The sun was beating down like a pile driver by the time we made Half Moon Bay the next morning. The Bayliner, a Confederate flag pegged to its bow, shouldered in against the wind slap, its outboard churning due east. It was the same red speedboat I had seen in the photo of the Bodeens—the Arabesque—maybe inherited, like Ruthie said, one more thing left behind. “Twin Mercs,” Lucky had boasted as we loaded in. “Fastest boat on the bay. One of these weekends, we’ll take her across the gulf to Bahrain, get the Brits to sell us some rum.”
The wind’s direction shifted, the depleting gales blowing off the cool water toward land.
“Executive weather,” Lucky hollered, meaning the kind you wanted when the company hotshots from California decided to pay their visits, but it made for rough seas. He stood bare-chested at the helm with the open stance of a linebacker, hair bristling from his scalp. I clutched my scarf and raised my face to the cottoned sky, the air like a poultice.
“Right about here,” Lucky said, and brought the boat to anchor. “Break out the Kool-Aid, girls.”
Ruthie poured the liquor while I unwrapped the picnic Yash had made for us: chapati, rice, cold chicken, chutney. When Ruthie stretched and stepped out of her capris, exposing her racy black bikini, brass rings at her hips and between her breasts, I saw Lucky watching her like she was the sweetest thing he had ever seen. He caught my eye, winked, and I blushed, too shy to strip down in front of him.
Mason helped rig the lines, and I watched the happiness with which he worked, his shirt undone, a red kerchief tied at his neck, the lean muscles of his legs bracing against the cast. Ever since we had launched the boat, he had been questioning Lucky about company politics, who answered to whom.
“You got this triangle,” Lucky said, and touched his thumbs and two fingers together. “The House of Saud is up here at the top. Smart as hell and mean as sin. When old Ibn Saud decided he was going to rule the peninsula, first thing he did was get the Ikhwan fundamentalists on board, then sent them out to slaughter enough Bedu that the sheikhs finally surrendered.” He wrinkled his upper lip, and his voice dipped. “Then the Ikhwan decide the king’s being too soft, start making a fuss, so he has to turn around and beat the snot out of them too. Names them his very own militia to keep the peace, gives the real crazies of the group special duties, and that’s the mutaween.”
“The Virtue Police,” I said, and looked at Ruthie, who held a finger to her lips and shook her head, but I had no intention of saying a word about our adventure in al-Khobar.
“Now Ibn Saud’s got the desert Bedouins and the town Arabs and the religious nuts all where he wants them, and that’s the second point of the triangle. Only problem is, he’s got no way to develop his new kingdom. Million square miles of worthless real estate but no money in the coffers. He had nothing,” Lucky said, “until we came along.”
Mason settled back with his drink. “Why us?” he asked. “We weren’t the only ones wanting in.”
Lucky smugged his mouth. “A limey or two tried to stake some claim, but they kept to their cabanas, ate their biscuits and drank their tea, wouldn’t even take off their piss helmets. What Ibn Saud liked about us Americans is the way we went right to work, eating, drinking, wearing the ghutra just like the Bedu. Sun burned us the same color so that pretty soon, you couldn’t tell a white man from a darkie.” He leaned in, squinted at Mason. “The king had requirements that we had to agree to, expectations. He wanted nothing but business, no politics, and we said okay. We beat out the limeys and frogs and wops, just like we always do, and now Aramco is the third point of the triangle. Perfect balance of power, like a pyramid, see?” Lucky clicked his tongue. “Few years back, old Saud swung a sweet deal, gets fifty percent of all our profit, but the IRS gives Aramco an equal tax break, so it’s jake. Keeps the Saudis from nationalizing, which is good for the company”—he winked—“but what it means to you and me, well, that’s different.” He tapped out a cigarette. “Your drill hits petrol, you just might want to say you’ve found an underground spring, something we don’t have to pay for. Know what I mean?” He lowered his face to Mason’s lighter, looked up, gave a lopsided grin. “Oil into water. It’s a goddamn miracle is what it is.” He stabbed his hook into a minnow, threw a long cast, settled his cap lower on his forehead. “Heard you and Swede had a little go-’round.”
Mason flipped his cigarette to the water, ticked one shoulder.
Lucky thumbed his nostril. “You don’t waste much time, do you?”
“Swede was the one wasting time.” Mason leaned back against the gunwale, crossed his arms. “No reason to treat a man that way because of his color.”
Lucky sucked out an ice cube, let it slip back into the liquor, gave Mason a half smirk. “Bet you’re a college boy, ain’t you?” When Mason didn’t answer, Lucky chortled and shook his head. “Swede don’t care about color. It’s human beings he can’t stand. Bossed me just the same when I came up under him, hollering and knocking me around.”
