by Brian Doyle
Young guy.
Yeh.
He’ll barf whatever we give him, you know.
Yeh.
Too bad we don’t have ice.
Yeh.
They dripped water between his cracked lips and after a while his tongue woke up and tried to explore the water but it took a while for the engineering of his face to get back into gear. His face was cracked and burned something awful. They spread salve on all the cracked and burned parts they could find easily and figured his shirt and pants had protected the rest. He had a jacket, it turned out, which he must have been using for a pillow or blanket on the raft, because it was rolled up tight and stuck to his neck, which had cracked and burned so that blood had seeped into the jacket and hardened and now the jacket was glued so tight to his neck that the shock and pain of removing it was what woke the man from his coma. It took a while for him to get his eyes all the way open, the skin on his eyelids also being badly cracked and burned, and it took him an even longer while to get his voice up from his chest and through the raw desert of his throat and across the blackened waste of his lips, but after more water and salve and hard work on everyone’s part he got his parts all moving together again and after a brief period of croaking he said you and yes.
Excellent start, said Declan. Good word choice. If you is a question, the answer is that this is a boat called the Plover, and yes, we will carry you to a doctor, we are heading that way anyways.
The man looked at Piko.
Just along for the ride myself, said Piko.
The man tried to say something else but his voice had retreated to croaking again and Declan said my sincere advice is for you to stop talking and keep sipping tiny drops of water. Also the more salve you get on the better. The ship’s medical officer here will remain in attendance. Dr. Piko?
Dr. O Donnell?
Your patient, sir.
Thank you, sir.
* * *
The island was small but thorough. It was three miles long by one mile wide and there was indeed a lake with eels in it, some of them mammoth. Most of the island was dense with palm trees that seemed as if they had never been cut in the whole history of the world. There were coconut crabs everywhere and lorikeets and terns and boobies and turtles on the beaches. As the Plover slid past the landing wharf Piko pointed out egrets and plovers along the shore. There was one airstrip and six coconut plantations and eight small villages and one village almost big enough to be a small town. The smallest village had thirty people and eleven dogs in it and the biggest village had hundreds of people including a doctor and a reverend mister and a skid row district and more than one hundred dogs. Piko jumped out and roped the boat to the wharf and Taromauri stepped off carrying Pipa on her shoulders like a nut on a tree.
You not coming, Dec?
Nah. Stuff to do on the boat. I’ll stay with the guy and you find the doctor.
You coming, gull?
Nope, said the gull. I believe I made it clear that we do not set foot on this island, and indeed even being roped to it like this is unnerving.
I tell you, said Declan, every time you ask that bird a question now she answers right quick. I think she understands us. I would give my—
No no, said Piko, keep your nut, you and your pal keep an eye on the boat and we will see what’s up. What’s my shopping list, fruit and water?
And fish and coffee. And the doctor. See if there’s pork to be had. And cigars. Cigars are important.
Why are you not coming? The burned guy isn’t going anywhere.
Stuff to do on the boat.
Why really are you not coming?
I don’t want to land.
Pardon?
Not ready to land yet.
You don’t even want to set foot on a beach? After all those days on the boat?
Nope.
Okay. Fruit, water, pork, fish, coffee, doctor.
And cigars. Cigars are—
Important, yeh, I got it. All right—see you in a couple hours.
* * *
In the second-largest village there is a chapel surrounded by ferns. The chapel is made of palm trees and screw pine and catchbird tree and there are little exquisite worked details cut from breadfruit wood. In and around the chapel are strings and pots and bunches of frangipani and hibiscus. To the west of the chapel there is a grove of guava and to the east there is a grove of papaya. At the foot of each tree in both groves there is a nameplate with the name of a deceased person whose used body was turned to ash and the ash planted with a new seedling so that as a person died a tree was launched and the person’s energy fed the tree from which came food for the families of that person and for other families if the person’s tree was especially generous.
