by Boyle, T. C.
The next splash was closer. She forced open her eyes, tried to focus through the drooping curtains of her swollen lids. Her pupils burned. The blood pounded in her ears. It took her a moment to understand that this wasn’t a shark, wasn’t a fish at all—fish didn’t have dog faces and whiskers and eyes as round and darkly glowing as a human’s. She stared into those eyes, amazed, until they sank away in the wash and she looked beyond the swirl of foam to the sun-scoured wall of rock rising out of the mist above her.
Anacapa is the smallest of the four islands that form the archipelago of the northern Channel Islands and the closest to the mainland, a mere eleven miles from its eastern tip to the harbor at Oxnard. It parallels the coast in its east-west orientation, from Arch Rock in the east to Rat Rock on the western verge, and is, geologically speaking, a seaward extension of the Santa Monica Mountains. In actuality, Anacapa comprises three separate islets, connected only during extreme low tides, and it is of volcanic origin, composed primarily of basalt dating from the Miocene period. All three islets are largely inaccessible from the sea, featuring tall looming circumvallate cliffs and strips of cliff-side beach that darkly glisten with the detritus ground out of the rock by the action of the waves. As seen from the air, the islets form a narrow snaking band like the spine of a sea serpent, the ridges articulated like vertebrae, claws fully extended, jaws agape, tail thrashing out against the grip of the current. Seabirds nest atop the cliffs here and on the tableland beyond—Xantus’s murrelet, the brown pelican and Brandt’s cormorant among them—and pinnipeds racket along the shore. Average rainfall is less than twelve inches annually. There is no permanent source of water.
Beverly knew none of this. She didn’t know that the landfall looming over her was Anacapa or that she’d drifted some six miles by this point. She knew only that rock was solid and water was not and she made for it with all the strength left in her. Twice she went under and came up gasping and it was all she could do to keep hold of the ice chest in the roiling surf that had begun to crash round her. All at once she was in the breakers and the chest was torn from her, gone suddenly, and she had no choice but to squeeze her eyes shut and extend her arms and ride the wave till the force of it flung her like so much wrack at the base of the cliff. Stones rolled and collided beneath her knees and the frantic grabbing of her hands, she was tossed sideways and had the breath pounded out of her, but her fingers snatched at something else there, sand, the floor of a beach gouged out of the rock. It was nothing more than a semicircular pit, churning like a washing machine, but it was palpable and it held her and when the wave sucked back she was standing on solid ground. She might have felt a surge of relief, but she didn’t have a chance. Because she was shivering. Dripping. Staggering. And the next wave was already coming at her.
The foam shot in, sudsing at her knees, driving her back awkwardly against the punishing black wall of the overhang. She found herself stumbling to her left, even as the next breaker thundered in, and then she was crawling on hands and knees up and away from it, the rock pitted and sharp and yet slick all the same, up and out of the water and onto a narrow perch that was no wider than her berth on the Beverly B. She hugged her knees to her chest, clamped her hands round her shoulders, shaking with cold. Her hair hung limp in her face. The waves crashed and dissolved in mist and everything smelled of funk and rot and the protoplasmic surfeit of all those galaxies of wheeling, biting, wanting things that hadn’t survived the day. She didn’t think about Till or the boat or Warren, her mind drawn down to nothing. She just stared numbly at the wash as it stripped the beach and gave it back again, torn strands of kelp struggling to and fro, a float of driftwood, the suck and roar, and then she was asleep.
When she woke it was to the sun and the beach that had grown marginally bigger, a scallop of blackly glistening sand emerging from the receding tide, the teeth of the rocks exposed now and the wet gums clamped beneath them. She’d been in the shadows all this time, huddled on her perch, tucked away from the tidal wash and the sun too, but now the sun had moved out into the channel and the heat of it touched her and roused her. For a long while she sat there, absorbing the warmth, and if she was sunburned it didn’t matter a whit because she’d rather be burned than frozen, burned anytime, scorched and roasted till she peeled, because anything was better than the cold locked up inside her, a numbness so deeply immured in her she might as well have been a corpse. She gazed out on the sea with a kind of hatred she’d never known, hating the monotony of it, the indifference, the marrow-draining chill. And then, abruptly, she was thirsty. Still thirsty. Thirstier than she’d been out there on the sea when she was thirstier than she’d ever been in her life.
