Cave-in

by Joseph Monninger

  Mr. Puffin nodded. Sandy came back again, this time carrying barely a handful of seaweed. No one pointed it out. No one had the energy to point out every shortcut Sandy employed.

  “We’re all here,” Mr. Puffin said, taking a position beside the fire. “We’re all going to make it. If we work together, we’ll be okay.”

  “We’re running low on wood,” Bob Worm pointed out.

  “Well, we’ll cut back a little on it. Everyone hear that? Be smart about the wood. Don’t add more than we need at any one point.”

  Then a loud cawing sound drowned everything else out. Bob Worm and Harry shouted and turned and ran off, yelling for everyone to come. When nobody did, Harry turned back and shouted to them all, the veins on either side of his neck tight strings.

  “We caught a seagull! We trapped him! Come on, dinner is served!”

  Mostly, it had been Harry’s doing. That’s what Bob Worm thought when he ran up to the old lobster pot and saw the gull beating its wings against the wire sides. The door — Harry had figured out a drop mechanism, so that any vibration brought the door down and trapped whatever was inside — had worked beautifully. It bounced occasionally when the gull rammed it, but two rocks secured it and Bob knew it wouldn’t release. No, they had fresh meat for dinner.

  “I can’t believe it worked!” Harry yelled, hopping and jumping over the rocks that lined the shore. He looked like a leprechaun, Bob thought, clicking his heels and leaping around after a pot of gold. But this was better than gold. If they could catch one seagull, they could catch more, presumably. That put an X through the hunger problem. They could find water and feed themselves, albeit in a pretty bleak fashion. Still, survival was survival, and Bob Worm slapped Harry’s back when they finally arrived over the pot.

  “What do you say?” Bob said, feeling good for the first time since they had left the lobster boat. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “I can’t believe the bait worked. It was lousy bait.”

  It had been a jellyfish, three small dead minnows, and a worm-type thing that grossed Harry out just to touch it. But it had worked. The gull had stepped inside, and its movement had sprung the door. Bob wasn’t surprised to see that the gull had eaten the three minnows right away. That’s how much calories mean, he thought. That was the importance of every bite and every meal.

  Mr. Puffin came up beside him.

  “It’s a herring gull,” he said. “You can eat him.”

  “Are there kinds you can’t eat?” asked Harry.

  Mr. Puffin shrugged. He squatted down to examine the lobster cage. He flicked the door a little and watched it close sharply on its makeshift hinges.

  “I’m impressed,” he said, standing again.

  “You’re not just going to kill it, are you?” Sandy asked.

  “No, you are,” Bob said, just to be a smart aleck.

  “Are you going to eat it raw?” Sandy asked. “We don’t have a way to cook it.”

  “We can put it on skewers and roast it,” Bob said. “You don’t have to eat it if you don’t want.”

  “Save the guts for bait,” Harry said.

  But the matter of killing the bird still remained, Bob knew. No one stepped forward. It was one thing to catch a bird, as miraculous as that was, but it was another to wring its neck. Bob knew enough about raising chickens to understand there wouldn’t be much meat on the seagull. Maybe ten good bites, he estimated, then a bunch of slurping and cracking. They could eat the guts, too, he realized. People ate the gizzard when they ate turkeys, plus the lungs and heart and liver. The truly gross parts he would use for bait.

  Bob had almost persuaded himself to step forward and dig his hands into the trap, when a tiny tremor moved across the island. It made everything shake, though it was nowhere as large or as forceful as the earlier tremors had been. It felt like an after-aftershock, something that marked the end of the blip that had caused the shaking in the first place. Still, it made everyone look around in mild discomfort.

  “What’s going on?” Sandy asked with her nasal voice obnoxiously raised. “Why does this keep happening?”

  “We’re okay,” Mr. Puffin said.

  “It doesn’t feel okay,” Sandy said. “It feels horrible.”

  Then the tremor disappeared and the birds, the gulls, raised their voices and screamed. Bob Worm stepped forward and opened the gate on the lobster pot. He held it open while the bird, panicked at first, then slowly gaining confidence, slipped past him and flapped away. No one said anything. Bob looked at Harry, who merely shrugged and turned to go back to the fire.

