Lighthouse Island (30 page)

 

Chapter 42

T
he deep interior glow of the Zircon radio dial band shone on their faces. Nadia had found it in the engine house, along with a bale of used clothing: rain gear and sweaters. She had found wet paw prints in the engine house as well as rat sign and stinking nests. When she came upon a rat head she grabbed up all she could carry and fought through the rain along the elevated walkways. Some gruesome thing lived in there. She would tell James about it later. Not now.

The kerosene heater flickered ornate patterns on the ceiling; the chalet smelled of fumes and the chemical tang of fuel pellets. Beyond the windows they could hear the roaring surf and the light pattering of a thin rain striking the collection tanks in their cradles.

James ran the needle down the band, searched for the TV audio and news of the megacity, the world and all the people they had left behind, either drowning or starving. She pulled a kitchen chair up beside him and he listened and absentmindedly stroked the hair from her face.

It was heavy, said James. Carrying all that back in the gale.

I could do it, she said. I mean, I did it. It was so you will love me and be forever grateful.

He looked at her a moment and smiled; her lashes seemed to have grown thick in the wet and cold, her gray-green eyes half hidden in the parka hood fur, a cautious animal.

Now here is the chill map.
An announcer's professional voice.
We can see the isobars coming down from the northwest so some areas are being hit with successive waves of isobars.

Oh my God, said James. He doesn't know what an isobar is. He threw himself against the backrest of the chair. Nobody has told him.

There are some floods that are exhibiting extreme flood behavior in certain areas.

That's it, said Nadia. The TV audio for sure. She was nearly engulfed by the big yellow parka but she didn't care, it was warm. Life was warm, just sitting here beside him.

An investigative panel has been tasked with looking into several instances of dam malfunction but the panel is finding it difficult to meet and the chairman has objected to the lack of a clear mission statement
.
In the meantime WETEMERG is considering requests for Type II Incident Management Teams and on-scene incident command structures . . .

Stupid sons of bitches. Louts. Hominids. Illiterate cretins. James shifted restlessly in his chair and turned the dial carefully. Odd how people who love abstract language also want to kill you and cut your legs off.

Listen, said Nadia.

They heard a simple folk tune, eight bars played over and over, ceaselessly.

What's that?

James bent his head and listened. I think it's a numbers station. Has to do with intelligence stuff. Spy stuff. He turned the fine-tune dial slowly.

Then a man's voice speaking in a foreign language, a patient, explaining voice.

That's not Spanish or French, said Nadia.

No. I think it's Japanese.

Do you speak Japanese? Nadia looked up at him.

No. They listened, as intent on the dial as if it had been a human face. And so, said James. He sounds close, so close.

But the Japanese speaker faded away into a distant Pacific of radio noise. Then they picked the TV audio again at 720.

Next! The trial of Director James Orotov and Sendra Bentley, the sexual brigand who seduced a paraplegic director of demolition.

Far overhead rats cried out in ultrasonic chitters. James and Nadia stared at each other.

Sendra Bentley has been repeatedly charged in the past with adulterous affairs, Tom, really sordid stuff here, and we obtained an interview with a subdirector in Cactea Opuntia Supply named Earl Jay Warren who was one of her, well, conquests and he . . .

Is he charged . . .

There's no charge on him as far as I can see here, and he said they went up on the roof, I mean really, right? Vet Supply in the same . . .

Supplying what, Ethel . . .

Looks like supplying gophers and pigeons to some kind of
street
zoo . . .

Nadia clutched her thick auburn hair in both hands and it sprouted up in tufts between her knuckles. A street zoo! she cried. It's all confused.

Hush, said James. I am dying to hear about me. Shoved back into my wheelchair. I suppose I will beg for my life. His face was set with fury. He took up a pen and flipped it from one hand to the other.

. . .
and then apparently moved on to other conquests. Now it appears that Warren's wife, Nadia, maiden name Stepan, is missing from their residence and may have been murdered.

I'm not dead! Nadia cried at the TV audio coming out of the old Zircon. I wasn't his wife!

Oh, come on, James said to the radio. What about Director Orotov, you slovenly bastards?

This trial has the highest ratings since . . .

It's sex, Ethel, sex and death, new audacious programming, we're taking chances here but life is chancy, you take risks and sometimes they pay off . . . here's the courtroom audio . . .
And then from the Zircon loudspeaker came the putative voice of director James Orotov:
You can't imagine the things she knows how to do! I was her slave!

