The Treasure of Maria Mamoun Page 11

  It was only when the whole family sat down together at the groaning table, and Grandma’s mouth was full of oyster stew, that Maria could turn her attention away from the old lady and to this strange new food. Oysters weren’t all that different from clams, she decided. Maybe a bit bigger. They tasted okay once she got past their boogery texture.

  Her mother said a familiar name. She was asking about Mr. Ironwall, when he was younger.

  “What was he like?” Grandma Newcomb lifted her eyes to the apple tree as if remembering. “Oh, he was a wild one—loved to throw parties.”

  “I used to help with the clambakes,” Pops Newcomb interrupted. “Do you remember, Ella, how we could throw a clambake for a hundred people with one day’s notice?”

  “Oh, Pops, no one wants to hear about that—” Grandma patted the old man on the hand.

  Pops Newcomb went on as if she hadn’t said anything. “He was Mr. Moneybags, that Mr. Ironwall! And he loved to spend it—practically gave it away. Not like he is now, all shut up and stingy.”

  “He’s been very generous to our family.” Grandma smiled apologetically at Celeste. “Hattie and Frank are well paid.”

  Pops went on. “I remember one time I’d raked up all these fat, fresh oysters and he said, ‘You know what we should do, Bo? We should hide pearls in them.’ I thought he was nuts, so I just shucked ’em and iced ’em, and what do you know, he came back with, honest truth, a whole box of pearls. Real ones! He had me hide them under the flesh. You know, to surprise the guests. We had to ruin the surprise though, when one lady cracked a tooth.” He chuckled to himself.

  Maria looked across the table at Paolo. He didn’t seem to be listening. He kept his eyes on his plate and shoveled the stew in like he was a machine built for eating.

  “That party did get out of control.” Pops chuckled.

  “Most did,” Grandma said.

  “What were the parties for?” Maria couldn’t help but ask. She couldn’t imagine that pale old man throwing out-of-control parties with entire boxes of pearls.

  “Oh, all sorts of reasons,” Grandma said. “Holidays, friends’ weddings, movie releases.”

  “He loved to throw parties when his movies were coming out,” Hattie explained. “To Have and to Hope—everything had to be French because the film took place in Paris. And The Last Privateer—all pirate things.”

  “What do you know?” Pops said. “You can’t have been more than a baby.”

  “Yeah,” Hattie said, “but you’ve told that pearl story a thousand times. Privateer was the party with the pearls in the oysters.”

  “Well, it’s still a darn good story!” Pops thumped the table.

  “Time for pie,” Grandma interrupted. “I had some canned apples left over from last fall.”

  Celeste and Hattie stood and helped to gather the dirty dishes.

  “It’s a shame he never had children,” Grandma said to Celeste as they went into the house. “That whole place for nothing. He’s going to die with no one to hand it off to.”

  “And leave us all high and dry,” Hattie said. “Just you wait.”

  Paolo caught Maria’s eye and nodded once, as if to say he’d told her so. Then he stood and picked up his plate. Maria started to clear hers, but he took it from her and said, “You sit.”

  Maria strained to hear the rest of their conversation, but the kitchen door slammed shut.

  Mr. Ironwall was going to die and leave them high and dry.

  It was the second time she’d heard that, and she was starting to believe it. After all, what would they do when Mr. Ironwall died? Return to the city? Return to that scary apartment building crawling with Bad Barbies? She would do anything before she would do that.

  20

  THE DREAD PYRATE PAOLO

  The next morning dawned bright and sunny, but Maria was too lost in thought to notice. She was trying to figure out her next treasure-hunting move. If Mr. Ironwall was going to leave them all high and dry, then she needed to find that treasure quickly, before her mother lost her job and they lost their home.

  “He’s going to leave you high and dry, too,” she grumbled to Brutus on their walk. She let him off his leash and he disappeared over the dune as swiftly as if he’d caught the scent of a rabbit. Maria ran after him.

