The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island

by Scott Semegran

  “Hold on. I know,” Brian said, then peeled his t-shirt off his back. He twisted the t-shirt around Randy’s wrist, then pulled Randy’s hand towards him. “I’m gonna have to suck it out.”

  “Suck what out?!” Randy protested, retracting his swollen hand. The look on his face turned from fear to disgust.

  “The poison,” Brian said, then sighed. “Do you trust me or what?”

  Randy also sighed then acquiesced. He gave his hand back to Brian, who gently examined it. He turned it over looking at the palm, then back.

  “I’m going to ask you to look away,” Brian commanded. Randy reluctantly did, and Brian got to work. He sucked on the two bloody spots on Randy’s hand then spit—his face twisting into a look of disapproval so pronounced that it was almost comical—then sucked and spit some more. After a few more fervent rounds of this, he released Randy’s hand. “I hope that helps.”

  Brian stood up, then trudged back down to the water. We could hear him slurping handfuls of dirty lake water, then spitting it out. The twilight dissipated, and the curtain of night hung high in the sky. Randy and I laid next to each other on the cold ground, me clutching my hip and Randy clutching his hand to his chest.

  “I hope we make it off this island alive,” Miguel said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “This isn’t like Gilligan’s Island at all.”

  I was thinking the exact same thing.

  21.

  The funny thing about hunger: you don’t know what true hunger is until you experience it. Those rumblings in your gut around your typical breakfast, lunch, and dinner times aren’t true hunger. That’s your brain tricking you, making you think you’re hungry, when you’re really not. If you simply ignored the gastric rumbles, then they would stop after ten or fifteen minutes, but no one ignores them. After two or three days without food, true hunger sets in and those hunger pangs are excruciating, the true definition of gut-wrenching. And that’s what started happening to us after two full days on Sometimes Island. Our bodies sent warnings to our brains that they would eat themselves from the inside if some food wasn’t dropped down into our stomachs pronto, and our brains panicked. We wrapped our arms around our midsections to quell the rumblings, but that didn’t do anything to ease our hunger. Earlier that day, we did drink some lake water—the four of us kneeling and lifting cupped hands filled with silty liquid to our parched lips—but the hint of spilt gasoline from motor boats and urine squirted from drunk boaters was a rancid reminder that we were not drinking clean water. It was difficult to swallow more than a gulp or two.

  Once the night sky hung above us—the stars twinkling within the inverted crevice of the Milky Way—Brian suggested we hunt for constellations as a way to keep our minds preoccupied. It was a fun idea until we realized none of us knew enough about where to actually find the constellations. Brian thought he could locate some, but it didn’t seem like he knew what he was looking for. Still, it soothed us looking up into space at the twinkling dots, so much so that Brian and Miguel quickly fell asleep. Both snored like fog horns.

  Randy and I couldn’t sleep, probably from the additional pain we each experienced: my hip and his snake bite. And Randy was sweating profusely, probably from the poison circulating through his body. I could feel the humid heat coming off his pasty skin as we laid next to each other, looking up into the obsidian black night sky. Randy cleared his throat as quietly as possible and wiped his brow with his forearm.

  “Do you think we’ll die out here?”

  The dreadful thought had crossed my mind, but I didn’t want to say it out loud, as if verbalizing my fear before now would make it come true.

  “Nah. Someone will come for us.”

  “Oh yeah? When?”

  I didn’t know, so I shrugged. “Soon, I hope.”

  Randy wheezed through pursed lips, then something caught his attention.

  “Look!” he said, thrusting up his chin, signaling for me to look up.

  The For Sale sign obscured some of our view of the treetop, but I could see a large bird clinging to a branch up there, with the black ceiling of space hanging above it and white speckles of stars and satellites casting distant light, soon followed by a familiar sound: Hoo huh hoo, hoo huh hoo.

  “Maybe it’ll drop us another dead mouse for a snack?” I said. “I’m so hungry I could eat a dead mouse.”

  “No way, man!” Randy said. “I wouldn’t. I’m no animal.”

  He shook his head defiantly and lightly clucked his tongue.

  “You’d rather starve to death?” I said.

