Somehow, without ever consciously deciding to do so, Mark found himself following the man to a hole-in-the-wall pub called, predictably, Barnacle Bill's. "A lot of us ex-Navy and charter boat sailors come here on the regular," Horowitz told him. "All locals; none of those tourists come here. We're here to get away from the tourists. But for you we'll make an exception." The inflection he gave the word 'tourist' made it fairly clear that it was being used as a euphemism for any number of other words, none of them polite. He waved Mark to a bar stool, took one himself. "Hey, Bill—look what I got here. The Kid wasn't an only child."

The bartender—Bill, presumably— looked at the two of them, shook his head with a sad smile. "Well, I'll be damned," he said. "One minute." He turned away, filled two foaming mugs, and set one before each man.

Mark took a sip from his, then made a face and set it down. "Coca-cola?" he said in disbelief.

Bill laughed. "Your brother was a character," he said. "I remember the first time they came in here. Old Skipper, he orders his drink, and tells the Kid, pick anything you want. So the Kid, he thinks for a minute, then asks for a chocolate malt."

"And Skipper starts in trying to tell him that they don't make chocolate malts here, pick something else, and so he asks for a strawberry malt!" Horowitz was laughing now, too.

"So Skipper, he's trying to keep his voice down, so's you could only have heard him in Maui instead of all the way back on the mainland, and the Kid's arguing with him about what exactly 'anything you want' was supposed to mean, and Skip trying to get him to understand that a bar wasn't like the corner drugstore." The bartender gestured at the mug in front of Mark with a smile. "Eventually we all compromised on soda pop, and so that was what he ordered every time they came in."

"Wait a minute, Bill," Horowitz said. "That was what he ordered, but it wasn't always what he got, right, Entwhistle?"

Another sailor joined them. "Hey. Hey. We only spiked his drink that one time," he protested. "And he was face down on the bar practically before he finished it. It hurt us more than it did him, anyway—I thought Skipper was going to kill us!"

"Skipper thought so, too," Bill said dryly. "You were just lucky that you could outrun him. He didn't much appreciate that you'd taken it on yourselves to buy the Kid a round, and you know as well as I do that it wasn't just the once."

Mark, to his own surprise, chuckled. He could imagine the scene, and somehow, miraculously, it didn't hurt. "Mom made him promise, before he left home," he told them. "Don't drink, don't smoke, always be respectful to ladies, keep your language clean, and about a hundred other things I don't remember."

"Don't act like a sailor, in other words," Entwhistle finished. "You can tell your mom that he kept his word, anyway."

Bill slid another mug—this one containing beer—down the bar. "Here. Jettison the soda. We won't tell your mom."

Mark smiled a bit, and took a drink. "So… did he come here a lot?"

"Sure did," Horowitz said. "Often enough that we all knew to grab our glasses and hold on tight when he walked by, anyway. Him and Skipper, both. I told you, this is where the charterers and us other sailors all come to get away from the tourists."

"He used to tell these crazy stories about the different folks on their tours," Entwhistle said. "Nothing mean—I don't think he knew how to be mean—but the way he told 'em! Did all these different voices, and made it all sound like it wasn't just a bunch of idiots getting underfoot and oohing and ahhing over the same damn islands you'd sailed around yesterday and the day before that one. It was like listening to a comedy show."

"Not just that," Horowitz said, frowning thoughtfully. "It wasn't just funny. It was like… every trip he took around the islands was Christmas morning. All brand new and exciting, every single time. And he talked about their passengers like waiting hand and foot on whiny mainlanders was the greatest thing since sliced bread and he couldn't believe his luck."

"We're talking about Skip and the Kid, right?" Yet another man joined them. "Say, Bill, you gonna just let a guy die of thirst over here?" Bill poured him a beer, and he raised it in a respectful salute to the lost before taking a slug.

"Who else?" Entwhistle shrugged. "Hey, McDermott. Say hello to Mark, here. The Kid's brother. Pretend you wasn't raised in a barn, wouldja?"

"Oh. Hi," he said. "Mark, was it? I'm sorry. Yeah, Skip had one hell of a good thing going. Look at their passenger manifests, and, I'm telling you, there were more'n a few of us wondered how he did it. They were never empty. Even the Hollywood types and other big shots from all over the place; if they were going to go island hopping at all, it was usually a safe bet they'd end up on the Minnow. The rest of us got the leftovers."

"Yeah," Horowitz said. "And it's not like she was the Queen Mary. She was your average little pleasure craft, no better or worse than any of the hundred other tubs around the marina, all giving pretty much the same tours with pretty much the same box lunches. Throw a rock and you'll hit three different boats all doing island cruises. Don't get me wrong. Skipper was a hell of a sailor and a real great guy, but it's not like the tourists could know that by looking, right? But they all ended up on the Minnow, anyway."

"We figured it out after a while," McDermott said with a half-smile. "The Kid was his ace in the hole. Five minutes after they met him, he was everybody's best pal. All the girls wanted to pat him on the head like a puppy dog, and all the men felt like they was mighty explorers out for adventure. Long John Silver, Horatio Hornblower, Columbus sailing the ocean blue… all mixed up into one. He made them want to go for that cruise, and word gets around. If I coulda shanghaied him onto my boat, I'd've done it so fast your head would spin. Would've been worth all the accidents."

"You and everybody else. Don't forget the agent," Entwhistle said. "She helped their business a lot." He turned to Mark. "It's like this. They go out one day, with this woman on board who's sicker'n a dog almost before they've weighed anchor. And I do mean sick; she must have been throwing up everything she'd eaten since birth. So what does he do? He spends the whole tour holding her hair while she fed the fishes, bringing her a Dramamine, and water to rinse her mouth, keeping her calm, telling her that everything's gonna be all right, she could trust the Skipper. Turns out she was with some travel company, or a magazine or something, and she'd been scouting out the best places to send the tourists. No prizes for guessing where she pointed all her clients from then on."

