The Island (15 page)

He continued westward, trolling in the deep water. Half a mile to the southwest, the barren land—a sliver of white sand topped with gray-green scrub—appeared to shimmer as heat was sucked into the clear air.

“Help!” Justin yelled. A fish had taken his lure. The butt of his rod was jammed between his legs, the tip—jerking wildly—rapped against the transom.

“Keep the tip up!” Maynard throttled down to neutral. “Don’t give him any slack, or he’ll shake it!”

“I can’t hold him!”

“Yes, you can!” Maynard put out a hand to brace Justin’s rod, but withdrew it. “Lean back, bring the tip up . . . that’s the way . . . now, go forward with him and reel!”

“Look!”

The fish broke water behind the boat—a writhing blade of silver that sparkled in the sunlight.

“Reel!”

“My fingers are cramped!”

“Then rest with it . . . but don’t let the tip down.”

Leaning against the gunwale, Justin held the rod upright with his left hand and flexed the fingers in his right. “What is it?”

“A barracuda. Fifteen, twenty pounds.”

The rod heaved, and Justin lurched forward. The fish was running, stripping line from the reel.

“Let him take it,” Maynard said. “When he turns, reel like stink.”

Justin strained against the rod. His stiff fingers skidded off the crank. “You take it.”

“Hell no! He’s your fish. You’re doing fine. Just don’t give him any slack.”

“I can’t!”

“Yes, you can!”

“He’s gonna get away.”

“Maybe.”

The tip snapped up; the line went slack.

Justin said, “I told you.”

“Reel, dammit! He’s not gone!”

Justin reeled frantically, and the line tautened.

Maynard leaned over the stern. “He’s coming to the boat. Easy . . . easy.” The wire leader cleared the water. Maynard grabbed it and flung the fish over the transom onto the deck. “Now, there is one sweet piece of fish.” He turned to Justin. “Good for you!”

Justin was gleeful. “Look at his teeth!”

Maynard found a pair of pliers on a shelf beneath the steering console and dislodged the hook from the barracuda’s mouth. “Good for you!” he said again.

“Can we stuff him?”

“You want to give him to your piano teacher?”

“To Mom. She won’t
believe
this.”

They laughed together.

Maynard turned east and trolled back toward the point, then turned west again. They followed a flock of feeding sea birds, but the larger fish that were forcing the bait fish to the surface were not interested in the shiny steel “spoons” trolled behind the Mako. A porpoise surfaced and rolled playfully in the boat’s bow wave. A small shark basked on the surface until, alerted by the sound of the approaching motor, it thrashed its tail and disappeared.

At one o’clock, Maynard checked with Windsor by radio. He reported Justin’s catch and promised to return within the hour.

“I’m hungry,” Justin said.

“So am I.”

“Thirsty, too.”

Maynard nodded. “To hell with it; let’s go in. Maybe the phone’s fixed.”

While Justin brought in the lines, Maynard looked out over the water. He saw something ahead, to the west: a small brown dot that lay low in the water. He made sure the rods were secure in their holders, put the boat in gear, and headed west.

“I thought we were going back,” Justin said.

“We are. In a minute.” Maynard pointed at the dot.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. A turtle, maybe, or a shark. We’ll check it out.”

“What for?”

“Just because . . .” Maynard smiled. “On Seventy-eighth Street you can go days, weeks even, without seeing a shark. Admit it.”

The dot took shape quickly. “It’s a boat,” Justin said.

“More like a canoe.”

“How’d it get there?”

“Must’ve dritfed up from there . . . West Caicos.” Maynard gestured at a gray lump on the western horizon.

The boat was a hollow log, tapered on both ends. Maynard circled it slowly. It was empty, save for a single, rough-hewn paddle.

“Look!” Justin pointed. “Over there.”

Maynard squinted. The sun was high, the flat surface of the sea a mirror. “What d’you see?”

“Someone swimming.”

“Sure.” Maynard was still blinded by the brilliant curtain of sunlight. “Driftwood, I bet.”

“Driftwood doesn’t wave.”

Maynard crouched beside Justin, beneath the canopy, and shielded his eyes. He saw a tiny silhouette. An arm, waving. “I’ll be damned. Must’ve fallen overboard.”

