The man looked at Robert. “I think it’s okay to take your life jacket off now,” he said. Robert flushed and fumbled the clasps. The life jacket was too big for him and made him feel like a child. He dropped it in the dinghy. “What’s your name, my man?” the man said.
Robert looked at his father. “Robert,” he said.
The man smiled. “Robert,” he said. His eyes were deep brown. His face was like bark. “Robert.” He took a breath. “Like the poet.”
Robert said nothing.
“Like his uncle,” his father said.
“Like, his, uncle,” the man said. Then he turned to Robert’s father. “You can put the Doritos down. I have food. You get caught in the storm?”
Robert’s father set the bag down at his feet. “Yup. We were moored. At Alma Russell, farther in.”
“No shit. I know that island.”
Robert looked at his father, who was shifting his weight around like he couldn’t get comfortable. The man’s forearms, crossed on his chest, were gigantic. Robert guessed he was over six feet tall. “Well, didn’t that wind come out of nowhere?” he said. “One minute, sky’s clear to Japan. Next minute the furies. Least you were in a nice boat, though. Those Valiants. Nice boats.”
“We were lucky.”
The man ran one of his hands through his hair, got stuck halfway through, and tugged it out. “Well like I said. I got wrecked on the other side here. Just been waiting for someone to swing by. You’re the first boat I seen.”
“Four days ago?”
“I suppose so. I suppose that’s what it would be.”
The boy’s father looked over his shoulder at Pamier. They’d left the hatches open. “We were about to pull anchor,” he said. “We’re heading south. We could tell someone. Call it in on the radio.”
The man shook his head. “I just gotta move some stuff ship to shore, if you know what … two people could do the job, easy. It’s a”—the man paused to watch something in the distance—“portable generator. Some food. That’s all. The boat’s wedged on a shoal. Just can’t do it by myself. Half an hour, tops.”
“We’re on a tight schedule.”
“Half an hour,” the man said. “Tops.”
They followed the man up the beach. On this island the woods hugged the shore and began near the high-tide line where sand gave way to rock. The trees were dense, their green branches enormous and windblown. At their base was a thicket of brush and bushes, grown together and knit closed by years of weather, a natural wall that appeared impenetrable to Robert. The man walked quickly until he’d led them above the tide line and over driftwood. When they got to the edge of the beach he stopped, turned to Robert’s father, and said: Ta-da. The opening into the woods was obscured by dead branches. It was less than ten feet from where they’d had their fire the night before, a small, almost invisible, seam in the growth. The man bent over and picked up a desiccated buoy in their path and hulked it into the woods before continuing up the dirt trail, motioning for them to follow.
He led them at a slow pace, stopping now and again to kick a branch out of their way or sometimes for no reason at all. They stayed close behind him. Sunlight filtered through the oak canopy and mottled the ground at their feet. It was at least ten degrees colder inland. Robert felt like he was now walking through a Gary Paulsen novel, bushwhacking the wilderness. He focused on the man’s feet in front of him. His boots were brand-new, barely scuffed. He and his father were both wearing sneakers.
After ten minutes of silent hiking, the man suddenly stopped and turned. He put his hands on his hips and looked at them, as if he were considering something. Then he grabbed Robert’s shoulder and said, “If you look up, you can see an eagle’s nest.”
Startled, Robert stepped back but was held in place. He looked up. He didn’t see anything but trees. “Right there,” the man said.
“Where?” his father said. He’d been a few feet behind Robert, but moved now, and put his hand on Robert’s other shoulder.
“In the trees,” the man said, releasing Robert and pointing. “Top of that one, there.”
Neither Robert nor his father saw anything that looked like a nest. The man shrugged. “Take my word for it,” he said. “Eagle nest.”
“Okay,” Robert said. “Okay.”
The man turned back up the path. “You ever see an eagle catch a salmon?” he said after a few minutes. He seemed interested only in talking to Robert. His father stayed close. He had fallen behind them a number of times as they weaved through the woods, but now he stayed close.
“Yeah,” Robert said, even though he hadn’t. He’d seen eagles, plenty of them, flying while gripping salmon, but hadn’t seen an actual catch.
“Water, then air,” the man said. “Imagine it. Just imagine.”
“Something else,” his father said. “For sure.”