“Saleh Misar stands five-foot-nothing, weighs about the same as one of your legs,” Mason said.
“I hear what you’re saying.” Lucky ran a finger across his teeth. “Thing is,” he said, “now we got no drilling superintendent, and that’s going to pinch everyone right down the line, including me and little Mr. Misar.” He squinted at Mason. “Swede’s been here since before the war, made his friends and made his enemies, but he knew where to slap the grease. That kind of education don’t come from no classroom.” He spat on his line. “Hell, we’re feeding the drillers red meat every day. You can stand back and watch them grow. Arabs never had it so good.”
Mason turned his head to the side. “Not even close to how good we got it.”
Lucky rolled his shoulders, leaned in. “That pretty little house of yours? Give it to a Bedouin, and he’ll trot in his goats, slaughter a few, roast them right there on that nice marble floor.” He settled back on his elbow. “When I first got here, you couldn’t get a full day’s labor out of the natives. Doc said they didn’t have an ounce of nutrition in them, shouldn’t even be alive. We came in, wiped out malaria, developed a vaccine that keeps them from going blind. Put them to work making real wages, showed them how to grow corn and raise chickens, built schools and taught them the alphabet. Turned the Saudi merchants into businessmen, and now we’re subsidizing their inventories, buy only from them. We’ve got houses the Saudi workers can buy on the payment plan. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.”
Mason lifted the rod tip and settled it again.
“Listen,” Lucky said, and hitched his leg. “I was born to the canals of the Barataria swamp. One-room shack on stilts, kept the turtles off our toes. Daddy was Acadian stock, right out of Nova Scotia, Mama a mean old German gal.” He circled his drink to take in the bay. “Kind of like here, people coming in from all over, doing what they was good at. Creoles grew sugarcane, Filipinos netted shrimp, Sicilians harvested oysters, Croats fished for anything they could catch. Irish, Africans, Yugos, Chinese, all mixed up together.” Lucky paused as though to remember. “Ten years old, got my first job skinning gators for a bohunk named Pohanko. You ever smell gator guts?” Mason shrugged. “Smells like pig shit, and I did too. That’s what my mama said.”
Ruthie looked at me and raised her fist, mouthed the word pow.
“Eleven of us kids.” Lucky continued. “Started getting a little crowded. Took off when I was fourteen. Doubt anyone ever missed me. Went right to the oil patch. They paid me ten cents an hour because that’s what they thought I was worth, and they was right. I worked my way up. No one ever handed me a goddamn thing.” He winced with quick pain, straightened his leg. “Just that fast”—Lucky snapped his fingers—“Saudis got it made.” He pinched one eye closed, gave a single nod. “I’ll tell you this. If they don’t like it, they can get on their camels and ride right back into that desert. All the prayers in the world won’t get that oil out of the ground.” He squinted a smile, jabbed his thumb down. “This here is our Mecca.”
“Somebody needs a drink.” Ruthie moved across the deck like a figure skater, smooth and precise, and filled Lucky’s cup, her shoulders glistening with suntan oil. Lucky lifted his face, looked past her, and his eyes grew big. He reared back, bellowed, “There!” and I saw Mason’s rod bend nearly double. Mason grabbed the butt, arched against the weighted line, reeled in, arched again.
“Bet you got a jack,” Lucky said. “Take her in a little. Keep the tip up.”
Ruthie clapped her hands. “He’s hooked a good one,” she said, and poured a little more liquor. We cheered Mason on until he had the fish close enough to net, but what came up wasn’t a jack or a bonito but a three-foot shark, the cone of its nose edging over the gunwale, its teeth gnashing the line.
“God damn!” Lucky grabbed the gaff, buried it deep in the shark’s gills, and hefted it over the rail. Ruthie pulled her feet beneath her and screamed, and I jumped to the stern, forgetting to take pictures as the shark thrashed and twisted. Lucky raised the gaff, brought it down again and again, the blood spraying from the hook in viscous arcs until the shark lay quivering only inches from Mason’s toes. I held out my spattered arms and legs, looked up at Ruthie, who let out a whoop and lowered her feet.
Mason wiped his face with his kerchief, flushed with excitement, his eyes as wide as a child’s. “Can you eat it?” he asked.
“Can, maybe. Won’t, for sure.” Lucky dragged the shark to the fish cooler, leaving an oily red slick. “Might be able to trade it once we get back to the bay.” He leaned over the edge and rinsed his hands. “Some of them Bedouins will eat about anything.”
Ruthie dipped her towel in the water, and I did the same, dabbing at the blood. She lifted her head, pointed east. “What’s that?” she asked.
