The Island (25 page)

“Judas priest!” Nau erupted. “As the boy begged, be done with it!”

“It becomes you ill,” Hizzoner chided Nau, “to call upon the archtraitor for relief. It was he who, when faced with just such a decision, when salvation and damnation were warring for his soul, chose to—”

“I know what he did! Be on with it!”

“Yes . . . well . . .” Hizzoner harumphed. “And now therefore, having discharged my duty to you as a Christian, by giving you the best counsel I can, with respect to the salvation of your souls, I must now do my office as a judge. It is the sentence of this court, for the court is where the judge sits, even if the judge stands but does not sit, and even if he stands at sea, that you . . .” He stopped. “What are your names?”

“Who cares what be their names?” Nau roared. “Call them Willy and Billy and Millie!”

“That you, Willy and Billy and Millie . . . and Willy and Billy again, for you are five . . . that you shall be presently rendered dead, dead,
dead!”

Maynard looked at the survivors. The wounded man seemed not to hear, or, if he heard, not to care; he was hypnotized by his hand. Two of the other men were incredulous; they shuffled their feet and eyed each other and muttered things like, “Hey, man . . .” and “C’mon, chief . . .” and “Hey, let’s cut the shit . . .”

But the woman knew, and believed, and was hysterical. She screamed.

Nau said, “Basco . . .”

Basco stepped forward, grabbed the woman’s hair, and slit her throat.

Without waiting to be told, Justin pulled the Walther from its holster and shot the wounded man in the chest. The man fell without a sound. As he slumped to the deck, Justin aimed at him again, but Nau stayed his hand.

“Add not insult to injury. He’s done. Besides, bullets are precious.”

Swiftly, with three efficient slashes of his cutlass, Basco dispatched the others.

Maynard stood at the stern, trembling with horror and outrage. He said to Nau, “You’ve made a monster of him.”

“A monster? Not at all. An engine. A job to do what must be done. Do you weep for these five? For
these?”
With his toe, Nau nudged one of the still twitching bodies. “What’s the loss?”

“For them? No, but I should. I weep for my son.”

“Aye, that’s a loss. But take comfort: Your loss is our gain.” Nau spoke to Manuel. “Put her down.”

“Fired?”

Nau scanned the sky, looking for the airplane. “No. Put her down easy. Show Tue-Barbe how it’s done.”

The boys ran forward and disappeared down an open hatch.

The pinnaces were loaded above the gunwales; they had only an inch or two of freeboard. If the sea had not been calm, they would have swamped.

Three pinnaces stood off. The fourth, Nau’s, stayed tethered to the schooner’s stern, awaiting the boys.

The schooner lay perfectly still in the water. As Maynard watched from fifty yards away, the bow began slowly—barely perceptibly—to sink. After a few moments, the stern, too, settled slightly. The boys appeared on deck, scampered aft, shinnied down the rudder, and tiptoed onto Nau’s overloaded pinnace.

The schooner seesawed—sinking first by the bow, then by the stern, then by the bow again—until, when the decks were almost awash, either something substantial shifted below or a compartment refused to surrender its air, and the balance in the hull changed and the stern rose out of water and the bow knifed downward with a reptilian hiss.

When the schooner was gone, there were a few residual noises—or perhaps they were not noises but sensations that reverberated through the water and the wooden hulls of the pinnaces, feelings of cracking and crushing and splitting.

Bubbles rose and burst where the schooner had been. The sea had swallowed and digested it, and the surface was normal again, as if the schooner had never been.

“Set your sails, lads!” Nau called, “and wish for a fair westerly. There’s rum to drink and whores to dandle!”

It was twilight when the pinnaces reached the cove, and half the men had a head start on tomorrow’s hangover. Jack the Bat had finished his jug of rum-and-gunpowder and was at work on a bottle of hundred-proof vodka, borrowed (“on account,” he insisted) from Beth’s share of the booty. Over and over, he sang a song that had only two lines: “Hey boys, up go we, Molly’s caught her skirts on the manzanilla tree.” Nau’s second fell out of his pinnace while lowering the sail at the entrance to the cove. He was unable to swim, and he kicked and thrashed until someone threw him a line and then—to the merry guffaws of the rest of the crew—proceeded to pee on him as he was towed toward shore.

A Boston Whaler was beached in the cove, and a man stood beside it, waiting. In the near-darkness, Maynard did not recognize the man: All he saw was a white linen suit, with the trousers rolled up to the knees. Then he heard the man call, “Well done, Excellency! If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.”

