The Island

by Peter Benchley

  The wind had been blowing from the east at a steady ten knots all day, and there was no reason to believe—from the radio or the sky or the breeze itself—that it was about to change. So the skippers of Penzance and Pinafore cruised slowly southeast along the western shore of a low island, searching for a leeward anchorage.

  The island was not on the Defense Mapping Agency Hydrographic Center charts, but such omissions had long since ceased to concern them. Everything about this part of the world was badly charted: Shoals appeared where none were marked; deep-water channels separated islands, that were, supposedly, one; lighthouses listed on the charts were heaps of rabble; “submerged reefs” turned out to be whole islands; and named islands were often nothing more than lines of breaking surf. Navigation was based on the principle of “What you see is what you get.” Consequently, the Lazlos and the Burguises never sailed at night.

  A hundred yards ahead of Pinafore, Lazlo sat at the helm of Penzance and scanned the craggy shoreline. The island was about half a mile long, ten-foot-high cliffs topped with a tangle of scrub and thornbushes and sisal trees. Lazlo noted idly that the sisal trees had been stripped and were regrowing. Once, the sisal must have been harvested, its fibers used to make rope. But, though Lazlo couldn’t see into the interior (if there was one), it was obvious that no one bothered with the island now. Nothing lived there. Nothing could live there, except birds. And bugs.

  “You’d best get the 6-12, dear,” Lazlo said. “I’m afraid tonight will be buggy.”

  “You’re not going ashore,” said Bella, pointing to the desolate island. “Not on that.’’

  “No, but the water’s too deep to anchor out. We’ll have to be within fifty yards of shore. And you know what kind of radar those devils have.”

  Lazlo saw a break in the cliff line ahead. He took a microphone from the bulkhead. “Walter, there’s an inlet up there. I’m going to head for it.”

  “All right,” Burguis’ voice came back. “I certainly can’t drop a hook here. I’d never get it back.”

  As he drew nearer, Lazlo saw that the inlet was a small harbor, perhaps a hundred yards wide and two hundred deep. At the far end, rusty iron tracks led up the beach into the scrub.

  “To haul the carts of sisal, I suspect,” he said before Bella could ask. “They probably loaded it aboard ship in here.”

  Lazlo anchored Penzance, while Burguis hung outside the harbor. Lazlo used his engine to maneuver his boat as close to dead-center as he could: At the moment, the tide was running into the harbor; the boat would lay at anchor with its stern toward the shore. But, in a few hours, the tide would slacken and turn, heading out. The boats would need plenty of room to swing with the tide. By morning, their sterns would be pointing out to sea.

  As soon as the boat turned away from the wind, the bugs struck, kamikaze mosquitoes and tiny black gnats known as “no-see-ums” that transmitted no itch or sting when they bit but whose toxin later raised painful welts. Lazlo removed his sunglasses and wrist watch (a substance in the bug spray corroded plastic lenses, first making them opaque and then, weeks later, dissolving them until they cracked and fell apart) and let his wife spray him with 6-12 from the part in his hair to the soles of his feet.

  Pinafore anchored aft of Penzance. The Lazlos hauled in the rubber Zodiac tethered to their stern, climbed aboard, and let themselves drift back until they could board Pinafore. While Walter Burguis mixed martinis, Ellen and Bella started a charcoal fire in a hibachi that fit in slots on Pinafore’s stern.

  As they ate club steaks and canned petits pois and watched the sun set, the water behind the boat came alive with rolling, jumping, feeding fish.

  “Jacks,” said Burguis.

  “Really?” Lazlo said. “How can you tell?”

  “He can’t,” said Ellen Burguis. “Everything’s jacks, unless he’s swimming and they bite him, and then they’re sharks.”

  “That’s not so, Ellen,” Burguis said. “It’s true that I have . . . well, respect . . . for the anthropophagi. Call it a morbid fear if you like. But there is a characteristic way that jacks flail their caudal fins when they feed, not unlike our own blue-fish.” He smiled. “You see, even we pedants sometimes know what we’re talking about.”