We all turned to see a column of smoke laddering the sky. Lucky rummaged in the cabin for binoculars.
“Blowout?” Mason asked. Only weeks before we arrived, an offshore explosion had killed three Saudi drillers. The divers who searched had come up shaking their heads. A few days later, the bodies floated in on the landward current, charred skin brined white.
“Think it’s just a waterspout, moving away.” Lucky glassed the horizon. “Got some dhows close by. Pearl divers.”
Ruthie turned to me. “How about a pearl, Gin? You could make a nice necklace.”
I looked to Mason, who looked at Lucky. “Can you buy them right off the boat?” Mason asked.
“Nothing you can’t buy off the pearlers. They’re at the bottom of the barrel.” Lucky lowered the binoculars. “Might even trade for a shark.”
I held tight to Mason as the Bayliner chopped across the waves to where the dhows, their sails roped tight, studded the water.
“What about us?” I asked. Ruthie had wrapped herself in a beach towel, but her shoulders remained bare.
“We’re on Aramco’s ticket,” Lucky said. “Rules are ours.” He reached for the gaff, jellied with blood. “We’ll keep this close, just in case someone says otherwise.”
The anchored vessel we approached was bigger than the others and sat high in the water, its elegant stern and low bow rising to a jutting prow. Ropes, baskets, casks, mended sails, clothes left to dry in the sun—the boat was piled high with everything the crew needed to work, sleep, and eat for weeks at a time. Two dozen men and stick-thin boys in loincloths lined the starboard and port, diving in shifts from each side.
“Hello, the boat!” Lucky hollered. “Marhaba!”
The dhow’s aging captain, his garments salt-bleached, moved between his divers, aided by a sturdy burled staff. His skin was cured to leather, wrinkled and pinched. When he motioned us forward, Lucky motored in close enough for Mason to throw the ropes, and I was glad for the breeze that carried away some part of the stench of rotting oysters. The men and boys stared at us, their faces slack with amazement.
“He’ll offer us food,” Lucky mumbled. “Take something or you’ll hurt the old fella’s feelings. Hospitality means more to a Bedouin than to Jesus Christ hisself.”
We picked our way through the clutter and sat on the rough boards that crossed the boat, where the shy boys brought us mangoes, pieces of fish, and cups of tea. When some of them slid down and disappeared into the water, I held my breath, let it out. It seemed too long before their baskets were hauled up and they followed, gasping, pulling themselves aboard, weary beyond their years.
The captain, whose long name Lucky shortened to Fahad as he translated, had once dreamed of being a boatbuilder, he said, but his clan was not of such rank within his tribe. He gestured at the boys, said he himself had begun to dive at age seven. He told us that forty, sometimes fifty times a day they would be weighted by the ankles and dropped to the bottom, then slip the nooses so that the stones could be hauled up and readied for the next dive. Just as Fahad was indebted to the ship’s owner, the boys were indebted to Fahad for food and the unpaid obligations of their fathers and brothers before them. Few had any hope of freeing themselves.
One of the youngest boys, thick hair curling at his brow, arms scaled with parasites, settled himself to sort the oysters, his fingers sheathed in leather, protection against the shells’ razored edges. He ducked his head when he saw me watching him. He worked his knife around a mango and offered me a slice.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said, mimicking my words.
“You are welcome,” I said.
“You are welcome.” He squatted, his knees scraped raw, his feet barnacled with calluses. His dark eyes seemed to fill his small head. He looked behind him to see whether he was being watched. “America, America,” he said.
I couldn’t help but smile. “America, America,” I echoed, and felt my heart shot through with longing. I imagined what my son might have looked like at his age and felt the pining desire to take the boy home, doctor his wounds, feed him hot soup, save him from his lot in life.
He pointed to the bright square of cloth at Mason’s neck. “Ahmar?” he asked.
“Red,” Mason said, and held the handkerchief out as a gift. The boy hesitated before tying it over his face, then drew his oyster knife and pointed it like a pistol, whispered, “Cinema?”
Mason ran his thumb over his mouth to keep from smiling. “Sure,” he said. “The movies.” We watched the boy return to his place at starboard, noose the roped stone to his ankle, give us a quick wave, then nod to the older man beside him, who dropped the rock over the side, the boy vanishing with it, the bandanna a brilliant splash.
Lucky smirked at Mason. “You’re a real do-gooder, ain’t you?”
“I’m just a soft touch, that’s all.” Mason stood, pulled out his cigarettes, shook one loose for Lucky, who eased into a smile, let the smoke laze from his mouth.
“You just keep it up,” Lucky said. “We’ll see where it gets you.”
