' Then he wiggles the light back and forth and says, 'Take a look, sweetie.'
Rose lets her eyes follow the beam through the darkness and the slanting rainfall until it bounces off something pale, not colorless but not a color that carries across distance, especially under these conditions. Tan, she thinks. Light brown. It's low and rounded, rising gradually out of the water, no more than a foot above it, and it's long, maybe eighty or a hundred paces in length. Smooth and featureless, as though it's been sanded down for thousands of years.
'That's the big one!' Howard shouts into the rain. 'Over here is its little sister.' He shifts the light to the right to reveal another stone, about half as long, and even lower, than the first, its sloping sides just peeking above the water.
'There's another one back behind the bigger one, but you can't see it. The Three Sisters. Also called the Bitches because they've ripped the bottom out of so many boats.' He turns the light so it's facing front again and then scoots crablike back toward the cabin area. 'At high tide,' he says, 'about six hours from now, they'll be underwater. Fucking everything's hit them for centuries and centuries. Chinese junks, Javanese pirate ships, the occasional fancy yacht. Great dive site, stuff all over the bottom.'
He's back in the cabin, facing her. She hasn't moved from the bench. He looks down at her and then shakes his head. 'You finally figured it out, didn't you?'
She responds, but her voice is almost a whisper. 'Figured…' She closes her eyes, hearing Fon's voice: Clothes folded by the door, shoes on top, just scoop it all up as you go. She says, more loudly than she'd intended, 'Oom.'
'You're not as dumb as you seem,' Howard says.
Rose says, 'Why?'
'Because I can. Because God in his infinite wisdom has humored my little quirk by providing me with an endless supply of brainless whores to play with and cops who don't give a shit.' He points a finger at her, eyebrows high, meaning, Don't move, and goes back to the wheel and does something that reverses the boat, pulling it back from the rocks. 'Not a good idea to drift into them.' He pulls the plastic bottle out from under again and drinks, then goes to the rear of the boat and picks up something heavy that's all points, on the end of a chain that's wrapped around a cylinder. He drops the object into the water and the cylinder spins as the chain unspools, the handle on one side whipping around so fast it's a blur.
'There,' he says. 'Finished with housekeeping.' He takes a step toward her.
Rose fastens the snaps at the cuffs of her windbreaker. Maybe a layer of cloth will be enough to protect her