In that moment her eye jumped to the gleam of metal at the near end of the cove. The ice chest. There it was, upright in the sand, its lid still fastened. She sprang down from the rock, slimed and filthy, her limbs battered and her tongue made of felt, and ran to it, threw open the lid and saw that the ice was gone and the bottles smashed—all but one, the precious last remaining dark brown sweating bottle with the label soaked off and sand worked up under the cap. Lifting the beer to the sun, she could see that it was intact, its bubbles infused with light and rising in a slow hypnotic dance. Beer. Cold beer. But she had no opener, no churchkey, no knife or screwdriver or tool of any kind. And where was Till? Where was he when she needed him?
She remembered how casually he would slam the neck of his beer against the edge of the counter or the workbench in the garage and how instantly the cap would fly up and away and the cold aperture of the bottle would come to his lips, all in a single fluid motion, as if the opening and the draining of the bottle constituted the same continuous physical process. Overhead, chased on a draft, a gull appraised her, mewed over her torn and abraded flesh, and was gone. She looked wildly around her for something, anything, to make a tool of, but there was nothing but sand and driftwood and rock.
Rock. Rock would do it. Of course it would. And then she was smoothing her hand over the wall of the overhang, feeling for a rough spot, a ledge, any kind of projection, and here, here it was, the cap poised just so and the weight of her burned hand coming down on it, once, twice . . . and nothing. She worked at it, frantic now, angry, furious, but the best she could do was flatten the ridges till the cap was even more secure than when she’d begun, and it was too much, she couldn’t take a single second more of this—and then it was done, the neck shattered and gaping and she draining the whole thing in three airless gulps and if there was glass in it and if the glass cut her open from esophagus to gut she didn’t give a damn because she was drinking and that was the only thing that mattered.
But the beer was gone and the thirst was there still, rattling inside her like a field of cane in a desert wind, and was it any surprise she was light-headed? She’d always been a capable drinker, proud of her ability to match Till beer for beer, but this one hit her hard and before she knew it she was down in the sand, sitting there cross-legged like a statue of the Buddha, as if that was what she’d meant to do all along. The sun seemed to have shifted somehow in the interval, dropping down close to the flattening gray surface of the sea where the fog could take hold of it and snuff it out like the burned-up butt of the cigarette she suddenly wanted as much as she wanted water. She stood shakily and went to the ice chest. It was right where she’d left it not ten minutes ago (or had it been longer? Had she dozed off?), but now the incoming tide was running up the beach to take it from her all over again. Seizing it by one corner, she dragged it awkwardly across the sand to the declivity beneath the overhang, then worked it up to her perch six feet above the beach. Inside, amidst the litter of broken bottles and stripes of sand and weed, there was a liquid that might have been a mix of beer and meltwater, that might have been potable, that might have quenched her thirst, but when she thrust a finger into it and licked that finger all she could taste was salt.
Dusk fell, aided and abetted by the fog, which closed off the beach even as the tide ran in, and thou
gh the water was up past her knees, she probed the scalloped ledges at both ends of the cove, looking for a way out. She braced herself, one foot up, then the other, straining for a handhold. Working patiently, her face pressed to the rock, she got as high as fifteen or twenty feet above the beach, but after she fell for the third time, coming down hard amidst the stones and the cold shock of the water, she gave up. It was no use. She was trapped. A single pulse of panic flickered through her, but she suppressed it. She wasn’t afraid, not anymore—that was behind her. All she felt was frustration. Anger. Why had she been spared only to wash up here to die of thirst, hunger, cold? Where was God’s hand in that? Where was His purpose? Finally, when it was fully dark and the fog settled in so impenetrably as to close off even the stars, let alone the running lights of any boat that might have been plying the channel looking for them, for survivors—and here she saw Till and Warren, wrapped in blankets in a gently rocking cabin, the glow of the varnished wood, lanterns a-sway, mugs of hot coffee pressed to their lips—she held fast to the ice chest and willed herself asleep.
