by Watt Key
“I’ll write you,” I said. “At your new school.”
“It’s not like I won’t come home.”
“Then I’ll write you and visit when you come home,” I said. “Make sure you’re still being nice.”
Shane looked down at the board and frowned. “Will you stop with that?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I was just kidding.”
He looked up at me again and smiled weakly. I was sorry for what I’d said.
“Hopefully we’ll get back before school starts,” I said.
“But what if we don’t?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“What if we have to spend the winter here?”
I didn’t answer. I’d thought about it, but it depressed me too much to discuss.
“Think how cold it’s going to get,” Shane said.
“Let’s don’t talk about it,” I answered.
38
We continued to eat the survival rations from the lifeboats and watch our supply of food slowly dwindle. I knew we could catch fish again when we needed to, but I was putting it off as long as possible. It was a lot of work, and the thought of eating more bloody jack crevalle made me queasy.
Getting water didn’t seem to be a problem. Shane located an empty barrel that looked like it once held potable water. He rolled it outside onto the deck and we emptied our pots of rainwater into it.
As the days passed, though, I found it harder and harder to motivate myself to do anything. Sometimes it was all I could do just to make myself get up and eat and drink. And when I did, it only reminded me of our rations getting slowly depleted. We didn’t talk about it much, but both of us had all but given up on finding anything else of value on the rig. Now we were simply planning to live a life of survival hibernation.
* * *
One evening Shane suggested we go up to the helipad and shoot flares.
“Why?” I said.
“I’ve just been wanting to do it. I’ve always wanted to shoot one. And who knows, maybe somebody will see it. At least it’s something.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to shoot one, too.”
We took two hand flares up to the helipad. Shane took one of them and approached the edge of the platform. He pulled the cap and pointed it overhead. The flare sparked at the end before shooting an orange fireball into the sky. The ball traveled high and hung there for a moment before starting a slow fall toward the water. It was so big and bright that it seemed impossible no one else could see it. But I knew we were alone. And the fireball eventually drifted down into the waves and disappeared. Then I shot mine and watched it do the same.
* * *
We ate the last of the chocolate and energy bars on the thirteenth day. From that point forward our only possible food was going to be raw fish and spoiled canned goods.
“We have to figure out how to dry the fish meat,” I said. “Like pioneers. We’ve got to figure out some way to build up a supply so we don’t have to fish every day.”
“I guess we just leave it in the sun,” Shane said.
“Seems like it would spoil,” I said. “Don’t you smoke it first?”
“Do I look like Daniel Boone to you?”
I wasn’t in the mood for sarcasm. “Don’t be a smart-ass,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Shane said. “I guess we’ll just have to try.”
That afternoon we caught a ten-pound amberjack and hoisted it up in the basket. Once I cut into the fish I saw the meat squirming with tapeworms.
“Can we eat it?” Shane asked.
“I think so,” I said. “If we get the worms out.”
“I can’t believe something can live with that many parasites,” Shane said.
“I know,” I said. “But lots of fish have them.”
I spent nearly an hour pulling and cutting the worms out and flicking them over the side. Finally I sliced the filets into thin, almost translucent strips and hung them over the railing to dry in the sun. It was hard to imagine they’d turn into anything more than rancid fish meat.
As if depleting our food supply wasn’t bad enough, that evening we faced another problem that was just as serious. As we got ready to play our nightly game of checkers the lantern began to flicker. Shane had the one from the other lifeboat ready to use, but when he pulled the activation tab and flipped the switch nothing happened.
Shane shook the lantern. “How can it not work?” he said.
I got a sick feeling just thinking about not having light.
Shane unscrewed the bottom of the lantern and peered inside it. “Crap,” he said. “It’s corroded.”
There was nothing to do but go to bed early.
* * *
Our first night without any light was the longest we’d faced. Between bad dreams I lay on my back staring into the grainy darkness and checking my watch. I thought it would never end.
When daylight finally crept across the bedroom floor Shane and I got up and used the last bit of lantern power to prepare for the dark nights ahead. We tied ropes together and strung them from the top of the stairwell down to the outside of the storage room so that we could find our way downstairs. Then we did the same up to the third level and out to the helipad. We got the remaining matches from the lifeboats and placed a few in the bedroom and the rest in the storage room for emergency purposes. By the time we were done the lantern gave off nothing more than a faint orange glow. We shut it off to be used in an emergency only.
That afternoon we checked on the fish meat. It was stiffening up like cardboard. I bent close and smelled it.
“Not bad,” I said. “Actually smells better than when it was raw.”
“Well, there’s no flies to get on it,” he said. “And no birds to steal it.”
Shane lifted a piece off the railing and bit into it. He looked at me while he chewed. “It’s better,” he said. “I think this is going to work.”
I took the meat from him and tasted it. It was definitely less fishy tasting, but it was still a little slimy and bloody.
“Needs to dry more,” I said, “but, yeah, it’s better.”
