Cave-in

by Joseph Monninger

  Someone bent close to his ear and whispered.

  “Just hold on,” the person said.

  It was a woman. But she seemed to speak from some place up in the sky and he was not sure whether to listen to her or not. It was possible the voice belonged to a fury, a banshee who came to carry his soul away. He had heard of such things. He had heard of souls being tricked into leaving their hosts and he was unsure if that’s what was happening to him.

  Thirsty, he tried to say.

  But his lips were glued shut by dirt and dust. He managed to moan softly, but that did not bring him water. Water, he decided, was what he really wanted.

  Mary squatted close to the fire. People came and went, carrying back anything they could find to burn. She nursed the fire carefully. She did not want to let it die.

  Mary had been able to start a fire using some dried-out sticks with pinecones and needles. It smelled good. Mary fed the fire slowly, not rushing it. Her father had taught her how to make a fire, and she was glad for the knowledge.

  After instructing everyone to stay clear of their landing site, Mr. O’Connell and Ms. Carpenter had gone off to search for food and water among the rubble of the collapsed fort. Everyone else they assigned to wood duty, but that didn’t mean those people actually did much. Mary had been designated fire guardian. Or fire warden. It was said as a joke, but she didn’t take it that way. They needed a fire. And they needed water.

  “Here,” Sandy said and dropped three tiny sticks into the woodpile beside the growing flames.

  Sandy had not left the light of the fire, Mary knew.

  “We need more than that,” Mary said flatly. “We need to keep this going.”

  “Why don’t you go find some, then?” Sandy asked, squatting next to the fire.

  “I’m responsible for the fire. Do you know how to build and maintain a fire?”

  Sandy didn’t say anything. She held her hands out to the fire instead.

  “We need more wood, Sandy. Please keep working.”

  Sandy didn’t move.

  Mary was totally fed up with Sandy. When Bob Worm came back with a decent armful of wood, Mary asked him to take Sandy with him. He shook his head immediately, but then met Mary’s eyes and shrugged. Bob Worm, Mary decided, was okay.

  Sandy and Bob disappeared into the darkness. Harry Cameron came back with half a lobster pot. The wood was dry and thin and she told him to put it on the fire carefully. He didn’t bother being careful and the fire bent sideways when he tossed it on and looked like it wanted to go out. Then it started catching again. It took the struts of the lobster pot and burned brightly for the first time. The strings holding the struts together burned with bright, friendly sizzles.

  “Decent,” Harry said.

  He held his hands out to the fire. It was late, late night. Or early morning. Mary smelled the sea everywhere. She could not seem to get herself fully oriented.

  “Once we get a good bed of coals, we’ll be okay. I just want to make sure until then,” Mary said.

  “No problem. Any word from Mr. Puffin?”

  Harry said it with a mocking tone. She couldn’t blame him.

  “No, not yet.”

  “If we don’t get water, man, we’re up a creek.”

  “Everything on the island is going to be salty. You can’t drink salt water.”

  “I know. That wall smashed our camp.”

  Mary didn’t say anything. What was there to say? Or rather, what wasn’t there to say? Any subject you brought up led to an uncomfortable topic. Better to remain silent. Falling rocks had pummeled the food and water. Mary remembered the water containers and she remembered how they had arranged them next to the fort wall. They had brought three plastic jugs, all of them as large as an average lampshade. It was plenty of water, probably too much, even, but she imagined Mr. Puffin wanted to err on the side of caution. Ironic. The plastic containers, all with red carrying handles, had been made of the same type of plastic used to make plastic jugs of milk. Perfectly fine, she acknowledged, until an enormous rock landed on it. The water jugs had exploded like old eggs, she imagined. The food lay buried next to it.

  She was still thinking of the water and the food when Harry pulled out his harmonica. He didn’t play it, but simply ran his lips over the holes in a quick trill, then put the harmonica back in his pocket.

  “How long have you played?” she asked.

  “Not long. A month or two.”

  “It’s nice that you can have music whenever you want.”

