Island Promises

by Connell, Joy

  Below them, Candy had stopped dancing and was almost still, only his leg shaking from the hip down. “You hear that?” The other two barely looked up. “I heared something, Scully, I know I heared something. Somebody’s out there, watching us right now. Yeah, they might be. Just lookin’ at us. You can never tell.”

  The world seemed to be turning upside down. Riley could barely breathe and beside her the other two were so still it was eerie.

  Scully picked up a pebble and threw it so that Candy had to duck to keep it from hitting him in the face.

  “That ain’t nice, Scully.” Candy hopped on one foot and whipped his head from where Scully stood to where the pebble had landed in the dirt. Scully took a drink from the whiskey bottle and grinned, his gold tooth shining like a hole in the shadows. Mikah interrupted his knife throwing ritual and laughed in that husky cartoon voice of his.

  “No, it weren’t nice. People ought to be nice toward each other. That’s what my mama always taught me,” Candy said. “Besides, I know what I heared and it’s there. They’ll be sorry when I’m right, when they knows something’s there.”

  Scully stood, stretching his arms up high, holding the whiskey bottle at a precarious angle. He turned in a slow arc, studying every inch of the clearing and especially the forest above him. For a long time he stared at the spot where she, Emil, and Millie were watching, so low to the ground that Riley could taste dirt, only her forehead tilted up just enough that she could see what was happening below. Seeming satisfied, Scully sat back down on the stump, took a sloppy swig from the bottle, and dug in the dirt with a long stick.

  “That’s all you gonna do?” Candy jiggled around the perimeter of the clearing, his high-pitched voice slicing through the jungle noises.

  In a move so fast and so fluid she wouldn’t have believed it were possible if she hadn’t witnessed it herself, Riley squinted as Scully rose off the tree stump, lifted the stick into the air, and sent it sailing in the direction where they were hiding. She heard Millie’s soft moan and Emil’s breath being sucked in. Riley was just about to scream herself when the spear landed in the bushes about 20 feet to their left. A ruckus ensued. A steaming, grunting, angry wild boar honked and ran from the place where it had apparently been napping. So scared she wasn’t sure she was getting enough air, Riley forced herself to look. She could tell the animal hadn’t been hurt by the stick, just disturbed.

  “That’s what you ‘heared’, Candy. It’s Abigail taking her afternoon snooze. You happy now?” Scully stood with his hands on his hips glaring at Candy. The contrast between the calm, controlled, danger of Scully and the loose, kinetic throb that was Candy couldn’t have been sharper.

  “How wuz I to know it was just Abby?” Candy pouted. “You always tells us to be on the lookout.”

  As the boar thrashed around, angry at whoever had interrupted its sleep, birds in the shrubbery became upset and began squawking and fluttering, beating their wings, flying in loops around the clearing.

  In the midst of the uproar, Emil touched her on the arm, nodded, and began to slip away on his belly. Riley repeated the gesture for Millie and they, too, began to slither their way back to civilization.

  “Now look what you did,” Candy yelped. “You upset everything. We won’t be able to get no sleep this afternoon.”

  “Shut up, or the next time it’ll be your ass I’m aimin’ at,” Scully growled at him. “Get yourself all in a state over a damn hog and some birds. I never seen nothin’ like it.”

  It was the last thing Riley heard before she was back in the dense part of the forest. Ahead of her, Emil rose to a semi-crouch and she followed suit. Behind her, Millie did the same. Even when they were far enough away that they felt safe enough to stand and walk, still no one spoke.

  Quietly, they loaded the camera equipment into the trunk. Riley tensed and grabbed for Millie’s hand as the taxi rumbled into life. Not until they were on the outskirts of the village, until she could see Rosalee’s nestled in the palm trees on the hill and Reprieve swaying at her anchor in the cove below, did Riley feel she could take a deep breath.