On the map, the island hadn’t looked large enough for a forest this size. They walked for fifteen more minutes, scrambling over debris felled by the storm, Robert’s father helping him by keeping a hand on his back. They walked through ferns and over moss. They passed fishing buoys lodged in the crotches of trees. Robert pointed out to his father what looked like a flannel shirt and a pair of pants draped over a bush, as if hung there to dry. His father nodded, and then looked at it like he was working something around in his head. Finally they broke through the other side into the sun, and Robert was filled with relief. In front of them was a huge cropping of rocks, and below that the water. The beach itself was piled with driftwood, sun-stained logs rolled tightly together like bleachers.
The man turned to them. “Down this way,” he said.
“What way?” his father said.
“Around.”
His father stood there. “Four days?”
The man looked at him. “About,” he said. He pulled himself up to his full height and smiled. “About.”
Robert’s father was quiet. Then he said, “Let’s do this, then. My wife’s waiting for us.”
“On the boat?” the man said.
“On the boat.”
The man laughed, and looked at his shoes and then looked at the sky like he was checking the weather. “No, she’s not,” he said. His tone was friendly, as if he were kidding an old friend. “Why would you say something like that?”
Robert followed his father, who followed the man over the rocks. They walked with their backs to the forest, moving slowly, the man not looking at them. From behind it looked to Robert like the man was covering his mouth. He picked up his pace, and as they approached the end of the outcropping he was almost at a run. He put some distance between them, then he suddenly stopped and turned. “It’s—” He stumbled. “I’m down here,” he said. He was pointing, but Robert couldn’t see at what.
Robert’s father lightly put his hand on the back of his son’s neck. “There’s no easier way down?” he said.
“Swim,” the man said. His eyes were wild. “I swimmed.”
Robert noticed the man’s mouth was bleeding slightly. The man looked at Robert like he’d just remembered him and smiled. One of his front teeth was smeared brown. He looked like he was trying to keep from laughing. “I swum to be here with you today,” he said.
“You all right?” Robert’s father said.
The man shrugged and looked over his shoulder at the ocean.
“We’re leaving,” Robert’s father said to his son. Then he turned to the man. “We’re leaving now.”
“You can’t,” he said. “I’m just down there.”
Robert was aware of something passing between his father and the man but couldn’t place it. His father was kneading his shoulder, pressing him into his body.
“Come down here,” the man said. “Two’s enough.”
“No,” his father said. Robert felt his stomach tighten. He was getting dizzy. He thought he might throw up. “We’re leaving.”
Robert walked quickly with his father behind him toward where they had come out of the woods.
“Move,” his father said. He was worried they wouldn’t be able to see the trailhead, but it was clear, as if everything were pointing them in the right direction. At the edge of the forest he looked back and saw nothing but the windswept shore, debris littering the beach. Seaweed above the tide line, dry and cracked and fly buzzing.
When they were twenty yards up the path his father said, “I need you to run.” He said it in an almost unrecognizable register, and it was this that frightened Robert. More than the size of the man. More than his dead tooth. His father’s voice. It seemed conjured from the earth, something from the soil.
They ran for what seemed like half an hour but though Robert was exhausted he didn’t slow. Twigs snapped across his face. His father’s breathing was loud in his ear. He tripped, stood. Tripped again, and felt a sharp pain in his ankle. He made no sound. He told himself that was something he was not going to do. He stood and felt his father’s hands on him, felt himself being lifted off the ground. He held tight to his father around his rib cage and his father held tight to him, carrying him down the path. Robert shut his eyes. He pushed one of his ears to his father’s chest, and became overwhelmed by the fact of his father’s jostling body, cradling his own while careening through growth. He felt his father’s breath on the top of his head. He felt his father’s beating heart. He felt his father’s arms around him, iron and unbending. They were a tree themselves, moving through other trees.
They were pushing the dinghy and had it halfway down to the water when the man came barreling into the sunlight. Robert saw his father reach for the fish club in the bottom of their dinghy, grab it, and turn. The man stopped briefly at the mouth of the trail, snorted, then resumed his charge. Arms outstretched, like wings.
What happened, happened fast. His father’s arm arced high, the man never slowed, the club came down with a sound that made Robert’s knees go out from under him. The man stepped back once, and then collapsed forward onto Robert’s father, bringing them both to the sand. His father exhaled what sounded like an animal whine, untangled himself, and then limply hit the man again with the club, this time on the back of the head. Then again, harder, with a blow that pushed his features into the sand. His father yelled something at the man, or at himself, Robert wasn’t sure. The man was motionless now, but his father, half-standing, hit him one more time. And then there was silence. The world had hushed. Robert, on his knees near the dinghy, watched a crab, watched a piece of seaweed, watched the rocks. He did not want to look up. In both hands he had fistfuls of sand. His father took him quickly in his arms and then the two of them pushed the dinghy into the water and began rowing toward Pamier, his father grunting with each stroke, Robert in the bow, as far away from his father as possible.
