Mexico

What was the word his mother would have said: not vamp. A word that sounded like something part rodent, part Venus: a mink or sex kitten. Minx? Not minx. Something bold and fast.

This is Ada, Carter said. She’s coming with us.

Don’t leave me alone with her, Slaney thought. She had taken one of Carter’s smokes from his silver case and she was looking around the patio for a light.

The eyes on her. She had eyes that were two different colours. One was blue and the other was hazel. Black eyeliner. He tried to figure out which eye was the most beautiful, but they were both beautiful.

An old-fashioned word his mother used about a particular kind of girl.

Ada slouched in her chair so she could rest her head on Carter’s shoulder. Shaggy blond hair, a red bikini under a loose peasant blouse embroidered with red poppies. The whole patio checking her out. Slaney saw three different men patting their pockets for a match.

He thought he might punch Hearn’s lights out if he ever got near him again. He wasn’t going to Colombia with a chick on board. Forget it. Bad luck. She looked to be about twenty if she was a day.

We saw a giant squid on the way down, Ada said.

Some dolphins, Carter said.

But it’s a boring stretch, isn’t it, Cyril? We were doing maybe a hundred and twenty-five miles a day, going about ten knots.

It’ll be longer on the way back, he said.

We might have died of boredom if it wasn’t for the squid, Ada said. She ran her fingers through her hair, tugging at the tangles. The clouds of ink, she said. These long beautiful tendrils.

Very rare sighting, Carter said.

It’s a sea monster is what it is, she said.

Some kind of smoky word his mother had for women younger than herself who were too glamorous for their own good. A partly ironic word that held a glint of admiration.

I’m a pretty fair sailor, aren’t I, Cyril? Ada said.

Hearn hadn’t told Slaney about the girl. Hearn hadn’t said. They’d partied all night, and Hearn hadn’t thought to mention. He’d driven Slaney to the airport in a convertible, stoned out of his mind, passing everything on the road, nearly killing them twice.

Hasta luego, Hearn said, dumping Slaney’s blue suitcase and tearing away from the curb.

Carter had now taken the tassel from the silk drawstring on the neck of Ada’s peasant blouse in his lips. She tugged it away and limply slapped his cheek with the saliva-soaked bit of fluff. He submitted to the mock beating.

You. (slap) Be. (slap) Good, she said. She mushed her hand all over his face and pushed it away from her and he swung it back right away, nuzzled her shoulder.

Carter was a slum landlord, amateur actor, father of four, loving husband, philanderer, and sailor. He produced the British farces and annual Shakespeare productions at the Arts and Culture Centre in St. John’s. Lunatic.

He’s a good laugh, Hearn had said.

Slaney had been in Carter’s Jaguar once when they were going to pick up a stash and Carter had stopped to get the rent from a three-storey hole he owned on Bond Street. A garbage bag taped up to a broken window and an old fellow coming out to the curb with his welfare cheque.

Treats the boat like a baby, Hearn had said.

Cyril was in his mid-forties. He was a man who surrounded himself with people a couple of decades younger. People said sophisticated. They didn’t mention bald.

A beaut of a boat, Hearn had said. Wait until you see her.

Cyril had a way: you didn’t think bald. You didn’t think short.

Ada excused herself. She said she was going to visit the ladies’.

Be right back, she said. She gripped Carter’s hand and took her time letting go, the tips of their fingers touching, touching, and then she turned and walked away. The walk on her.

It’s my boat, Carter said. I’m the captain. What I say goes.

I thought you were married, Slaney said. There was a celery stick in Carter’s drink and he stirred and tapped it against the rim of the glass and laid it down on the table. I thought you dried out.

I’ll tell you something, Cyril said. But he didn’t go on. He didn’t tell Slaney anything at all. He drank down the remains in the glass, raised a finger in the air as if testing the direction of the wind. A waiter in a bow tie replaced his empty glass with a full one.

Are you kidding me? Slaney asked.

She’s coming with us, Carter said. It’s my boat. I make the decisions. Besides, we need her to sail the damn thing. Two of us can’t manage it alone. She’s a fine sailor. She can sail circles around me.

I thought you were a family man, Slaney said. The wife, the kids.

I’m leaving my wife, he said. This is love. Ada and I are in love. You know it when you feel it. I feel it. You feel it, David, and you’re helpless before it.

Call me Knight. Doug Knight.

Okay, Doug. You know it when you feel it.

The door of the plane sliding open yesterday and the heat billowing in. The heavy air, it had just rained and stopped raining in the same instant, and the warm tar smell and the rundown airport and Mexicans, shades of brown and reddish brown and olive and black, black hair.

The dogs at the luggage carousel. Two dogs had sniffed aggressively at Slaney’s jeans. He was afraid for his balls. A wet nose prodding his balls, teeth gently grazing. Manic panting and slaver.

Try to pretend nothing out of the ordinary is happening when there’s a dog’s snout driven halfway up your arse. They could smell it on his clothes from the party the night before. Or they were smelling his fear.

Guards wandering through the air conditioning with rifles over their shoulders had stopped to look. But just as quickly as they had been on him the dogs leapt away. One was on the carousel sniffing the seam of a big black suitcase and it disappeared under the rubber flaps at the end of the carousel that led to the loading zone. The other dog had a child pressed against a pillar. A tiny girl with big eyes and her tummy sucked in, holding herself away from the dog’s teeth.

He got a taxi to the hotel. They drove past four men on the side of the road lifting a squealing hog. A rope through the animal’s mouth, looped around to tie its legs, and the noise out of it. Honking more than squealing, full of terror.

The green of the ocean under his window, the hot sand. He’d checked in and splashed water on his face. It was just one night. He’d meet Carter in the morning by the pool as Hearn had instructed and they’d head to the marina right away.

Nobody said a girl.

Hearn must have known and he kept his mouth shut.

Carter picked up the celery stick and cracked it in half and crunched down on it. Then his whole face changed. It was as though years fell away, or he had sobered up. Slaney turned to look behind him. It was the girl. Ada was coming back from the john. Maybe Slaney’s mother didn’t have a word for this kind of girl.

There she is, Carter said. He drew her chair closer to him, making the legs clatter across the marble. He touched the girl’s cheek, moving a strand of hair, tucking it behind her ear. She kissed his nose. She took his hand in hers and caught one of his knuckles in her teeth and growled.

Methinks Himself would like another drink, she said. The truth was, she could have been his daughter. She was younger than Slaney.

There’s my girl, Cyril said. There she is.

I am glad to meet you, Doug, she said. What an adventure. A couple of weeks ago I was working as a receptionist in my father’s office. And now look at me. Cyril swept me off my feet.

I certainly tried, Carter said. You were the most beautiful girl in Toronto. I had to steal you away from all those other guys.

We met at a gala dinner and dance and he swirled me off my feet, she said.

Slaney didn’t want the girl on the boat. Jesus Christ. He didn’t want this beautiful stupid girl on the boat with him. He would take Carter aside and tell him to send her back on the plane. He didn’t care where Carter sent her. She was not getting on the boat. Nobody said the word anymore. Sexed or vexed or kitten. Vixen.

Hoist the Sails

The sailing was perfect for the first two days. They saw dolphins and a whale and Carter caught fish off the side and Ada gutted and cooked them.

Carter uncorked a bottle of wine he’d been saving for the occasion.

I think you’ll find this very pleasant, he said.

We’re celebrating our engagement, Ada said.

I’d be very much surprised, Carter said, while pouring Slaney a glass, if this is not the best wine you’ve ever tasted in your life, young man.

Cyril is developing my palate, Ada said.

He’d only poured a splash and Slaney looked at it with disbelief.

You have to taste it, Carter said. Swish it around in your mouth. Slaney tasted and said it was good and Carter filled his glass and Slaney drank it down in three big gulps.

Bought this in France, Carter said, when my first son was born. Slaney saw that Ada didn’t flinch at the mention of the child. She knew about Carter’s wife and believed the woman would be better off without a husband who didn’t love her.

She had convinced herself that the wife would be better off.

Or: there was nothing that could be done about the wife.

Or: she didn’t think about the wife.

Ada was reading murder mysteries and Hemingway and she had a Fitzgerald and a really good Dashiell Hammett, she said, and when she was done she tossed them over the side. She didn’t lift her face from the pages but she’d raise her wineglass and wave it back and forth and Carter would hop up to pour for her. She’d read three Agatha Christies in two days.

Did you know she mysteriously disappeared for a while? she asked Carter.

Who did, darling?

She had a nervous breakdown, Ada said. She just disappeared. Ada closed the book and sat up straight, looking hard at the horizon as if she’d just figured something out.

The big reveal, she said. That’s my favourite part.

Why are you reading those stupid things? Carter asked.

There was a moment when Ada was at the wheel and Slaney was behind her and he had to lean in and she was between his arms and she glanced back at him to ask a question and her expression was innocent and avid.

She talked about knots and longitude and the sextant with its mirrors and spyglass. Lining up the sun, the horizon, and a star. She was quick with the math of it. She did not acknowledge his chest brushing against her spine. She was doing the math in her head. Figuring the speed and miles they had to cover.

They hit rough water around the coast of Costa Rica and they had winds of twenty knots and once the waves were ten feet.

Slaney went up every fifteen minutes to check the rigging and he had Ada go and check it while he slept. But he hardly slept. A half-hour, here and there.

Carter was drunk for the two rough days, and Ada was exhilarated. Her hair stood out like a flag and she’d had a straw hat she’d tied down with a scarf but it flew off anyway, the brim flapping like a wounded bird.

They were going very fast, smacking down hard on the backs of the waves, and Slaney felt it too: the exhilaration. Lashings of warm rain against his bare chest. He could hardly keep his eyes open on deck, the rain was so hard. The sleepless joy.

He was out he was out he was out.

What he felt was freedom. It was more potent than he had ever imagined or remembered while he was in jail. Potent because it had been lost and regained.

They should have been going ten knots at most and there were times they were going twelve. The wind was thirty knots and it felt like it might tear them asunder. They loved it. It terrified them. All the wave-sparkle and crashing down. The knocking from side to side. Carter’s empty whisky bottle rolled across on the floor and rolled back.

They squeezed past each other in the galley, Slaney and Ada, and the thrust of a wave flung her against him and she pushed him away, hard, with both hands flat on his chest.

But they’d looked in each other’s eyes and he thought:

Well met.

Hail fellow, well met. That greeting they used in old-­fashioned books about robbers and rebels, anarchic and quaint, the kind of thing Robin Hood might say to his Merry Men, or the Three Musketeers.

But it was more than that. Just a brief glance that went deep. Her hands on his chest because the waves had toppled her into him. They weren’t well met at all. Another phrase, from a different kind of book: undoing.

She would be his undoing.

Whatever he saw in her eyes: it was modern and harsh and willing. It wasn’t brotherly.

On the fifth day the water was calm. The coast was so green and close they thought they could smell the earth.

Let’s go swimming, Doug, she said. Let’s get in.

Maybe Carter had drunk everything on board. He was snoring his head off.

Kicking

There were thirteen of us, Slaney said. Would have been fifteen but two were crib deaths.

He was lying on a blanket he’d dragged up from the bunk. His eyes were closed and the sun was flaring orange on the inside of his eyelids. Seven days on the water. Carter was below deck frying the fish he’d caught that afternoon. They could smell the onions. Slaney heard the suntan lotion.

She had a suntan lotion that squirted and spat from a brown plastic bottle that was warm to the touch and the cream came out in a warm squiggle and oil seeped away from the cream on the palm of her hand. She smoothed it over her legs and she did her arms.

Want me to do your back? he said. He didn’t open his eyes. He wanted to listen to her.

I’m lying on my back, she said. She was resting on her elbows, he figured, looking out to sea. For a while they didn’t say anything and then it felt like she was going to speak. He thought he could feel that. But she lay down flat and said nothing. She lifted her back a little and settled her shoulders.

He heard Carter banging around in the galley, frying up some lunch for them.

Slaney tingled all over, the water evaporating from his skin, leaving a salty residue. They’d been diving over the side, he and Ada, and pulling themselves up on the ladder; they’d splashed each other, little splashes with their fingers, treading water, or skimming the top of the water with the sides of their hands, sending up sheets of splash and was it ever warm.

What a day, Slaney had said. Then she reared back and went crazy with her feet, kicking up a storm. They hauled themselves up the ladder and she was first, and her ass and her legs, what a body, the water a transparent sheet that peeled away from her shoulders and dripped from the bikini bows at her hips.

They lay down trying to catch their breath and he was getting a burn.

She talked about her mother dying and the boarding school she grew up in. A school with lawns rolling in every direction and big trees and forget it. You weren’t getting out of there except on the holidays.

The teachers were strict and big on music and she’d learned to sail on Lake Ontario during the summers but during winter the dormitories were cold.

You could see your breath, she said. She told him he could never imagine how lonely. Not when he had all those brothers and sisters elbow to elbow at the one table, he couldn’t. Not when he had both his parents.

She said that music was the only thing in her life she could depend on. I’d love to play for you sometime.

I’d like that, he said.

She said her father. She loved her father but she didn’t know him at all. He was old already when she was born. Been through the war and what that does. A doctor in the navy.

He’s administration now, she said. He runs a hospital in Toronto. He’s high up there, a very busy man. She rolled over on her side, her head resting on her hand.

Very, very busy, she said. Her parents had grown up in England and they had wanted to get out. Sick to death of Europe after the war. They’d decided Canada. They’d wanted a clean break. Her mother had died when Ada was seven, a flu with complications. Then she was off to boarding school.

At seven? Slaney said.

You should hear me on the piano, she said. He kept his eyes closed but he knew she was studying him.

Cyril was going to buy her a baby grand. She laughed. Already she was doubting Cyril.

He’s full of ideas, Cyril is, she said. But Slaney could tell, she was still willing to believe. The way he danced with her at that gala, she told him. Her father had been getting an award.

They had a twelve-piece band, she said. And one of those machines that makes bubbles. You know those machines?

Slaney said it sounded very different than the dances he’d attended.

Like Lawrence bloody Welk, she said. Bubbles floating down all over the place. I’m kind of a big deal, she said. On the piano.

Good for you, he said.

What about you?

I play the fiddle, he said. Nobody makes a big deal.

She didn’t have anything to say to that. They both lay there in the sun not speaking.

Then Slaney told her his name. He said his name wasn’t really Douglas Knight. That was the name on the fake passport. He said it was the name of a guy about his age who had died in Montreal. He said he thought about the guy now and then and he wondered if he was somehow keeping the guy going like this, if he was living the guy’s life, not his own at all.

That’s just foolishness I’m talking now, he said.

What’s your name? Ada said.

David Slaney, he said. That’s my name.

