“Cook for everyone,” he called after her. As he looked down into the galley he was pleased to see that although the area was a mess, it was a functioning mess: Jeanne and Lisa had removed all the food from the bilge, where some of it had been spoiled by the previous night’s deluge, and were inventorying and stowing it away. He noted too that Jeanne and her two children were dressed as neatly as for a quiet summer cruise, their white shorts and blouses in curious contrast to the big bluish bruise on Jeanne’s cheek and the bloody bandage on the side of Lisa’s head. Skippy was looking shyly up at him, clinging to one of his mother’s bare thighs.
“Can you keep an eye on Skippy for me?” Jeanne called up to him.
“Of course.”
But Skippy didn’t need an eye kept on him, since he was content to stay with his mother down in the main cabin, clinging to her as if she were safe space in a game of tag. He ignored her suggestion that he go up with Neil to look at a comic book and limited his conversation to periodic announcements to his mother: “I’m hungry.”
Lisa came up to where Neil was examining the wrecked wheelhouse wall to hand him a cup of coffee. The bandage on the left side of her face was immense and had a blot of red in the middle, but she told him that though it hurt and throbbed, she felt no dizziness.
“Here comes somebody,” she added unexpectedly, squinting off to the northeast.
Following her gaze, Neil turned to see a small skiff motoring at full throttle toward them, a man standing up in the stern, steering. Neil picked up the .22 again and cradled it in the crook of his elbow. At first he assumed the man was headed toward the village of Tangier, but the skiff kept coming straight in and coasted to a halt alongside the starboard hull. A small, deeply tanned young man about Jimmy’s age wearing dirty khakis and a soiled cotton sweatshirt looked over Vagabond’s combing at them.
“My father here?” he asked.
“Who’s that?”
“Cap’n Olly.”
“He’s sleeping in the forepeak, I think.”
“Hey, pa! Pa! It’s Chris!” the young man shouted.
After a moment the captain poked his head out of the forward hatch and then came up on deck, his sparse white hair disheveled; he was dressed only in T-shirt and underdrawers.
“Well, you don’t have to shout about it,” he grumbled, looking aft, and seeing Lisa standing twenty feet away staring at him, he disappeared below to get his trousers on.
“’Pears you had some waves come visiting last night,” Chris said to Neil, nodding solemnly at the wrecked wall of the wheelhouse.
“We did,” Neil agreed. “How about you?”
“Well, most of the houses on Smith Island are a few hundred feet farther north than they used to be, and there aren’t many people left to give a damn.” Chris glanced to his right. “Tangier must have really got socked.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Good morning, ma’am,” Chris said to Jeanne, who had come up into the wheelhouse.
“Good morning.”
“Well, what you want?” Captain Olly asked when he came out on deck a second time, buttoning up his pants. “Getting so a man can’t even escape his own family out at sea.”
“I was worried about you, pa,” his son said. “They said you went chasing pirates or something, and then the tidal wave last night, and you didn’t come back.”
“Well, I’m back,” he said. “Got myself two pirates. Woulda gotten more, but there weren’t none.”
“Where’s Lucy Mae?”
“I sent her into Crisfield to pick me up some pipe tobacco.”
Chris looked at his father uncertainly.
“We had to cut her loose when the big wave was about to hit,” Neil explained. “I imagine she sunk.”
“You okay?” Chris asked his father.
“Course I’m okay. I been dying for two years now, and chasin’ pirates and dodging tidal waves ain’t gonna affect it none. What you been up to? You remember the mayonnaise?”
“I’m going in the Navy, pa.”
“What do you mean you’re going in the Navy?” the old man demanded, sitting now on the cockpit bench near his son and pulling on his socks. “Why you want to go in the Navy?”
“Because I have to,” Chris answered.
“How have to? Why have to? What are you talking about?”
“The President ordered us to,” Chris answered quietly. All reservists had to go. I’m taking a special bus this morning at eleven from Salisbury.”
“What’s the hurry?” Captain Olly said irritably. “Navy got a ship needs bailing out this afternoon?”
“I’ve got to go, pa,” Chris insisted.
Captain Olly stood up and looked out across the afterdeck toward Smith Island. He stood silently for almost half a minute while his son watched him patiently.
“Well,” the old man finally said. “Give me a good-bye kiss. Ain’t every day a son goes put-putting off to get himself blown to bits.” He took a step toward his son and presented his grizzled cheek. Chris kissed him awkwardly. Captain Olly straightened up but kept looking down at his son.
“One of them H-bombs come after you, you remember to get below,” he said.
“You know me, pa,” Chris said, smiling boyishly. “If I know one’s coming, I’ll want to come up on deck to get a look at it.”
“Know you will, son, know you will. I figure in another week you’ll come raining down into the Atlantic.”
Chris stared at him.
“Don’t mind me, son,” Olly said, tears glistening in his eyes. “I just wish you’d a stole a boat and sailed into the Atlantic like a respectable son would do. Or at least a live one.”
“I’m going, pa.”
“I know you are, but I’m not going to stop talking. You’re just gonna have to go, ’cause I ain’t letting you go. ’F I had my druthers, I’d stay here talking to you till this boat rotted and sank. I like your face, son, and the damn sky’s gonna be empty without it.”
“Good-bye, pa,” Chris said, and gave his skiff a gentle shove away from Vagabond and pulled the starting cord on his outboard. The engine purred into life.
“I know you’re going, son, but you can’t stop me from talking to you. I been talkin’ to you eighteen years, and I ain’t gonna stop now just ’cause you want to go rushing off to become a smithereen. The world’s full of smithereens these days, and I don’t see why you think one more’s gonna make the air smell any purtier, ’specially you smelling most the time like a blowfish after flies been at it a week. Why I remember when you…”
His son was already fifty feet away, the sound of the skiff’s engine buzzing gently back to them across the water and beginning to fade.
Captain Olly, tears dampening both cheeks, turned to look at Neil and Lisa and Jeanne, who had been watching Chris’s departure from the wheelhouse. After several seconds delay he snorted.
“You got breakfast ready yet, lady?” he suddenly blurted at Jeanne. “I gotta get some eggs and coffee aboard my belly before I swamp us again with my dribble. Got any that whiskey left there, cap’n? I’m eighteen.”
The three stared at him.
“Nine o’clock in the morning and I ain’t even pissed yet,” he went on. “You got a head aboard this boat or can I pee off the side or use a bucket like real sailors do?”
“Off the afterdeck is fine,” Neil answered.
“Would you like some bacon and eggs?” Jeanne asked.
“Course I’d like bacon and eggs,” Captain Olly said as he stepped up out of the cockpit to get to the afterdeck. “And toast and juice and potatoes and anything else you got cooking. A dying, orphaned man got to make the most of his last days. Least he can do is eat like a pig.” Turning his back to the ladies, who went below to make breakfast, Captain Olly pissed with dignity off the aft deck.