James fell back laughing and threw the pen across the desk. Well, shit, I am sorry to miss it.

Nadia closed her hands into fists. Sexual brigand!

He bent forward to relieve the pain in his spine but instead it flared into something resembling an intense electrical shock so he sat up straight again. You will introduce me to all these vile practices?

Oh please.

And who was Earl Jay Warren?

Nadia flushed bright red. A dreadful affair at the office. A total mistake. I should never have done it. First clue: he had eyes like ball bearings. She put one hand over her eyes. I'm an orphan. I'll take up with anybody.

Then she was instantly sorry she said it.

But I'm not anybody, said James. I'm apparently Sendra Bentley's sex slave. Or somebody's sex slave. They're not quite sure. Lots of indefinite pronouns here. You would be a kind of celebrity except they don't have your name. Be grateful. You've only been murdered but I, worse luck, am being groped by Sendra Bentley.

Nadia placed her hands flat over her eyes and created a private darkness full of regret and rage. Tears leaked from the heels of her hands.

Bentley and Orotov were attempting to escape on a private jet when they were apprehended by a local housing authority . . .

Nadia pulled the big parka hood over her face and said, Get away from it, James, it's poison. It's evil.

I am, I am,
shhh.
He put one hand on her arm and spun the dial again, searching for Big Radio. And there it was at 88.3, clear and reassuring.

There it is, there it is! A glad voice from inside the hood.

James reached out and pulled it down around her shoulders. How can you hear anything inside that parachute?

November,
said Female Voice One,
is the time for sea tales and shanties and ballads of the sailor's life, for winter winds and the sound of the ocean at the eaves of the house. Now let us listen to excerpts from the heroic true story
Endurance
.

Yes, yes, let's listen, said Nadia. Heroism and no sneering. She wiped tears of sheer fury from her cheeks. Just mindless heroism.

The radio said, smoothly, in the voice of reason and storytelling,
At the time the boats were launched from Patience Camp, Clarence Island lay just thirty-nine miles due north. By sailing northwest, they had reduced that distance to about twenty-five miles NNE, Worsley estimated. However, it had been two days since the last observation, and during that time the strong wind out of the northeast had probably blown the party a considerable distance to the west.

James got up and limped to the tattered old couch with his long legs stretched out before him and held out his hand to her. Take off that parka, would you?

She shed it and threw herself beside him.

It's all right, he said. He put the blanket and his arm over her and so she pressed against him and put her hand on his belt buckle, close to his human warmth and out of reach of the accusing powerful invisible eye that even now lurked in the radio dial. She heard his heart, thumping away in steady and heroic thumps.

The trial may have been prerecorded months ago, he said. They may be all drowned. I like to think of them drowned. He kissed the top of her head and then fell back in a relaxed slump against the couch and his eyes drifted shut and opened again.

It was worse for you, she said. It was your real name. They had you back in a wheelchair.

But here I am. Here we are. James was drifting into sleep. Arms, legs, everything. Including rats.

Canvas from the tents was stretched over each boat and with great difficulty the small primus stoves were lighted so that some milk could be heated. They drank it scalding hot, huddled together under the flapping canvas of the tent cloths. They were enjoying the luxury of a moment's warmth, when a new menace appeared . . .

She lay with her head on the heavy old sweater she had found for him. They were alive and here and the news was not alive and somewhere else and they were holding out, the two of them, against the gales and the sea much like the light tower itself. She said, You know, it always seemed to me that there was a man and a woman up there, reading. I mean a live man and woman.

No, it's sent up there from here on the earth somewhere. Called an uplink. From NASA. It was geeks fooling around at NASA. Place called Houston. His eyes drooped. He said, Your hair is growing out. You have such beautiful hair, Nadia. Such beautiful hair.

