Still Summer

  Once, years before the young man had joined them, Chief had given them extra cash for a canvas bag of fat-faced watches with jangling bands, watches a man such as he could never wear. No man could wear such a watch without the rattle of its metallic band like a signal of his approach from yards away. Americans walked about like animals at a fair, braying and jingling. Still, Chief had warned them not to kill American citizens, and though this meant little to Ernesto, it still crossed his mind. He would think this over after a time. The long-haired girl was very beautiful. A woman who stood beside her was also beautiful.

  A few hours lost would do no harm.

  A good meal, maybe even a sleep and a fuck. Then they would speed all the way to Chief and plead bad weather for their tardiness.

  Cammie had motioned the motorboat to come alongside before she noticed the black paint smeared all over it, smeared in streaks and blots, like a little child’s school project. But the boy smiled at her. He was blond and young, certainly not much older than she. Cammie was confused.

  Fishermen, after all, she thought. She put out her hand to him, and he took it.

  “Thank God you came,” she said to him as the motorboat purred alongside. “We’ve been out here for . . . ages. Well, it seems like ages. A freighter just passed us by. I can’t believe it didn’t hit us. I’m from Illinois. Where are you from? Do you have a working radio? Because ours is wrecked. It only sends or we can’t answer . . . and we have only the one VHF. . . .” She attached the ladder and threw it over. “Maybe you can help me work it. I’m usually very good at stuff like that—”

  “They can’t understand everything I say,” the young man told her softly, cutting her short, his voice grim as an omen. “Especially complex sentences. Do precisely what they ask you to do and maybe we’ll go away.”

  Cammie jerked her hand back.

  She saw the big, dark-skinned man pull himself up from his bench seat in the little boat. He tugged his shirt down over his immense belly. He motioned to the young man, and the young man handed him an enormous shining rifle.

  Cammie tried to wrestle the ladder back into the Opus. But the big man was up over the deck like a fat shark with its gaping mouth, pushing her against the wall of the saloon so that her head pounded from the impact. He motioned to the young man to follow him. Another man, smaller but not young, motored in circles around the Opus. He threw a rope, and the fat man caught and secured it.

  Carlo climbed aboard.

  In Spanish, Ernesto told the young man to greet the women in American and to tell them that no one would be hurt if they acted con mucho cuidado. The young man said, “Listen to him. Pay attention. He will murder you. You have to do what I say, even if I, uh, make a pretense that I’m hurting you. I’m trying to speak in sentences they won’t comprehend.”

  “What do they want?”

  “The boat, I hope.”

  “You hope?” Cammie cried.

  “They desire you as well,” the young man said.

  “What? Why?” Cammie cried. “Are you thieves? Who are you? Why did you smile at me?”

  “Because I don’t want any unpleasantness. I’m not an evil person. I’m trying to use words they won’t grasp, you see? They can comprehend some English, but not the idiom.” He glanced over his shoulder at Ernesto, who was examining a scrape on his hand. He whispered urgently, “What’s a long word for, um, forcing intercourse?”

  “Forcing intercourse,” Cammie said.

  “Sexually molest,” Olivia called.

  “This man would sexually molest the Virgin Mary,” he said.

  “Oh God, no, please help me,” Cammie whispered.

  “I’m, uh, attempting that.”

  “Cammie?” Tracy called from the saloon. Cammie came down the stairs, pushing her arms into the sleeves of a shirt she wore over her bathing suit. The sight of the dirty men and Cammie, cringing, struck Tracy mute and motionless. Olivia stood at the stern, wide-eyed, her back flattened against her closed cabin door.

  Ernesto sat on the storage seats and pulled Cammie onto his lap.

  “¡Mi hija!” Tracy cried.

  Ernesto muttered something to the young man as he pawed Cammie’s shoulder, pulling down the strap of her bra.

  “That’s my child!” Tracy cried.

  “He knows she’s your daughter,” said the young man. “Can you . . . can you make a diversion of any kind to let me concentrate? Otherwise he’ll force her right here.” Tracy nearly yelped but choked it back. “That’s good, that’s okay. You have to behave as if I’m ordering you around.” Tracy rushed down into the saloon. “Do you have booze? Do you have food?”

