The rinky-dinky beat of French Polynesian guitar music rattled the porch. Weathered planks creaked under their feet. They passed through a deserted store, beneath shelves of French canned goods, piles of coconuts, and huge bottles of homemade wine. A musty copra smell was everywhere, with the sweet-sour odor of stale beer. They went through an inner door and found themselves behind a rough wooden bar in a room jammed with sailors, yachtsmen, and Marquesan natives.

A nut-brown half-Polynesian with sharp Gallic features looked up from a tub of beer bottles. He motioned them to the customer’s side of the bar with a jerk of his head. Mitch, parched and hoarse, asked him for two beers, in French.

“I speak English,” said Henri, “and better than your French.” He reached into the tub and extracted two immense bottles of Hinano beer. He set them dripping on the bar. “Warm! Well, I am not Quinn’s. Twelve yachts, you are thirteen, and the damn militaire...”

Mitch paid him with a twenty-dollar bill, U.S., and got the change in Polynesian francs. Later they would find the exchange rate better at Henri’s than anywhere in French Polynesia, including the banks in Tahiti.

Henri asked them to sign his Livre d’Or of foreign yachts, promising that in it they would find news of all their friends. He requested their yacht club flag, to hang on his wall when he began to decorate, tomorrow, or the next day; anyway, après demain. They promised him, and later delivered. Après demain took a bit longer but a year later they heard that the job had got done and the place was dripping with club burgees.

She turned to look for a place to sit. Her toes were cramped in shoes, and her arches tired from unaccustomed walking. Her cutoff Levi’s, washed for weeks in salt water, felt like iron. She still had her sea legs and the room rolled and heaved beneath her feet.

There were four round tables in the room, with spindly chairs and wooden beer crates drawn up around them. At one table sat Frenchmen in civilian clothes, presumably officers from the ship, with a day’s purchases of carved paddles, spears, and tikis laid out on the wet table top. The next table was full of French sailors, very drunk and very young. A third was for the local orchestra: three sweating guitarists and a spoon-clinker. The last table held a collection of weatherbeaten boat people: men, women, and children with shaggy haircuts. She was sure that she and Mitch looked just as scroungy.