The Island (2 page)

The boy’s eyes widened. “No, sir, Mist’Dickie. Whatever that is, I don’t want none.”

“How many bunks you make up?”

“Eight. That’s what the cap’n said.”

Nelson sniffed the air. “What the hell you cookin’, boy?”

“Hog snout, Mist’Nelson.”

Dickie said, “I told you, Nelson. That’s all you’re good for.”

When Manuel had washed and stowed the plates and pots and pans, and had scrubbed the galley clean, he had nothing to do. He would have liked to shut the outside door, turn on the air conditioning and the television in the main salon, and lounge on the velour-covered sofa. But the air conditioning was never turned on except for the comfort of paying guests; there were no signals for the television set to receive; and the sofa—like all the rest of the furniture—was covered by protective plastic shrouds.

There was a bookcase full of paperbacks, and Manuel could have gone to his bunk and read, but his reading fluency was limited to the block letters on packages of frozen food, labels on marine instruments, and place names on nautical charts. He was determined to improve his reading, and he had been studying the captions in picture magazines left behind by previous customers—
People, US, Playboy, Penthouse
, and
Yachting.
But he felt he had already gleaned as much as he ever would from the magazines on board.

Dickie and Nelson were still fishing off the stern. Manuel could have rigged himself a line and joined them, and he would have if they were catching anything. But the banter between Dickie and Nelson increased in inverse proportion to the number of fish being caught, and on days this slow it was ceaseless. If Manuel joined them, they would turn on him as a fresh target, and that he hated.

So he washed his clothes and ironed them, and was bored again.

Dressed only in a pair of mesh undershorts, Manuel walked to the stern. The sun was swelling as it touched the western horizon, and the moon had already risen, a weak sliver of lemon against the gray-blue sky.

“Mist’Dickie, you want I should take the covers off the chairs and stuff?”

Dickie did not answer. He was sensing his fingertips, trying to decipher the faint jolts and tugs on his line, to distinguish between the nibble of a small fish and the first tentative rush of a larger one. He yanked at the line to set the hook, failed, and relaxed.

“No. Leave it be. Time enough in the morning. But if you’re sittin’ around with your thumb in your butt, you might’s well fill the booze locker.”

“Aye.”

“And bring us a charge of rum when you’re done.”

“Can I turn on the radio?”

“Sure. A touch of gospel do you good. Flush the evil thoughts from your mind.”

Manuel returned to the salon. In a cabinet beneath the television set was a bank of radios: single side band, forty-channel citizens band, VHF, and standard AM-FM. At this time of day, most of the receive-and-transmit bands were cluttered with conversations between Cuban fishermen discussing the day’s catch, cruise-ship passengers calling the States (via Miami Marine), and commercial purse seiners telling their wives when to expect them home. Manuel switched on the AM receiver and heard the familiar, anodyne voice of the Saviour’s Spokesman—an Indiana preacher who taped religious programs in South Bend and sent them by mail to the evangelical radio station in Cape Haitien. Most boats cruising in the neighborhood of latitudes 20° and 22° north, longitudes 70° and 73° west, kept their AM receivers locked on WJCS (Jesus Christ Saviour), for it was the only station that was received without interference and that broadcast regular local weather conditions. U. S. Weather Bureau reports from Miami were reliable enough for Florida and the Bahamas, but they were notoriously, dangerously, bad for the treacherous basin between Haiti and Acklins Island.

“. . . and now, shipmates,” crooed the Saviour’s Spokesman, “I invite you to join us here in the Haven of Rest. You know, shipmates, for every soul a-sail on the sea of life there is always a small-craft warning flying high. But if you’ll let him, Christ will stand beside you at the helm . . .”

Manuel rolled back the carpet in the salon, lifted a hatch cover, and dropped into the hold. He took a flashlight from brackets on the bulkhead and shone it on countless cases of canned food, soft drinks, and insect repellent, net bags of onions and potatoes, paper-wrapped smoked hams, tins of Canadian bacon and turkey roll. Crouching in the shallow hold, he moved forward, searching for a case or two of liquor. At most, he figured, three cases: eight people—including four women, who don’t drink as much as the men—for a seven-day trip. Thirty-six bottles would be more than enough. And he knew that guests did not order more than they planned to drink. Food was included in the charter price, but liquor was extra, and leftovers remained on board. Those were the rules.

