"Ain't a man's life worth more than a load of liquor?"
The man was intent on his steering.
"All we have to do is stop and let them take the liquor."
"No," the man said. "They take the liquor and the boat and you go to jail."
"I don't mind jail," the nigger said. "But I never wanted to get shot."
He was getting on the man's nerves now and the man was becoming tired of hearing him talk.
"Who the hell's shot worse?" he asked him. "You or me?"
"You're shot worse," the nigger said. "But I ain't never been shot. I didn't figure to get shot. I ain't paid to get shot. I don't want to be shot."
"Take it easy, Wesley," the man told him. "It don't do you any good to talk like that."
They were coming up on the key now. They were inside the shoals and as he headed her into the channel it was hard to see with the sun on the water. The nigger was going out of his head, or becoming religious because he was hurt; anyway he was talking all the time.
"Why they ran liquor now?" he said. "Prohibition's over. Why they keep up a traffic like that? Whyn't they bring the liquor in on the ferry?"
The man steering was watching the channel closely.
"Why don't people be honest and decent and make a decent honest living?"
The man saw where the water was rippling smooth off the bank even when he could not see the bank in the sun and he named her off. He swung her around, spinning the wheel with one arm, and then the channel opened out and he took her slowly right up to the edge of the mangroves. He came astern on the engines and threw out the two clutches.
"I can put a anchor down," he said. "But I can't get no anchor up."
"I can't even move," the nigger said.
"You're certainly in a hell of a shape," the man told him.
He had a difficult time breaking out, lifting and dropping the small anchor but he got it over, and paid out quite a lot of rope and the boat swung in against the mangroves so they came right into the cockpit. Then he went back and down into the cockpit. He thought the cockpit was a hell of a sight, all right.
All night after he had dressed the nigger's wound and the nigger had bandaged his arm he had been watching the compass, steering, and when it came daylight he had seen the nigger lying there in the sacks in the middle of the cockpit, but then he was watching the seas and the compass and looking for the Sand Key light and he had never observed carefully how things were. Things were bad.
The nigger was lying in the middle of the load of sacked liquor with his leg up. There were eight bullet holes through the cockpit splintered wide. The glass was broken in the windshield. He did not know how much stuff was smashed and wherever the nigger had not bled he himself had bled. But the worst thing, the way he felt at the moment, was the smell of booze. Everything was soaked in it. Now the boat was lying quietly against the mangroves but he could not stop feeling the motion of the big sea they had been in all night in the gulf.
"I'm going to make some coffee," he told the nigger. "Then I'll fix you up again."
"I don't want no coffee."
"I do," the man told him. But down below he began to feel dizzy so he came out on deck again.
"I guess we won't have coffee," he said.
"I want some water."
"All right."
He gave the Negro a cup of water out of a demijohn.
"Why you want to keep on running for when they started to shoot?"
"Why they want to shoot?" the man answered.
"I want a doctor," the nigger told him.
"What's a doctor going to do that I ain't done for you?"
"Doctor going to cure me."
"You'll have a doctor tonight when the boat comes out."
"I don't want to wait for no boat."
"All right," the man said. "We're going to dump this liquor now."
He started to dump it and it was hard work one-handed. A sack of liquor only weighs about forty pounds but he had not dumped very many of them before he became dizzy again. He sat down in the cockpit and then he lay down.
"You going to kill yourself," the nigger said.
The man lay quietly in the cockpit with his head against one of the sacks.
The branches of the mangroves had come into the cockpit and they made a shadow over him where he lay. He could hear the wind above the mangroves and looking out at the high, cold sky see the thin brown clouds of the norther.
"Nobody going to come out with this breeze," he thought. "They won't look for us to have started with this blowing."
"You think they'll come out?" the nigger asked.
"Sure," the man said. "Why not?"
"It's blowing too hard."
"They're looking for us."
"Not with it like this. What you want to lie to me for?" The nigger was talking with his mouth almost against a sack.
"Take it easy, Wesley," the man told him.
"Take it easy, the man says," the nigger went on. "Take it easy. Take what easy? Take dyin' like a dog easy? You got me here. Get me out."
"Take it easy," the man said, kindly.
"They ain't coming," the nigger said. "I know they ain't coming. I'm cold I tell you. I can't stand this pain and cold I tell you."
The man sat up feeling hollow and unsteady. The nigger's eyes watched him as he rose on one knee, his right arm dangling, took the hand of his right arm in his left hand and placed it between his knees and then pulled himself up by the plank nailed above the gunwale until he stood, looking down at the nigger, his right hand still held between his thighs. He was thinking that he had never really felt pain before.