Colombia

Carter had a collapsible spyglass with four brass cylinders, a rosewood sheath on the last. He gave it a flick with his wrist and each cylinder shot straight out, until the spyglass was nearly as long as his arm. He put it to his eye and turned the wheels near the eyepiece. His other eye screwed up tight and he was showing his teeth. After a moment Carter announced they had the wrong spot.

They were anchored in a cove with a white beach about fifteen miles from Cali in the Valle del Cauca, Colombia, according to the map. But Carter said the map must have been wrong.

Carter had sobered up. They were picking up the cargo and Carter wanted to be sober for the occasion. He had joined Slaney on deck and he’d put on a white shirt and a linen suit.

We’re in the wrong bloody place, you fool, Carter said. There’s nobody around.

But it had been Carter who was navigating. Slaney snatched the spyglass from him and pressed it to his eye.

He moved the telescope and the water streamed by in hazy jerks and he steadied his elbows on the rail and adjusted the brass wheel and each melting sparkle of sunlight became diamond-­hard. He swerved the glass six inches to the left and the beach flew sideways like a scarf tugged by the wind and lurched to a stop.

He lifted it half an inch, very gently, and there were the camouflaged army tents in the shadows, under the palm trees, beyond the beach. He counted fifteen tents.

A man in army fatigues was sitting on a chair in front of a large tent with a rifle across his lap. Another man approached him, took a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, and tapped it and held out the pack. The man in the chair swatted his hand around his head at insects. Slaney heard the far-off buzz of a boat engine, growing insistent and menacing and loud.

Here they come, Carter said. Slaney lowered the spyglass and saw a speedboat racing toward them. It was a blur in the afternoon haze, a streak of aluminum, mirage-kinked in the heat, bouncing on the waves. Slaney and Carter stood on deck and watched them come. They told Ada to go below.

Do me a favour, Slaney said. She turned the last page of her book and flung it over the side and it skipped three times like a stone and floated away.

You want me to miss all the fun, she said.

Make yourself scarce, he said, as a favour to me.

Slaney felt tense and happy. Carter had gone down below and come back with the suitcase full of money. It was an ordinary brown leather bag and it had heft.

Ada stretched one arm up and yawned and flapped her towel and wrapped it around herself. She had been topless and coated in baby oil all day.

They give you a choice around here, lead or gold, Carter said. Did you know that, Slaney? It means a bribe or a bullet.

Tell her to go below, Slaney said.

Go below, Ada, Carter said. You heard the man.

The man, Ada said. Yes, I heard the man.

Several minutes later the speedboat was upon them and turned sharply just before it hit and the wave splashed against the yacht.

You’re not coming, Carter, Slaney said.

I’m coming, Carter said. I’ll do what I bloody well like.

Carter climbed down the ladder and stepped into the speedboat, the men reaching for his hands to steady him.

Slaney passed down the suitcase with the seventy-five grand into the boat and Carter gripped it between his knees. Slaney had taken a quarter of the hundred thou out of the suitcase so that he could barter. If Lopez wouldn’t let the pot go for seventy-five, he’d come back and get the rest of the money. After Carter was settled, Slaney climbed down the ladder and stepped into the speedboat.

They were soldiers with gold watches and gold teeth and they had houses with big pools and five years ago they were peasants making a handful of dollars a month growing coffee. Or they were the ruling elite who had lost the family fortune and had to maintain a lifestyle. Slaney got all this from Hearn, but he could see it for himself, a different kind of confidence than when he’d been here before. He felt like the mood had shifted.

Now they were armed with machine guns and a few of them had grenades and leather belts of bullets hanging over one shoulder and they had hunting knives and some of them had pistols on each hip like cowboys in the movies.

The men asked if it was cold in Canada.

Mucho frío, sí, Slaney shouted over the engine. Carter attempted to explain hypothermia and they all laughed.

One of them said, Horses, yes? Carter clearly had no idea what they meant. There was a burst of Spanish and one of them said, RCMP. Carter said yes, they had the RCMP.

They were all hearty about the RCMP and then there was silence.

One of them said, Toronto?

Newfoundland, Carter and Slaney said in unison. Then there was silence until they reached the beach.

Slaney had expected Carter to make a fuss about getting his shoes wet. But he took them off without a word and rolled up the linen pants and he carried the shoes in his hand above his head and Slaney realized he preferred Carter drunk. The men offered to carry the suitcase but Slaney carried it on his head.

A few huts and the sound of a radio and excited Spanish coming out in bursts of static. A dog came out to greet them and she had big black teats hanging to the sand. A sad German shepherd face but the legs were too short. It had the hunching gait of something starving and maddened by flies.

There was nothing but the huts and then a roar overhead made Slaney and Carter duck and the soldiers laughed at them. The plane was so low they felt the pull of it. It touched the tops of the palm trees and they swayed in its aftermath and coconuts thumped down into the sand. Probably armed guards or field workers flown in for a few weeks’ work.

They had a landing strip. Five years ago they’d had nothing. Slaney tried to look unimpressed. Carter leaned in and asked if he thought Sanchez was really a colonel.

It’s Lopez, Slaney said.

Lopez, Sanchez, said Carter.

There’s a difference, Slaney said. Do you want to get us shot?

We should have brought a bottle, Carter said. He reached to straighten his tie but he wasn’t wearing a tie. They approached the man Slaney had seen in the spyglass but he was standing at attention with the rifle across his chest, staring straight ahead at nothing. The soldier lifted the flap of the army tent and Slaney and Carter ducked inside. Shafts of sunlight came through the mosquito-net windows, making the room a swampy orange. It was cooler inside and smelled like candlewax and wet canvas.

Colonel Lopez was standing before an impressive table. He waved a hand at it, inviting them to sit. There was a platter of papaya and guava and melon and bananas and some roasted chicken and a basket of bread. Tomato and cucumber slices arranged in a spiral, shredded cabbage and beets, fried plantains.

Langosta, the colonel said, and he lifted a silver dome off a platter and revealed four barbecued lobsters. A young girl, of perhaps fourteen, lit the candles. She had thick black braids and acne on her forehead and cheeks and she kept her eyes on the wick until it was lit. Then the girl sat in a chair in the corner with her hands on her knees, ready to jump if she was needed.

While they ate they discussed the price. Slaney started at fifty.

Lopez asked about their journey and offered them coffee and had the girl on the chair bring in a teapot and they were given espresso cups and saucers. She kept one hand on the loose-fitting lid as she poured and eyed the stream of coffee with a fixed surliness. Everyone was silent as she moved from chair to chair with the teapot.

You must understand how many people are employed on this end, Lopez said. He said he would accept no less than one hundred thousand dollars for the two tons of marijuana they were purchasing.

I will go no lower, he said. He asked them to consider the unpredictability of the growing season, the peasants who broke their backs working in the fields, and the need they had to feed their children. He mentioned the heat they worked in, the sweat. He talked about the economic disparity between their nations, the growing violence in his country for workers in the industry. He said that an offer of fifty thousand dollars for the product they were going away with was an insult. As he spoke his face became flushed and his voice became louder and more sonorous.

Then he raised a hand to halt the conversation altogether and he said, Flan.

The girl at the back jumped up so quickly from her chair that Slaney saw Carter flinch. Slaney had no idea what flan meant but the girl snapped open the tent flap and disappeared and returned with dessert.

Slaney said he appreciated the position Lopez was in, and the position of his workers. He spoke about the imperialism of the United States, particularly in Central America, and he mentioned each of the countries there and the dictatorships propped up by the West. But then he spoke about Newfoundland and the relative poverty on the island and how cold the water was and how hard it was to make a living from the sea as his forefathers had done. He spoke about the Commission of Government, and how his grandfather had had the right to vote stripped from him and the bad teeth of Newfoundlanders and rickets and scurvy and frostbite. He spoke about weather, ice, and snow and the great sealing disasters.

Then he and Lopez bartered by five thousand, up and down, and then by a thousand. And five hundred dollar lots.

They were at eighty thousand when Carter began to speak about the coffee.

It’s so strong, he said. He asked if the beans had been grown in the area. He mentioned the first occasion he’d tasted coffee; a distant relative in London, England, had served it to him when he was a child of six.

He’d been sitting across from the mounted head of a rhinoceros, he said. Poor creature.

The head was bigger than I was, Carter said. All that bone and horn, the glassy eyes. Before that I’d only ever had tea with lots of milk. He talked about staring at the mounted rhino and how he’d expected the rest of it to crash through the wall at any moment. He thought it had just poked its head through the plaster to look around before charging them. He believed it must have had terribly long legs, on the other side, and that he would be stomped to death.

Carter had been rocking the side of his fork through his flan, shovelling big pieces in quickly, talking with his mouth full. Slaney realized the bartering was frightening him out of his wits and that he needed a drink. Then Slaney saw that Lopez had his napkin scrunched tight in his fist.

Seventy-five, Slaney said. Lopez agreed immediately.

A soldier came through the flap and took the briefcase and returned when they had finished the flan. He spoke to Lopez in a whisper, cupping the man’s ear with one hand. Then he straightened up and stepped back against the canvas wall.

Everything is tranquilo, Lopez said. I prefer it we settle business out in the open.

Slaney said he preferred things that way too.

I prefer we be honest with each other in all transactions.

Slaney agreed.

Honest and open, Lopez said.

Open discussion, absolutely, Slaney said.

I understand you lost a great deal on your last trip, Lopez said. This turns investors, no? He winced when he said this and shifted uncomfortably in his chair, removing a pistol that had been in a holster at his waist. He laid it on the table next to his plate.

You are young, Lopez said. Mistakes, you begin to learn. Now you know.

I think so, sir, Slaney said. He glanced at the flame of a candle in the centre of the table. It was wagging low and stretching, making itself thin. It was trying to squirm off the wick.

Hearn had lied to him. He had not told Slaney about Ada; he had said Carter had dried out. But this was of a different order of untruth. Now there was a loaded pistol on a linen napkin near Slaney’s crystal bowl of cubed papaya. Hearn had said Lopez didn’t know about the other trip. He had given his word Lopez wouldn’t know.

It was not Hearn sitting under the canvas tent in the rising heat surrounded by armed men. Hearn was probably sitting in an English class where the most loaded thing was the use or abuse of the semicolon in a thesis on Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness. Hearn had let him walk into a situation blind. There was a kerfuffle outside.

Shouts from the men. People running.

Lopez shouted back and he leapt up and was out through the flap with his pistol in his hand. Slaney and Carter followed behind him, ready to take off into the trees. They thought a raid. They thought: Make a run for it.

Fifteen men had arranged themselves in a line from one of the tents to the beach and they’d been tossing the bales of weed from one to the other, loading a large speedboat with the cargo they would transport to Carter’s sailboat. The sun was still very hot and the water near shore was crimson-streaked and too bright after the cool darkness of the tent.

Five soldiers were running over the sand from the forest behind them to the water’s edge with their guns held out before their chests and they halted together, lined up side by side, the guns raised and aimed, and they cocked the triggers and stared down the barrels like a firing squad.

Who have we here, Colonel Lopez asked. Ada was rising out of the surf. She was wearing the red bikini.

One of the men moving the weed had been hit in the chest by a bale while his head was turned to look at her.

Ada had swum the two miles to shore. She stood at the edge of the water and tilted her head sideways. She knocked one ear with the flat of her hand.

We are lucky the sharks didn’t get you, Lopez said.

He shook hands with her.

Come inside and have something to eat, he suggested. We have just finished, but there is lots left over.

I’m starving, Ada said. She had gathered her long hair in her hands and was ringing the water out of the length of it.

Do you mind, darling? Ada called to Carter. I’ll be in the big tent back there, getting something to eat. I was feeling lonely back on the boat.

Slaney and Carter helped the men load the weed and they were fitting the bales into the hold for the better part of three hours.

When they were done they screwed the false panelling in place and Carter slapped the wall and smoothed his hand down the length of it. They both stood back with their hands on their hips and surveyed their work.

They found that the wall looked like a wall. But they could smell the jungle stink.

Feathers

They’d been invited to a beach party with the Colombians and headed back to shore in the speedboat.

A young man showed the three of them the path to the toilet, a deep pit with a seat built over it, a hole in the middle of the seat. The pit was covered in lye that glowed weirdly in the beam of the flashlight. The construction involved hanging over the open pit but the support beams looked sturdy.

Ingenious, Carter said. But Slaney wasn’t sure.

Lopez had broken out bottles of homemade whisky and they’d all smoked up. A bonfire going on the beach.

More people arrived in the back of a truck, men and women who had been working in the fields and had returned to the camp for the evening.

The weed was of a very high quality, stinking like Christmas trees, sticky with resin. It was strong and enlightening. Provoking of revelation.

Some of the men had taken out instruments as the night wore on and they’d sung Colombian folk songs and Carter and Ada had danced, her forehead resting on his collarbone. Two sisters sang a Spanish ballad in harmony, and everyone joined in the chorus. They sang with their eyes closed, nodding their heads slowly, as if they agreed with the words of the song.

Slaney asked Ada if she wanted him to give her a brainer. They were sitting in old frayed lawn chairs and Ada slid off her tilted chair and crawled to him, the mock slink of a wild cat, a panther or lynx, until she was between Slaney’s legs. She raised herself up to kneeling, with her hands on his thighs, and she opened her mouth an inch or so from his.

Slaney drew in a deep lungful of smoke from the joint and put his mouth as close to hers without touching as he could. Then he blew out a soft grey column of pummelling smoke. It streamed from his open lips to hers until her mouth was a smoky O. Ada sucked it in, dropping her head, and then let the smoke pour back out and he was ready with another lungful.

She fell over in the sand, her arms and her legs spreading open and shut as if she were making snow angels.

Look at the stars, Ada said. I wonder if anybody is out there. Maybe my mother is looking down from heaven. Hi, Mommy.

Slaney was offered a violin and he played it like a fiddle, jigs and reels, and then something slow and full of need that he made up as he went along. Ada had rolled over on her side now, her head in her hand, and she stared up at him.

All the need he’d felt in prison came out of the wooden instrument under his chin. All the longing, terse and barbed and broken, hung over the bonfire. The flames near the crackled black logs were blue and flicking. It seemed like the fire breathed up and sank down with the music. The ocean roared and shushed. Someone had bongo drums; someone had a tin whistle. There were a few stringed instruments made of gourds. A silver flute. Everybody playing together, improvising. Looking up into each other’s eyes so they could all know where they were going with it. Slaney leading the way, sawing gently, tapping his foot, urging them on by nodding yes and yes.

If Slaney had a reason for going on this trip in the first place, maybe it was this: so he could be on a Colombian beach playing all his sadness out under the stars, stoned out of his mind. He was there for the sense of abandon he felt.

That’s why, he said out loud when he stopped playing. Ada had stood up and brushed the sand away from her elbow and dropped into the empty chair next to him. She was wearing army fatigues someone had loaned her, the fabric faded from washing. She rubbed her shoulder back and forth against his shoulder. She was flushed and grinning.

What’s why?

