“Raymond came partway up the companionway and I could barely hear him over the storm. He said, ‘The jib’s got to come off before we lose control.’ I knew it was true, but all this time I had been thinking, and I wasn’t sure if I cared whether we controlled the boat or not. As it was, I had trouble. Even twenty-five tons of oak and lead seemed to lose traction in those seas.
“Typical Raymond, he went forward hand over hand toward the foredeck. I kept her on course until he eased the halyard and the jib started down. I turned her upwind and the jib collapsed, Raymond on top of it lashing it with wild, violent exertions of his arms. I bore off, and as I did so we were lifted on a huge wave. We stayed atop it for a long moment, Raymond facedown on the foredeck, and then we started into the trough, which was just a long, bottomless hole. What had made me change direction? I felt the boat pick up speed as we went down and it had begun to yaw as the sea hissed out behind the keel. It seemed like it yawed harder and harder. The spokes on the wheel just tore at my hands, and either I lacked the strength or I — or I — it got away from me. The wheel got away from me. . and we broached. The next wave buried us from starboard and the bow went under, beyond the forward hatch, then over the brow of the house. She stayed like that for a long time, and when she came up, the ocean was pouring off the crown of the foredeck. There was no one there.
“The Cuban came aboard in Havana and read the crew manifest. He said, Where’s the otro hombre? I said I came by myself. He left and came back with another guy in a green uniform with a machine gun. He spoke English. I said there had been a language problem with the first guy. I told him the otro hombre washed overboard on the western edge of the stream where it changed color. He believed me. I don’t think it’s that unusual to Cubans to wash overboard.”
The gardener came quietly into the room. Errol couldn’t tear his gaze away from Florence, because he felt any second now she might speak. He was hoping she would. She pulled herself up and looked at him intently, all phosphorus gone as her eyes blackened and some beads rolled off the counterpane and tinkled to the floor. Errol could tell she was going to say something.
“Are you with the termite people?” she asked. Errol didn’t reply and Florence repeated her question, this time with some agitation.
The gardener pushed past him and leaned over Florence so she would be sure to hear him. “They can’t come without they tent the place,” he said to her. “And they can’t tent the place if you in it, ’cause they pump it full of poison.” She let out a moan. The gardener spoke in a more conciliatory voice. “The exterminator been every week,” he told her, as if he was singing her a song. She seemed crushed at the news.
“Is he the one with his car all fixed up like a rat?” asked Florence urgently. “Has big ears on it like a rat?”
The old house on Fleming was the obvious choice, as long as they had a room with a tub available. He stopped first at Tres Hermanos for some supplies. The front door was wide open to the air, and a desk had been set up in the front hall. Here sat the clerk reading the newspaper, his treated blond hair swept forward from a single spot. Without looking up, he asked how he could help and Errol told him he wanted a room with a tub.
“No can do.”
“No rooms?”
“Not with a tub.”
“There’s a tub in the last room on the second floor.”
“That’s a suite. You said you wanted a room.”
“I’ll take the suite.”
“It’s not the same price as a room.”
“I understand.”
The clerk looked up finally. He regarded the paper bag from the Cuban tienda. “Is that all you have to your name?”
“Yes.”
“Usually, when we rent the suite, it’s to someone with a suitcase.”
“I’ll bet that’s right.” The clerk had no idea what a problem lay before him.
Despite all the heavy, almost operatic furniture and tasseled drapery, the room was recognizable. He remembered its old bare wooden bones, the sparse secondhand furnishings of that time, the Toulouse-Lautrec poster and its rusty thumbtacks. The names were streaming at him. The gardener had told him he was wasting all that noise on Miss Ewing; he declared that Miss Florence Ewing had upped and cleared out during a previous administration and wouldn’t know him from Adam.
The water made a deep sound in the old tub. Errol pulled a chair next to it and placed the bag where he could reach it. He filled the tub, calculating how deep it could be without the mass of his body overflowing it. The water looked so still, so clear, with light steam arising. He undressed and got in, sliding down until the water was as high as his throat. Errol remembered taking bread scraps to the birds in the small town where he grew up; and when he reached toward the chair next to the tub, he saw the birds again, how they rose in a cloud. He was alert enough to enjoy this slide into oblivion, to picture a million oranges rotting on trees as his mestizos dispersed into Florida barrios, and at first he confused the shouts he heard with those of his boss, the cracker, the juice king of Arcadia and citrus oligarch who made his life so wearisome. A cloud of blackbirds rose from the rotting oranges around a small man shouting in the grove. .
It was the desk clerk and two police officers, but the desk clerk alone, soaking wet, was doing all the shouting. “He ruined my beautiful hotel!”
One of the officers, a small portly Cuban, asked, “You call this a hotel?”
“Get him out of here! Pump his stomach, do something!”
To the skeptics in the emergency room, Errol said, “Must be some kind of bug.”
Grisly days at Keys Memorial passed slowly. The nurses knew what he had done and several considered it a mortal sin, a view that produced grudging service and solitude beside otherwise busy corridors. At checkout, the accounting office having assumed indigence expressed surprise at his Blue Cross. He started to explain but all that came out was citrus. He was too numb to speak and wondered whether he had done himself permanent harm. Perhaps I am now feeble-minded, he thought. But really his heart was lighter for having survived the outcome of a long obsession.
He spent the rest of the morning buying provisions. The yawl was just as he had left it, but for a light coating of ash from the island’s heroic burning dump. A fishing boat was being swabbed down by two Cubans in khakis and white T-shirts who from time to time tossed a fish from the scuppers to a pelican waiting modestly on the transom. The tide had dropped, leaving a wide band of barnacles around the pilings, and Errol moved his spring lines until the boat stood away from them. Provisions were stowed in the galley; the water he had acquired on the mainland was still in good supply. He washed the deck down with seawater, sweeping the ash over the stern, and checked his watch. The bars had just opened. He stepped off the boat and headed uptown, stopping at a phone booth to call his employer, the owner of the groves and juice plant. He told him he’d gotten a much-needed rest and would be back among the oranges in no time flat. He’d left the Latino crew detailed instructions sure to see them through every waking moment. “I’ll just bet,” the grove owner said, adding, “You’re the damnedest feller I ever met.”