They fell asleep on the couch listening as Shackleton and his men made their way toward Elephant Island through enormous icy Antarctic seas in a twenty-two-foot boat. The kerosene stove broadcast its patterns over them and sparkling streams of rain ran down the panes. They fell into dreams that took place in old-time places, strangely altered. James and his brother, Farrell, were looking for their dog, Bandit, and James slogged through deep snow in boots far too large for him and then suddenly the dog was behind them, silent, stalking them with teeth like a ripsaw. Nadia was on trial in the old high school auditorium; she stood destroyed because the prosecutor knew her intimately and it was all true and he despised her; he held out his hand to point at Earl Jay Warren and his wife Oversupervisor Blanche Warren and two weeping children. She was guilty and done for. But then her father came through the crowd dressed in his old work clothes and greasy apron, a person whom she had never seen before but still was her father, and said,
Get out, all of you, get out now. This is over. She is my daughter.
Her sense of relief was overwhelming. Near dawn she woke up and remembered that her father had been killed a long time ago.

J
ames leaned aching and weary on the kitchen counter and poured hot water from the kettle into a basin. The greasy soap foamed up and he scrubbed a pot with a rag, which from time to time he dipped into a saucer of sand. Wet trousers and shirts hung from the drying rack. Wild onions, which survived the sleet, had been chopped into fragrant green dice. They lay in a heap on the counter ready to go into a soup made with the last of the bottled beef.

He dried off the counter and his hands with one of the thin towels and then took up his cane and steadied himself.

And so why did you not tell me about the mess in the basement?

She stared at him, at his expressionless gray eyes and the flat planes of his face. She inhaled deeply in order to come up with some explanation and then stuck.

He sat down on a kitchen chair, one hand on top of the other on the handle of the cane. I went down to the basement to see if I could negotiate the stairs. Never mind. I know. And you have been eating very little. You are diminishing by the day.

They sat and listened to the gusts of wind tugging at the house as if it would collapse at last and be thrown into the sea. Finally she said, The rats. Rats got it.

I saw that. How much do we have?

Ten pounds of flour, about ten of quinoa, five pounds of rice, a gallon of cooking oil, a tin of sugar. Some glass jars of wiry chicken thighs and bluish beef. One brick of tea, some citrus powder, a good supply of soap and biscuit powder, two boxes of candles and kerosene and batteries.

This is catastrophic, he said.

She shut her hands together into a bony knot. What are we going to do?

Leave.

Oh no. Nadia's hands dropped limp as rags in her lap. We just
got
here. This is our island.

We have to.

A slick and weighty rat stared at them boldly from a hole in the kitchen ceiling and made a little chipping sound as it ground its teeth.

 

Chapter 43

H
e had to be able to walk and run and sail before they ran out of food and starved, before they became too weak to handle the skiff and too malnourished to think straight. And whatever sort of people they would have to deal with at Saturday Inlet, he would prefer they didn't stand around the dock watching a lurching gangling six-foot-two cripple wallow out of the skiff and sprawl at their feet.

He walked with iron resolution down the elevated walkway as shots of pain ran up his spine, his long feet squelching in the good shoes. Then down again into the paths through the island, an unpredictable world. Things streamed past Lighthouse Island in the storm winds: flights of petrels, gulls, a bright-colored piece of awning from somewhere, a trailing glitter of plastic weather balloon, a faded handbill advertising a Squid Fest. He fought the wind and his own pain to load the wheelchair with pellets and bring them into the house. Nadia hid and refused to watch.

Once he caught the smell of wood smoke being blown from the coast, another time a long dark ship with russet-colored sails coming up from the south. He stopped to watch it, leaning on the wheelchair handles, and wondered if it had been blown off course, maybe from Japan or Kamchatka, wondered if it was a friend or an enemy.

He tripped on salal roots and plunged into holes, fell, lay there looking up at the soaring firs, the fog and rain that misted their crowns. A banana slug crawled past him, laying behind it a highway of slime. Then the orange cat appeared, staring down at him and when he put out his hand to it, it disappeared.

Come back! he said, but the dollar-shaped salal leaves closed around it. He rolled over to his hands and knees and then got up slowly. He must not break a bone or knock himself out because this would put Nadia in danger; he would become a fatal liability.

On every side the North Pacific pounded and polished the small island into secret beaches and tide-polished volcanic stone. In a tidal pocket was a stone that had been rolled round as a cannonball over the centuries. In other pools were green shapes like dollars and hairy, lifting things with pink fur. They had few names for anything here except desire, rain, love, the sea.
I heard the sea roar past in white procession filled with wreck:
Masefield.

It was a miracle that he should be walking at all, swinging one leg after another. In all the cold and rain he often felt the unstained joy of people who have been granted miracles. It was neither digital nor chemical but you had to know the dwarf's secret name;
miracle
or
dwarf
.

