Читать книгу Castle of Water - Dane Huckelbridge, Dane Huckelbridge - Страница 17

10

Despite her many incorrect assumptions regarding Barry and his country of origin, Sophie had been at least in the ballpark with her comment about Huckleberry Finn. Although he was raised in Cleveland, Barry’s grandparents’ farm, which he had visited frequently as a boy, was to be found in Macoupin County, Illinois, just across the river and a few tractor pulls away from Hannibal, Missouri, the hometown of Mark Twain. And indeed, as a boy, Barry had engaged in many similarly folksy pursuits, one of which was catching catfish, although this occurred more often in local “cricks” than on the Muddy Mississipp’. Unlike those hook-and-line aficionados Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Barry had learned to fish with the fine-meshed nets known locally as “seines,” any similarity to the river that bisected Sophie’s city of residence being pure coincidence. In fact, one of Barry’s most beautiful and haunting memories (and he had never told anyone this, certainly not his co-workers at Lehman Brothers and definitely not his ex-girlfriend Ashley) was going seining with his grandfather when the moon was full, the two of them waist-deep as they dragged their gossamer nets through the quicksilver water.

So Barry was not a total stranger to fish. Of the sort one finds in southwestern Illinois, anyway. Perched on the rocks above the island’s clearest little cove, however, he was a long way from the fried catfish and freshly gigged frog legs he had relished in his youth. Shirt returbaned about his head, line in hand, he gazed down at the calm pool below and squinted for a sign of anything edible. He fixed one of the artificial lures onto a hook (it reminded him of the gummy worms his mother used to put in his Easter baskets, a poor substitute for an actual night crawler), attached the float and the sinker, and, following a weak sidearm cast, watched the whole baited affair settle in the water. It seemed like a good place to fish—a sheltered semicircle of rock that created a calm patch of water, some twenty feet across and perhaps ten feet deep. He could see the white sandy bottom, rippled and duned with the soft tracks of the current; kelpy-looking things swayed in it, and corally-looking stuff at its rim formed ledges below. Dark shapes occasionally darted in the shadows, and he hoped one or more of them might have an appetite for yellow gummy worms.

The first three hours were uneventful. He smoked another cigarette, ever mindful to take an occasional scan of the horizon; he was sure somebody would be arriving soon, and he had the flare gun tucked in his waistband to welcome their landing. But neither rescue nor dinner was quick in coming. The waves rolled in steadily around the tiny cove, trade winds picked up as morning became afternoon, and the yellow gummy worm hovered beneath the surface without a nibble to its name. Crap.

Something occurred to Barry. He recalled hearing his cousins talk about fishing for catfish with a trotline during one of his visits to Macoupin County and remembered that they had suggested “stink bait” to lure them in. Old chicken livers, rotten eggs, even chunks of hot dog coated in WD-40—stuff that put some funk in the water. A funk that his little gummy worm, no matter how noble its intent, simply could not exude. It was four hours in, and although he was certain he saw fish wriggling down below, his virginal lure remained untouched. It was worth a try.

But what to use? The island didn’t seem to have worms—or any significant insects, for that matter, beyond a few gnatty little flies. And to use pieces of fish, he would have to catch one first. He had noticed, though, a scatter of peculiar-looking shells wedged in the crevices of the larger rocks. He suspected them to be clams of some sort, and in this instance, Barry was correct. They were maxima clams, a smaller cousin of the giant clam and favorite foodstuff of Polynesians for centuries, although Barry had no knowledge of that fact. Ready to try anything, he pulled in his line, set it at his feet, and went peeking between the rocks for a suitable specimen. Arm deep in such a hole, he found one and with three hard tugs pried it loose. Examining it in the sun, he saw that it was actually quite beautiful, blue tinged with nacreous swirls. He almost regretted having to smash it against the rocks, but alas, this was a survival situation. Two hard whacks and the fist-sized clam split apart like a coconut; its meat was tough, but the azure-colored lips stripped away easily enough. Barry removed the gummy worm lure and worked the barbed hook through several layers of clam meat, forming a tempting bunch with some dangle on the end. “Shit,” muttered Barry, “if these fish don’t eat this, I definitely will,” oblivious at the time to the accuracy of that statement. And he retook his perch and cast it in.