  Lazlo finished his meal and washed his plate off the stern. “I hope you folks have a wonderful icthyological symposium,” he said, “but I think it’s time we hit the sack. Tomorrow’s a long stretch of open water. Who wants the first watch?”

  Burguis said, “I’ll take it. I’m not tired. Ellen can take the second, Bella the third. That’ll give you a good five or six hours before your turn.”

  “You think we have to stand watch here?” Bella Lazlo complained. “There’s no weather, and none forecast, and there’s not exactly a lot of traffic.”

  “We agreed on the rules,” said her husband, “and we should follow them.”

  “But what could happen?”

  “A change in the wind, a freak squall, anything.”

  “Even poachers,” said Burguis. “The book says there are lobster poachers from Haiti and Cuba around here all the time. Believe it or not, they can come aboard and strip you clean while you sleep.”

  “We don’t have anything they’d want.”

  “We don’t know what they want. For all we know, they’re 6-12 addicts who’ll kill for a squirt.”

  “It’s basic good-seamanship,” Lazlo said. “We stand watches every night, even in port, and we wake up hale and hearty. There’s no reason to break the routine.” He reeled in the Zodiac, hopped aboard, and held it beside Pinafore until Bella got in.

  As they pulled themselves back to Penzance, they heard Burguis call, “It’s eight-thirty now. Ellen will take over at ten-thirty, and she’ll wake you, Bella, at half-past twelve.” Bella waved.

  Burguis upended the hibachi, spilling the charcoal briquets overboard. He watched as the school of jacks surrounded the tumbling crumbs, circled them, and, when they concluded that the ashes were inedible, sped away into the twilight. He went below and returned with the Remington pump shotgun, which he loaded with three shells.

  “You really think that’s necessary?” his wife said, wiping the dishes dry.

  “If you’re going to stand a watch, stand a watch. There’s no point in not having it.”

  With no clouds in the sky to reflect light, once the sun dropped below the horizon the sky grew quickly dark.

  Ellen Burguis looked at her watch. “Well . . .”

  “You might as well try. Any sleep is better than none.”

  “All right.” She went below and pulled the curtain across the doorway.

  Burguis had brought with him a brief case full of books. At home, he found time to read little more than daily papers and trade journals, and during the year he set aside piles of books to read on his vacation. They were all paperbacks, light, not bulky, and dispensable. Burguis liked to feel free to stop reading an unsatisfying book after twenty or thirty pages and pitch it into the sea. “Prose pollution,” he would mutter happily as he watched the soggy book wallow in Pinafore’s wake.

  He sat in the stern, the shotgun by his side, using a small flashlight to illuminate the pages of Dragons of Eden.

  The night was full of nature’s noises: ashore, the random hooting and cawing of birds; in the water, the swirls and splashes of fish; and on the boat, below, the rattling of Ellen’s breathing through congested antrums.

  Burguis heard a splash close behind the boat—not loud, but more substantial than a rolling fish would make. Curious, he pointed his flashlight overboard and saw a circle of ripples spreading, as if something had been dropped. A fish must have jumped completely out of the water and re-entered headfirst. He returned to Carl Sagan’s analysis of the R-complex function of the brain.

  Suddenly, the stern of the boat seemed to sink—gently, just a few inches. Burguis turned, but before his pupils could dilate to adjust to the darkness, a garotte had whipped around his neck and the filament of wire had se
vered everything but bone.

  Dragged backward overboard, in his last seconds Burguis felt no pain. There was an instant of perplexity, a sense that something had gone wrong, and then nothing.

  The man stood in the cockpit, dripping, listening. He heard snoring. He pulled the curtain back from the doorway.

  Ellen Burguis lay on her back, covered by a sheet, breathing deeply through her nose. A drop of water fell on her face and trickled up a nostril. She stirred.

  “Already?” She snuffled, to clear her nose, and felt a sting of salt water. She smelled something terrible, as if an animal had died in the bilges.

  A figure stood between her bunk and the doorway, blocking the starlight. “Walter?”

  “Ha a prayer, mum?”

  “Walter?”