He stood below the blazing fan of the wind turbine and knew it had to be sending power to the big green battery chassis at the foot of the ladder inside the light tower, and then to the radio console up in the cupola but when he attempted the steep stairway he fell ten feet onto the concrete floor with one foot twisted under him. He lay there in the reek of his steaming clothes and gazed out the open door at the gray sky and the gray sea beyond. He got to his feet and put weight on the foot. He had not broken it.

From time to time would come moments when he was actually striding along the flat places, along the walkways, at the shelly beach, spinning his cane with long reaching strides. He was suspended with joy and fear of falling. He was a biped again among all the normal bipeds on earth, listening to the jingle of the seas' loose change as the salt waves thundered into this protected little pocket and ran all the billion broken shells clattering through their fingers. He listened, listened, as the surf exploded in foam and the distant currents ran deep and unseen and he heard the sea call his name.

N
adia handed him a blanket warmed on the rack over the stove and a bowl of broth. The lighthouse keepers' book lay on the counter. She had been reading about the wrecks on a dangerous coast called the Graveyard, which was apparently nearby.

Good broth, he said. Warm blanket.

She tucked it closely around his neck. Rain drained from his hand as he tipped up the bowl.

You're hurting, she said. She lay her hand on his neck.

Let's not talk about my falling down and wallowing in the rain, he said. Water dripped from his nose and his brown hair was all awry like splinters. Let's just consider wallowing an occupational hazard at present.

Okay. Nadia turned back to her cooking. She dropped a spoonful of baking powder into the flour. Not a word. Now, James, listen, do you have to train chickens to lay eggs?

He fell back laughing helplessly. For a moment he couldn't stop.

I resent that, she said.

He managed to stop laughing and cleared his throat. No, Nadia, you don't. They just sort of lay them naturally.

And what about mussels?

He shut his hands around the blanket. Listen, Nadia. Listen to me. Don't go down on those rocks, Nadia, I mean it. You don't understand the sea. I have no way to help you if you fall or get hit by a rogue wave. You hear me?

Yes.

I mean it.

Okay. Nada's hands were gloved with sticky dough. I promise.

James sat watching her work. How thin she was, how thin they both were. They were not getting enough nourishment; they were losing weight, losing ground.

Now, as for the mysterious noises, it's a cat.

Oh! Nadia's mouth dropped open. Oh, a cat! They kill rats, right? She did a quick dance with her skillet. Yes, yes! Murder and mayhem!

Yes. James smiled. He's completely wild so don't get your hopes up. He's terrified.

James handed her the empty bowl and stood up and shucked off his coat and then his shirt and boots. He stood beside the stove with both arms out to take in the heat and he was steady on his feet and his skin flushed red from the warmth and his desire for her.
This, this,
he thought.

N
adia stuffed the bathroom rocket-stove water heater with wood splinters and struck a match to it. The match lit her face and the tips of her auburn hair, the hirsute wool of her giant sweater. The wood took fire and roared and within minutes hot water gushed out of the faucet and into the tub and the harsh soap powder foamed. Even though they were both yet hungry after a meager dinner, they still had hot water.

She said, And so what do we know about this place on the coast? Saturday Inlet?

Not much. Looks like ten houses or so.

And Banefield? There's black squares for houses there. South of here, right?

Yes. They are supposed to grow their own everything. It is some kind of an experimental ag station. Mislaid biologists. But I suspect it is long gone.

He unbuttoned his shirt and pushed his shoes off with his cane and then shed his trousers and underwear. He was weary and his sentences were collapsing. Used to be called Bamfield, I think. Are you embarrassed?

We're married, she said and held her hand out for the trousers. At least nominally.

Soon I will drag you kicking and screaming into my bed. He stepped into the tub. I will turn into a savage, you will be my sex slave.

Okay. She shook out the trousers, flicked off wet leaves, and went over the seams for tears.

He sank into the hot water and said, Ah. After a moment he said, Maybe it's a fantasy village.

Which one?

Banefield. He felt around for the hard bar of yellow soap and lifted it in foamy hands.

Like, fantasy how?

As in people so many times have this romantic idea that there is someplace where people reward each other for good work. I'm not being sarcastic. Independent yeomen who hold town meetings and build cider mills. The old noble savage cliché. James's eyes closed. He said, We dream of fresh milk and eggs, honest folk. Unicorns. There will be meat, bread, bells, amiable big men who can lift timbers to their shoulders and build a barn and sing some kind of hearty work songs, grapevines, homemade wine, people who play instruments.