What, he asked.

You just said, That’s why. What’s why?

You’re why, he said.

I’m why what?

You’re why. You’re why, he said. His flimsy lawn chair, with its chrome frame and woven nylon strips of plaid, collapsed under him then. He stood, with great effort, and the trees behind them lurched sideways and he bequeathed the unharmed violin to the man next to him and took the flashlight and headed off to find the lye pit.

The flashlight beam bounced and jiggled over rocks and tree roots and then the swaying beam found a girl with shiny black hair tumbling down one shoulder. She was sitting on a wooden chair, her knees apart, her boots planted firmly. She was plucking a chicken and she had a kerosene lantern that lit her like a painting by Rembrandt, golden and shadowed. The denuded, incandescent and pimpled bird hung by the claws from the girl’s raised fist.

There was a tree stump and the axe stood up in it, the blade sunk into the blond wood that was stained with blood. A chicken’s head lay in the dirt, and when the flashlight beam strayed to it, the chicken’s yellow eyeball with its black pupil and red warty-looking eyelid stared at Slaney, unblinking. The eye looked full of consternation and acceptance.

The woman spoke a few words to him and he told her: No entiendo. But she kept talking.

White feathers filled the air. They seemed forever suspended in the beam of his light.

She was pointing toward the lye pit and kept talking and plucking though he didn’t understand a word of what she was saying. But he knew the gist. He had a good idea she was talking about the bathroom. The crude toilet was an entrance to hell. He must be very careful.

She was saying life is magnificent. Freedom was running in his blood now, it was part of him. Nobody could take it away. She was reminding him of the light on the water, how bedazzling it had been on the way down and the crack of the sails when the wind picked up and the horizon and the smell of salt in the air and the fish they’d eaten the minute they pulled it out of the water and how fish as fresh as that could affect your dreams. She was saying Hearn had been right about one thing: they were no longer who they had been before.

They had been changed.

She warned him that once he was back in Canada he must forget Hearn. They should go their separate ways. Hearn was weak and dangerous, she said. Hearn had lied about Lopez and the first trip. Lopez knew everything. How they had failed the first time. What they owed.

You owe so very much, the woman said. She asked him did he think about his mother. What this was doing to his mother.

The feathers stirring in the little beam of the flashlight.

Watch out for the girl, she said. But it was unclear if she meant he should protect Ada, as a guardian angel might, or be afraid of her.

Everything the woman said came out all at once, every thought overlapping, currents of converging thoughts and tidal pulls and he was following her drift. She was speaking Spanish very quickly and pointing toward the lye pit, but what she communicated came in a gush of interior voice that Slaney understood without effort.

Then a man came out of the woods behind the woman and stood like a sentinel with his rifle, his hand on her shoulder.

What are you looking for? the man asked. For a second Slaney believed he had broken through the language barrier once and for all. Because he understood. Then he realized the man had spoken in English.

Looking for the bathroom, Slaney said. He thanked them with everything he had in him. He hoped they understood his sincerity. He thanked them in English and Spanish and he turned and stumbled on through the woods to the pit.

The three of them ended up sleeping in the same small tent, Ada in the middle between Carter and Slaney. He’d hit the ground hard after he stumbled through the tent flap. The ground rose up to meet him and fell with the rhythm of the sea. Great swells lifted him and let him slide down.

Slaney could not remember getting into the tent but he woke in the middle of the night with an amorphous terror pounding through him.

Nothing stirred outside except the surf. The ocean roared up over the beach and drew back. Carter was snoring the clotted, wavering honk of the trumpeter swan.

In the beat while Carter inhaled lived the hope the noise would stop. But Carter kept snoring.

There was the terror and then Slaney felt himself falling, as though from a great height, falling backwards into forever, arms and legs flailing. Below him, his friends had stretched a white sheet that glowed in the dark as the dancers’ white clothes and teeth had glowed under the black light at Hearn’s party. They were waiting to catch him. But as he got closer he realized the white circle was an aerial view of the lye pit. He was heading straight for it.

The fall gathered velocity the closer he got to the ground and finally he thumped down hard and his heart burst out of his chest and he passed out until morning.

He woke with his arm wrapped tight around Ada’s waist, her bum sunk into his hips, his cock hard against her. He got up and tore the tent flap open and a shaft of bright light struck him in the face.

Slaney walked down the beach until he was sure he was alone and took off all his clothes and ran into the surf.

He strode forward until he was up to his chest and he watched for the right wave, rolling in from the horizon. The wave rose higher and higher, sunlight blazing through the thick glassy wall of it, the crumbling white crest plowing toward him. When it reached him he threw out his arms and let it carry him into shore.

Animism

On the first two days sailing up from Colombia, along the Pacific coast, Carter maintained a profound level of drunkenness. The drinking gave him a level gaze and his face slackened and his speech became prim and elegant. The effort of becoming sober for the visit ashore with Lopez had withered him.

It had been a mistake for him to get that sober. Now he was saying he didn’t believe the man’s military credentials.

He said that the lobster, which he had gorged on, dipping each morsel in a bowl of drawn butter, had disagreed with him. He thought he had been poisoned.

Carter told them there was a religion of animism practised in the region where they’d partied. He’d read about it in National Geographic. A mix of witchcraft and Christianity that made use of hallucinogenic roots, ground to powder.

Some of these rituals involved the ancient art of voodoo, he said.

Carter believed they’d given him something altering on the night of the party. Slipped something in his whisky. He’d given up on the idea of drying out as soon as Lopez offered some wine after lunch.

Don’t mind if I do, he’d said. Now he believed they’d been trying to kill him. A formality crept into his diction that frightened Slaney. Then he became very sick.

I have acute indigestion, he said. He was flushed and pale by turns, clammy and sour-smelling, vomiting every hour or so. Ada said his temperature had reached one hundred and four. He’d broken out in a rash and the touch of the bedsheets hurt his skin.

Ada screamed for Slaney and he found that Carter had fallen out of the bed. He was wearing a Stones T-shirt and nothing else. His grey pubic hair a shock.

He sees rats, Ada said. The three of them stared at the bedsheets.

They were all over me, Carter said. The T-shirt was soaked through and Slaney helped him take it off and then he was cold and shivering. He collapsed, banging his head against the wooden bed rail, opening a gash on his cheekbone.

But he kept drinking. Carter believed the alcohol would kill whatever bug he had. He called out for whisky and Ada gave it to him. He slept deeply and sometimes they couldn’t shake him awake. Slaney and Ada had to sail the boat by themselves and nurse Carter. She was determined and waxen from lack of sleep.

He’d started muttering to himself. Sometimes he looked straight through them and spoke about a teapot with a crack. He asked them to bring him a particular teapot and grew agitated when he saw it wasn’t the one he wanted. He called out to his wife through the night.

We’ve got to get him to a doctor, Ada said. I am frightened out of my wits. She had her fists in her hair near her temples and she slid her back down the wall until she was hunched in the corner.

Please, David, she said. A fever like that could kill him. That’s how my mother died. It was so fast. Please.

We’ll get caught, Slaney said. They were off the coast of Nicaragua. He could go in there and try to find a doctor, but they would get caught. She looked up at him from the floor, her eyes glassed over with tears, her nose pink at the tip. She was pitiable and commanding.

Or brain damage, she said.

Okay, I’ll bring him in, Slaney said. I’ll get him to a hospital or clinic or whatever they have. First thing in the morning.

Oh, David, she said, and she rested her forehead against her wrist and sobbed.

The dread that coursed through him straightened his posture. He stood upright and rigid. He must have looked like he had been called to attention.

Why are you with him? he asked.

That doesn’t matter now, she said.

But the fever broke the next morning and Carter became docile and grateful. He drank broth, cupping the bowl with both hands, slopping it all over the sheets. He looked like a mendicant or he looked cursed, munching the soda crackers Ada handed him one by one.

He stayed in bed except to go to the toilet. He hardly spoke to them. After three days Carter was up again, on the deck. Two days later he had fully recovered. By then they were sailing past Mexico. One beautiful morning Slaney found them necking in the galley. Ada had a frying pan on the stove and a pat of butter slid across the black surface, sizzling.

Darling, it’s beautiful on deck, Ada told Carter. Go up and get some sunshine, I’ll call you down when the pancakes are done.

She picked up the chrome bowl with the batter and the whisk chimed against the sides. She had been restored. The haggard fortitude that she’d called on to keep Carter alive had disappeared. She was girlish again.

I feel kind of light-headed, Ada said. Slaney wedged himself into the bench at the table. Ada swivelled more butter over the hot frying pan and put it down on the gimballed stove and poured the batter in and the smell filled up the galley.

I had a flying dream last night, she said. Ever had one of those, David?

I slept the sleep of the dead, he said.

Watch this, Ada said. Are you watching? She jerked the frying pan and the pancake flew up and flipped in the air and she caught it.

Did you see that? Ada asked. She turned to him holding out the pan. Her face was lit up.

You’re making me hungry, Slaney said. She tried to open the bottle of honey, hitting the metal lid with a butter knife, holding the jar between her knees.

Give it here, Slaney said.

No.

Pass it over. He got up to wrestle it away from her but she turned her back and they were roughhousing over the honey and he had her pinned against the counter, but she was curled around the jar with her back to him.

I can do it, she said, and she was laughing. They were both laughing. Then the lid gave and they were embarrassed. They both blushed and Slaney stepped back and she poured out the honey and twisted the jar. A line of it wiggled over her knuckles and she licked it.

I am grateful, she said. I know what getting a doctor would have meant.

They were looking at each other, and her strange eyes, blue and hazel, and what the hell was she doing, she was only nineteen and she seemed without guile.

Slaney thought there was something true in her. He could not understand how she had come to be there with an old drunk. They were overtaken by stillness. The sea was still and there wasn’t a breath of wind.

Carter yelled for Slaney to get up on deck and she had the open jar of honey and they were both self-conscious. Slaney sat down at the table and picked up his knife and fork. He held them upright in his fists.

There, she said. She put the plate in front of him.

Fluffy, Slaney said.

Timing is the thing, she said.

Slaney, Carter yelled. I need you up here. He sounded sober and amazed.

Caroline

Hello, Staff-Sergeant Patterson, O’Neill’s secretary said. She stood up from the desk and left the telephone, lit up and ringing, to lead Patterson down the corridor to the screening room. He’d been following the sailboat’s progress over the weeks and he’d heard about the hurricane on the news.

Superintendent O’Neill is grateful you could come in on such short notice.

That’s my job, Patterson said.

And how’s Mrs. Patterson? the secretary asked. She was trotting down the corridor and Patterson had to rush to keep up. His wife would be making crayon shavings with a cheese grater. The children put the shavings between sheets of wax paper and his wife ironed them, melting the crayon, and they cut out autumn leaves to decorate the classroom.

Mrs. Patterson is fine, thank you.

Still reading her poetry, I guess? she asked. The secretary spoke as if she and Patterson were in collusion about how to deal with his fey and capricious wife.

Patterson had driven Delores through the New England states last year to see the fall colours. She was fond of Emily Dickinson and they’d visited the poet’s cottage.

Oh look, her inkwell, Delores had cried out, startling the other people crowded together in the little rooms on the tour.

The guide had said, Don’t touch. Delores spun around and her hand flew to her cheek as if she’d been slapped.

No, no, I wouldn’t, she blurted. But she held up the inkwell before her like a weapon.

He’d been married for just over twenty years and it was a solid and narrowly focused marriage. Delores taught kindergarten and had kept her figure doing calisthenics and he could trust her to cook meals he loved; or he had grown to love the meals she cooked. She had lots of girlfriends, a rich social life with which he had very little to do.

The poetry mattered to her and she wrote it and went off to meetings and came back tipsy and raw. He didn’t know what went on there but when she returned from a meeting she was distracted and amorous, or obscurely hurt and closed off.

He loved that there were things he didn’t know about her. He couldn’t say what made her tick or why she stayed with him but he felt lucky to live in her orbit.

The soap and candles and chocolates she brought home when kindergarten was over for the year.

The ardent and unformed love the school children had for her — he’d once witnessed a mobbing, each child hugging her waist, digging in against one another for a handful of his wife, and Delores on tiptoe with a box of Popsicles raised over her head.

Their son, Basil, was a cadet in the RCMP, and Patterson would not brag. He would not boast, but it was an effort. And their daughter had broken his heart.

The secretary knocked on a door at the end of the hall and listened and opened it.

Superintendent O’Neill, Staff-Sergeant Patterson has arrived, she said.

He’d been called into the office and there were men with white shirts and ties standing in the dark room and they were facing the screen.

Patterson, O’Neill said. The men all turned to look at him. Come in, Patterson.

O’Neill and Simmonds and Tony Belmont were there and they had called in a few guys Patterson hadn’t met before and O’Neill introduced him. Patterson looked them in the eyes as he shook their hands. He repeated their names, Greenwood, Capardi, Bennett, and Hughes, but he felt the magnetic pull of the screen.

It was a juddering picture full of snow. Washes of emptiness. Grit. There was nothing to see.

We think they’re gone, O’Neill said. They may be lost at sea. We’ve lost them. The screen turned to sand and reconfigured. The picture swished away and came back and the whole image vibrated like the pelt of a frightened animal.

What’s wrong with the signal? Patterson asked.

They hit Hurricane Caroline and we’ve lost the picture, Greenwood said. They are right in the middle of that thing. It’s very doubtful a vessel of that size will get through it.

The device must have been damaged, Bennett said.

There’s no signal, O’Neill said. There’s been a lot of wreckage along the Pacific coast, they’ve got flooding, fires, twenty-four people injured, twelve deaths reported since September 4, the count is rising. Fishing boats crushed. Cattle. Crops destroyed. We’ve got calls out all over the coast. But they haven’t turned up. We think they must have been hit by the storm early this morning.

One of the men crossed in front of the projector and his shirt turned blue and grainy. The light from the projector was full of cigarette smoke. The secretary who had shown Patterson in knocked and opened the door again and she said she had Señor Vasquez from the Mexican Bureau of Immigration on the line for Superintendent O’Neill.

Excuse me, boys, O’Neill said.

Our guys are talking to their guys where we can, but the lines are down, Capardi said. We’re trying to see if they turn anything up. But I’d guess we’re the least of their worries.

The white screen flashed whiter and went grey.

What was that? Simmonds asked.

The projector blew a bulb, Capardi said.

Patterson sat on one of the chairs they had arranged in a row in front of the screen and somebody asked him if he took sugar.

For the first time Patterson felt complicit. He broke a sweat all over.

Carter. Carter had made his choices.

But David Slaney was just a kid.

And the girl was even younger than Patterson’s own daughter. He thought about Ada playing the piano. Patterson had tracked down her father. Sebastian Anderson. He was a widower, a doctor in Toronto. A former medical officer in the navy, held prisoner in a detention camp in Italy. A decorated man, a war hero, probably wrecked by his feckless, wild child.