  As she came over the dune, she saw a small sailboat tied up to the dock behind The Last Privateer. It was white, about twelve feet long, and had one mast. A large number 32 was painted in red on the hull. Then she saw that Paolo was aboard, waiting for her. Maria’s stomach squeezed. She wasn’t sure if she was glad or scared to see him.

  But Brutus was already on the dock, wagging and turning joyful circles. Paolo threw a tennis ball far into the water. Brutus bounded into the waves after it.

  “You bring the ball chucker?” Paolo called out.

  Maria held it up. She’d even brought her own tennis ball.

  “Told you I could get you a boat,” Paolo said.

  “Told you I didn’t want your help,” Maria said. But she stepped onto the dock to look at the boat anyhow. “Did you steal it?”

  “No.” He sounded annoyed. “I borrowed it from the yacht club.”

  “You did steal it!”

  Brutus swam to the beach, and then scrambled back to the dock and ran down the ramp to drop the ball at her feet.

  “He’s gotten used to the ramp and dock,” Maria said. She scooped the ball up with the tennis ball–size cup and flung it back into the ocean. Brutus dove off the end of the dock, into the chop, and paddled after it.

  “Do you like it?” Paolo asked. He sounded as if he actually cared what she thought.

  “Yeah, it works well.” It was much easier this way; she didn’t have to pick up the disgustingly drooled-on ball. She found herself smiling at him and he smiled back.

  “I meant the boat,” he said. “Climb aboard.”

  He held out his hand to help her. She climbed on without taking it.

  The boat was very different from The Last Privateer. It looked brand-new and everything was metal or plastic. No wood or glass or charm at all. It had barely any deck. Most of it was a hollowed-out hull with molded plastic benches on either side where you could sit and handle the sail and the tiller. Paolo whistled and Brutus swam to the beach, clambered onto the dock, and ran down the ramp. He pranced his forepaws on the floating dock and gazed at them sitting in the boat. After a few attempts, the boy maneuvered the dog onto the boat.

  “We could get in so much trouble,” Maria said.

  “No one will know. We’ll bring it back in a couple of hours,” Paolo said. “It’s not like anyone needs it. They’ve got, like, a million of them, and no one’s using them right now. Sail camp doesn’t start till July eleventh.”

  “What if someone sees us?” she asked.

  “Like who? We’ll stay away from Edgartown.”

  “It’s not safe.”

  Paolo pointed to a couple of life jackets. “Come on, Maria. Did I really go to all the trouble of stealing this for nothing?” He looked at her a long time, but she did not know how to answer.

  “Besides,” he continued, “I brought us a really nice breakfast.” He held up a wax-paper bag of the sort Frank always brought her mother. “The best doughnuts ever.”

  She did think they were the best doughnuts ever. And she loved Hattie’s fritters, muffins, and croissants. She couldn’t believe she’d spent her entire childhood eating mass-produced cardboard junk from mass-produced cardboard boxes when there was such homemade deliciousness in the world.

  “Hot chocolate, too,” he said. A thermos was propped in the corner of the hollowed hull.

  Maria looked around. No one else was on the beach. And it really was a beautiful day. It was sunny and warm, and the breeze was light. And she’d never been sailing before. And ever since she’d seen The Last Privateer bobbing on the dock she’d wanted to go sailing.

  “Oh, all right,” she said. “But you’d better be safe. If you do anything scary,
I get to say turn around and you can’t argue. Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  * * *

  Within a few minutes they were under way. Paolo had launched them expertly. He quickly loosed the line with one hand and steered with the other. He raised the sail as they drifted from the dock, and pointed them toward the mouth of the bay.

  “Where are we going?”

  Maria opened her backpack and handed him the modern chart and pointed to the three tiny islands in the northeast corner. “There.”

  “Why? There’s nothing on those rocks except bird poop.”

  “I just want to go there,” Maria said. “No questions.”

  Paolo shrugged. “Okay. No questions. But you can’t just sit there like a landlubber. You have to work for your passage. I’m going to teach you how to sail on the way over.”

