The boat poked into the bay, putt-putting, almost drifting with some storm-induced tide, becoming a child’s toy that bobbed in the great rain-drenched bathtub of the bay. They remained unchallenged, and Frank roused a little, thinking about the task at hand, wishing Lew could have been sent again (not even thinking about Ellen), and finally turning to yell, “Keep to the left, you asshole!” at the boatman, who was drifting them eastward into the middle of the bay, probably out of some subconscious desire to be back in—to the east of here—Kenya.
Shit. As usual, his most determined statements remained un-understood by their targets; fuming, Frank suffered through a translation of his command by Charlie, knowing that whatever Charlie was saying, it bore little or no relationship to the original.
Nevertheless, it worked. The boat angled left; it even seemed to increase just a trifle in speed. “It’s along here,” Frank said, then wondered whom he thought he was talking to. “I hate rain,” he said, and slumped deeper inside his clothing.
Charlie’s translation of Frank’s shout at the boatman had somehow blossomed into a full-fledged conversation. Behind him Charlie rattled away, the boatman rumbled back; Charlie took his turn, the boatman his—a regular dialogue. Charlie pointed vaguely ahead and to the left, the boatman pointed vaguely a bit to the left of that, Charlie pointed somewhere else, the boatman pointed at his engine, Charlie pointed at Frank, and through it all they kept yakking away together, like long-lost brothers who had never cared for one another. “I think I’ll kill them both,” Frank muttered.
Through the curtains of rain, on the bank to the left, he could just make out their intended landfalclass="underline" a muddy crescent where a faint two-track dirt road came down to the water’s edge. “There it is, you goddam idiots!” he yelled, and cuffed Charlie across the head to distract him from his patter with the boatman. “Right there!”
“Yes, it is,” Charlie said. Even in this downpour, still dressed in nothing but tattered shirt and trousers, he remained cheerful and unaffected. “We were just talking about it,” he said, and calmly went back to his conversation.
“Lying bastard,” Frank muttered.
The boatman steered them to the crescent, where they ran aground a good twenty feet from shore. Frank shook his head. “We got to do better than that,” he said.
“Oh, sure,” Charlie said. While the boatman unlocked his motor and tilted it forward, lifting the screw out of the water, Charlie hopped over the side, grabbed the thick frayed end of rope tied to the bow, and waded them ashore. Surprisingly strong for all his skinniness, Charlie pulled a good half of the boat up onto the mud with Frank and the boatman still in it. Of course, the mud itself was half water. When Frank stepped into it, his booted feet sank in halfway to the knee; pulling out, against the suction, he felt the mud doing its best to yank the boots right off him.
The boatman also clambered over the side, and now the three of them dragged the boat the rest of the way over the mud and up onto the solid cross-hatching of last year’s dead grass. Like the Abominable Snowman, Frank lumbered around in the mud, plop-squirking at every step, while Charlie and the boatman were agile in their bare feet, slithering around like upright eels. That Charlie’s squalid unconcern was somehow better attuned to the circumstances than Frank’s careful preparations only made Frank’s mood worse.
With the boat on relatively solid ground, they pulled the tarp off the two mopeds and carried them to the beginning of the road. Then Charlie stood grinning, the rain already washing the mud from his shanks, as Frank opened his slicker, opened the coat within, found the flask, and pulled it out. The first short swig of body-warming bourbon burned his throat and brought tears to his eyes, but they could count as tears of gratitude. Blinking them away, Frank knocked back another, longer swallow, then screwed the cap back on the flask and smiled as he felt the welcome warmth spread through his body the way molten steel runs to fill the mold.
But then, looking at the mopeds, he frowned again. It was a damned undignified mode of transportation for a grown man, this stubby motorized bicycle with the ridiculously thick wheels. But Maintenance Depot Number 4 was a good twenty miles up the road, and no other vehicle could have been brought here over the lake. “Might as well do it, then,” Frank said, stowing away the flask and rebuttoning all his coats. Jabbing a dripping thumb over his shoulder at the boatman, he said to Charlie, “Tell him to wait.”
“Oh, he knows,” Charlie said.
“Tell him, if he doesn’t wait we’ll get him for it later.”
Charlie looked dubious. “Later? If he leaves us here, we don’t have any ‘later.’ He knows that, too.”
So did Frank. “Will he stay?”
“He wants his money,” Charlie said with a shrug. “If something scares him, he will go away.”
“Shit.” Shaking his head, Frank said, “Come on, then, let’s get it over with.”
They climbed onto the mopeds, both of which snarled into life at the first kick, and started up the faint double track into the low dense trees, Frank slightly in the lead on the right-hand rut, Charlie a bit behind him on the left. Looking back, Frank saw the boatman had climbed back into the boat, where he now sat, unmoving, his back against the upturned engine, forearms folded on his sunken stomach. He seemed asleep; or dead.
This road had been cleared by the railroad-building British seventy years earlier, and abandoned fifty years after that. The occasional passage of a farmer’s wagon or truck in the twenty years since had been sufficient to keep the twin track visible against the ground, but not sufficient to keep saplings and brush from encroaching. “This’ll be hell on the trucks,” Frank said, shoving the moped through the tangle of shrubbery. He felt that he looked like the clown in the circus who rides the tiny tricycle, and he wasn’t far wrong.
The forest was dense here, the old road completely covered by tree branches, which screened out most of the rain. Individual drops could be seen and heard—and felt—and the air seemed cooler and not quite so humid. The ground was just a bit less spongy. It was almost as though the rain had stopped barely a minute ago and these were the final droplets shaking out of the trees.
The effect of the mopeds’ nasal roar was strange in this empty, wet forest. It seemed both very loud and utterly silent. It seemed to be posing some further corollary question to the old one about the tree falling in the forest. The only effect the engines seemed to have was that the quality of the empty silence behind them was more shimmering, more tense, than the empty silence in front.
The mopeds were theoretically capable of doing fifty miles an hour, but not in this terrain. They did manage short spurts of twenty, even twenty-five, but more usually traveled at fifteen and sometimes even slowed to ten or less. The land was a persistent gradual uphill slope, the forest unchanging all around them, here and there a small path—cut by humans or animals—leading away to the right, inland. The lake was never more than a few miles away to the left, but there was no hint of it.
Frank kept one eye on the odometer, and they had gone nineteen and four-tenths miles when some change in the mass of the sound filling his ears made him glance to his left, where he failed to see Charlie. Looking back, frowning, he saw that Charlie was stopped fifty yards back, standing beside his moped, cheerful and patient, gazing alertly this way.
“Now what?” Frank made a U-turn from the right track onto the left, not quite getting bucked off when the moped hit a root in the middle of the maneuver, and roared back to where Charlie stood, smiling in all innocence. “What-chagot?”