If something had happened to the girl Patterson would have to contact her father. He thought about the call. He would have to admit he’d met her, heard her at the piano, knew she was talented and strange, and that he’d let her go off with that filthy old goat of a man. Let her get embroiled in illegal activity. He had not taken her aside as he hoped somebody might do, another father, for his own daughter.

Patterson could have put a stop to it. He thought of shaking Slaney’s hand. The boy had been earnest and, Patterson thought, intelligent and desperate. Audacious. The raw will in his eyes. That would be destroyed by another round in prison.

How much of this had to do with Patterson’s promotion? He let himself ponder that question. What if they died out there?

What are they, he asked Simmonds, three weeks from home? Yes, I take sugar.

Upside Down

The sky dropped her fingers into the warm sea and leisurely trailed them along. The hurricane seemed to be a long way off but they could see the sky trailing in the waves.

Carter was charged up. He’d developed the thrusting walk of a man looking for a fight. He saw the storm swish and sway and turn to look over her shoulder at him.

Come and get me, he whispered. He gripped the rail and was transfixed.

Everything dead still, the water smooth and flat. Slaney saw a large glassy patch on the surface near the starboard side, the footprint of a diving whale, and he saw the long black shadow of it, gliding far, far below the surface.

Lower the mainsail, Carter said. I’ll get the rest. The whisper of the canvas flumping, the creak of the boom, the rigging skittering, and they looked up and saw the lines were tangled at the masthead.

I’ll go, Slaney said. He strapped himself to the mast with two loops of rope and climbed the mast steps. He held tight with one arm while he worked up the lines that secured him, lifting them a foot or two up the pole with each step he took.

Then it was upon them. Such instant force and power, seemingly out of nowhere. They were lashed with it, coils of snapping rain and the wind. It seemed to come because Carter had asked for it.

The mast was dipping down near the surface and swinging back up and down again and Slaney was yelling but he didn’t know what he was saying. A wall of plowing white surf bore down on the boat, high as a house.

Slaney lost his footing on the mast steps and clung with all his might, bicycling his feet until he found purchase and he reached out as far as he could, the tangled lines just inches from his fingers.

Get down, David, Carter called out.

We can’t afford to lose the sail, Carter, Slaney said.

Get down, Carter called. And he called David’s name over and over.

I almost got it, Slaney screamed back.

David, Carter said. And Slaney saw the wave billowing over the side and Carter was lifted off his feet and buried by white foam, and the boat disappeared in the avalanche and Slaney was on a pole with the sky swatting him and there was nothing below. Then the prow pointed out of the curdled foam and the boat peeled itself out of the water, the deck emerged, and Slaney saw that Carter lay on his back, rammed against the gunwale. He was still and Slaney thought he might have been knocked unconscious and called to him because another wave was coming as malevolent and full of white mist and crumbling concrete as the last, and Carter got to his hands and knees and shook his head as if he disagreed with the way it was going down and he was rammed hard against the gunwale again.

Then the mast tipped all the way down and a wave bared its white teeth at Slaney’s backside, hanging now over the water, his arms and legs wrapped around the mast. The wave below him was licking its chops, snarling, snapping, and then Slaney was swallowed whole.

It was roaring below the surface, roil and gush, foaming spume, and he wondered how far down he was and if he would ever see the surface again and his lungs were ready to explode. He drew in water and it burned like fire.

Then he felt himself lifted skyward in a great rush and the mast broke free of the fist of the wave and was upright again and Slaney gasped and gasped and slid down and was back on the deck and he untied the ropes around his waist and he couldn’t see Carter.

Maybe Carter had gone below. The crack rang out like a shot canon and the mainsail, soaking wet, was ripped to shreds. Wet ribbons of sail draped themselves over the deck and Slaney waited for the next wave to wash over and pass away and then he slid over the deck to the hatch and was down below.

Where is he? Ada screamed.

Isn’t he down here with you? Slaney shouted, but he was already heading back up to the deck and he saw Carter halfway over the gunwale as if he were trying to make a break for it.

Slaney staggered over the deck and grabbed Carter by the back of his shirt and they rolled together like lovers over the tipping boat and as the boat righted itself they both made it back to the hatch and Carter yelled You first and Slaney went first because he didn’t want to argue and it took Carter a long time to follow. Then he half fell down the hatch.

The drinking had a purpose, Slaney thought. The drinking had called forth Carter’s best self. A lifetime of being loaded had made him composed and stoic in the face of the hurricane. Slaney watched as Carter drew in a deep breath through his nostrils and slowly let it out. They battened down the hatch and went to their cabins to wait it out.

During the night Ada bawled out Slaney’s name. Or he thought she did.

Go to your bunk, Slaney shouted back. Maybe she didn’t want him to be alone. Carter yelled too. It sounded like they were fighting. He thought one of them had thrown something at the other.

The storm hadn’t built; there was no arrival. They say the eye, and now Slaney knew what they were saying.

The eye of the storm.

The eye gave them a good hard look, then the eye lost interest. A roving eye.

The sailboat rose up and seemed to teeter on the crest of what felt like a thirty-foot wave and then it crashed down. It was a motion that entered each of Slaney’s cells and undid all the rhythms in his blood and his inner ear and he felt upside down when he was right side up.

His blood had been touched by the same fingers that had stirred up the sea out near the horizon. For a long time he had the feeling that if he could just drink a glass of water everything would be put right.

There was lots of time to think about how wrong it all was. How funny it felt. Carter saying, You first. Slaney lay in his cot and listened to the vessel groan. A litany of splintering complaint.

The storm went on for thirty-six hours. Slaney didn’t sleep because he kept being jerked awake. Then he was struck by sleep. It came like a blow. It took a fitful dream to draw him back to the surface. Slaney dreamed his way back.

When he woke, his neck was stiff, or it was the only part of him that wasn’t stiff and it felt funny by comparison. The storm was over.

Slaney had dreamt a forest in Norway. He’d never been to Norway nor thought anything about it. In the dream he’d walked by himself through a spare wood of birch, the snow creaked underfoot, and there was someone walking behind him.

Slaney crawled out of his room and found that Ada and Carter were already on deck.

There was a rainbow.

The sun was shearing through the clouds, tacky looking, a velvet painting with religious tones.

There’s land over there, Ada said.

The sails are destroyed, Carter said.

They were near a shoreline. A long, white beach with a few demolished huts, destroyed fishing boats, hulls smashed out. The palm trees were taking a nap, all lying down next to each other on the beach.

The first thing I’m going to do, Carter said. I’m going to call my kids. My oldest girl does ballet. There’ll probably be a concert. They’ve started school now.

I did ballet, Ada said. They offered it at school. You could do sewing or you could do ballet. I did tennis and ballet, but then I just played piano.

I’d have gone for the sewing, Slaney said. Ada leaned over the railing and vomited. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

Can you read music, Slaney? she asked. I’ve been wondering about that.

I didn’t learn that way, Slaney said.

What have I done? Carter asked. What have I done? He was holding onto the rail, looking over the side. He was shaking his head. Ada and Slaney didn’t speak.

I want to hold my wife, Carter said. Little Mary is probably at her ballet class right now.

We’re messed up by this storm, Ada said. We thought we were dead. I did, anyway.

I don’t know what time it is back home, Carter said. They might be having breakfast. The first thing I’m going to do when we get off this boat is find a phone.

I think I cracked a tooth, Slaney said. He spit into his hand and held it out to Carter.

Is that part of my tooth? Slaney asked. Carter reached out a finger and touched the bit of tooth covered in saliva and it stuck to the tip of his finger and he looked at it closely and flicked it away.

I don’t know what that was, he said. That wasn’t anything. Whatever strength Carter had summoned to get them through was the last reserve. He looked old and fragile and diminished. He looked like he was going to have another nervous breakdown.

Look at that rainbow, Slaney said. They were still alive. He lowered himself to the deck because his legs were giving out. They were fucked without the sails. Hearn. He would have to phone Hearn. The authorities would come aboard the boat. It would take a couple of weeks, at least, to get the sails repaired. They would have to go ashore. They were caught. They were as good as caught.

There’s vomit all over the cabin, Ada said. I can’t go back down there yet. But I’m going to need my hairbrush.

All I need is a phone, Cyril said.

My hair is just full of tangles, Ada said. She was raking her fingers through her hair.

You can’t call your family, Slaney said. There’ll be plenty of time for your family later. You can call your wife after we’ve all said our goodbyes.

I’m not saying goodbye to anyone, Ada said. Cyril and I are in love.

Is There Something We Should Know

Slaney sat in a wooden chair across from the immigration officer’s desk. The desk was full of papers and forms. There was a stack of white forms and a stack of pale yellow papers and there were sheets of carbon and the officer had taken Slaney’s passport.

We weren’t planning on a visit, Slaney said. The officer met Slaney’s eyes whenever he spoke. It was a calculating stare devoid of welcome.

He was broad with a clean blue uniform, the cuffs and collar frayed. The officer had a black moustache and thick curly hair and his eyebrows were heavy. His skin was light and there was a black mole high on his cheekbone. The mole gave an otherwise rugged face a feminine haughtiness.

Do you have any illegal cargo on board your vessel, Señor Knight? Any firearms or large sums of cash, illegal substances, marijuana or cocaine?

Slaney said they didn’t have anything like that.

That’s fine, the officer said. Forgive me for asking. It’s procedure, of course. I have to ask.

The officer spread Slaney’s passport open on the desk before him and let his hands fall, loosely linked, between his knees and he rocked slightly in his chair as he stared at it.

We’re heading home, Slaney said. The officer picked up the passport and brought it to the window and held it to the glass, tilting his head to look at it in the natural light. He left the room with the passport and returned empty-handed.

We will wait, Mr. Knight, the officer said. The vessel must be searched before we can let you go. The passport verified. These procedures will happen in good time.

The officer began to attend to the paperwork before him. He wrote on each page that he took from the stack on his left and when he had come to the end of a form he held it out in one hand before him, snapping it straight, and read it through. He frowned while he read and when he was satisfied he placed the completed form in a pile on his right.

The man appeared to have great stores of patience for the forms and became so absorbed in the work that he seemed to forget that Slaney was sitting opposite him.

There was a pile of smaller forms, all blue, that had been pierced with a metal spike. These he removed from the spike by the handful and he read each one and crunched it into a ball and tossed it in the wastepaper basket in front of his desk.

He used a stamp he had sitting on a red ink pad, leafing through another stack of papers in one go, the stamping a hard, fast rhythm like a tribal drum or a heart about to give out. Three hours passed.

I wonder if I could talk to my friends, Slaney said.

Your friends are taken care of, Señor Knight, the officer said. Once we’ve cleared the sailboat you can be on your way.

There was a knock on the door and a man in overalls came in with a ladder and set it up behind the immigration officer’s desk and the men shook hands, speaking in fast Spanish. Both men put their hands on their hips and stood looking up at an air-conditioning unit embedded in the wall. The repairman climbed the ladder and took down the unit bearing the weight on his shoulders and neck and the immigration officer reached up for it, one hand against the repairman’s leg for support.

It was a heavy unit and the two men struggled under the weight of it and Slaney jumped up and took a corner and together the three men moved the unit onto an empty shelf and they stood for a moment looking down into the guts of it, cylinders and coiled wire furred with lint and dust and the Mexicans spoke in Spanish.

The immigration officer noticed that Slaney was out of the chair and told him to sit back down without thanking him for his help. He returned to his desk and after a moment the repairman left the office. Two more hours passed without incident.

At one point the officer put his feet up on the desk and made a phone call and spoke for close to an hour. The conversation was leisurely and for a great deal of it the officer just listened. Slaney had the impression there was a woman on the other end. Part of the phone conversation cracked the man up. He laughed so hard he had to press the bridge of his nose between his finger and thumb to get a hold of himself. He was trembling with giggles and after he hung up he shook his head in disbelief, some story the woman had told him.

The door of the office opened and a woman came in wearing the same blue uniform as the first officer and she had a coffee and a snack for each of them. A taco with beef and guacamole.

Can I see my friends? Slaney asked. The woman told him she didn’t speak English.

Señor Knight, the male officer said. I’m asking the questions here.

After another hour had passed, his taco untouched, the officer gathered up the papers on his desk and filed them in the filing cabinet, which he locked with a key that hung from one of the drawers. He put the key in his breast pocket. He lowered the blinds and left the room.

Slaney tried the door and found it unlocked. All of the offices in the corridor were occupied by people typing and speaking on the phone. There were guards with guns in holsters at their hips. Slaney closed the door quietly and gobbled down the officer’s taco.

The officer returned and dropped Slaney’s passport and a visa on the desk and he told Slaney he was free to go. You can remain in the country for three weeks to repair your boat, he said. I believe you have incurred some damages.

We certainly have, Slaney said.

Before you go, the man said. Is there anything you think we should know?

Not that I can think of, Slaney said.

Then you are free.

What about my friends? Slaney asked.

Your friends, the man said. Of course, they are free also. I believe they are waiting outside.

Get Down There

They were picked up by Immigration, O’Neill said. Little seaside town called Puerto Escondido.

Everybody safe? Patterson asked.

All accounted for, O’Neill said. Patterson had thought they were gone. He pushed his chair back from O’Neill’s desk and stood. He looked out the window at the city below. Then he sat back down, the chair legs squeaking on the linoleum tiles.

He could see Slaney at the party and he thought of himself talking about Clarice Connors. The print of her dress, a sailor motif, anchors and rope and brass buttons. A nest of the oily white papers she used with her hair curlers. How they fell out of her curls, how they rustled on her little vanity table when the wind blew, toppling them end over end. A particular afternoon when the affair had first begun. He hadn’t thought about Clarice in years. The gentle force she had been in his life.

He hadn’t wanted anyone to get hurt on the sailboat. But they were okay. They had survived. For days now he’d been haunted by the thought of Ada Anderson. She was just a child.

And he thought of Hearn’s girlfriend waving the vodka bottle overhead, calling for change. She’d spoken about love and peace as if she were the one who had discovered them, half-baked rhetoric and euphemisms. But when she said forgiveness Patterson had fallen open like a lock with the right key.

He had been compelled to talk against his will. He’d watched for her reaction, horrified and hungry for it, hoping to catch some glimpse of his own daughter in her face. Why things had gone wrong; how to get her back.

He thought he’d let Hearn’s girlfriend judge him and he might learn something. He had been stoned out of his trees. But he knew she suspected him. Her cool banter, the way she’d made him account for himself. So he’d made a bone of Clarice Connors, and he’d thrown the girl the bone.

Slaney had been polite to him. The boy gave the impression of a good upbringing. Patterson wanted to throw the kid back in jail, but he’d never wanted him to drown.

We’ve placed a few calls, O’Neill said. This operation is still a go. But we have to do it without the satellite now. Clearly it was destroyed by the storm. We need a little human contact. We need you to go down there, check out the situation.