  “Okay,” Maria said.

  “Okay,” Paolo said. “This kind of boat is the simplest kind. One sail, small, easy to handle. It’s called a catboat for some reason, although maybe it should be called a dogboat.” He nodded at Brutus, who lay curled at their feet.

  Maria smiled and Paolo continued. “Where we’re sitting is starboard. The other side is port. You can remember because ‘port’ has four letters and ‘left’ has four letters, and when you face the bow—the front—port is left. The back is the stern. This stick is the tiller, it’s for steering, and you just push it opposite the way you want to go. The rudder is attached to the tiller underwater, and when you push the tiller left, it goes right, and vice versa, so we can steer. Try it.”

  Maria put her hand on the tiller. She was surprised by the force she felt pushing against it, and let go. Paolo quickly took it again.

  “It felt weird, like it was going to jump out of my hand,” she said.

  “That’s because of the force of the wind on the sail,” Paolo explained. “The wind pushes the sail in one direction, but the centerboard, which is an underwater keel, keeps us from sliding sideways in that direction.”

  Maria nodded. She was already lost in all the new vocabulary.

  “This is the boom.” Paolo whacked a metal pole that ran along the bottom of the sail with his hand. “Remember ‘boom,’ because it hits you with a boom in the back of your head if you aren’t paying attention when we come about. It goes from one side of the boat to the other like this.”

  For the next few minutes, Paolo demonstrated how he controlled the angle of the sail by moving the boom from side to side with ropes and pulleys—sheets, he called them. Every time he moved the sail, he moved the tiller, and the boat zigzagged back and forth across the bay.

  “What we’re doing is tacking,” he explained. “You almost never have the wind directly at your back, so you have to tack back and forth to move forward toward your heading, which is the direction you want to go. Now, if you want to turn completely around, you jibe. You yell, ‘Coming about,’ so no one gets hit. That’s when it’s important to remember the boom and duck.”

  He completely loosed the sail, gave the boom a shove with one hand, and pulled the tiller all the way over with the other. “Coming about! Duck and come to port!”

  Maria hesitated and he pushed her head down and pulled her over to the other side of the boat. As she slid across the bench, the sail swung completely across the deck and reached the end of its lines with a shuddering stop. Brutus raised his head and sniffed. The boat swung in a wide arc and suddenly they were facing in a completely new direction.

  “You have to switch sides because our weight matters in a boat this small,” Paolo explained. “See how we are tipping over? Even big boats heel because of the wind pushing on the sail. But on something larger, you don’t need to switch sides.”

  As a gust of wind caught the sail, the boat heeled closer to the water, but Maria found that she wasn’t scared by all the strange movements.

  “It does feel like flying!” Maria said. “I thought it would and it does!”

  “Here, put your hand on the tiller with mine and just try to get a feel for what I’m doing,” Paolo said.

  Maria put her hand near Paolo’s so it wasn’t quite touching his, but almost. The tiller vibrated under her palm like something alive and buzzing.

  Paolo steered them out of Ironwall Bay. “You do realize there’s no way you could have rowed out to those rocks. I mean, it’s really far.” He adjusted the tiller.

  Her cheeks burned. “I know,” she said, though she hadn’t known at all.

  Paolo pulled on the sheets and pushed on the tiller, and took them around a promontory to the neighboring cove. The mansions along the shore were mostly still shuttered, but here and there Maria could see signs of life. Housekeepers hung rugs over the porch railings of one large mansion, and next door a stable hand exercised a horse. Teams of gardeners pruned, clipped, and mowed this yard, while painters painted that house, and at one estate they sailed past, workers were setting up a large white party tent.

  “Maybe we should go back. There are a lot more people out than I expected,” Maria said.

  “The summer people are coming, the summer people are coming!” Paolo said, as if he were Paul Revere announcing the British invasion. “Don’t worry. The workers won’t tattle. Most of them can’t speak English anyhow.”

  “What do they speak?”

  “Portuguese.” He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Olá! Bom dia!”

