“Where the bwoy is, you wut’less son?” Vernon Saunders yelled. The front door slammed. Lloyd had gone to bed, intending to sleep for a few hours only, but still tired from his trip to Middle Cay he had not woken to go to the seawall. He sat up, wishing his window was bigger and he could escape. His father was drunk, of course.
“Ssst!” his mother hissed. “Stop you noise! You want everybody hear you damn foolishness? What you going on with?”
“Me no care who want listen. Where him is? LLOYD! Find you backside in here!”
Lloyd got out of bed. His father was free with his fists and his belt, but this was nothing remarkable—most of Lloyd’s friends were regularly beaten by mothers and fathers and visiting men; there was almost a pride in it, in being able to take it. But there was something more in his father’s voice that worried Lloyd. He pulled on his clothes.
The shower curtain was torn aside and his father stood in the doorway. Lloyd was trapped—he should have walked out himself into the outer room, perhaps he would have been able to dodge his father’s blows and get through the front door. If Vernon was really drunk, avoiding him would have been easy. But now he filled the doorway and there was no easy escape.
“Where you tell you mother you go Monday night, bwoy?” he shouted, his face close to Lloyd’s, his hands balled up into fists.
“What wrong with you, Vern?” his mother said. “Him did a little crewin for Popeye, that’s all. Come outside. Leave the bwoy alone.”
“That’s what you think! Crew for Popeye? Is a damn lie! You know where you good-good son was Monday night? Him was on the Coast Guard boat! Him stowaway on the Coast Guard boat to Pedro. You lucky him not in jail!”
“Lloydie?” his mother said. “Is true?”
How had his father found out? Lloyd wondered. He stared at the floor.
“Lloydie?” his mother said again, her voice sharper now. Lloyd backed away from his father and reached for the dangling switch to the one lightbulb in his room. He turned it on and his father blinked in the sudden light. Lloyd took his chance and squeezed past his father and out of his bedroom. The front door was shut. His mother caught his arm.
“Hear me dyin trial!” his mother said. “You stowaway on the Coast Guard boat? What you do that for?”
“Me went to look for Gramps,” he said. And then a righteous anger filled his chest. He dragged his arm away. “Nobody care! You don’t care! Gramps lost at sea and nobody lookin for him. So yes, is true; me go on the Coast Guard boat. And me talk to the fishers on Pedro, but nobody tell me nuttn. Until me see Slowly. Him tell me Gramps have sumpn to do with them foreign people what catch dolphins. Me hear you talkin about it at nighttime. You think me is a fool? Me think Gramps is dead over some foolishness to do with dolphins!”
The loss and fear Lloyd had carried for a week broke like a wave on the sharpest of reefs and he began to cry. He was a twelve-year-old boy. He was not a man. The person he loved most in the world was lost at sea. The days had surged past and with each dawn the chances of finding Gramps alive grew smaller.
“Slowly?” sneered his father. “Bare foolishness! That man don’t even have half a mind.” He staggered a little.
Lloyd wiped his eyes. It was hopeless. He would never know his grandfather’s fate. Perhaps one day the wreckage of his boat would be found, maybe a splintered plank of wood with Water Bird written on it would wash up on the coast. He would never know. There would never be a grave anywhere, perhaps not even a funeral or a nine night. Maybe he would live the rest of his life waiting for Water Bird to round the point at Palisadoes until the span of a human life was finally over. How long would wondering last, how slowly could hope die?
“How old Gramps is?” Lloyd said to his silent parents. They stood apart from each other, but there was something united in the way they looked at him.
“How old you father is?” his mother said to his father, and there was relief in her voice. This was a question they could answer.
“The old fool? Must be sixty-seven, sixty-eight by now.”
Lloyd thought of Pastor Errol’s sermons about the three score and ten years of life a person was given, according to the Bible, but he knew many people who lived into their eighties and nineties. Even many fishers—despite the life of sun and sea and hardship, they lived and worked until they were very old and sometimes their bodies outlived their minds, and they became like Slowly, talking and dancing to no one. It would be at least twenty years before he could be sure Gramps was not on an island somewhere, not on a lonely beach, not run off with a woman, not migrated to do farm work. Twenty years before Lloyd would know for sure Gramps was dead.
The anger had left the room. Vernon staggered and the smell of rum rolled off him. Lloyd wished his mother would put her arms around him but she was not that kind of woman. He thought then of Jules and the way she had whispered to the Lime Cay dolphin and the story that it had been put on an airplane and taken to another island. He thought of mad Slowly and his dolphin dance. No. He would not give up. Gramps had seen something he should not have seen and someone knew what had happened to him.
“Who is Black Crab?” he said to his mother.
She grabbed his arm again and her nails bit into his skin. “Now you listen me, pickney,” she hissed. “You forget you ever hear that name, you hear me? Some things not good to talk. Pickney must stay outta big people business!”
“Tell me what happen to Gramps,” he pleaded.
“Nuttn don’t happen to him,” shouted his father. “You hear me? NUTTN!”