“You could have stopped using oil paints and just switched to acrylics. Nobody uses oils anymore.”
“I think the real issue was that she thought it was a waste of time. No money in it, I guess. No future.”
Sophie sniffed sympathetically. “Well, you never know. An easel and some watercolors could wash up any day now.”
“I won’t hold my breath.” Barry nudged her. “Et vous?”
“You say ‘toi,’ ‘vous’ is for people you don’t know well.”
“You think we know each other well?”
“Starting to, I suppose. And I would bring an espresso machine. Coffee would be nice. A subscription to Le Monde, too, so I could have something to read and keep up with the world.”
“No drafting table and AutoCAD?”
“Pfff, no, I don’t think so,” she answered, frowning at the thought. “Architecture was something Étienne and I did together. We were a good team, and we would build off of each other’s ideas. I’m not sure I could do it without him.”
“I don’t know. You did a pretty good job on our little house here.”
“Robinson Crusoe is a less demanding client than the ministre de la culture. And my little sand castles aren’t quite up to par with Le Corbusier.”
“Great artists have to work with the materials they have.”
Sophie was quiet for a moment; Barry worried he had said something wrong.
“Everything okay?”
“Oui. And there’s one part of my birthday wish still left.”
“What’s that?”
“I said that after my octopus salad, I’d like to take a walk down by the water.”
“I think that can be arranged.” Barry climbed to his feet and helped Sophie to hers, brushing the loose sand from her back. “Après vous.”
“It’s not ‘vous,’ it’s ‘toi,’ putain, how many times do I have to tell you?” And she feigned annoyance, but in reality she was quite pleased. Far from saying something wrong, Barry had given her an idea with his last comment about great artists, and the brisk clockwork of her mind was already whirring—Barry’s birthday was less than two months away.
They did a lap of the island over the course of a moonset, after which Sophie suggested a swim. Barry was reluctant at first—he didn’t want to get his bandages wet, and the incident with Balthazar still gave him the willies. But then again, Sophie had experienced far worse with sharks. Sure, why not, he finally agreed.
Sophie went in first, stirring the water around her with her fingers. Barry followed close behind. The warmth of the day persisted in the shallows, and he couldn’t recall the ocean ever feeling so pleasant. They waded out until it reached their chests, then turned on their backs to admire the light show above. The distance from the shore was making Barry nervous, but Sophie didn’t turn back, so neither did he.
The moon was low and bright. The ripples shimmered. They took to treading water and floated side by side. From their vantage point, they could see the entirety of their island, a quiet sanctuary in a star-crossed sea. “C’est tellement beau,” Sophie whispered over the sloshing of the water. Barry, whose French had improved enough to at least understand that much, concurred. She looked at him, eyes glossy with moonshine, and smiled. He smiled back, his heart quickened, and she moved in, just a little bit closer …
And then something pale and sleek came crashing down into the water between them.
“What the fuck?”
Then it happened again to the left of them, and twice more behind, and in seconds, a hail of feathery torpedoes was raining all around. Sophie dove under the water while Barry shouted and covered his head. At least until the anonymous dive bombers came plopping up to the surface, many with fish still wriggling in their mouths. Sophie resurfaced just a few seconds behind them, pushing the wet hair from her eyes for a better view.
“It’s the birds!” she cried out in pleasant surprise. “They’ve come back to the island!”
Indeed they had. The island’s entire colony of sooty terns had returned that very eve, from wherever they had fled to avoid the destruction of the cyclone. Habitual night feeders, they exploited the nocturnal habits of fish to their own advantage—when the schools rose to the surface to feed in the moonlight, the sooty terns were happy to greet them.
Barry slapped water at a nearby tern and couldn’t help laughing. Sophie splashed water at Barry and couldn’t help joining in. The return of the birds felt like something fortuitous, if not portentous, their own Capistrano brought down to miniature.
“Let’s head back in and let them eat in peace. They’re probably starving.”
“So? Two hours ago, so were we.”