  “That was something,” Millie said beside her. “Of all the stories we’ve been on, this one is at the top of the list. Remember the one where we interviewed the hit man in the back of that bar on Third Street? Or the time that guy who was threatening to jump off the bridge asked to speak to you? Or the pawn broker who threatened to smash the camera and throw us out on the street? Of all of them, this was the worst.” She picked leaves out of her hair and dug at the caked dirt under her fingernails.

  “Hey, was not so bad,” Emil said from the front seat. For some unexplained reason, he didn’t appear nearly as dirty or disheveled as they did. “We are here, the camera is here. They do not know. All of it is good. Even my shirt, this one I always wear on this day, is not too bad with dirt. My wife she will holler about it, say ‘Emil, you are worse than all your children, like a little child yourself, wallowing in the dirt.’ But she will know when I am one day in Meeamee with the air-conditioned cars and the fancy offices. She will know then why my shirt has stains.”

  “When you get to Miami as a cameraman at one of the TV stations, we’ll all go out to a big dinner and do up the town,” Riley said.

  “I know some producers there. They took me to a nice restaurant once that overlooked the ocean. We could go there. Get some fruity drinks with those tacky little umbrellas that I love.” Millie sounded wistful.

  “First we will get this dirt out of our noses,” said Emil. “And we will eat no wild boar. Not even tame pigs.”

  Maybe because it was a release of tension, maybe it was feeling so good to be alive and safe or maybe it was just school girl idiocy but Riley began to laugh hysterically. She laughed until she made funny little hiccupping noises trying to catch her breath. She laughed until Millie caught her mood and laughed with her. She laughed until Emil, a little incensed at first that they might be laughing at his expense, decided the joke was not on him but on the circumstances and began to laugh, too. Emil’s laugh was much lower and deeper than his regular voice and was interspersed with honking noises, which made them all laugh even harder.

  When they finally dropped her off, Riley was dirty, hot, and emotionally exhausted. She walked up the dock to Reprieve just as the tropic sun was lighting the sky with fiery reds and oranges, giving its final farewell for today but in a last glorious blaze reminding mere mortals that it would be back tomorrow to rule their universe with its fickle decisions to shine or hide behind clouds. Grateful Joe wasn’t on board yet, Riley broke the rules about not showering on the boat when they were at the dock. She stripped off her dirty, smelly clothes and bundled them into the trash. She stepped into the guest shower, the bigger of the two, and stood under the hot water until it began to run tepid.

  Had Joe been there he would have been appalled at her flagrant use of Reprieve’s precious resources. But he wasn’t, and what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Even after all that hot water and soap, the smell of the jungle lingered. It was inside her, along with the smell of fear and disappointment. They had been too busy saving their own hides to shoot much footage. The whole escapade was probably a bust and without some solid footage, the story would probably be a bust, too. Tomorrow Emil would drop off the footage but she wasn’t optimistic about what she’d see on them.

  She was too tired to care about eating. Normally at this time of night, she would be reading, surfing the Net, catching up on e-mails, and waiting for Joe. Tonight she dug out the key for the liquor cabinet, poured a good cup of whiskey, settled into the stateroom, and was asleep within minutes of downing the last drop.

  The video was jumpy in spots. Emil had turned it on the moment they’d started into the jungle and had apparently never turned it off. They were lucky it was new equipment with a new, fully charged battery or the camera would have died befor
e they could get it back to Reprieve to be plugged into the shore power and recharge. Watching the first part of the video where they slogged their way through the jungle, the picture weaving in and out, the focus jumping like a cat on a hot sidewalk, was enough to make Riley queasy. She fast-forwarded through as much of it as she could.