And so why not?

He was silent for a moment, a wry smile, and finally he said, Good point.

Nadia turned over his wool shirt looking for rents. James felt the pain in his back and thighs diminish, fade. He ran the sliver of soap over his face and its two-day beard and searched her face as if wondering how a blind orphan child had become this ardent young woman with her face now smoothed out by wet and damp. To him she was erotic and steadfast and endearing and if she were not this to other people, then he alone held the key to her being. Sometimes love is blind and sometimes it is sighted, perhaps with a third eye.

T
hat night on Big Radio was the old ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” They warmed their hands at the Storm King and heard again the story of the sinking freighter, the loss of the twenty-nine men, and how all the church bells of Lake Superior had rung out twenty-nine times. She bent over a torn-off coat sleeve in the soft steam of the teakettle and tried to wipe tears away without James seeing her. Her emotions were dangerously close to the surface of her mind and her eyes.

J
ames and Nadia ran the little skiff down the trackway into the waves but a rogue wave lifted up the bow high into the air and turned it over on its side. James fought with it, managed to drag it back onto the crushed shells of the little beach and then he and Nadia righted it.

Then he nosed it back in, up to his waist in freezing surf. The little beach was being swallowed by the tidal surge, wave upon wave.

Nadia struggled in the crashing, leaping salt water, spray in her face, her hands clutched to the stern and then a larger wave struck her full in the face and she went under. She tore her arm on something below the surface, something steel, and salt water rushed into her mouth. James shut his muscular hand around her parka hood and dragged her out. She stood gasping and shaking on the shells while James struggled the little skiff back onto the track and back into the boathouse. He was surprised at the buoyancy of it and at the sucking power of the sea. He came to Nadia and put his arm around her and helped her into the house.

O
w. Ow.

Be quiet. James wound gauze over the iodine. It was a puncture wound. Then he put his chin on top of her head and held her close against him.

He was so much taller than he had seemed in his wheelchair and she felt all the length of his body against hers and his collarbone against her temple. They both smelled of salt water and wood smoke. He unbuttoned her wet and disreputable khaki workshirt to reveal the female within, her thin, pale skin. Then her trousers. I knew you were in there, he said. Beneath all this. I suspected it all along. He wrapped them in a blanket. She was naked and salty with her feet to the fire. He ran the tip of his forefinger along her shoulder and up to her mouth, watching her.

They abandoned the blankets. Then they were in the bedroom with the covers thrown back. Nadia burrowed under them, shivering. Bright pinheads of wet snow flicked at the windows. She heard James unbuckle his belt and strip off his soaked trousers and then he was beside her in the bed with its curtains and pillows. His long pale body tight against hers and after a while they were warm. The room was warm. The kerosene heater threw its floral patterns of light on the ceiling. He sat up, relaxed and loose on the sheets. He leaned on one elbow and ran his hand down her face and torso and thighs.

Darling, you are very thin, he said. And beautiful.

She smiled up at him and lightly touched the tip of his nose.

They lay face-to-face and put their arms around each other. In the other room the stove cackled loudly over its load of fuel pellets like an enormous fiery hen. The voice of Big Radio was deeply engaged with a biography of Doc Watson and played illustrative clips of his music:
Was blind but now I see
. They did not hear it, nor did they hear the Pacific seething over the Outer Rocks. She forgot about the gauze and the iodine on her arm. He bent over her and lifted her against him with his powerful arms for he was starved for her and had been starved for her for all these months and distances.

They woke early in the morning, swamped with rucked sheets and quilts, to turn to each other yet again.

It was midmorning before she got out of the bed. I'm so hungry, she said. I'm famished.

He watched her dress. No kidding.

Yes. There has to be something left in one of those jars. If not, not. She bent and kissed him.

Tant que je vive,
he said. However long that is.

T
hey lay together in bed every night and she ran her small, strong hands over his back, his thighs and ribs. He was building muscle, slowly. Too slowly. She brought iodine and ran a bath and they sat together with bright hot skins; steam pearled the bathroom window, and afterward they slid into the bed where hot water bottles had heated the sheets. They were hungry. Still hungry for each other and for nourishment.