by Glenda Adams
Lark nodded, waved, and passed on. At the other end of the village she found another path and an inlet with a patch of sand that seemed never to have been used for anything. The sand was golden, unmarked. Lark found a rock to perch on and took out her little picnic. She was at last on an island in the Pacific, in that different place she had always longed for. It was peaceful enough on the surface. But she did not belong. And she was glad that she did not. She could see that she was not wanted here. She closed her eyes and tried to understand why she was so frightened.
A few sea gulls flew down, curious. Several more landed. They stood in a semicircle around Lark’s rock. The sea gulls took a few steps forward. Lark drew her legs up, close to her body, unaware of the birds. She rested her head and her arms on her knees. At the movement the sea gulls moved back a little, then pressed forward again.
Solomon Blank was now probably settled in a house with empty bedrooms waiting to be filled with babies in an unlikely place called Champaign-Urbana. And beyond him there was Tom Brown in New York, whom she intended to love forever, if she ever escaped from this island, which at the moment seemed like the whole world, her oyster.
There were perhaps fifty sea gulls within ten feet of Lark, stepping forward and surrounding her. One of them, like a company commander, walked right up to Lark’s sandals and trod on her toe, one of its spiked claws digging into her skin. She looked up. Then dozens and dozens of sea gulls seemed to be upon her. She clapped her hand to her mouth, to stop the scream, and while some of the birds flew off, the others stayed there; and when she jumped to her feet, the salami and cheese dropping from her lap, several sea gulls flew at it. Lark shrank back, believing that they intended to tear her to shreds. The sea gulls carried off the food, and the paper and plastic it was wrapped in, pursued now by the dozens of others, screeching and wrangling with one another for a share in the prize. A single shred of plastic fluttered at Lark’s feet.
She ran back through the village to the dock, pushing her way through several dozen villagers who were gathering to watch the departure of the Avis Maris. The gangplank was being raised, but when the crewmen saw Lark, they lowered it again.
“We waited,” said Mr. Fischer sternly, standing at the top of the gangplank. “And Miss Bird? Is she not with you?”
“She is already back on board,” said Lark, out of breath, remembering the visor on the handle of the bookcase. “You didn’t sound the horn. I could have been left behind. Is it another of your jokes?”
“We sounded,” Mr. Fischer said. “But in reality, passengers do not belong on a freighter. They disturb things, make waves, where before was smooth.”
Lark stood on her deck. She would wait to see if Paul came to her, and then she would tell him about the sea gulls. She watched the ship distance itself from the dock, packed with the villagers, who were watching the ship grow smaller as they themselves grew smaller in Lark’s eyes. They looked like so many gray and brown creatures, crowded along the wharf, jumping, waving, seething almost, like rats confined on a ledge in a lab experiment. Then Lark saw a little figure in brown and gray, looking like a leaf or a stick, scampering along the main street and onto the dock. It was unmistakably Donna Bird, waving something—the new rush hat. And she was probably shouting, if indeed she was capable of raising her voice enough to shout. The ship was some way down the river, and Donna Bird was already a tiny little thing, standing at the edge of the wharf.
At first Lark was annoyed. Here was Donna Bird, once again, making a spectacle of herself. Just like her. And why had she left her visor behind? To trick everyone? What joke was she engineering this time? Lark watched Donna Bird’s waving thread of an arm holding the round balloon of the hat. Then the arm stopped waving, the hat seemed to be on the head. Both arms seemed to be close to the body, the hands at the face. Was she crying? The ship sailed on. Lark stayed on her deck, watching Donna shrink from sight. Finally she forced herself to climb down to the bridge, where she found the Captain at the wheel and Mr. Fischer staring back at the land. Lark said nothing. She withdrew. Surely Mr. Fischer, too, had seen Donna Bird running along the dock.
Lark climbed back to her deck, confused, staying there until the land had completely disappeared and they were at sea again. She had deliberately left Donna Bird stranded on a remote Pacific island. It was likely that Mr. Fischer, at least, had done the same thing. And if that was so, what would he do to her, the remaining, unwelcome woman on board?
