The Frenchman ran out on deck cursing and looked to the cockpit, where Blessington had the helm. His hair was cut close to his skull. He showed his teeth in the mast light. He was brushing his shorts; something had spilled in his lap.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est là?” he demanded of Blessington. Blessington pointed into the darkness where the barge had disappeared. The Frenchman knew only enough of the ocean to fear the people on it. “Quel cul!” he said savagely. “Who is it?” He was afraid of the Coast Guard and of pirates.
“We just missed being sunk by a barge. No lights. Submerged cable. It’s OK now.”
“Fuck,” said the Frenchman, Freycinet. “Why are you stopping?”
“Stopping?” It took a moment to realize that Freycinet was under the impression that because the boat had lost its forward motion they were stopping, as though he had applied a brake. Freycinet had been around boats long enough to know better. He must be out of his mind, Blessington thought.
“I’m not stopping, Honoré. We’re all right.”
“I bust my fucking ass below,” said Freycinet. “Marie fall out of bed.”
Tough shit, thought Blessington. Be thankful you’re not treading water in the splinters of your stupidly named boat. “Sorry, man,” he said.
Sans Regret, with its fatal echoes of Piaf. The Americans might be culturally deprived, Blessington thought, but surely every cutter in the Yankee Coast Guard would have the sense to board that one. And the cabin stank of the resiny ganja they had stashed, along with the blow, under the cabin sole. No amount of roach spray or air freshener could cut it. The space would probably smell of dope forever.
Freycinet went below without further complaint, missing in his ignorance the opportunity to abuse Blessington at length. It had been Blessington’s fault they had not seen the barge sooner stoned and drunk as he was. He should have looked for it as soon as the tug went by. To stay awake through the night he had taken crystal and his peripheral vision was flashing him little mongoose darts, shooting stars composed of random light. Off the north shore of St. Vincent, the winds were murder.
Just before sunrise, he saw the Pitons rising from the sea off the starboard bow, the southwest coast of St. Lucia. Against the pink sky, the two peaks looked like a single mountain. It was hard to take them for anything but a good omen. As the sudden dawn caught fire, they turned green with hope. So many hearts, he thought, must have lifted at the sight of them.
To Blessington, they looked like the beginning of home free. Or at least free. Martinique was the next island up, where they could return the boat and Blessington could take his portion and be off to America on his student visa. He had a letter of acceptance from a hotel management school in Florida but his dream was to open a restaurant in the Keys.
He took another deep draft of the rum to cut the continuing anxieties. The first sunlight raised a sweat on him, so he took his shirt off and put on his baseball hat. Florida Marlins.
Freycinet came out on deck while he was having a drink.
“You’re a drunk Irish man,” Freycinet told him.
“That I’m not,” said Blessington. It seemed to him no matter how much he drank he would never be drunk again. The three Vincentians had sobered him for life. He had been sitting on the porch of the guesthouse on Canouan when they walked up. They had approached like panthers — no metaphor, no politics intended. Their every move was a dark roll of musculature, balanced and wary. They were very big men with square scarred faces. Blessington had been reclining, tilted backward in a cane chair with his feet on the porch rail, when they came up to him.
“Frenchy?” one had asked very softly.
Blessington had learned the way of hard men back in Ireland and thought he could deal with them. He had been careful to maintain his relaxed position.
“I know the man you mean, sit;” he had said. “But I’m not him, see. You’ll have to wait.”
At Blessington’s innocuous words they had tensed in every fiber; although you had to be looking right at them to appreciate the physics of it. They drew themselves up around their hidden weaponry behind a silent, drug-glazed wall of suspicion that looked impermeable to reason. They were zombies, without mercy, and he, Blessington, was wasting their time. He resolved to count to thirty, but at the count of ten he took his feet down off the rail.
Freycinet turned and shaded his eyes and looked toward the St. Lucia coast. The Pitons delighted him.
“Ah là. C’est les Pitons, n’est-ce pas?”
“Oui,” said Blessington. “Les Pitons.” They had gone south in darkness and Freycinet had never seen them before.
The wind shifted to its regular quarter and he had a hard time tacking level with the island. The two women came out on deck. Freycinet’s Marie was blond and very young. She came from Normandy, and she had been a waitress in the bistro outside Fort-de-France where Freycinet and Blessington cooked. Sometimes she seemed so sunny and innocent that it was hard to connect her with a hood like Freycinet. At other times she seemed very knowing indeed. It was hard to tell, she was so often stoned.
Gillian was an American from Texas. She had a hard, thin face with a prominent nose and a big jaw. Her father Blessington imagined, was one of those Texans, a tough, loud man who cursed the Mexicans. She was extremely tall and rather thin, with long legs. Her slenderness and height and interesting face had taken her into modeling, to Paris and Milan. In contrast, she had muscular thighs and a big derriere, which, if it distressed the couturiers, made her more desirable. She was Blessington’s designated girlfriend on the trip but they rarely made love because, influenced by the others, he had taken an early dislike to her. He supposed she knew it.
“Oh, wow,” she said in her Texas voice, “look at those pretty mountains.”
It was exactly the kind of American comment that made the others all despise and imitate her — even Marie, who had no English at all. Gillian had come on deck stark naked and each of them, the Occitan Freycinet, Norman Marie and Irish Blessington, felt scornful and slightly offended. Anyone else might have been forgiven. They had decided she was a type and she could do no right.
Back on Canouan, Gillian had conceived a lust for one of the dealers. At first, when everyone smoked in the safe house, they had paid no attention to the women. The deal was repeated to everyone’s satisfaction. As the dealers gave forth their odor of menace Marie had skillfully disappeared herself in plain view. But Gillian, to Blessington’s humiliation and alarm, had put out a ray and one of the men had called her on it.
Madness. In a situation so volatile, so bloody fraught. But she was full of lusts, was Texan Gillian, and physically courageous too. He noticed she whined less than the others, in spite of her irritating accent. It had ended with her following the big St. Vincentian to her guesthouse room, walking ten paces behind with her eyes down, making herself a prisoner a lamb for the slaughter.
For a while Blessington had thought she would have to do all three of them but it had been only the one, Nigel. Nigel had returned her to Blessington in a grim little ceremony, holding her with the chain of her shark’s-tooth necklace twisted tight around her neck.
“Wan’ have she back, mon?”
Leaving Blessington with the problem of how to react. The big bastard was fucking welcome to her but of course it would have been tactless to say so. Should he protest and get everyone killed? Or should he be complacent and be thought a pussy and possibly achieve the same result? It was hard to find a middle ground but Blessington found one, a tacit, ironic posture, fashioned of silences and body language. The Irish had been a subject race too, after all.