It seemed we had the worst of our problems figured out. We had a way to gather water, a plan to stockpile food, and a system to overcome navigating the rig in darkness. Now all we had to do was wait for someone to find us.
But there was an even bigger problem we’d never considered. A problem that had been haunting us all along.
39
We’d been on the rig three weeks when Shane began to cough. At first we didn’t take it seriously. But after two more days the cough grew deep and raspy and he became weak and pale. He didn’t feel like getting out of bed or eating.
“It’s probably just a cold,” I told him.
Shane agreed, but even then I don’t think either of us really believed it. It didn’t make sense catching a cold when there was no one to catch it from.
I gave him ibuprofen and some cough syrup I found in a medicine cabinet, but it didn’t seem to help.
“Do you think I’ve got the flu or something?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I think the flu comes from animals. Like birds and pigs. There’s nothing out here. Not even seagulls.”
“We don’t know it’s the flu. It could be something else. Maybe a virus that’s been living here for five years.”
“I’ll bet it got bored,” Shane said, smiling at his joke.
“And tired of the food,” I said, laughing.
Shane chuckled and sighed. Neither of us spoke for a moment.
“You think we could make it a year or two?” he finally said.
I thought about it and nodded. “We could, but I think I might go crazy.”
“It would be like our lives just stopped. All the school we’d miss. Everybody getting older and forgetting about us.”
“Somebody has to come,” I said.
Shane nodded, but I sensed he didn’t believe my wo
rds any more than I did.
* * *
Over the next week Shane’s condition didn’t improve. The only thing that made him feel better was sitting outside, breathing the fresh air, and feeling the breezes on his face. Each day I helped him take a blanket, a pillow, and water upstairs and onto the lookout where part of the rig extended about ten feet overhead. This small roof created shelter from the sun, but it wasn’t enough to keep rain from blowing in. I tied one of the emergency blankets to the railing to help keep him dry during afternoon squalls.
I kept the water pots emptied into the barrel and tried to fish some. Without Shane to help me, I couldn’t use the basket and most of what I caught broke the line. Sometimes I managed to reel up a small bluefish or a lane snapper, and these were more than enough for what we needed, especially with Shane’s loss of appetite.
When I sat there next to him it felt like there was nothing left to say, but occasionally we still found small thoughts and pieces of our lives that we shared.
“I’ve been thinking about Mom,” he said to me one day.
“What about her?”
“About what a pain my dad and I both were.”
I didn’t respond.
“I wonder if she still loves me.”
“Of course she does.”
“I think she’s got a boyfriend,” he said.
“What?”
“I caught her talking on her phone once outside the back door. She was whispering, and she acted really weird when she saw me.”
“What was she saying?”
“I couldn’t really tell.”
“Is she gone a lot?” I asked.
“Yeah, all the time.”
“Do you think your dad knew?”
“Maybe. He didn’t act like it. But he never seemed to care what she did.”
I didn’t respond.
“I wonder if she’s with her boyfriend,” Shane continued. “I hope she is. I mean, especially now.”
“Maybe you’ll meet him when we get home.”
“Yeah,” Shane said. “When I get home.”
* * *
Each morning I marked off another date on the calendar and helped Shane carry his things upstairs to the lookout. I checked on him throughout the day, bringing him new magazines, water, and fish. Sometimes I was able to convince him to eat something, but mostly he just wanted to sit there and stare over the rig. This left me alone for hours at a time, lying in our bedroom, mostly sleeping. Sleep during the day was the only thing that really brought me any peace. I didn’t have so many nightmares, and it seemed to be the only time that I could close my eyes and dream my way off our island prison.
40
Day thirty-one. I was alone, reading in my bed, when I coughed. The sudden impulse and sound of it froze me. After a moment I made myself cough again and felt a scratchy feeling in my throat.
I put my book down and sat up and let the dead silence of the rig press in on me.
I’ve got it.
And it wasn’t until then that I knew what we were up against. It had been living on the rig all along.
I looked up at the sagging, stained ceiling tiles of our bedroom and studied the black splotches creeping around the edges. I looked at the baseboards and the doorjambs. The black stains seemed to appear everywhere, like more had seeped in and spread during the night. I thought about the rig, closed up and warm and damp for so many years.
I made my way upstairs and onto the lookout and sat down next to Shane. He smiled at me through his woozy fog of boredom. I stared over the rusty steel and peeling paint of the rig. Suddenly it all looked diseased.
“It’s the air in there,” I said. “It’s mold making us sick.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve got it, too.”
“Mold?”
I looked at him and nodded. “I coughed. I felt it.”
“But we opened the windows,” he said. “We let the fresh air in. You cleaned.”
“It’s not enough. We had it in the dive shop after Hurricane Katrina flooded the building. I remember a scratchy feeling in my throat and my eyes watering. We had to take out the walls and remove all the insulation to get rid of it.”
