Robert Stone - Bear and His Daughter

“It means stakes,” Blessington said.

“Steaks? Like…”

“Sticks,” said Blessington. “Rods. Palings.”

“Oh,” she said, “stakes. Like Joan of Arc got burned at, right?”

Freycinet’s mouth fell open. Marie laughed loudly. Gillian looked slyly at Blessington.

“Honoré,” she said. “ Tu es un dindon. You’re a dindon, man. I’m shitting you. I understand French fine.”

It had become amusing to watch her tease and confound Freycinet. Dangerous work and she did it cleverly, leaving the Frenchman to marvel at the depths of her stupidity until paranoia infected his own self-confidence. During the trip back, Blessington thought he might be starting to see the point of her.

“I mean, I worked the Paris openings for five years straight. I told you that.”

Drunk and stoned as the rest of them, Gillian eventually withdrew from the ascending spring sun. Marie went down after her. Freycinet’s pointed nose was out of joint.

“You hear what she say?” he asked Blessington. “That she speak French all the time? What the fuck? Because she said before, ‘No‹, I don’t speak it.’ Now she’s speaking it.”

“Ah, she’s drunk, Honoré. She’s just a bimbo.”

“I ‘ope so, eh?” said Freycinet. He looked at the afterdeck to be sure she was out of earshot. “Because … because what if she setting us up? All these time, eh? If she’s agent. Or she’s informer? A grass?”

Blessington pondered it deeply. Like the rest of them he had thought her no more than a fatuous, if perverse, American. Now, the way she laughed at them, he was not at all sure.

“I thought she came with you. Did she put money up?”

Freycinet puffed out his hollow cheeks and shrugged.

“She came to me from Lavigerie,” he said. The man who called himself Lavigerie was a French Israeli of North African origin, a hustler in Fort-de-France. “She put in money, oui. The same as everyone.”

They had all pooled their money for the boat and to pay the Vincentians. Blessington had invested twenty thousand dollars, partly his savings from the bistro, partly borrowed from his sister and her husband in Providence. He expected to make it back many times and pay them off with interest.

“Twenty thousand?”

“Yes. Twenty.”

“Well, even the Americans wouldn’t spend twenty thousand dollars to catch us,” he told Honoré. “We’re too small. And it isn’t how they work.”

“Now I think I don’t trust her, eh?” said Freycinet. He squinted into the sun. The Pitons, no closer, seemed to displease him now. “She’s a bitch, non? ”

“I think she’s all right,” Blessington said. “I really do.”

And for the most part he did. In any case he had decided to, because an eruption of hard-core, coke-and-speed-headed paranoia could destroy them all. It had done so to many others. Missing boats sometimes turned up on the mangrove shore of some remote island, the hulls blistered with bullet holes, cabins attended by unimaginable swarms of flies. Inside, tableaux marts not to be forgotten by the unlucky discoverer. Strong-stomached photographers recorded the tableaux for the DEA’s files, where they were stamped NOT TO BE DESTROYED, HISTORIC INTEREST. The agency took a certain satisfaction. Blessington knew all this from his sister and her husband in Providence.

Now they were almost back to Martinique and Blessington wanted intensely not to die at sea. In the worst of times, he grew frightened to the point of utter despair. It had been, he realized at such times, a terrible mistake. He gave up on the money. He would settle for just living, for living even in prison in France or America. Or at least for not dying on that horrible bright blue ocean, aboard the Sans Regret.

“Yeah,” he told Freycinet. “Hell, I wouldn’t worry about her. Just a bimbo.”

All morning they tacked for the Pitons. Around noon, a great crown of puffy cloud settled around Gros Piton and they were close enough to distinguish the two peaks one from the other. Freycinet refused to go below. His presence was so unpleasant that Blessington felt like weeping, knocking him unconscious, throwing him overboard or jumping over himself. But the Frenchman remained in the cockpit though he never offered to spell Blessington at the wheel. The man drove Blessington to drink. He poured more Demerara and dipped his finger in the bag of crystal. A pulse fluttered under his collarbone, fear speed.

Eventually Freycinet went below. After half an hour Gillian came topside, clothed this time, in cutoffs and a halter. The sea had picked up and she nearly lost her balance on the ladder.

“Steady,” said Blessington.

“Want a roofie, Liam?”

He laughed. “A roofie? What’s that? Some kind of…”

Gillian finished the thought he had been too much of a prude to articulate.

“Some kind of blowjob? Some kind of sex technique? No, dear it’s a medication.”

“I’m on watch.”

She laughed at him. “You’re shitfaced is what you are.”

“You know,” Blessington said, “you ought not to tease Honoré. You’ll make him paranoid.”

“He’s a asshole. As we say back home.”

“That may be. But he’s a very mercurial fella. I used to work with him.”

“Mercurial? If you know he’s so mercurial how come you brought him?”

“I didn’t bring him,” Blessington said. “He brought me. For my vaunted seamanship. And I came for the money. How about you?”

“I came on account of having my brains in my ass,” she said, shaking her backside. “My talent too. Did you know I was a barrel racer? I play polo too. English or western, man, you name it.”

“English or western?” Blessington asked.

“Forget it,” she said. She frowned at him, smiled, frowned again. “You seem, well, scared.”

“Ah,” said Blessington, “scared? Yes, I am. Somewhat.”

“I don’t give a shit,” she said.

“You don’t?”

“You heard me,” she said. “I don’t care what happens. Why should I? Me with my talent in my ass. Where do I come in?”

“You shouldn’t talk that way,” Blessington said.

“Fuck you. You afraid I’ll make trouble? I assure you I could make trouble like you wouldn’t believe.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Blessington said. He kept his eyes on the Pitons. His terror he thought, probably encouraged her.

“Just between you and me, Liam, I have no fear of dying. I would just as soon be out here on this boat now as in my little comfy bed with my stuffed animals. I would just as soon be dead.”

He took another sip of rum to wet his pipes for speech. “Why did you put the money in, then? Weren’t you looking for a score?”

“I don’t care about money,” she said. “I thought it would be a kick. I thought it would be radical. But it’s just another exercise in how everything sucks.”

“Well,” said Blessington, “you’re right there.”

She looked off at the twin mountains.

“They don’t seem a bit closer than they did this morning.”

“No. It’s an upwind passage. Have to tack forever.”

“You know what Nigel told me back in Canouan?”

“No,” Blessington said.

“He told me not to worry about understanding things. He said understanding was weak and lame. He said you got to overstand things.” She hauled herself and did the voice of a big St. Vincentian man saddling up a white bitch for the night, laying down wisdom. “You got to overstand it. Overstand it, right? Funny, huh.”

“Maybe there’s something in it,” said Blessington.

“Rasta lore,” she said. “Could be, man.”

“Anyway, never despise what the natives tell you, that’s what my aunt used to say. Even in America.”