  “Why did you do that?” Mary asked. “I thought we were going to eat it.”

  Bob shrugged. He didn’t know why he let it go, but no one said anything else about it. It was just too much, he thought. The whole thing was just too much.

  “Hey,” Sam Harding called, “who wants a piece of a Snickers bar?”

  Silence. Then someone, it sounded like Bob Worm, said, “Saaaayyy whaaaaatttt?”

  Sam heard them wrestle their way to the tent, all of them laughing. Someone zipped the zipper down and stuck a hand through. Sam gave them the Snickers. Mary said over and over, “No way! No way!”

  “Divide it up evenly,” Harry yelled. “No cheating.”

  “I can’t believe we have a Snickers bar,” Sandy said. “Three Snickers bars! Where were they?”

  “Inside my sneakers. A spare pair. I just didn’t look before.”

  Sam wanted to get out and join them, but he felt tired suddenly. He felt tired and his head refused to stop ringing. It was a high, plaintive bell sound that filled the inside of his head and he hated it but couldn’t chase it away.

  “Snickers bars!” Harry yelled in a happy, surprised voice, apparently calling to Mr. Puffin. “Real Snickers bars.”

  Sam tried to hear Mr. Puffin’s reaction, but he drifted off again before he could catch all of the conversation. When he woke again, he heard them discussing the temperature. It was getting colder. He felt it even inside the tent. He felt it in his back, radiating up from the ground. He tried to remember what his bed felt like, what it felt like to take a shower and to be warm, but those things seemed from another life.

  Then he heard someone suggest they move back into the magazine. Just for the night. Just to be out of the wind and to be a little warmer. He tried to stay with the conversation, but sleep tugged him away again. For a moment he imagined himself deep under his covers in his own bed, freshly showered, homework finished, everything safe and warm and clean. The seagulls made a sound like someone screaming, yes, yes, yes, and that sound sent him deeper into sleep.

  The wind made a sound like a woman keening for her man lost at sea. It kept pulling thick, unhappy sounds from the slot in the magazine wall. They had already tried a fire, but the fire pushed out too much smoke and there was nowhere for it to go. Bob Worm had talked about pushing a hole through the roof, but that had been voted down as too dangerous. As a result, they sat in near darkness, like cave people, Mary thought, and shivered and tried anything to stay warm.

  “He comes tomorrow, though,” Sandy said for the umpteenth time.

  Meaning the lobsterman comes tomorrow, Mary reflected. Meaning they would be rescued tomorrow.

  “At noon,” Mr. Puffin said because someone had to say something each time Sandy said it.

  “I’m going to have the world’s biggest soda,” Sandy said. “I have an enormous craving for it. I don’t know why.”

  “I want a steak,” Bob Worm said. “A juicy one with a side of potatoes.”

  “Tomorrow,” Sandy said, her voice wrapping it in prayer tones.

  “Let’s get through what we need to get through,” Mr. Puffin said. “Then we can think about everything else.”

  “I’m starving now,” Harry said. “I didn’t know I could get this hungry and not die. The candy bar only made it worse.”

  “It was better before the candy bar,” Bob Worm agreed.

  Sandy did not think her shar
e of the Snickers bars had been a fair portion. Three bars divided among six people was not rocket science. But they didn’t have a knife or a ruler, so they had broken her bar apart in what was supposed to be an equitable way, but it clearly didn’t work.

  Half a bar was half a bar. Sandy’s piece, she was absolutely certain, was smaller than the piece they gave to Mary.

  She almost didn’t care. She was sick of the whole situation. She didn’t dare say anything about the Snickers bar, because of course everyone would see her as being a complainicus. That’s what her mother always said when Sandy voiced an objection.

  “Quit being such a complainicus,” she would say. “Who are you, a Roman general named Complainicus?”

  But half a Snickers bar was half a Snickers bar, and anyone who knew anything could certainly agree with that.

  “We could be eating a nice seagull right now,” Harry said. “If we hadn’t all chickened out.”