The morsel had been dancing beneath the surface for no more than ten minutes when something torpedo shaped and lithe came circling in. “Yes!” Barry exclaimed with a triumphant hiss. It was a fish all right—and a good-sized one at that. Definitely enough for two hungry people. Come on, you son of a bitch!

The paddletail snapper in question (of course Barry didn’t know its species, either) pecked, prodded, and then took a bite. The line jerked to a delightful tautness, accompanied by a flurry of silvery flopping. Oh, he had it, and hand over hand, Barry began pulling dinner in, despite its zigs and zags to the contrary.

What was the best way to cook such a fish? he asked himself. Skewer it? Bury it in coals? Then again, sashimi was good—could they just eat it raw? Barry didn’t find out. Not that day, anyway. He was on the verge of yanking the weary fish right out of the water when one of the boulders at the sandy seafloor—it had been sitting there utterly inert since he had arrived—came bursting to life. With a horrific surge of speed, its massive bulk heaved up from the depths, engulfed the poor snapper in a tangle of limbs, and with the weight of an anvil shot back down. The initial tug was so great, it nearly pulled Barry into the drink—a terrifying prospect given what he had just learned was lurking there. Weak-kneed with adrenaline, too shocked to curse, he pulled from the water the limp remainder of his line, discovering as he did so that the creature had not only stolen his supper, but also gotten away with one of his few precious hooks. Then he cursed.

When the water settled, Barry peered into the pool’s depths to search for some trace of the beast, but it was gone. He suspected one of the caverns at the bottom was its lair, where it was no doubt enjoying his sashimi dinner. Crestfallen, Barry removed the bobber and the sinker and rewound the line around the spool, wondering what to do next. Sunset wasn’t far off, and he doubted he’d be able to land a second fish. Honestly, the notion of that thing coming back up scared him to death. The idea of returning to Sophie empty-handed was also disconcerting, so he decided to pry loose a few more of the thick, blue-tinged clams and take those back instead. He found two at the pool’s edge, yanked them free of the rock, tucked them in his pants pockets, and headed back to the shelter.

Barry was not the only one who’d had an eventful afternoon. Sophie had been busy, as well, using the time alone to get their camp in order. She was, after all, a committed and serious architect, and even an island maroonment was no excuse for bad taste. And besides, keeping busy also meant keeping her mind off of Étienne, whose loss she was still not prepared to cope with. Was it denial? Probably. Well, almost certainly. But what other option did she have? She could confront what had happened when she was back in Paris. She could deal with the emotional nightmare of burying her husband’s empty coffin in his family’s plot at Père Lachaise once she was home again. And she could begin sweeping up and dusting off the shattered pieces of her life as soon as the rescue plane had spirited her off this putain d’île and away from that paunchy and bumbling imbécile d’américain. But in the meantime, she had things to do.

First, the shelter. It definitely needed work. Sophie took Barry’s ramshackle attempt down and began anew, with a far more suitable and aesthetically pleasing plan in mind. For while Barry had spent his summers on his family’s farm in Illinois, riding tractors and trolling for catfish, she had spent hers at her ancestral home in the Pyrenees, the Cirque de Gavarnie. Her grandfather, although retired at the time, had worked most of his life as a local guide and mountaineer. He would take Sophie and her younger brother on long hikes outside the village, showing them how to slice saucisson with their little Opinel knives, teaching them the words to bawdy peasant songs that their mother did not approve of in the least (“Le curé de Camaret” was without question their favorite), and, as it just so happens, giving them instructions on how to make a basic emergency shelter. Granted, his shelter had been intended to protect against Pyrenean blizzards and not Polynesian downpours, but she was certain it would serve its new purpose just as well. Remembering his lesson, she cut a length of the nylon rope from the survival kit and tied it securely between two carefully selected trees; she unfolded one of the three tarps and slung it over the rope, and using four small pieces of driftwood she had whittled with the utility knife, she staked down the corners. Voilà! A makeshift tent. She took a step back to appraise her work but still was not satisfied. No, the blue of the tarp was too garish, its artificial color too discordant with their primitive surroundings. She may have been the granddaughter of a peasant guide, but she was still a French architect. So she gathered up fallen fronds from the palm forest’s edge and arranged them over the tent in careful layers, creating after several passes a functional and actually quite charming thatched roof. The floor, however, was still nothing more than kicked-about sand, and that she did not care for. It was tedious work, but she managed to pull off some larger frond leaves and weave them together into a sort of tropical version of a tatami mat. She put this on top of a cushioning layer of banana leaves and was pleased with the end result. It would do for sleeping, at least until she was rescued.

