“Not much, but there’s more to it than just hearing about it.” Nathaniel looked past Artemis’s shoulder, toward a sponge sloop making sail, its wake putting folds in the slick water. “But if you could tell us about it, we’d sure appreciate it. When you’ve got the time.”

Artemis turned and lowered his head, and seemed to be studying the fat snappers schooled around a piling fringed with green algae.

“Not today. Got to unload, clean up de boat, get some rest. Den tonight, I got to jolly up my Euphy. Been out five days dis trip. Now we gwan to be ashore tamarra, so it got to be den. You tell me where, what time.”

“Tomorrow night, then? In our boat. We’ll meet you here and take you out to her.”

Artemis pointed to the gray smear beneath his left eyebrow. “Know what folks on dis eye-lond say about me and your papa after dis hoppen? Dot if you put us together, what you got is a mulatto what is blind in both or can see with both, dependin’ on which eyes got put into that half-nigger’s head. You boys got somethin’ cookin’, and I want to hear what it is.”

19

ELIOT AND DREW were on the cabin top, drinking Coca-Cola, while Nathaniel, sitting against the taffrail, sipped rum from a tin cup with Artemis and Will. Far beyond the harbor’s mouth, the slender, leaning coil of a waterspout dropped from a low cloud to briefly tether cloud to sea before it was drawn up again, like a rope on a winch. Artemis smacked his lips and said:

“Oh, dis Bermuda rum de finest kind, next to de rum of Haiti. Dere’s folks who say Cuba rum de best, but uh-uh. It’s too white.” He let out a laugh, his big chest heaving under his overalls. “De good black rum of Bermuda or Haiti gimme any day.”

“I thought Jehovah’s Witnesses weren’t allowed to drink,” said Will; Artemis had mentioned earlier that he’d joined the sect some years ago.

“Where you hear dot? A Witness can drink, long as he don’t make a fool of hisself like dot rummy, Desmond Knowles. Witness can smoke, too, but I don’t have nuttin’ to do with dem dom cigars and cigarettes.” He looked up at a man-o’-war bird, a dark speck circling. A tarpon rolled off the port side, its back showing bronze in the slant of late sunlight. “Knew a fella come up with me on Harbour Island. Me and him divin’ for conchs before we could walk. We got so we could stay down five minutes at five fathom, but when he got older, he start to smoke dem dom cigarettes like you do, Will, and he got so that he couldn’t hold his breath long enough to fart. Dass what dem things gwan do to you, mon.”