  Then Mary hissed for everyone to be quiet.

  She heard an engine. At least she thought she heard an engine. It was hard to tell. The interior of the magazine echoed and the voices, everyone’s voices, blocked the sounds from outdoors. She hissed again and held out her hand, patting it down in a signal to be quiet, and everyone looked at her strangely. But she held up a finger, pointed to her ear, and then made them all listen.

  It was an engine. A boat engine.

  Mary went through the doorway first. She was the most nimble, she knew, and she didn’t wait to see who came second. She stopped for an instant to locate the sound — from the water, duh, she told herself — and then darted off to the east end where they had originally landed.

  The ground was not easy going. About four inches of icy rain had fallen and turned everything slick and greasy. She skidded around the first corner of the fort, nearly fell, then managed to jerk her body back upright. As she slid down the bank toward the sea, she spotted the boat slipping past the island, its lights bright and happy and purposeful.

  “Hey … help, help us!” she screamed.

  Behind her an entire chorus joined in.

  “Help,” they yelled. “Hey. Help, hey …”

  They had forgotten about mic check, Mary realized too late.

  The boat did not pause. It was hard to see exactly what it was, what kind of vessel, but it looked like a lobster boat, a blue one, a different color than Bertie’s. It looked like someone returning to port, Mary thought, after checking his pots.

  “Did they hear us?” Sandy asked. “Did they hear?”

  No one answered. But the wind rose up and kicked them in the tail, and Mary turned around and headed back to the magazine.

  Now the cold was the issue, Eamon thought.

  The issue changed faster than he could keep track of it. First it had been the rocks falling from the tremors, then it had been water, then it had been food, then it had been Sam’s worsening health, then it had been Ursula, then it had been the wind, then it had been the boat slipping past and condemning them to more time on the island …

  And now it was the cold. The fierce, relentless cold.

  They needed a fire, and they needed to be out of the wind and storm, and those things didn’t work together. Not a bit.

  This time of year, he calculated, sunrise came later. Call it seven fifteen or so before the sun would appear. Until then they had to rest inside their lair like animals. He guessed it was somewhere around four. He wanted to ask Bob, but Bob was asleep.

  For a time he dozed. When he woke, his mind went to the newest issue.

  Wood.

  Fuel. They were running out. If Bertie showed up promptly at noon, they would be okay. But if anything interfered with the pickup, if weather made it difficult for Bertie to retrieve them, then the cold would become serious indeed. They could not endure too many days of such sharp temperatures. Not on top of food deprivation and exposure.

  He sat up. He didn’t want those thoughts racing around in his head.

  “I’m freezing,” Sandy said from her position on the ground not far from him. “Is anyone else freezing?”

  “I’m pretty cold,” Harry said.

  “We should take turns in the tent,” Mary said. “Two by two. We brought it inside for Sam, but we all need to use it. We can lie close together. Give everyone a half hour at a time and see if we can warm up.”

  “What about Sam?” Bob Worm asked.

  “Sam’s going to have to share some of his heat,” Mary answered.

  It was true, Eamon thought. It was the best plan given the circumstances.

  He watched — as much as he could in the dimness — Mary crawl across the space and zip down the tent flap. She said something to Sam and then Sam slowly came out of the tent.

  “Sandy, come on,” Mary said. “Someone time us. We get fifteen minutes, maybe. We’ll keep this bag warm.”

  “We’re going to squeeze in together?” Sandy asked.

  “That’s the plan unless you have a better one.”

  Eamon heard them making their way into the single sleeping bag. He worried about Sam. It must be frightfully cold, he thought, to come out of a warm sleeping bag and find yourself in a rocky dungeon.

  “You okay, Sam?” Eamon asked the boy.

  Sam said yes, but Eamon could hear the cold covering him.

  “You know, I was thinking,” Sam said after a little while. “We should make teams. We should never have a boat go by like that and not have someone outside to signal.”

  “You’re right,” Eamon said and he knew it was true. “Maybe we’ve been a little lazy because Bertie should be back soon. But we should prepare for the worst and be happy when things turn out better.”

