sea again.
Their confidence in the sloop’s seaworthiness was founded on their study of boating manuals and the experience of having built a boat themselves, a little gaffrigged pram. They named it for Marina, who fashioned its sail from flour sacks. It was a vessel of much mirth to the fishermen in their dugouts not only for its makeshift aspect but because the river breeze was frail at best and often nonexistent. A sailboat, even one this small, was simply out of place on the Rio Perdido. Still, on its maiden try, the twins managed to sail it upriver for about a half mile with the weak breeze behind them before they came about and dropped the sail and rode the current back to the landing dock. The short trip took the better part of a day, and as they tied up at the dock they were aware of their father watching them from a high balcony of the house but did not let him know they had seen him. At that distance they could not see his smile nor anyway have known that he was recalling another small sailboat of another time and the young twins who often sailed it from Portsmouth Bay to the Isles of Shoals—and did so once in a squalling heaving sea.
They gained facility at sailing in the river’s weak wind, but they hankered for the open sea they’d not yet laid eyes on and for a larger boat to sail upon it. When they learned of Ensenada de Isabel, their keenest interest wasn’t in the cove itself or in its house but in the sloop their father kept moored at the cove pier. They wondered if the boat was there still, and if it was, if it might be in reparable condition. Very likely it was in ruin or long ago sunk. There was one way to know for sure. They had anyway been wanting to try the rapids everyone spoke of in such ominous voice. And so began to construct a suitable raft.
They were of course thrilled that the sloop was in reparable condition—and now that they’d seen the cove, were no less enthusiastic about the place itself, recognizing its manifold advantages. Its isolation and natural camouflage against detection. Its bounty of natural sustenance. And the house on the little bluff. They hauled the
The pilings looked like they would stand till the end of time. The gallery steps were solid, so too the gallery floor. The front door had swelled from the humidity and they had to shoulder it open. There was a smell of mold and decay and something else, some stink they could not identify, and they opened all the shutters to air the place. Spiderwebs everywhere, but the ceiling showed only a few water stains. An oil lamp lay in shatters on the floor. Some of the wicker furniture was overturned and one of the chairs was in shreds, but most of the furniture and lamps appeared functional. In the kitchen a window was missing its shutter and the floor held the dry mudprints of a young jaguar. In the pantry were a tattered sack of beans and a bag of salt hardened to rock, strings of jerky like sticks of black wood. The stink was coming from behind the bedroom door and when they opened it they startled a colony of roosting bats and they yelled and crouched down with their arms clasped over their heads as the creatures fled the house in a shrilling dark cyclone of beating wings. The reeking layer of guano on the floor made their eyes water.
They found the roof missing only a handful of shingles. The widow’s walk was still securely in place and they marveled at the view from it. They checked the cisterns and saw they would need a thorough cleaning, but the piping system into the house was in good order. A shed behind the house held a variety of tools, most of them coated with rust. “He couldn’t use much of this with just one hand,” Blake said. “Momma had both hands,” said James Sebastian.
They went back around to the front of the house and sat on the verandah steps and stared out at the cove and neither of them said anything for a time. They had reason to believe John Samuel’s only time at the cove had been in his childhood and that their father had not been here since their mother’s death. There was no sign of anyone else having been there in all those years, either, proof of how well the inlet was hidden from gulf view.
At length Blake said, “A fella could live out here real nice.”
“Make himself a little money, too,” James said. “What with all those hides just up the river.”
They were there for three days, exploring the area around the house and clearing out the guano, shoveling several wheelbarrow loads before finishing the job on hands and knees with trowels and buckets, gagging even through the bandanas over their lower faces.
They slept on the verandah. The large hammock on which their parents had passed so many enjoyable nights was still suspended from the rafters, its craftsmanship and treated hemp resistant to the attritions of time and weather, and they took nightly turns sleeping on it and on a smaller hammock they hung beside it. They fed on coconut milk and mangos, on fish they caught on handlines and roasted over open fires, on oysters gathered from the shallows and pried open with their knives and eaten raw or after baking in the fire. And all the while, they talked about the enterprise they thought to operate from this place once they had fixed up the house and boat. They made a list of the materials they would need to make the repairs—the kegs of pitch and oakum and caulking and solvents, the buckets of paint, the shingles, the sails, the fittings, the special tools and so on.
There was of course a problem. One so obvious they had been skirting it and whose only solution was also so obvious that neither of them had to say it. A solution that held no appeal, requiring them as it would to renege on a vow of long standing. On the other hand, they told each other, things changed, and vows sometimes had to change with them. It was a matter of common sense.
“No matter how you cut it, it’s gonna be double humiliating if the answer’s no,” Blake said.
“Yeah,” James said. “I’d rather take an ass whipping. But there’s no other way.”
“Hell with it. He says no, we’ll come anyway.”
“And if some bunch comes after us, we’ll go in the bush. Like to see them find us in there.”
“And we’ll re-mast that boat some kinda way and rig some kinda sail and—”
“—we’ll start taking croc hides and—”
“—load em on the boat and—”
“Damn right.”
They returned to the compound by way of the vestigial wagon track on which no one had passed since their father’s last visit. Where it had not overgrown the track completely, the rampant foliage had narrowed it to an indefinite footpath and they had to hack their way through in some places. The jungle steamed, droned, shrieked as in some primeval madness. They daubed mud on their faces to fend the mosquitoes but the sweat kept washing it off and the bugs fed on them between applications. The brush slashed at their faces. At night they made a pair of small campfires on the trail and hung their hammocks low between them and under a drape of mosquito netting, and at every low growl from the surrounding darkness tightened their grips on their machetes.
They were two full days on that rugged track and arrived at the compound at a late hour of the second night. The guards opened the gates to admit them, and they crossed the plaza and vanished into the shadows and snuck around to the dark alamo grove adjacent to the casa grande’s garden wall. In childhood they had dug various tunnels between the casa grande enclave and the main compound—and even one under the compound wall itself, running from the back of a stable stall out to a growth of brambles. Josefina and Marina had long suspected the existence of the tunnels and were sure that one of them ran under the garden wall, but the inner walls were lined with thorny shrubbery too dense for the women to search closely for the tunnel opening, and no telling where in the outer alamo grove the other end of the tunnel might be. It was a wonder to them the twins could pass through those thorns without a scratch.
They crawled through the tunnel and out into the shrubbery and then lay motionless, listening hard, making sure no one else was in the garden. Then crossed as silent as shadows to the kitchen door.
As soon as they entered the kitchen, where a lantern always burned through the night, Josefina came out of her room, belting her robe, her colorless hair hanging loose and her dark face pinched with sleep. She shook a finger at them and whispered reproofs for their rashness with the rapids. You’re very lucky to be alive, she said. One of them made to hug her but she recoiled with a face of disgust and told them they stank to high heaven and their clothes looked like they were made of dirt. And your faces! You look like you’ve been trying to kiss cats!
“We have, but I’d rather kiss you, you temptress,” James Sebastian said, reaching for her again.
She slapped him away with her skinny hand and said, “Callate con ese ingles! Ya les dije mil veces!” She had never learned English nor cared to and had long since forbidden them from speaking it in her presence, yet they anyway sometimes did, either to keep her from knowing what they were saying or just to rile her for the fun of it.
Blake Cortez said it had been easier to kiss the cats than to kiss her. She berated them for their disrespectful
