The Island (21 page)

A scream. Not his. Another scream. A woman. Why was a woman screaming? Then a scream that went on and on and on.

He sat up and shook his head. The pain was there, but dull now, bearable. The scream did not stop.

He looked to one side and saw Beth. She was staked, spread-eagle, naked, to the sand. Her stomach and chest and legs were crisscrossed with welts. A frail, cloudy bubble—a man o’ war “sail”—lay on either side of her. The tentacles had been draped across her.

When she saw him, she yelled, “Piss on me!”

“What!?”

“Piss on me! It is the only way! I did as much for you!”

He did as he was told, and soon her shrieks subsided into sobs and whimpers.

Leonard Hiller was feeling righteously indignant, as he always did when a source declined to be interviewed—especially a source who claimed to be a member of the fellowship of journalists. “What do you mean, Trask said no? Who does he think he is?”

“ ‘No’ wasn’t exactly the word he used,” said Dena, checking her note pad. “He said that as far as he was concerned,
Today
could go crap in its corporate hat.
He
didn’t say it; his P.R. man said it.”

“What did you tell him?”

Dena blushed. “I told him I bet that’s how he got off, talking dirty to women.”

“Where’s Trask now?”

“Nassau. He’s supposed to leave in a day or two. He’s going to the out-islands.”

“Tell Miami to get a man over there. I want him aboard that boat. I don’t care if he has to charter another boat and chase him down. I want a Trask interview, and I’m not about to give up just because he’s being coy. I mean, this is the father of modern media! He quits, and billion-dollar companies get the runs. The most trusted man in America doesn’t trust television any more! Two hundred and thirty million people believe every word out of that man’s mouth, and suddenly he doesn’t think there’s anything worth saying. That is
news!”

“The
news
is that he wouldn’t prostitute himself. These days, that makes him the Messiah.”

“Miami can charter a plane if they have to.”

Dena nodded. “The man from the Coast Guard called again.”

“What man?”

“About Maynard.”

“Oh, Christ . . .”

“He says he talked to a pilot who flew Maynard and the boy to some island. The next day, they disappeared.”

“I told you, he wigged out and went native.”

“The trouble is, he took his son with him.”

“So what?”

“His mother has been on the phone to the chairman’s office.”

“How do you know that?”

“They called me. They wanted to know what I knew about it.”

“If the Today Publications Company wants to mount an air-sea rescue operation for him, that’s their business.”

“They don’t want to, exactly. Blair’s ex-wife is in the ad business. She has a lot of clients who advertise in
Today.
And all our other rags, too:
TV Week, Health & Happiness,
you name it.”

“She’s
threatening
us?”

“Not in so many words. But she is . . . eager, let’s say . . . to find her child. She’s already tried to get the FBI involved.”

“On what grounds?”

“Kidnaping.”

“Good God . . .”

“She’s going to go look for him, and she wants us to help her. I can’t say I blame her.”

“I don’t
blame
her either. But what am I supposed to do?”

“You were talking about chartering a plane . . .”

“Yeah, but . . . Okay,” Hiller sighed. “Call her.”

C H A P T E R
1 3

E
very day at dawn the pinnaces left the cove, and every evening at sunset they returned, empty. Twice, in frustration, the men attacked and sank native fishing sloops and killed the fishermen, but the victories were so worthless, the rewards so puny—a few bushels of conch, a few dozen spiny lobsters—that they stopped molesting the native boats and steered well clear of them.

The men grew bored and restless and hungry for food more savory than dried fish and cassava paste. The half-dozen cows had not yet calved, so beef was in short supply, and the few remaining hogs—skinny and tough in the best of times—were stricken with an ailment that swelled their eyes shut, puckered their skin, and made them wobble as they walked. The memory of an outbreak of diarrhea dehydration was fresh enough in Nau’s mind to make him declare any suspect food inedible.

Liquor was rationed. It was a step Nau was loath to take, for booze was an anodyne for discontentment. A drunken rebel was controllable, and he would sleep off his rebellion; a surly, sober rebel thought too clearly, hatched too many intricate plots, and was unpredictable. But the community was running out of alcohol, and Nau’s rationale went: Better to keep half the company half-lit half the time than to run the risk of having all men sober all the time.

