With Jean-Paul that afternoon they met people who would be their friends and companions for months on the long sail west with the trades. They met a shy young girl from the protest vessel Star of Peace, and her tiny daughter, who had greeted them on anchoring. They met a French radio officer from the nuclear test ship Rance, a Dutch couple from a steel ketch and their doll-like little girl, dressed immaculately and seemingly of a different species than the child from Star of Peace. They met Jack-the-Rip-Off, a piratical young American who wore a headband and had gentle eyes and who single-handed a tough little double-ender he had built for himself in Costa Rica. He was, he announced proudly, the current drug-smuggling suspect.

“Is there a drug problem here?" Lindy asked.

“Yes,” Jean-Paul said. “If it were not for Jack, it would be difficult to find any pot at all.”

She could never tell if Jean-Paul was serious or not, but everything he said seemed sparkling to her. From a souvenir stand set up for the French liberty party, he selected her an ugly little tiki beautifully carved: the carver refused payment from her because Jean-Paul had been his teacher. For a moment, in a moist sweating crowd of French sailors, they stood on a village pavilion to watch dancing: choreographed lines of beautiful adolescents, swirling their hips and wobbling their knees. Jean-Paul identified the otea, a Marquesan war dance. But he turned away quickly. “The greatest warriors of all Polynesia, performing like a troupe of seals!”

It was the same old complaint she had heard and read a hundred times, but from his lips, through the beer they had drunk, it sounded quite profound.

He took them to the island’s only restaurant, a stucco affair with a galvanized roof, perched on the hill above the bay. There was a line of French officers waiting, but the native proprietor slid them in ahead, into the best table in the place.

They said goodnight at the beach and paddled to their respective craft. They had to sleep topside on the dinghy, it was so hot below.

“What did you think of Blue-Eyes?” Mitch asked suddenly.

“Oh, wow!” she said. He had caught her unawares, and she overreacted. “Charisma, I mean. Did you see those people, when he’d smile?”

“A charismatic Frog,” he reflected, “in a very tiny pond.” It was exactly the kind of red-necked generalization they both hated.

In fact, she thought, dozing off, a judgment so uncharacteristic as to be interesting. She fell asleep mulling it. In a few minutes she was awake again, writhing on the dinghy-top. From then on it was between her and the germs, whatever they were, and she had hardly a conscious thought of Jean-Paul for almost a week.

Her subconscious was another matter, and blew the whistle on her, but Jean-Paul would not tell her of that for a long time.

Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6