  “Bom dia!” a worker from the tent-raising crew called back.

  “You speak Portuguese?” Maria asked.

  “Not really. Just food and curse words, mostly,” Paolo said. “It’s kind of like Spanish. You speak Spanish?”

  “No. I can read signs, and I know some words from kids at school.” Maria looked out at the brilliant water.

  “What’s your mom?” Paolo asked. “I mean, it’s just that she has a little accent.”

  “I’m supposed to lie and say it’s French. Most people believe that. Anyhow, she did go to a convent school in Paris, before she met my dad and followed him to New York. But she was really born in Lebanon.”

  “You speak Lebanese?”

  “Arabic, you mean. Not really. I was born here. And my mom wants me to be American, so she only speaks English at home. The only time I ever hear her speak Arabic is at the grocery store or when she loses her temper. There really isn’t anyone else for her to speak Arabic to anyway—my grandparents are still in Beirut and I’m never going to meet them.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause they’re always blowing each other up over there, my mom says.” The wind caught her hair and whipped it across her face. Maria pulled it back and tied it in a loose knot. “But really it’s because her family disowned her for getting pregnant with me.”

  “That’s harsh,” Paolo said. “I can’t imagine not having my grandparents.”

  “It’s okay. I mean, the lady in the grocery store was kind of like a grandma.”

  The sharp, sudden memory of Tante Farida caught Maria off guard. She wondered what Tante was doing now. Who visited her? Was she lonely? If you didn’t have family, a big family like the Newcombs, you ended up alone.

  She shook her head. “Is your whole family Portuguese?”

  “No,” Paolo said. “My dad was from Brazil. But everyone you met last night, my mom’s side, is all longtime Island. So we always just spoke American. I just learned a little Portuguese from listening to my dad and the guys he worked with.”

  “You have a huge family,” Maria said, “in that tiny house.”

  “Yeah. I guess. Back when my dad was alive though, it was just him, me, and Mom in our own house. I mean, we saw everyone at holidays and stuff, but we didn’t live with them like we do now.” Paolo looked away. “Let’s tack. You do it this time. Loose this sheet and haul that one.”

  Maria did what Paolo said and miraculously the boat turned. “Do you miss your dad?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Paolo looked back at her. “Do you miss yours?”

  “I
never knew him,” Maria said. “He went back to Puerto Rico before I was born…”

  He shrugged. “I guess you can’t miss what you never had.”

  “I used to think that, too. It’s weird, though. Since moving here, it’s not that I actually miss having a family, it’s just that I’m kind of noticing I don’t have one…” Maria paused. “Mr. I tells these stories of growing up with his cousins, and you have all those people around…”

  “Come on,” Paolo said. “Grab the tiller. I want you to try to jibe.”

  They spent the next hour tacking back and forth, working their way around the tip of the island. Maria loved the soaring feeling she got when the boat came around and the wind filled the sail.

  On the eastern side of the island the wind came close to their back, so they could both take a break from the constant tacking. Paolo kept his foot on the tiller and his eye on the heading, and Maria lay back on the tiny deck. She was almost falling asleep when she heard the roar of a close engine. Brutus leaped to his feet, barking. A small powerboat whizzed by them, splashing spray, then circled back and cut the throttle.

  “Attention!” A boy called from the boat. He stood straight and saluted. “It’s Major Dirt!”

  His friend next to him laughed.

  “You can tell by the smell that he isn’t washing well!” They chanted in a military cadence. “Sound off! One, two! Sound off! Three, four!”

  Maria froze. She felt the same sick sinking in her stomach she’d had when the Barbies attacked. She glanced at Paolo. “Can we go?”

  “Yeah.” His eyes looked fierce, and he was pushing the tiller over to turn the boat around.

  Maria adjusted the sheets. It was a small comfort. Even if their sail was ruined, at least she knew what to do with the lines. Slowly they began to move in the opposite direction, but they were going largely against the wind, and the powerboat puttered alongside easily.