He’d had advanced
weapons and martial arts training that went well beyond even what SEALs
normally received, and they had saved his life. But the biggest help most times
turned out to be something that came quite naturally: the naive, easy, and open
smile of his. Years of military training, and then several years as a highly
paid merc, didn’t dampen or remove it. People often mistook him as a buffoon,
and his somewhat lanky build seemed impossible considering his training, which
often bulked his compatriots into looking like weightlifting champions or
superheroes. That hadn’t happened with him.
Oh, he built hard muscle,
to be sure. But the uncompromising training had supercharged his stamina even
more while loosening his ligaments to the point that during any endurance exercise,
he almost always finished first. He wasn’t the fastest runner, but over any
long-distance stretch, eighty-five pounds of equipment and weapons bouncing on
his back and mud up to his goddamned knees, he was unbeatable.
His martial
training was excellent as well, a surprising combination of Japanese aikido and
Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Both complimented his physical stature (he stood just a
shade over six feet); together they made him one wiry, tough son of a bitch.
Mennon saw the lack of bulk and thought him easy prey.
Mennon, like the
fruit fly, was now shark chum.
Did August Howell decide
to destroy the Minnow and kill her
passengers and crew in a fit of pique? He was world-famous for them. In
financial circles he was known as “Turn On a Dime” Howell for his sudden
about-faces. Gilligan was a total nobody to him. Killing him wouldn’t even make
a tiny dent on his conscience, given of course that he had one. Or a soul for
that matter.
The Minnow had sunk in flames in the middle
of the Pacific Ocean, which would make
salvaging virtually impossible. It would, at least potentially, be the perfect
crime. Who else could possibly be responsible than Thurston Howell’s petulant,
temperamental, turn-on-a-dime brother?
Mary Ann had kept the radio on after Gilligan, just as the
dark made it impossible to work any more without a flashlight, discovered a
small cardboard box heavy with what turned out to be brand-new Eveready
double-Ds.
Try as either of
them might, they could pick up no other stations. She made them dinner—ham and
cheese sandwiches (two each) washing them down with sweetened iced tea as they
listened in silence.
“It must be an
oldies station,” she said as she started on the second sandwich.
That’s all that it
played—oldies. But just ones from the mid-50s to the mid-60s. Its repertoire
seemed limited to just that ten-year period.
“We should use it
only on a schedule,” she suggested. “We only have a finite number of
batteries.”
“Yeah,” he said in
the middle of “Love Me Do.” “Let’s turn it off. We need to save those batteries
for the flashlight too.”
They finished the
meal in silence, washed the dishes, and sat back down. The day’s heat was
finally lifting, so he turned the AC off as well. She watched him as he sat.
“We really need to do something about getting you some clothes. You’ve only got
those pants? That’s it?”
He glanced down at
them. Considering that they had endured sixty-five days of brute jungle
survival (and no, he thought angrily, he hadn’t fucking hallucinated them, they
fucking happened, he wasn’t going
crazy!), they were in pretty decent shape. The cuffs at the bottom were a bit
frayed, and there was a six-inch tear near the left knee, one he’d noticed when
he first woke in the lagoon, and a small hole near the crotch. The black of the
fabric had faded from repeated lava stone washings.
“Yeah. This is it.”
She brushed debris
off his shoulder. “It’s amazing you aren’t a charred cinder.”
Her touch was
almost too much for him. He tried not to stare. “I guess it helps that I’m
mulatto.”
She scowled. “Isn’t
that term a bit ...”
“Racist?”
“Well ... yeah.”
He wanted her to
touch him again. But it seemed clear she had no intentions of doing so.
“I’ve never thought
so. I’m not Caucasian, and I’m not African. I’m both. I don’t have a problem
with it.”
“Well, whatever you
are, we need to get you more clothes. Those pants aren’t going to last much
longer, and you running around in your underwear won’t do.”
“If I were wearing any,”
he chuckled. He saw the momentary look of alarm cross her face and chuckled
harder. “But wouldn’t you say these pants are pretty good evidence that I’m
telling you the truth—that I’ve been here longer than two days or five days?
More like sixty-five days?”
She sighed. “Yes.
They do.”
He slept in the entertainment room, but hadn’t bothered
switching on the large flat-screen TV or seeing if the Playstation was working.