It was a young girl, buoyed by an orange kapok life jacket. She was waving, but in a manner that struck Maynard as peculiar: There was nothing frenzied about her wave, nothing desperate. Her arm moved back and forth as regularly as a metronome. And she did not shout or cry out or say a word, even when they drew near.

Maynard put the boat in neutral, letting it coast up to the girl. “Are you hurt?” he called.

She said nothing, but she shook her head: no.

He turned off the engine, to eliminate the possibility of an accident with the propeller. He knelt in the stern as it glided to the girl and held his hand out for her to grab. “Glad we came along. You could float out here for a week without seeing anybody.” His fingers touched her wrist. She was fair-skinned and blond and, he guessed, no more than twelve or thirteen years old. “How’d you get all the way out here?”

He gripped her wrist, braced himself against the transom, and pulled. Something was wrong: She was too heavy. And in her eyes was a flash of panic, of terror. “What’s the . . . ?”

She was yanked downward, out of Maynard’s grasp. He saw a rubber tube protruding from her dress, behind her head.

There was a splash, a burst of water, a blur as something flew at his face. He fell backward, and an ax buried itself in the deck.

Maynard backed away from the stern and scrambled to his feet. The girl was gone, and now a man crouched in the boat, panting, drooling water from his mouth and nose. His long hair was plastered to his head and shoulders. Bits of seaweed dripped from his beard. His shirt was torn and stained, his trousers tattered. His feet were wrapped in uncured animal skins that were lashed to his legs by rawhide thongs. He had no teeth.

Holding the ax above his head, never taking his eyes off Maynard, the man reached behind him and bent down. He hauled a boy aboard—dark-haired, skinny, with black, darting eyes.

The man passed the ax to the boy. “Now, lad”—he pointed a finger at Maynard
—“do
him!”

“Justin?” Maynard snapped his head around. Justin was cowering behind the steering console. “Stay there!”

The boy held the ax clumsily.

“
Do
him, I say!” the man shouted.

The boy did not move.

From his belt the man withdrew a slim, double-edged dirk. He poked it under the boy’s ear, drawing blood. “You Portugee bastard! You do what you been taught!”

Maynard reached under his shirt and drew his pistol. He chambered a bullet and pointed the pistol at the man. “Drop it.” The pistol trembled in his hand. He had never pointed a loaded gun at another human being. His upbringing, his training, his experience, had conditioned him to avoid pointing a weapon at a living thing. If you ever point a gun at another man, his father had said, you’d better want him dead.

He cupped his left hand under his right, steadying the pistol.

The man coiled into a compact ball, weaving from side to side like a cobra, shifting the knife from hand to hand.

Maynard sighted along the top of the pistol barrel, trying to hold the muzzle at the man’s open mouth.

The man screamed and sprang, and Maynard shot him in the face.

The .32-caliber bullet was too small and too fast to knock the man down, so though he died in mid-air—the bullet entered his left eye and exited behind his right ear—he kept coming. His corpse hit the gunwale and bounced onto the deck at Maynard’s feet.

Maynard was appalled. He stared down at the upturned face, at the one blank eye and at the oozing cavity where its partner had been. Seconds ago, this had been a man. Now it was carrion. He had caused this metamorphosis by moving his finger an eighth of an inch.

Justin screamed, “Dad!”

In the instant it took the warning to penetrate the muddle of Maynard’s mind, the dark boy was upon him like a gibbon—legs locked around his waist, a hand clawing at his face, an arm wildly swinging the hand ax, teeth snapping at his face and neck.

Maynard could not see. He tried to pull the boy away, but the wiry limbs were like tentacles: As soon as one was disengaged, another would scratch or kick or slash. The pistol fell from his hand.

Maynard staggered backward. He reached up and grabbed a handful of hair, but before he could pull, the boy turned his head and bit Maynard’s fingers to the bone. The ax dug at his back—short, slicing blows that lacerated the flesh. A hand clawed at his eyes, fingers probing to uproot his eyeballs. He stopped one hand, then the other, then felt teeth fasten on the skin of his cheek and tear away. He released a hand and punched at the biting mouth, and the hand he released drove a pointed fingernail deep into his ear.

His brain shrieked: Overboard! Get in the water and he’ll have to let go. Blindly, he stumbled a few steps, took a deep breath, and flung himself into the air.