Paul vaulted up the ladder and came to Lark’s side.
“She’s not in her cabin,” he said. “I’ve looked everywhere.’’ He was distraught.
“Her visor was in the dining room,” said Lark, not able to look at him.
“She is nowhere,” said Paul. “I think she has been left behind.”
Lark joined him in the search, going to Donna Bird’s cabin, walking through her sitting room into the sleeping alcove and bathroom, as if Paul might have overlooked her and Donna would be found crouched in a corner. Donna Bird’s bright green fountain pen was on her table. Her visor and fan were next to it, presumably placed there by Paul, and next to them the flowers in a jar and the lamp filled with fuel and ready to light the evening meal.
They combed the deck, looking in the lifeboats and behind coils of rope.
“Damn,” said Paul.
They went to see the Captain.
“She went to look for you,” said the Captain to Lark. “We would soon leave. It was late, half twelve, and we were ready. She was good and went to find you.”
“But her sun visor was here?” whispered Lark, imagining that Donna Bird was still capable of turning up. The whole crew was now searching for her.
“She left the ship,” said the Captain. “She said not to worry, she knew where to find you. You say she is back, so we sail.”
They were now several hours away from the island. The Captain radioed Mr. Weiss on the island and eventually received the reply that Donna Bird had been found and was staying in one of the villages. After conferring with Mr. Fischer, the Captain decided, reluctantly it appeared, that he could not go back for her. She was to wait for another ship or for some little boat going to one of the bigger islands for supplies. “Native boats are always going there. And she is her father’s daughter. She will have ideas of her own. But what will I tell him?”
“She could be there for months,” Paul said to Lark. He was distressed. “I should have seen that she was not here. I can’t stand her, but I wouldn’t have wished her left behind, would you?
And Lark felt guiltier than ever.
At dinner, after the ritual scraping of chairs and leaping up by the men when Lark entered, silence prevailed until Lark asked the Captain, “What is in the box you took on board?”
Paul Crouch lounged morosely in the doorway.
The Captain, who was eating, looking at his plate, lifted his head briefly.
“What do you guess is in it?”
“A—a body? It looked heavy enough.” Lark attempted to smile, to indicate levity, trying to keep the fear and trembling out of her voice. “Like the one taken on board in Sydney.”
“Ah, yes, a coffin, of course. Why not a sarcophagus? A man in a sarcophagus, a heavy sarcophagus.” The Captain winked at Mr. Fischer, but without smiling. “The lady makes good jokes.”
“A German man in a heavy sarcophagus,” said Mr. Fischer.
“A heavy German man in a heavy sarcophagus,” said Mr. Blut, joining in the game.
Lark looked at Paul Crouch, and while she understood that the men were ridiculing her, she was thinking about the days it would take to transport a corpse across the ocean, and she smelled the stench of bodies, in advance, seeping up through the layers of the ship to her deck. “Why not a burial on the island, or at sea?”
“They will with their own people rest,” said the Captain. “No man wants to rot among primitives.” He returned to his eating.
“They always bury them at sea. I’ve seen it, in war movies.”
/> “That war,” growled the Captain. “But we like to be buried at home.”
“That is the way we like to do it,” said Mr. Blut, feigning good cheer.
They were teasing her, so seriously, with such determination, that Lark now believed that something was wrong, that something terrible was being planned.
Mealtimes became funereal, with Mr. Blut and Mr. Fischer lapsing back into German, speaking only sporadically, the Captain hardly at all. The Captain was morose, slamming his knife and fork and glass down on the table, striding noisily along the gangways, turning corners abruptly. The men made no attempt to converse with Lark. While she was blamed for causing Donna Bird to miss the ship, Lark began to believe that it had been arranged, the ultimate practical joke. But she was not sure who the joke was on.
Paul had packed Donna Bird’s things, leaving her suitcase on the bed, the visor, fan, fly whisk, and lamp on top, as if they were to receive the burial at sea. Lark, standing before them, took the whisk and the lamp, and tucked them into her own luggage. Then she went back and took the visor, too. Lark wrote to Tom, protesting her innocence in the abandoning of Donna Bird, then tore it up. She wrote to Solomon Blank: “Here is a voice from the past,” and tore it up.