In the chapel this evening the choir is practicing. The choir has eleven members, one of which is the Reverend Mister, who sings bass or baritone, depending. The Reverend Mister was almost ordained a priest but not quite. Matters conspired such that he completed his study and training and took final vows but found himself pastor of the chapel and its small attendant congregation before achieving ordination. It is a long story and not especially interesting, as he says. It is the stuff of low drama. Whereas our choir is the stuff of elevated aspiration. The choir is his baby and his pet. He recruits widely and well. Among the members are two boys with voices as nearly perfect and pristine as you can hear in this world. This perfection cannot last but we will savor it before it flees into croaking maturity. There are three young women who sing like birds like angels like the murmuring sea. There is another man who sings bass if the Reverend Mister sings baritone and vice versa. They call themselves the Alternators when they are in their cups. When they are in their cups they sing Jimmy Rushing songs. There are two older women who love to sing and do not sing at all well but they sing with passion, and awkward passion is so often so very much more admirable than mere achievement, isn’t that so? We also have a new member this evening, a visitor from another island, where he was a man of great service to his community; let us welcome him with our usual grace and warmth, and assure him that here he is among friends. You stand back row center, sir—bass far left, baritones center, tenor to the right. With that nose, you are surely a baritone. Tonight I will sing baritone and our broad-shouldered comrade Toba here will sing the bass line. Our tenor … but ah, here, as if entering from the wings on cue, is our tenor, prompt and punctual as always. Danilo, welcome. Ladies and gentlemen, “Be Thou My Vision,” on three …
* * *
Taromauri carries Pipa along the beach. Terns swirl around them like sentinels. Your legs are longer than they were yesterday, says Taromauri. Are you growing an inch a day? And soon you will be eighteen feet tall? Eventually you will be tall enough to walk in the ocean and pull the boat? Pipa the Giant! With one foot on one island and the other on another far away. Birds will build nests on your shoulders. Or you can be a bridge from one island to another and people will walk along your spine and think it is a range of lovely gentle mountains. It is not so bad to be big. I have been big forever, I think. When I was little I was big. People were angry that I was big and for a long time I wondered why they were angry and then I figured out that they were frightened of me. Yet big people are rarely frightening. It is small people who are frightening because they are frightened. This is the way of the world, I think. I was so big when I was little that people didn’t talk to me. People shouted at me like I was a stone or a storm. The first person who spoke gently to me was Kekenu. I think that is why we married each other. He understood that I was a person inside my big body and I saw that he was a person inside the powerful armor of his body. He had tides and storms inside but his face was set like a stone or a sea and people thought he did not feel things painfully but he did, very much so. Did I ever tell you about the last time I saw him? He was on the beach and he took the last letter he had written to our daughter and he made a little fire and he burned it. I watched him do this thing. Then he took her clothes and toys and a book
she loved and her sleeping mat and her bracelets and hair-twists and a flute she loved and he burned all those things too. He sat by the fire with a stick making sure that everything burned properly. I watched him do this thing. Poking the fire with his little stick so that every single thing burned away. He crouched there for hours until the fire burned everything through and burned down to ash and blew away. That was the last time I saw him. I miss him very much. I wish that we could see into each other again but I don’t know if we will ever see each other again. That is the way of the world, I think.
* * *
The doctor in the largest village, on hearing about the man found on a raft at sea, sent a truck and two men to carry him from the boat to the clinic. The two men were small and silent and efficient and they shouldered the burned man gently into their truck. One of the men had lightning bolts tattooed on his cheeks and the other wore intricate blue-and-green feathered earrings that hung to his shoulders. After they drove off Piko and Declan stashed the fruit and water Piko had bought, and made coffee with the o my gawd fresh coffee he had bought, and commiserated that sadly there was no pork to be had whatsoever absolutely, and Piko with a flourish produced a bright golden box of cigars, and said me personally I suggest that we wait to enjoy these until we have circumnavigated the island, and walked it stem to stern, and explored the teeming jungle, and quartered the compass, and spent a whole blessed day on terra firma, a boat that doesn’t rock even a little.
Nah, said Declan. I am staying with the boat.
The boat’s not going anywhere, man. Let’s wander and wonder.
Nah, misneach, stay with the boat, rule number one.
We’re not at sea, for a change, Dec. Come on, man, Taromauri will keep an eye on the boat and the pip, let’s have an adventure. Why else did we land on land?