“Come on, it’s time.”
Sophie led the way with an elegant sidestroke; Barry trailed reluctantly behind, doing his very best doggy paddle. They swam until the water became too shallow, then stood up on the sand and walked the rest of the way in.
“I think I’m going to sleep,” Sophie pronounced with an exaggerated yawn. “Bonne nuit.”
“You’re going to bed already?”
Sophie nodded. “I am. But thank you again. It was the best birthday I’ve ever had.”
She kissed him on his one unbandaged cheek before ducking into their palm-thatched hut. Barry stood alone in the darkness for a sad and solitary minute, letting the breeze do the delicate work of drying his skin. Then he took a seat beside what remained of their fire and set the shortwave radio upon his knee. He clicked it on and turned the volume down low, scanning the same frequencies he had listened to before for some hint of a voice, something akin to what he had heard out at sea. But there was nothing. Had he picked up just a small snippet of a radio transmission, or even some snatch of a casual conversation between ships, he might have been able to make the case for inflating the raft and going back out there. Whatever transmissions he had detected before, however, were not repeated. In fact, even the Tahitian station had called it a night. Once again, nothing but those haunting whistles and the silver of static. Once again, sitting outside all alone beneath the stars. He clicked the radio off and leaned back against a palm tree, envisioning an alternate universe in which Sophie had never been married, a world in which sooty terns did not exist, and a place where ships did not pass in the night but actually took heed of your lonesome flares.
27
The night of Sophie’s birthday may have proved a romantic failure for Barry, but the sight of the terns did get him thinking. He had witnessed the birds dive for fish before—in addition to night feeding, they would swoop down just before sunset, when the slanted light caught the glitter of scales. But seeing the birds fish en masse out by the edge of the reef had put an idea in his head. From the flopping glints in their greedy mouths, he knew there must be fish aplenty on the cusp of the lagoon. Whole schools, judging by their consistent success, clustered out there by the encircling coral. The question was how to traverse the hundred yards of seawater to cast his line. Not that there were no fish to be had in the erstwhile Balthazar’s cove—there certainly were, and since Balthazar’s demise, Barry had been angling at the respectable rate of one or two good-sized catches a week (usually snappers that Sophie either baked in the coals or steamed in a banana leaf). That, together with the bananas, which had finally begun to grow back, proved just enough to keep them alive. But in the cove, it was a question of waiting for the occasional timid straggler to nose its way in. Out there by the reef, where the terns took their business, there appeared to be fish galore, ready and ripe for the picking. Barry was tired of hanging his hunger on fickle piscine whims. He wanted to go out and get them for a change, and if such a thing could be achieved, he knew the hard days of famine would be forever behind them. He had done it with Balthazar, why couldn’t he go after fish as well?
The life raft was a possibility, but not a horribly convenient one. Inflating it by mouth was an exhausting hour-long chore, and keeping it inflated left it at the mercy of all sorts of sharp shells and sea urchi
n spines. Seeing as it was their only means of escape from the island in the event of an emergency, Barry and Sophie had both agreed that it was best stowed away, carefully folded in the duffel bag with the survival gear for the day they might truly need it.
Which left Barry with only one option: If he wanted to ply the fish-rich waters that surrounded the reef, he would have to build and captain a boat of his own. Not the easiest task for a midwesterner whose nautical experience was limited to a few feckless hours on a summer camp Sunfish more than two decades prior, but not beyond the realm of possibility, either. And the inkling of an idea had already formed in his head. Barry had not forgotten the coconut log that had saved him in the storm. Its supine bulk was on the beach where he had left it—he passed it daily on his way to the cove. And each time he saw it, he started to wonder: Could he make a canoe from it?
