The Great Wide Sea

by M. H. Herlong

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  TWO DAYS LATER, Dylan caught an iguana in one of the snares he had rigged with string and boat wire. I didn’t feel I had fully digested the flounder when I saw Dylan walking down the hill carrying an iguana by its tail and grinning, as if he’d just won the National Science Fair. Then he sat down to skin it and cut it up.

  This was not a pretty sight. It involved a lot of blood and guts. Gerry and I tried not to watch, but there was Dylan, sitting right by the tent, smeared up to his elbows. He was totally focused, carefully ripping away the skin and setting the edible meat in a pot. When he was all done, he looked up at us and smiled.

  “I hope you’re hungry,” he said.

  We nodded, but to tell the truth, watching the whole operation had taken the edge off my appetite.

  “Good,” Dylan said. “Let’s cook it. And we’ll save the guts and stuff for fish bait. At least until they start to rot.”

  So that night we had roasted iguana and roasted prickly pears. It was actually good. We couldn’t even eat it all, so Dylan wrapped it up very carefully and hung it in a tree to keep it away from crabs. In the morning, we ate the rest for breakfast. Then Gerry took Blankie and his spear and went to watch for another flounder—he could sit still all morning if he just had Blankie with him—and Dylan headed back up the hill to see what he could find.

  We had been on the island about three weeks, and I was the only one who hadn’t brought any food to the campfire. It was time I got off my butt and killed something for us to eat. I knew the speargun would be my weapon. But first I needed a boat to get to the outer side of the reef. That meant I had to turn the dinghy into a sailboat. And I had no idea how I was going to manage that.

  Sometimes the first step toward solving the problem of building something or fixing something is to sit and look at it. You just sit and stare at it for a while and ideas float through your head and eventually one of them makes sense and sticks. This job was about how a sailboat should look. So I righted the dinghy, walked off a few steps, and then just sat and looked at it.

  I thought about a lot of things besides the dinghy. I thought about the girl who used to come ride in my imaginary car. I thought about Mom. I thought about the southeastern shore of this island and how it was a straight drop into the sea. I thought about what Dad’s hands looked like on the tiller and how his eyes squinted when he looked up to check the set of the sails.

  And I remembered one time on the lake when we were in the rowboat and I had lost one of the oars overboard. Dad stood up in the middle of the boat, unbuttoned his shirt, and held it open wide. Then he turned himself until he was set the way a sail would have been. “Use that oar for a rudder,” he said. I stuck the oar in the water at the stern of the boat to steer and watched us begin to inch through the water as the wind caught Dad’s shirt. We had sailed with no mast, no sail, no tiller, and no rudder. If Dad could turn a rowboat into a sailboat that easily, then surely I could manage.

  It came to me in lurches. The spinnaker pole for a mast. Cut a piece out of the jib for a sail. We had plenty of lines. With the toolbox I ought to be able to use some branches to make an all-in-one tiller and rudder. That center ridge of a palm frond had a nice flat surface that would work well. A boom? We didn’t need a boom. This wasn’t going to be a fancy sailboat. It was just going to take me to the reef and back.

  I walked to the tent and yanked out the spinnaker pole. The tent collapsed, but I had begun the boat. Five days later, the tent was fixed and the sailboat was finished.

  When Dylan and Gerry came to admire it, I showed them how I had lashed the spinnaker pole to the forward seat through a new hole, how I had stabilized the top with makeshift shrouds, and how I had used the old head and grommet on the tack to attach my handkerchief sail to the mast. Even the tiller-rudder was complete—two palm-frond spines bolted together at an angle.

  It wasn’t pretty, but it sailed. Of course, it couldn’t point. The closest I could sail to the wind was about sixty degrees. Still, if I had to tack and was willing to go slow, I could get where I wanted to go.

  “You’re a genius,” Dylan said, admiring my handiwork, but Gerry’s mind was on something different. He stayed behind even after Dylan had gone back to stalking iguanas. He went with me on a short sail to the reef and back. He helped me tidy up afterward.

