The Hard Blue Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

saw the group step back. They saw the fish’s silvery underside glint for a second as it went sailing out into the waiting beak of a pelican.
    Perique turned away and began to pull at the heap of nets. “You want to do something about these, no?”
    “In a while, man.” Hector kept rubbing at the back of his neck: that was where the sun got you first, sometimes so hard it felt like a rabbit punch.
    “I come down here to work,” Perique said, “And I ain’t gonna sit on my ass all day long.”
    Hector shifted and stretched and scratched through the buttons of his shirt in the thick hair of his chest. “Go on ahead.”
    “Why don’t I run ’em up, so we can see how bad they torn.”
    “I know how bad,” Hector said.
    Perique dragged at the heap of nets. His sweat-soaked shirt stuck to his back and shoulders. He straightened up. “Enfant garce!” He unbuttoned the shirt and threw it to the deck. His body was brown and very thin; the edges of the spine stuck up like knuckles, and the muscles were like cords. There was a tattoo high up on his left arm, almost to the shoulder: an eagle with a flag in its mouth.
    “You fixing to get sun stroke for sure?” Hector asked.
    Perique did not answer. By the time he’d fastened the net and cranked it up, man-high, by the little hand winch, he was covered with sweat.
    All of a sudden Hector looked over the rail and grinned. “Hi, what you say?” He got up and sat astride the rail. “Perique man, look who we got here.”
    Annie Landry took her pirogue within ten feet of the lugger, and then with a single quick stroke, turned it sideways and stopped it dead on the water.
    “See that?” she grinned up.
    “Always did say you could handle a pirogue like a man.” Hector took a cigarette from his pocket.
    “Me, too,” Annie said.
    Hector tossed one. She caught it with a quick downward motion of her hand. The pirogue bobbed lightly but steadily.
    Perique came and stood just behind Hector. “Where you going?” he asked her.
    She ignored him and was looking at Hector from under her lowered lids. “No light?”
    “Come get it.” He pulled a box of matches from his pocket and held them out.
    She was looking at Perique now, fluttering her lids. “You want me to fall in the bay, huh?”
    “I don’t want you to do nothing, me,” Perique said. “You was yelling for matches and he’s giving it to you.”
    “How I’m going reach it?”
    “That your problem,” Perique said.
    “Think I can’t get it?”
    She shifted her paddle and dipped with it. The pirogue jumped almost sideways. The water swirled to the top, but not a drop splashed in. She flicked the paddle dry and laid it across the narrow boat. She waited until the water was quiet and the hull had stopped vibrating. Then she put out her hands, one on each gunwale and lifted herself to a crouching position.
    “Sure glad you know how to swim,” Hector said.
    She shifted her feet slightly; the pirogue swayed.
    “If anybody come along now,” Perique said, “you go over for sure.”
    “Bet I can do it.” She stood up finally, one foot on each side of the sloping shell. Her head was just above the deck of the lugger.
    “Look at that,” Hector said, “no hands, even.”
    She stuck up the cigarette between her lips. Perique struck a match. “Not you,” she said. “I wouldn’t trust you.” The cigarette dropped down again. “You likely to burn my nose off just to get me to fall in the water.”
    “Me?” Hector asked.
    She stuck the cigarette straight out again.
    “Okay,” Hector said. He snapped a match against his fingernail and, leaning down, lighted the cigarette.
    She puffed at it, hard, the way a beginner always does, her eyes squinted against the smoke.
    “If you old man knew you smoked,” Perique said, “he’d take a couple pieces of skin off you.”
    She stuck out her tongue, around the corner of the cigarette. “Il vient d’poulailler,” she said to nobody in particular.
    Perique