Nah.
You serious?
Yup.
We just spent weeks at sea, and you are not going to even set foot on this island.
Correct.
What’s the matter with you?
Nothing’s the matter with me, man. Just not leaving the boat. Calm down.
What is your problem? says Piko, and for once he is angry; he is never angry and in the way of guys who never get angry, when he gets angry he is slightly too angry. What are you running away from? Why don’t you want to land? Are you going to live on a little stinking boat the rest of your life? What is your problem?
Little boat? says Declan, trying to cut the moment. Stinking? Don’t call my boat little. This is a fecking cabin cruiser. This boat is almost thirty feet long. This boat is an island, man.
This is chickenshit, Dec, says Piko.
Long pause.
Who are you to talk? says Declan, real quiet; dangerous quiet. Who are you to bark at me? Who ran away from home to throw fecking firesticks? What are you, ten years old? Everything is going to be better in the fecking swaying fecking palms of the tropics?
I left because Elly died and everything was finished, you dumb fuck.
So did I, you stupid ass.
They stare at each other, furious.
What’s to go home for? says Declan. What home? And what’s to land for? Where the hell would I live? What would I do? This is what I do, you stupid ass. I run a boat. At least you had a home where someone loved you and you loved them. I know you loved Elly. I know it hurt when she died. I am not a fecking idiot. I know it hurts, what happened to Pipa. But get a fecking grip, man. You can go home. You have a home. You can go back and get a job and have fecking neighbors and a fecking mortgage. At least you have a daughter. What would I go home for? What home? What fecking job would I do? I fish. I have a boat. This is home. I live here. You don’t want to be here, don’t be. Fecking run away like you did from your life. Jerk.
Piko comes real close and sticks his nose about half an inch from Declan’s nose and says real quiet, fuck you, Declan O Donnell. You don’t know what you are talking about. You never got married. You never had a kid. I am playing in the big leagues. My wife wasted away and died and I live in that hole every day. My baby girl got smashed and she’ll never come back and I live in that hole every day. Fuck you. Don’t talk to me about what you don’t know a fucking thing about. Stick to talking about fish. You know fish all right. Don’t talk to me about running away. Your wife dies, your kid’s crippled, then you talk to me.
Declan shifts his right shoulder and Piko tenses his whole body like the string on a bow.
Listen, man, says Declan even quieter than before. You wanted a ride. I gave you a ride. You are my brother and I love the pip. But don’t give me shit, Piko. Don’t do it. You want a ride, you need a place to stay, there’s bunks for you anytime. But do not, do not, give me shit. I got enough shit already to last me a lifetime. I got twenty years of shit at home. I am not taking shit from anyone again, ever. This is where I live and how I live and it’s not up for debate. Get it?
Pause. Boat creaking. Taromauri and Pipa just visible at the far end of the beach, a big dot carrying a little dot with terns whirling all around like snowflakes in summer.
Fuck you, Dec, says Piko just as quiet as Declan. We’ll find somewhere else to go. Fuck you. You don’t want to talk about real things, fine. You want to be alone on your boat, fine. Thanks for the ride. That was real generous and we are very grateful. We’ll get our gear off before sunset. Thanks for the ride. If Pipa could talk she would say thank you too.
* * *
That night Declan pays a kid strolling by the boat to go get him a bottle of whiskey and he gets so drunk he slips in the stern and sprawls in the slosh. The starry heaven. That’s old Ed Burke. Éamon de Búrca. Never used his Irish name. Poor old Ed. Two sons died. Never a penny. The story of the race. The sea of sons. The silent She. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling something something the shilent sea. The thtarry thee. Scuttled o yes scuttled. Piko not coming back. Pipa not coming back. Taro not coming back. Declan came back. Good old Declan! God gold Declan! Declan O Lonely. Captain of nothing. I have to pee like a horse. One hand for me and one for the boat. Oldest adage on the She. Up we go, captain! One for the boat and one for the dolt. Oldest adage on the She. Ahoy, mate! Present yourself, Mr. Johnson! Avast your waving and man the pumps! Sure yes sir! Bless my soul that is the single greatest feeling o my God in the history of feelings. No fecking novels about that, are there? Back to quarters, Mr. Johnson! Sir yes sure! One hand for the skipper and one for the zipper! Sir yes sir! Permission to stand on the cabin roof and imitate the gull who used to be there, captain! Permission granted, sir! Gull not coming back either. Must be a dull gull, sir! Pooped on the poop deck, sir! This makes Declan laugh so hard he loses his balance and he lurches and shoots out a hand for the mast but misses it and falls to port and smashes his arm on the railing as he falls and then he crashes into the water, the stabbing pain in his arm so immediate and huge he opens his mouth to scream and the Pacific Ocean, which has been waiting patiently for many years for exactly this chance, rushes into his mouth as fast as it can go.
