He ambled up the beach, his gaze on the sea. The waves rolled and crackled against the shore, and a boat floated a few hundred yards out. The engine hummed along, and soon it melted into the background with the waves. He only noticed it again when it stopped and the boat seemed to idle. He couldn’t see anyone on it. The boat just drifted with the current. Nothing unusual, as many people stopped their boats out there to eat or relax or for more intimate activities. He ignored it and kept going.
The party probably boasted about a thousand people already. Mark made his way through the crowd to the bar. “Jack and Coke, please,” he said to the bartender, a native islander in white clothing with a red bowtie. He gave him his drink, and Mark left him a tip in a large wine glass on the bar.
Four years wasn’t a long time to live on this island, but in that time, Mark had gotten to know just about everybody. He saw members of the provincial council, the equivalent of state legislators back in the States; he saw commissioners, chiefs and senators. All of them were mingling and shaking hands, with large, fake smiles on their faces. No matter where you were in the world, politicians were all the same.
Someone lit tiki torches as night fell. The moon ignited the ocean a dull white. Mark was standing by himself near the water staring at it, the crowds growing larger and drunker behind him.
Someone else had broken away from the crowds and was sitting in the sand. Riki Gilmore.
Her arms rested on her knees, and a beer dangled from her fingers. She glued her gaze to the ocean, but in the light of the torches, Mark could see deep contemplation filled her eyes. She appeared so lonely and vulnerable that Mark wondered if, on top of her missing brother, something else had happened as well.
“I never really saw the stars until I moved out here,” he said, walking up to her.
She looked to him then back at the ocean. “It’s a beautiful place to live. I can see why my brother chose to come here every year.”
“It’s right on that cusp that places like this eventually get to. Enough people know about it to have a good tourist economy, but it’s exclusive enough that it won’t become Disneyland. At least for a while.”
“I like Disneyland,” she said sullenly. She blinked as though clearing away a thought and said, “I’m sorry for being angry with you today. It’s just…”
“No apology necessary.” He sat down next to her.
“My father was an alcoholic. He left us when we were young, and my mother slowly started withdrawing after that. I was the oldest, so I raised everyone. I feel responsible for what happens to Billy.”
“You know, there’s a good possibility he just found a girl and ran off. It happens all the time. And then usually, months down the road, he’ll give you a call letting you know he’s okay.”
She placed her beer bottle onto the sand. “I hope that’s all it is.”
They didn’t speak again. Instead, they sat quietly and watched the moonlight reflect off the water, until she wordlessly rose and walked away.
5
The ocean wasn’t as calm it should’ve been this late at night. When the yacht stopped about five hundred yards from shore, all they could see were the twinkling lights of a party. Another boat farther in drifted along without the engine on. Miguel had seen it before. It belonged to one of the island’s oldest residents, Stanley something or other.
“What’re you looking at?” his girlfriend, Rachel, said from somewhere behind him.
“That boat. It’s just been drifting around for the past hour.”
“So what?”
“I know that guy. He’s never out this late. He’s an older dude. I wonder if he had a heart attack or something.”
“He’s probably passed out drunk. Like everyone else.”
“Yeah, maybe. Guy was really cool to me once. I’m gonna just swing over and check up on him.”
“Babe,” she said in the whiniest voice he’d ever heard, “you said there were awesome parties going on.”
“There are. We’ll head in in a minute. I’m just gonna go check up on him.” Miguel brushed past her and hopped up to the flying bridge.
Rachel was beautiful. No, he thought. She was much more than beautiful. Julia Roberts was beautiful. Rachel was a knockout. One of those women that turned men into blubbering idiots. But Miguel never had trouble with women. He had discovered early that if he asked out every beautiful woman he saw, he had about a fifty-fifty shot of getting a yes. With his wealth, garnered through years of buying up distressed properties, those odds were probably somewhere around seventy or eighty percent. Or, as he liked to believe, maybe he just really was that charming.
He swung his yacht around. The choppy waves made the vessel bounce. Rachel sat in a deckchair and looked annoyed that she was enduring this. But she would get over it. They had a few more days on the island before heading off to Rome for a week. What was she going to do? Ask that he take her back to her one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco? No way. Without even realizing it, she was bound to him, and though she might complain and whine, she would ultimately do whatever he asked.
The other boat bobbed in the water. Miguel cut his engines early and drifted forward, using momentum to carry the ship forward. Slowly, he glided in front of the other vessel before casting anchor. This close to shore, the water wasn’t much deeper than thirty feet.
No one was on the deck, and the lights in the cabin were off.
Miguel left the flying bridge. He was close enough to the other vessel that he could probably just hop between the two. “I’ll be right back,” he said to Rachel.
“Where you going?”
“On the other boat. I’m going to make sure he’s okay.”
“Him? What about me!”
Beauty or no, Rachel could certainly get on his nerves. She hadn’t seen hardship in her life. Her looks had sailed her through school and various employments without her having to put effort in. And then she just let men take care of her. She probably saw herself as some sort of ideal woman, one that used men for whatever means she needed. But Miguel saw her for what she actually was. A parasite. A gorgeous, hundred-and-ten-pound parasite.