  “Probably.”

  “That’s silly!”

  Randy nudged my ribs with his elbow, then shushed me.

  “You’ll wake up those two honking dipshits,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said, struggling to keep the giggles inside.

  “And don’t be sorry, but do have some dignity. You know?”

  “OK,” I said. “I’ll just starve to death with you, then. Very dignified like.”

  He nudged my ribs again. I guess he wasn’t a fan of my sarcasm.

  “I never, ever thought about dying before, until I was down in the water looking for something to eat,” he said, then stammered. “I guess I always took my mom and our full fridge for granted.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I was feeling guilty about the same thing. “We’re just dumb kids.”

  “Real dumb.”

  “I sure would love to be going through my folks’ fridge right now.”

  “Me, too! What would you get?” he said, excited. He propped himself up on one elbow, but the shift in his body weight brought him discomfort. “Ow!”

  “You OK?” I said, propping myself up, too.

  “Yeah, my hand hurts. That’s all.”

  “Oh.”

  “So,” he began, then took a deep breath. “What would you get?”

  I looked up and inventoried the refrigerator and freezer in my mind, or at least how I last remembered it to be. It was hard to decide.

  “A vanilla Drumstick!” I said. For those of you who don’t know, that’s not a chicken leg or a stick to smack a drum with; it’s a chocolate-coated, vanilla ice cream cone with chopped peanuts in the chocolate coating. It’s delicious. Trust me.

  “Ooooo!” he said. “I’d destroy one of those right now.”

  “What about you?”

  “Shoot, I don’t know.” He fell silent and, I assumed, inventoried his mom’s refrigerator in his mind. “My mom baked some chocolate chip cookies last weekend and stashed some in the back of the fridge. She thinks I don’t know they’re there, but I do. I’d gank some of those cookies and eat them slowly.”

  “With a glass of milk?”

  “Duh!”

  We both laughed out loud, which almost woke up Brian and Miguel. They twitched and moaned, but didn’t wake up. They were deeply entranced by their slumber. Randy and I covered our mouths with our hands to keep from laughing louder. Right then, we heard the owl leap from its brittle branch and flap its broad wings a few times—batting humid air and buzzing insects down with great force—then watched it glide through the air, illuminated by the moonlight across the great expanse of water that separated Sometimes Island from where the marina and campgrounds were on the other side, until we couldn’t see it anymore. I envied the ease in which it could escape from the island whenever it felt like it, something we didn’t have the fortune of being able to do.

  A pshaw flopped from Randy’s parched lips. “I guess no dead mouse this time.”

  “Guess not. Stingy old owl.”

  “So rude!”

  “Selfish!”

  My stomach interjected, groaning loudly, clinching my insides. I laid my arm across my stomach to soothe it.

  “All this talk about food isn’t helping, is it?” Randy said. He picked a booger, then unceremoniously flicked it. He probed his other nostril, but found nothing.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Maybe tomorrow, we c
an ask Brian and Miguel to go down to the water to look for some food or something.”

  “OK.”

  “I’m sure another boat will come by tomorrow.”

  “I hope so,” I said, then sighed. I laid back down on the ground and looked up at the stars. If I kept still long enough, I could see a shooting star or an airplane with its flashing red light. I couldn’t locate any constellations, but I was OK with that. A chill was in the air and we both shivered.

  Randy laid back down, too, with a groan.

  “This sucks,” he said.

  “Does your hand still hurt?”

  “Yeah, a lot. But I’m not sweating as much right now.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Maybe we should try to get some sleep.”

  “OK.”

  Randy closed his eyes and soon snored softly. He must have been more tired than he thought. Me, I wasn’t tired at all. And I couldn’t lay still long because the rough ground with its pebbles, sticker burrs, and dried twigs stabbed my ribs and spine through my t-shirt. Every few minutes, I would have to fidget and find a new position for my body to lay, before repeating the process again in hopes for at least a little comfort. It was useless, though. And nothing made it more apparent that I wasn’t home than lying on the hard, rough ground without a roof over my head or a blanket to keep me warm.