On the boat, they sat in the cockpit. The man, still on the beach, wasn’t moving. Someone his size, Robert imagined, would, in a few minutes, rise. But they watched for a few minutes, and nothing.
“Is he dead?” Robert finally asked. He’d searched for and found the fillet knife they’d left in the cockpit and was now holding it in his lap.
“I don’t know,” his father said. “I don’t think so.”
Robert wanted to say the man needed help, but was afraid.
“Give me your knife,” his father said.
Robert shook his head.
“I need to cut the stern-ties. Please.”
Robert handed his father the knife, and he leaned over the stern and began sawing the lines. Then he gave up. “Just untie them,” Robert said. His father looked at him and then at the cleats that held the lines, reached down and freed them. They dropped into the water with a tiny splash, and sunk.
On the beach Robert could see the bag of food they’d brought for the man, tipped over, its contents not six feet from him. The orange of the Dorito bag. The soda can catching the light. It looked like the man, carrying a bag of groceries, had suffered a heart attack and fallen. Not in the sand. Not on a desolate beach in the Broken Group on the outside of Vancouver Island. But in an asphalted parking lot, where someone would find him, tell whoever needed to be told, and be on their way.
His father stayed in the cockpit. He did not go below for the radio. He did not reach for his son. He sat perfectly still, watching the beach.
Finally he asked Robert if he was hungry. Robert shook his head. “Thirsty?” he said.
“No.”
Then he said, “Your mother loves you very much,” and Robert started crying.
The sun was high over the mast, and the dodger didn’t provide much shade. Robert’s father was sweating when he stood. He looked at the beach and then told Robert he was going.
“Where?”
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “I’ll be right where you can see me, the whole time. In sight of the boat. I’ll be back.”
“He needs help,” Robert said.
His father didn’t say anything.
“He needed our help.”
His father coughed and then asked him if he remembered how to use the radio. “I’m coming with you,” Robert said.
“No.”
His father climbed down over the lifeline and into the dinghy. Robert followed him and stood at the rail.
“Do you want the knife?” Robert said.
His father shook his head. “This is not your fault,” he said, and then pushed off the boat and began rowing to shore.
“Why can’t we just leave him?” Robert said. He knew his father, thirty feet away in the dinghy, could hear him, but there was no response.
From Pamier, Robert watched his father beach the dinghy. He stepped onto the sand and, holding the fish club close to his leg, approached the fallen man. Once he stood at the man’s side he bent over, as if whispering to him. Then he straightened up. He turned to face the woods, turned again, and lobbed the club underhand toward the dinghy. When he saw Robert watching him he raised one hand in a wave. Robert waved back. Then he saw his father bend over the man, again, put his hands on his shirt, and pull. The man was enormous, and as he watched his father lose his grip, and try again, it seemed to Robert like the man had become lodged in the earth. Eventually he came loose. And Robert watched as his father began to drag the man up the beach, toward the tide line.
It was not easy going. He could hear his father strain with the load, grunts that reached across the water as he jerked and tugged. The man’s shirt ripped and his father fell backward. He stood, wiped the back of his pants, and then clasped the man’s hands in his and pulled him that way. The toes of the man’s boots carved parallel grooves in the wet sand. Behind both of them, the trees loomed motionless, a painting of trees.
Robert saw where his father was going, and wanted to tell him to stop. At the mouth of the woods, his father straightened up, paused for breath; then he bent over, found the man’s hands again, and disappeared into the growth. The man’s trailing legs jerked incremental progress until he too disappeared into the woods, and then there was silence. Free of the stern-ties, Pamier began to drift over her anchor. The wind picked up. Robert thought of his sister, at home, and then thought of the radio. He imagined a distress signal, issuing out from his boat and pulsing under the waves, washing up across the ocean. He imagined someone who looked like his father, but older, removing the receiver and answering. Lighthouses rhythmically sweeping the bay. He unsheathed the fillet knife and lay it across his lap. He listened in their gentle anchorage to the wavelets sucking against the hull, and waited. He promised himself he wouldn’t move until he saw what he wanted to see. Someone—perhaps many—would come. They had to.
a mugging
What do we need to know about these people? Her name is Claire; his name is Charles. They are in their early forties, white, both architects—he works downtown, and she works from home, freelance. They’ve been married twelve years, and their time together has been punctuated by moments of happiness so engulfing that even the major interruptions—the birth of their son, her parents fourth-act divorce, the slow introduction of th
eir own mortality—have been hurtled with the brio of inebriated three-legged racers. They are out walking now. They’ve just seen a movie neither of them cared for. They are looking forward to getting home. Can you see this particular train coming? Is there anything you or I can do to stop it? It’s ten-thirty now. I feel like there’s still time. But there they are, walking toward their car, not listening to me, or to anyone.