He moved farther forward and shone his light into the bow compartment. It was full of liquor boxes. He read the stenciled letters on the sides of the cartons, and then, conditioned to distrust his reading, read them again: scotch, gin, tequila, Jack Daniel’s, rum, Armagnac. In his head, Manuel counted bottles, people, and days. A hundred and forty-four bottles, eight people, seven days. Two and a half bottles per person per day.

Manuel knelt on the deck and stared at the cartons and felt ill. This was going to be a bad trip. There would be complaints about everything: When the guests drank too much, nothing was right for them—not the weather, not the comforts aboard the boat, not the food, not the kinds of fish caught nor the number, and especially not each other. Dickie and Nelson and the captain were immune to churlishness; their ages and experience and toughness deterred all but the most reckless of boors. That meant, of course, that the drunks saved their most vitriolic abuse for the young and defenseless Manuel.

He set the flashlight on the deck and tore open the nearest case of scotch. The topside bar could hold two bottles of everything—enough for the first night, at least.

At twilight, the fish began to feed.

“I never could figure it,” Nelson said, hauling in his line hand over hand. “There’s no light down there anyhow, so how’s them buggers know when’s dinnertime?”

“They got a natural clock inside ’em. I read that.” Dickie leaned over the stern. “Well, looka that goggle-eyed bastard.”

Nelson reached for the leader and hauled the fish over the gunwale. It was a glass-eyed snapper, rich, reddish pink, six or eight pounds. As the fish had been dragged from the bottom, the air inside had expanded, bloating the fish’s belly and popping its eyes. The tongue had swollen to fill the gaping mouth.

“Supper,” Nelson said.

“Damn right. Manuel!”

There was no reply. The boy was in the hold, far up in the bow. From the salon came the voice of the Saviour’s Spokesman, backed by a choir: “. . . you may say to yourself, shipmate, ‘Why, Jesus can’t love me, for I am too grievous a sinner.’ But that’s why he loves you, shipmate . . .”

“Manuel!” Dickie started forward. “Goddammit, boy . . .” Looking beyond the salon, through the forward windows, Dickie saw something drifting toward the boat, carried by the swift tide. “Hey, Nelson,” Dickie pointed. “What you make of that?”

Nelson leaned over the side. In the half-light, he could barely see what Dickie was pointing at. It was twenty or thirty yards in front of the boat—dark, solid, twelve or fifteen feet long. Obviously, it was unguided, for it swung in a slow clockwise circle. “Looks like a log.”

“Some robust log. Damn! It’s gonna smack our bows dead-on.”

“Not movin’ fast enough to do no harm.”

“Scrape the crap outta the paint, though.”

The object struck the boat just aft of the bow shear, stopped momentarily, and then, caught in the tide, moved lazily toward the stern.

Below, Manuel heard a dull thump on the port side. He opened a case of Jack Daniel’s, tucked two bottles under his arm, and, holding the flashlight in his other hand, went aft toward the hatch. He reached up and set the Jack Daniel’s on the salon deck. He crouched again and moved forward, ignoring the Saviour’s Spokesman’s exhortation to “. . . write to us here at the Haven of Rest, and we promise to write you back if you will enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope.”

“It’s a
boat!”
said Dickie.

“Go on . . .”

“Like a canoe. Look at it.”

“I never seen a boat like that.”

“Get a gaff. The big one.”

Nelson reached under the gunwale and brought out a four-inch gaff hook with a six-foot steel handle.

The object was closing fast. “Snag it,” said Dickie. “Wait . . . not yet . . . not yet . . . Now!”

Nelson reached out with the gaff and jerked it toward him. The hook buried in the wood, and set.

It was a huge, hollowed log, tapered at both ends. The tide pulled at it, swinging the far end away from the boat. “It’s a heavy bastard,” Nelson said. “I can’t hold it much longer.”

“Bring her ’round here.” Dickie unlatched and opened the door in the transom used for bringing big fish aboard. He stepped down onto a narrow platform at water level, just over the exhaust pipes.

Nelson guided the log around the stern, into the lee of the boat, out of the tidal flow. The log rocked gently, like a cradle.

Nelson said, “There’s something in it.”

“I see it. Canvas, looks like.”

Nelson hauled the log up to the stern.

Steadying himself with a hand on a stern cleat, Dickie reached out with his left foot and flipped back an edge of the canvas. There, palm upward, as if mendicant, was a human hand.

“Holy shit!” Dickie’s foot snapped back onto the platform. He held the cleat with both hands.

For a moment, neither man spoke; each listened to his heartbeat. Then Nelson said, “More of him under there?”

“I don’t want to know.”

“Maybe he’s alive.”

“What he be doin’ out here alive? ’Sides,
smell
the bastard!”

