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Travis.”
    “I have no intention of …”
    “The first thing we have to do is get him on his feet, and pry every living piece of information out of him.”
    “How about that weekly television thing you …”
    “I’m two tapes ahead, and I can go down there and do three more in one day. Trav, they didn’t leave him a
dime
! It was some kind of land development thing. Over near Naples.”
    “Maybe by fall …”
    “Travis!”
    By the following Saturday afternoon the
Busted Flush
was swinging on two hooks in Florida Bay, two miles off CandleKey, all larders stocked, five hundred gallons in the fresh water tanks. With alterations from time to time, I’ve tried to make the old barge-type houseboat ever more independent of shore-side services. Except when home at Bahia Mar, I like to avoid the boat basin togetherness. Under one hatch I have a whole area paved with husky batteries, enough of them so that I can stay at anchor and draw on them for four days before they begin to get a little feeble. When they’re down, I can use them to start up an electric trickle-feed generator which can bring them back up in six hours. If I ever get careless enough to run them all the way down, I can break out the big 10 kw gasoline generator and use it to get the electric one started. At anchor I switch everything over to 32 V. I can’t run the air-conditioning off the batteries, but I can run it off the gas generator. Then it is a decision as to which will be the most annoying, the heat or the noise.
    The sun was heading for Hawaii. Just enough breeze for a pattycake sound against the hull. I was stretched out on the sun deck. A line of pelicans creaked by, beating and coasting, heading home to the rookery. What I had learned so far from Arthur didn’t sound promising. But I comforted myself with thinking that while we were getting him in shape, I was doing myself some promised good. I was on cheese, meat and salad. No booze. No cigarettes. Just one big old pot pipe packed with Black Watch for the sunset hour. Due any time now.
    Every muscle felt stretched, bruised and sore. We’d anchored at mid-morning. I’d spent a couple of hours in mask and fins, knocking and gouging some of the grass beards and corruption off the hull. After lunch I’d lain on the sundeck with my toes hooked under the rail and done about ten sets of situps. Chook had caught me at it and talked me into some of theexercises she prescribed for her dance group. One exercise was a bitch. She could do it effortlessly. You lift your left leg, grab the ankle with your right hand, and play one-legged jump rope with it, over and back. Then switch hands and ankles and jump on the other leg. After that we swam. I could win the sprints. In our distance events, she had a nasty habit of slowly drawing even, and then slowly pulling away, and an even nastier habit of smiling placidly at me while I wheezed and gasped.
    I heard a sound and turned my head and saw her climb the ladderway to the sundeck. She looked concerned. She sat cross-legged beside me. In that old faded pink suit, dark hair in a salty tangle, no makeup, she looked magnificent.
    “He feels kind of weak and dizzy,” she said. “I think I let him get too much sun. It can sap your strength. I gave him a salt tablet, and it’s making him nauseated.”
    “Want me to go take a look at him?”
    “Not right now. He’s trying to doze off. Gee, he’s so damn grateful for every little thing. And it broke my heart, the way he looked in trunks, so scrawny and pathetic.”
    “He eats many lunches like today, it won’t last long.”
    She inspected a pink scratch on a ripe brown calf. “Trav? How are you going to go about it? What are you going to try to do?”
    “I wouldn’t have the slightest idea.”
    “How long are we going to stay here?”
    “Until he has the guts to want to go back, Chook.”
    “But why should he
have
to? I mean if he dreads it so.”
    “Because, dear girl, he is my reference