The sun beat down hotter, and her skin started to run with sweat. She was getting sticky, uncomfortable. The sails fell lifeless and quiet, flapping morosely. The boat no longer thrust ahead, slicing the waves; now it rolled from side to side. She crawled back over the cabin.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
The two boys were leaning back, drinking beer from cans. “Wind’s died down,” Tom said.
“That happens,” Jerry added. “Especially in the middle of the bay. No worry. The only deadline we have is I’ve got to be back in Annapolis by dark.”
“Yeah, or the ghosties and boogies will get him.”
Jerry frowned, but ignored his friend. “We can always let you off and head right back.”
“I’ve got some friends in St. Mikes,” Tom said.
“We know about your friends in St. Mikes,” Jerry answered.
“It beats sitting around watching TV,” Tom answered. “Doesn’t it? Your mom’s not here, Jer, you can tell the truth.”
Dicey interrupted. “Could I steer? I mean, we’re not going anywhere—”
“We are, but not far,” Jerry corrected.
“Go ahead, let her,” Tom urged. Jerry agreed.
Jerry slid down toward Sammy and put Dicey’s hand on the long tiller. The wood was smooth and warm. It responded to every vibration in the hull and every flapping of the sails. Dicey’s hand seesawed gently back and forth. The tiller let her feel the boat under her hand. She grinned at Jerry. “I like it,” she said.
He grinned back at her and taught her how to head up, into the wind, and point down, away from it. He showed her what changes in the mainsail to watch for. He pointed to the glassy water just ahead of them and then to a patch far ahead where little ripples danced in the sunlight. “There’s wind up there,” he said. He leaned back and drank from his can of beer.
“I’m going below for a snooze,” Tom announced. He climbed down the ladder and disappeared.
Sammy went up to sit with James.
Jerry moved over to Tom’s seat. “He doesn’t like sailing,” he said.
“Who, Sammy? I didn’t notice.”
“No, Tom.”
“But—”
“He’s got nothing better to do.” Jerry shrugged, then smiled a little. “And he likes getting me in trouble.”
“What about you?” Dicey asked.
“I need some help getting in trouble. I’d never dare do it on my own. You know? Rebellion is necessary for the development of character.”
Dicey wondered about that.
“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Jerry said. “Somebody said that. He was right. So—I get in trouble, now and then—so I won’t be like most men.”
“You’re going to lead a life of noisy desperation?” Dicey asked.
He laughed at that. He gave himself over to laughter and enjoyed it. Dicey decided she liked him after all.
“At least that much,” he said. “More if I can, but at least that.”
They sailed on, if this odd, rolling progress could be called sailing. Then, under her hand, Dicey felt the boat stir. She looked at the water and the sails. They had reached the ripply patch of water. The sails bellied out.
Jerry was watching her. She offered him the tiller, but he shook his head. His smile teased her. He pulled in on the genoa line and held it. The long sail lay nearly flat. The mainsail line he had already cleated down. “Watch the genoa,” he instructed.
Dicey did. She watched the sail and the water ahead. She rested her hand lightly on the tiller, letting the boat tell her where it wanted to go. She sat alert, her body tuned to that gentle pull on the tiller.
Boat, waves, water and wind: through the wood she felt them working for her. She was not directing, but accompanying them, turning them to her use. She didn’t work against them, but with them; and she made the boat do that too. It wasn’t power she felt, guiding the tiller, but purpose. She could not stop smiling.
The wind built up, and Jerry took back the tiller, giving Dicey the genoa line. She played it, without being told, letting it out a fraction, pulling it in two fractions, responding to the pull of the wind in the sail.
They didn’t talk, sailing the boat. They didn’t talk at all until Jerry pointed out the land approaching. Dicey saw short, narrow beaches, a few trees, some big houses.
“Another hour,” Jerry said.
Dicey nodded.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Thirteen,” Dicey answered. “I turned thirteen in June.”
