She had with her a little straw picnic basket, and she handed it up to me. It held a bottle of wine and some cheese and crackers.
“I thought you might be getting hungry,” she said.
“I’m always hungry.”
“How marvelous to be seventeen,” she said. “With everything before you.”
“Well, you have everything before you.”
“Yes I do, but there’s quite a bit behind me too.”
I waited for her to go on, but that was as far as she would go. When it came to talking about herself I never got anything more than cryptic little bits and pieces like that.
“You take a swim,” she said, “while I open the wine.”
I went over the side in a long flat dive and plowed about halfway across the channel holding my body high in the water and digging in hard and feeling full of strength. Hester affected me that way. I felt full of confidence and guts when she was around.
I wondered if Harry was watching us. I scanned the beach but could not see him.
When I pulled myself up, she had spread the contents of the basket out in the cockpit and opened the wine. It was a Spanish wine, very dry and tart, and you could taste it on your tongue long after it had gone down.
I wanted very much to touch her, just to feel her flesh against mine. But I was nervous about it. Had she changed her mind about me? Decided I was nothing but a punk kid? But I knew she hadn’t. Why would she have come to the boat if that were the case?
I put down the glass of wine and reached out and took her hand. The skin of her palm was a little rough from gardening. She tightened her grip on mine, but we did not make a move toward each other. My anxiety began to fade. I felt as I had during the confrontation with Harry. On top of the situation. Quite different than I had ever felt with Miss Wong or Elvira McGee. Hester wasn’t teasing me. I don’t think she would have been capable of it. She honestly liked me. I knew that sooner or later we would go to bed together.
CHAPTER 29
IT HAPPENED SOONER THAN I EXPECTED. Right after lunch as a matter of fact. We were stretched out on the cabin top in the bright sun, and the wine was making me feel pleasantly relaxed and drowsy. But then Hester took my hand again. This time decisively and pulled me up and said, “Come on.” I could not think at first why she was taking me below but I followed her down the crazily canted companionway steps.
I stood there like an ox wondering what she was up to until she pushed me down on the settee and said, “Sit down there where I can get at you.”
She was very small, but very determined. She bent down and put her arms around my neck and kissed me thoroughly. It was not so much biting and tonguing as it had been with Elvira, just a nice long, warm, soft, sweet kiss. At the very end of it she let me feel just the tip of her tongue. At the same time she reached down and began to pull, a little angrily I thought, at the button of my shorts.
“Get those off,” she said.
I reached down and unsnapped the button and slid out of the shorts. She just stood there looking down at me.
“You’re very beautiful,” she said.
Then she unbuttoned her shirt, took it off, and threw it away into a corner of the cabin. Her breasts were larger than I expected. Very firm and golden brown all over with small pink nipples. I was shaking like a horse. We lay there touching but not doing anything to each other. Then she turned toward me and smiled.
“Is this your first time, Clay?” Her voice was hardly more than a whisper.
I was embarrassed to tell her the truth but I thought I’d better.
“Yes.”
“Don’t worry, darling. It will be lovely. Leave everything to me.” She put her fingertips on my thigh and let them drift gently up and down. Then she bent over and kissed my nipple and nibbled at it.
“Has no one ever done this to you before?” she said.
“Not exactly.”
“Oh ho. So someone has done other things to you.”
“Yes.”
“What?”
How could I possibly tell her what Elvira had done?
“Kissed you other places?”
“Yes.”
“Mmm. I’m jealous. Where did she kiss you?”
“Never mind.”
“But I do. Was it here?” she said, letting her hand drift down across my belly.
I couldn’t speak.
“I think it was,” she said, “and I’ll kiss you there too to take her kiss away.”
She wriggled around on the narrow bunk, kissed me at first gently and then more firmly, and finally took me in her mouth. I floated in a kind of dreamy bliss, unaware really of where I was and who I was with. When I could stand it no longer I clutched her hair and she nodded her understanding and moved up and kissed me on the lips. This time she put her tongue very firmly into my mouth. At the same time she was guiding me with her hand and in a moment we were joined.
“Ah,” she whispered. “Ah, that’s beautiful. I love having you inside me.”
I could not wait. I let her know by clutching her more tightly, and she responded by a quickened rhythm of her hips and a deepening of her breathing. It was elemental. Like the oceans and the winds. The wind through a pine forest. Then I could not wait and I let it go, and she answered by pressing her lips to my ear and whispering, “Yes, yes, yes. I love you. I love you.”
We were both bathed in sweat. We lay clasped together and the world came slowly back into focus. I looked down at her. Her face was flushed and all its crisp, clean outlines seemed blurred. She opened her eyes and smiled at me and it was like sunlight dancing through leaves. “Well, Mr. Bullmore,” she said. “Well, well, well.” When I did not answer she said, “Where are you?”