Lark still went to her deck during the day, wearing Donna Bird’s sun visor all the time. She had begun to feel dizzy, the sun seemed hotter and fiercer. She wrapped a long cloth around her like a skirt, over her shorts, to protect her legs. As soon as they reached Tacoma, she would get off immediately and go by land to New York. She would not stay on this ship a moment longer. In the meantime, the remaining weeks on board seemed interminable.
Two days out from the island the ship gave an enormous lurch, then a series of jolts, as if it were descending a staircase. Lark was lying on her deck in the sun, alone. Her book flew out of her hands, across the deck, and slid under the railing, going over the edge down past the bridge. Lark slid across the deck behind it. The jolts continued. There was a creaking of the whole ship, a crashing of the aluminum rods on the deck, a general breaking and shifting, falling and clanging. When the ship subsided, the deck was at a slope, and Lark was lying against the rail. The cloth wrapped around her had come loose; the visor had fallen off. She got to her knees and crawled out of the cloth, up the slope of the deck to the ladder, peering out over the edge.
The crew was scurrying around beneath her, shouting. This was the first time she had seen the whole crew at once. She could not tell what the trouble was, or if the ship was going to sink. Then she saw that the sea was a light blue, and therefore shallow, and she understood that the ship had run aground. Holding onto the rail, she slid her body around, her legs toward the ladder, which, as she swung her legs over and started down, swayed with her. It had been jarred loose by the impact and was swinging free, held only by two screws anchoring it at the top. Her weight on the ladder made the whole thing break away and fall to the bridge deck with a tremendous clatter, which nevertheless went unnoticed in the general uproar. She was left with the top half of her body bent over the deck, her hands holding onto the bottom rail, her legs waving in the air, searching for a foothold. She eased herself down a bit, with a toe hooked onto one of the brackets that had secured the ladder. Her other foot edged down toward the next bracket. She look down and saw Paul Crouch standing at a slant, as if he were leaning into the wind, holding onto a bracket to stop himself from sliding. He was smiling up at her, not a smile, just a bent mouth.
“Help me,” she said.
It was simple enough to get off the ship. They had been able to lower the lifeboats. The crew stayed on board to work the winches and dump the aluminum rods to make the ship lighter. Lark was placed in a lifeboat with four oarsmen, and they sat some way off, watching the jettisoning of the rods, keeping their distance in case the ship should subside or list further. Military airplanes flew low over the ship, then disappeared. Lark sat all day in the lifeboat, at first bent over, trying to protect her face and neck and legs from the sun, until one of the sailors hauled out a flag tucked under one of the seats, which Lark was able to wrap around her, like a cloak.
Before nightfall the rods had gone, the tide had risen and the ship sat higher in the water, floating, at first listing a little, then straightening up.
When it was dark and the tide had risen, the ship was as ready as it could be, and they climbed back on board. The Captain’s face sagged. “This was not foreseen,” was all he said, before lapsing into silence for a few minutes. Then, “We will end in Tacoma. No New York now. We need to put the ship in the hospital for a diagnosis.”
The Captain and Mr. Fischer spent much of their time below, leaving bridge duty to Mr. Blut. The wheel had been tied in place again.
“They fix something,” said Mr. Blut, when Lark asked about their absence. “Busy, busy.”
Bombs, thought Lark. The boxes surely were the two parts of a bomb, waiting to be assembled, as Donna had insisted. She was worldly and knew about these things. The Captain would unite the boxes, link them.
Lark took to eating her dinner in her cabin. She said she was sick, which she truly felt she was. Paul Crouch, now remote and cool, brought her dinner on a tray at night. Whenever the Captain caught sight of her, he tapped his head and nodded at her. “Hat,” he said, pulling down the corners of his mouth. “Too much sun. Far too much sun. It harms the head.” As soon as her ladder was fixed and secured once again, Lark climbed to her deck, to lie there, doing nothing, thinking nothing. Paul Crouch no longer climbed the ladder in the mornings bearing tea.