"He was a catastrophe waiting to happen on land, no insults intended, but steady as a rock once you got him out on the blue. And like I said, he had some sorta magic touch with the tourists. Couldn't help liking the Kid, even if he was a bit on the clumsy side. You can tell your folks he did good," McDermott said, and cleared his throat, uncomfortable with even that brusque a show of emotion.

Mark wasn't much more comfortable listening to the eulogy than McDermott was delivering it. He fumbled for a question, some way to shift the subject. "You all called him 'Kid'?"

Entwhistle gestured with his mug. "I'm going to go out on a limb and say that he must have had a first name, but damned if I ever heard it. I barely use my own, let alone anyone else's. Skip called him 'buddy.' But compared to the rest of us, he was barely out of short pants, so yeah. Kid."

"Huh. I figured you were going to tell me it was short for 'Captain Kidd,' or something nautical like that."

"You know, I never even thought of that. I wonder if he thought so, too," Horowitz chuckled.

"What he thought… I wonder what he thought he was doing out here," Mark said, finishing his second beer. When had that happened? Silently, Bill slid him a third. "I was cleaning out his place before I came over here, and that dump should have been condemned years ago. I saw pictures of that deathtrap of a boat he was working on, and the only surprise is that it held together as long as it did. Do you have any idea what this is doing to my mother? What the hell kind of hold did this place have on him? How could he do this to us?"

"This place…? These islands, you mean, or is it the ocean in general you're talking about?" asked Entwhistle slowly.

"Either, I guess. Or maybe both. I don't know anymore." There was something wrong with the beers here; they disappeared far too quickly. Probably the glasses leaked. Like the damned boats did. That had to be it.

Horowitz shrugged. "You seem like a nice enough guy, but you're just a landlubber, and I'm not real good with words. I don't know if I can explain to you what it is that keeps guys like us out here on the water. 'Cause it's hard work, and there sure ain't a whole lot of money in it, and there's no room for mistakes at sea. It's just… something that either gets you, or it doesn't. It got me, and Skip, and, yeah, the Kid, too. It's just in us, and there's no fighting it. He was living the only way he wanted to live."

Mark scowled. "Living the way he wanted to live got him killed."

"Sooner or later, living gets all of us killed," Horowitz said.

"You get that out of a fortune cookie?" Mark snapped. "Next you'll be telling me that he wanted to go down with the ship. That drowning is some kind of wonderful fate for a sailor."

Horowitz gave him an even look. "No, mostly sailors want to die the way anyone else does—of extreme old age, with a just-emptied glass in your hand and a pretty girl on your knee, the day before the rent's due. Watch your mouth, sonny. You're grieving, I get it, but we are too."

"Oh, right, I'm sure you're all just devastated. He wasn't just some guy I saw in a dive bar every once in a while," said Mark. "He was my brother. What the hell do you know about it?"

"As opposed to some guy on the other side of the planet I never saw at all?" Entwhistle asked Bill with cutting sarcasm.

"I was in the Pacific during the big one," Horowitz said, ignoring the byplay. "Started the war as one of three. Ended it as an only child, and that's not even counting all the men I served alongside who weren't as lucky as I was. You don't get to tell me what I do or don't know about losing brothers." He drained his beer, glared into the dregs at the bottom of his glass.

Mark didn't want to know what he was seeing there. "I'm sorry," he mumbled, and looked away.

Horowitz nodded. "You're grieving. I get it," he repeated. "Were you guys close?"

Mark felt his throat close up. He was grieving. He was. And he was also guilt-stricken… because he wasn't grieving enough. "No," he admitted in a voice only a tone or two removed from a whisper. "He was… a lot younger than me. Kind of a pest, when we were kids, you know? I was older, and I didn't have all that much patience for a dopey little tagalong. And then he was gone, except for a letter every once in a blue moon that Mom would make everyone reread at every single Sunday dinner… and then he was gone."

Horowitz nodded slowly. "Thought not. Sad I'd have understood. Angry, I get. You? You looked guilty. You got to know it wasn't your fault, but that doesn't help much, does it."

"If I'd been a better brother…" Mark murmured.

"If it's brothers you're talking about, he had one. Don't doubt that," Entwhistle said. "He'd've crawled through hell for Skipper, and that hadda be at least partly because Skip would've crawled through hell for him. Everyone knew it, and passenger manifests weren't the only thing we envied the both of 'em."

"Times like this, people don't cry for the one who goes, even if they think they do; they're cryin' for themselves, and for the rest of us left behind to weather through the storm," Horowitz said quietly. "And you got reason to cry; there's a lot of stuff you won't get because of that storm, a lot of memories you won't have. I'm sorry for you, sonny, I really am."

"I wouldn't have had them anyway," Mark said slowly. "He wasn't ever coming home, was he?"

Entwhistle and Horowitz looked at each other. Horowitz made a 'go ahead' gesture with the hand that wasn't holding his beer. "No, probably not. Not if you mean wherever you're from. That wasn't home anymore," Entwhistle said.

OoOoOoOoOoOoOoO

Author's Note: I'm not entirely certain, but I believe that 'Barnacle Bill's' is fanon, not canon, and if so I am indebted to the original author thereof. I also have to thank Callensensei, whose story 'The Biggest Wise Guy of All' gave me the excuse I needed to have the regulars at Bill's use the nickname 'Kid,' rather than continuing to repeat variants of 'your brother' ad nauseam.