  Emil had dropped the video off mid-morning, after Joe had left for his training with the Island Guard. This misadventure had cost more than time and money. It was the first time since they had become a couple that they had barely spoken to each other, let alone made love. She had been dead asleep when he crawled into the bunk beside her last night and this morning he had been up long before her, walked up to the shower, then came back to kiss her awake. As he handed her a cup of steaming strong coffee, he’d lifted one of her chafed, bruised arms from the bunk. In the intense early morning light, every scratch and gouge stood out. There were many of them from her elbow to the pale line where the T-shirt hit her upper arm.

  “What the hell happened? It looks like you wrestled with a tiger and the tiger won.”

  “It’s fine. It’s nothing.” She turned away, taking her arm back, and covering herself to her chin with the sheet. Self-conscious, she wondered how bad her legs and face looked.

  He sighed and sat on the bunk, his back to her, his eyes on the docked boats outside the porthole.

  “Not good enough,” he finally said. “You look like you’ve been dragged through the jungle behind a pick-up truck. And you want me to just pretend all those bumps and bruises aren’t there? Come on. Even you can’t be that manipulative.”

  That’s when the fight had begun in earnest. She had slammed out of the bunk and turned on him. How dare he call her manipulative? Maybe what he really thought of her was finally coming out.

  “You’re doing it right now,” he’d accused. His eyes blazed and his body, when he stood and turned to square off against her, was as rigid as a soldier’s on parade. “Trying to get me off the topic. Trying to turn the conversation away from the fact you look like death warmed over. All because you don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I’m not doing that.” There she went again with that schoolyard attitude. It infuriated her even more than this man with his golden tan, his sandy hair and his trim, muscular abs. His very presence could reduce her to an idiot unable to string a sentence together beyond fifth grade rhetoric. “This was work, if you want to know.”

  “Work?” He looked puzzled for a moment. “Don’t tell me you’re doing that damn pirate story.”

  “Okay. I won’t tell you.” Riley tried to flip her hair back in a defiant gesture but it had become so long and unruly it fought back and stayed in a lump where it was.

  Joe stepped forward in the small cabin and took her by the arm. She had no choice but to look up at him. This close she could feel his power, his determination. He was the captain of his ship, a consultant for the Island Guard. He was used to making his wishes known and having those wishes carried out. He was definitely not used to being defied.

  “You are not to do that story,” Joe pronounced every word as he pinned her with a determined gaze.

  Riley shook off his hand and forced herself not to rub her arm where one of the cuts hurt from his hold.

  “You can’t tell me what to do,” she shot back in her best fifth grade tone.

  “I damn well can if I’m the one you expect to pull you out when you get in over your head.”

  “Then I officially relieve you of that duty.”

  Exasperated, he tried another tactic. “This is too dangerous. You could get hurt.” He picked up her arm to underscore his point. The swelling and black and blue marks were prominent in the gentle morning light.

  “Oh, and what you do isn’t dangerous?”

  “That’s different.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “I can’t do what I do and hold your hand, too.”

  That remark had cut her to the bone. “I can handle myself. I don’t need a babysitter.” There was a lump in her throat and she knew if she stayed one more moment, so close to him, wanting him to put those strong arms around her, pat her hair, and keep her safe, she would cry. All of her bravado would be gone and she would crumple like a little girl, not an experienced reporter. Retrieving her arm away once again, she marched into the head, started the shower, and stood under it until she was certain he was gone. The water tank for Reprieve would need refilling after all these onboard showers but she didn’t care.

  After he left, Riley felt a little lonely and remorseful so she’d gone to Rosalee’s for a mid-morning pick-me-up. Only one waitress was lazily wiping tables after the breakfast rush and before the lunch set arrived.

  Rosa, Stanley, Millie, and Henri had all gone off to look at an art exhibit on another island for the day. There were no cruise ships scheduled to dock, the waitress had said, and so they had decided to take the day and leave the chef who’d been with them for years in charge. Her early lunch was slow and lazy and left her feeling sluggish and a little down.

  Back on Reprieve, she forced herself out of the sunshine on deck and below to look at the video. Emil had definitely been off his game. The footage was so bad that Riley let it run on the computer tucked into the nav station while she got herself a cup of coffee to shake off the afternoon slump.