Shane looked away. It seemed like he was trying to think of something to say, some way to argue with me. But there was no argument.
“Stay out here with me,” he said. “It helps.”
“We can’t live out here.”
“Just until we feel better,” he finally said.
“I don’t think we’re going to get better,” I said. “The stuff’s alive inside us,” I said. “All in our throats and chest. We’ve been breathing it for weeks.”
“What do you think it does?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t know how to get rid of it. But we can’t sleep inside there anymore.”
“We can make a tent outside the storage room,” Shane continued. “There’s a big area of covered space down there.”
“At least with the bedroom I sort of remembered what it was like to live in a real house. Now we have to make a tent on a hard steel floor. What about when winter comes? What about the storms?”
“Maybe mold’s not down in the storage room.”
I sighed. “Maybe not.”
We sat there without speaking for a while, watching the giant cloud shadows move across the sky. I remembered my nightmarish thoughts of being starved, then dead and picked at by seagulls.
“When do we give up, Julie?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you can’t even if you want to.”
* * *
We moved two mattresses down to a small alcove outside the storage room. Shane barely had the energy to help, but there was no way I could have done it without him. It was on that same day that I stopped marking the calendar.
The days continued to pass. Occasionally I got up and fished and put more meat out to dry on the railing. But most of the time we spent simply lying on the mattresses, doing nothing, saying nothing. Now not only were the nights long, but the days were, too, as we watched the squalls prowl over the Gulf and the cloud shadow and the schools of feeding fish. The rest of the world was going on a hundred miles away like it had given us up for dead and forgotten us.
Sometimes the rain swept over us. Our new bedroom offered enough cover overhead to keep it from blowing in, but water still ran across the steel floor and wicked up into our mattresses. I eventually wrapped them in plastic tarps, which kept them dry but also made them hot and uncomfortable. The thought of lying on an exposed steel deck eating dried fish and drinking rainwater indefinitely was almost impossible to bear.
41
At first it looked like nothing more than another afternoon squall, grumbling and flickering far away to the west. But after a while the bruised line of clouds began to consume the entire horizon, and soon it was obvious that we were watching the approach of a storm that was bigger than any we’d seen. And it appeared we were directly in its path.
I emptied all the pots into the water barrel and repositioned them near the edge of the railing. Not a moment later, the rig fell into shadow and we felt cool gusts of wind blow over us. Soon the Gulf water began to whitecap and spot with rain. From our small alcove we watched lightning strobe against the swells and heard thunder slamming after it like a steel gate. Rain began to pelt the side of the rig in windblown sheets, and I felt the mist of it on my face.
“We may get wet this time,” I said.
Shane didn’t answer me. I looked over and saw him staring intently out into the weather. I searched for what he was looking at and it only took me a moment to see it. Through the haze of gray was a giant wavering cone of darkness dropping out of the clouds and drilling the surface of the water into a white froth. Then I heard it, rumbling like a train, vibrating the steel beneath me.
“Holy crap,” Shane muttered.
“Waterspout!” I yelled.
Shane was already starting to stand. “Get inside!” he
said.
I stood and grabbed his arm and shoved him into the storage room. I slammed the door behind us and locked it. Then I held on to him in the inky darkness as he felt his way along the guide rope. In a moment we came to the stairs. Shane sat down, and I sat beside him and grabbed and squeezed his hand. We felt the rig shaking and creaking and groaning, and we heard the howl and shriek of the waterspout as it tried to twist and tear the structure to pieces.
“Holy crap,” Shane said again.
Something loud crashed outside like a part of the structure had toppled over. There was clattering and banging all around us. I was too terrified to move or speak. We stayed there, squeezed together in the stairwell for what seemed like ten minutes but what was probably only thirty seconds. Then, suddenly, there was no more howling and shrieking. We listened to the waterspout as it rumbled off to the east. And the only sound was that of the wind and rain pelting the outside walls again.
“I think it’s gone,” I said.
“You think it hit the rig?” Shane asked.
“If it didn’t, then it had to have brushed it,” I said. “You could feel this whole thing shaking.”
“Come on,” Shane said. “Let’s go look outside.”
We made our way back to the door, unlocked it, and stepped into the alcove. It was almost night, and I could barely see. The first thing I noticed was that the mattresses were gone. Then I realized the deck was completely clean, like we’d never been there.
“No!” I cried.
I rushed out into the rain and looked down to where our water pots had been. They were gone. The water barrel was gone. All the dried fish were gone. Even our fishing equipment had been blown away.
Shane came up behind me. “That was everything,” he said blankly. “That was everything we had.”
I couldn’t answer him. I was in shock.
“Now we’re really going to die,” he said.
42
The alcove was so wet after the waterspout that we moved into the storage room for the rest of the night. I left the steel door open and the small amount of light coming from outside was all we had to orient ourselves. Otherwise it was so dark that I couldn’t see my hands before my face.