Free Green Boy by Susan Cooper Page B

at the cut chains of the lost boats. Lou jumpeddown and ran to our dinghy. He looked back at me and made his soft hooting sound. It was very clear what he wanted.
    I said, “Grand, can we go out in the boat for a while?”
    Grand glanced automatically at the sky, at his watch, and at the level of the tide. He said, “You got water in the boat?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œOkay then. Back before dark.” He gave me a small tight smile. “If you find a bonefish boat, bring it home.”
    But we saw no sign of the four missing boats, though we were both looking out for them. The water was very low, and all the white sandy shoals in the cut were exposed, with channels running between them. Even in our tiny dinghy it was easy to find yourself stuck, and I had to keep clear of our usual landing-place. It was a relief to be back at Long Pond Cay, after the things that had been happening.
    I hadn’t talked to Lou at all about the Otherworld. In a way, there wasn’t much point. Not just because he can’t talk, but because there was nothing to say. We both knew what had happened; we both knew nobody would believe it. And we both knew it would happen again. Now that we were really truly on our own, in a way we could be only in the boat, I said, as I watched for the channel, “Lou?”
    He was sitting in the bow, holding the anchor-line. He looked back at me over his shoulder.
    â€œLou, did the tree really talk to you? Did it tell you what to do?”
    Lou shifted round a bit and looked at me cautiously, even though I was the person he trusted most in the whole world. After a moment, he nodded.
    I wished, for the millionth time in my life, that he could speak.
    â€œWas it an accident, our going there?”
    He shook his head firmly.
    â€œDid they . . . call us?”
    Lou nodded.
    â€œD’you know why? D’you know what they want?”
    Cautiously still, he made an oddly grown-up side-to-side movement with one hand: the gesture that means “sort of, a little bit, so-so.”
    I shook my head helplessly. “There’s no way you can tell me, is there?”
    Lou tried. He pointed ahead, at Long Pond Cay, with his eyes fixed on me to make sure I was watching. Then he pointed up at the sky, his arm stiff, straight up, pointing as high as he could. Then, because I still looked baffled, he reached out and gave me a little reassuring pat on the leg, and he grinned. It was such an open, happy, infectious grin that all the worry went out of me, and I laughed. It was as if our ages were suddenly reversed, and I was the little one and Lou the big kid.
    We puttered up through the deeper blue-green water to the far end of the broad curving beach, and cameinshore there, where an old buttonwood tree groped its branches out over the sand.
    When the boat was anchored right we went up across the powdery white sand of the beach. It was littered with the leavings of the tide: pieces of purple sea fan, bits of wood and broken sponge, and scraps of hairy rope, colored turquoise and a very bright blue. Casuarina needles lay in scribbles on the sand.
    Lou ran ahead of me, inland, toward the lagoon, and I followed him through the tall stringy grass, between hard black patches of marl, and fleshy-leaved clumps of scrub set with little yellow daisy-like flowers. Over on the smooth sand near the lagoon there were hundreds of the faint star-shaped patterns that the little ghost crabs leave, when they dart in and out of their holes. It was quiet, quiet, with only the small distant splash of a fish jumping somewhere in the lagoon, and the cheeping of tiny birds in the casuarina pines.
    But Lou was running ahead of me, the wet sand sucking at his sneakers, water rising up out of it to fill his footprints, and suddenly I realized what he had been wanting, why he had asked to come here now, at this particular moment. It was the time between tides again, when the sea had gone down and not yet started to