However, the rationing was soon overturned by petition from the whores. The community might suffer politically from total abstinence, they argued, but in the meantime they were suffering physically at the hands of the disgruntled men. Drunk, their customers were malleable; sober, they were impossible. So the whores relinquished their own rations and exacted a similar pledge from the wives, who were better off than the whores only in that they suffered the abuse of but one man. Nau agreed to the bargain and restored the men’s traditional rations of a bottle a day.

Maynard’s days slipped into a dull routine. In the morning, Beth would wake him and coax him into servicing her. No matter how reluctant he was—and he was always intellectually reluctant, since every act was, potentially, the one that would give life to her body and consequently take life from his—she would employ threats, cajolery, tickles, kneads, and massages until, inevitably, she succeeded.

His feelings for her were equivocal: She had saved his life; he had repaid her by trying to escape and causing her agony, and for this he felt guilty. But her intercession on his behalf had been entirely selfish, and by servicing her he was holding up his end of the bargain, so he felt honorable. Sexual intimacy had begun to breed (if, as yet, nothing else) a measure of fondness: She was demanding but solicitous, inexhaustible but gentle. She was simple and candid and totally absorbed in her crusade to attain her ideal position within her community.

Either by incapacity or intent, she refused to consider a life beyond the island. She claimed to know nothing about her existence prior to arriving on the island, but Maynard was sure that her amnesia was the direct result of an iron determination to block out anything that might interfere with survival and success within the perimeters of local laws and customs. Memories would trigger longings, which would, in turn, trigger fruitless aspirations. Better to have no memories.

She would not permit Maynard to talk about the outside world, except in terms of his family. She was eager to know about his wife—not about what she did or what she wore or where she went, but what kind of person she was: loving or cold, harsh or lenient. And she wanted to know everything about how to raise a child. Always, the conversations returned to that: how she would succeed as a mother. She truly cared for the child that was yet to be, and Maynard found her concern touching.

Once, he asked her to help him escape, to work with him at night building a raft or a boat. He promised to take her with him and Justin, to ensure that her child would be born in the finest hospital, to support her indefinitely.

She responded angrily to the proposal, accusing him of violating a code. He couldn’t tell whether her anger was genuine or a manifestation of confusion at the planting of an unwelcome seed in the orderly garden of her mind. He tried to explain that from his point of view, anything was fair if it would save his life. She couldn’t blame him for wanting to live. She replied that he was wasting his breath, and she forbade him from raising the issue again.

He decided that her reluctance was based, at least in part, on a profound fear of the unknown. Before he could even hope she would listen to another proposal, he would have to—somehow, subtly—convince her that she could survive off the island.

After what she referred to as “the morning breed,” she would feed him. Maynard had learned never to look at his food, always to hold his breath before he took a bite (thus blocking his sense of taste) and to hum when he chewed, so he would not hear, as once he had, the crunch of a bird’s skull between his teeth. If Beth chanced to look away while he ate, Maynard hurried to pluck the insects and slugs from his bowl, but usually she monitored his every bite. She was like a fastidious cat owner, determined to maintain her pet at the peak of health.

They always took a morning walk, watching the shipwrights caulking hulls and sewing sails, the women doing laundry (boiling clothes in sea water) and collecting roots and birds’ eggs, the cattle-tender plying his charges with herbs and massages to encourage healthy deliveries, the swineherd—a young man blinded, Maynard was told, when a battery exploded and sprayed him with acid—squatting in the hog yard lamenting the sorry state of his diseased pigs, and Nau and Hizzoner sitting cross-legged on a knoll overlooking the sea, searching for signs of success from their scouts.

Beth took him by the armory—a hut, always guarded, beside Nau’s—only when the children were somewhere else. He begged her to let him see Justin, even from a distance or from hiding, but always she gently refused. He is gone, she would say, he is a new person. Maynard’s elliptical arguments—one went: “If I’m dead and he’s a new person, he won’t see me and I won’t recognize him, so what’s the harm?”—were met with a silent smile.