“That’s too bad,” Jerry said. “If you were fifteen, or even fourteen . . . You really take to it, don’t you? I’ve never seen anybody take to it like that. I never thought a girl could. You’ve got good hands, Dicey. And you’re not scared.”
“Thirteen isn’t too young to sail,” Dicey pointed out.
“No, it isn’t,” he agreed. He leaned his head down and called Tom awake. “We’ve got to come about and make the approach to St. Mikes.”
Dicey nodded to show she understood, and she thought she did understand what he had said. She was too young to be a girlfriend. Her cheeks grew warm with the thought. Of course she was, much too young, and besides, she had more important things to do. She was surprised at herself, though, for the nice feeling it gave her. Maybe because she’d been so often taken for a boy.
She joined James and Sammy. Maybeth said she didn’t want to move from her seat nestled up against the cabin wall, where she had sat silent for the whole trip. So Dicey returned to the foredeck. The boat heeled a little now, in the afternoon wind. She and James kept Sammy sitting between them. “I sailed it,” Dicey said.
“I saw,” James answered. “What was it like?”
Dicey couldn’t explain. “Great,” she said.
They watched the shoreline close them in as Jerry negotiated the channel into St. Mikes. This was low land, with large houses standing on bright green lawns. Buoys slipped by.
Jerry let down the mainsail and gathered it in, wrapping it around the boom and looping a line around it to hold it. Tom turned on the motor. Jerry loosed the genoa halyard and showed Dicey how to pull it down and hold it in at the same time. Great armloads of material surrounded her. She couldn’t see anything. Jerry’s voice, muffled by the sail he was packing into a sail bag, assured her that she was doing just fine.
They pulled into the front of a long dock, and Tom took a line from the bow and wrapped it around one of the posts. Jerry tied the stern. He held the boat close to the dock while the Tillermans climbed out.
The steadiness of the land under her feet felt strange to Dicey. She felt as if everything was reversed. On the boat, the deck had been unsteady and her leg muscles had worked to keep her balanced. On land, the ground was so steady that her leg muscles took up the motion of the boat. It was crazy.
Her family stood back while she thanked Jerry. Tom was talking to him about calling some people. “We got beer on the boat,” he was saying.
Jerry hesitated.
“Just an hour. You can call your old lady and tell her where you are, if you’re worried. Or better yet, call her and tell her you’re here and can’t get back before dark. She’ll be mad at you for sailing over, but glad you called, so it’ll be all right. Jerry? You wanna? Man, we’re over here with the boat and beer—we can really have a party.”
Jerry laughed, a light, high sound. He turned the idea over in his mind. “I don’t know,” he said.
Dicey knew. She knew also what he would decide. “We gotta find a bus,” she said. “Thanks an awful lot.”
“That’s okay, kid,” Tom answered.
Dicey waited for Jerry to say something. Finally he noticed. “It was fun,” he said.
“Yeah, it was. It really was.”
“See you around, yeah?” he said.
“Probably not,” Dicey said. She held out her hand and he shook it.
“Yeah,” he said, but he wasn’t paying attention to her. He was looking at To
m, and a smile was creeping over his mouth. Dicey picked up her bag, slung it over her shoulder, took a last look at the boat and walked off fast.
St. Michael’s was a small town huddled around its waterfront. It was like Annapolis, but without the hurrying quality of the city across the bay. It was pretty, but Dicey was not cheered by that as they walked out of town on the one main street. She felt vaguely sad. To make herself feel better, she vowed that she would sail again, and often, if she could. Crisfield was on the water. People there must sail.
The midafternoon sun pounded down on them. They walked two abreast on the side of the road, Dicey with Maybeth, James with Sammy. Dicey carried her bag over her shoulder.
Little town houses, with handkerchief lawns, gave way to fields where corn and soybeans grew. Driveways led off the highway. Sometimes you could see the roofs of houses back among the trees that began at the far ends of the fields. Some of the mailboxes had the names of houses on them, Windward, Petersons Landing, Oakwood, Second Chance.