Absolutely, sir, Patterson said.

The authorities picked all three of them up on the beach. Somebody went out there in a rowboat. Brought them to shore. We’ve asked our counterparts down there to stamp their passports, let them out. O’Neill had his hands in his pockets and he was jiggling his change, an erratic, nervous percussion.

But they can’t go anywhere without repairs to the boat.

Patterson tugged at the cuffs of his shirt so about half an inch of each sleeve was visible under the suit jacket. He smoothed his hands over the sides of his head. His hair was longer than he was used to for the purposes of the undercover work. It felt unruly.

Here’s the thinking, O’Neill said. Patterson, I want you to make contact with Hearn. Tell him you’ve heard; say you have an inside source down in Mexico. Say you made inquiries after the hurricane. You were concerned about your investment, about the crew. Tell him not to give up yet.

You offer more financing. They get the sails repaired. Tell Hearn. Say they can bribe their way home.

We’ve got a guy down there in the military we can work with. The Mexican military is onside.

You fly down there saying you have the money available. Hearn knows you. All you’ve got to do is sell him on this contact. The fellow, Enrique Hernandez, whom you’ll meet up with, inspects the sailboat, gives them the go-ahead in exchange for what appears to be a bribe.

We want you down there to make sure this thing goes smoothly. You talk to them, see what their thinking is, make sure they’re on course. We don’t have the surveillance now, but you can get a bead on them, if you go down in person. Ask some questions. Appear to be helping them out.

Tequila Sunrise

They’d gone into a crowded bar on top of a hill mostly undamaged by flooding. They could see the lower streets where the water had risen above the verandas and into the front door of an abandoned house. Walls had been torn off some of the buildings and they could see an exposed bedroom, wallpaper peeling in long strips, the mirror catching passing headlights as a few cars rolled by.

They sat near the entrance of the bar so Slaney could keep his eye on the road. There was a woman wiping the glasses with a red rag in the darkest corner of the bar. Slaney could see the rag prick the shadows as she snapped it between glasses.

Out on the cobblestones, a hen was testing the pool of light under the street lamp, touching it once and then again with its claw, jerking the inert lump of its blazingly white body forward by the neck, taking teensy steps. The hen froze in the centre of the light, full of trembling.

A motorcycle puttered through the strolling couples on the street. The driver had a black girl in a yellow dress sitting sideways between his outstretched arms.

The hen stopped thrusting its neck forward and assumed an outer-space stillness before it burst up like a thing shot, zigzagging into the restaurant, lifting off the ground with ungraceful leaps and crashes, veering toward a group of men who stood in a circle clinking their beer bottles, spilling froth.

A waiter brought over a bottle of tequila and three shot glasses and he poured for them and left the bottle on the table.

Carter lifted his glass immediately and held it close as if he expected someone to snatch it away from him.

Ada brought hers to her nose and sniffed. Slaney raised his glass to them and they did the same and they drank at the same time and touched the glasses back down on the table carefully and Slaney filled them again.

It sure goes down, Ada said. She laid her fist on her chest. Then she thumped her chest twice.

You’re shivering, Slaney said. What did you tell the immigration officers?

I said it seemed like our last visit was a million years ago. They saw the stamp on my passport and asked what I was doing back here again. I said I was sorry for the devastation. I said it had seemed like such a pretty country a couple of weeks ago and now everything is different. I said I was here by accident.

There was a man with a white gym bag and a white shirt with a glittering appliqué Elvis on the front. The man unzipped the gym bag at the table next to them and there was a small commotion, people getting up to see, gathering around.

Slaney’s eyes had adjusted to the dark and he saw, on the far wall, a giant turtle’s head and its two claws mounted on a varnished plaque, the turtle floating in the murky shadows, covered in dust.

What happened in that office? Ada said. They kept us for hours and then they just let us go.

Carter showed all his teeth; it was the opposite of a smile. It was a naked wince Carter had no idea he was making.

What did you tell them, Carter? Slaney said. They’d lost Carter to some netherworld of spirits, or it was self-regard. He had decided to save his own skin. Slaney was sure of it.

Did you tell them about the dope? Slaney asked.

Of course not, Carter said.

Did they make you some kind of promise? Slaney asked. He poured Carter another drink.

Leave him alone, Ada said.

Your poor wife, Slaney said. Your kids. The bloody sailboat. They had moored the boat in a quiet cove away from the main beach, out of the surf.

David, stop it, Ada said.

What did they promise you, Carter? Slaney asked. You’re going to have a rough time explaining Ada to your wife. You think they’ll cut you a deal. They won’t cut you a deal. It doesn’t work that way down here. Did they say you could keep the sailboat? They won’t let you keep her, Carter. We’ll all rot together in a Mexican hole.

Why had Hearn trusted Carter? His height might have had something to do with it, Slaney thought. Not his height — his bearing. He was short and arrowlike. Everything he wore fit him properly. That might have been part of it. Or it was his voice. He was sonorous and slow-spoken when he needed to be. He had a deep voice that someone like Hearn might mistake for spiritual gravity.

Ada was tipping her tiny shot glass between her finger and thumb before drinking down the tequila in two swallows.

The guy with Elvis on his shirt turned out to be a magician. Slaney had thought it would be a gun in the white gym bag but it was a top hat and a white dove. It flew out from a red silk scarf and circled above their heads, perching in the rafters. They had come through the hurricane and here was a reward.

A magic show, Carter said, how perfectly quaint.

Are you drunk again? Slaney asked him.

There are men, Carter said, who build up a resistance, gradually, over years and years of drinking. Those men are visionaries.

And you’re one of those men, Slaney said.

I am indeed, he said.

Cyril, it’s going to be okay, Ada said. They let us go, didn’t they? The hen had moved under a nearby table; they could see it now and then, through the legs of the crowd. It had lifted a claw and was standing on the other one, frozen mid-step, unable to move. Ada downed the third shot and she took up the menu. The crowd was clapping for the magician.

What a funny thing to happen, Ada said. Why did they let us walk?

I don’t think it’s funny, Slaney said. He could tell she was frightened. A woman came out from the bar and put a saucer with lime wedges on their table and she waited while they read the menus. She gazed out the entrance to the street. It had begun to rain again and there was a low, loud rumble of thunder. Several men were carrying a large sheet of corrugated tin down the road. It wobbled and boomed out a hollow metal twang.

Solo pollo, the waitress said. She gathered the menus and hugged them to her chest.

I think I’ll try the chicken, Slaney said. The woman took a box of matches from her apron and struck one. She lit the candle on the table and Carter’s shadow stretched from his chair legs to the wall behind him and up to the ceiling and rocked like a punching clown, though he hadn’t moved. Ada picked up the bottle from the table and held the bottom of it near the flame and she said there was a worm.

Just rotting away in there, aren’t you, little worm, she said.

The worm is lucky, Cyril said. Whoever drinks the worm, you’re set for life. It contains everything.

I don’t need luck, Ada said. I have you.

The waitress brought them rice and beans and chicken.

Slaney watched Ada eat. She crunched the bones and sucked the marrow. She was ravenous. He saw her glance toward the table the hen had run under. The hen was gone. She dropped the bone onto her plate and took up a napkin and patted her lips.

They had to get out, but Slaney wasn’t leaving without the weed. He wasn’t going back without it. He expected the military to roll through the doorway at any moment. He imagined Ada jittering and bouncing in her chair, arms flailing, as some Mexican soldier emptied a machine gun into her.

He would fall face down in his refried beans. Carter would be blown backwards, crashing onto the floor, chair and all. He could see it as surely as he could see Ada sucking on the bones, candlelight on her greasy chin. It came to him slowly but he was absolutely certain: there are worse things than dying.

Going back without the weed would be worse.

The sensible thing to do would be to get the hell out. Travel inland; keep going. Leave Ada with Carter and the yacht. He thought of Jennifer saying she would take him back.

But he wasn’t going to do the sensible thing. They might know about the pot, but why hadn’t they seized it? They had allowed the three of them to walk. It may be the authorities had a plan, but if they did, Slaney would wait them out. See what they had in mind. Slaney could be patient too.

The man with the Elvis shirt had a crowd now and he suddenly turned to Slaney’s table and, leaning in, he cupped Ada’s chin. He smoothed her hair behind her ear. She glanced up and her eyes were big. Believing. This must be what Carter had fallen in love with: a willingness to believe.

The magician showed the bar his empty hand and he rubbed it over her ear and pulled out a large gold coin.

Everyone in the bar laughing, applauding. Ada touched her burning ear.

They’d rented rooms in a hostel overlooking the water but they drank in the bar until light leaked up from the horizon a furious red. They could see the sailboat as they walked back to their rooms. The mast in silhouette, a needle swaying gently like a metronome. And the soldiers lounging on the deck, black against the orange and azure sky.

Dirty Laundry

He was walking by her bedroom door in the hostel, and he glanced in because she was raising her voice. She had a nasty edge. She was speaking to the maid.

Ada ripped down the top bedsheet. The maid was dark with high cheekbones and big eyes and a taut body. She wore a fitted black skirt and a white cotton blouse. She looked to be about their age.

Ada told her the sheets were dirty. The maid had her hands on her hips. The sun behind her punched through under her arms and between her legs. Carter was sprawled in a wicker chair, snoring. Every breath he drew caused the wicker to squeak.

These sheets aren’t clean, Ada said. Her voice climbing notch after notch. He could hear the privileged childhood, her enunciation icy and clipped. An echo of a British accent she must have picked up from her parents, something he heard when she was tipsy or enraged.

What do you mean? the maid said. This might have been her only English sentence. Slaney thought it might be the only sentence anyone ever needed.

Look there, Ada said. She pointed and made a small circle with her finger over the sheet. And farther down another small circle. Slaney and the maid leaned in too. And then Slaney could see it. Two stains. For a brief moment the three of them were frozen over the bed, leaning in, scrutinizing, and then they leaned back.

The maid tore the sheet off and bunched it in her arms and strode out of the room. Ada turned her back on Slaney and looked out the window at the water.

I’m not sleeping in someone else’s filth, she said. So you can get that look off your face.

Cyril has a wife and three children, Slaney said. She didn’t answer.

He’s a dirty old man, Slaney said.

I’m not interested in you, she said.

What do you mean? he said.

Hello, Stranger

The next morning Slaney realized he was proud of coming through the storm alive. He felt he had been judged by it and punished accordingly and he had endured. He wanted Hearn to understand what had been overcome. It was time to place the call.

He sat on the wooden chair watching for the red blinking lights over the phone booths that indicated a call had been placed. He’d bought some peanuts and he tore the package with his teeth. A speck of plastic stuck to his bottom lip. He blew it away, a hard pfft.

Slaney tilted back his head, tipped the peanuts in.

He was overcome with the phantom thrust and fall of the sailboat battered by the hurricane. How it had shuddered against each blow. The rhythm of the storm was a violent sensation that visited him, swished in his blood and made the solid world sway.

The operator called his name: Douglas Knight. Numero ocho. It took him a moment to know they were talking about him. Douglas Knight. Numero ocho. Slaney was used to the name but he could forget about it. He jumped up and headed for booth eight with the blinking red light and inside the phone was ringing loud and shrill and he picked it up and he could not believe how much he wanted to hear the voice of somebody he knew.

Hearn’s voice.

Listen, Hearn said. I’m sending a guy down there. I’m sending Roy Brophy. You met him at the party. The Mexicans know about the cargo but they can be bought off.

What do you know about Brophy? Slaney said. Where did he come from? You don’t know shit about Brophy, do you.

Slaney wondered if a person comes close to death, or if a person’s death is a fixed point that’s always equidistant from the present, no matter what the present happens to be.

It leaps, that’s what Slaney was thinking. Death leaps over the space between the future and the present. It was the heat in the waiting room.

Or the quaking pleasure of hearing Hearn’s voice. He was suddenly scared shitless.

We nearly died out there, man, Slaney said. And now it feels like that again.

We’re going to get you out, Hearn said. I’ll be honest. Brophy’s all we got.

There were turning points from which there could be no return, Slaney had learned. He wondered if he’d stumbled on one of those.

You didn’t tell me about the girl, he said.

What girl, Hearn said.

Carter’s girl, Slaney said. Ada.

What the hell are you talking about?

The girl, Hearn. The girl.

Get a hold of yourself, Slane. Doug. I mean Doug. You sound like a nervous wreck. You’ve got to be careful now.

I’m being careful, Slaney said. He thought of coming up from downtown St. John’s, very drunk, with Jennifer one night, a particular night, dried leaves swirling around in the park. Leaves rising up from the frost-stiff ground, twisting up in columns of wind and scattering low again across the grass.

She’d had a bottle of Baileys in her purse. They weren’t careful. There was no being careful involved in what he felt back then.

This was one of the things prison had done to him. He was full of care. Care worn.

Roy Brophy is going to meet you, Hearn said. He has a contact in the military down there. The military contacted Immigration. Brophy’s already made them an offer. That’s why they let you go. Brophy brings you the money, you give the money to the contact. You’re free to go. We hire the locals to repair the boat.

Are you kidding? Slaney asked. This guy calls off the army? You’re kidding, right? But he found himself believing it. Why not?

This is how things are handled down there, Hearn said.

You trust this guy, Slaney said.

I do, Hearn said. I believe him.

Lopez knew about the last trip, Hearn, Slaney said. He knew all about it. Took a pistol out, laid it on the table while we were having our lunch.

Get the boat ready to sail, hire some guys. Brophy will have the money for fuel and supplies. You hand over a suitcase to the authorities. That’s all you have to do.

There’s a girl here, Barlow, and she’s very young and I’m afraid she’s going to get hurt, Slaney said.

I didn’t know about the girl, Hearn said.

The Sails

Slaney saw three men on bicycles with dining room chairs. They had removed the cushions and put their heads through the wooden frames of the seats, the legs sticking up in the air, so they could steer the bikes and pedal at the same time. Moving furniture out of the flood waters.

Two men had walked past him with a giant square of sky and cloud, a mirror they had scavenged unbroken from a restaurant. There were men laying sacks of sand against the bank of a rising river. Women sitting sideways on bikes their husbands pedalled. And men, alone, riding bikes with a flat of eggs held out on the palm of one hand. Here and there, the stink of sewage. Broken pipes spewing up from the ground.

Two days after the storm the town bakery had reopened, despite the smashed plate-glass window, and in the evenings women carried decorated cakes home from work.

Men had come in on the backs of flatbed trucks from villages farther inland to help with the reconstruction. Slaney had hired five men to fix the sails.

In the morning he and Ada were alone at the communal breakfast table.

He asked her to pass the milk.

Of course, she said. Sugar also? She passed the sugar and turned her book over beside her plate and reached for the basket of bread.

I’ve been thinking, she said. She lifted her white sunglasses to the top of her head. David? You should get out. What are you doing?

