He saw the two sailors from the yacht look at each other but they didn’t say anything. He stood there, holding the long, pleasantly bitter drink, tasting the first swallow of it, and it reminded him of Tanga, Mombasa, and Lamu and all that coast and he had a sudden nostalgia for Africa. Here he was, settled on the island, when he could as well be in Africa. Hell, he thought, I can always go there. You have to make it inside of yourself wherever you are. You are doing all right at that here.
“Tom, do you really like the taste of that stuff?” Bobby asked him.
“Sure. Or I wouldn’t drink it.”
“I opened a bottle by mistake once and it tasted like quinine.”
“It’s got quinine in it.”
“People surely are crazy,” Bobby said. “Man can drink anything he wants. He has money to pay for it He’s supposed to be taking his pleasure and he spoils good gin by putting it into some kind of a Hindu drink with quinine in it.”
“It tastes good to me. I like the quinine taste with the lime peel. I think it sort of opens up the pores of the stomach or something. I get more of a kick out of it than any other gin drink. It makes me feel good.”
“I know. Drinking always makes you feel good. Drinking makes me feel terrible. Where’s Roger?”
Roger was a friend of Thomas Hudson’s, who had a fishing shack down the island.
“He ought to be over soon. We’re going to eat with Johnny Goodner.”
“What men like you and Roger Davis and Johnny Goodner that been around stay around this island for I don’t know.”
“It’s a good island. You stay here, don’t you?”
“I stay to make a living.”
“You could make a living in Nassau.”
“Nassau, hell. There’s more fun here. This is a good island for having fun. Plenty money been made here, too.”
“I like to live here.”
“Sure,” said Bobby. “I do, too. You know that. If I can make a living. You sell those pictures you paint all the time?”
“They sell pretty good now.”
“People paying money for pictures of Uncle Edward. Pictures of Negroes in the water. Negroes on land. Negroes in boats. Turtle boats. Sponge boats. Squalls making up. Waterspouts. Schooners that got wrecked. Schooners building. Everything they could see free. They really buy them?”
“Sure they buy them. Once a year you have a show in New York and they sell them.”
“Auction them off?”
“No. The dealer who shows them puts a price on them. People buy them. Museums buy one once in a while.”
“Can’t you sell them yourself?”
“Sure.”
“I’d like to buy a waterspout,” Bobby said. “Damn big waterspout. Black as hell. Maybe better two waterspouts going roaring over the flats making a noise so you can’t hear. Sucking all the water across and scare you to death. Me in the dinghy sponging and nothing I can do. Waterspout blow the water glass right out of my hand. Almost suck the dinghy up out of the water. God’s own hell of a waterspout. How much would one like that cost? I could hang it right here. Or hang it up at home if it wouldn’t scare the old woman to death.”
“It would depend on how big it was.”
“Make it as big as you want,” Bobby said grandly. “You can’t make a picture like that too damn big. Put in three waterspouts. I seen three waterspouts closer than that across by Andros Island one time. They went right up to the sky and one sucked up a sponger’s boat and when it dropped the motor went right through the hull.”
“It’s just what the canvas would cost,” Thomas Hudson said. “I’d only charge for the canvas.”
“By God, get a big canvas then,” Bobby said. “We’ll paint waterspouts that will scare people right out of this bar and right off the damned island.”
He was moved by the grandeur of the project but its possibilities were just opening up to him.
“Tom, boy, do you think you could paint a full hurricane? Paint her right in the eye of the storm when she’s already blew from one side and calmed and just starting from the other? Put in everything from the Negroes lashed in the coconut palms to the ships blowing over the crest of the island? Put in the big hotel going. Put in two-by-fours sailing through the air like lances and dead pelicans blowing by like they were part of the gusts of rain. Have the glass down to twenty-seven and the wind velocities blown away. Have the sea breaking on the ten-fathom bar and the moon come out in the eye of the storm. Have a tidal wave come up and submerge every living thing. Have women blown out to sea with their clothes stripped from them by the wind. Have dead Negroes floating everywhere and flying through the air—”
“It’s an awfully big canvas,” Thomas Hudson said.
“To hell with the canvas!” Bobby said. “I’ll get a mainsail off a schooner. We’ll paint the greatest goddam pictures in the world and live throughout history. You’ve just been painting these little simple pictures.”
“I’ll start on the waterspouts,” Thomas Hudson said.
“Right,” said Bobby, hating to come back from the big project. “That’s sound. But by God we can make some great pictures with the knowledge you and I’ve got and with the training you’ve put in already.”
“I’ll start on the waterspouts tomorrow.”
“Good,” said Bobby. “That’s a beginning. But by God I’d like us to paint that hurricane, too. Anybody ever paint the sinking of the Titanic?”
“Not on a really big scale.”
“We could paint that. There’s a subject that always appealed to my imagination. You could get in the coldness of the iceberg as it moved off after they struck it. Paint the whole thing in a dense fog. Get in every detail. Get that man that got in the boat with the women because he thought he could help because he was a yachtsman. Paint him getting into the boat stepping on a few women just as big as life. He reminds me of that fellow we got upstairs now. Why don’t you go upstairs and make a drawing of that one while he’s asleep and use him in the painting?”
“I think we better just start with the waterspouts.”
“Tom, I want you to be a big painter,” Bobby said. “Leave all that chicken stuff behind. You’ve just been wasting yourself. Why there’s three paintings we’ve outlined together in less than half an hour and I haven’t even started to draw on my imagination. And what have you been doing up until now? Painting a Negro turning a loggerhead turtle on the beach. Not even a green turtle. A common loggerhead. Or painting two Negroes in a dinghy bullying a mess of crawfish. You’ve wasted your life, man.” He stopped and had a quick one from underneath the bar.
“That don’t count,” he said. “You never saw me take that one. Look, Tom, those are three great paintings. Big paintings. Worldwide paintings. Fit to hang in the Crystal Palace alongside the masterpieces of all time. Except the first, of course, is a small subject. But we haven’t started yet. No reason why we can’t paint one to end them all. What do you think of this?”
He took a very quick one.
“Of what?”
He leaned over the bar so the others could not hear.
“Don’t shear off from it,” Bobby said. “Don’t be shocked by its magnitude. You got to have vision, Tom. We can paint the End of the World,” he paused. “Full size.”
“Hell,” Thomas Hudson said.
“No. Before hell. Hell is just opening. The Rollers are rolling in their church up on the ridge and all speaking in unknown tongues. There’s a devil forking them up with his pitchfork and loading them into a cart. They’re yelling and moaning and calling on Jehovah. Negroes are prostrated everywhere and morays and crawfish and spider crabs are moving around and over their bodies. There’s a big sort of hatch open and devils are carrying Negroes and church people and rollers and everyone into it and they go out of sight. Water’s rising all around the island and hammerheads and mackerel sharks and tiger sharks and shovelnose sharks are swimming round and round and feeding on those who try to swim away to keep from being forked down the big open hatch that has steam rising out of it. Rummies are taking their last swigs and beating on the devils with bottles. But the devils keep forking them down, or else they are engulfed by the rising sea where now there are whale sharks, great white sharks, and killer whales and other outsized fish circling outside of where the big sharks are tearing at those people in the water. The top of the island is covered with dogs and cats and the devils are forking them in, too, and the dogs are cowering and howling and the cats run off and claw the devils and their hair stands on end and finally they go into the sea swimming as good as you want to see. Sometimes a shark will hit one and you’ll see the cat go under. But mostly they swim right off through it.