  When we were walking back to camp, he reached out and took my hand. “Ben.” He tugged slightly, and I looked down at him. “Now we can go find Dad,” he said.

  I stopped still. It’s not very often that a door opens and all of a sudden you see life from another person’s completely different point of view. But here was Gerry’s shining face and all his happiness laid out for me like that, and suddenly I understood. All the time between waking up and finding Dad gone and this day when the dinghy became a sailboat was an interlude of unreality for Gerry.

  “What do you mean, Gerry?”

  “We can go back now to where we were when the storm hit us, and then we can find Dad.”

  It was so simple to him. Rewind the tape. Rewrite the show. Do a better job with the end this time.

  I wished Dylan were with us. I knew the words I wanted to say were cruel. I closed my eyes against the brightness of the sun. I felt the hardness of Gerry’s slender fingers in my palm.

  “And then,” he said, “we can go back home—all of us together.”

  “Gerry—” I started. But what could I say? Anything I said would hurt, because the truth was cruel. So I cheated—I lied. “A fishing boat has already found Dad by now. Now he is looking for us. The best thing for us to do is to wait here. If we stay in one place, it will be easier for him to find us.”

  “Someone is coming to get us?”

  I looked in his eyes. Blue. Sky blue. You’ve heard that phrase all your life and then you look in someone’s eyes and there it is—sky blue eyes. It’s a shock. Especially if you’re looking into eyes you’ve seen almost every day of your life for six years.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He looked back at me. “Good,” he said quietly. He sighed a little. “I hope they come soon.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  EVERY MORNING AFTER that, I took the dinghy-sailboat to the reef and tried to spear fish. I had thought it would be easy, but it was not. I ended up spearing a lot of coral. I managed to nab a reef lobster a few times so I wouldn’t come back empty-handed. I figured out how to roll the sea urchins over and out of their hiding places and how to pick them up with sticks. We learned to eat them too. But the only fish I got was the one I found trapped in a ball of sargassum that tangled on my anchor line.

  And the dinghy was not as good a sailboat as I had hoped. I spent a lot of time repairing it or, if the wind was in the wrong direction, sailing forever to get to a spot a hundred yards away. It was a frustrating business.

  Still, it was a peaceful, mystical world on the reef. It was different from all the other reefs we had seen because I knew this one. I swam it every day. I was not surprised to see the huge brain coral because I had seen it before. I would have been surprised if it had been gone. And the staghorns and sea feathers were where they were supposed to be. They waved there just as they had done the day before, their colors changing with the slant of the sun, their direction shifting with the current but always exactly in the same place every day. I came to recognize the flash of shadow that was an octopus suddenly sucking himself into his hiding place. I saw the tiny garden eels that lived in the sand with just their heads poking out until I rippled the water too close. I saw the brilliant blue Pederson shrimp that groomed the coral, eating away the slime or mold that would have made the coral sick. I almost felt I recognized the school of neon gobies that flashed in unison across the maze on the face of the brain coral.

  But even though I got to know the reef, I never saw any fish big enough to spear. Maybe it was the tides. Maybe I was too noisy. I decided to try chumming, baiting the area with pieces of leftover fish or meat. The chum attracts the
fish, and then you get a good shot. The very first time I did it, the chum worked. A big grouper came by to investigate but I wasn’t ready. My shot missed. By the time I’d reeled in my line and cocked the gun again, the grouper and the chum were gone. Another day empty-handed. I tried again the next day and missed again. I decided I needed to hunt where my dwindling supply of chum would attract more than one grouper. I decided to fish near the rocks that fell off the secret beach and rolled like giant stepping-stones into the ocean.

  Here the reef began to break apart so that dark blue fingers of ocean reached up to the fallen rocks and made deep protected pools. I was hoping that the deeper water right next to the half-submerged rock had created a feeding ground the fish couldn’t pass up. It would be harder to fish here because of the danger of the rocks and the difficulty anchoring. But I decided to try.