In the morning, at first light, there was the sound of the gulls that was like the opening and closing of a door on balky hinges, but there was no door here, no bed or room or clothes or warmth, and she couldn’t see the gulls for the fog. She shivered into the light, slapping at her thighs and shoulders and huddling in the cradle of her arms, and then the thirst took hold of her. It roused her and she rose to her feet, fighting for balance, the tide having receded and risen all over again, reducing her world to this rock and the wall above her. She wanted a pitcher of water, that was all, envisioning the white bone china pitcher in the kitchen at home, a hand-me-down from her mother she brought out for special occasions, and it took her a long moment to realize that there was a persistent cold drip tapping at her shoulder and that she’d been shifting unconsciously to avoid it. She lifted her face and saw that the cliff was wet, the fog whispering across the rock above her, condensing there, dripping, dripping.
What she didn’t know was that forty years earlier a man named H. Bay Webster had leased the island from the federal government for the purpose of raising sheep, but the sheep had failed to thrive because of overgrazing and lack of water, and finally, in their distress, they had been reduced to licking the dew each from another’s fleece in order to survive. Not that it mattered. All that mattered was this drip. She held her tongue out to it, licked the rock as if it were a snow-cone presented to her by the lady behind the concession stand at the county fair. And when one of the little green shore crabs came within reach, a flattened thing, no more than two inches across, she crushed it beneath her foot and then fed the salty cold wet fragments into her mouth.
It took her a long while after that to get her courage up, because she knew now what she had to do though her whole being revolted against it. She kept praying that someone would come for her, that the prow of a ship would ease out of the fog or a rope come hurtling down from above, anything to spare her getting back into that killing water. The funny thing was that she’d always liked swimming—she’d joined the swim team in school and trained so relentlessly her hair never seemed to be really dry her whole senior year—but now, as she climbed down from the rock, clutched the ice chest to her and fought through the surf, she hated it more than anything in the world. Instantly, she was cold through to the bone and thrashing for warmth, then she was fighting past the breakers and out into the sea.
Here was the nightmare all over again, but this time there was a difference because she was saved, she’d saved herself, and she kept close to shore, trembling, yes, exhausted, thirsty, but no longer panicked. There wouldn’t be sharks, not this close in, not with the sea full of seals, armies of them barking from the rocks and sending up a sulfurous odor of urine and feces and seal stink. The sea was calmer now too, much calmer—almost gentle—and from time to time she tried floating on her back, head propped on the chest and elbows jackknifed behind her, but invariably she had to roll over and pull herself up as far as she could in an effort to escape the cold. Fog clung to her. Great fields of kelp, dun stalks and yellowed leaves, drifted past. Tiny fishes needled the water around her and were gone.
As the morning wore on, the world began to enlarge above her, birds uncountable lifting off into the fog and gliding back again like ghosts in the ether, the cliffs decapitated above skirts of guano, shrubs and even flowers so high up they might have been planted in air. She let the current carry her, periodically forcing herself to unfurl her legs and paddle to keep on course, telling herself that at any moment she’d come upon a boat at anchor or a beach that spread back to a canyon where she could get up and away from the sea. How far she’d drifted or how long she’d been in the water, she had no way of knowing, the cold sapping her, lulling her, killing her will, every seal-strewn rock and every black-faced cliff so exactly like the last one she began to think she’d circled the island twice already. But she held on, just as she had when the Beverly B. went down a whole day and night ago, because it was the only thing she could do.
It must have been late in the morning, the sun lost somewhere in the fog overhead, when finally she found what she was looking for. Or, rather, she didn’t know what she was looking for until it materialized out of the haze in a cove that was no different from all the rest. A rust-peached ladder, so oxidized it was the color of the starfish clinging to the rocks beneath it, seemed to glide across the surface to her, and when she took hold of it she let the chest float free, pulling herself from the water, rung by rung, as from a gently yielding sheath.
