Read Online Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway - Free Book Online Page B

wickedness around with him transmuted into a sort of teasing gaiety. But he was a bad boy and the others knew it and he knew it. He was just being good while his badness grew inside him.
    There, below the sea porch, the four of them were lying on the sand with the oldest boy, young Tom, on one side of Roger and the smallest one, Andrew, next to him on the middle side and the middle one, David, stretched out next to Tom on his back with his eyes closed. Thomas Hudson cleaned up his gear and went down to join them.
    “Hi, papa,” the oldest boy said. “Did you work well?”
    “Are you going to swim, papa?” asked the middle boy.
    “The water’s pretty good, papa,” the youngest boy said.
    “How are you father?” Roger grinned. “How’s the painting business, Mr. Hudson?”
    “Painting business is over for the day, gentlemen.”
    “Oh swell,” said David, the middle boy. “Do you think we can go goggle-fishing?”
    “Let’s go after lunch.”
    “That’s wonderful,” the big boy said.
    “Won’t it maybe be too rough?” Andrew, the youngest boy, asked.
    “For you, maybe,” his oldest brother, Tom, told him.
    “No, Tommy. For anyone.”
    “They stay in the rocks when it’s rough,” David said. “They’re afraid of the surge the same way we are. I think it makes them seasick too. Papa, don’t fish get seasick?”
    “Sure,” Thomas Hudson said. “Sometimes in the live-well of a smack in rough weather the groupers will get so seasick that they die.”
    “Didn’t I tell you?” David asked his older brother.
    “They get sick and they die,” young Tom said. “But what proves that it’s seasick?”
    “I think you could say they were really seasick,” Thomas Hudson said. “I don’t know whether they would be if they could swim freely, though.”
    “But don’t you see that in the reef they can’t swim freely either, papa?” David said. “They have their holes and certain places they move out in. But they have to stay in the holes for fear of bigger fish and the surge bangs them around just the way it would if they were in the well of a smack.”
    “Not quite as much,” young Tom disagreed.
    “Maybe not quite as much,” David admitted judiciously.
    “But enough,” Andrew said. He whispered to his father, “If they keep it up, we won’t have to go.”
    “Don’t you like it?”
    “I like it wonderful but I’m scared of it.”
    “What scares you?”
    “Everything underwater. I’m scared as soon as I let my air out. Tommy can swim wonderfully but he’s scared underwater too. David’s the only one of us that isn’t scared underwater.”
    “I’m scared lots of times,” Thomas Hudson told him.
    “Are you really?”
    “Everybody is, I think.”
    “David isn’t. No matter where it is. But David’s scared now of horses because they threw him so many times.”
    “Listen, punk,” David had heard him. “ How was I thrown?”
    “I don’t know. It was so many times I don’t remember.”
    “Well let me tell you. I know how I was thrown so much. When I used to ride Old Paint that year he used to swell himself up when they cinched him and then later the saddle would slip with me.”
    “I never had that trouble with him,” Andrew said smartly.
    “Oh, the devil,” David said. “Probably he liked you like everybody does. Maybe somebody told him who you were.”
    “I used to read out loud to him about me out of the papers,” Andrew said.
    “I’ll bet he went off on a dead run then,” Thomas Hudson said. “You know what happened to David was that he started to ride that old broken-down quarter horse that got sound on us and there wasn’t any place for the horse to run. Horses aren’t supposed to go like that across that sort of country.”
    “I wasn’t saying I could have ridden him, papa,” Andrew said.
    “You better not,” David said. Then, “Oh hell, you probably could have. Sure you could have. But honestly, Andy, you don’t know how he used to be going