Most of the day he spent chained to the roof of the hut (the combination lock had been replaced by
a
key lock), writing, dipping
a
sharpened quill into a bowl of fish blood (for richness of color) mixed with berry juice (for permanent set) and scratching the saga of the l’Ollonois line onto a roll of brown wrapping paper acquired, he assumed, from some unlucky vessel. The writing was drudge work, but it gave him relief from his otherwise ceaseless pursuit of a way to escape.

He thought he had thought of everything, and everything he had thought of amounted to either fantasy or suicide. All his options began with him getting loose from the chain around his neck. That he could do, either by picking the lock or, if he had to, by dismantling the hut and lugging the chain with him. Stealing a boat was unlikely, and if he succeeded he still could not be sure of freeing Justin. If he could get a boat and Justin and some water, he could poke holes in the other boats and render them temporarily useless, then put to sea. But he had seen how quickly a damaged boat could be repaired, and how expert these men were at reading winds and tides. He would be caught before he had gone a mile.

His plan had to be perfect, for he could not risk failure. He would not be given another chance; he would be killed instantly. The prospect of his own death was bothering him less and less; he had almost accepted his end as imminent. But his end would spell Justin’s, too—not a physical demise, but the end of opportunity, condemnation to a life barren of promise. Maynard had no designs on immortality for himself, would not be chagrined to leave the world no better a place than he had entered. But he didn’t like these sentiments in himself: He wanted to want immortality, wanted to want to change the world. And most of all, he wanted Justin to have the chance.

Now and then, he thought of trying prayer, but he felt like a wretched hypocrite. It was the same impulse he had felt as a child: “Dear Lord, if you’ll let me pass this exam (or get this date with Susie, or whatever), I swear I’ll . . .” As soon as the crisis passed, prayer was forgotten.

What
would
he do if he got away? How would he change his life? He didn’t know. He would appreciate it more, that was for sure, would treat every minute as something precious—not something to be preserved, safely, for its own sake, but something to be filled with experience and learning. He had lost his capacity for wonder; he would try to regain it, and to keep it alive in Justin. But all those thoughts were safe and easy. He had first to confront the hard one: How the hell was he going to get off this island?

He had debated trying to get to the radio in Nau’s hut. If, as he had read in the covenant, there was a penalty for transmitting signals, that must mean that the radio was capable of transmission. But, supposing that he could co-opt the guard—and what, he thought amusedly, could he offer the man?—whom could he be sure of reaching? What would he say? One possibility was to send an S.O.S. to all ships, giving longitude and latitude (which he would have to guess). Another was to place a call to the Miami or Nassau marine operator. But to reach across five hundred or a thousand miles of open water and changing weather, that would have to be one formidable radio powered by a bank of batteries.

Always, Maynard’s musings ended with the faint hope that someone might be looking for them. When he found himself wallowing in that hope, he knew it was time to give his brain a rest. Nobody would be looking for him because nobody cared very much what happened to him, a thought that was mildly depressing but not at all surprising. He had no commitments, and no one had any to him. His disappearance would anger Hiller, to whom it would be an inconvenience, and annoy a couple of editors of other magazines who were expecting him to deliver free-lance pieces. Otherwise, no one would miss him, which didn’t particularly bother him. But the fact that it didn’t bother him, bothered him. He decided that, by God, there is more to life than surviving, and he laughed at himself for deciding that now.

Their one chance was Devon. By now, she would be frenzied. She would have demanded the mobilization of the militia, placed calls to the White House, and would be hectoring Hiller to distraction. Maynard’s worry was that all her flurry would generate no action, until it was too late.

At the end of the day, Beth would bathe Maynard in the ocean, feed him, and take him for another walk.

One evening, they found Nau sitting alone on a cliff above the cove, watching two of his pinnaces duel for puffs of breeze that would bring them home. Beth flicked the chain to urge Maynard along, but he resisted. Nau heard the clink of the chain and turned around.