Castle of Water

by Dane Huckelbridge

  Shelter complete, Sophie moved on to the hearth, circling their fire pit in rocks to establish a cooking area. As for a counter space, there weren’t a ton of suitable stones, but she was able to locate one larger, flat rock that she rolled through the sand to the edge of their fire pit. She found four smaller rocks, all of similar shape and size, and used those as legs, resting the flat slab upon them to create a very small but perfectly useful table.

  Done. Well, almost done. There was one thing left she’d wanted to do before preparing for dinner, although she was concerned about the amount of rope it might take. She measured the coil and decided there was enough to spare; besides, they could always take it apart if needed. Using the survival kit utility knife, she began measuring out lengths, singing under her breath a bawdy mountain song that her grandfather had taught her and her brother years before, one that her mother did not approve of in the least.

  Meanwhile, no longer quite so crestfallen but certainly discouraged, Barry trudged back to camp with his meager harvest of clams. Tremendous shafts of mango-colored sunlight came sloping in from the west, and the breezes whisked sea spray up from the whitecaps, spritzing the beach in a rainbow mist. Something jarringly out of place pricked at his ears; he froze for a moment to put his finger on the source.

  “Sex Machine.” James Brown. No mistake about it, the wind was whipping strains of its funky rhythms from around the horn of the island. Baffled, Barry picked up his pace to a steady jog, rounded the bend that preceded the camp, and dropped his jaw to an unexpected sight: a perfect, palm-thatched shelter, a small table set for two, the shortwave radio from the survival kit doing its own tinny rendition of the Godfather of Soul, and, the icing on the cake, a rope hammock hanging daintily between two palms. Sophie, considerably cleaner and more composed than when he had left her, was crouched beside it, occupied with stripping a coconut of its husk.

  “Wow,” Barry exclaimed. “You really fixed the place up.”

  “It needed some work. You left it a mess.” Sophie paused to push back an errant strand of chestnut hair. “Did you catch a fish?”

  “No, no fish,” he answered, choosing not to mention the beast that had stolen their dinner. “But I think I found some clams.” Emptying his bloated pockets, he dumped the two blue-tinted mollusks at her feet. She inspected them closely.

  “Ça marche. I think we can eat them.”

  “I think so, too. I’ll put them in the coals. They should cook pretty quickly, and we can have them with bananas.”

  “I’d rather have them with this coconut.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “There are just a few coconut palms on the end of the island. I saved the coconut water inside, we can drink it with dinner.”

  “How did you get it down from the tree?”

  Sophie picked up a hunk of volcanic rock and tossed it up and down in her palm. “Le fastball,” she said with a slight torque of the lips that verged on a smile.

  Barry did smile and celebrated their small burst of good fortune with another Russian cigarette. Three quick flicks of the Bic and it was lit, filling their wild beachhead with at least a half-civilized smell.

  “Why do you think the survival kit had cigarettes, anyway?”

  Sophie shrugged. “To bribe local fishermen, I presume.”

  Barry chuckled. “Like that would even work.”

  “It worked with you, didn’t it?”

  She had a point. Barry picked up the clams and arranged them in the coals. The palm fronds burned quick and hot and were certainly not ideal for creating coal beds, but the clams probably did not require all that much cooking. Once he was satisfied with their position, he tried out the hammock, settling gently into its web. “Sex Machine” had concluded, and a disc jockey announced the next song—“Lookin’ Out My Back Door,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival—in an Asian language he could not identify. He remembered hearing the song quite often on the car radio in Cleveland, on cold winter mornings when his father drove him to school. Sometimes they’d both sing along, Just got home from Illinois, locked the front door, oh boy …

  “This hammock is great,” Barry remarked, locking his fingers behind his head, watching the waltz of the palm trees above.

  “I’m glad you like it, because you’re going to be sleeping in it.”

  “I am?”

  “Of course. Tonight, anyway. Someone should stay outside with the flare gun for when the rescue planes come. They could pass by at night.”

  “Okay. Sure.” The palm-thatched shelter did look inviting, but a breeze-rocked hammock wasn’t a bad alternative. Barry closed his eyes; he could smell the clams now, wow, a goddamn clambake on a desert island in the middle of the South Pacific. Who’d believe it?

  “This all feels like a dream, doesn’t it?” Barry stated rather whimsically, pausing to tap a cap of ash from his Russian cigarette. “I mean, it’s all so surreal, you know, both of us here, alone on this—” A hard, twisting pinch to his rib cage yanked him from his philosophizing. “Ow, shit!”

  “This isn’t a dream, putain de merde. So wake up and quit acting like a typical stupid American.”

  Sophie glowered at him, tremendously perturbed by something he had said. Christ, thought Barry, this French girl. He rubbed at the fresh bruise and reconsidered the situation he was in. It certainly would make a good story someday, having survived a plane crash and swum to an island and spent a week, maybe less, with a pretty young castaway—and after that flotilla of steaming ships came to whisk them away, he thought, he’d never have to see her again.