“On Saturn. Or Mars. A third orbit around the moon.”
“Let me know when you come down to earth.”
“Splashdown. Now.”
“Would you say a word for the vast TV audience, captain. How was it up there?”
“Indescribable.”
“That’s a good word,” she said. “A very good word indeed.”
When we got up at last she said, “Let’s go for a swim.” And with that she ran naked out of the cabin and jumped over the side. I went after her.
“Listen,” I said. “Harry may be watching.”
“Who cares?”
We played around in the water for a little while and then I came up behind her and put my hands on her breasts. She wriggled her bottom against me.
“Oh my,” she said. “So soon?”
“Yes.”
“How wonderful to be seventeen,” she said.
CHAPTER 30
HARRY WAS STONED ALL THE TIME. ON SOMETHING. Pot or booze? Where he got it I don’t know. Perhaps he had hidden it along with the money. He went out every so often to his secret place, and he was damn careful to see that I did not follow him. I think he kept looking behind him all the way, although there was no need. I didn’t want his money and I surely did not want his pot. I had the one thing he really wanted. Hester.
You would not think that a man with Harry’s vast experience would go all to pieces over a woman. You would think that he would say fuck them and leave them. There is another one round the bend. But what bend? There was no other bend on that island. And no other woman. Just the three of us. And he could not understand how I had beaten him. With all his experience. And his money.
That was the last card he played. He told her about the money. I could hardly believe it at first.
She said, “Harry told me about the money.”
“What money?”
She smiled and said, “Don’t play games with me, little friend.”
We were lying on the sand under a bamboo tree. What was bamboo doing in a place like that? Bamboo is supposed to grow in Viet Nam. Why did it grow on a bare island in the Bahamas? Because Hester willed it to grow. When it came to growing things she was something else. She could make anything grow. Orchids. Radishes. She used to say, “I don’t trus
t people. People let you down. But not growing things. You can count on growing things.”
“What money?” I asked again.
“The money from the casino.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t believe it. Why would he do a thing like that? Maybe she was just fishing. Maybe she had a radio we didn’t know about. Or it could be that she had heard about it from someone else. She sometimes went off for hours in that little skiff. Especially since I had fixed the forty-horse Johnson. There were like five hundred islands in the Exuma chain. She could have gone to any one of them and heard about it there. And put two and two together. But why? Why relate Harry and me and Jezebel to the holdup. There was nothing to tie us in. Never had been. Or had Grogan talked? Or Burger? Or Miss Wong? Anything was possible.
As for my own money, I had buried it in a plastic bag under a coral rock shaped like a bullfrog—350 strides southeast of the house. On a line with Jezebel and a single straight coconut palm. Harry had brought me the money the morning after we talked about it, when I had told him I would not do any more work on the boat until I had it. Now I had it—$25,000. A fortune. And more if I had wanted it. But my share only was what I had said and I meant it. As it was I could not begin to imagine what I would ever do with $25,000.
He slapped it down in front of me without a word. He never called me Number Three anymore. In fact he never spoke to me except when it was absolutely necessary. I used to hate it when he called me Number Three, but now I kind of missed it. I missed the old Harry. With all his old rambunctiousness and unpredictability. I missed the sense of fun and adventure and to-hell-with-everything that he used to pass along to people. It had been his big talent, and he had lost it. He had lost more than that. He had lost his youth. He seemed shrunken and negative these days. Like a quarrelsome old man. All because of her.
The cool gray eyes were searching mine. “You don’t believe me, do you?”
“Sure,” I said.
“No you don’t. But you will. He told me everything. He even told me how he left you in the water.”
So she did know. There was no way she could have found that out except from him. Poor old Harry.
“I love you,” she said. “Do you believe that?”
I didn’t answer. I was not sure I believed it. I was not sure I knew what love was. Harry loved her and she loved me. And I? I didn’t know. I think I was too young to really know. I mean I loved being with her. And I loved making love. And I was not even looking ahead to what would happen to all of us when the ketch was refloated. I mean it was only a few days off now and I was not even thinking about it. One thing was sure: I was finished with Harry. But what then? Would I stay there on the island with her? Would she grow tired of me and send me away? Would I take the money and go home? What would I do with $25,000 in Peckinpaugh? The thing was I never knew what to make of her really. What had she seen in me in the first place? Why had she taken me for a lover? The money? If it was the money she was after, she would have been better off with Harry. Except that Harry almost certainly would never have told her about the money if she had not taken up with me and driven him half-crazy.
I couldn’t really figure her out. Who was she and what was she doing living there alone in the first place? She never gave me the slightest hint. To this moment I still don’t know.
“Do you believe that I love you?” she said again.
“Yes. I guess so.”
“Why do you only guess it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what it’s all about.”
“You will, Clay darling,” she said.
A little later she said, “Put your hand here.”
I did.
“Sweet,” she said.