He decided right then that, after Rome, he would look for another traveling companion. He could take only so much annoying.
Miguel stood up on the port side railing and eased his way onto the old man’s boat. For the past three years Miguel had been coming to the island, Stanley was always kind to him. Miguel knew about yachting, a passion he’d picked up since he’d earned his wealth a decade or so ago, but he didn’t realize how little he knew until Stanley showed him the ropes. How to tie a clove hitch and a rolling hitch and what the purpose of the different knots was, for example.
Miguel stood on the bow a moment but didn’t hear anything. He walked to the bridge and checked it out. Empty. Miguel took the stairs into the lower level of the boat. The space was messy, something you would expect from an old man who preferred to be alone. Crates of dynamite used for fishing lined the wall. Blow a stick, and any fish in the blast radius would float to the surface. Miguel saw it as cheating and didn’t like the fact that Stanley didn’t.
Empty beer cans filled the trash bin next to the unmade single bed. A few shirts and dirty jeans were thrown in random places on the floor. Miguel walked to the small bathroom. That was empty, too. The boat was abandoned.
Immediately, the worst-case scenario played in his head. What if Stanley had fallen overboard? The old man was probably drunk. He toppled over and just didn’t have the strength or coordination to climb back into his boat.
“Shit,” Miguel mumbled. He took the stairs up to the deck. He looked over to his own boat but didn’t see Rachel. The hairs on his neck stood up. A chilly feeling, like a breeze. He marched over to the starboard side and said, “Rachel? Rachel, you there?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” a small voice said from inside the cabin.
Miguel breathed a sigh of relief. He turned around to see if Stanley happened to leave the keys somewher
e when he noticed something near the stern. The moonlight illuminated it enough so that he could see it was some kind of discoloration on the transom.
Near some metal cleats on the transom, was a large puddle. He didn’t realize what it was at first. Some spilt red wine perhaps, mixed with seawater. But chunky, with little bits of what looked like meat. He bent over the puddle for a closer look. Likely red wine, he was sure of it. But when he drew close, he didn’t really smell anything.
Dabbing just the tip of his finger in it, feeling its warmth, he knew what it was instantly. Blood.
He jumped up and backed away from it, his eyes scanning the sea around the boat. His first thought was that Stanley had drunkenly slipped, hit his head somewhere, and fallen over. But the blood was pulpy, not just liquid. Something was wrong with this whole thing, and he didn’t want to be on this boat anymore.
He trotted over to the starboard side and hopped back onto his vessel. He ran up to the flying bridge and started the engine, the stern tucking low as he accelerated too quickly. Rachel must’ve been standing, because he heard a thump and she shouted, “What the hell?”
“We’re going to the police, hang on.”
“The police?” She stepped out onto the deck and looked up at the bridge. “For what?”
“I think Stanley’s dead.”
6
Mark Whittaker seldom got hangovers. So when he woke up with one sometime around noon, he knew he’d drunk too much the night before. A few beers led to a few more, which led to whiskey and then Jell-O shots. He didn’t really socialize unless he was drunk, and last night he had socialized. He vaguely remembered a long conversation with a selectman about 9-11 being an inside job. The selectman was adamant that Bush and Cheney wanted 9-11 so they could declare war on whomever they wanted.
Mark didn’t remember his response, but it had been something like agreeing. Though, of course, he didn’t actually believe that. He’d seen government from the inside out. Covering up the biggest terrorist attack in the world and blaming it on someone else was far beyond the capacity of the U.S. government. Missing all the signs of the attack when Bin Laden had declared he would attack the United States, and not noticing several Arabian and Egyptian flying students were learning to take off and fly but not to land—that sounded more like the government he had come to know in his work.
He rinsed his mouth out with a cup of water over the sink. The beach was clear of people with the exception of a cleaning crew picking up last night’s trash. Watching them work, backbreaking labor for which they were probably paid pennies, filled him with a sense of injustice. But it wasn’t injustice, not ultimately. Because if they didn’t have these jobs, they would starve. Some American corporation paid the islanders a buck fifty per hour at a factory further inland. The managers there worked the poor employees six days a week for twelve hours a day. But none of them complained. Because the alternative, without any type of welfare program, was that they would fight every day to scrape together enough to feed themselves and their families.
“You just getting up?”
His nearest neighbor, Daniel, held a fizzy fruit drink in a glass bottle. Daniel’s long hair reached his shoulders. He had informed Mark he’d been an investment banker until leaving the profession and retiring here. He was, though he never mentioned it, probably pretty wealthy, but he dressed like a bum. His shorts were always dirty, as were the spaces underneath his fingernails, and his shirts were all stained. Mark guessed he liked the freedom not only of leaving the world he came from but also of abandoning social norms and customs.
“Late night,” Mark said.
“Yeah? Good for you. Hey, I meant to ask ya, that girl I’ve been seeing, she’s got a sister, and they were looking for something to do this weekend. I thought the two of us could take them out on my boat for a day.”