  He shrugged. Then she saw Ms. Carpenter and Mr. O’Connell coming toward the fire. She looked at their faces, then at their hands. Their faces told the story, then had it repeated by their empty hands. Nothing. They had found nothing. And they were on an island without water, without food, without a boat, with no means to contact anyone, with no dependable shelter. Marooned, that’s what they were, she realized. She had always thought of that happening in some warm, tropical place, mostly to pirates or people from long ago, but no, it had happened to her. In Maine. Outside of Portland. On the busiest shopping weekend of the year.

  SURVIVAL TIP #3

  * * *

  Follow several logical steps if you are marooned on an island. First, decide that you are going to do whatever it takes to survive. You’re going to have to set aside just about every custom and preference you have if you’re going to live for more than a few days on a deserted island. Second, identify a clean source of freshwater. Safe drinking water is your first priority. If you don’t have clean, safe drinking water within three to four days, you’ll die. The farther inland you go, the more likely you are to find freshwater. Finally, let other people know where you are. Whether that’s with a signal fire, or by placing rocks in a large HELP pattern on the beach, figure out ways to let planes and ships know you are in distress.

  Bertie Smith had his hands in a sink of dishwater when his heart began to give way. It didn’t go all at once, but staggered him sufficiently that he was able to take two steps to his kitchen table and swing his hindquarter around and sit in his usual chair. His chest rocked him with pain. A tiny electric bolt in his head wondered if he wasn’t suffering something life-threatening, but his instinctual determination, earned through sixty-seven years of lobstering and roaming the bays beyond Portland, had left him with a hard, staunch character. He didn’t believe in illness.

  But it came anyway and he put his head down on the kitchen table, his forearm sticking to one of the plastic place mats his daughter had brought last Christmas during her annual visit from Indiana. The place mats had pictures of lobster boats and lobster pots, and Bertie, with his head down next to the empty potato bowl and the dribbles of gravy he hadn’t yet cleaned up, found it almost funny that he should feel such a pain in his chest while his eyes stayed riveted to the lobster boat picture. A nice-looking boat, he admitted. Its name wasn’t visible from the camera angle, but he had seen a boat like that once, from up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and he recalled admiring it. So that’s what he felt when the final tremor took him.

  He did think of the kids out on the island, but what good was that? he wondered. He knew in his final moments that he wasn’t going to be the one to fetch them. That was someone else’s job now, and he wished there was something he could do or say to make it better, or to inform someone, but he couldn’t even open his mouth to begin. They might have to put in a few days extra but someone would eventually get them. He wanted to tell Barney, a man he’d known since boyhood, a fellow with a boat who could have picked them up dandy, but it was too late for that. The wall phone looked to be a thousand miles away and the lobster boat on the place mat had begun to carry him out to pull his last pots.

  Bob Worm watched light come across the ocean. It wasn’t strong and it didn’t warm him, but he was still grateful for it. He looked around the fire, trying to see who else was awake. Hard to say. People snored. Even girls snored, which was news to him. He hadn’t known girls did that. His dad was the big snore king at
his house. But Sandy and even Ms. Carpenter brought the old crosscut saw back and forth against a block of maple and let it rip. Mary, not so much.

  He reached down and put more wood on the fire. It was his job to do. He had first watch.

  Dew had pushed the fire lower. He had to squat down and blow into it to get it hotter. It wasn’t as easy to keep a fire going as you thought. Burn dry wood in a stove, no problem. But a campfire took a ton of fuel and pushed most of the heat into the ground. Bob knew that. He felt as though he had always known that. Every spring he went to his uncle John’s sugar bush and helped boil off the syrup. They used stacks of pine slabs on that chore. It was funny how things you didn’t know you had learned along the way came back to help you when you didn’t expect it.

  When the fire became more secure, he lifted back up and resumed his position. He was hungry and he was mad thirsty. Insanely thirsty. He tried to think back and remember his last drink of water. Before the boat ride over, he thought. That was his last drink. He couldn’t remember consuming anything after that, anyway, and so using that as a fixed time he estimated it had been a day and a half. A little longer, maybe. They had arrived on Friday afternoon, been trapped all day Saturday, and now it was Sunday morning.

