Caine and his father; a kid named Paolo and his father; a girl named . . . well, he couldn’t recall her name. The three fathers were doing business and fishing for swordfish aboard a seventy-foot power boat.
The girl, what was her name?
Oh, my God, her name had been Diana. Not the same Diana, of course, a very different girl, not very attractive, red hair, bulging eyes, not at all the same.
Diana had led them, Caine and Paolo, down into the tight forward space where the anchor and ropes and so on were stored. There she had produced a joint, a small, tightly rolled marijuana cigarette.
Paolo, an Italian kid a couple of years older than Caine, had shrugged and said, “No problem,” using his American slang. Caine had felt trapped. Trapped on the boat. Trapped in the company of the two kids. Trapped into getting high.
Trapped.
It wasn’t Caine’s favorite feeling.
He’d sat there in that dark, damp, cramped space taking hits of the joint and wishing he was anywhere else.
Paolo had tried to hook up with the girl, the pre-Diana Diana. She’d discouraged him and eventually Paolo had gone off in search of food. The girl had sidled up beside Caine and made it clear that she’d like to make the most of their privacy and the drug’s effects.
Caine had rebuffed her, but she’d said, “Oh, you think you’re too cool, right? You think you’re out of my league, don’t you?”
“You said it, not me.”
“Yeah? Guess what? Your dad needs my dad. What if I go up on deck and tell my dad you forced me to smoke pot? I do that and guess what? Your dad loses this deal and he blames you.”
Her eyes shone with triumph. She had him. She had her hook in him, no different from the loudly laughing men up on deck and their stupid fish.
She was sure of it, that Diana.
But Caine had laughed. “Go ahead.”
“I will,” she said.
“Fine. Go.”
He had come to realize a basic truth that day: You can’t be trapped by other people, you can only be trapped by your own fear. Defy and win.
On that day, that day on the boat, Caine had been less afraid than the girl. And he’d known intuitively that he held the winning hand.
Defy and win.
The problem now was that Caine was truly, deeply afraid of the creature in that mine. Afraid all the way down to his bones. Afraid down to the smallest, farthest, most secret recesses of his mind.
He couldn’t bluff the Darkness. The Darkness knew he was afraid.
There was a rope wrapped tightly around his mind and soul. The other end of that rope was held by the dark thing at the bottom of that mine shaft. Caine imagined himself cutting that rope, picking up an ax, raising it high above his head, bringing it down with all his might. . . .
Ruthless and unafraid. Like he had been with Diana.
With both Dianas.
“Have to,” he whispered to himself.
“Have to cut it,” he said.
“Maybe I will,” he muttered.
But he doubted very much that he could.
“He’s hungry,” Little Pete said.
“You mean you’re hungry,” Astrid corrected automatically. Like Little Pete’s major problem was bad grammar.
She was in Sam’s office at town hall. People were coming and going. Kids with requests or complaints. Some Astrid dealt with herself. Some she wrote down for Sam.
One thing Sam was right about: This couldn’t go on. Kids coming in to ask for someone to arbitrate sibling rivalries, or asking whether it was okay for them to watch a PG-13 DVD, or asking Sam to decide whether they could stop wearing their retainer. It was ridiculous.
“He’s hungry,” Little Pete said. He was hunched over his Game Boy, intent on the game.
“Do you want something to eat?” Astrid asked absentmindedly. “I could maybe find something.”
“He can’t talk.”
“Sure you can talk, Petey, when you try.”
“I won’t let him. His words are bad.”
Astrid looked over at him. There was a slight smile on Little Pete’s face.
“And he’s hungry,” Little Pete said, whispering now. “Hungry in the dark.”
“Because Sam said so, that’s why,” Edilio said for maybe the millionth time. “Because if we don’t pick the food, we’re all going to get very, very hungry, that’s why.”
“Can I do it another time?” the kid asked.
“Little dude, that’s when everyone wants to do it: some other time. But we got melons need picking. So just get on the bus. Bring a hat, if you have one. Let’s go.”
Edilio stood holding the front door of the house, waiting for the kid to find his Fairly OddParents cap. His mood, already gloomy, was not improving as the morning wore on. He had twenty-eight kids on the bus, all complaining, all wanting to go to the bathroom, all hungry or thirsty, squabbling, whining, crying.
It was almost eleven already. By the time he got them to the fields it would be noon and they’d be asking for lunch. He was determined to tell them to pick their lunch. Pick your lunch, it’s right there in front of you. Yes, I mean melons. I don’t care if you don’t like melons, that’s your lunch.
Thirty kids, counting himself. If they worked hard for four hours they could harvest maybe seventy, eighty melons each. Which sounded like a lot until you divided it by three hundred-plus hungry mouths and you started to realize that it took a whole lot of cantaloupe before you felt full.
What worried Edilio was the way so many of the melons were already rotting in the field. The way the birds were getting at them. And the fact that no one was thinking far enough ahead to wonder what they should be planting for the next season.