Castle of Water

by Dane Huckelbridge

  Mental gears once again grinding, Barry fiddled with the tuning knob a little more; it took some time, but a signal from America eventually came through, a religious station droning on about some form of twangy salvation. Barry climbed to his feet, adjusted his breechcloth, and followed the blur of sand to the other side of the island, darker and cooler in the mountain’s long shadow. Again, the same—the signal strengthened ever so slightly when the antenna was pointed in the opposite direction, a touch north but mostly east.

  With Barry’s suspicions confirmed—that signal strength could be used as a crude homing beacon of sorts—his intentions shifted in a more local direction. The Marquesas. The island chain they had been supposed to land upon at one twenty-five P.M. almost three years earlier, before the storm sent their Cessna veering tragically off course. He never had been able to receive a shortwave signal. But now, upon more thoughtful consideration, he suspected that was almost certainly due to the fact that the islands were simply too small to have a shortwave station. A few ham radios, sure, but no real broadcasts. And as for FM, there was no way those signals could travel the distance over all that ocean—modulated frequencies were great for the Doobie Brothers or Steely Dan at close range, but terrible for broadcasting outside of city limits. Standard AM signals, however … well, that was a possibility. As a boy, Barry recalled getting the occasional AM signal in Cleveland all the way from Quebec, that peculiar form of French trickling down from across the border. Could he have the same luck there in Polynesia? It was worth a shot. He’d never given the standard AM dial much attention, but perhaps something reasonably local could poke its way in.

  It took him an hour, but he found it. Broadcasting not in French, as he expected, but in the native and vowel-rich Marquesan, faint as a whisper and just as mysterious. He couldn’t make out anything that was said beyond the names of several islands, but that was enough: Nuku Hiva, Fatu Hiva, Hiva Oa, Moho Tani. Music to his ears. He recognized them instantly; he had encountered them time and time again in his biographies of Paul Gauguin and stared at their position on the map for days before quitting his job at the bank and packing up his paintbrushes. They were somewhere out there.

  Like the water witches his grandpa had once used in Macoupin County, Illinois, Barry executed the slow and patient walk of a diviner, his dowsing rod the antenna of a weather-beaten Grundig rather than a forked hazel twig. In his half-blind state, he stepped on sharp shells and stubbed his toes against rocks, but he hardly noticed. He was sure that he was on to something. And when the signal leapt enthusiastically at the island’s southeasternmost terminus, so did he. They were there. How far away, he had no idea, but islands occupied by humans could be found in that direction. Hot damn.

  An entire week passed before he picked up the Marquesan AM signal again. But this time he was ready, with the magnetic compass from the survival kit in hand. In painstaking increments, he adjusted the antenna, with the radio resting atop a north-pointing marker he had scratched out in a patch of damp sand. He marked the second position off at the signal’s crescendo, comparing it with the degree markers on the compass and using his fingers to scratch out the numerals. Just as he suspected. The Marquesas were a little south, but mostly east. Around 110, maybe 120 degrees.

  Based on that revelation, he decided to sit and wait until later in the afternoon for the shortwave station to come in from Tahiti. He knew by heart the frequency that harbored the station; it was simply a matter of time before the signal came through. When it finally did, he applied the same technique, positioning the antenna just right and marking its position off in the sand. Mostly south, but just a touch west. Around two hundred degrees.

  Because of his eyesight, Barry was forced to crouch directly over his diagram and study it with a fierce squint. But something was coming together. Those two vectors he knew could form a triangle, with one of the vertices representing their current location. Obviously, the storm had blown their flight far off course, to somewhere vaguely northwest of the Marquesas. Just how far, he did not know. Barry did recall, however, that Tahiti and the Marquesas were a bit over eight hundred miles apart—the third side of that magic triangle, one that he began to delineate with a trembling finger. Bent over on his knees now, the sand only inches from his face, he studied the new diagram. Angles, hypotenuses, Pythagoras, sine, cosine, tangent … the answer had to be there somewhere. The formula that would allow him to calculate the distance to the nearest island. Only Barry couldn’t find it. For if he had been a poor student of Boy Scout first aid, he had been an even worse one of trigonometry.