  This was the first time in my conscious memory that I ruminated about my life and the real danger I found myself in. Before the boat wreck on Sometimes Island, I don’t think I contemplated my existence and the possibility that my life could end. It was a sobering experience for a middle-schooler. I thought about my parents and wondered how much my mom missed me. Surely at that point, she knew me and my friends were missing. How much pain am I causing her? I thought. Would she be mad at me for running away? I even missed my step-dad, Steve, and would’ve preferred his solemn presence to the predicament I was in on that unforgiving island with the wind laughing at us and the owl dropping dead mice. I thought about my friends’ parents and wondered how they felt, too.

  Then mental images of all the things I would miss if I perished on that island marched through my mind—a strange parade of unfortunate missed opportunities—like my first kiss, which hadn’t happened yet since I hadn’t met a girl I wanted to kiss by that point. Or getting my driver license and first car at sixteen years of age, which I later learned would be a 1978 Honda Civic with a 60 hp engine, the perfect car for me. Or going to the senior prom with Carly Simpson, who would then go down in history as the first girl I kissed and the first one to break my heart in two. She crushed me after the prom. But if I were to die on Sometimes Island, then none of these things would come to be. I would rot on the island, my bones collecting dust and housing spiders, along with the skeletons of Randy, Brian, and Miguel. My eyes watered. My heart ached.

  Knowing that coming out to the lake was my idea, I felt an oppressive amount of guilt, even if the Thousand Oaks Gang had something to do with it. I even felt bad for Bloody Billy, if you can believe that. I was sure his mom missed him, too. But on second thought, decided that even his own mother probably didn’t like him. He was just too much of a degenerate to be loved. My immature mind put the blame for our predicament squarely on Billy, the one who put us on the path to escape to the Cabin of Seclusion and our eventual wreck on Sometimes Island.

  “It’s all that jerk’s fault,” I whispered to myself. “Yup, his fault.”

  I imagined Bloody Billy at the bottom of the lake, his face and neck bloated, bottom feeders sucking on his blanched arms, his shirt billowing in the water while moonbeams danced around him, and his backpack lying in the silty lake bed not too far from him just out of reach, a school of minnows pecking at it. I had no idea how deep the lake was at the point where he vanished or if moonbeams could reach the bottom of the lake or even if there were bottom feeders down there, but just the idea of this soothed me. I joyfully thought about Billy’s watery grave while looking up at the stars.

  “That son of a biscuit,” I whispered to myself, then immediately thought of my mother making breakfast back at home, popping open a can of Pillsbury Biscuits and laying the circles of dimpled dough on a baking sheet. “Mmm, biscuits.”

  I soon fell asleep—a deep, deep black hole of sleep, without dreams of scrumptious breakfasts or sunken bullies.

  22.

  I woke up to witness Miguel peeing in the lake and Brian—standing on the jutting rock—peering through his binoculars across the lake. Miguel’s urine stream was more like a splatter as he mercilessly blasted the lake water in fits and starts. His urination was a fluorescent yellow spurt of water out the end of a withered straw, the spurts shooting in random directions. It looked painful, although he didn’t audibly reveal if it was or not. Once he was done, he pulled up his shorts, snapped the elastic band at his waist, and returned over to where Randy and I were lying on the ground. Randy was still asleep, his swollen hand and arm on his chest like a swaddled baby.

  Miguel plopped down next to me, quite chipper for the early morning hour. “Good day, sunshine!”

  “Hey,” I said, rubbing the crust from my eyes. “What’s he doing?”

  I set my gaze on Brian. Miguel turned to look.

  “Oh, he’s just watching. Hoping to see Tony or someone.”

  “And?”

  “Nada,” Miguel replied, then picked up a stray pebble and tossed it in Brian’s direction. It skidded on the ground, missing Brian’s legs, and plunked in the water. “But he’s on a mission.”

  I shifted my body position and noticed that the pain in my hip wasn’t as bad as the day before. I slowly lifted my leg without much pain—raising it, then lowering it, then rotating it in small, circular motions—which pleased Miguel.

  “Look at you!”

  He jumped up and ran to where Brian stood on the jutting rock, jabbing him in the ribs with a pointy index finger.

  “Hey! William’s getting better!” Miguel exclaimed.