There was a wet bar and another fridge, this one small and tucked into the far
left cabinet; to the right were three rows of books and a laptop computer,
which he turned on. It quickly booted up but reported “No Internet Access
Available.” Frustrated, he turned it off and made for the sofa in the back,
which turned out to be a fold-away bed. He stripped off his pants after making
it, crawled under the sheets, and fell asleep. He heard water running just
before he dropped off; it must’ve been Mary Ann in the shower.
“Ah, imagery,” he mumbled,
smiling. “Imagery.”
Next to the iceboxes were a stacked washer-drier set. Mary
Ann had already pulled the cabinet doors open, revealing them, as he stumbled
out of the room. Once again he had slept like a baby. “Well, good morning, sunshine,”
she said with a grin. “Here—”
She tossed him a white
ball of clothing—a robe. A woman’s bathrobe. Silky, with light-pink flowers on
it. “Put that on and give me your pants. The shower is next to the bedroom. Go
on, now!”
He glanced down. “I
take it these smell?”
She gave him a
sheepish shrug. “Not just those ...”
“I’ll leave the
pants on the bed,” he replied, turning back towards the bedroom. “It’ll be safe
when you hear me get into the shower.”
“Not too long.
There is only so much fresh water ...”
“Oh, we’ve got
mega-gallons of it, don’t worry,” he interrupted at the door. “There are
freshwater streams all over the island, and even a waterfall in the lagoon.
We’re set. I’ll make breakfast when I get out. How’s that sound?”
She smiled. “You’ve
got a deal.”
In the late morning, his pants dry and airy-warm from the
drier, they hoisted the sheets and began sailing around the island to the
lagoon, which, he informed her, “is always calm. The boat will be much safer
there; and besides, the water is nice and shallow for a good ways. It’ll make
for easy access. The island is loaded with fruit and plenty of wild meat. Since
this tub is solar-powered, we can keep the food fresh!”
Mary Ann, though
unfamiliar with the workings of a sail boat, was a quick study, and made for a
fine first mate.
“I don’t suppose
you get many opportunities to sail the high seas in Kansas,” he chuckled. “Unless of course it’s
seas of corn.”
She shot him a
playful scowl and went back to trying to figure out why she couldn’t get the
GPS or other electronic gear to work. He was manning the wheel. Since she
couldn’t get the GPS or the rest to work, he kept a careful eye out for shoals
and rocks. The Lanie was their way
off this island and back to civilization—that is, once they figured out where
they and civilization were.
Certainly nowhere
near where the Minnow was when it
sank. There were maps under the captain’s chair, which he had pulled out and
taken a long look at. She finally joined him, radio in her left hand, compass
in her right. She put both on the dash and looked at the map he currently had
open.
“Here’s
approximately where we were,” he
said, pointing at an open map of the Pacific Ocean west of the United States and Mexico. “There are no islands anywhere near there. Someone moved us.”
“What I don’t get
is why,” she said, grimacing. “Why
would anyone move us?”
He shrugged. “We’re
definitely in the tropics; my guess is no more than a thousand miles north or
south of the equator. But that’s really not helpful.”
He looked up and
pointed. “See those rocks up ahead, just to the right of those palm trees
sticking way out into the water?”
She glanced out.
“Yeah?”
“Just past those is
the lagoon. We should be there in an hour or two.”
“Should we turn the
radio on, you think, once we get there?”
“Might as well. It
seems to be our only link to the outside world.”
Mary Ann’s practical-but-ever-cheery disposition was
catching, he thought as she oohed and
aahed over the lush scenery as he
turned the Lanie hard to port once
past the thin, rocky cape. The lagoon was naturally sheltered by sea stacks initially
on the right, and heavy tropical forest to the left, and also by its
ever-narrowing passage, which wound back and forth gradually, was gorge-deep,
and calmed the sea completely. Nearer to the end, with jungle looming closer
and closer on both sides, it narrowed just wide enough for the catamaran to get
safely through before opening into a two-hundred-yard-wide teardrop ending at a
wide band of settled, golden sand.
“This is so beautiful,” she murmured for
something like the fifth or sixth time.
“Let’s drop the
sheets, and then the anchor. It should be no more than ten feet deep here.”
The lagoon’s bottom
was clear as glass, even to a depth of what he estimated to be at least a
hundred feet. Schools of brightly colored fish zig-zagged beneath them.
“This is where you
woke up? Here? On the sand?”
“Yeah. Half in and
half out of the water. Getting pecked at by vultures.”