  “We could divide into fuel, water, signal,” Bob Worm said.

  Yes, Eamon thought. Why hadn’t he thought of that before?

  “We’ll start at sunrise. Fuel is food, too, so that team has to bring seaweed. We should have three teams working all the time. It’s stupid that we haven’t.”

  “We keep thinking Bertie will solve things,” Bob Worm said. “If we knew we had to be here for a month, we’d have a different attitude.”

  “Still, it’s a good idea to break out in teams,” Eamon said. “It will give us some structure. We need structure.”

  “Or we’ll turn savage,” Bob Worm said.

  For reasons Eamon couldn’t quite name, everyone laughed. He didn’t know, but he laughed as hard as anyone. It felt a little like going crazy, but it felt good, too. Then Harry pulled out his harmonica and played an old cowboy song. This time, though, the songs didn’t make you sad. They made you feel like maybe you had a chance after all. At sunrise, Eamon promised himself, they would set up a new camp and get serious about making work teams.

  Bertie was nowhere to be seen. It was noon on Tuesday, Sandy knew, and Bertie was nowhere on the horizon. It frosted her to think about it. Where was he? What was he doing? How could he be late to pick them up off the island? She didn’t care what kind of explanation he tried to give later on, she wouldn’t buy it. Not for an instant. On time was on time, and lateness was a choice. That was what her grandfather had always said and she had never fully understood it until this moment.

  Whatever her grandfather said or didn’t say hardly mattered now. The only thing that mattered was the sight of Bertie pulling up in his little lobster boat.

  “Where is he?” she asked aloud.

  She knew it was a mistake to ask. People didn’t like other people who asked hard questions. People didn’t like her when she asked them.

  “Sandy, if I knew, I’d tell you,” Mr. Puffin said.

  “Jeez, Sandy, give it a rest,” Bob Worm said. “You’re not making it any better by asking every ten seconds.”

  “Noon, right? He said noon.”

  What good was it to argue with them? She was deathly sick of them all. If they knew so much about everything, how come this disaster had befallen them in the first place? She would like to have asked them that little riddle. But they
needed her to be the nag and scold, the person who asked all the questions and then ate all the responses. She had lived that role her entire life. It was nothing new.

  “What’s our plan if he doesn’t show up?” Sandy asked. “Do we just sit here?”

  “We don’t have a plan,” Mr. Puffin said. “I’m open to suggestions, though.”

  “We should start collecting wood and seaweed while there’s light to work with,” Mary said. “Break back into our teams just in case.”

  “I have to think he would be early if anything,” Harry said. “Don’t fishermen wake up early? Isn’t that their deal?”

  Sandy stood and moved her position to get more squarely into the sun. They sat on a half-dozen boulders near the landing area. The sun felt good. It wasn’t warm, exactly, but at least it was direct and threw their shadows around them. That counted for something. The stones underneath them held what little heat the sun produced. It felt good to sit on them, especially when the wind stopped for a second.

  “I suppose we might as well work while we’re waiting,” Mr. Puffin said. “Let’s break into two teams, one for wood, one for food.”

  “What kind of guy did you hire, anyway? Is it so hard to be on time?” Sandy asked.

  “He’s a local fisherman, Sandy,” Mr. Puffin said, his voice tight and controlled, “who knows these waters and knows this island. He has a dependable boat. I don’t know why he’s not here now, but he said it would be around noon. Around noon. Is that clear?”

  “He should be here,” Sandy said.

  Mr. Puffin stood and walked away, heading toward the waterline, where they often found driftwood. She didn’t care if he was annoyed with her. She was annoyed with him, so let that go down on the record books as a tie, she reflected. Just because he was the teacher didn’t make him an expert about everything. She just wanted to go home, take a shower, and forget any of this ever happened.

  One by one the others followed Mr. Puffin. Everyone except Sam, who had found two rocks together in the sunlight and had stretched out on them, dozing. It was hard to figure Sam, Sandy thought. Sometimes he seemed to be faking his illness, then other times he seemed like he was going to croak any second. She couldn’t read him.