  Utterly perplexed, Barry collapsed onto his elbows and buried his face in his hands, grunting aloud in frustration. He had no idea how to make sense of it all. Defeated for the time being, he gathered his hips beneath him and sat cross-legged before the diagram, staring down at its incomplete blur. Well, almost defeated. Because while his little exercise in triangulation had proven futile, it had not been totally unproductive. Using his finger once again, he drew two clusters of islands where he had guessed the Marquesas and Tahiti to be. Somewhere to the northwest—where, exactly, he could not say—two castaways were stranded on a minuscule and otherwise uninhabited beach. But he knew in which direction both island clusters could be found. The Marquesas were likely closer, given that they were within distance to receive the occasional AM signal and that they had been flying for some time when the storm hit. But the Marquesas were also composed of just a handful of islands—if one was to make the trek, the possibility existed of missing them altogether. Tahiti, on the other hand, must have been considerably farther. Maybe too far to even consider. But Tahiti, he knew from his time spent poring over travel guides, was surrounded by an archipelago of hundreds of tiny islands. The voyage in that direction would be far longer and even more perilous, but if one could traverse all that open sea, one would be far more likely to bump into something. The trade winds could be problematic, but between tacking and paddling, they were not insurmountable. And even if no land was ever sighted in either direction, simply being closer to inhabited islands meant the chances of running into a boat or a plane would increase exponentially—and being rescued at sea wasn’t a bad option either. He remembered telling Sophie, the first time they had seen the old Polynesian cave paintings together, how those ancient people had known exactly what they were doing and precisely where they were going when they set out onto the open seas. Was he inching closer to that category? Admittedly, Barry was hardly a nautical expert, and he did not know exactly what he was doing. But the countless hours he’d logged on the Askoy III did count for something. And yes, he was far from being able to pinpoint their precise location on a map, had they even possessed one. But he did know in what general directions civilization could be found, if he were only to point the Askoy’s nose its way.

  If. A big word. A humongous, daunting word, in fact, when your home was a five-acre island, your boat a rickety outrigger canoe, and the love of your life now seven months pregnant and soon to give birth. If there was only some way to get them all safely home. If only someone would come and rescue them, if only he knew what the hell he was supposed to do. If. Two letters the size of the world.

  And just then, he felt Sophie’s hand, small and cool on his sunbaked back.

  “Qu’est-ce que tu fais, mon amour?”

  “Nothing, baby.” Barry stood to kiss her, using his foot to sweep away what under better circumstances might have been the first wings of a plan.

  “You’re a sand painter, too, now?” she said both adorably and teasingly.

  “It’s a little more plentiful around here than canvas. You hungry?”

  “Oui. I could eat an elephant.”

  “Probably no pachyderms on the menu, but maybe I can whip up some baked bananas.”

  “With salt and coconut on top?”

  “Avec plaisir. It’s the only way I make ’em.”

  “Ça marche.”

  “How’s Junior doing?”

  “I thin
k she’s hungry, too,” Sophie replied, setting both hands gently on the bulge of her stomach. “She had the hiccups again earlier.”

  “So the baby’s definitely a ‘she’ now?”

  Sophie shrugged. “Oui. I think so.”

  “Well, if she looks anything like her mother, she’s going to be very beautiful.”

  “Pfff. You sound like some ridiculous Hollywood movie, Barry.”

  “Then I’ll just hope that she’s healthy and has all of her fingers and toes.”

  “Much better. Allons-y.”

  Barry put his arm around Sophie and let her lead him back across the sand to their house, tucked unobtrusively as it was in a coconut grove, sheltered from the wind, positioned away from the sun, the closest thing they had to a haven from words like “if.”

  43

  The last time it happened, Barry and Sophie were seated together on the beach, only a few feet from where he had found her three years before, hanging half-conscious from an orange rubber raft. There was no reason for them to be there, beyond the fact that it was an exceedingly pleasant night. For once they were not toiling, were not fretting, and they were not planning—just sitting. Sitting together as couples have been doing since long before the advent of time. A drawn-out stretch of perfect silence was at last punctuated by a question on Sophie’s mind.

  “How does it all end?”

  “What?”

  “You know, how would it all end, with this couple living on Château d’Eau, and their daughter, and their lives.”

  “You mean our daughter, Persinette?”

  “Yes. Précisément. How does it end?”

  “I can’t say exactly.”

  “You can’t?”

  “No. Nobody can. But I have some idea.”

  “Tell me. I want to know.”

  Barry shifted his weight and settled back in the starlight. “Hm. Well, okay. Of course I’d have to teach her baseball. In Paris, we wouldn’t be able to watch games, or listen to them on the parked car radio while we had a beer in the hammock like my dad used to, so I would have to tell her all about it. I think I still have a few mitts back in Cleveland, we could get my parents to send them. Or we could go visit.”

  “What would it be like to visit Cleveland?”

  “We would have to go in summer, because the winters are so cold and gray. But we would show her how to catch lightning bugs, and how to play kick the can, and how to trick her parents when the ice-cream truck came by cutting through the neighbor’s backyard and getting your Rocket Pop on the next street over.”

  “Would we take her to your family’s farm in Illinois?”

  “Yes. She would sit on my lap while I drove the tractor, and gig frogs in the cow pond behind the barn for supper. We’d steal wooden shingles off the old pump house and whittle them into shingle darts, and we’d look for Indian arrowheads in the woodlot, and I’d show her the family cemetery by the little whitewashed Baptist church where her great-grandparents are buried. Oh, and Frito pies. We would definitely get Frito pies.”

  “What would our daughter be like?”

  “She’d be a lot like you. Maybe a little less stubborn.”

  “Pfff.”

  “Okay, fine. Just as stubborn. She would get freckles when she spent too much time in the sun the way you do, she would love to make things with her hands the way you do, and she’d probably have brown hair, too.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because we both have brown hair. You know, dominant genes, Mendel’s bean plants and all that. What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “About what she’d be like.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think you can predict something like that. I would want it to be a surprise. I’d like to discover new things about her every day. The things that would make her unique.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right about that. It’s silly to guess.”

