I must’ve gone on about the island—more specifically, the dolphins—with enough awe that Captain O’Malley laughed, delighted.
“You tickle me so, Gem.” He wiped at his eyes. “It’s a pleasure to sit next to you.”
Not everyone seemed to feel this way. I got the impression that Agwe had spread rumors about me to the other men. They were all sailors, part of Captain O’Malley’s treasure-hunting team, and they either eyed me with enough suspicion to keep their distance, or they were awed and came close enough to view me with intrigued speculation.
A young sailor, with gold hair to match his dusting of a beard, blew into his bottle, making a high-pitched noise, before he approached us. “Agwe tells me you’re a nymph. A friendly one?”
I shrugged. “Ask Agwe. He knows.”
The young sailor and Captain laughed.
“I’d say an amusing one.” Captain O’Malley guffawed. “What is that you’re needin’ with Mrs. Fausti, Jonesy?”
“Permission to get a tattoo of the otherworldly being, Cap. But I’m tending to disagree with my man Agwe. I think she’s an angel.”
“You want to get a tattoo of me?”
“You’re beautiful enough.” Jonesy’s innocent blue eyes glistened in the firelight. “One of Neptune’s wooden angels in the flesh.”
“He’s speaking of a figurehead on the bow of a ship, aye? In the early days, when boats were made of wood, that’s what they’d call the carved nautical figureheads—Neptune’s wooden angels.”
“You’ll have to do it by memory,” Brando said, handing me a tray piled high with seafood. Then he took a seat in the sand, close to my legs, with the rest of our food.
Jonesy came closer, offering Brando his hand. He called him the shark slayer, but Brando shook his head, saying he was a shark admirer. Agwe must have been telling wild tales. I should’ve known.
I glanced at the storyteller in question. He gave me a hard look in return before turning his back on me. He seemed to keep one eye on me at all times, even the one I imagined behind his head.
“I love your food!” I yelled toward him. It was an attempt to soften his resolve toward me.
Agwe turned his head slightly. I waved a crimson crawfish at him. Shaking his head, he went to the other bonfire, taking a seat on their log.
The wind picked up. Brando had said we were due for rain, his internal radar catching the signs, and I started to believe him. I could smell the oncoming moisture in the air, mingling with the scents of roasted meat and boiled seafood.
I filled up on everything that was given to me, and perhaps too many spiked coconut drinks, all the while listening to the sailors tell stories by firelight. Some of them were amusing—the tellers animated, even acting out the parts that were the funniest. Others were more serious, to the point of dire, and the rest were downright frightening.
At one point during the evening, Aunt Lola gave Brando an extra blanket, and he laid it out on the sand, resting with his back against my legs. At one sailor’s particularly haggard account of a monster straight from Davy Jones’ Locker, I slipped from the log, settling next to him in search of comfort.
He grinned, tucking me in closer. His free hand lifted a bottle for a pull of his beer, the liquid gold against the bright flames of the fire.
Once the sailors used up their ocean of stories, Jonesy handed Captain O’Malley his guitar. In the beginning he strummed the instrument, a pretty melody dancing with the rush of the sea and the rattling of fronds overhead. One song led to another, leading to a lewd ballad called “Why Don’t We Get Drunk.”
“And screw!” one of the sailors screeched.
Uncle Tito, who was drunker than a waterlogged fish, laughed until he fell off his log when the sailor sang this.
“Help me out, Fausti!” Captain said, bending forward, trying to tempt him to join in the chorus.
To my surprise, Brando did. What made the entire song even funnier was that Brando couldn’t hold a tune. So between Captain’s raw voice and Brando’s off-tune one, the entire group began to sing along. When Brando sang about the snub queen, I screamed drunkenly, “Charlotte!”
“That’s true!” Brando responded, not missing a beat in the song.
The campfire music kept on, until Brando and I gravitated closer to the sea, dancing and laughing.
Silence descended—apart from the natural noises, and Uncle Tito and Aunt Lola, who still clapped—and we stopped our shenanigans to find that Captain O’Malley had put down his guitar, and every sailor’s eye was on me.
“È ballavi,” Brando whispered.
Iwasdancing. What Agwe had called “moving.”