“Won’t know till you look.”

“
You
look.”

“
I
can’t look. I’m holdin’ the gaff.”

Dickie gazed down at the hand, considering. He reached out, drew back, reached out again. “C’mon, chummy,” he muttered. “C’mon. Be nice and dead.” He touched the corner of the canvas and lifted it.

He saw a wrist, circled by a crude, green metal bracelet, and part of a forearm.

“C’mon,” Nelson said impatiently. “He ain’t gonna bite you.”

“I can’t get a grip on him. Pull him in further.”

“There ain’t no further. He’s hard against the transom now.”

Holding his breath, Dickie leaned away from the stern, reaching with his left hand, clutching the cleat with his right. His fingers wrapped around the lifeless palm. He pulled.

Suddenly, the hand was alive. Fingernails bit into Dickie’s wrist and yanked downward, tearing him away from the boat.

The canvas heaved up and flew back.

Dickie’s body hit the canoe, and a blur of gray hissed through the air, striking him above the left clavicle. Like a doll dismembered by an enraged child, Dickie’s head flopped loose from his body, connected only by threads of skin and sinew. A rush of air burst from his open trachea, blowing bubbles of blood. Nelson heard two splashes as body and head hit the water separately.

The man was aboard before Nelson could unhook the gaff. Frantically, he tried to free it, but the hook was fast in the wood. He dropped the gaff and backed away.

Nelson did not look at the man advancing upon him; he was mesmerized by the upraised ax, a crescent blade drooling with blood. As droplets fell to the deck, they glittered in the twilight. The ax spun in the man’s hand, and facing Nelson now was a tapered nick, a curved triangular spike. The pick jabbed at him. Nelson dodged.

His eyes flickered away from the pick and saw—behind the man, behind the stern—the pirogue drifting away. If he could get overboard, if he could swim to the pirogue, then paddle it . . . where? Anywhere. Away.

He feinted to his left, and the man swung at him, burying the pick in the bulkhead. Before the man could dislodge it, Nelson sprinted for the stern.

But, in the shadows, he didn’t see the pile of liquor cartons until his shins hit them. He tried to stop, skidded on fish guts, and sprawled on the deck. As a last, reflexive defense, he covered his head, helplessly, with his hands.

Manuel had the last of the bottles, two quarts of Armagnac, under his arm. His legs were beginning to cramp from crouching so long in the hold, and he scurried aft, hoping to be able to straighten up before a muscle knotted. Ahead, in the rectangle of light cast through the open hatch, the shadows of the bottles arrayed on the deck above were obscured by the shadow of a man.

“I got the last of them, Mist’Dickie.”

The Saviour’s Spokesman was bidding farewell: “Well, shipmates, the time has come to furl our sails here in the Haven of Rest . . .”

It was the smell that Manuel noticed first, a heavy, putrid stench. He had smelled something like it once before, when a goat, killed and half eaten by dogs, had lain decaying in a neighbor’s field. He reached the hatch and held up the bottles, but no hand took them.

The stench made his eyes water. He looked up, saw feet.

“. . . until tomorrow, when we’ll raise our anchor and cruise together through the shoals of life . . .”

Manuel stood in the hatchway, frozen. A drop of blood fell on the carpet before him.

A hand withdrew from a broad leather belt a weapon unlike anything Manuel had ever seen. A thumb pulled back the hammer, and a shudder swept through Manuel’s body. He closed his eyes and heard, all in a fraction of a second, a click and a
psst,
then a resonant
boom
.

He fell backward, striking his head on the edge of the hatchway, and collapsed in the bilge. He heard glass break, smelled alcohol and sulphur, felt pains in his head and a spasm in his bowels.

And then he heard: “. . . and remember, shipmates, there’s always a fair wind when Jesus is your skipper.”

C H A P T E R
2

A
s usual, Blair Maynard was late for work. He was due at the office at ten, but he had stayed up until two-thirty the night before, finishing a freelance piece for one of the airline magazines. He could knock off most such assignments in an afternoon or evening: movie or theater reviews, celebrity interviews, $750 for 1,000 or 1,500 words. He had struggled over this piece, though, for it was on a subject that interested him—recent discoveries of what were thought to be pre-Columbian stairways and paving stones, underwater in the out-island Bahamas, His conclusions, after analyzing the evidence, were unsatisfying: Nobody knew, for sure, what the stones were. In all probability, they had been formed and smoothed by nature. But maybe not. And the research into the past, into who might have made the stairways, and why, had been fun.