A little later she said, “Do you know why he told me about the money?”
“Not really.”
“You can’t guess.”
“I guess he was trying to make himself seem important. I guess he was trying to sort of buy you.”
“Yes.”
“I feel sorry for him.”
“Don’t be. He’s only having done to him what he has probably done to a hundred others. What we all do to each other. What you will someday do to me.”
“Me?”
“Yes,” she said. “Someday you’ll leave me. I am the first woman you have ever had and you will always remember me, but someday you’ll leave me.”
I started to shake my head.
“Or,” she said, “if I see it coming I may leave you.”
I didn’t see much point in going on with that kind of talk. “Then what happens now?” I said.
“Now is beautiful.”
“Yes.”
“Now is delicious.” She bent over and let her lips trail lightly as butterfly wings across my chest.
“Now is the mother-loving end,” she said.
We made love on the wet sand, her honey-colored body arched like a bow to receive me. Wavelets lapping around us.
When we had finished she said, “I never get enough of you.”
“It’s the same with me.”
“Oh you,” she said. “With you it would be the same with anyone. You’re a young bull.”
“Then what are you?”
“I,” she said happily, “am a bitch in heat.”
CHAPTER 31
“COME AWAY WITH ME,” SHE SAID.
“To where?”
“Somewhere. Anywhere. Everywhere.”
“But I thought you loved it here.”
“I did. But now I love you. The vibrations are different.”
I wondered if the money had anything to do with the different vibrations.
“All right,” I said. “When do you want to go?”
“Soon. Before something happens.”
“What could happen?”
“I don’t know. I have a bad feeling about Harry. He’s breaking up.”
“What could he do?”
“A man like Harry could do almost anything. He might, for instance, kill you. Or me.”
“Go on.”
“I mean it. You’ll see. I don’t think you know him very well.”
That much was true. I knew him less each day.
“Well, how do you think we ought to work it then?” I asked.
“I think we ought to take the skiff and just go.”
“Leaving him here?”
“He left you, didn’t he? And in worse circumstances. In the water without a sou. You’ll be leaving him with a boat and all the money in the world. Everything he’s wanted.”
“Except for one thing.”
“Yes,” she said, “but that one thing he won’t have in any case.”
When I hesitated she said, “What do you think you owe him anyway?”
“Nothing, I guess. Well, yes, I owe him something for bringing me here to find you.”
“He didn’t bring you. You found your own way. Continue to find your own way, love. Find your way to Paris with me.”
“Why Paris?”
“Why not? Paris in the spring with someone you love. Chestnut trees in the Bois and a Ferrari with the top down. What a dream.”
“What about your house?”
“The house will still be here. And if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter. It’s time to move on. Every seven years.”
“Have you been here seven years?”
“A figure of speech, love. It doesn’t matter.”
I thought briefly of Peckinpaugh and Mary Ann Mobley. Very briefly.
“All right,” I said. “When do you want to go?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Not tomorrow. I told him I’d help him refloat Jezebel.”
“And you still think you owe him that?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose that’s one of the things I love about you. How long will it take?”
“The day after tomorrow.”
“Oh my God,” she said. “The day after tomorrow. How beautiful.”
“Do we have enough gas? How
far can we get?”
“We have enough gas to get to Highbourne Cay and Mr. Albury. From there we can signal the mailboat. We’ll take the mailboat to Nassau, and Bahamas International to Luxembourg. From Luxembourg to Paris is a hop and a skip.”
“What about your things?”
“What things?”
“Clothes and stuff. If Harry sees us putting a lot of stuff into the skiff it won’t take him long to figure it out.”
“He won’t see it. I’m not taking anything.”
“You’ll go just the way you are?”
“Of course. Like I said, every seven years.”
“And what about me? Will you get rid of me after seven years?”
“Ah, love, seven years is a lifetime. Let’s think of seven months or seven hours. The world lies before us.”
“What lies before us right now is to get that boat off the reef.”
“You’re determined to do that for Harry?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a little mad, my love. And so very young.”
“I’ll do it all the same,” I said.
And I did.
I had been getting the ballast out in sections, dropping the lead pigs over the side into the water. At low tide they were not in more than a foot of water and it would be easy enough for him to retrieve them. The lead keel of course was something else. I had tried the nuts holding the keel bolts, but could not budge them. Probably they could be gotten off with a blowtorch or, if that did not work, they could be hacked off. Either way it would be a murderous job and I did not see how, without a great deal of help, the keel could ever be replaced. The French sailor Gerbault had once replaced his four-ton keel after his ship had been wrecked on a reef in the South Seas, but he had been lucky enough to get help from the French navy and half a hundred natives. Harry would have to do it all alone and it would be impossible. So if it came to removing the keel Jezebel would probably have to be abandoned. Still it might not come to that.
Harry & the Bikini Bandits Page 15