  “But I would still take her to the Pyrenees. That, she has to do.”

  “You mean hiking in the mountains?”

  “Oui. The same path my grandfather used to take us on. We would pack a picnic of saucisson sec and fromage de Bethmale. We would have a little dog named Astazou that would follow behind us. You would be very allergique to him, but you wouldn’t be able to get rid of him because Persinette would love him so much.”

  “But would we stay in Paris? To live, I mean?”

  “Well, most of the time. But when you really became a great painter, you would probably surprise me with a cute little house in Portugal. Maybe in Cascais.”

  “That sounds like a lot of paintings to sell.”

  “No, not so many. Each one would be worth a lot.”

  “I wouldn’t get your hopes up, baby. Architects make a lot more than aspiring painters.”

  “Then we’d save up and buy it together. We would spend some of the summers there, and get coffee and pastéis de nata from Belém in the mornings, and go into Lisbon in the evenings and take the little trolley car up the steep sides of the hill, all three of us, together.”

  “Well, that all sounds great, but she’s not ever going to want to go to Cleveland if she’s spending all that time in the south of France, and on a beautiful beach in Portugal.”

  “Of course she will. She’ll love both. She’ll love my half, and she’ll love your half, too.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know because I do. Even though I’ve never been to the places you’ve told me about, I love them because they’re part of you. I can close my eyes and see them. Cleveland in the summer is beautiful—deep, dark, sad, and green. The farm in the south of Illinois is all gold—golden sunlight, golden corn. New York at night is like a giant paper lantern, but during the day … Are you crying?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shhh. It’s okay, my love. But really, now might not be the best time to talk about this.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because my water just broke.”

  44

  For the first few minutes of what he assumed to be impending labor, Barry was consumed by a fatherly panic. Sophie calmed him, assuring him that unlike the taxicab childbirth scenes of Hollywood movies, labor was hardly a speedy affair. We probably have hours ahead of us, she informed him, and on that score she was absolutely right.

  Neither could make it back to the house very easily alone, between bad eyesight and severe contractions, so they hobbled arm in arm and helped each other home. Once there, Sophie settled onto the bamboo cot while Barry lit the oil lamps and started a fire in the stone oven, intending to boil as much sterile water as he could—he wasn’t sure precisely why, although it seemed like something a midwife ought to do. He also burrowed through the deflated rubber folds of the life raft, rummaging around until he found the first-aid kit. Upon locating it—next to a pack of decidedly stale Russian cigarettes that in his anxious state he longed to smoke—he removed all of the gauze and bandages contained within, leaving the cigarettes right where they lay.

  “How are you doing, baby?” he shouted over his shoulder as he checked the water.

  “I’m okay. I don’t think I want to be inside, though.”

  “You don’t?”

  Sophie, half-inclined on their bed, shook a sweaty brow. “Non. I want the baby to be born outside.”

  After taking the water off the stove, he helped Sophie as best he could to shuffle across the palm-frond mat and out the door.

  “Where do you want to go?” he asked, his feeble eyes useless in the inky dark.

  “The beach. Where our old shelter was. There’s a large rock that’s tilted a little. Do you remember? That’s where we ate the octopus, and where we first kissed.”

  “Okay, you lead the way, I’ll help you walk. I can’t see a thing.”

  “Je t’aime.”

  “Je t’aime aussi.”

  The last part was said with fresh assurance in their voices, because it was the one and only thing that they could both be
certain of.

  After a painful half lap of the island, Sophie found the spot. She settled gingerly onto the flat stone, which Barry padded with a fresh bed of fronds. He made sure she was comfortable, then kissed her and stumbled his way back to the house, where he gathered up the bags of clean water, the first-aid supplies, and a freshly washed Charles Tyrwhitt cotton dress shirt minus one sleeve, so thin and brittle after three years of wear that it had become virtually translucent. His heart was racing. They had been waiting for months, and now the day had arrived.

  Barry followed the sound of Sophie’s voice to locate her, and he knelt beside the wondrous blur of her body—she had removed her breechcloth and was utterly round and naked in the starlight. Her breathing had quickened, she was almost panting; he could feel the heat rising off of her in waves.

  “What happens now?” he asked, sincerely ignorant of the answer.

  “Now?” Sophie shrugged as best she could. “We wait.”

  45

  The labor itself was unforgivingly long. The horizon took on a claret-colored glow, paled to a blush before erupting in light, and still the grunts and contractions rumbled on. By midmorning, the cramps had become closer together; the clenches of forthcoming life were now only minutes apart. By midday, with the sun shearing down on them with a relentless glare, the contractions had turned into a continuous spasm. Barry wiped Sophie’s face and body with cold water, gave her sips from the stainless-steel cup to drink. She grimaced and panted and occasionally swore; he comforted her as best he could, telling her that he loved her and that he knew she could do it.