“Oh, boy,” said Lindy dubiously, studying Louie, “you are getting Christian. On the other hand, at least you’re asking me.” The child might not understand English, but he knew somehow that his fate balanced on a knife edge, and she held the knife. He gave her a dazzling smile. “You want fuck?” he asked.

“What in the world,” she asked, “does he think that means?”

“’Have a good day,’ I guess. Well?”

“Whatever you say.”

He asked the chief about red tape. The chief beamed incredulously. No problem, monsieur, he would radio ahead. Mitch wanted to know where Louie would live in Tahiti? The chief looked at him as if he were mad. Family, of course, the chiefs, or the mother’s perhaps; even the old pearl diver had family in Papeete. Failing that, at the government school. All would be arranged.

Mitch glanced down. The boy’s eyes were shining, but his face was impassive. His little shoulders braced. “Monsieur le capitaine?” he piped.

“Oui?”

“Pour le pilotage, je ne vais rien vous prendre.”

The chief rubbed his eyes helplessly, shaking his head. “He said,” Mitch muttered, “he won’t charge us a cent!”

“Louie,” said Lindy, “you are just too frigging much!”

“Too frigging mawsh,” agreed Louie. “Jus’ too frigging mawsh.”

They had signed on their first crewman, and their last.4/24/00 11:52 AM

They cast off from the wharf, wreathed in polished shell leis and loaded with coconuts. Lindy’s friends of the night before were misty-eyed: she was touched, until she decided later that they were crying with joy at Louie’s departure. Linda Lee swept into the channel in a cacophony of yells and laughter; the machine-gun rattle of toares and the drumming guitars followed them up the cut.

Louie blustered around the deck for the benefit of the bleachers, coiling lines backward, tiny arms pointing port and starboard as they churned straight out the channel and through the pass. At the first trade-wind swell he turned greenish-gray, looked startled, ignored the vast possibilities of the Pacific, and threw up on a cockpit cushion. If his father indeed followed the sea, Louis ignored his genes. He burrowed into the forepeak, where the motion was worst. For hours he defied her efforts to drag him out, like their cornered copra rat.

The rat they finally conquered, but never Louie. Every hour he would emerge voluntarily, to stagger topside and look for Tahiti. As Mitch, at the chart table, sweated out vigias and atolls and sets and the drift, Louie chattered on, expressing his opinion. He almost wore out the chart, which he read half the time upside-down. He became worried that they had missed Tahiti the first day, became sure that they had on the second, and absolutely certain on the third.