  “Not much,” Tracy whimpered. “But some. Here and . . . here.”

  Cammie was moaning, hugging herself, rocking her body side to side. Carlo approached as Ernesto nudged Cammie’s shirt up with the handle of his knife. Carlo tugged at her bra. Her breast, exposed, seemed to gleam in the dim light. Then Ernesto pointed his knife at Carlo, warning him away.

  “Mama!” Cammie bleated, pulling down the cup of her bra to cover herself.

  “Mama!” Carlo bleated. “Ma-ma!”

  Olivia said, “Shut up, Cammie! Tracy, come and help me.”

  “Is that your sister?” the young man asked. Cammie said nothing.

  Baring her teeth at Carlo in a mask of a smile, Olivia pushed past Cammie. While Carlo held Cammie’s arms back to placate him, Ernesto stuck a thick finger into the waistband of Cammie’s shorts. He rooted until he touched the shaved line above the tendrils of her hair. The young man winced. Tracy flew out of the saloon with a full bottle of Chivas. Ernesto saw the label on the Scotch. This was expensive American liquor. He could do the girl later on. He let Cammie step aside and made his way down into the saloon.

  Cammie fell to her knees and scrambled away like a crab into the corner. She pulled a beach towel around her.

  “No. Steer,” Tracy told her sternly. “Get up now. Go steer.”

  Ernesto grunted a word.

  “He would like to request drinking glasses,” the young American prompted Olivia.

  Olivia brought three glasses and smiled with what she hoped was a hint of seductiveness, a hint she hoped did not betray playacting.

  “Listen,” the young man said, “do you have anything . . . dangerous to give them, to put into the spirits? I don’t mean cyanide. . . .”

  Olivia hesitated as Carlo grabbed her wrist and began to stroke her thighs. Olivia smiled and swiveled her hips. She knew that the young man had taken her hesitation to mean no, there was nothing. But she was thinking that it would be unwise to let the young man know that she had anything, tranquilizers, sleeping pills, whatever remained in her enameled boxes.

  “Well, then let them drink. They drink like you breathe.” Ernesto downed a full glass, then another. Ernesto nearly smiled and then said quietly, “Fuck.”

  The young man asked Olivia, “Where’s the captain? Is one of you the captain?”

  “He’s dead,” Cammie said. “He got hit in the head. The other captain got swept off in the tender. The tender is gone.” The young man motioned at Olivia. “That’s my aunt. The man who died is still tangled in the propeller. His body is tangled in the propeller.”

  The young man spoke to Ernesto in brief, halting Spanish.

  Carlo said, “¿Un hombre muerto? Mala suerte.”

  “He thinks this is a bad omen, a dead man on the boat.” The young man spoke again. “That’s good for you. A woman on a boat is a bad omen as well. They might want to get away. I told him we should get fuel. We are out of fuel.”

  “We have fuel, but the engine doesn’t run. It’s damaged.”

  Ernesto motioned for more drink, banging his glass on the table of the saloon.

  “Olivia,” Tracy whispered, her lips barely moving, “get Holly to give you the canned food. I’ll give them the bread and the noodles. Get her to give you the MREs.” Olivia crossed like a ghost to Holly’s closed door. “Ask them if they want a meal,” T
racy told the young man. From her college Spanish, Tracy understood the offer of food. “I told you, Camille. Go away now and steer the boat.” Cammie slipped up into the cockpit. “She has to steer the boat.” Tracy made her hands into the shape of a great wheel. “We’ll run onto a sandbar.”

  “Don’t say that again. That’s what they’d like. Then the boat would be stuck until they can come back,” said the young man.

  “Comida,” Tracy said.

  Ernesto shrugged. Then he nodded, his eyes lidded.

  Tracy jerked her chin at Olivia, who bounded down into the cabin that had been Lenny’s, where Holly slept. But once inside, she could not find Holly. She opened the closets and the bathroom door. “Are you fucking hiding while we get murdered?” she whispered.

  “I can hear you. I can hear everything that’s going on. Just take the canned food. It’s mostly tuna and beans. A can of rice and a can of corn. Make a loud noise. Drop the cans,” Holly said. Her voice was muffled. She was in the ama, inside the hull. She opened the small door and tossed the food out to Olivia.