  The lobster guy was coming back in two and a half days. They needed water before that. That was simple to understand.

  He heard Sam moan from inside the tent. They had brought the tent around — it was Sam’s tent anyway — and listened while the wind made the tent chatter and snap. The kid wasn’t doing great. Bob liked Sam and was sorry to see his injuries, but the kid seemed to live on a different island now. He was with them, but he was also apart. The sick went to a different country, his dad always said. Bob sort of knew what he meant now.

  Bob found himself thinking of his dad a lot in this early dawn. He couldn’t say why. His dad was not a great guy in every way, no illusions about that, but still, still, he had his moments. His dad was good at making Sunday breakfast, for instance: orange juice, waffles if you wanted, and bacon and sausage. Eggs always. His dad liked to read the Sunday papers, look at the car ads, check the high school football scores. Even when he was deep in the paper, his dad was always willing to pop to the stove and heat something up, microwave a cinnamon roll or get some fresh strawberry jam for your toast. It was as if he counted on Sunday breakfast making up for a ton of not being around, making up for the shouting and the chores. Bob Worm didn’t know what to think about it all, but he liked remembering Sunday breakfast with his dad. He liked thinking about that a lot.

  He was still thinking about his dad and Sunday breakfast when Mr. O’Connell woke up, rubbed his face, then stood and came around the fire. Mr. O’Connell looked horrible. Dirt lined the creases of his forehead and his nails and hands looked like badger claws. Bob Worm wondered if he looked as bad as Mr. O’Connell did. Probably so.

  “How’s it going, Bob?” Mr. O’Connell asked, squatting near and holding his hands out. “You’re keeping the fire going, I see.”

  “We’re getting low on wood.”

  “We’ll get people moving on it when they wake up. There should be plenty around. Plenty of driftwood.”

  “Okay.”

  “You thirsty?”

  Bob nodded.

  “They say if you suck on a pebble sometimes it helps. I want to look around and see if the dew can provide us with some water. I want to take a good look at the tents and everything. We couldn’t make out much last night.”

  “The fire is good.”

  “A fire helps morale,” Mr. O’Connell said. “Even if we weren’t so cold, I’d make us build a fire. Gives everyone a center.”

  “We need water.”

  “I know. I’m trying to remember my high school chemistry about salt content in seawater. I think it’s around thirty percent by volume. Something like that. I don’t know how we desalinate it.”

  “If we could catch some gulls, we could drink bird blood.”

  Mr. O’Connell looked at him. Then he smiled.

  “Whoa. You’ve watched too many zombie shows. Not sure we’re there yet, Bob, but I’ll keep it in mind. Captain Bertie will be back day after tomorrow.”

  “In the afternoon?”

  Mr. O’Connell nodded. He threw another piece of wood on the fire.

  “Does anyone expect to hear from us?”

  Mr. O’Connell looked a little uncomfortable about the question. He cleared his throat and stood.

  “I’ll be honest, Bob. I made a big deal of making sure we had no electronics on the trip. Well, you heard my lectures on the topic. No video games, no movies, no anything. I told my wife I wouldn’t call on the satellite phone unless it was an emergency. Big, brave Mr. Puffin. Now I can’t call, and I’ve arranged it so she won’t call. Circumstances, Bob. See how they work into the situation?”

  Bob nodded. He was thinking it was pretty cool that Mr. O’Connell had been honest with him. He was also thinking it was pretty cool that Mr. O’Connell was being honest with himself.

  “I’m going to scout around,” Mr. O’Connell said, stretching again. “Keep the fire going. Get people to collect wood when they wake up.”

  “Okay.”

  Mr. O’Connell scanned the area before he took off.

  “We’d be warmer inside, but I’m not willing to risk it again,” he said.

  “It was pretty crazy in there.”

  Bob felt Mr. O’Connell touch him on the shoulder, then heard him walk off. Mr. Puffin. Bob picked up a half-dozen pieces of wood and fed them to the fire.

