She feels as though he's trying to hurry time along. When she asks him about it, he tells her he's just eager to get up to Isaan, eager to meet her parents and arrange the marriage. They'll be married in the village, he says, and he'll throw a two-day feast for everyone. It seems like a dream, but still, the whole time they're in Phuket, she feels like she's running to keep up with him.
On the rickety dock, they stand side by side, his arm around her shoulders. One of the things she loves about him, she decides, is that he makes her feel short. She wraps her arm around his back and is surprised to find she can feel his heart. It's beating much more quickly than hers.
The boat rides high in the water, battered wood painted white a long time ago, with a faded, abstract brown eye on the front of the side Rose can see. About seven feet back from the prow are a big wheel and some controls, set behind a curve of plastic windscreen that has absorbed so much salt it's almost opaque. The engine is tilted up at the rear, its big propeller hanging almost a meter above the water, nicked and scarred.
An afternoon breeze, chillier than usual, blows in off the water.
"Little," Rose says, eyeing the boat.
"There are only two of us," Howard says. "Just you and me." He throws a suitcase onto the boat and turns to get the four big two-gallon bottles of water.
"This"-she levels a finger at the gray-blue horizon of the Andaman Sea, the water dark today beneath gray clouds-"this very big."
"Ahhhh," Howard says. "The Andaman is a swimming pool. Anyway, you're with me, and I can handle this thing."
"Not hard? Not hard to… to handle?" The new word comes out fine, but Howard doesn't acknowledge it.
He does arm curls with the water containers. "Easy as buttoning a shirt."
"Sometime you not so good with shirt."
Howard laughs. "Light a cigarette. It'll relax you. Oh, wait. I almost forgot." And before she can even react, he drops the water bottles to the deck, making it shake underfoot, slides his big hands under her arms, and lifts her straight up like she weighs nothing. She laughs and beats at his chest as though he's a monster, but he carries her across the pier, leans forward, and puts her down in the boat, which rocks enough beneath her weight to make her grab the side. "Trip wouldn't have been any fun without you," he says, watching her hang on. "You'll have your sea legs in no time." He turns back to the water containers.
"See legs?" she asks, raising one of hers.
"Not like 'see,' not like looking at legs." He's been pointing at his eyes to illustrate, and now he picks up a huge bottle of water in each hand and waves her away so he can lower them into the boat. "The sea," he says, nodding at the Andaman as he puts the water aboard. "That's the sea. You know, it goes"-he puts his hands in front of him palms down and makes wave motions-"like that. It can make you sick at first. When you get used to it, we say in English you've got your sea legs."
She sits on the wooden bench that runs around the passenger compartment and opens her purse. A cigarette sounds good right now. "Sea legs. You have sea legs?" She's taken to repeating every new term she hears so she can file it in memory, hoping to improve her English more quickly. In her imagination she sees herself in two or three years going to farang parties as Howard's wife, speaking perfect English.
"I don't need them," Howard says. "I'm a fish." Rose suddenly remembers Oom describing herself as "half fish" the night Rose-Kwan then-went with Captain Yodsuwan. It seems like years ago. Howard puts the other two water bottles aboard and bends to the dock to pick up the black rubber wet suit that looks to Rose like an empty person.
"Not cold," she says. She finds the pack of Marlboro Lights and shakes one out. "Water okay." She swam the day before for hours, forgetting for once about not getting dark from the sun, no longer worried about what the customers and the other girls would think. The water was much warmer than the shower back at the apartment. "Why only one?"
"You won't need one," Howard says, climbing aboard with the suit tossed over his shoulder. "And it's not for cold. It's for something else. I'll show you when I see one." He rolls the suit up and stuffs it beneath one of the benches, then straightens and shades his eyes, although the day's not bright, and squints up at the sky, dark gray in places but with one or two small, tattered patches of blue. "We left the rain in Bangkok."
"Maybe later," Rose says, watching him as she takes the first puff. He's right; the smoke makes her feel smoother. Howard, on the other hand, seems even more energetic than he has the past couple of days, as though his blood is carbonated, bubbling in his veins. There's something bristling, something sparky about him that reminds her of the first day she drank Nescafe. That buried kernel of energy. If she could see through Howard right now, she wouldn't be surprised to find a flame at his center.
In all the months she's known him, she's never seen him do a muscleman exercise like the one he just did with the water bottles. His body tells her he exercises often, but it's something he does privately, and although they've been together for three and four weeks at a stretch, she has no idea when.
Howard steps up onto the edge of the boat and makes the leap to the dock. The boat's stern swings outward behind him, but the prow stays put, anchored by a thick rope that's been passed over one of the vertical timbers that supports the dock. He pulls the loop of rope off the timber, tucks it under his arm, and jumps back onto the boat, which rocks alarmingly. He holds the rope out to Rose.
"Coil this," he says.
She says, "What?" This "coil" is not a word she knows.
"Circles," Howard says with an edge of impatience. "Just-" He makes a circular motion with his index finger, pointing down. "The rope," he says. He makes the gesture again, giving her the wide eyes she sometimes gets when she's too slow for him.
"Fine," Rose says, getting up tentatively. The boat is still rocking, and she has to put out a hand to steady herself. "Coil." She goes to the place where the rope has been knotted inside the boat and begins to feed the loose rope onto the deck in a circle. "Coil," she says again experimentally.
At the wheel, Howard mutters something and takes a long drink off a smaller bottle of water.
Rose says, "What?"
Without looking back, Howard says, "I said, Jesus Christ."
"Oh." She finishes making rope circles and drops the end, then nudges the rope with the toe of her flip-flop to make it rounder. "Why Jesus Christ?"
Howard screws the cap onto his water bottle, but he doesn't look at her. "Something I always say when I go out to sea," he answers without turning. She has to cup a hand to her ear to hear him. "Like a prayer." He turns a key beside the wheel and pushes a button, and the engine growls to life with a racketing sound, spewing gray smoke. "Sit down," Howard says, almost pushing past her. He goes to the back of the boat and releases a little catch that lets the engine drop into the water. The noise is cut in half, and the dock begins to slide by beside them. He returns to the wheel, and the boat points itself away from the dock. She grips the edge of the bench in both hands and turns back, seeing the widening V of their wake, churned greenish white in the center behind the propeller, seeing the island fall away behind them. It seems to get smaller very quickly.
"That way is India," Howard says, pointing west. He's at the wheel, and he zigzags right and left. The boat's sudden wobble makes Rose dizzy. "The old Thai boats had the engine at the end of a pipe," he says. "The long-tail boats were steered by pushing the pipe right or left."