  “Why? Why are you in there?”

  “I don’t want them to hear me lock the door.”

  “Lock the door? You stupid cow! Come out there and help us,” Olivia seethed.

  “Olivia, do just what I tell you, now, or you won’t have to worry about them because I’ll kill you myself,” Holly said. “Shut your fat mouth. I know what I’m doing. There’s no reason they have to know that I’m here. I’m better off doing this.”

  “Whatever you mean by this!” Olivia hissed.

  Holly didn’t bother to answer. She climbed out and knelt, the pain from her wound like an electric shock, to help gather the cans into an apron Olivia made of her gauzy shirt. As she left, turning back to bare her teeth at Holly, Holly nudged the door closed, slowly, behind her. She waited. In a moment, she heard the clatter of the cans falling. She slipped the lock and crept into the ama through the small door near Lenny’s headboard. She went back to work. One thumbnail ripped off at the quick. Holly winced and sucked on her thumb until most of the real bleeding stopped. Then she breathed deeply and forced herself to keep at it.

  Back in the saloon, Olivia held out the beans and canned fish, the tin of rice. Carlo nodded. The young man extracted a Swiss Army knife from his belt and opened the cans. Ernesto caught up one of the water jugs and swigged from it. Tracy swallowed her reflexive gag, then brought spoons. Both Carlo and Ernesto began to eat. The young man watched. “You can eat, too,” she said, for no reasons he understood.

  “No, thank you,” he said. He drank a large glass of water.

  Cammie came down the steps from the cockpit, wringing her hands as she watched her mother serve the men. The young man raised the gun and pointed it at Cammie. “Don’t be frightened. Look as though you are horrified. The gun isn’t loaded. They want the boat. See? Maybe they’ll let you, uh, escape in the lifeboat. Make a motion like you’re asking for spectacles. Eyeglasses.”

  Cammie made two circles of her index fingers and thumbs. In Spanish, the young man told Ernesto and Carlo that the young girl couldn’t see well. Carlo shrugged. He downed another glass of whiskey. The young man said, “If they think you can’t see them, maybe they’ll be more likely to let you survive, because they’re not supposed to kill Americans.”

  Olivia disappeared into her cabin, and Ernesto roared for her to return. She did, pulling on over her translucent top a long sweatshirt that had been Michel’s.

  Carlo said, “¿Qué pasa si usan su teléfono para llamar a alguien?”

  The young man said to Olivia, “Give him your cell phone.”

  Olivia ran lightly back into her cabin. Carlo smiled approvingly at her behind and pointed at it, for Ernesto. Olivia brought back her cell phone. “It doesn’t work,” she said.

  The young man translated.

  Carlo ground the tiny silver phone under his bare foot until its spine split. “Todo,” Carlo said. Tracy produced her cell phone and watched as Carlo and Ernesto mangled it and then tossed it over the side. When Carlo asked for Cammie’s phone, Tracy haltingly explained that she and her daughter had only one. Cammie’s phone was tucked safely inside the inner pocket of her duffel.

  Then the SSB crackled.

  Cammie froze. They all did, the worst possible choice they could have made. The men were drunk. Tracy thought later that she might have chosen that moment to punch the button on the CD player and turn it up, loud. But the player wasn’t in its customary spot on the shelf. Cammie had taken it into the cockpit. Cammie sprinted for the cockpit. A second mistake.

  “Tell them she just has to steer, that no one can hear us,” Tracy pleaded with the young American, who began to speak. “We’ve been trying for days.”

  But it was still possible to hear, faintly, a voice that said, “This is Captain Sharon Gleeman, over. Lenny, you rascal. Where have you got yourself to now? Did you forget we were to rendezvous for the food exchange? . . . Lenny . . .”

  Ernesto got up, staggering with the drink and his heft, climbed out of the saloon, and, after pushing Cammie roughly against the steering wheel, smashed the SSB into shards. Angrily, he took his knife out of his belt and stuck it into Cammie’s thigh. She screamed, and Ernesto sighed, jerking his knife away. He then delicately made his way back down into the saloon. He sat down and asked for the young man’s small knife. Using the corkscrew, he opened a bottle of red wine and drank a glass.