  Mary felt wobbly and light-headed. Dehydration, she knew. She carried an armful of wood back toward the fire but had to stop twice to regain her energy. It drained her to put the wood down, rest, then pick it up again. She might have carried lighter loads and made more trips, but that didn’t seem so great, either. Everything came down to energy in, energy out, water in, water out. She had known that intellectually before, but she had never really understood it in her gut.

  She was hungry, too. Very hungry. Her insides felt like a dozen birds fluttering.

  Use your head, she kept thinking. That phrase rolled in and out of her mind, but never entirely left it. Her mother had always said that to her. Use your head. She said that life didn’t depend on fancy tools, but on your mind. On your attitude. If you met challenges directly, made reasoned decisions, then your chances improved exponentially. You had to think before you acted.

  But if you couldn’t find water, you couldn’t find water. And you couldn’t survive. That was the long and short of it, she knew.

  She was glad to make it back to the fire and to dump the wood from her arms. She was glad to get out of her own head, too.

  “Where is everyone?” she asked Harry Cameron, who was on fire duty for the time being. It was still early morning, the sun a few feet above the horizon line.

  “Collecting wood,” Harry said, waving at the land around him. “Most of the wood is down by the water.”

  “I know,” Mary said. “I just came from there.”

  “Ms. Carpenter was in with Sam. He’s not doing so great.”

  “Is he worse?”

  “He needs water and food. They’re worried about him. Really worried.”

  “It all comes down to water,” Mary said.

  “Do you feel light-headed?”

  Mary nodded.

  “I do, too. Mr. Puffin has a headache and his lips look cracked. It’s like we’re on a desert island, which is crazy because we’re up here in Maine.”

  “I know. It is crazy.”

  “If it would rain or snow, we’d be okay. But it’s completely sunny.”

  “It’s cold, though. The temperature is dropping.”

  “When we have enough wood, Mr. Puffin wants us to build a HELP sign with rocks. He thinks someone might see it from the air.”

  “We can’t expend too much energy, though,” Mary said. “That will burn up water faster than anything.”

  “I’m
just saying what he said.”

  She didn’t speak for a minute or more. She knew she should go back and get more wood, but she had no energy. In time the others came back, all of them carrying wood. They dropped the wood into a pile and didn’t move away. Mr. O’Connell was the last one back. Harry had been right, Mary saw: Mr. O’Connell looked shaky and weak.

  “Come on, everyone, please give me your attention,” Mr. O’Connell asked. “Can you please just hold on for a second?”

  Not many people were speaking anyway, Mary thought. Mr. O’Connell stepped close to the fire and held out his hands. He started to speak twice before he finally gained sufficient saliva to begin.

  “Here are our options as I see them,” Mr. O’Connell said. “No matter what, we need to stay positive. Everyone agrees on that, right?”

  Mary saw people nod.

  “Nobody expected this,” he continued. “No one planned for anything like this. Our equipment is buried under the rocks. Our food is buried, too. Ms. Carpenter and I studied the likelihood of digging it out and we don’t think the chances are very good. The rocks are extremely heavy, for one thing, and the wall above looks to be unstable. I’m not entirely sure we could get to the supplies, and I think it’s too dangerous to try in any case.”

  Mary looked around the group. Everyone had come to the same conclusion. Harry put a few more pieces of wood onto the fire.

  “Ms. Carpenter and I also discussed the possibility of moving back into the magazine in order to be out of the wind. I’m sure you all considered that might be a good thing to do, but again, we’re worried about the stability of the structure. If another tremor comes, we don’t want to be trapped inside. I think we all agree on that.”

  “Then what are we going to do?” Sandy asked, her voice whiny and plaintive. “All you’re saying is what we can’t do. How about what we can do?”

  Mary watched Mr. O’Connell turn his gaze on Sandy. Mr. Puffin suddenly looked like Mr. Vulture. It was easy to see he didn’t care for Sandy. Mary watched him slowly get a grip on his anger.