The universe stopped rocking. The sea fell away. And she found herself on a path leading steeply upward to where the fog began to tatter and bleed off till it wasn’t there at all. Above her, opening to the sun and the chaparral flecked with yellow blooms that climbed beard-like up the slope, was a shack, two shacks, three, four, all lined up across the bluff as if they’d grown out of the rock itself. The near one—flat-roofed, the boards weathered gray—caught the flame of the sun in its windows till it glowed like a cathedral. And right beside it, where the drainpipe fell away from the roof, was a wooden barrel, a hogshead, set there to catch the rain.
She was in that moment reduced to an animal, nothing more, and her focus was an animal’s focus, her mind stripped of everything but that barrel and its contents, and she never felt the fragmented stone of the path digging into her feet or the weight of the sun crushing her shoulders, never thought of who might be watching her in her nakedness or what that might mean, till she reached it and plunged her face into its depths and drank till she could feel the cool silk thread coming back up again. It was only then that she looked around her. Everything was still, hot, though she shivered in the heat, and her first thought was to call out, absurdly, call “Hello? Is anybody there?” Or why not “Yoo-hoo?” Yoo-hoo would have been equally ridiculous, anything would have. She was as naked as Eve, her blue jeans gone, Till’s sweater jettisoned, her underthings torn from her at some indefinite point in the shifting momentum of her battle against the current and the waves and the sucking rasp of the shingle. When she touched herself, when she brought her hands up to cover her nakedness, they were like two dead things, two fish laid out on a slab, and she fell to her knees in the dirt, hunched and shivering and looking round her with an animal’s dull calculation.
In the next moment she rose and went round the corner of the house to the door at the front, thinking to clothe herself, thinking there must be something inside to cover up with, rags, a bedsheet, an old towel or fisherman’s sweater. But what if there were people in there? What if there was a man? No man on this earth had seen her naked but for the doctor who’d delivered her and Till, and what would she say to Till if there was a man there to see her as she was now? She hesitated, uncertain of what to do. For a long moment she regarded the door in its stubborn inanimacy, a door made of planks nailed to a crosspiece, weather-scored and unrevealing. Beside it, set in the wall at eye level, was a four-pane window so smeare
d as to be nearly opaque, but she shifted away from the door, cupped her hands to the glass and peered in, all the while feeling as if she were being watched.
Inside, she could make out a crude kitchen counter with a dishpan and an array of what looked to be empty bottles scattered atop it, and beyond that, a sagging cot decorated with an army blanket. A second window, facing north, drew the glare in off the ocean. She tapped at the glass, hoping to forestall anyone who might be lurking inside. Finally, she tried the door, whispering, “Hello? Is anybody home?”
There was no answer. She lifted the latch and pushed open the door to a rustle of movement, dark shapes inhabiting the corners, a spine-sprung book on the floor, shelves, cans, a sou’wester on a hook that made her catch her breath, fooled into thinking someone had been standing there all along. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, the shapes manifesting themselves all at once—furred, quick-footed, tails naked and indolently switching, a host of darkly shining eyes fastening on her without alarm or haste because she was the interloper here, the beggar, she was the one naked and washed up like so much trash—and she let out a low exclamation. Rats. She’d always hated rats, from the time she was in kindergarten and her mother warned her against going near the garbage cans set out in the alley behind their apartment building—“They bite babies,” her mother told her, “big girls too, nip their toes, jump in their hair. You know Janey, upstairs in 7B? They got in her cradle when she was baby. Right here, right in this building.” Her father reinforced the admonition, taking her by the hand and probing with one shoe in the dim corners of the carport so she could see the animals themselves, the corpses of the ones he’d caught in spring traps baited with gobs of peanut butter. In secret, in the dark, they would lick and paw that bait—peanut butter, the same peanut butter she ate on white bread with the crusts cut off—until the guillotine dropped and the blood trailed from their crushed heads and dislocated jaws. Rats. Disease carriers, food spoilers, baby biters. But what were they doing here on an untamed island set out in the middle of the sea? Had they swum? Sprouted wings?