Indeed he could. The outer trunk of a coconut palm, if stripped of its pulpy core, could be used to make a lightweight, seaworthy craft. In fact, in the Maldives—not so very far in oceanic terms from Barry and Sophie’s island—fishermen had been hewing their dhoni boats from coconut timber since time immemorial, traveling with ease from one atoll to the next. Of course, Barry didn’t know any of this. Aside from a few basement carpentry projects he had helped his father with as a boy, and apart from a trip to the South Street Seaport Museum in New York, he knew practically nothing of woodworking or shipbuilding. What he did possess, however, courtesy of a dusty display in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, was the knowledge that ancient indigenous peoples of the Midwest had used fire to make dugout canoes. He recalled that on a fifth-grade social studies field trip, a docent with a bad permanent had explained the entire process, describing how they burned out the middle with coals to hollow the log. Who was to say that same technique Ohio’s Paleo-Indians once used to fashion their water-going vessels couldn’t be applied to a massive coconut log on a Polynesian beach? After giving it some thought, Barry decided no one was to say. He discussed the idea with Sophie, who was initially reluctant to give up precious driftwood from their cooking stash for such a far-fetched plan. But after some cajoling, along with the promise of potentially unlimited fish down the line, she agreed it was at least worth a shot. A week or two of raw sushi wouldn’t kill them, and a future without a dependable food source beyond bananas just might.
The first step was to create a foundational boat log of just the right length. Ancient Polynesians would have used basalt adzes for such an undertaking, but Barry had neither the time nor the expertise to fashion advanced Neolithic tools (the Cleveland Museum of Natural History seemed to have guarded such knowledge more carefully). Instead, he picked two points on the log roughly ten feet apart, dug out pits in the sand beneath them, and, with the help of his trusty Bic and some kindling, got two driftwood fires going in just the right spots. It was a process, but eventually the coconut wood began to glow and cinder, and voilà!—after an entire day of careful burning, Barry was able to roll away from the main trunk a ten-foot portion of serviceable lumber.
What to do next? It was Sophie, the experienced designer, who came to the rescue, as Barry was at a loss. After some rather heated deliberation, she convinced him that he needed to shape the basic canoe form and flatten the top before trying to burn out the core. As to how to initiate that, it was also her idea to recruit some of the pumice stones that littered the rocky center of their island and put them to good use as sanders. Employing the ever-versatile Charles Tyrwhitt dress shirt as a tote bag, they gathered half a dozen good-sized stones and went to work—and work it was. The two of them laboring side by side for two straight days yielded little more than a scuffed-up log and four excruciatingly sore arms. But patience is a virtue for a reason, and after a perspiration-filled week of relentless sanding and shaping, the thing was starting to look unmistakably boatlike. The outer palm rings had been ground down to nubs, the soon-to-be bow and stern were slowly gaining some form, and the top was just concave enough to hold a few embers.
Meticulously, with the utmost care, Barry and Sophie laid a wreath of dried fronds and wood shavings along the shallow trough that ran down its middle. Then, with a shared nod and held breath, they lit the line of kindling ablaze and watched the agonizing slowness with which it burned and smoked. The minutes turned to hours, the hours to the better part of a day, but it was working. Holy shit, was it working. The two of them began to jump up and down, as giddy as schoolchildren once it became clear that the fire was eating out the center of the log, turning it to a bone-white ash. The results definitely weren’t pretty, but it was certainly a start.
“It looks like a big coffin,” Sophie proclaimed after Barry had quenched with seawater the last of its smoldering embers.
“Then call me Ishmael, because this coffin’s gonna float.”
Sophie, however, was dubious. “It still needs work.”
“I can sand it and smooth it down some more, but I think it’s pretty good.” Barry eyed his handiwork up and down, giving it an approving thump with the heel of his foot.
“Je ne sais pas. It doesn’t really look stable enough for the ocean.”
“Why are you always so cynical?”
“Pfff. I’m not being cynical, I’m being realistic. I don’t think it’s ready to go out yet.”
“Well, there’s only one way to find out.” Barry wiped his sweaty hands with the dress shirt and tossed it into what he was confident enough to call a boat. “Let’s push it down to the water. It’s time for a test run.”
