“What do you think?” said Diego.
“You’re crazy.”
“If this keeps up,” Diego told him “we’ll all be crazy and that girl will be dead. She’s going after that boy, and something’s got to be done. I don’t know who that is, but if you’ll kindly hand on to her, I mean to find out.”
“Suppose it’s not a who?”
“All right then, it’s a what.”
“You may find out more than you expect.”
“At least, we’ll know.”
He faced the sea, closed his eyes in prayer, and went in. He took a comber sidewise, then straightened out and started to swim. He confessed later to a horrible fear, as it seemed to him the wail was from the other world and suggested death. He reached the spot where it seemed to come from, then was started to hear it behind him. With a sense of being cut off, he pulled his feet up, reversed direction, and started back. Then, in horror, he saw a fin and remembered the sharks. He panicked, digging for shore. Then red trucks flashed at his eyes, and Gil rose in front of him. He rose clear out of the sea, moaning as Diego insisted later, and landed plop in his arms. In utter terror by now, afraid to hold on, for fear the shark would close in, ashamed to let go, he did nothing but thresh with his feet and beat around with one free arm. But the roll of the waves was with him, and in a few moments he made it, Gill still on his shoulder. As he staggered out on the sand, Maria grabbed the boy, the soft-drink woman grabbed her, and the Gendarme grabbed Diego, thumping him on the back for his bravery, and blowing his whistle for help.
Exhausted, Diego collapsed, but revived and yelled to them alclass="underline" “Work on him — give him artificial respiration! He’s alive! He spoke to me! He spoke and leaped out of the sea!”
“He’s dead,” said the soft-drink lady.
“He’s cold, so cold,” said Maria.
“Thus the tale,” said my friend, the pilot at the Brazos Santiago station, a few miles north of Playa Washington, “as I heard it around Matamoras.”
“I admit it’s spooky,” I said, “and as a feat of derring-do, quite romantic. Only trouble is, I don’t believe it.”
“I do,” he said. “That’s the difference.”
“Captain, you surprise me.”
“Maybe, but I think it’s true.”
“Shark and all?”
“Wasn’t a shark, but sharks figure in it.”
“What was it, then?”
“Porpoise.”
“And the wail, what about that?”
“That was a porpoise too.”
“Bringing the boy in to Mamma?”
“That’s just about it.”
He said, looking at the thing from the point of view of the porpoises, they were probably delighted when Gil swam out where they were, as “they love to play and love little boys. That statue they put in the picture, of a boy riding a dolphin, was not far-fetched. It has happened in the aquariums, as those things aren’t fish. They’re animals. And when Gil began to sink, their idea was, get him up to the surface again, get him breathing. So they handled him just like one of their own pups. They began bumping him up to the surface, and when the boy on the raft said they were fighting him off, he probably was telling the truth. But of course it didn’t work, and then night came on and changed the whole picture.”
“In what way, Captain?”
“The sharks.”
“Then they do come in at night?”
“Or, like most fish, they begin to bite at night.”
“So they’re more dangerous.”
“As anyone who knows them will tell you.”
“And what then?
“The porpoises began bringing him in.”
“Bumping him with their noses?”
“Exactly that.”
“To Maria?”
“I wouldn’t put it past them.”
He said the interest animals take in people is more than is commonly realized. “And in the case of porpoises,” he went on, “they talk. I’ve heard them many a time, standing watch on deck, as they swim along with the ship, especially at night. But I’m telling you, I don’t know as we sit here if they talk to themselves, each other, or me. Maybe they’re just breathing, but maybe it’s something more, and they were calling Maria that night, bringing her little boy in, saving him from the sharks. They can handle a shark — they bump him too, and hard, right in the gills, and as they bump they bite, tearing his gill feathers out. But they can’t handle all sharks all night. So they did what they could in their way. But she interested me more than they did.”
“Maria? In what way, Captain?”
“As the eternal soldadera.”
“The soldier’s girl?”
“A muchacha who must have a hero.”
“First little Gil—?”
“And then big Diego. Kind of nice.”
He told me the rest of the story, how the Gendarme, with the cuerpo recovered all the difficult questions settled, outdid himself to make things easy for her. He paced the way, in the patrol car, up to Matamoras, while she followed with Diego holding the little cold body to her warm one. He routed the undertaker out, made all the arrangements for the inquest next day, the services, and burial. He had everything fixed up in a few minutes, so when she walked out, the band was just ending its concert, in the Plaza de Hidalgo, for the same people as had been at the beach, now all dressed up for the evening.
As she sat on a bench with Diego, she felt his clothes, which were wet, clucking with concern. But he motioned toward the band. It was playing Estrellita, and suddenly she started to weep. “For you,” he said, taking her hand and drawing it through his arm. “The play to your Little Star.”
“Yes, my little Gil.”
“If I had only gone sooner!” Diego exclaimed.
“You did your best. You are now...”
She caught herself, then half defiantly, as he waited, went on: “... my Big Star. My brave one.”
“You want me, then?”
“Diego, I do...”
“And so,” said the pilot, “she lost someone, and gained someone. They’re married now, and as I hear, quite happy. Neither of them, probably, have any idea of the true explanation of what happened, but neither of them are wrong as to the amount of bravery involved. Because, my friend, would you have answered that call, in that sea, on that night? I wouldn’t, but he did.”
Mommy’s a Barfly
On the bar, in the space between the fat man’s Tom Collins and the sailor’s beer, a girl was dancing. She wore a white muslin blouse, a red print dress with shoulder straps, black shoes, and white socklets; she was an uncommonly pretty girl, she was known as Pokey, and she was four years old. As she danced, she smiled at the pianist, who thumped a tiny instrument that had been tucked under the bar, and held out her skirts. When the tune ended, she did a pirouette, bowed, and received a crackling hand. Then, from a booth, a woman came over, kissed her, and listed her down. She was a woman of medium height and undeniably arresting-looking. She was dark, and there was something slightly gaunt about her figure and haggard about her face. She would have touched tragic beauty if there hadn’t been something bummy about her.
When Pokey had run over to the soldier with whom the woman was sitting and climbed in his lap, the pianist clapped loudly and called for an encore. The bartender, who was also the owner of the place, said: “It’s OK, Fred. She taps nice and she’s sweet. But when she’s using the bar for a dance floor I can’t use it for a bar, and it’s as a bar that it pays.”