I moved to join Ruthie, who was looking over the basket Fahad proffered. He held fast against Lucky’s rough bartering of the shark: he was Muslim and would not eat fish without scales. He gestured to the binoculars that hung from Lucky’s neck.
“What the hell,” Lucky said. “There’s more where these came from.” He handed over the binoculars, which were passed from one diver to the next, each snatching a second’s peek at the magnified world. Even the boy, who had popped back up like a cork, got his turn.
“How about this one, Gin?” Ruthie held a creamy bead between her fingers.
“Perfetto.” The voice came from the bow of the boat, where I saw Carlo Leoni in his scarf and high boots rise like an imp from a sacking of sailcloth. He positioned a Brownie camera at his breastbone, looked down, clicked the shutter, then lit a cigarette in one fluid motion.
“Carlo. Never a surprise.” Lucky introduced us, his voice tight. I watched as Carlo kissed Ruthie’s hand, then moved to press his cool lips against my wrist.
“Bella,” he said. “Sei molto bella.” He took in my camera, his dark eyes half-lidded. “We share the same soul, I see.”
“I love your photographs,” I said in a rush. When Ruthie looked at me, one eyebrow lifted, I felt my face turn red.
“And I your beauty, bella,” he said. “Perhaps we can work together someday.”
Lucky growled as though clearing his throat, and Carlo straightened to peer at him, then swung himself up onto a crate coiled with rope so that he stood a head taller. He turned to look at me and Ruthie, raised his chin and then his camera. Ruthie leaned into me as Carlo directed us to move first this way, then that, ordering the boy, still wearing his bandanna, to stand between us. Fahad frowned as he wrapped my pearl in a swatch of leather. When Lucky bent and began unknotting the bow, Ruthie and I stepped back on board while Mason gripped the stern. Carlo helped me, his fingers wrapped around mine, and passed me on to Mason, who steadied me against the roll of water. As we motored off, Carlo stood with his legs spread wide like a swarthy Peter Pan, the tail of his scarf flapping in the wind, then raised his hand and barked a challenge before heeling off his boots, stripping down to his underwear, and diving over the heads of the boys who hung from the dhow’s ropes. When he surfaced, he was only yards from our helm. He began a strong, steady stroke alongside the boat, keeping time, until Lucky goosed the throttle and we shot forward, leaving Carlo in our wake. I looked back to see him riding the swell, his mouth open in a full laugh, cheering us on.
“What’s his story?” Mason asked.
Lucky cupped a cigarette against the crosswind, pointed it west toward Africa. “Came over with the Italians from Eritrea. When Mussolini went down, Brits made the colony an internment camp until the war was over.”
“Fascists?” Mason asked.
Lucky nodded. “Skilled labor. We shipped them in, thousand or so. Wasn’t nothing they couldn’t make. Something broke, they fixed it. Only problem was they didn’t like the Saudis and the Saudis didn’t like them. Didn’t fit into the Aramco family plan.” Lucky checked his direction, touched the wheel. “Once we got the Arabs trained, we sent the wops back out, but Carlo, he wanted to stay, had a camera and a way of getting to people. Nailed up a shack on the beach north of Ras Tanura and called it his studio, got in good with the sheikhs by taking their portraits, and the princes took a shine to him. Now he has the run of the kingdom. Hops trains, tankers, camels, boats. There’s no one he can’t get next to.” Lucky spat tobacco from his tongue. “Little bastard knows it too. Got to watch him around the women.”
Ruthie and I sat with our backs to the cabin, listening and sipping the last of our drinks. I looked to where Mason stood, more serious now, thinking too much, my grandfather would say.
“I worry about him,” I said. “It seems so dangerous out here.”
“It doesn’t do any good to worry,” Ruthie said. “When Lucky was in the war, an officer knocked on my door one day, told me that Lucky’s plane had gone down.” She shook her head, remembering. “I fainted, thinking he was dead. Turns out it was only a broken leg.” She huffed a light laugh. “Lucky is lucky, and Mason is a golden boy. Nothing is going to happen to them.”
I looked out over the water. In twilight, the sky and the sea were the same, no longer blue but striations of purple and pink shot through with blue-white like the inside of an oyster. When the mouth of the bay came into view, Ruthie banged on the cabin to get Lucky’s attention and cut a hand across her throat. The boat throttled to a stop, and Mason helped her overboard, feeding the tow rope and skis. We motored slowly until the line straightened and she gave the thumbs-up. The boat churned forward, pulling Ruthie to a stand. Another thumbs-up, Mason passing the signal to Lucky, and we were speeding across the bay.
Dhows dotted the shallows, and I wondered whether the pearlers were watching us, whether what they saw was a woman tethered or simply flying, skin burnished by sun, hair a dark banner against the last fold of light.