The Dust of 100 Dogs - A. S. King [81]
“That girl, for one. You said she was too young, and she’s not. You’re always saying I’m a queer, and I’m not. You’re wrong all the time!”
Not about the dog.
“Whatever. Just shut up and let me sleep, will you?”
Fred slept soundly and didn’t worry about Rusty once. When he woke up the next morning at five, he’d even forgotten about his injury until he saw a huge stain in the bed where his foot had been—a wide circle of brown dried blood. He examined the carpet and saw that he’d bled there too, and left footprints to and from the bathroom during the night. “God damn it!” he said, propping himself up and pulling his sopping foot onto his other leg.
Fred stripped the bed of its creamy cotton sheets. He tried to remember the trick his mother taught him. Was it cold water or hot water? Baking soda or lemon juice? He dropped the sheet at the bedroom door and removed the now-brown washcloth from his foot. The bleeding had pretty much stopped, but the wound had become a swollen, gaping hole overnight and Fred worried, again, that it might be infected. He searched the bathroom for something strong and found Listerine. Before he poured it over his foot, he took a long swig from the bottle.
“GOD DAMN IT!” Fred screamed as his foot recoiled from the shock. If it stings this badly, it must be working, he thought as he fought back tears.
While David went to fetch Seanie, Emer went to her cabin and tidied herself. She brushed her hair and applied a dot of perfume oil to her neck, her armpits, and her knickers. She worried.
“What if he hates me as this murderous woman?” she asked herself, and then tried to remember the girl she was when they last saw each other. A simple girl. An orphan girl. An owned girl. She felt better once she rationalized things—surely Seanie had some bad history under his belt by now, too. Perhaps worse than killing many men and plundering Spanish ships.
†
David was having trouble thinking about the plan to sink the Spanish fleet. He was too busy rowing between large boats to retrieve Seanie Carroll from the Virginia and feeling replaced. He tried not to feel too sorry for himself, but it wasn’t working. Even though he knew that Emer never returned his feelings, he loved her more than he’d ever thought he could love a woman. Now he would have to give her up—after all his efforts to impress her! After all his work to assemble the fleet! How unlucky could he get?
Things got worse once Seanie climbed into the rowboat. David grunted and smirked—the closest to a welcoming smile he could manage—and Seanie looked pained and impatient. The two rowed violently back to the Vera Cruz, not a word between them.
David reluctantly showed him to Emer’s cabin and knocked. Emer called out for them to come in. She got up from her bed and hugged Seanie tightly, then held him at arm’s length and looked at him, then hugged him again. Seanie grinned and laughed loudly, shook his head in disbelief, and blinked back tears.
“Seanie, this is David, my first mate and best friend. David, this is Seanie Carroll, the man I once told you about.” The two men shook hands and nodded to each other. David left as soon as he could.
Seanie sat in the armchair next to Emer’s bunk and stared at her in the lamplight, smiling. She found herself crying, and then embracing him again, weak and sad as much as relieved and happy. She’d left her cape hanging on its hook and tried not to seem like the monster she’d become, tried to seem like a Connacht woman, or like someone who might have just thrown grain to the hens or washed the clothes in the river.
“How in the world did you land here?” she asked in rusty Gaelic.
Seanie laughed. “I was meant to be looking for you,” he said. “In Paris.”
“You were in Paris?”
“Well, no. The boat never went to Paris. I wanted to find you and bring you home, Emer. As it was, the boat I found was going to Barbados. I had very little English,” he explained. Every time he looked at her, he shook his head and sighed. He held her right hand in his left and squeezed it with each sigh. “I worked three years on the