  11

  Bananas, coconuts, pools of fresh rainwater, clusters of accessible clams—the supplies that the island provided may have struck Barry and Sophie as a convenient accident, but their existence owed far more to the prescience of Polynesians than to the generosity of Providence. Barry and Sophie did not yet realize it, but they were hardly the first visitors to land on the island—in fact, early Polynesians had beaten them to it by hundreds of years. For while medieval Europeans were still clinging like frightened children to the wading pool wall of the Atlantic, these bold and inventive people were venturing into the deep end of an entire Pacific hemisphere, landing their immaculately carved outrigger canoes in such far-flung places as Samoa, Easter Island, New Zealand, Hawaii, Tahiti—and, eventually, even the tiny island that Barry and Sophie came to call home.

  To those ancient Polynesians, a three-thousand-mile voyage over open seas was nothing, a mere interstate road trip to see the grandparents in Illinois. But as is the case with any good road trip, a few rest stops were in order, to stretch the legs, relieve the bladder, and restock supplies. And with Motel 6 and Wendy’s still a ways in the offing, these Polynesian adventurers had to get creative. In effect, they created their own rest stops, and Barry and Sophie’s island had once been just such a place. No, the barren scrap of rock the Polynesians discovered was far too small for long-term habitation. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t plant a few banana trees, seed a few clam beds, release a few pigs and chickens, and stop there for the night when they needed a break. They even carved a pair of cisterns into the island’s central rock face, with channels carefully chipped away to coax in the rain. The island served its purpose wonderfully, becoming a regular Howard Johnson’s on the oceanic highway that connected a widely dispersed and highly peripatetic society for more than five hundred years.

  Then, with the arrival of that first wave of colonially minded Europeans, all of that came to a grinding halt. By the time Gauguin landed in the Marquesas in the late nineteenth century, such times were largely forgotten, with a formerly seafaring people having become more or less sedentary in their habits and the uninhabited island in question erased from their cultural memory. It was last visited by Polynesians in the year 1762, when a Tahitian prince known to the history books as Tu-nui-ea-i-te-atua-i-Tarahoi Vairaatoa Taina Pomare spent a week there with his entourage on his way to visit distant cousins in Eiao, and last alighted upo
n by Westerners in 1767—Samuel Wallis of the HMS Dolphin dropped anchor there for the night while circumnavigating the globe, killing every wild pig and chicken on the island in the process. The coconuts, bananas, cisterns, and clam beds prevailed, however, dutifully awaiting the next batch of travelers in need of sanctuary—who, as we now know, happened to arrive almost two and a half centuries later in the form of one Barry Bleecker and one Sophie Ducel.

  Not Providence, exactly, but providential indeed.

  12

  The night found the two fresh castaways in their designated positions—Barry cradled shirtless in the hammock, flare gun atop his belly, Sophie nested away in her shelter, trying to muffle her sobs. Barry considered checking in on her to see if she was all right but suspected such things would only result in another bilingual tongue-lashing. And frankly, he was a little afraid of her. Besides, he was an American, and a midwesterner at that—grief was far better suppressed than shared. So he remained in the hammock, staring quietly skyward, the moon above him a pearly chaperone to all manner of cosmic splendors, but sadly no blinking rescue planes or winking choppers. The closest thing was satellites, small reminders of civilized light, crawling their way through the tangle of constellations. Barry remembered them from the same Boy Scout camp that had taught him basic first aid and female anatomy. He’d received the astronomy merit badge following a full week spent under the night’s perforated ceiling, and his instructor had actually known each satellite by name. “G-47-X12 should be coming along,” and sure enough, a fleck of light would slip through the stars. And Barry found comfort in that, in their lingering presence, and he wished he knew their names as well.

  At some late hour, he finally took out his contacts and surrendered to the darkness, closing his eyes, drinking in the breeze. But thanks to the roughness of the ropes and his evolving sunburn, he was unable to sleep. Itchy and restless, he decided to take a crack at the shortwave radio instead. It was a portable Grundig, very much like one he had received for Christmas when he was just ten years old. He’d spent almost every night of that winter with the little radio whirring beside his pillow, adjusting the dials with a Swiss watchmaker’s precision, navigating a vast ocean of static until the sweet whale song of some faraway station came rising from the deep. There was Radio Havana, Voice of Free China, Deutsche Welle, the BBC. Sure, it was no great shakes in hindsight, but to a ten-year-old Cleveland boy in a flyover state, such sounds were nothing short of magic, hints at what awaited beyond the bleak soot of the horizon. He would listen in secret, with the volume almost but not quite extinguished and the speaker pressed tightly to his ear.

  And now he had at last ended up in exactly the sort of exotic, faraway locale that he had longed for as a boy, only to do exactly the same thing. But with considerably less luck. Perhaps because of solar winds or distant storms, viable stations were hard to come by. Like timid leviathans they refused to surface, remaining hidden below the rolling whitecaps of static. There was, however, something out there. Every so often, snatches of a disembodied voice, ghostly as sin, would come warbling through the crackling waves. Like a crossed telephone line, a conversation in the background thin as a whisper and too faint to hear. And each time it happened, Barry would press his ear even closer to the speaker, straining to make some sense of voices that he wasn’t entirely sure were voices at all. But he could not. There was no sense to make. The signals were too weak, too far away. Just comet trails, there and then gone again, drowned out and lost at sea. So he gave up trying to find them and settled instead for the comfort of static. Eventually, he dozed off and the charge on the radio wore down, the whistles settling out to a hum, the silver whiteness of that static fading into the blackness of silence. Then there was only the waves and the trees.