They came to a wooded section, mostly pines, and walked at its edge, as far from the traffic as they could get. In the midst of this section, a driveway went off. Like the other driveways they’d passed, this was a dirt road. But this road had a name, Overview Circle, and a bunch of mailboxes clustered at its beginning.
Dicey peered down the highway and saw a small store ahead, with a gas pump out front.
“You all wait here,” she said, putting down her bag. “I’m going up to the store to get some food, and we’ll see if there’s a place to camp down this driveway. I figure, these are big estates, and probably on the riverfront. Okay?”
“It’s not dark yet,” James objected.
“It’s getting late and we’ve got to find a place. This looks like there might be lots of privacy,” Dicey explained.
“Okay, if you say so,” James said.
“And if I’m wrong there’ll still be time to find another place,” Dicey said.
They sat down within the first row of trees. Dicey walked on, scuffing her feet, to the store.
Dicey entered the store through the screen door. She saw mostly cans and dried foods. There was one small icebox that held milk, butter, eggs and cold cuts in plastic packaging. She picked out a can of chicken noodle soup, a quart of milk, a loaf of bread, a bar of soap, a box of safety matches and four tomatoes from a bushel basket. It cost two dollars and ten cents.
The storekeeper stood beside her while she made all these selections, watching her carefully. He didn’t say a word. He was a bony man, with short grizzled hair and long, nervous fingers. When Dicey had piled everything on the counter, he said, “That be it?” and rang up her purchases on an ancient cash register.
Something about his voice was familiar, but Dicey couldn’t put her finger on it.
Outside Dicey recognized what had been familiar in the man’s voice. He had Momma’s way with the sounds of letters. They sounded, just a little, like Momma. Dicey smiled and rejoined her family.
The dirt driveway led off the road straight for a quarter of a mile before it began winding among the trees. At the turns, driveways entered. Dicey walked down one and saw a large house, white shingled, and water beyond it. Dogs barked at her, so she turned back.
The third house was silent, although a car waited in the long garage. The Tillermans skirted the trees at the edge of the property and cut down to the water when they saw it. They found a marshy beach, nestled back against the piney woods. It was not ideal, but it was private and, except for birds and frogs, quiet.
Dicey built a small fire and opened the soup can with her jackknife can opener. It was hard work, but it did the job. She mixed a can of milk into the condensed soup in the pan. Then she told everybody to strip and put on clean underwear. James stood in the muddy water and washed out their underwear, using the cake of soap. He brought it back for Dicey to inspect. “I dunno,” she said.
“The water’s muddy, not like a laundromat.”
Maybeth spread the wet clothing over some bushes. They sat around the small fire and took turns drinking soup from the pan, soaking it up with flabby slices of bread. They passed the milk container around, and Dicey halved the tomatoes. They ate these eagerly, even Sammy who didn’t ordinarily like tomatoes. They were red, firm, juicy. They tasted fresher than anything Dicey had ever eaten before.
After supper, Dicey put out the fire (“We don’t want to attract attention.”) and set Sammy fishing in the quiet river. After a while, James joined Sammy, holding his own line and hook.
The sun set quietly, flaming in the water. The boys caught five small fish, which they killed and then left lying in the water, so they’d be fresh for breakfast.
When the sun was only a band of burning red seen through the trees, Dicey took out the ponchos and spread them on the ground, rolling on them to crush the undergrowth beneath. Nobody wanted to go to sleep, however. They sat with their knees pulled up under their chins. Maybeth began to sing, and they joined in without thinking. They kept their voices down, just in case, but they sang eagerly. When darkness had fallen over everything, and the stars burned bright in a moonless sky, they went to sleep.
CHAPTER 4
They slept late the next morning and were awakened by the roar of a racing motorboat as it headed down the river to the bay. They were all, even Sammy, shoved out of sleep into the hot morning, like falling out of bed.
Dicey raised her face from the poncho. Her cheek was damp with sweat. Her thighs stuck to the rubber. She rubbed at her eyes.