I’m getting through it, he said. He meant he was moving through time. He was starting to believe something entirely different about time. In prison he had thought time was an illusion. But now he believed time was a natural force, like the hurricane, except he believed that it could be harnessed.

He made me feel like I was special, she said. Isn’t that silly?

Carter was sleeping it off in the room over the kitchen. He slept most days until late afternoon.

We’ve got to keep going now, Slaney told her.

It was hard leaving my father, Ada said. She blinked very fast and the colour of her eyes changed. She was crying. Slaney didn’t know how to compose himself.

I more or less ran away, she said. Cyril promised me a house after the trip. I didn’t care about the house. I just wanted to be in love. My father was so proud of my music. He came to all my performances. I just couldn’t keep playing, David. That was the thing. I started to hate it. And it was the only thing I loved. I didn’t want to hate it.

She had no control over her mouth and it stretched slowly so her teeth and gums showed and the lump of wet bread and then she pulled her mouth shut. Her chin trembled. Her shoulders drooped and shook a bit. There was no other sound from her while this happened.

It was a mistake, she said.

I’m sorry, Slaney said. Then she giggled. She was laughing at her predicament.

The things you see in retrospect, she said. He’s bald, for Christ’s sake. You don’t understand it, you couldn’t.

You think I haven’t been in love? Slaney said.

It is ridiculous to imagine you matter, she said. She waved at the room and the ocean beyond the room with the butter knife.

You matter, Slaney said. He thought it was true. She was only six years younger than he was, but it seemed like there were decades between them. He’d made mistakes too. He was living out the mistakes he’d made, doing it over, or trying to fix it, and look at him — he still mattered. He mattered very much.

It’s impossible, she said. He figured she meant the hurricane and the money they stood to lose and Carter, almost catatonic for hours at a time. Carter demanding they let him go home to his wife. We’ll have you back in a jiffy, Slaney kept telling him.

Just to love someone, Ada said.

I don’t believe you ever loved him, Slaney said.

The whole thing is impossible, she said. She wiped her nose by flicking the bone of her wrist under it. Then she reached for the marmalade. It was just out of reach.

She brought the dish of marmalade across the table by sticking her knife into it. The little white bowl skittered across the table toward her under the knife tip. Slaney knew that he would never see this side of her again.

You’re going to make it out of this, he said.

I’m getting a tan, she said. That’s what I’m going to do.

She put the piece of bread down on the side plate and balanced the knife on the marmalade bowl and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. Then she pulled her fingers through her hair, patted it down. She threw back her shoulders. Slaney could see the print of her teeth in the piece of bread. He didn’t try to touch her; he let her keep going.

You are probably in love with me, she said.

I’m not in love with you, Slaney said. Then Slaney told her. He didn’t know what he was going to say before he said it. He told her about Jennifer and the kid, and how she was gone.

It had to do with the kid, he said. She wanted to feel secure. He said he had believed, for a while, that he was doing the trip for Jennifer. But that wasn’t true at all.

He said how there were things you could make happen and he was good at that. It seemed that there was nothing he could not animate.

But there were things that just happened to you, he told Ada. Things you couldn’t see coming. There were things that could knock you out. He’d already ended up in jail once and he might very well have fallen in love with Ada except he thought she was cold. He told her that.

If he had fallen in love with her it was something he would work his way out of as fast as he could, he said.

Cyril has a wife, he said. He’s got youngsters. A family he’s temporarily abandoned. But men don’t leave their wives. They don’t leave their kids. You’re his Maserati. He’s a lush. The two of you will probably be the end of me.

Probably, she said.

I am already in too deep, he said. Do you know that feeling?

Get out, she said. Why don’t you get out?

Slaney had been forced to listen to them every night on the boat. There had been giggles and thumping and some cries that sounded authentic and he’d had to go up on deck and wait it out.

Did you ever get blamed for something you didn’t do? Ada asked. She told him about a nun who taught her piano. The wooden ruler Sister Consilio used to count the beats as she paced behind Ada’s back, listening to her bang out Mozart. The nun kept saying Ada wasn’t trying hard enough.

I don’t think I ever did, Slaney said.

After a while you decide you might as well do the things you’re blamed for, she said.

I did them from the start, Slaney said. Otherwise there would have been a lot of catching up to do.

My father was a prisoner of war, she said. Being in the navy required a lot of him. They shot him in the leg, left him with a limp.

So he is brave, Slaney said. He’ll be okay.

Whatever he gave, he didn’t get it back, she said. Don’t count on me, David. I’m warning you.

But I am counting on you, he said.

You can hollow yourself out, she said. Then it’s too late. Do you believe that?

You think we’re going to get caught, he said. She said she did think that. She was certain of it.

Then why don’t you leave? Slaney said.

Because I’m going to make sure nothing happens to Cyril. He’s helpless.

The hurricane threw us off, Slaney said. We can’t let a little thing like a hurricane get in our way.

The Bull

Patterson was at the Plaza de Toros, in Acapulco, for the meeting with Hernandez. He had arrived early and the sun was high and the band of his hat cut into his forehead. The hat was white with a black ribbon at the crown and a very small red feather. He’d bought it off a revolving rack outside a shop that catered to tourists.

There’d been a rack of sharks’ teeth beside the hats, the upper and lower jaws attached by a film of cartilage, and all the rows of teeth, pointing inward, very white and small. He’d tried on the hat and looked at himself in the tiny cracked mirror that hung from a piece of twine on a nail.

Hernandez would find him; he just had to wait. It was important to appear unhurried. He removed the hat and saw it was coated with dust. The dust gummed up and felt gritty and he saw that the hat was whiter than he had thought.

A speckled feather: he’d let the guy charge him a fortune because he’d needed to cover his head. There was a thing that happened to him in Mexico: he could be persuaded by a burst of colour. Everything was red and aqua blue and lime green and orange; you didn’t see this in Canada, where it was all earth tones, dun and charcoal. There was nothing wrong with a feather. It was a nice touch. A person could get away with little touches of elegance in a hot climate.

The bull galloped into the arena and kicked and jackknifed. It was maddened and desultory by turns. The shine and muscle awed Patterson and became ordinary and awed him again. The bull embodied unsustainable awe.

A cloud of dust was settling. His shirt stuck to his back and his pant legs tugged at him. The ribbing of his acrylic sock imprinted on his damp leg.

Hearn had called him: I need someone to talk to, man. He’d given Hearn a day. He had figured he’d give Hearn a day to call him before he tried to make contact himself. O’Neill hadn’t wanted him to wait but screw O’Neill.

Come over, man, have a drink, Hearn said. Patterson was going to get the promotion. The promotion was a sure thing now.

He would visit Alphonse when he got back. He’d pay the bill in full. Sometimes he was afraid Alphonse would forget him between visits, but he never did. What if something happened to him while he was on the job? Who would explain Patterson’s absence? His brother would feel abandoned.

He felt a drip of sweat move down his face, and another and another. Who would take care of Alphonse?

The matador looked like a china doll, prissy and brave. There was gold brocade crusted on the man’s shoulders and chest and climbing up the legs of his stockings. The red cape flapped out and the bull charged through, kicking up dust. The matador twisted his hip to the side. He seemed to rise on his toes. Then he turned and ran like a cartoon stick-man.

The bull was full of pent-up violence and a sly heaviness.

And there, at last, was Hernandez. He made his way toward Patterson through the crowd. He was dressed in a screaming red shirt and white suit.

The Mexicans could do that, Patterson had observed. They could keep a bright linen suit crisp-looking in any kind of heat. Hernandez was not wearing a hat. A black ponytail hung down his back. He cut a figure.

Hernandez stopped and spoke to a young woman in a black dress. He wanted to show Patterson that he could be languid. He wanted Patterson to understand that he would decide on the formalities. The woman stood and gestured toward her children. Three young boys stood up beside her. Hernandez took her hand while he spoke to her. Then he made his way to Patterson.

Señor Hernandez, buenos días, Patterson said. He shook the man’s hand. Both men turned to the arena. They pretended to scrutinize the work of the matador.

You have to be tolerant, Hernandez said. He gestured toward the bull. Patterson was not interested in philosophizing about the bull. He found it a dull dance. There were lags. There was despondence. Currents could pulse through the crowd but there could be long moments when nothing happened.

Hernandez had worked his way up, as Patterson understood it. He had bought beach property for nothing at the right moment near Puerto Vallarta. Richard Burton and Ava Gardner had made a movie and Burton had bought Elizabeth Taylor a place and a cluster of hotels went up and Hernandez had invested.

He had a taxi stand with fifty vehicles; he owned three midsized vessels. He had been a drug runner and an informant. He was fit and unfathomable.

The cape caught on the animal’s horn and a terror set up in the bull. There was nothing graceful now. It had been stabbed twice and its haunches shivered. It ran a few tight circles, shaking its great bone of a head. It was comical, the cape on the horn, causing a peripheral and stagnant terror. The bull had lost its animality, was all big brown girly eyes, coquettish and mannered.

Hippies, said Hernandez. Children. Something in the stalls had caught his eye. It was a redhead in a bandana and halter top.

The girl was lanky and pale and hunched, she was making her way over the knees of spectators toward the end of the row. She wore a long patchwork skirt. Patterson wasn’t sure what Hernandez meant. He appeared disgruntled.

They are so free in your country, Hernandez said. Then the cape fell off and the bull trotted to the centre of the arena and stood still. It appeared that Patterson would have to accept a lecture on the desultory longing that had passed through a generation of North American kids. It was what he wanted to crush in Hearn and Slaney; his own daughter had fallen prey to it, he didn’t need to be lectured.

The bull had given up or pretended to give up. It would not co-operate. It would not bother to make its own death worthwhile or full of sentiment.

Do you know Lorca? Hernandez asked.

Was he at the meeting with Intelligence last week? Patterson asked.

García Lorca, Hernandez said.

Patterson didn’t answer. Delores read Lorca. He knew who Lorca was. This guy in his linen with his toned chest and gold chains. Hernandez crossed his arms and his shirt collar fell open and Patterson saw a cross. The man lifted his chin toward the redhead across the arena; she had squished herself between two Mexican men.

Playing with fire, Hernandez said. It’s the pill.

Yes, said Patterson. This was something they could agree upon.

The pill is to blame, Hernandez said. Patterson had come across the flesh-coloured plastic dial, labelled with the days of the week, in his daughter’s brassiere drawer. A rotating wheel with a window.

The wheel turned and allowed you to press the pill from behind through a foil cover so it popped out the little window. Her bras and girdles and a nest of stockings. He had been looking for pot. He had asked her if she’d tried it and she’d said no. But he didn’t trust her. He trusted her but he felt compelled to check.

He had not thought of his daughter’s bras and stockings and girdles as the undergarments of a young woman but when he found the pill packet he felt the sexual static like electricity and flicked his hand out of the drawer as if burned.

The pill, you think the pill is the problem, Patterson said.

Young women, Hernandez said. They have turned against their fathers.

Patterson’s daughter had turned away from everything he and Delores had tried to give her. He thought of the little girl she had been. How she would stand on a chair in the kitchen and fall forward into his arms. How tightly she held on to his neck. How she leaned against him while he talked to his wife in their small kitchen. She needed to be leaning on him or climbing on him as soon as he came home from work. She loved showing him her printing, a little scribbler full of letters, nonsensical rhymes about rain or talking dogs. She played the piano for him, her legs swinging hard under the stool, banging out “Hot Cross Buns.”

A drop of sweat inched down Patterson’s cheek. The crowd sent out a small complaint, a collective yell toward the bull. The crowd didn’t want to see the animal acquiesce. If some part of the bull was timid or polite, or willing to compromise, the crowd wanted that part cut out and served on a plate.

Hernandez spoke unaccented English. Or if there was an accent, Patterson could not detect it. The man’s eyes were almost black and Patterson could see a wily intelligence.

Patterson always made a point: engage the eye of the contact; hold the eye. It was a sort of flirting.

They were both essentially untrustworthy men; they were savvy to the ways of trust and saw it was predicated on a flimsy belief system. Trust was an unwillingness to think things through.

It was a collapse in the ability to reason, an intoxicating sentimentality. The ornate work of giving in.

His little girl: he thought of her in the plastic swimming pool they’d bought for her birthday, he thought of her kicking her legs and clots of mown grass on the surface, she was what? — five or six — and the chocolate cake on the patio and her little friends from next door.

Two banderillas wagged from each of the bull’s shoulders. Then the animal got frisky again. It was dying. It charged and the hooves danced up and kicked out and the matador draped the animal’s head and hop-stepped. The bull disappeared in the red flash and came back.

Patterson would meet Slaney and bring him to a bank where he would withdraw forty thousand dollars and Hernandez would be waiting on the sailboat along with the rest of the soldiers and he’d accept the bribe.

They need provisions and fuel, Hernandez said. The men have already repaired the sails.

I’ll be there to oversee the exchange, Patterson said. Hernandez stared hard at the bull. He didn’t answer.

I’m down here to keep an eye, Patterson said. We got them on three counts if they make it back to Canada. These kids will never see the light of day.

We will meet again on the sailboat, then, Hernandez said. He turned to shake Patterson’s hand.

What Patterson admired was the way the animal jackknifed all that weight, turning from the cape to charge it again. The momentum behind each buck and shudder.

He loved that the fight was fixed. Every step planned and played out. Always the bull would end up dead.

It was the certainty that satisfied some desire in the audience. The best stories, he thought, we’ve known the end from the beginning.

You’re Coming with Me

Slaney came down the stairs of the hostel and Roy Brophy was standing at the common room window watching the surf. He was wearing new jeans and a rope belt and a white cotton shirt with a Nehru collar.

Brophy was looking out at the sailboat. The new sails were up and the sun on the white canvas was very bright and the sea was full of sparkle.

Roy, Slaney said. Patterson turned around.

Doug, how the hell are you? The men shook hands. Patterson gripped him hard and he met his eyes. Slaney’s hair was longer, curly and black, and his eyes looked bluer because of the tan and he’d lost weight.

Heard you had quite a trip, Patterson said.

Quite the wind, Slaney said. Not something I’d like to try again, let me tell you.

She’s looking pretty good out there now, Patterson said. They both turned toward the boat. Patterson had a jocularity, Slaney thought, that was a notch too upbeat. The handshake had gone on for a second too long. The man was perspiring.

Thanks for coming down, man, Slaney said.

No sweat, Patterson said. I’m happy to help. I know how things work down here. I have to look out for my investment.

They serve a half-decent breakfast here, Slaney said. You want something?

I’m ready to hit the road. It won’t take us an hour. You guys are planning to sail tomorrow, right? We go to the bank and get the money and the authorities are waiting on the sailboat for us the next day. We hand over the money; they count it. You guys are good to go. I don’t foresee difficulties. We want to get you guys back to Vancouver, start turning a profit.