  As for Sophie, she fell asleep shortly after Barry, after having spent most of the night gagging on her grief. She’d been able to keep it simmering quietly on the back burner for most of the day, but it came boiling back when she was all alone in the darkness. It was unbearably visceral, as if an essential organ, one that could not be replaced or transplanted, had been ripped with indifference right from her gut. Her Étienne was gone—no, much worse than gone. “Gone” was resting peacefully beneath French platane trees in a velvet-lined box. The place he had been dragged to was the pure stuff of nightmares, the raw substance of dread. And at the one moment he had truly needed her, his face awash in fear and regret, she’d been unable to help him, powerless to do anything. She wondered if she’d made the right choice out there in the ocean—if perhaps she should have joined him, surrendered instead and gone down by his side.

  So great was her sadness, she even considered going to talk to the American, to beg him for comfort, to let him tell her that everything would be all right. But she could not. No, a French girl could not do such things, never disclose there might be a cant to the perfect posture, a shaky wheel in the noble carriage. It was impossible. So instead she let her sobs rock her to sleep, terrified of the nightmares to come but giving in at last to whatever horrors midnight might bring.

  But the strangest thing. When she finally dozed off, there were no dark things waiting for her there—no sucking whirlpools or circling sharks. Just her grandfather Jean-Pierre Ducel, the mountain guide from the Pyrenees with whom she had spent her summers all those years before. He had died from a heart attack back when she was in university, but in her dream there he was, dressed in his wool knee breeches and red Gavarnie socks, sitting beside her, shaving off slices of saucisson sec with his Laguiole knife. He smiled through the bushiness of his mustache, told her to eat up, it was time to go. Allons-y, ma chérie, he said. Il faut avoir la niaque. She finished the dried sausage slices and they stood up together, brushing the pine needles from the seats of their pants. Then they started marching upward, ever upward, clearing the spindled boles of pines, cresting the top of an ancient ridge, entering upon a field of pure white snow, mountains rising all around them, ancient things that feared no sea.…

  13

  “No planes or ships during the night?”

  Barry massaged the sleep out of his eyes, easing his feet over the hammock with a groan and a wince—his sunburn had worsened considerably overnight. “The French navy pulled up briefly, we had coffee and croissants, and they said they’d send for help.”

  “You’re an imbécile,” murmured Sophie, less than amused with his attempt at a joke.

  “How did you sleep?”

  “Fine,” she lied. “And you?”

  “Pretty well,” he lied back. “Christ, I would kill for a toothbrush.”

  “Maybe you can buy one on your way to get some water.” She tossed him one of the plastic water bags—it bounced off his chest and fell to the sand.

  “Maybe you can get it yourself.”

  “Do you want breakfast or not?”

  “Breakfast? What…” And then he sniffed. Eggs. Somehow, she was cooking eggs. He squinted down over her shoulder and noticed the little omelet she was prodding atop a small driftwood fire, using one of their stainless-steel drinking cups as a pan.

  “Whoa! Where did you get that?”

  “I found two eggs in a bird’s nest by the rocks.”

  Barry felt a slight inkling of appreciation, perhaps even admiration, but was at a loss for how best to express it. “I’ll go get some water” was all he said, putting in his contacts from the case and gathering up the water bag.

  “Bon. And try to get some more eggs, too, while you’re at it.”

  “I don’t know about the eggs, but I can definitely bring back some more bananas.”

  He plodded off across the sand toward the island’s interior, shaking his head. It was the infuriating insouciance with which she said it—she might as well have been asking him to grab a baguette on his way home from work. God, these ridiculous French.

  Barry did have to admit, though, the interior of the island was growing on him. It was a nice respite from all that sea and sand, and although certainly differen
t in terms of its foliage, it was not entirely unlike a midwestern forest. The undergrowth was tough on the soles of his feet, and the insects there were more of a nuisance, but it was peaceful, a silence tended to by the comforting rustle of trees rather than the disconcerting roll of the surf. In fact, it was almost pleasant. He wrested a bunch of green bananas from a shaggy tree and slung it over his sunburned shoulder, gaining in doing so the courage—audacity, even—to whistle, with the insouciance of someone grabbing a six-pack of beer at a bodega after work. God, these ridiculous Americans, he snickered to himself.

  And the water was spectacular. Barry hadn’t realized how parched he was. At the two freshwater pools in the mountain’s rocky base, he quenched his thirst with wild abandon, drinking it down in tremendous gulps. Once adequately hydrated, he dunked the water bag under, let it fill, and sealed the top. He gazed up past the rock ledges, at the pillar of seabirds that circled above, their cries that morning unduly harsh—maybe they were upset about the missing eggs. He didn’t see any nests with eggs nearby, but he did notice a single white feather on one of the rocks, and something about it appealed to him. He picked it up and decided to take it back for Sophie. Who knows? Maybe she’d like it.