Silent Prey

motor, his fine white hair standing up like a sail, his eyes shaded by dark oval sunglasses. A smile grew on his tanned face as he maneuvered out along the jetty, then swung into the open river. “Jesus, I love it,” he said.
    “You gotta be careful,” Lily said anxiously, watching him.
    “Yeah, yeah, this takes two fingers . . . .” To Lucas he said, “Don’t have a heart attack—it just unbelievably fucks you up. I can run the engine and steer, but I can’t do anything with the sails, or the anchor. I can’t go out alone.”
    “I don’t want to talk about it,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah, fuck it,” Kennett agreed.
    “What does it feel like?” Lucas asked.
    “You weren’t gonna talk about it,” Lily protested.
    “It feels like a pro wrestler is trying to crush your chest. It hurts, but I don’t remember that so much. I just remember feeling like I was stuck in a car-crusher and my chest was caving in. And I was sweating, I rememberbeing down on the ground, on the floor, sweating like a sonofabitch . . . .” He said it quietly, calmly enough, but with a measure of hate in his voice, like a man swearing revenge. After another second, he said, “Let’s get the sails up.”
    “Yeah,” Lucas said, slightly shaken. “I gotta pull on a rope, right?”
    Kennett looked at the sky. “God, if you heard the man, forgive him, the poor fucker’s from Minnesota or Missouri or Montana, some dry-ass place like that.”
    Lucas got the mainsail up. The jib was on a roller, with the lines led back to the cockpit. Lily worked it from there, sometimes on her own, sometimes with prodding from Kennett.
    “How long have you been sailing?” Lucas asked her.
    “I did it when I was a kid, at summer camp. And then Dick’s been teaching me the big boat.”
    “She learns quick,” Kennett said. “She’s got a natural sense for the wind.”
    They slid lazily back and forth across the river, water rushing beneath the bow, wind in their faces. A hatch of flies was coming off the water, their lacy wings delicately floating around them. “Now what?” Lucas asked.
    Kennett laughed. “Now we sail up and then we turn around, and sail back.”
    “That’s what I thought,” Lucas said. “You’re not even trolling anything.”
    “You’re obviously not into the great roundness of the universe,” Kennett said. “You need a beer.”
     
    Kennett and Lily gave him a sailing lesson, taught him the names of the lines and the wire rigging, pointed out the buoys marking the channel.
    “You’ve got a cabin on a lake, right? Don’t you have buoys?”
    “On my lake? If I peed off the end of the dock, I’d hit the other side. If we put in a buoy, we wouldn’t have room for a boat.”
    “I thought the great North Woods . . .” Kennett prompted, seriously.
    “There’s some big water,” Lucas admitted. “Superior: Superior’ll show you things the Atlantic can’t . . . .”
    “I seriously doubt that,” Lily said skeptically.
    “Yeah? Well, once every few years it freezes over—and you look out there, a horizon like a knife and it’s ice all the way out. You can walk out to the horizon and never get there . . . .”
    “All right,” she said.
    They talked about ice-boating and para-skiing, and always came back to sailing. “I was planning to take a year off and single-hand around the world, maybe . . . unless I got stuck in the Islands,” Kennett said. “Maybe I would have got stuck, maybe not. I took Spanish lessons, took some French . . .”
    “French?”
    “Yeah . . . you run down the Atlantic, see, to the Islands, then across to the Canaries, maybe zip into the Med for a look at the Riviera—that’s French—then come back out and down along the African coast to Cape Town, then Australia, then Polynesia. Tahiti: they speak French. Then back up to the Galápagos, Colombia and Panama, and the Islands again . . .”
    “Islands—I like the idea,” Lucas said.
    “You like it?” asked Kennett, seriously.
    “Yeah, I do,” Lucas said, looking out across the water. His cheekbones and lips were tingling from the sun, and he could feel the muscles relax in his neck and back. “Ihad a bad time a year ago, a depression. The medical kind. I’m out now, but I never want to do that again. I’d rather . . . run. Like to the Islands. I don’t think you’d get depressed in the Islands.”
    “Exactly what islands are we talking about?” Lily asked.
    “I don’t know,”