  She tried to sit up, but the heel of a hand drove her back against the pillow. A shadow flashed by her eyes.

  The figure turned away. Ellen reached for it, and tried to speak, and only then realized that her throat had been cut.

  In the stern, the man held the shotgun and examined it, turning it in his hands, aiming it at the sky. The pump slide was alien to him. He jiggled it and pulled it back, startled when a shell ejected from the chamber and spun out over the water. He peered into the open chamber and counted the shells that remained, then pushed the slide forward.

  Holding the shotgun aloft in his right hand, he slipped over the stern and paddled silently, scissor-kicking with his sodden, hide-wrapped feet, toward Penzance.

  A few moments later, two shots resounded across the still water and echoed off the rock cliffs.

  C H A P T E R

  4

  “Oh-oh!” Justin looked up from his magazine, the latest issue of The American Rifleman. “Mom’s gonna kill me!”

  Beside him, in the aisle seat, Maynard closed the folder in which he carried all the Today clippings. “What’d you do?”

  “My piano lesson. I forgot.”

  “When is it?”

  “Noon. Every Saturday.”

  Maynard looked at his watch. “It’s only nine-forty. We’ll call your teacher from the airport. She’ll be easy.”

  “It’s a him. Mr. Yanovsky. He doesn’t believe excuses.”

  “He’ll believe me. I’ll tell him you have a bad case of sunspots.” Maynard smiled, remembering. “I used that once on the Tribune when I had a God-awful hangover. It worked, too. The city editor thought it was a cancer.”

  Justin was not placated. “She’s still gonna have to pay him.”

  “I’ll pay him, okay? A deal?”

  “I don’t know.” Justin flushed. “Mom says your checks bounce.”

  “Oh she does, does she? One lousy check does not make a habit. I’ll pay your piano teacher and the check’ll be good. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.” Maynard frowned. “She shouldn’t tell you things like that.”

  “She says a bad example is the best sermon.”

  Maynard laughed aloud. “First of all, it’s ‘a good example is the best sermon.’ It’s Benjamin Franklin.”

  “I know. But it didn’t fit.”

  “Didn’t fit what?”

  “The jingle she was working on.”

  “O that this too, too solid hair would fall and resolve itself unto the drain.” Maynard laughed again.

  “What?”

  “It’s Hamlet. His famous depilatory speech.”

  “What’s Hamlet?”

  “A play. You’ll know it soon enough.”

  Justin returned to The American Rifleman. “Hey, didn’t we used to have one of these?” He pointed to a photograph of a Colt Frontier revolver.

  “Yup. A rare one, too. A .32-20. You remember how the holster used to shine? That leather was a hundred years old.”

  “They say in here that the single-action Colts weren’t accurate. The grips were too small.”

  “They didn’t have to be accurate beyond about twenty feet. The fighting was all close-in.”

  “What about gunfights? You know, when they drew down on each other.”

  “I bet that didn’t happen ten times in ten years. If a fight came to guns, they shot each other any way they could. In the back, from under a table, behind a door.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be fair. The point was to get it over with as quickly as possible, and walk away from it in one piece.” Maynard paused and looked at his son. “No fight makes any sense, Justin. If you get into one, all you should want to do is end it. ‘Fair’ is for the other guy to worry about.”

  The seat-belt sign lit up, and the stewardess announced over the intercom that they would be landing at National Airport in a few minutes.

  “I wish we could still shoot,” Justin said. Until a year ago, when Maynard’s parents had moved to Arizona, Maynard and Justin had spent frequent weekends shooting with Maynard’s father, who was called Gramps, on his small Pennsylvania farm. Gramps had been Marine Corps rifle champion during World War II, and during the Korean War he had tested weapons for the Pentagon. His eighteenth-century stone farmhouse was packed with military memorabilia, from a James I-cipher musket to a Ferguson breech-loading flintlock rifle used at the battle of Kings Mountain during the Revolution, to (Justin’s favorite] a rare example of the protean “Stoner system,” which made a one-man battalion out of a modern soldier. They had been good weekends, warm and close and cozy and exciting.

