"Good afternoon," he said simply, looking somehow even more disreputable in the noonday sun. "May I come aboard?"
"There is no dance tonight," Laura said, feeling her cheeks go hot and the faded bruises on her arms suddenly throb in sympathy. "Or ever again."
"Oh, I assumed that," he said easily. "You are Laura Powers, are you not?"
She nodded.
"Do you still need a mate?"
"Why do you ask?" she said, wondering. But she felt bound to add, "The position hasn't been filled yet."
"Good. I think I may be your man."
Him? His confidence rankled her. So she stood up, walked over to the boarding steps as self-assuredly as she knew how, and said, "Before you even trouble to come aboard, may I ask if you've any experience on a coasting schooner?"
"No," he answered honestly enough. "But I was mate on a schooner-yacht—she was a hundred and forty-odd feet—during the Pacific leg of an around-the-world cruise."
"Oh." She faltered, then rallied. "But not the whole way around? I suppose you managed to put her up on a reef?"
He took in Laura's testiness, then answered calmly, "No. The owner fell overboard in Tonga—just outside the harbor at Neiafu, Vava'u—and drowned. The yacht changed hands and the new owner brought his own captain and crew."
Tonga. Vava'u. The names sounded as ordinary on his lips as Boston and Providence.
"Oh? How did the owner fall overboard?" she asked, without having any idea why.
"Not because I pushed him, if that's what you mean. He was drunk."
"Oh? So he's dead?" she said, continuing to listen to herself with amazement. "Then how can I check him out as a reference?"
"I didn't offer him as a reference."
"Well, if you're not going to cooperate—"
"Lady! I thought you were looking for a first mate, not a second character for a one-man play." He allowed himself a short, ironic laugh. "This has been very ... educational. Bye." He threw her a jaunty salute and turned to leave.
"Wait!"
He stopped and she said, "I am looking for a first mate. If you want to talk about it …."
He seemed to consider whether he wanted to or not anymore, leaving Laura with absolutely nothing to do but stare at her feet or try to guess how old he was. She stared at her feet.
He came aboard, which caused her immense relief—a reaction she needed to analyze further—and they went aft to the cockpit, right past Billy, who was hovering over the donkey-engine like an irritated prospector over a balky pack mule. The two men nodded, Laura held her breath, and Billy went back to cursing the machine; he did not recognize their guest of the previous week.
Laura sat down rather demurely (considering that she was wearing Sam's pants, drawn in at the waist with a length of manila line), took a deep breath, and launched into the interview. She explained her husband's absence and the contract in a few words, skipping the business of the angry Bahamian locals, and when her applicant signaled his interest in taking on the job, said, "I am sorry. I haven't even asked your name."
He'd been glancing around the schooner observantly as she was speaking. Now he turned and said, "Colin Durant."
"Colin Durant." She turned the name over slowly, like the pages of a foreign-language dictionary. His eyes, she saw, were heavily lashed, his cheekbones high. Yes, he might have French in him. But her visceral response was to distrust him, starting with his name: it sounded made up to her. "Where are you from, Mr. Durant?"
He smiled and said, "That's a tough one. Can we start with something easier, like, can I fix that sputtering donkey-engine?"
She set her chin in the way she had. "No, we can start with where are you from?"
A veil dropped over his chameleon eyes, and the green in them retreated behind the brown. "I was born in Nantes, spent my childhood in Brest, my teenage years in Guadeloupe, and the time after that"—he shrugged—"all over."
"Where did you learn to sail?"
"All over."
"Where did you learn to speak English?"
"All over."
"You don't have an accent."
"You're not listening." He shifted into the devastatingly charming lilt of a Frenchman just off the boat: "At what hour leaves the next bus for, how do you say, the Flat Bush?"
Startled by the transformation, Laura burst into nervous, instantly infatuated laughter. But she did not believe him. "You're an American," she insisted, still smiling.
The eyebrows lifted slightly. "Suit yourself."