  The jab caused Brian to reflexively bend at his waist, turning his entire body into a greater-than symbol.

  “Why’d you do that?!” Brian said.

  “Do what?”

  “Poke me!”

  “I barely touched you,” Miguel said, rolling his eyes at Brian’s frustration.

  I looked over at Randy and he turned on his side, a quick herky-jerky type of turn like he levitated, then commanded to turn against his will by a wizard. He snorted, then snored some more. Brian and Miguel came over and squatted next to me.

  “You doing OK?” Brian said. One corner of his mouth turned upward in a hopeful gesture. “You look better.”

  “Thanks, dude. I feel a little better. Did you see anybody out there?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Keep lookin’.”

  “How’s he doing?” Brian said, then thumbed in Randy’s direction. Some blades of grass were stuck in his Afro like needles in a pin cushion. He noticed me looking at his hair, so he patted it, and a couple of blades fell out.

  “Sawing logs,” I said.

  Brian winked, then returned to his post on the jutting rock—his binoculars pinned to his face. Miguel dusted off a spot next to me and sat down. It seemed strange that he would dust off the ground considering we were both filthy as pigs. Maybe it was a habit from our more civilized life back home and the constant scolding from our mothers to not get things in the house dirty. Miguel was noticeably gaunt, a withered facsimile of my friend—his eyes a little sunken, his lips a little ashen. His tangled hair, dotted with grass and sticker burrs, flickered in the breeze. But his withered state didn’t seem to hamper his good disposition.

  “I had a dream last night,” he started, then cleared his throat.

  “Oh yeah? What about?”

  “I had a dream that my brother was being nice to me and rescued us. Weird, huh?”

  He looked at me for an affirmation, knowing full-well how I felt about his dastardly brother.

  “That would never happen
in a million years.”

  “So true,” he said, picking up another pebble, and launching it at Brian. The pebble skidded on the rocks, ricocheted up, then pegged Brian behind his right knee. He yelped, swinging the binoculars down while he rubbed his leg. “Bullseye!”

  “Screw you!” Brian said. He glared at Miguel, then lifted the binoculars back to his face, returning to his lookout position. “Can’t you see I’m doing something important here.”

  “Looks like you’re just standing there,” Miguel teased.

  Brian’s pshaw morphed into a loogie, which he spat into the lake. But his protestations quickly turned to a celebratory dance. He jumped up and down, waving his arms in the air.

  “Hey!” he yelled, waving his arms furiously and yelling out into the giant, watery chasm.

  Miguel and I were perplexed, to say the least.

  “What’s up?” Miguel called out.

  Brian continued his pleas, not looking back at us.

  “There’s a boat! Look out there!”

  I sat up while Miguel stood up. And sure enough out on the horizon was an object skirting across the water that certainly could’ve been a boat, if not a mirage from our collective imaginations. Our commotion awoke Randy, who sat up and rubbed his crusty eyes with his good hand. He seemed to be a little lost, as if awaking from a 100-year slumber and he didn’t quite know where or who he was. Then he carefully shook out the tingly sleep from his swollen hand. He winced as he cradled it gently back against his chest.

  “What’s all the racket?”

  “Brian sees a boat!” Miguel called out.

  The look of surprise on Randy’s face was priceless. His eyes bulged wide while his jaw dropped open, revealing his skeptical tongue.

  “Really?”

  “Yup,” I said. “Look!”

  Randy miraculously stood up—pressing his lame hand against his chest and shading his brow with his good hand—as he peered out across the water, squinting. Hope is a miraculous thing. Even the faintest bit of hope elicits will power from the deepest recesses of downtrodden souls. As if yanked to life by a puppet master, Randy and Miguel both joined Brian, all three jumping and screaming their brains out, trying their best to get the driver of the boat’s attention to where we were stranded on damned Sometimes Island. I sat in the cool shade of the For Sale sign and watched my crazed friends as they pleaded to be seen. I could finally see the faint stirring of water way off in the distance, and I could hear the muffled buzz of the boat’s motor. It skimmed across the water, but not in our direction. It seemed to be heading toward the Cabin of Seclusion.