  “¿Qué pasa si hay otra radio?” Carlo asked.

  “He wants to know where the other radios are,” said the American man.

  “The electricity is shot. The console doesn’t work,” Tracy told him. “You can see that. We have no lights.” Ernesto put his great head with its tangled snakes of curls on the saloon table. He gestured to Carlo, a wide, swinging arc with his thick arm, and mumbled a command.

  “No!” the young man said. He explained very slowly, and simultaneously to Cammie, that Carlo had been instructed to smash the control panel. The young man had told Carlo not to do this, because it would lower the salvage price of the boat. If it didn’t work, there was no reason to ruin it.

  “He stabbed my daughter’s leg!” Tracy cried. “That’s a deep cut!”

  “Don’t you have bandages?” asked the young man. He said in Spanish not to cut the girl. A sick girl was bad.

  Ernesto lay back on the bench seats and began to snore.

  Tracy got out the first aid box and found butterfly bandages. She pressed a gauze pad to Cammie’s leg. When that soaked through, she grabbed a double thickness of gauze, cut it with a kitchen knife, and pressed it so the pressure slowed the bleeding. Then she applied a line of butterfly adhesives across the cut, smearing it with antibiotic ointment and taping a layer of gauze across it. Christ knew where that knife had been. She was about to slip the knife into the back of her shorts when Carlo strode across the deck, took it, and tossed it over the side. As Tracy watched, he did the same thing with the rest of the knives in Lenny’s immaculate rack above the stove. Tracy fetched a pair of blue jeans for Cammie to slip on. They were Tracy’s jeans, and she would have to belt them tightly around Cammie and roll them up, but at least they were so loose that they would not touch the wound.

  Carlo told the young man that now he needed to get fuel. Tracy noticed that the young man didn’t obey Carlo readily. He waited a moment before he said, “We’re going to have to siphon from your engine down into ours. Hold still. Carlo will do it.” Carlo half slipped, half fell into the yola. He caught up a length of ragged garden hose and climbed back onto Opus, then staggered toward the stern. He attempted to make a link and begin the siphoning. He asked for tape and sucked the hose until the fuel rose. But the hose was far too short. It popped out of the yola. Diesel leaked into the sea.

  Cammie said quickly, “That hose is too big and too short. You would have to use plastic piping and hand-pump it in.”

  “He’s drunk.”

  “Cammie could do it,” Tracy said. “She’s an
engineer.”

  “She should do it, then, if she knows where the things are, the quicker the better,” the young man told her.

  “But you have to make them promise to leave her alone,” Tracy said. “They can have me.”

  “They don’t want you, ma’am,” said the young man. “I mean no disrespect.”

  “I take none, for the love of God! But if they don’t leave her alone, then they can’t have the fuel. She won’t show them where the piping is.”

  “They can kill all of you and look for it.”

  “It’s in a locked case. I have the key,” Tracy said. She in fact had no idea where the plastic piping was, or if there was any at all.

  “A ella,” the young man said, and continued, with a combination of gestures and words, to point out that Cammie could transfer the fuel. Carlo grunted and nodded. He poured himself a glass of wine. When he beckoned to Olivia, she crossed the room stiffly.

  Carlo said, “Pecho.”

  Raking his hair, the young man mumbled, “I’m so sorry. He, uh, would like to see your breasts.” Olivia shook her head. Carlo pointed at the weapon that lay limp, like an offering, across the young man’s upturned hands.

  “Can’t you stop him?” Olivia begged. “Aren’t you a man?”

  The young man shook his head. “I don’t . . . ,” he began. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Panting, Olivia slipped out of the sweatshirt. Mesmerized by the grim striptease, Tracy watched in exquisite disgust. Olivia began to remove the light blouse she wore over her bathing suit top. But her hands, trembling and sweating, slipped down onto her belly. Carlo became impatient. He got up and yanked the cloth until the elastic bra snapped up beneath Olivia’s chin. Her hands fell to her sides, and she looked away, out at the sliver moon, while Carlo pinched her nipples and chuckled as they hardened.