  The day was almost windless and the seas were calm when I anchored the dinghy at the end of the string of rocks, snagging the flukes in a shallow, sandy drift between two rocks. From my anchorage at the rock farthest away from the island, I could see Gerry clearly where he lay on his flat rock, Blankie tucked under his chin, his spear tip quiet in the water. Dylan was climbing the side of the island, carrying an old shirt to bring home whatever he found that we could use. He waved to me when he saw me round the rocks, and Gerry looked up when he heard the splash of my anchor.

  The waves broke gently against the rock where Gerry lay, but out where I was they just sloshed weakly against the rounded rocks and then fell quietly away. I rocked in the dinghy a moment, feeling the sun hot on my head. Then I picked up the chum wrapped in a scrap of old sail and the speargun and slipped silently into the water.

  Here the water was cooler and darker, but I could still see. From underwater, I could tell that these were not rocks that had rolled off the mountain and landed in the ocean. Instead, they were like the chunks of ice that break off an iceberg, huge sections of the island that had broken away and sunk slowly sideways into the ocean, so that only the tops were now left above water. Their steep underwater sides were crusted with sharp coral and teeming with tiny fish. Sea urchin spines rose like black spears out of the crevices. Right next to my left elbow an anemone waved the purple tips of its light green tentacles. The water was so rich, I could feel the fish around me just waiting to be caught.

  I swam in a tight circle, dropping the chum in three different spots, then surfaced for breath. In the bright sun, I could see Dylan a little higher up the side of the hill. Again he was turned to me. Again he was waving. I took in a deep breath and dove.

  The water filled my ears. The tiny fish swam within inches of my gun. Then suddenly there were three grouper gliding toward the chum. The sun was overhead, but my shadow was safely behind me. I was slightly above the largest fish, looking at his side. I aimed. I led him slightly. I pulled the trigger. Ping. Swish. Thunk. In an instant two of the grouper disappeared. But the third, the largest, was still there, suspended in the water with my dart piercing it just over its gills. I had made the perfect shot. The fish was paralyzed in the water. I had done it. Finally, I had speared a fish. I turned to take my prize home.

  Thirty feet away and cruising slowly closer was a giant hammerhead shark. Gray, long, and relentless, he swung his flat, evil face gently from side to side as he pinpointed me in the water where I was floating in the center of a circle of chum and holding a large, bleeding fish.

  I couldn’t move. I just stared at him. He was twice as big as I was, and he took up the whole ocean between the dinghy and me. I needed to surface to breathe or to swim away or to climb the coral-crusted side of the rock. But I could not move.

  I heard my own blood rushing in my ears and believed I felt the push of the water from the lumbering movement of his head. He swam toward me deliberately and slowly. There was no need for him to hurry. There was nothing I could do.

  Then the water exploded beside me into a tornado of bubbles and noise. I saw boy legs treading water furiously and kicking in the clear blue. And there were boy hands slapping the surface of the water and sending harsh sounds ricocheting into the currents. The hypnotic spell broke and I pushed myself to the surface gasping for air. Gerry and Dylan were swimming beside me, kicking and yelling and slapping the water. The shark’s fin stopped. He was frozen in the water and facing the three of us.

  “Throw him the fish, you idiot!” Dylan yelled.

  I ripped the shaft out of the grouper and threw the fish hard and far out into the water.

  The fin paused, then turned slowly and sliced toward the exact spot in the ocean where the grouper was now sinking.

  Then the shark was gone too, and the three of us were swimming there in the water, hearts pounding and breath ragged.

  “You idiots!” I screamed at them. “You could have—”

  “Noise,” Dylan panted. “Scares them.”

  We were gasping and slowly treading water when we both suddenly looked at Gerry.

  He was pumping his arms and legs desperately. He blew out his breath in puffs as he barely kept his head above the water. My arm flashed out and grabbed him.

  “Let go,” he said quickly. His eyes darted to the boat and I let go.

  “Can you make it all the way to the dinghy?” I asked.

  He looked at the side of the rock he had just jumped from. It was too steep and high to climb. His arms and legs worked frantically. Then he nodded quickly and began to dig his way slowly through the ocean, spitting water and blinking hard.

  “Hold your fingers together like a cup,” Dylan said. “That helps.”