Windsor.

“Say hey, Doctor!” Nau cocked his arm and threw something at the shore. “Your purse. Poor perhaps, but all she had. And what have you brought me?”

“Powder—two kegs—and medicine to cleanse your wretched persons.” Windsor picked up the purse and put it in his pocket.

The pinnaces were run up onto the sand, the cargoes unloaded onto the beach.

Justin and Manuel walked a pace behind Nau as he approached Windsor.

When Windsor spotted Justin, he said cheerfully, “Now, there’s a lad. Give me your name again, boy.”

“Who he was is gone,” said Nau. “Now he is Tue-Barbe.”

“A fine name. So, Tue-Barbe, how goes the battle?”

“Fine, sir,” said Justin.

“He is worthy,” Nau said. “Time will come, he and Manuel will vie for leadership.”

“Top shelf. Survival of the fittest. Keep the line pure.” Windsor surveyed the cargo being stacked on the beach. “She was rich. I thought so. Their talks with the mainland suggested it.”

“Aye, but a worthless cargo. Drugs, the scribe called them.”

“Who?”

Beth had led Maynard out of the pinnace and stationed him on the beach while she supervised the separation of her share.

“The scribe.” Nau pointed at Maynard.

Windsor crossed the beach to Maynard and examined him, unbelieving, as if suspicious that Maynard was a practical joke. All he said was, “Why are you alive?”

“Hello to you to.”

“I tried to save you, but you were pigheaded. Now you should be dead.”

“Well . . .”

Windsor said to Nau, “Why is he alive?”

“It’s a tangled web,” Nau replied. “I’ll unravel it for you over a glass.”

Windsor insisted: “He should be dead! That’s the way.”

“That he will be, and before long. He knows it, we know it, it is a fact. Meanwhile, he scribbles for us.”

Windsor did not argue with Nau. He whispered to Maynard, “I don’t know how you did it, but whatever it is, it’s finished. Believe me.”

“You’re threatening me?” Maynard smiled. “Please . . . don’t bother.”

“Just believe me,” Windsor repeated. He turned away.

Maynard took a guess. “You worried I’ll contaminate your laboratory?” Windsor halted. “This is your perfect society, isn’t it?”

“Not yet.” Windsor could not stifle a smile. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Mencken, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

“Come, Doctor,” Nau called. “Your jug is full and your dandelion is lonesome.”

Beth fetched a crude wheelbarrow from the underbrush, and she and Maynard loaded her goods aboard and pushed them back to her hut. Sounds of celebration were carried on a fresh breeze throughout the island: shouts and laughter, squeals and curses, bottles breaking and bodies stumbling through the bushes.

“Sounds like a real blowout,” Maynard said as they stacked cases and cartons and mesh bags in the hut until there was barely enough room for them to squeeze by one another.

“Warming up for council.”

“Council?”

“We’ll go by and by. We’ve other business first.”

He looked at her, expecting an explanation, but all he saw was a peculiar sad smile that he could not interpret.

When all the goods were stored, she said, “What rum pleases you?”

“I don’t know rums.”

“You must have a favorite.” She pointed at the cases. “Vodka rum? Whisky rum? Gin rum? Rum rum?” She waved her hand proudly. “I have them all. I am rich. Roche would die a second death to see how rich I am.”

“Whisky rum.”

Delighting in the role of munificent hostess, Beth tore open a case of scotch and presented Maynard with a bottle. For herself she took a bottle of vodka. She opened hers and gestured for him to do the same. Then, “Wait,” she said. With her fingernails she scraped the dirt floor of the hut and uncovered a key. She unlocked Maynard’s chain, unwrapped it from his neck, and cast it aside. “There,” she said.

The muscles in Maynard’s neck and shoulders felt suddenly elastic and alive. Gingerly, he touched the skin the chain had abraded raw. “Thank you.”

She nodded. “Drink.”

“Why . . . ?”

“Why drink? Because . . .”

“No. Why . . . that?” He indicated the chain.

“No reason.” She shook her head, but she wouldn’t look at him. “You are to be trusted.”

“All of a sudden?”

“You would have me replace it? No? No! Be quiet and drink.”

They sipped from the bottles. The liquor, neat, burned on the way down and then pooled warmly in the stomach.

“You have brought me good fortune,” Beth said.