VI
4° NORTH, 160° WEST
THE TWO YOUNG ISLAND RATS, kiore, and the tiny warbler, bokikokiko, had long ago come to an understanding, a tenuous peace, something like a truce on the boat; one of the rats had made a gesture toward attacking and eating the crippled warbler, but the warbler had bristled and cocked its one good wing like a grim fist, and the other rat had intervened to calm things down, and an arrangement had been negotiated whereby the rats were masters of the lower reaches and the warbler master of the deck, ruling from her headquarters under the water tank; all three were respectful but wary of the gull, and generally leery of the human beings, especially the smallest one, who knew everything about them although she did not move on her own but was carried about by the other three. It was the warbler who saw the kai, or trees, as she called the human beings, in their most active modes, working the boat, fishing, talking, laughing; the rats, on the other hand, saw the human beings active only when they we
re cooking in the tiny galley kitchen; inasmuch as the human beings came below only to sleep or shelter in their bunks from wild weather, the rats had concluded that they were a generally somnolent and nocturnal species, and, for all their epic size, probably harmless. But they too felt the thorough attention and curiosity of the smallest of the human beings, the one who was carried around by the others; no matter where you hid on the boat, no matter how far that one’s body was from your body, as one of the rats noted to the warbler, that one sees you.
* * *
Declan falling down and down and dark and down.
Well, you useless rat bastard, I see you’ve come to your sorry end at last, says his father.
Declan is so shocked to hear his dead father’s voice in his ear that he opens his mouth wider and more of the ocean roars in snarling.
Poor boy, says his dead mother. Close your mouth and stand up straight. You look like a trout. God alone knows what to do with that hair. You’ll never be handsome but you are a clever boy and if you work hard you’ll get by somehow.
Drowning while drunk, says his father. What a surprise. What a shock. Fecking sorry bastard. His sister is a better man than he is.
You’re too hard on that boy, says his mother. You drench that boy in your own bile.
He’s a useless flop of a child and he’ll end up a rudderless drunk, says his father.
Because you are a failure he has to be one also? says his mother, grim and cold.
You’re an icy bitch, says his father, and he steps toward her suddenly but Declan jumps up faster and closes his mouth and swings as hard as he can at his father’s bony white face and his hand slams against the rudder and he hauls himself desperately up and his head breaks the surface and he retches and coughs and hauls in air and retches and sobs and coughs for longer than he can later remember. After a while he tries to grab the rudder with both hands but his left arm screams and refuses to answer the bell. Some parts of him are screaming and raging but the seagoing parts are calm and patient. As long as he is touching the boat all will be well. Misneach. Find the anchor cable, first of all. How deep is the moorage? Not so deep. It’s a sandy bottom. Stay with the boat. Misneach. No passion so effectually robs the mind as fear: Burke. The water is warm. There are no sharks in the lagoon. With two arms he could haul himself up on the stern step and so reach the railing from which hung Taromauri’s tent; but with one arm dead he could only wait, or swim to shore. Probably the arm is broken, which means shock and loss of blood. Which means try for shore now while you have the gas. Jesus. Drowning while drunk. Misdemeanor. Misneachdemeanor. It’s not like there’s a choice. Swim. Jesus blessed Christmas. But just as he lets go of the anchor cable a hand grabs his collar and he sees Piko’s rope beard swaying silvery in the dark and hears a voice say my turn, man.