  Gerry instantly tightened his fingers together.

  “Try to keep your butt a little higher,” I said. “It makes your legs work better for you.”

  We could see him trying. Dylan and I slowly cruised beside him. It was so easy for us. It was so hard for him. His eyes never turned from the dinghy. He did not look to us for help. He kicked and spat and splashed and blinked. And he made it to the dinghy all alone. Dylan climbed in first and grabbed him under his arms. I shoved him under his butt, and we threw him in.

  “When did you learn to swim?” I asked Gerry.

  He shrugged and looked away. He was shaking.

  I unfurled our makeshift sail and pointed us toward our beach. There wasn’t really enough room in the dinghy for all of us, now that I had rigged the sail through the forward seat, but the wind was with us and we were only ten minutes from shore. Gerry sat slumped and gasping for air until we landed and hauled the dinghy up the beach. Once again I had no fish.

  “Thanks,” I said to them both.

  “Sure,” Dylan said, already heading back to camp.

  I stooped and looked Gerry in the face. “That was brave,” I said.

  He dipped his head in a silent nod.

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Because you’re my brother,” he said, and waited quietly to help me furl the sail.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  THAT NIGHT THERE were so many stars that even Dylan couldn’t talk about them. With no moon, they were like glitter spilled across the sky, all merging into one another in their brilliance. We just lay on our backs on the beach and looked up and were silent.

  “Aren’t you going to tell a star story?” Gerry finally asked Dylan.

  “No,” Dylan said. “Not tonight.”

  “I need a story,” Gerry said.

  Dylan was quiet for a few seconds then answered, “I’ll tell a Baby Gerry story.”

  “Okay.” Gerry wiggled a little to settle himself better in the sand.

  “Once upon a time there was a mom named Christine and she had two sons.”

  “What about me?” Gerry asked.

  “This is about when you got born.”

  “Oh.”

  “She told her two sons, ‘Boys, you are going to have a baby brother or sister.’ Then one day, she made a funny sound and Dad rushed her to the hospital and when you were a boy, she said, ‘Perfect.’ ”

  “
You’re making that part up,” I said. “You don’t know what she said.”

  “That’s okay,” Gerry said. “I don’t mind.”

  “Anyway,” Dylan continued, “that night Dad took us to see you and I gave you one of my army men. I wanted to name you Timmy.”

  “But they named me Gerry.”

  “Actually,” I said, “they named you Gerard, but every time we tried to say it we choked. So you got to be Gerry.”

  “I like Gerry.”

  “It fits you,” Dylan said. “Anyway, when I came home from nursery school the next day, Mom and you were back from the hospital and she let me hold you. You were all wrapped up in Blankie, and you were wiggly, like a puppy. When she took you back, you threw up on your clothes, so she told me to go upstairs and get you something clean to wear. I didn’t know where your things were, so I brought my Batman pajama shirt. It’s a good thing it was my short-sleeved one. The end.”

  “That story is more about you than me.”

  “Well, it’s what I remember.”

  “I want a story about me.”

  Then a memory shot into my head. “I have a story about you, Gerry. Just you. Dylan, remember that time when Gerry was really little and Dad came home from work just as Mom was finishing giving him his bottle? And Dad was sitting there, reading the paper, but she wanted him to hold Gerry while she cooked dinner? So she was kind of pretending that Gerry was jumping up over the paper? And Dad put the paper down and looked up at Gerry with this big, goofy, openmouthed look, like goo-goo, gaa-gaa or something, and Gerry just kind of looks down at him and—blugh—throws up right into Dad’s mouth!”

  Dylan howled. “I remember! I remember! And remember Mom just stands there and says, ‘Oh. I forgot to burp him.’ ”

  “You guys!” Gerry said. He was trying to act upset but he was laughing too. A little, anyway. “Stop it,” he said. But we couldn’t stop laughing.

  I sat up. “Oh, I forgot to burp him,” I said, and let go the biggest burp I could. It was a good one. Dylan’s was better, though. “My Noogie,” I said, and grabbed Gerry and rubbed his head with my knuckles.