“That’s something, I guess.”

“It is too bad.”

“What is?”

She gestured, vaguely, at the world. “Everything.” She took a long pull on the vodka bottle. “But . . . that is the way.”

Maynard sipped and said, “You know what? The way is a pain in the ass.”

Beth laughed. “Well, perhaps . . .”

“You know,” Maynard said carefully, hoping not to sour her mood, “my offer still stands.”

“What off—?” Beth knew. “No. It is too late.”

“Why?”

Beth shook her head, dismissing the thought, and set her bottle on the floor. “Come.”

“Where to?”

“Come. I told you: other business.”

She took his hand and led him to the beach, where she bathed him with, it seemed to him, extraordinary tenderness.

They started back up the beach, but halfway to the underbrush she stopped and said, “Here.” She dropped to the sand, dragged him down beside her, clamped her mouth on his, and rode him with a fierce intensity. Then, breathing heavily, she touched his face and said softly, “You have been good to me.”

There was nothing in her words to distress him, but the flat finality in her voice made his heart race.

They walked along the dark paths, following the now-concentrated din of revelry. They came to the edge of a clearing, and Beth paused and peered ahead, as if checking for ambush.

“What are you worried about?” Maynard asked.

Beth held a finger to her lips and said, “Ssshhh.”

She dashed across the clearing, and Maynard, following, saw the empty catamites’ lodge.

They came to the clearing where the prostitutes lived, and again Beth paused warily before crossing.

They continued silently along the path. Suddenly, from the underbrush, an enormous man bulled his way onto the path and blocked their passage. He was roaring, drooling drunk. He staggered across the path, stumbled into a bush, righted himself, and swiped viciously at the air with his cutlass. “Stand!” he cried.

“Stand yourself, Rollo,” Beth said, “if you can.” She seemed neither frightened nor alarmed, but resigned to an unpleasantness.

The big man weaved and squinted at them. “However many ye be, have a glass with me or I’ll have at ye with my hanger!” He waved his cutlass at them.

“Let us pass, Rollo.”

“Ye’ll not pass until ye’ve drunk to my honor.” He reached behind a bush and dragged onto the path a case of Kahlúa. He knocked the neck off a bottle and held it out to Maynard. “Drink. To my honor.”

“No, thanks.”

Rollo bellowed and lunged at Maynard. Maynard sidestepped and, as Rollo passed, punched him in the kidney and knocked him to his knees.

“A fine blow!” Rollo said as he lurched to his feet. “Rattled my guts. Now’’—he wiped the neck of the bottle on the seat of his trousers—“drink or I’ll have at ye again.”

Maynard glanced at Beth, who said, “Pacify him.” So Maynard sipped from the bottle and passed it to her. She sipped and muttered, “Your honor,” and returned the bottle to Rollo.

Pleased, Rollo said, “My honor.” He drained the bottle and pitched the empty into the shrubbery. Then, giggling, he removed the case from the path and tottered back to his hiding place, to await the next passers-by.

“How long’ll he play that game?” Maynard asked as they continued along the path.

“Till he topples. He’s harmless enough.”

“Harmless! He was joking?”

“Oh no. He’d kill you sure enough, but if you drink with him, he’s a cub.”

They walked on, toward the sounds of celebration. “Suppose he did kill somebody,” Maynard said.

“Rollo? He has.”

“What happens to him?”

“Happens?”

“There’s no punishment?”

“If it’s a child, yes, that’s butchery. He wouldn’t. But a grown person . . . that’s a fair fight.”

“Suppose he ambushes him.”

“Anyone who can’t defend himself against a reeling sot like that . . . he’s no loss.”

The company was gathered in the clearing before Nau’s hut. The brim-full rum pot, surrounded by ruptured cases of various liquors, stood in the center, simmering over charcoal embers. Drunken men and women were sprawled everywhere. As Beth led him into the clearing, Maynard stepped over a pair of grunting, sweating, copulating bodies.

Jack the Bat, clad only in a pair of rubber boots, sat in the sand with a half-dressed whore in his lap. Jack the Bat was weeping copiously, and as Maynard passed he heard him say to the whore, “But Lizzie dear, I’ve always loved you! You’re my heart’s desire.”

“There, there, Jack,” the whore replied, stroking his neck. “I can’t run away with you. Where would we run to?”

“I’ll build you a cottage at the end of the island. Make me happy!” Jack the Bat blubbered. “Say you will.”