The goat stepped back, still chewing.
“Here, goat. Come here.”
The goat blinked.
“Come to Papa.”
He shifted slightly, and the goat moved back again. He froze on his hands and knees, his gaze locked with the goat’s.
One... two... three!
He shot forward.
The goat shot backward.
Hank landed face down in the monkey grass. He could feel the goat standing over him. Taking deep breaths, he slowly lifted his head.
Something hard conked him on the back of the head. He sucked in a breath of pain through gritted teeth and looked up.
The goat had trotted away.
Hank glanced down at the grass. A silver bottle was lying next to his head. He sat up, one hand rubbing the sore spot on his head.
Frowning, he picked up the bottle. He turned it one way, then the other. It had a few nicks and some teeth marks on it. But it was just an old perfume bottle, like the one he’d thrown overboard. Not a jewel or a stone on the worthless thing.
He took a deep breath and looked up, then froze. He dropped the bottle and slowly scanned the area around him. “What the hell?”
His hut was gone. The roof. The walls. Gone. All that remained was the bamboo frame.
He got up, and his feet sank in the muddy grass. He looked around for the first time and saw the remnants of a storm. Outside the bamboo frame, the palm fronds and leaves that had last night been his walls and roof now littered the ground and were sticking out from bushes and shrubs. Fresh rain dripped from the trees and bushes, and steam was beginning to rise from puddles of rainwater in the grass and sand.
He spun around and looked toward Smitty’s tepee. There was nothing left standing. Only a huge messy pile of thatched matting that lay atop some of the trunks and crates she’d salvaged.
He swore and ran across the clearing, thinking she and those kids were somewhere under it all. He was a few feet away when he realized they weren’t there at all.
He took off running down the beach. When he’d gone about a couple of hundred feet, he heard squeals of laughter and stopped.
Smitty stood in the shallow tide holding onto Annabelle’s hands. Whenever a small wave would drift in on the low morning tide, she would fling the baby up like a swing, just letting her toes brush through the seafoam.
A few feet back, Theodore was burrowing in the sand. He looked up, before he began to holler and jump up and down and point. Lydia rushed down from the bank, her arms filled with bananas.
Hank shielded his eyes from the bright sun and looked out toward where the kid was pointing on the eastern side of the water. Every few seconds, a group of porpoises arced one by one over the glassy sea, making white, foamy sea spray when they hit the water.
He remembered the first time he’d ever seen a school of porpoises leap from the sea like that. There was something sobering about it; the realization that other things lived on the same earth, an awareness that humans weren’t the only things trying to eke out a life. Some long-buried part of him had reacted just like Theodore.
Watching them now, he still felt that same sense of awe. And he relished it because he hadn’t felt that way for so long. Too long.
He stood there, soaking up the freedom to do whatever the hell he wanted. He watched the porpoises, something that in the past few years he’d forgotten existed.
With an overwhelming sense of bitterness, he wondered what else prison had stolen from him. In the distance he could hear sea auks crying from the cliffs. Their keening didn’t sound like the call of birds but of men who had been condemned.
Men cried in prison. He had cried in prison. When no one knew.
He threw his head back and took in deep breaths of sea air. He was free. He wouldn’t hear the loud and brittle clank of the cell closing tonight. He wouldn’t have heard it last night either, but the whiskey he’d drunk was a little insurance. It gave him one night of sound sleep, something he felt as if he’d never get enough of.
He opened his eyes and looked above him, reminding himself he wasn’t staked. He wasn’t locked in a box in the scorching sun. His ankles weren’t chained together, and he wasn’t in a cell.
Overhead, gulls soared across the blue sky and circled above the dancing porpoises, swooping down, teasing. Off to the right, a waterspout shot up from a group of rocks near the edge of the headland, and its spray picked up rainbow colors in the bright morning air. The sea was easy; the waves drifted in instead of beating the shore.