For a moment she was silent. "What do you know about celestial navigation?" she finally asked, cool and formal once more.
"Not my strong suit," he admitted. "I know which way is up on a sextant; I get by. On the other hand, I consider myself a positive genius at dead-reckoning," he added without a smile.
Another Sam. Laura distrusted dead-reckoning. It was too intuitive for her, almost an art. She preferred precise observations of celestial bodies to tell her where she was on the ocean. On the other hand, her confidence did tend to sink on a cloudy day. Colin Durant, like her husband, would complement her navigational skills well. It was very annoying.
She looked for another way out of having to hire him. Desperate as she was, at the moment Laura was ranking him dead last as a candidate.
"Would you be comfortable going aloft?" she asked suddenly. "Billy, there, often needs help when the weather pipes up."
He seemed amused by the question. "Would you like a demonstration?"
"No—no, I believe you. You would have to share the crew's quarters forward, of course; there is no private stateroom for the mate."
He nodded.
"The food is very simple; we aren't a yacht."
"Indeed."
In a burst of desperate candor she added, "I feel bound to tell you that there may be trouble at the other end." She told him about the disgruntled Bahamians.
To no avail. He wanted the job. "All right then, Mr. Durant. Naturally I will need to complete my interviews. Where may I reach you?"
"Christ!" was all he said. Apparently it had not occurred to him that Laura would consider anyone else. But he recovered his sang-froid and said, "You can write to me in care of the YMCA here in town."
"Thank you. I'll make a note of it."
He chose not to use the boarding steps, but instead swung himself over the bulwarks, landing softly on both feet. Laura decided he was no more than thirty-five, still young enough not to need to ration his energy.
He hooked his thumbs in his hip pockets and took one last sweeping look at the Virginia, no longer young; at Billy, altogether too young; at Laura, a woman in a man's domain.
"One thing," he added. "Who's the captain?"
Laura's cool composure collapsed like a pierced balloon. Her eyes opened wide and she said, "I am. Who did you think I was—the secretary?"
He shook his head. "Definitely not. I don't see you behind a desk. Good afternoon."
Billy paused on his way below decks to stare down the wharf at their departing visitor. "Does that mean he thinks you're too stupid to type?" he asked indignantly.
"Oh, shut up, Billy!"
****
When Neil returned an hour later it was to his favorite lunch: canned beans spiced with lots of molasses and mustard, and cornbread. It was part of his mother's effort to make up for having hurt him. He understood that; in fact, he was counting on it. Because he'd done something wrong on his little half-holiday. He'd broken his word to her. But if his mother was feeling guilty herself, she might not get too angry about it.
He shoveled the beans into his mouth with a spoon so that he wouldn't miss any of the sweet juice, and studied his mother as she climbed up into the pilot berth to paint the underside of the starboard deck. She was wearing his father's pants and had her hair bound up in a red kerchief, but she looked pretty anyway. Probably it was her eyes: they were slanted and very bright. They seemed to invite you to join in a special secret, only he never could figure out what the secret was. Once his mother had whispered that she was part Sioux Indian, only not to tell. With his blond hair and blue eyes, Neil himself didn't look anything at all like an Indian. Maybe that was why he could never understand the secret.
They talked back and forth about the Rainbow for a bit, but his mother seemed to want to change the subject, though Neil couldn't understand why. It was the most important thing in the world. And besides, he still had to confess about having gone aboard it.
"Mama," he began cautiously, "Dad says to keep supper warm for him tonight."
His mother paused mid-stroke in her painting and looked at him. "When did you talk with your father?"
"I saw him when I got kind of near the Rainbow," he said, pressing a cornbread crumb into his forefinger and licking it carefully clean.
"Just how near the Rainbow were you, exactly?"
"Well, sort of on it."
"I don't believe it!" she said, shocked. "What did your father say?"
"He didn't yell or anything. He just said, have supper warm."
"But he isn't free until Sunday. Did he say why he was coming tonight?"