Lark packed her bags. She wanted to put her things in order, as if to be ready for whatever happened next. Among her clothes she found the list of names which Donna Bird had left in her hands early in the voyage. At the top of the list, Donna Bird had written, “The Book of Names.” Lark sat and read the list, page after page. She came to Tom’s name and her own. Right at the end, after the names of the Captain and Mr. Blut and Mr. Fischer and Paul Crouch, were the words, “At Tention, Dan Gereux, Bom Beenbas, Des Troyship, Avan Tarriverusa,” as if they, too, were just more names. Attention, dangereux, bombe en bas, destroy ship, avant arriver U.S.A. Warning, dangerous, bomb below, destroy ship, before arriving U.S.A.
“Can’t you find out what is really in those boxes?” Lark asked Paul Crouch when he brought her next meal, breaking days of silence. “I have to know.”
“I’m not Superman,” Paul said tersely. He pointed at the tray. “Here. Food. I can’t just break open the lids of coffins, boxes, whatever they are, with my bare hands.”
“Can’t you steal the key or something?” Lark sat hunched on her bed, miserable, frightened, the recipient of Donna Bird’s legacy. “What is in them, then?”
Paul shrugged. “Drugs? Weapons? Explosives? Corpses? I neither know nor care.”
Lark took out the list of names and pointed to the words at the end. Paul frowned at them.
“Don’t you see? She says it’s dangerous, there’s a bomb,” Lark said.
Paul was silent for a while, then he looked up at Lark’s wild face. “Say, you’d better stay indoors. You look terrible. And you know she likes jokes. She is always saying so.”
Lark tried to descend into the hold but found everything bolted. She climbed to her deck and on the way paused on the bridge, contemplating the fire ax, then the radio. She wanted to summon help, but she had no idea how to work the radio. She had never learnt the Mayday call. So Lark decided to destroy the ship. She would have to set it on fire.
She wrote to Solomon Blank and to Tom Brown, beginning, “By the time you read this, I shall be...” and getting no further.
Everything on board seemed to be metal, with the exception of some of the decks and the paneling in the cabins. And she had no gasoline, nothing in enough quantity, to start a conflagration that could not be controlled. All she had to do was disable the ship, attract attention somehow, get help.
She simply took Donna Bird’s lamp, emptied the fuel onto her sheets, and set her b
ed on fire. She could not believe she was doing this, trying to destroy a freighter, and prepared to die in the process. The bedspread and sheets smoldered, resisting the sluggish little flames. All Lark had to do to put out the fire was roll up the bedding and smother it. Then she remade the bed, with the burnt sheet and bedspread at the foot, tucked out of sight.
Lark sat up. Someone was climbing the ladder. If it was Paul Crouch, she would confess that she had allowed Donna Bird to be left behind. It was the worst thing she had done in her life.
The Captain’s head appeared. He stopped climbing and rested his arms on the deck, and then his head on his arms, Humpty Dumpty balanced on his wall. Lark drew away from him. She had not seen him for several days. Perhaps he had found the burnt bedding. She thought of lashing out, of kicking the Captain’s face, a football just a short distance from her, sending him off the ladder. But it would not kill him, and then he would really come after her.
The Captain hoisted himself right up onto the deck. Lark jumped up and backed away, against the rail. “This is an unlucky ship,” said the Captain. ‘Two bad things happen to this innocent ship.” He walked toward her, his arms out.
“It was an accident,” Lark cried. “I didn’t mean it.” She pressed back against the rail. “Stay away from me.” And then she started to scream.
“Poor Miss,” said the Captain, advancing, taking her by the shoulders. “I know you are unhappy, to lose Miss Bird, and also sick.”
“Don’t throw me overboard,” Lark cried. It seemed that was what he had in mind.
The Captain folded his arms around her and held her against his chest. With one hand he felt her forehead. “A terrible thing,” he said. “A tragedy. You will go to bed, and we shall bring soothing food—soup, brandy—until you feel much better. We do not want a third bad thing to happen.”
Mr. Blut and Mr. Fischer appeared. “Hilfen Sie mir,” said the Captain. “Help me.”