  Looked like they had gone through all of that for nothing. So far no frame on this film would back up her story or her claim that Scully, Candy, and Mikah were modern day pirates, taking their plunder from those monstrous cruise ships that pulled into these islands. From what she could piece together, the three of them had started out small: pick pocketing, purse snatching, and poaching anything that wasn’t nailed down. Somewhere along the way, they’d hooked up with crewmembers on the immense ships, and that’s when the operation had gone big-time. Instead of netting $500 out of the wallet of a middle-aged American who’d made the mistake of not paying attention while bartering for trinkets in the local market, now they were taking in $50,000 by filching computers, ship parts, and high-end electronics, all of which could be sold easily and moved off the islands quickly.

  To prove her case, she needed pictures. No one was willing to step forward and be quoted about the pirates. The video she was watching had out-of-focus shots of the jungle and one enormous, embarrassing picture of her butt, complete with a huge dirt spot on her pants as she crouched her way through the jungle.

  Now mid-afternoon, she’d had her lunch at Rosalee’s and was viewing the video. What she saw on the screen buoyed her spirits and made her shove the fight with Joe to the back of her mind. Before he had crawled in beside them on the ground overlooking the sunken cove, Emil had been busy shooting some good footage. No, make that great footage.

  Scully came into clear focus.

  Riley set her cup down and moved forward in her chair as she watched for about fifteen more minutes.

  “I take back everything I ever said about you, Emil.” She slapped her hands together in joy, then stood and did a little jig around the cabin.

  “Back to work, girl,” she told herself as she shimmied from the saloon to the nav station. She drew the heavy cotton curtains that hung in the portholes so the reflection didn’t distort the computer images. The first thing she did was burn a back-up CD.

  “This one’s for you,” she said in silent thanks to the burly, gruff editor at her first TV station who didn’t trust any kind of technology and kept repeating, as though it were a prayer, “Always back up your work. Always back up your work. Always . . . ”

  This would make her story and maybe remake her career. Again and again, she ran the video. Apparently she had been too frightened and distracted to notice what was there. The fact she couldn’t see well didn’t help, either.

  The tree stump Scully sat on was actually a barrel-shaped stool. Entwined in the design were a
crown and a star. The Royal Star Cruise Line’s famous emblem. The knife Mikah had tossed so casually had a leaping porpoise carved into the long handle. No doubt a pricey souvenir from the Dolphin of the Islands, one of the most majestic ships in this part of the world. The crates and boxes strewn around haphazardly all bore the labels of a cruise ship or tourist business.

  Emil had hit the bull’s eye. Excited, Riley grabbed her cell phone to call Millie. But this was one of those times when it had decided not to work. Here in the islands, reception was always a crapshoot but no one seemed to care enough to force the cell companies to do something about it. The attitude was that if the call didn’t go through now, it would go through later. Not to worry. Eventually it would happen when it was meant to.

  Riley climbed up to the deck, crossed to the bow, hooked one arm around the jib line, and leaned forward to try the call again. This time she got Millie’s voice mail. She tried Emil. The chirpy, crackly voice of one of his children urged her to leave a message. Joe was out of the question. He was only to be disturbed for a real, bleeding emergency. And even if she could get him, he would be angry that she was following through with a story he considered to be dangerous. But she had to tell someone.

  “Well, well, darlin’. My little girl finally decide to check in?” RK laid it on thick when he heard her voice. “Thought you’d fallen off the face of the earth into one of those large sugary island drinks.” In the background, there was giggling. He was showing off for an office full of people just as he’d done many times when she’d been sitting on that long, leather couch thinking him so witty and charming. Now that she was on the receiving end she found him rude and dull.

  “Funny, I thought the same thing about you the first week I was here. Only I figured it was an oversized Scotch on the rocks.”