Sophie shook her head disapprovingly but relented. “Putain. If you say so.”
A short spate of heaves, a brief set of groans, and the crude canoe was committed to a gritty slide down toward the surf.
And Sophie was right. No sooner had the prow kissed the water and Barry pulled himself in than a wave—just a couple footer, not even a big one—tipped the whole kit and caboodle, sending its overeager captain spilling into the foam and its more prudent first mate into fits of laughter.
“I wouldn’t try to circumnavigate the globe just yet, Monsieur Magellan.”
Barry emerged from the water sputtering and coughing, but laughing nonetheless. “Just shut up and help me pull it back in, okay?”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” she answered with a snappy salute, and waded in to assist in dragging the ponderous thing to shore.
Weary from the exertion and the disappointment, the two part-time boatbuilders and full-time castaways sat back on the damp edge of the sand and stared at the beached dugout, which, while flailing about in the surf only moments before, had borne far more resemblance to an unwieldy log than the lithe fishing vessel Barry had envisioned.
“Well, crap.”
“It just needs more work, Barry. I told you that.”
“How is more work going to keep it from tipping over every time a wave comes along?”
“Do you think your stupid Mayflower was built in ten days? You have to get it right. That’s the first rule of design: You don’t put an object into service until it’s finished and you’re sure that it’s ready.”
“Okay. Any ideas?”
Sophie shrugged. “Sure. You need to widen the middle and narrow the front and back to help keep it stable and going in one direction. And you probably should add that thing that the canoes have in the cave.”
Barry cocked a confused eyebrow in her direction. “What?”
“You know, the pictures in the cave, up on the side of the petite montagne.”
“Sophie, what in the hell are you talking about?”
“The paintings of boats inside that little cave where you took me during the cyclone. I thought you’d seen them.”
“I was a little preoccupied at the time with a giant tidal wave, Sophie. So no, I don’t recall any pictures of canoes.”
“Pfff. Let’s get the flashlight. I’ll show you.”
A determined Sophie Ducel and an extremely bemused Barry Bleecker marched back to the campsite, where they picked up the wat
erproof flashlight from the survival kit as well as a pair of bananas and two strips of smoked octopus jerky before heading to the tower of rock that composed the island’s core. Sophie took the lead this time, which Barry did not mind in the least, as it afforded him a pleasant view of her derriere.
They took the climb slowly, which was nice, and not even the occasional vomit attack from nested terns was enough to sour the mood. It was a hot day, humid, too, and once they crested the tops of the palms, the unobstructed breeze was delicious on their skin.
“Here, regarde là.” Sophie had reached the mouth of the hollow and was jabbing at the darkness with the beam of her flashlight. “Look at the paintings.”
Barry pulled himself onto the ledge and ducked inside beneath the low-hanging rock. Squinting, he examined the illuminated wall inside. Just as she had described, almost too well preserved to be true, were what he had to assume were Polynesian rock paintings. And they were stunning—a sweeping, stylized seascape of boats, painted in whites and blacks, their edges nearly as sharp as the day they were put there.
“Wow” was all that Barry could muster, crouching in the darkness and staring up at the mural. “Wow,” he muttered again. Up until that point, it had never occurred to him that other human beings, let alone artists, had set foot on their island. The realization added a whole new dimension to its seemingly meager topography. He crept up close and touched ever so gently his fingers to the pigment, and in doing so he felt a shiver, as if caressing a ghost.
“See?” Sophie had assumed a crouch right beside him. “The big boat with all the little men on it is like a—Comment dit-on ‘catamaran’?”
“We say catamaran. Same word.”
“It’s like a catamaran, with a plank resting on top of two canoe floats. But the little ones…” And she jiggled the beam to point them out. “They’re thin and elegant, not big and bulky. And they have that thing hanging off the side to help keep them stable on the sea.”
Barry smacked his forehead. “Of course. They’re outrigger canoes. I remember reading that the Polynesians used them to go between islands. I think it was in that Michener book.”
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