"If I keep it out straight, pulled out straight, it don't hurt so bad," he said.
"Let me tie it up in a sling," the nigger said.
"I can't make a bend in the elbow," the man said. "It stiffened that way."
"What we goin' to do?"
"Dump this liquor," the man told him. "Can't you put over what you can reach, Wesley?"
The nigger tried to move to reach a sack, then groaned and lay back.
"Do you hurt that bad, Wesley?"
"Oh God," the nigger said.
"You don't think once you moved it it wouldn't hurt so bad?"
"I'm shot," the nigger said. "I ain't going to move. The man wants me to go to dumpin' liquor when I'm shot."
"Take it easy."
"You say that once more I go crazy."
"Take it easy," the man said quietly.
The nigger made a howling noise and shuffling with his hands on the deck picked up the whetstone from under the coaming.
"I'll kill you," he said. "I'll cut your heart out."
"Not with no whetstone," the man said. "Take it easy, Wesley."
The nigger blubbered with his face against a sack. The man went on slowly lifting the sacked packages of liquor and dropping them over the side.
While he was dumping the liquor he heard the sound of a motor and looking he saw a boat headed toward them coming down the channel around the end of the key. It was a white boat with a buff painted house and a windshield.
"Boat coming," he said. "Come on Wesley."
"I can't."
"I'm remembering from now on," the man said. "Before was different."
"Go ahead an' remember," The nigger told him. "I ain't forgot nothing either."
Working fast now, the sweat running down his face, not stopping to watch the boat coming slowly down the channel, the man picked up the sacked packages of liquor with his good arm and dropped them over the side.
"Roll over." He reached for the package under the nigger's head and swung it over the side. The nigger raised himself up and looked.
"Here they are," he said. The boat was almost abeam of them.
"It's Captain Willie," the nigger said. "With a party."
In the stern of the white boat two men in flannels and white cloth hats sat in fishing chairs trolling and an old man in a felt hat and a windbreaker held the tiller and steered the boat close past the mangroves where the booze boat lay.
"What you say, Harry?" the old man called as he passed. The man called Harry waved his good arm in reply. The boat went on past, the two men who were fishing looking toward the booze boat and talking to the old man. Harry could not hear what they were saying.
"He'll make a turn at the mouth and come back," Harry said to the Negro. He went below and came up with a blanket. "Let me cover you up."
" 'Bout time you cover me up. They couldn't help but see that liquor. What we goin' to do?"
"Willie's a good skate," the man said. "He'll tell them in town we're out here. Those fellows fishing ain't going to bother us. What they care about us?"
He felt very shaky now and he sat down on the steering seat and held his right arm tight between his thighs. His knees were shaking and with the shaking he could feel the ends of the bone in his upper arm grate. He opened his knees, lifted his arm out, and let it hang by his side. He was sitting there, his arm hanging, when the boat passed them coming back up the channel. The two men in the fishing chairs were talking. They had put up their rods and one of them was looking at them through a pair of glasses. They were too far out for him to hear what they were saying. It would not have helped him if he had heard it.
On board the charter boat South Florida, trolling down the Woman Key channel because it was too rough to go out to the reef, Captain Willie Adams was thinking. So Harry crossed last night. That boy's got cojones. He must have got that whole blow. She's a sea boat all right. How you suppose he smashed his windshield? Damned if I'd cross a night like last night. Damned if I'd ever run liquor from Cuba. They bring it all from Mariel now! Just go in and out. It's supposed to be wide open. "What's that you say, Cap?"
"What boat is that?" asked one of the men in the fishing chairs.
"That boat?"
"Yes, that boat."
"Oh that's a Key West boat."
"What I said was, whose boat is it?"
"I wouldn't know that, Cap."
"Is the owner a fisherman?"
"Well, some say he is."
"What do you mean?"
"He does a little of everything."
"You don't know his name?"
"No sir."
"You called him Harry."
"Not me."
"I heard you call him Harry."
Captain Willie Adams took a good look at the man who was speaking to him. He saw a high-cheekboned, thin-lipped, slightly pudgy face with deep set grey eyes and a contemptuous mouth looking at him from under a canvas hat. There was no way that Captain Willie Adams could know that this man was regarded as irresistibly handsome by a great many women in Washington.
"I must have called him that by mistake," Captain Willie said.