Читать книгу Castle of Water - Dane Huckelbridge, Dane Huckelbridge - Страница 10

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Barry awoke to a parched throat, sore muscles, a mild sunburn, and the sickening realization of the predicament he was in. But first things first. Water, and then food. He had swallowed a considerable amount of ocean the previous day, and his last meal had been a granola bar consumed at the airport in Tahiti. Slowly, achingly, he crawled from beneath his little teepee of palm fronds and rose to his feet. He cracked his neck and squinted into the sunlight; it was overcast, but still bright. The waves rolled in, steadily, incessantly. The air tasted faintly of brine.

After a quick and unsettling bathroom break (the darkness of his urine was a disturbing reminder of his dehydration), he put in his contact lenses and turned for the first time away from the sea, toward the little island’s bosky heart. And bosky it was. Columns of trunks propped up an ever-shifting ceiling of frond leaves, through which fugitive slats of sunlight escaped. He stepped gingerly over the prickly undergrowth, as he had lost both his loafers the day before. The terrain became increasingly rocky the farther in he ventured, until he came to the base of a mountain or, perhaps more accurately, very steep hill. Boulders, bedded with some form of ferny moss, rose to a peak some five or six stories overhead. And nested snugly in their crevices were birds: gulls or terns or cormorants. Barry didn’t know, but they were living creatures sharing in his fate. And even more important, he found water. Two separate rock pools, both about the size of Jacuzzis, were coolly waiting, filled to the brim with the previous night’s rain. Barry inspected the pools first before consuming their contents. They both looked clean enough—one had a few odd squigglies jetting about its edge, some larvae, perhaps, but nothing that screamed befoulment. Barry chose the slightly more pristine of the two and brought several handfuls of the water to his lips. Its flavor was fresh and deliciously minerally, not unlike a white wine he had once tasted while touring Napa Valley with his girlfriend—fine, ex-girlfriend—Ashley. Well, perhaps that was a slight exaggeration, but after all he’d been through, a gulp of clean, cold water was nothing to sneeze at.

Once his thirst was slaked, all that remained was for his appetite to be sated, and that came courtesy of the island’s banana trees. Somehow he had missed the bunches of green, starchy fruit, dangling just above head level. But upon noticing their presence, he also became aware of their prevalence. Good, thought Barry, chewing on his sixth banana and fully prepared to eat six more. Water and bananas. I shall want for neither hydration nor potassium. And he laughed at his little joke, which, anyone with experience in survival situations can tell you, is a promising sign. Attitude is everything, and those that turn negative can be just as ruinous as diseased streams and toxic berries.

With his most basic of needs addressed for the immediate present, Barry returned to his post on the shore, ripping off the lower half of his slacks as he did so. They were shreds anyway, and cutoffs seemed more appropriate to the conundrums of a castaway. His sleeves he rolled up past his elbows, then muttered, “What the hell,” and took his shirt off entirely, wrapping it around his head in a sort of improvised French Foreign Legion hat. He breached the tree line and scanned the horizon, having transformed in a few short minutes from a high-yield-bond salesman at Lehman Brothers into a passable Robinson Crusoe. “Shit,” he muttered to himself. “Goddamn.” And goddamn was right—no rescue boats sat poised on the horizon, and no choppers hovered above the unfurling waves. He kicked sand at the remnants of his signal fire and considered his options. If only his cigarettes weren’t mush—he was dying for a smoke. After some deliberation, he vetoed a signal fire for being too labor-intensive and decided instead to write a message in the sand. After some scouring (he was surprised at how little loose wood there was, but then again palm trees didn’t exactly have branches), he settled on a rock with a jagged edge. Using it, he carved out SOS as large as he could. He then repeated this in several other locations, doing another lap of the island. He considered again starting a fire, but the palms he found were too damp, and he ultimately gave up on the idea altogether. A school of ominous storm clouds was quietly gathering, squirting its dark squid ink deep into the horizon; finding shelter took precedence over everything else.

Barry thought for a few minutes, studying the tree line and hoping for an idea. After considerable grumbling, head-scratching, and additional sand kicking, he came to one palm that hung especially low, jutting out over the beach at a shallow angle. Yes, it was just close enough to the ground to do the trick and was sheltered quite well by the surrounding trees. Newly inspired, Barry set to work, harvesting the larger fronds he could find and leaning them in thick layers against both sides of its trunk. Within an hour, he had something resembling a tent. When the rains came later that evening—and boy, did they come—he was even able to stay relatively dry. It was a definite improvement over the leaf pile of his first night, which offered some relief to Barry, although not much. He was still stuck alone on an island not much bigger than Madison Square Park. Still uncertain if anyone was searching for him. Still at the mercy of a negligent sea and a vastly indifferent sky. And then of course there was the pilot and the other two passengers. Christ. Barry hadn’t even thought about them in that flaming mess of twisted steel and surging water. Had he seen them, he would have certainly tried to help, but he had not. Chances were, they hadn’t survived the crash. No, the Filipino pilot with the Hawaiian shirt was probably at the bottom of the sea, the young French honeymooners were likely food for fishes—a thought that alarmed and saddened Barry, but comforted him in a strange way, too. It alarmed him because they had all seemed like nice people, in no way deserving of their fate. But it also served as a reminder of the fact that there were far worse places he could be at that moment. Like the ocean floor, for example. He stifled a shudder and listened to the rain, damp, weary, very afraid, but also very much alive, and in that fact alone he found vast reassurance. “Crap,” he said out loud, once again on the edge of sleep. He’d forgotten yet again to take out his contacts.