Roasted

As in:

Because he was from a family that knew only how to prepare beer-battered cod, Ben easily deferred to Ventine on how to cook the large grouper. The spirited Haitian’s method was to wrap the filets in Thatch Palm leaves and roast them on coals.

What he was telling Ben, in French, is that he would need to sing his song three times for the fish to be done. But Ben didn’t understand a word. So while Ventine cooked and sang near the top of his lungs, Ben cupped his hands behind his head, leaned back, and easily concluded that even though there were just two of them, he could still name the place the Island of Lost Souls.

The roasted fish turned out to taste a lot better than anything that Solly had hauled aboard The Bluefin. Ben must have eaten fully two pounds of the tender filets before he again set his head back and began to drift off to sleep.

He was awakened, in fading light, to Ventine’s excited calls.

“Ben Meen! Ben Meen!” he heard, which was Ventine’s way of saying “Benjamin.”

Ventine’s after dinner walk had taken him a quarter mile to the other side of the island, where a boat had been abandoned on the beach. Ben would eventually figure out that it had been left there, temporarily, as part of a drug smuggling operation and this would, as he later relayed it, “scare the shit,” out of him. But, for the time being, on the drift of a small winning streak with the delicious grouper, it just seemed like outrageously undeserved good fortune. A 20-foot boat with a working engine, stocked with food, flares, water, and a radio.

Before the more sinister explanation occurred to him, Ben was reminded of the children’s story about Harold and the purple crayon where the boy saved himself from the ocean by drawing himself a boat, and climbing into it.