“Más tarde,” Will said, with a wave, and then informed his shipmates that they were to wait for Uncle Enrique, who might aid them in getting home. He flopped on one of the beds. After four nights sleeping on deck and one on the beach, the straw mattress felt like down. Drew went out to have a look at the other room, Eliot took a bed, and Nathaniel lay on the floor, because he thought he deserved it.

24

“HEY, WILL, what does ‘San Pedro’ mean in English?” asked Drew, poking his head through the draw curtain.

“You can’t figure it out? Saint Peter.”

“So, these folks here, these Spaniards, they’re Christians, is that right?”

“They’re Cubans. They’re no more Spaniards than we’re Englishmen. And yeah, they’re Christians. Roman Catholics.”

“Our old man doesn’t think Catholics are exactly Christians,” said Eliot, curling his big toe. “But, I wonder if they’re going to do the Christian thing and feed us. I’m hungry enough to eat the tail off a wooden horse.”

“C’mon out here and look at something,” Drew said to Will.

In the other room, he opened the doors to a shelved cabinet. On the top shelf was the wooden figure of San Pietro, standing on a base carved to resemble a rock. The shelves below it were occupied by a rag doll, its hair crudely dyed with paint or shoe polish, a peculiar little statue with seashells for eyes, a garishly painted bowl containing a few stones, and miniature models of weapons and tools—a pair of tongs, a hammer, a sword about two inches long.

“This doesn’t look Christian to me,” Drew said, in a tone of disgust.

“Kind of pagan,” Will said.

The door flew open, a sultry breeze blew through the room, raising dust from the hard-packed dirt floor.

“Ohe! Qué carajo hacen?”

The loud voice was as startling as a thunderclap. Standing in the doorway was a man of about five feet six, with walnut-brown skin stretched over a bony frame as tautly as hide over a drum. His dark hair, cropped short and tipped with silver, had retreated to the middle of his skull, and he wore a drooping mustache that gave his mouth the grim set of someone resolved to do an unpleasant duty. A faded red shirt hung outside a pair of khaki trousers that must have been cut for a fat midget, for they were too baggy for the man’s scrawny legs and at the same time too short, the cuffs three inches above his feet, which were shod in rope and leather sandals.

He spoke again, in the same rapid-fire dialect as Rosaria.

“Cómo se dice?” Will asked. “Más despacio, por favor.”

“That was the canastillero of my brother-in-law,” the man shouted, but more slowly. “It’s not for you to look at.”