Neil made an odd, nervous little smacking sound with his lips. "I think to talk about the trip."
His mother's dark eyes glittered. "Neil! You didn't tell him!"
"I didn't mean to, Mama. Honest. It just slipped out."
Her face was flushed and angry. "Oh, never mind. It was absurd to entrust something like that—"
Dismayed, he seized on the word. "You can trust me, Mama. You always can trust me! You know you can!"
"Oh, yes," she said dryly. "You've just proven that." And she went back to her painting in stony silence.
He wanted to point out that he hadn't said a word about the horrible dance party on board, but then he would be breaking his promise not to mention it. How unfair could you get?
That night he went to bed when it was still light out, claiming that he didn't feel well. He heard a school of snappers jumping madly around the boat, but he wouldn't have ventured out of his berth even if it meant filling the whole cockpit with them.
Eventually he heard his father's voice: "That's too much. I'm not hungry. Give me half that."
There was a pause and then his father said, "Well? What are you up to now?"
And then Neil heard his mother's voice, low, indistinct, the tone she used when she did not want him to hear. She knew how to speak some French, and some Swedish, and even a little Polish. But none of them did her any good in keeping things from Neil, because his father only understood English. Most of her English, anyway.
"Are you daft?" shouted his father in response. "I said we'd go back to hauling, not you'd go back."
His mother again, low, urgent.
And then his father: "I don't give a rat's ass if he can hear me! He should hear this. God knows it affects him. If you think you're going to go sailing off with my son and my boat—"
In a voice goaded into combat, his mother interrupted.
"Our son, our boat. Half of this boat is mine, paid for fair and square. You accepted my inheritance easily enough—"
"And the reason your brothers bought out your share of the farm is clear as rain to me: you're like a mare that won't train to harness, a boat with fierce weather helm. You won't be steered nohow!"
"Why should I be steered? I've paid my half, in money and in sweat. Why can't I make a decision once in a while? You didn't ask me whether you could sign on as one of Mr. Vanderbilt's 'black gang'—you just went and did it, because we needed the money and because you knew it would be exciting for you. And I understand that; that's what life is all about. Well, my motives are exactly, exactly the same. There's no difference."
Neil heard a fist come down on wood. "There is a difference—you could lose the boat!"
"The boat can take it, we both know that."
"It can't take a hurricane, and we're in the thick of the season for 'em."
"We won't sail offshore; we'll follow the coast down—"
"Who 'we'? You, my brother, and the boy? Don't make me laugh."
"I ... I've lined up a first mate; he's sailed around the world on a three-master, and he comes highly recommended, and he's a mechanical genius—"
Neil sat up in his berth. His mother never told him about any geniuses.
"Hold on, now," said his father in the voice that Neil dreaded. "You mean to say you've already taken on a crewman?"
"No, of course not. I'm just trying to see what's out there."
"There's nothing out there!" his father shouted. "Just a lot of water! No jobs, no future, no money! Get it through your head!"
Neil held his breath during the long, deadly pause that followed. Then he heard something slap on the table and slide across it. His mother's voice was calm but very clear, the voice of triumph: "There may not be a future, but there is a job, and there's definitely money. Open it."
Neil heard his father fumble with the wrapping. "Holy—!" he said. "How much is in here?"
"A thousand dollars. There's another two thousand waiting for us in Pineapple Cay when we deliver."
"Deliver what? The King of England? No one pays that kind of money for a few hundred board-feet of lumber and some sinks and toilets."
"I don't know and at this point I don't care. Do you?"
There was silence.
"I haven't spent a penny of it," his mother continued, "because I've been waiting to hear what you had to say."
After a little pause his father said, "What can I say?"
After that Neil couldn't make out anything, only low murmurs and a kind of nervous excitement. And after that he heard nothing at all, so they must have gone into their sleeping cabin.
For a long, long time he did not sleep but lay in his berth, listening, thinking; excited and afraid.