  “So do I,” Maynard said. “We will, someday.”

  “When?” Justin looked at him, wanting a promise.

  Maynard could not promise. “I don’t know.” He saw the boy look away, disappointed. “Hey, you remember when we shot skeet that time? You did really well.”

  “I got three.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” It was a stupid thing to bring up. Maynard had forgotten that the shotgun stock had been so long that Justin had had to hold it under his arm instead of against his shoulder. “I only got three the first time, too.”

  “Yeah, but the second time you got nineteen.”

  The plane dipped and bounced and slowed as the flaps were lowered.

  “Have you decided which place you want to see?”

  “The new one. Air and Space, I think it is. You said you’d be two hours.”

  “More or less. But don’t get excited if I’m a little longer. And for God’s sake, don’t leave the building.”

  “Dad . . .” Justin’s voice suggested insult and reprimand. His maturity and judgment had been impugned unjustly.

  “Sorry.”

  “What I still don’t get is, why you couldn’t talk to this guy on the telephone.”

  “The telephone isn’t a good way to meet people. They can’t get to like you or trust you. I have to make this man trust me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want him to tell me things he’s been told not to talk about. My hunch is, he talked about them once already, and it ruined his career.”

  “Then he’s not going to talk about them again.”

  “Maybe, but I hope he will. I hope he’s angry.”

  They took a taxi from the airport. Maynard dropped Justin at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space museum, armed with the phone number of Today’s Washington bureau, “in case the place burns down or something.” Then Maynard gave the taxi driver an address uptown, near the Washington Cathedral.

  As the cab cruised along Rock Creek Parkway, Maynard reviewed the questions he planned to ask Michael Florio, the Coast Guard man who had been reassigned after questioning the boat disappearances. On the phone, Florio had been wary. At first, he had refused to speak to Maynard, had insisted on returning the call through the Today switchboard. It was an old-fashioned, but usually reliable, way to make sure that the caller was who he said he was—or, at least, that he worked where he said he worked. Then Florio had recited the standard litany of bureaucratic cant: He didn’t know for sure why he had been transferred: people were transferred all the time; he did what he was t
old.

  None of these responses surprised Maynard. Florio was within a few years of retirement. Why should he jeopardize his pension just to get his name in a newsmagazine?

  The cab turned off Connecticut Avenue and climbed Thirty-fourth Street into a quiet, bosky neighborhood of old, medium-size, medium-price homes. The driver stopped in front of a gray stucco house with a sagging wooden front porch.

  Michael Florio was in his mid-forties, flat-bellied, evidently in good physical shape. His hair was cropped close to his skull. He wore a white T-shirt, and his hands, arms, and face were coated with fine white dust. There were goggle marks around his eyes.

  “I appreciate your seeing me,” Maynard said.

  “Yeah.” Florio ushered him into the hallway and shut the door. “Use a beer?”

  “Thanks.”

  Florio led the way back to the kitchen. Maynard guessed that he lived alone, for cooking in the kitchen would have been impossible: The room was a workshop. The round table was covered with drills and chisels and tiny hammers and pieces of ivory and bone. A vise had been bolted to the edge of the table. The shelves were filled with carvings—whales, sharks, fish, birds, and ships.

  “Nice stuff,” Maynard said.

  “Yeah.” Florio reached into the refrigerator for two cans of beer. “Gotta have a trade, for after. Can’t sit on the porch and watch the sun go down for twenty years.” He handed Maynard a beer and said, “I don’t do interviews.”

  “I gathered.”

  “Anything I say . . . I mean, if I say anything . . . is off the record.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Is it?” Florio was surprised.

  Maynard sipped his beer. “Don’t take offense, but I’m not really interested in you.”

  “Good. I don’t want anybody interested in me. Twenty and out and screw ’em all.”

  “I don’t want to hassle you. I won’t even identify you if you don’t want me to.”

  “That’s it.” Florio was beginning to relax. He sat down and motioned Maynard to a seat across the table. A half-carved eagle’s head was clamped in the vise, and Florio could not take his eyes from it.