“There’s no way the
current just dragged you in here,” she said. “Someone put you here.”
“Just like someone
put you on this boat. We’re shallow enough. Let’s drop anchor.”
“Aye-aye, Captain,”
she said with that ever-present cheer, and hurried down to the stern.
She didn’t mind having to jump into the water to swim to
shore. She was already wearing a yellow and blue bikini top and denim shorts
that covered her (hot) ass. As usual, it was difficult for him not to stare or
say anything. She jumped in ahead of him and began freestyling for the shore.
She had good form.
She told him earlier that she had competed on the swimming team in high school,
“and even lettered my junior and senior year.”
He dove in and
followed her. Once on shore, water glistening on her skin and dripping from her
hair, she gazed around again. “I cannot believe
how beautiful this island is! It’s like paradise!”
“Yeah,” he grunted,
“a paradise with fifty-foot snakes and six-foot spiders and stinging insects
the size of your fist and big fangy cats looking for an easy meal.”
That wiped the
smile off her face. She had wanted to see the tree where he had made sixty-four
marks; he glanced down at her bare feet and said, “Just stay on the trail and
you’ll be okay,” and walked ahead of her into the jungle.
At the tree fifteen
minutes later, she stopped and gawked, then ran her hand over the marks. “I
didn’t want to believe you,” she murmured. “I just don’t get how any of this can be true! Sixty-four days
for you, two for me, but the radio says five
days! Which one is real?”
The size of the Lanie
made it impractical to beach her, as was common practice with regular-sized
catamarans. Getting her back into the water would be impossible, for one, and
he wasn’t sure the pontoons could handle the stress differential between the
sand and the water. She looked like a sturdy boat, but he didn’t want to chance
it. At low tide there was still a good six feet of water between her and the
lagoon’s bottom. That was shallow enough.
A pair of goggles hung
from a hook in the bedroom closet; he put them on and swam under the boat
looking for signs of damage and wear and tear while Mary Ann, back aboard, put
sandals and other wearables into a plastic bin for transport to the shore. “So
I don’t have to walk around bare-footed or with water sloshing around my feet
in soggy shoes!”
The sun was just an
hour from going down, and they were both famished, so he swam back to the beach
in search of fresh fruit while she busied herself with cleaning the rest of the
blood spatters left behind by the fruit fly.
“Out here!” she
heard him call an hour later. She went up to the deck and peered over the
starboard edge.
The plastic bin
he’d taken with him was full of bananas, mangos, and guava, and floating just
ahead of him. She descended the short steps to the pontoon and helped him lift it
aboard. “Ooh!” she exclaimed. “These look tasty!”
He hauled himself
aboard. “I’ll make dinner tonight.”
“You’ve got a
deal,” she replied with a smile.
There were cans and cans of vegetables—mostly beans. He made
vegetarian burritos and covered them with jarred salsa, and slices of fruit. In
agreement with her plan to save meat supplies, he had thought ahead while fruit
hunting and decided Mexican food sounded best. They ate as they normally had to
this point: voraciously, and mostly in silence.
“Delicious!” she
said when she finished. “Shall we turn on the radio while we do the dishes?”
As he cleared away
the dishes, she glanced down once more at his pants. “I sure do wish we could
find you a hidden chest full of clothes!”
He’d gotten used to
living like this, and had trouble imagining what wearing a shirt all day would
feel like, or underwear, or socks, or (he sighed inwardly) shoes. Shoes!
At the moment the radio, which had been
playing “I Put a Spell On You,” cut off abruptly, and the radio announcer, who
had been utterly absent since the first time they turned the radio on more than
a day ago, said:
“This just in: Vicious Mexican drug cartel
mobster Pancho Garcia de Perez has escaped Hawaiian law enforcement in a
dramatic shoot-out with authorities in Hilo, where he boarded a private
submarine and submerged before being apprehended. Six officers lost their lives
in the gunfight on the dock. Interpol has launched an all-points bulletin for
all coastal cities in the Pacific Rim. Now
back to the music.”
Chubby Checker’s
“The Twist” came on.
Gilligan chuckled.
“Mexican food ... Mexican gangsters.”
Mary Ann, however,
wasn’t so amused. “The poor families of those officers.... I’m sure glad right
now that wherever we are, we are nowhere near Hilo! Can you imagine running into that
monster out here?”
“Yeah, that would
definitely suck,” replied Gilligan, who turned on the hot water and began
washing the dishes with her help.