He heard a strange, yet vaguely familiar, sound—a hollow, explosive roar, like the sound when the school bus he was riding in had skidded on ice and hit a tree. The sound subsided into a hum, and he was at a going-away party for someone at
Today.
Why was there a hum at the party? Someone tried to speak to him, but the voice was muffled by the hum. Then the party was outdoors in the wintertime, and he was so cold.

Then the hum faded, too, and there was nothing.

The boy squirmed out from under Maynard and left him on the deck, with his head sloshing in the drain beneath the outboard motor. On the motor itself, a patch of hair-tufted scalp hung from the steel brace Maynard’s head had struck. The boy leaned over the stern and helped the girl aboard. She shivered from long immersion in the sea. She reached behind her head to remove the rubber tube from her dress, but she could not grasp it. The boy put his hand up her dress and pulled the tube from below. It was in the shape of an inverted “Y.” He and the man had clung to the girl’s legs, breathing through the arms of the “Y.”

Justin stood behind the console and looked at his father’s body. Blood from the wound in Maynard’s head dribbled down his neck into the drain, mixed with a puddle of oil and water, and ran out through a hole in the stern. Justin wanted to run to his father, to soothe his wound and beg him to awaken. He wanted his father to sit up and smile and say it had all been a joke. He shook, though he was not cold, and his teeth clacked together.

The radio was on the console, beside his right hand. He slid his hand a few inches to the left, turned the radio on, and removed the microphone from its bracket. He ducked down and pressed the Talk button on the microphone. “Help!” he whispered. “Help! They’ve killed my dad!” He looked up, in time to see the skinny boy’s fist descending in a wide arc. He tried to dodge, but the fist hit him behind the ear and spent him sprawling across the deck.

“Nobody help you now,” said the boy. “Nobody help you ever again. You on you own, sum’-bitch!”

The boy retrieved the dangling microphone. “Hey, Mary, let’s sing ’em de song.”

Windsor stood at his kitchen counter, listening to the radio. The reception was faint and scratchy, but he had no difficulty deciphering the words. There were two voices, both high and young and very gay. They sang:

Him cheat him friend of him last guinea
Him kill both friar and priest—O dear!
Him cut de t’roat of pickaninny,
Bloody, bloody buccaneer!

Windsor did not wait for the laughter he knew would follow. He turned off his radio and said sadly, “May the wind sit in the shoulder of your sail, my friend.”

C H A P T E R
1 0

W
hy were they pulling him? He told them he didn’t feel like dancing, but they wouldn’t listen. Now they were forcing him onto the floor, dragging him by his arms and legs. They were hurting him, but they didn’t care. The more it hurt him, the more they cheered. Please, something to drink. So thirsty! Just a sip. Then he would try to dance. Promise.

The dancers left, the dream faded, and all that was left was the pain—a sharp throbbing in his head and, worse, the sensation that his arms and legs were being wrenched from their sockets.

His eyes opened, and he saw the sky. He was on his back, but he felt nothing beneath him, only the agony in his shoulders and hips. He cocked his head forward, put his chin on his chest, and saw his feet—ropes around his ankles, suspending his legs from two wooden posts. His head lolled back, and he looked up at his hands—hanging from ropes to two more posts. Each rope led to a spoked wheel.

He was on a rack.

He turned his head to one side, then the other. He was in a small sand clearing, surrounded by brush. Alone.

He heard radio music, an orchestra and chorus, a hymn: “His love is greater than the shining sea, greater than you and me, greater than the power of love, and He’s with you, like a hand in glove.”

The hymn ended. A voice began, “And now, shipmate . . .” The voice stopped, and another—closer, alive—intoned: “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them. Thus has our comrade, Roche Sansdents, a righteous man and true, gone to the lap of God. All men have one entrance into life, and the like going out. When shall we see him again? Who can number the sands of the sea, and the drops of rain, and the days of eternity?”

A murmur of “Amen” from a somber crowd.

A new voice, resonant, commanding: “Goody Sansdents, by covenant you are heir to Roche’s goods, and they shall pass to you. Likewise by covenant, you shall receive food from the common store, apparel as you shall have need, and the tenth part of the finest prize next taken. Likewise by covenant, to you shall fall the disposition of him who caused Roche to pass from this world.”