Before the attack, they will, the two of them, have been talking about her mother’s love life, her mother who is now dating after years of mistaking solitude for happiness, and their plans for the upcoming weekend. Afterward, they will drive home in a silence he will later interpret as quiet accusation and she will interpret as mutual reverence for the fact that they are now both back in the car, moving safely away, doors locked as if muggings had aftershocks like earthquakes. Just a wallet with the credit cards and a cell phone, it was my husband’s wallet, and my purse, she’ll say into the telephone after they’ve explained to the babysitter why they cannot pay her tonight and have turned on all the lights in the house. Just, her husband hisses. He’s overheard her from the bathroom where he’s leaning over the sink and letting pinkish drool drip from his mouth. He’d been hit hard. No words had been exchanged. Just hit. Bang. He didn’t even see the guy who hit him, couldn’t have said if he was enormous or small, he could’ve been the Chrysler Building for all he knew.
In the car, they’d talked about the emergency room—she’d wanted him to go, but he’d said no with such quiet force that she didn’t argue. It was dark where they’d parked, but soon they joined traffic, other people in their cars, and it was when they merged onto the freeway that he’d started crying. She’d pulled onto the shoulder and reached for him, but he’d pushed her away. Harder than he meant to. And then he’d said just drive.
Home. The sitter paid and gone. After checking on Sam, their son, happily watching a movie on his own, barely nodding as she asks if he had fun, pushing her away after a few seconds when she comes to hug him on the couch while Charles stays outside the room, she will call to cancel their cards and inquire about any recent charges, and the woman on the other end of the phone will say how sorry she is to hear about things like this. That it happens more than you’d think, meaning not just the losing but the violent taking (she will hear this, for some reason, as “violet talking” and ask the woman to repeat herself). The good news is that the card can be canceled and of course all the charges if there are any will be reversed. In fact, there is a recent charge, the woman says, I’m seeing that. It’ll be reversed, don’t worry. Where was it? The woman will tell her, it’s across town, and Claire, surprised at the calm with which all of this is being handled, will say thank you. Her husband is pacing the kitchen, opening and closing drawers, looking for who knows what, some crackers, she supposes, to go with the whiskey he’s poured himself, the alcohol that is making him wince as he slugs it back and sluices it around like mouthwash. His lip is swollen. His eyes are distant but burning, or drowning, she thinks drowning might be a more appropriate description of what his eyes look like, the same eyes she’s seen and loved every day for thirteen years, since even before they were married, these eyes that have only looked at her the way they are looking now twice in their life together, which is more like a not-looking, a scanning without seeing, as she tips his head back to get a closer look at his mouth in the light of the kitchen. She’s not a doctor, but she knows the hospital isn’t going to enter the picture tonight, that all he needs is the ice and alcohol he’s already allowing himself, and without thinking she pats his head to indicate she’s done with her inspection, a school nurse gesture, a this-gets-better-I-promise, your parents will be here to pick you up soon. As soon as she’s done it, there’s the hope he’ll interpret this as reassurance, but it’s dashed by a goddamn it, Claire. As if this were a mode of hers, this infantilizing. She reaches for the phone again, this time to call the police, but her husband tells her to put it down, tells her while refilling his glass and then filling one for her what are we going to say, that some black kid hit me? and she will say that it wasn’t a black kid, that she had seen him and it was a white kid, or a mostly white kid, and that when he had punched her husband she was so scared that she just held out her purse in front of her like it was something she suddenly didn’t want, something that stunk to her, something to get rid of, and she was grateful the guy had in fact taken it from her and run in the other direction, as if he were the one being chased and was scared himself. So now the sympathy express stops for everyone, her husband will say, and then go further and accuse her of not understanding what had happened to them, of really just not understanding, another liberal-leaning moment of not connecting the dots, that he could’ve been killed for chrissake, and she will tell him but you weren’t, you weren’t, you weren’t as he leaves the kitchen to double-check the doors and windows, whiskey in hand, walking briskly from one point of entry to the next, cupping his eyes against the glass to get a better sense of who might be standing outside, with his wife’s keys, he knows our address, did you think of that? Our address.
The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories Page 13