That sounds good, Slaney said.

Sound good to you? Patterson asked.

That sounds fine.

They thought it was the potholes before they realized a flat. They rolled into a garage on the side of the road. Slaney jacked up the Jeep and removed the tire.

There were chickens running around in the gravel outside and a clothesline with a few rags on it. There was a child on a weathered stoop with a doll. The little girl had on a faded red dress and when the Jeep came up the drive in a cloud of dust she stepped back inside the house and watched them through a screen door. She stood in the shadows of the hallway but one knee, covered in the red skirt, was pressed against the screen.

A man in a white undershirt took the tire from Slaney without a word and dunked it in a trough of water and slowly turned it, holding the tire upright with just the tips of his fingers.

Three men appeared from the fields behind the house. They gathered around the tire and watched and didn’t speak much. Whatever they said was in Spanish. Brophy stood with his hands on his wide hips, his back to the men, looking at the wall of tools.

Look at that, Slaney said. A jet of bubbles rose in the water near the tire’s rim and the man lifted it out and held it up to his chest and Slaney could see a piece of green glass jammed in the rubber. The man brought it over to a work counter and Slaney and Brophy went outside to share a joint.

You have a family? Slaney asked.

I’ve got a daughter and a son, Patterson said.

And you got a wife, Slaney said.

Wife and kids, Patterson said. I’d say you’re about my daughter’s age. Give or take.

You’re a contractor, Slaney said.

I’m a contractor, Patterson said. Almost twenty-five years.

I just want to know who I’m dealing with, Slaney said. He could hear a bell tinkling nearby. It sounded clear and eerie, a tiny warning bell. Something was rustling in the dirt on the other side of the garage.

I’m here to get your money and make sure it goes through the proper channels, Patterson said. I’m acquainted with the people down here.

You’re a friend of Barlow’s, Slaney said.

I’m close to retiring, Patterson said. But a little extra wouldn’t go astray. I have expenses. Friend, I would say no. Not a friend. I figure a man has one or two friends his whole life, if he’s lucky. That’s if he’s lucky. My brother is my friend. My wife is my friend. Barlow I would call a business acquaintance. I met Barlow because somebody gave me his name. Somebody knew I had some capital I wanted to invest. I called him up.

You called him up, Slaney said.

I called him up, asked if he wanted to get together, Patterson said. He took a long drag on the toke Slaney passed him and dropped it into the dirt, pressed down on it with the toe of his shoe. A goat had come around the corner of the garage. It looked at Slaney with its yellow eye, the vertical black pupil. The goat opened its black-lipped mouth and baaed at them. Then it trotted away, the bell piercingly sweet.

Your friend Barlow is a good cook, nice people he hangs around with, he’s got a nice girl. They’re nice people. They had me over. Singing and talking, it was a very nice evening. A young man, intelligent, doing his university, seems ambitious, and I think to myself, Okay, maybe. I’ll take a chance on this guy.

You’re in it for the money, Slaney said.

I know Hernandez, Patterson said. This is a couple of days’ work for me down here. Take a few days. This is money should my daughter decide on a university education. I see her as maybe a lawyer.

The man in the white undershirt walked past them with the tire then and Slaney went back to the Jeep with him and they had the tire back on in a few minutes.

Patterson peeled off some money from a wad he had in his pants pocket and the man looked at it and took a blue elastic band off his wrist and put it around the bills and put them away.

Slaney and Patterson drove along a dirt road for fifteen minutes more. The only thing they saw on the road was a barefoot man on a horse with a rope that was tied to the horns of a dusty white ox that plodded behind.

They found the bank and parked in front of it. The beach was a short walk away. The Jeep was hot to the touch and Slaney was sticking to the seats. He closed his eyes for a moment.

He was thinking of Hearn’s girlfriend with her hand pressed flat against Brophy’s chest. How she had shoved Brophy into the corner and interrogated him.

She had not trusted Brophy either. But Hearn wanted the trip to be a success. He wanted it so badly he was willing to talk to a guy who phones up cold, out of the blue. A guy he’s never heard of.

I’ll be at the beach, grabbing a bite to eat, Slaney said. Want me to order you something?

No, I’m careful about the food here. I’ll find you when I get out of the bank, Patterson said.

I’ll be here, Slaney said.

Don’t worry, I’ll find you.

Slaney sat where he had a view of the beach and a view of the front doors of the bank.

The timbers that held up the thatched roof of the little restaurant were painted jaunty blue and the counter along the back wall was tiled in blue and white. A man was cutting the heads and tails off fish he was pulling from a bucket on the concrete floor. He slapped each fish down on a counter of sheet metal slathered in blood and guts and each time he brought the knife down a cloud of flies rose and settled. After every fish tail he scraped the cleaver blade over the skim of red water on the counter and sluiced it into the bucket below.

The ocean was greenish and the sand was as white as could be and a woman with a beautiful body in a white bikini stood up from her towel. Her hands swatted at her ass, brushing off sand, and she pulled on a scuba mask and fitted a snorkel into her mouth. It made her eyes bulge and her mouth look surprised and dumb. She put on flippers and walked toward the ocean like the flamingos Slaney had seen in the zoo, picking up her knees. Slaney ordered a beer and some beans and rice and fish.

He reminded himself to have a good time. He had never liked the idea of heat but it had got inside him on the last trip and it had unlocked a slow longing for salt and cold drinks. The desire for something was on the tip of his tongue, a word or belief, something half articulated that he realized he could wait for; whatever it was, he didn’t have to force it.

Slaney had cleaned off the tin plate with a tortilla and pushed the plate aside and he’d finished his beer when Brophy came out of the bank and walked down the hill to the beach with a duffle bag. The afternoon enveloped Brophy in a rippling jello of heat, and he appeared warped and elongated in the waver, the duffle bag dragging one shoulder down. When he spotted Slaney, he lifted a finger in a weak salute. Brophy’s shirt was soaked through and sticking to him and he looked cold and white like raw fish.

Drink? Slaney asked.

I’d like to get going, Brophy said. Slaney stood and counted out some money and tucked it under the plate and he looked out at the ocean.

There was a commotion on the beach. Someone was screaming. A woman on the beach was crippled up and bent with the effort of making herself heard. Begging and pointing toward the water. Flinging her arm out toward the horizon, grabbing at people.

There was a swimmer a long way out. Slaney could see someone’s head, a silhouette, far away, or it was a buoy. He gripped the wooden railing that separated the restaurant from the beach and leapt over it, and ran to the edge of the water. He yelled over his shoulder to Brophy to come help.

Somebody’s drowning out there, let’s go, he shouted. He’d taken off his shoes as he ran and when he got back later the shoes were still there, but far apart from each other. He remembered taking one shoe off, because he’d had to hop-hop with his foot in both hands before he could toss it. The other one must have come off by itself.

He’d taken off his T-shirt too. He would have no memory of doing that.

Another man with a lifeguard ring was ahead of him and got to the drowning woman first. This man and the woman were going under together and whatever they said was underwater. She must have been shouting, You’re coming with me. And he must have shouted, No, you’re coming with me.

But the language was bubbled and came out silvery and wiggling and broke apart before it got to the surface. On the surface there was just the sucking up of sky and foam and the language went in backwards and garbled and on the surface there was love and desperation and a war of save me, save me.

She was the kind of strong that could hoist a car over her head if she wanted, but what she wanted, with all her might, was to drown the guy who got there first.

The guy was speaking Spanish. Slaney didn’t hear it but he formed the impression it was Spanish. He was from there and handsome, these were Slaney’s impressions; and he also had an animal strength, just like the woman, and if they ever made love, the two of them, children would burst out of her forehead and all that was wrong would be okay. But they were not making love, there was so much hate it boiled the water. She threw her arms around and she sank back down and was gone from them for long stretches so they could only see her white bikini like a glimmer of light in the murk and the blooming flower of her hair.

She was going to stand on the Mexican guy’s shoulders to keep her chin out of the water whether he liked it or not. She had the authority of a person who refuses to see reason, or is lit up with a reason all her own. She wanted the Mexican guy to be standing on the shoulders of another man, possibly Slaney, and for there to be more men all the way to the bottom. All she really wanted was a lungful of air.

The guy had a family, Slaney thought, he had that look, or that was another one of the impressions formed later, on the drive back. Like Slaney, the guy had ended up in the water without ever considering what he was doing.

They had not thought, None of my business. They had not thought, What about if something happens out there, or that she deserved what she got for being so bloody stupid, for wandering out so far. And they had found themselves in an awkward threesome where she had laid down the law: she would get what she wanted any way she could. The claw marks on Slaney’s back were something when they got out.

And the Mexican guy, too, was bleeding from the corner of his eye. She had taken pieces out of his face with her fingernails.

Slaney popped her in the jaw. It was her jaw or her temple and he was not careful. No decision was made. It was done before he knew it. He could not remember it but he knew it happened, the way you know something someone tells you. He knew it second-hand. He would never have believed it if he hadn’t been told by a reliable source. He was the source. It was exactly the right measure of violence. He’d never hit a girl before. He had time to think that.

She was still wearing the mask and the water was sloshing inside the glass window and her eyes were screaming but — and this he could swear to, this was something he’d never seen before and did not want to see again — he saw the eyes roll back in her head. First a fluttering of one eyelid that looked flirtatious. A nerve with a mind of its own in her eyelid. The ecstasy of giving up. He saw that.

That’s what he hadn’t wanted to see. It was a bad precedent. If giving up felt that good he might like it. That’s what he thought. He never wanted to try it. Giving up was all or nothing. The woman had given up.

The Mexican guy was swimming away and Slaney lost sight of him from one wave to another. There, not there. He was swimming out toward the horizon and Slaney found he was yelling over the waves and he had to prop her up, and really, the situation was boring. They were almost done and where did that bastard think he was going? The guy came back with the ring. He had gone to get the ring.

She had knocked the ring out of his arms and he’d got it back and Slaney had her in a loose headlock, face up, and his other arm linked into the ring.

Then there were two other men. And it was just as well because Slaney was done and the Mexican guy was done too. The other two guys lifted her out of the waves and when they did Slaney thought to put his feet down and saw he was up to his waist. The hardest part was the last few waves that drove him into the upside-down sand and he crawled out on his hands and knees.

He lay there and waited to breathe. When he pulled himself up, the woman broke out of the thick crowd that had surrounded her. The other man had gone. The Mexican had been swallowed up in a separate crowd that had gathered. The woman came over to Slaney and put her arms around his neck and rested her head on his chest. He put his hand on her heart. He was feeling the heartbeat. It was so off-kilter and bewildering. Her skin was bewildering and a strand of her hair and the way she pressed against him and her crazy little beating thing of a heart under his hand. That was just an instant, of course. Then it was over and she went back to being whoever she was and Slaney looked for his T-shirt.

Brophy was standing in the sand in his black socks. He held his shoes, a finger hooked into each heel. Slaney picked up his clothes as they headed back to the Jeep. He remembered he had to pay for the meal, and then he remembered he had paid already.

You want a beer? Brophy said.

No thanks, I’d like to get moving, Slaney said.

I have a heart condition, Brophy said. I couldn’t leave the money. My heart is bad. I would have just been in the way out there. You would have had to rescue me.

Let’s go, Slaney said. I don’t want to be out in the dark with all this cash.

There was only that brute thing, Slaney thought. There was only the pop he’d given that girl and the way she had allowed him to keep her alive and how important it had been for her to succumb.

They drove back to the hostel. Brophy said he’d like to help Slaney with the boat, if they needed help on board, but he couldn’t do heavy lifting. Slaney invited him in for a drink and he bought a couple of beers from the maid and they sat out on the deck of the hostel in wooden lawn chairs.

He’d had a clogged artery a while back and his arm would tingle, Brophy told him. He’d wake up; the arm would be asleep. There would be pins and needles. This was his right arm, hanging off his shoulder. He’d spent a weekend drinking at his brother’s stag and then the wedding and he’d turned grey.

The colour of that there, he said. He tapped the grey weathered wood of his armrest with his finger. Everything went funny. It had a funny aspect.

My vision, he said. He swayed a hand in the air. My son came to get me at the airport and I told him. My arm, I said. Brophy touched Slaney’s arm as he said it.

I told him I’d been throwing up, and I broke a sweat right there at the luggage thing.

The carousel, Slaney said. Brophy was stirring the air with his finger. He nodded. Waiting for my luggage.

He was the one that said a heart attack, Brophy said. He called it. My son called the damn thing.

Slaney had the suitcase of money for the Mexican authorities tucked in under his chair.

What he thought was this. He believed the story about the heart attack, but it had a different cadence than everything else Brophy had said. He was thinking: the heart attack is true, but everything else has been a lie.

They were relying on the Mexicans to be corrupt. It was a hell of an assumption. It was easy for Hearn. Hearn was in Vancouver. Hearn was getting ready for the life after his life of crime. As if there wasn’t a tide of events to swim against. It was a merciless quality in Hearn. He didn’t respect those who doubted themselves.

Hearn was a contemptuous bastard to those who had doubts.

Brophy was talking about his condition. He said there were things he’d had to give up because of his heart. He spoke about diet.

You wonder if it’s worth it, Brophy said. Slaney took a quick peek at him then, glanced over. Because this statement had come from a deep place, a peeling down of facade. Brophy wasn’t aware that he’d said it out loud.

It was a tone of disappointment. The guy was deflated. He was sick and unsure of himself. Why hadn’t Hearn checked him out? It wasn’t Hearn with a yacht full of weed parked under the noses of the Mexican authorities, owing for fuel and supplies.

Slaney felt the teeter-totter inside him shift. He was dropping from trust to doubt. If he had to pinpoint the moment. There had been a moment and it was when Brophy spoke about it all being worth something.

He had spoken with the authority of a man who had suffered. He was a broken sort of man, Slaney decided. He had been broken not by something big, but the grinding of a thousand small things to which he himself had agreed. He had made concessions.

Brophy had gone into the bank and he came out with the money. His shirt was buttoned up in the heat. You wonder if it’s worth it. Slaney knew that every lie commingled with the truth.

But you could not spend an afternoon with a man who had suffered a heart attack, who had come near death because he could not control his cholesterol, and not experience some minor revelation. Something would be revealed and Slaney could already see it. This guy wasn’t what he said he was. There would be double-crosses, for which Slaney had to allow; there was a double-cross in the works. But the nature of it mattered.

Hearn didn’t know the guy. But it was a question of how deep the double-cross went. It was a question: should he grab the bag of money and run down the beach with it? Should he tell Ada?

It was because Slaney had saved the drowning woman. Slaney and the Mexican and the other men. But it had been Slaney who did the thinking out there. He’d knocked her out and saved all their lives.

It was instinct or he had thought about it. A sharp jab to the jaw. Brophy was drowning too.

What kind of man stands on shore and watches a woman drowning? A man with a bad heart.

