“Give it to me. Someone needs to say howdy, they can call me on your phone.” He stuffed the phone into his pocket and left the tent.
He’d done his job, he figured, and more. He’d come up with a plan. Let the others work out the details. They gorged on steak, potatoes, peas. It was the best meal Nick ever had in his life. Then, because they were still hungry, Nick cooked another steak and they split it.
He looked at the boy opposite him. Jason had made some attempt to clean himself up—he’d washed in the sink and tried to scrub off the mud he’d used to paint his face and arms, though not very successfully. His hair hung in dirty strands down his forehead, there was grime caked into his knuckles and streaked on his arms, his clothes were stained with mud and river water. His eyes were red, and in spite of the mud he’d slathered over himself, he’d managed to get a good case of sunburn. Jason looked like a refugee from six months of war, and Nick supposed that he didn’t look any better. Nick looked at the boy, who was shoveling food into his mouth before he’d finished chewing the last forkful, and sipped thoughtfully at his own glass of milk. “Save room for ice cream,” he said. Jason looked up at him. “No problem,” he said.
“I’ve got the water heater going,” Nick said. “We should see what the crew has left us in the way of soap and shampoo, and shower while we can.” He rubbed his chin. “I should shave. And there are probably toothbrushes around. And sunburn ointment. And some clothes that should fit us.”
“Okay,” Jason mumbled past a mouthful of steak.
“I don’t want to tell you what to do or anything,” Nick said, “but we should bathe and brush our teeth whenever we can. It keeps up morale. Keeps us from giving up.”
Jason gave him a curious look. “Morale?” he said, as if he’d never heard the word before. “You’re worried about our morale? Are you in the Army or something?”
“I was raised in the Army. But I was never in the service myself.”
“Army brat?”
“My dad was a general,” Nick said. “I learned some things about survival from him and, ah, from the military culture, you know. And I was in the Boy Scouts, too.” He shook his head. “If I can remember all that stuff. It was years ago.”
A wary look entered Jason’s eyes. “So what do you do now?”
Nick saw the look—it was one he knew all too well—and felt surprise roll through his mind. The boy thought he was crazy, or a criminal.
Well. Nick had preferred to run a deadly rapid in an unpowered boat to asking help from the cops. There was a wound on his arm. And—his mind a little grimmer now—Nick was black, and the kid’s only contact with black people was probably watching pimps and gangsters on TV. What else was Jason to think?
“I’m an engineer,” Nick said. “Got laid off from McDonnell in St. Louis five months ago.” He laughed. “I shouldn’t have any trouble getting an engineering job now. Not with so many things needing to be put back together.”
Jason’s wariness lessened somewhat, but Nick could see that the boy was still a bit on guard. But exhaustion was falling fast on Nick, and he didn’t have the energy to deal with Jason’s suspicions now. Nick stood. “I’m going to shower and shave,” he said. “You think you could put the dirty dishes in the washer? If the crew comes back, I don’t want them to find out we’ve made work for them.”
“Sure.” Jason, his stomach full, seemed content enough.
Nick went into the crew’s little cabins and dug through some of the lockers in search of clothes that would fit him. Photos of the crew’s families looked down at him from the walls. He looked at pictures of smiling families, of kids and spouses and parents, and wondered if those families would ever meet again, if there would always be one or more missing.
He found some clothes that fit fairly well, a disposable razor, some shaving cream, a comb, a towel. In a locker he found a first-aid kit with sterile bandages and disinfectant. In the shower he found shampoo and soap.
He stayed in the little shower a long time, enjoying the hot water, the clean scent of the soap, the pounding droplets that relaxed the muscles of his shoulders and neck. He cleaned the dried blood from the wound on his arm, winced at the sting. The wound itself seemed to be scabbed and, so far as he could tell, healing. At least it wasn’t hot, or oozing pus. He slathered on the disinfectant and bandaged the wound.
Then he shaved and splashed on the Mermen’s Skin Bracer he found on the sink. The sharp, clean scent stung up a memory. His father had used Skin Bracer. At the remembrance, sadness briefly clouded his eyes.
In the mirror he looked better than the refugee he’d seen a few minutes ago, but he still looked as if he’d been worked over with a baseball bat. He didn’t look much like a general’s son, that was for sure. He found Jason in the galley, eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream with Hershey’s chocolate sauce. The dinner things were gone, and Nick presumed Jason had put them away.
The boy knew how to do a few things, anyway.
“Don’t you ever stop eating?” Nick said.
Jason looked at him. “I didn’t fill up on cattails, the way you did.” Damn, Nick thought. Ask a question, get a zinger. What was with this kid?
“I’ve been thinking,” Nick said. “We can stay on this boat awhile, I guess, maybe till someone takes us off. The people who own this boat are going to come back before too long, I imagine. But in case something happens, we should have some emergency supplies ready to put in that bass boat. Canned food, fresh water.”
Jason looked up from his bowl of ice cream. “If there’s an emergency,” he asked, “wouldn’t we be safer here?”
“What if the water rises, and this boat goes floating onto some rocks, or into the trees? What if a snag punches a hole in the hull?”
Jason scraped the bowl with his spoon. “Okay,” he said. “I guess you’ve got a point.”
“I’ll put it together. You might as well take a shower. See if you can find yourself some clothes.” Nick assembled his emergency food in plastic garbage bags. There were jugs of fresh water right on the shelf. He threw in a container of flour, another of sugar, another of salt. Matches and a skillet. Soap, scissors, sun block, a sewing kit he found in one of the rooms, a bag of disposable razors, and a mirror—for signaling, as the Boy Scout manual might say. He smiled at the memory. He stowed everything aft on the deck, where Retired and Gone Fishin’ was tied. Then, since he remembered seeing a long extension cord, he plugged it in, ran it over the side, and plugged in the bass boat’s battery recharger.
If another catastrophe occurred, he thought, the boat’s little electric motor could carry them away. At all of maybe three miles per hour. Maybe he should study the engine controls, find out if he could operate the towboat single-handed.
He could feel exhaustion floating through his mind like fog. Stress, a wound, and a night spent in a tree had caught up with him. He would find one of the unused beds and turn in.
In the morning, he thought, he would figure out how to work the radio. Maybe he could make a radiophone call, or whatever they were called, directly to Arlette, surprise her as she was eating breakfast.
In the morning, he thought. First thing.
He found an unused bed, dropped his clothes to the deck, slid between fresh crisp sheets. Before he could turn off the light there was a gentle knock on the door.
“Yes?”
Jason stuck his head in. “Good night,” he said.
“Good night, Jason.”
“And thanks.” Jason’s words came slowly. “Thanks for pulling me out of the water. When I went in. You know.”