“I don’t think so, Danny.”
“Dude, why not? I never see you date anybody, and when it falls in your lap, you don’t act on it. I would think you’re gay, except you don’t go out with dudes, either.”
“Just not into it right now. I’m not a kid anymore anyway. Sex is work now, sometimes more than it’s worth.”
Daniel chuckled. “What are you, ninety years old?” He shook his head. “You’re coming out with me.”
“I’ll think about it.”
Mark looked down the beach again, and out a few hundred yards from shore was the boat he’d seen last night. He knew the boat; it belonged to an old recluse named Stanley Fischer.
“Hey, Danny, what’s goin’ on with Stanley’s boat? It’s been out there all night.”
“Yeah?” Daniel glanced out there. “The whole night?”
“Yeah. I mean, it moved with the tide, but it’s just been drifting there. I’ve never seen him do that before.”
“Hmm.” He took another drink. “Weird. Stanley doesn’t usually stay out that long. He likes his little cabin in the jungle. You wanna go check it out?”
“I can’t right now. Got a lunch date.”
“Seriously? With who?”
“No one you’d know. But if it’s still out there tonight, maybe we should check up on him.”
“Sure thing.”
Mark changed into shorts and a loose button-front shirt. He thought back to the party last night as he dressed. The island had beach parties all the time, nothing new, but this was unusual in that the selectmen had thrown it for a single man, an executive from an oil company. As far as he knew, an oil company couldn’t want anything on this island, so he wondered why the selectmen decided to arrange that little shindig.
He opted to walk to a café by his house. While not in order of his sixteen-day rotation, and he’d been there just last week, it was probably his favorite of all the places to eat in the city.
The sun was bright, and he put on his sunglasses. The streets were filling with the weekend shoppers. Though they would find nothing mainstream, like a department store or Aldo’s, fine retail clothing shops sold their goods at abnormally high rates. The tourists imputed value onto something only in terms of money. So if they expected to sell, they had to mark the prices way up.
But to the locals, they gave an “island discount.” Something akin to about seventy percent off. Mark earned his island discount after two years, and they’d finally come around to seeing he was going to stay. One shopkeeper, a man who owned a shoe store, informed him that many Kaivalagi, the Fijian descriptive term for anyone white, tried to make a go at living there. But island fever set in after the first year. The really strong or stubborn ones lasted two years. After that, they ran from the island and back to wherever they came from as though chased by a plague. Two years was the limit, and anyone that lasted longer than that was accepted as one of their own.
Not a single table or booth was available in the tightly packed café. The hostess, a young girl of sixteen named Ashneel, told him she would fit him in next, though several groups were waiting for a table.
He sat down with the other groups and listened to their conversations. A group of six Australians was discussing some television show he’d never heard of. Then they began talking about recipes and other upcoming trips.
Ashneel nodded to him, and he followed her, to the chagrin of everyone else waiting. She sat him at a table for two by the window. She didn’t give him a menu because he didn’t need one.
“The same?” she said.
“Yes, please.”
Since he’d been coming here, he always ordered the pulled pork salad with extra vinegar ranch dressing. The pork was fresh, not imported. It came from a local, small hog farm, and he could taste the difference. He wondered what was in the meat back on the mainland to make it taste like an artificial imitation of the real thing.
He ate his meal with ice water. When he finished, he wiped his lips with the linen napkin then pulled out his phone. He placed it down in front of him, excitement tingling his belly, and dialed the number. She answered on the second ring.
“Hel
lo, Mark,” the soft, feminine voice said.
“Hey. How you doing?”
“Good. How’s the weather in paradise?”
“About eighty-five, no clouds. How’s Buffalo?”
“Still cold and gray.”
“I’ve told you to come out anytime. My treat.”
“I know. It’s just hard to get away from work. And Jake would be coming with me. I don’t know how comfortable that would be.”
“I know. Is she there?”
“She is, hold on.”
Some shuffling followed, and the quiet voice of a young girl came on the line. “Hi, Daddy.”
Mark’s heart sank in his chest. The pain and elation that hit him simultaneously was too much to bear. He didn’t want to speak; he just wanted to enjoy this moment. But she wouldn’t be there long. “Hi, baby. How are you?”
“I’m good. I got outta school yesterday. So I’m gonna be in the second grade next year.”
“Wow. I can’t believe how fast you’re growing up. I got that picture you sent me. I think you’re gonna be taller than me.”
A pause. “Daddy, when can I come out and see you?”
“Any day or time you want to, Sweetheart. You just tell me when.”
“Well, Mommy says it’s not good to come out by myself because I’m so little.”
“I know she does.” The pain was sharp and intense, a hypodermic needle slowly inserted into his chest. “I’ll come out there to visit you soon. How about that?”
“Yay! That’d be fun, Daddy.”
Mark choked back emotion. “I’ll see you soon, baby.”
“Bye, Daddy.”
His wife came back on the line. “How’s your BP?”
“It’s fine. I’m still on that blood pressure medication and it’s doing the trick. The atmosphere here doesn’t have any stress. I think that was the big difference.”
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