The woods rested behind them. The water and the opposite shore lay before them. Between these wandered the narrow river. The sun was high in the sky, high and hot.
They all peed in the woods and then gathered fuel for a small fire. Dicey pulled the five fish out of the water. With the jackknife, she gutted them and scraped off some of their scales. Then she and James threaded them onto supple branches. Nobody spoke.
They ate the fish and finished the milk and bread. James experimented with toasting the bread on a stick. He got a patchwork piece of toast, splotches of white, splotches of black and various shades of brown. Dicey gathered the underwear, almost dry, from the bushes where they had been hanging all night. James taught Sammy how to put out a fire properly; how to cover it with dirt and then stamp on it and wait, to be sure no telltale smoke rose from the ashes.
Maybeth helped Dicey fold up the ponchos and pack them into her bag. They gathered all their garbage into the brown grocery bag.
Dicey knew it was time to go, but she didn’t want to start, not yet. She pulled out her map and studied it. They would go through Easton and then loop west. Dicey would have preferred to stick to the water’s edge, to follow the shoreline down, but this countryside had too many fists and fingers of land that reached out into the water. If they followed the shoreline, they would travel many miles more than they had to, winding in and out along the points of land.
At the sound of another motor, they all froze. A small boat, really just a rowboat with an outboard, chugged downriver. Three boys were in it, all about James’s age. They were tanned by the sun; all wore cutoffs, T-shirts and sneakers. Their hair looked shaggy, as if it hadn’t been cut all summer. They trailed lazy hands in the water as they moved slowly, aimlessly, down the river and out of sight.
“You know,” Dicey said, “they look like us. Don’t they? James?”
He nodded. His eyes followed the wake the little boat left behind.
“Do you think we’re like most of the kids over here, in the way we look?” Dicey asked.
“Natural camouflage,” James said.
Dicey looked at them. They were all tan, and her day in the sun yesterday had caught her up in brownness for what she’d lost during hours inside at Bridgeport. Their hair was scruffy, and Maybeth’s curls looked tangled. But they didn’t look out of place, or unusual. They looked like kids running a little wild during the summer.
They returned to the road, hurrying down the dirt driveway.
James carried the bag of trash and dumped it into a garbage can near the little store Dicey had shopped in the afternoon before. The clock within the store read ten. Late.
The children walked on beside the highway. This was Route 33, heading east. In Easton, they would change roads to go south. Traffic was light on this hot summer morning. They walked two by two on the shoulder of the road. Fields of corn hedged them in. Insects buzzed among the rows. Dicey wondered if they could take a few ears for supper. Her pan wasn’t big enough to hold a whole ear of corn, but you could scrape off the kernels. Her curiosity was aroused by these fields, so unprotected from the road. Anybody could go in and steal the corn. There were no fences to stop them. Maybe that was why she didn’t want to do it.
As they neared the town of Easton, they began to pass shopping centers and development houses, little, low one-story ranchers with sprigs of new grass and one or two puny trees. At one of the large markets, Dicey bought a pie on sale and four bananas. They cost ninety-two cents. She told her family that they would stop to eat after they had passed through Easton.
Sammy wanted to stop before the town. “It takes all day to get through a place.”
“Not a little one like this,” Dicey said.
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure,” Dicey said. “Wanna bet?”
They wagered an hour’s fishing time. If it took too long to get through Easton, Dicey would have to fish for an hour, while Sammy had free time. If it didn’t, then Sammy would have to fish an extra hour. Sammy liked this. Either way, he won. He walked eagerly on.
Dicey won the wager, of course. As she said to herself, if she couldn’t read a map by now, she’d be a pretty sore fool. The streets of Easton, even the main arteries that they walked on, were sleepy, treelined roads. The tallest buildings reached only four stories. Stop signs outnumbered traffic lights.
Their roads took them around the town rather than through its center. They passed by a long pond that ran behind the YMCA and then down across abandoned railroad tracks to where a big highway joined up with 322.