Brophy was talking about his daughter. The daughter had lost faith in him. That was the story. Some distancing had occurred. She’d become frustrated with him. She’d left. Walked away.

He was telling about the wild spirit in his daughter. It was a quality Brophy had admired when she was a child. He talked to Slaney about her as a four-year-old. He said about her gymnastics. He said triple somersaults. It was something he’d tried to encourage.

She doesn’t understand responsibility, Brophy said, tossing the beer bottle into the bushes beside the deck. But he didn’t go on about his daughter after that.

Patterson had intuited a new quiet in Slaney. He knew he’d said something wrong but he could not imagine what it was. He was afraid the smallest thing might cause the kid to give up now. Patterson had thought nobody could give up after coming so far, but maybe the opposite was true. Maybe the kid had come too far. Maybe he’d feel like it was time to turn back. Slaney might give up and leave Carter and Ada Anderson and get the hell out.

I suppose I should get going, Brophy said. Slaney drank down the rest of his beer too. He stood up and got the bag of money from under the chair and hefted the strap over his shoulder.

Slaney thought of the goat they’d passed on the drive back from the beach. The Jeep had dipped down in a rut and bounced up and they were passing the garage where they’d had the tire fixed. The white, white goat was eating a screamingly red blouse. It lifted its head and shut its eyes against the dust they were kicking up.

It came to Slaney then. The revelation he’d waited for, drinking his beer in the bar. The revelation that had hovered over his fist like a butterfly, his innermost thing, while he drank his beer and watched the woman put her mask and snorkel on, while he watched her awkward walk over the sand in her flippers.

He wouldn’t return to the port where they were waiting.

Where Hearn was waiting; where the transport trucks were waiting; and the caves were waiting and the men and whatever Brophy had in store for them, the dogs and the sirens and the guns and the cuffs.

He’d alter their course at the last minute. He’d explain it to Carter once they were on the sailboat and Carter would see the wisdom. The wisdom ran like this: Let them all wait.

Maybe You Thought a Vacation

Patterson approached Ada when she walked into the bar.

Hello, Roy, she said. I’d heard you were here. Lovely to see you again. I’m just looking for Cyril.

Patterson told her he’d had a few drinks with Carter, sent him back to the hostel about an hour ago.

I must have missed him, she said.

Why don’t you have a quick drink with me, Ada, Patterson said. He pinched the sleeve of her peasant blouse near the cuff and gave it a playful little tug.

I don’t know, Roy, she said. Cyril’s probably in a bad way. I should get back to the hostel.

You guys are setting sail tomorrow, Patterson said. I have to talk to you. He took her by the wrist now.

Hey, she said. She flicked her arm free but she followed him to the back of the bar where there was an empty table next to the back door. The door was ajar and a band of harsh sunlight fell over the floor. She could hear the chickens outside clucking and step-stepping, the ruffling of wings. Someone was out there scattering feed, speaking in Spanish, cooing and cajoling.

Sit down, Ada, Patterson said. Just long enough for a little chat. I want to make you an offer. He raised his hand to the bartender and she came to the table with two beers and two glasses and they waited for her to wipe the table and lay down the coasters and place the beers.

I thought you might have died in that hurricane, Patterson said. I wished I’d had a chance to say something to you before you left.

We’re fine, Ada said.

Do you know that man is married? Patterson said. He suffers from mental illness. His wife and children are worried sick. He’s had breakdowns before. The stress here can destroy a man like Carter. My guess is you’re seeing symptoms of another nervous breakdown already.

Who are you? Ada asked. My God.

You could be a confidential informant, Patterson said. This is what I’m offering. You don’t appear in court. Nobody knows you said a thing. Your identity is never disclosed. I am a father too. I have a daughter your age. I think of your father. I’m telling you there’s a way out of this for you. This is an offer.

She stood up and gripped the back of her chair with both hands. She looked as if the chair were alive with a current or spirit and she were struggling to keep it from flying through the air and smashing against his skull. He saw the same girl who had been playing the piano that night at Hearn’s. The feral, grounded voltage of emotion.

Hear me out, he said. A rooster came through the door then, black and rust, a white speckled throat, an angry and inquisitive strut.

Maybe you’ve been coerced, Patterson said. Maybe you didn’t know the implications. You’re a young girl. Your whole life ahead of you. I want to tell you how moved I was listening to your music. I won’t lie; it was unsettling. You have a gift. Maybe you have a responsibility to it. I don’t know what you have.

The rooster stood still, its wattles a grotesque red, quivering and wrinkled.

Maybe nobody told you there were drugs, Patterson said. Perhaps the men hadn’t told you the whole story when you set out. You thought a vacation in Mexico. You didn’t know what was happening.

I knew, Ada said. Of course I knew. She became limp, her shoulders drooping, and she let go of the back of the chair and sank onto the seat.

If you don’t want to think about yourself, think about Carter. That man won’t last very long in prison.

Patterson kept talking. He told her it would be easy to cast her as an innocent bystander. He took a long drink of his beer.

Everyone involved will be going to jail for a very long time, Miss Anderson, he said. If you co-operate with us, things will be different for you. Carter, too. That’s a promise. Please, drink your beer.

No, thank you, she said.

Carter’s a very ill man, he said. Right now, if you co-­operate, we see a much lighter sentence for Carter, and you go free. Maybe you go back with your father, pursue your career, forget all this ever happened. You’re just a kid here. Your whole life ahead. It’s really Hearn and Slaney we’re after. Or whatever you choose to call them. And believe me, they’re as good as caught already.

She put her elbows on the table and held her forehead with her hands. She stayed that way for a long moment. Then she looked up at him. How calculating and innocent. How reckless. He thought indomitable and tender. He didn’t know what to think. He had her. That’s what he thought.

All I’m asking: If Slaney decides to walk away, you let us know. If there’s a change of plans, you let us know. You make a phone call. If you’re blown off course, you let us know. You dock somewhere; you make a call. You get to a phone. You call us.

If you don’t want to do this for yourself, you do it for Carter. The bartender had come around the side of the bar with a broom. The bristles were neon pink nylon and she swished it at the rooster, ushering it toward the back door. It hop-skipped and swerved around a chair, through the door into the obliterating sunlight. They could hear it crowing outside.

A Visitor in the Night

Someone had come into his room. He’d woken when the door closed. There was a bedside lamp and he switched it on. The lamp had a red shade and cast a glow.

Ada stood at the foot of his bed hugging her army surplus knapsack.

The room was doubled in the black glass of the window and spread on forever over the ocean. The white lines of surf from the beach below moved over her reflection.

She was digging in her knapsack and she tugged out the wrinkled bundle of a negligee. It was white, free-falling layers of gauze and lace, and there was a satin ribbon gathering the neck. She shook it out, holding one puffy sleeve between her finger and thumb. She flicked it twice to get rid of the wrinkles.

Are you drunk? Slaney asked. Where’s Carter?

Carter is drunk, she said. I want to sleep with you, David. I’m going to put on this nightgown and get in bed with you. I want you to hold me. Then I’m going back to bed with Carter and I don’t want to talk about it. Not ever.

You don’t need that nightgown, he said. But she went to the bathroom, and then stood in the doorway, wearing it. The gown fell to her knees and it was see-through. It floated around her naked body.

Do you like it? she asked. I was saving it for a special occasion.

I think this is pretty special, he said.

Ada lay down beside him. Slaney ran his hand over her belly and lifted the filmy gown up slowly so the ruffles and frills at the hem pooled over one hip and between her legs. He felt her ribs and the slope of her hip bone and he ran his knuckles over her nipples. He watched her breasts rise and fall. Then she moved her leg over him and they kissed. At first he hardly touched her, except to kiss. Then he touched her everywhere he could. He took his time.

He smeared up the gauzy veils of the gown and parted her legs and put his mouth on her and touched her with the tip of his tongue. It was like they had all the time in the world. She held his hair in her fists and twisted it. She was breathing short, shallow breaths and her thighs were trembling and she arched up into him and the sound she made when she came was a fast breath of surprise. Then she was straddling him and he held her ass with both hands and the nightgown tumbled in folds over his wrists and he lifted her down onto him and he was inside her. The bed smacked and smacked and he said, Let me see your face.

She tucked her hair behind her ears. She looked into his eyes. They looked at each other for a long time.

Then she braced herself with one hand flat against the wall over his head.

She looked as though someone were speaking to her and she had to listen very hard. Her eyes closed and she nodded now and then and she began to rock harder against him and faster.

Open your eyes, he said.

No.

Open them. I want to see your eyes, he said. Open them, come on, please. She opened her eyes but they fluttered and then they were closed tight, and there was a beautiful expression he hadn’t seen on her face before.

She was astonished or succumbing or, he realized, coming, maybe three times, maybe four. She spoke a few words and it was a phrase from a prayer.

Afterwards they lay side by side not touching at all. It was too hot to touch. He couldn’t handle the cotton bedsheet. She started to giggle.

What’s so funny? he said.

No, she said.

Tell me, he said. He ran the back of his finger over her breast, put his lips on the gauze over her nipple and felt the rough texture of it with his tongue. She was trembling, now, with giggles.

Tell me, he said. He rolled over on his elbow and looked at her. She was pressing her fingers to her eyes as if the laughter were leaking from there.

You won’t get away with it, she said. David. You are going to get caught. I came to tell you something. They’ll be waiting for you.

They can wait, he said. We won’t be there.

Where will we be? she asked.

Where they’ll least expect us.

The next morning they hired a local guy to row them out to the boat. The man named Hernandez was on board already with several soldiers. They were all armed and standing at attention. Brophy was there already too and he introduced General Hernandez.

Carter was in high spirits; he liked the new sails.

Craftsmanship is superb, he said. He offered everyone a drink. The soldiers ignored him.

You have fuel and supplies, Hernandez said. No one will bother you in these waters.

Brophy nodded to Slaney and Slaney handed Hernandez the duffle bag with the forty grand. Three soldiers took the bag below deck to count the money and they all waited in the hot sun with their heads bowed, silent, as though in church. The soldiers came back up again with the duffle bag and nodded to Hernandez.

Everything is in order, gentlemen, Hernandez said. We will leave you now. I wish you a safe journey and good luck with your endeavours.

Very nice, Carter said. Thank you, sir. A pleasure doing business.

The soldiers disembarked, climbing into the two speedboats that were waiting below. Brophy was the last to go down the ladder. He wished them luck. He’d shaken hands with Carter and Ada.

You take care of that little girl you have there, Brophy told Carter. She’s a fine girl.

Slaney took Brophy’s hand in his and shook it firmly. He gripped Brophy’s elbow with his other hand. He held him there for a long moment.

Thanks, man, he said. Thanks for everything.

Let’s get out of here, Slaney said. Then he told Carter they had to change course.

We were set up, Slaney told him.

What are you talking about? Carter said.

We were set up, Carter. We can’t go back to Vancouver. They’re going to be waiting for us. They’ll confiscate the boat. Throw us in jail. We can’t go back.

Carter put his hands over his ears and stood for a long moment staring at the deck.

What’s happening, Ada, he yelled. Ada? What’s happening here? But she was looking out over the rail of the boat at the water and didn’t turn to him.

I want to head back to Newfoundland, Slaney said. Let’s go home, Carter.

We’d have to go through the Panama Canal, Carter said. Ada turned to Carter then with her arms crossed tightly over her chest.

The boat handles differently with the extra weight, Ada said. The line handler in the canal will know as soon as he steps on board.

We pay off the line handler, Slaney said. Pay off Customs. Use the twenty-five thou left from the deal with Lopez.

Cyril, it’s so risky, Ada said. They’re on to us, David already told you that. I don’t think we should keep going.

It takes thirty hours to get through the canal, give or take, Carter said. We’d have to skip the line or you can end up waiting forever just to get in. Once you’re in, you just sit pretty and the line handler takes you through. I don’t know, Slaney. They could lock us up down there and nobody would ever hear from us again.

The whole country is propped up with drug money, Slaney said. It won’t be hard to find the right line handler.

Listen to me, Cyril, Ada said. We could just dump the cargo.

It’s a couple of million dollars, Slaney hissed at her. He flung his arm out, pointing toward the cargo below deck. We can’t give up now, he said. We’re almost there. Ada, I didn’t want you involved. But you’re here. You wanted to be a part of it. Now you’ve got to see this through.

Ada put her hands on Carter’s face.

Look at me, Cyril, she said. Look at me. I am asking you for this. You said you’d give me anything I wanted. This is what I want. I want you to listen.

Honey, Cyril said. It was as though he’d just noticed her. He took her hands off his face and pressed them between his own. He rubbed them vigorously as if they were cold and he had to warm them.

Tonight, when it’s dark, Ada said. We could toss the whole lot of it overboard. We could just sail home. They know about the cargo, Cyril. It’s too risky to keep going now.

But Carter was staring hard at the deck, his hands held out before him, gently slicing them through the air, as if marking off the miles, calculating the route. Then he was wringing his hands together, muttering with his eyes shut tight. He’d forgotten all about Ada. Then his eyes flew open and he grabbed her shoulders and drew her into his chest. He held her like that in a hard grip.

Ada, he said. This is the real beginning for us. This is the test. We’re going to sail through it. We’re going to make it. I want to believe you’re with me. I want us to do this together.

You can do this, Ada, Slaney said. We’re through the worst of it now. Clear sailing ahead. There’s no way they can catch us. They think we’re on the way to Van-fucking-couver.

I feel like a drink, Carter said. Anybody else feel like a drink?

I’d have a drink with you, Slaney said. Come on, Ada. Let’s drink to the trip.

Let’s turn this baby around, Carter yelled. He raised a triumphant fist in the air.

I’ll get the bottle, Ada said.

So you’re in? Carter said.

I’m in, my love, she said. It might be crazy, but I’m in.

I knew it, Carter said. I knew I could count on you. This is why I fell in love, David. Look at her. Just look.

Where we headed, Captain? Slaney asked.

The Caribbean has a strong east-to-west current, Carter said. We’ll be up against the trade winds.

We want to avoid sandbars near the Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas, and those waters are lousy with coastal patrols, Slaney said. We learned that the hard way the last time around.

So we head northwest first, Carter said. Get ourselves to Cuba, and then head northeast.

That’s the route Hearn and I took the first time, Slaney said. That’ll get us there.

Then the Gulf Stream carries us home, Carter said. But we move now, before the sea gets rough up there. We have to beat the bad weather.

They sailed all day and the weather was beautiful. Ada finished reading Tender Is the Night and when she was done she threw it over the side.

They went ashore in Panama to get supplies and split up on the dock. Ada hired a horse-drawn cart to take her to the market. Slaney and Carter hung around the dock in a filthy bar until they found the line man they needed and negotiated a price. And Slaney went to place a call to Hearn. Tell him to meet them in Newfoundland.

Hearn, he said. Get yourself a plane ticket to St. John’s. There’s been a change of plans.