Shelter complete, Sophie moved on to the hearth, circling their fire pit in rocks to establish a cooking area. As for a counter space, there weren’t a ton of suitable stones, but she was able to locate one larger, flat rock that she rolled through the sand to the edge of their fire pit. She found four smaller rocks, all of similar shape and size, and used those as legs, resting the flat slab upon them to create a very small but perfectly useful table.

Done. Well, almost done. There was one thing left she’d wanted to do before preparing for dinner, although she was concerned about the amount of rope it might take. She measured the coil and decided there was enough to spare; besides, they could always take it apart if needed. Using the survival kit utility knife, she began measuring out lengths, singing under her breath a bawdy mountain song that her grandfather had taught her and her brother years before, one that her mother did not approve of in the least.

Meanwhile, no longer quite so crestfallen but certainly discouraged, Barry trudged back to camp with his meager harvest of clams. Tremendous shafts of mango-colored sunlight came sloping in from the west, and the breezes whisked sea spray up from the whitecaps, spritzing the beach in a rainbow mist. Something jarringly out of place pricked at his ears; he froze for a moment to put his finger on the source.

“Sex Machine.” James Brown. No mistake about it, the wind was whipping strains of its funky rhythms from around the horn of the island. Baffled, Barry picked up his pace to a steady jog, rounded the bend that preceded the camp, and dropped his jaw to an unexpected sight: a perfect, palm-thatched shelter, a small table set for two, the shortwave radio from the survival kit doing its own tinny rendition of the Godfather of Soul, and, the icing on the cake, a rope hammock hanging daintily between two palms. Sophie, considerably cleaner and more composed than when he had left her, was crouched beside it, occupied with stripping a coconut of its husk.

“Wow,” Barry exclaimed. “You really fixed the place up.”

“It needed some work. You left it a mess.” Sophie paused to push back an errant strand of chestnut hair. “Did you catch a fish?”

“No, no fish,” he answered, choosing not to mention the beast that had stolen their dinner. “But I think I found some clams.” Emptying his bloated pockets, he dumped the two blue-tinted mollusks at her feet. She inspected them closely.

“Ça marche. I think we can eat them.”

“I think so, too. I’ll put them in the coals. They should cook pretty quickly, and we can have them with bananas.”

“I’d rather have them with this coconut.”

“Where did you find it?”

“There are just a few coconut palms on the end of the island. I saved the coconut water inside, we can drink it with dinner.”

“How did you get it down from the tree?”

Sophie picked up a hunk of volcanic rock and tossed it up and down in her palm. “Le fastball,” she said with a slight torque of the lips that verged on a smile.

Barry did smile and celebrated their small burst of good fortune with another Russian cigarette. Three quick flicks of the Bic and it was lit, filling their wild beachhead with at least a half-civilized smell.

“Why do you think the survival kit had cigarettes, anyway?”

Sophie shrugged. “To bribe local fishermen, I presume.”

Barry chuckled. “Like that would even work.”

“It worked with you, didn’t it?”

She had a point. Barry picked up the clams and arranged them in the coals. The palm fronds burned quick and hot and were certainly not ideal for creating coal beds, but the clams probably did not require all that much cooking. Once he was satisfied with their position, he tried out the hammock, settling gently into its web. “Sex Machine” had concluded, and a disc jockey announced the next song—“Lookin’ Out My Back Door,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival—in an Asian language he could not identify. He remembered hearing the song quite often on the car radio in Cleveland, on cold winter mornings when his father drove him to school. Sometimes they’d both sing along, Just got home from Illinois, locked the front door, oh boy . . .

“This hammock is great,” Barry remarked, locking his fingers behind his head, watching the waltz of the palm trees above.

“I’m glad you like it, because you’re going to be sleeping in it.”

“I am?”

“Of course. Tonight, anyway. Someone should stay outside with the flare gun for when the rescue planes come. They could pass by at night.”

“Okay. Sure.” The palm-thatched shelter did look inviting, but a breeze-rocked hammock wasn’t a bad alternative. Barry closed his eyes; he could smell the clams now, wow, a goddamn clambake on a desert island in the middle of the South Pacific. Who’d believe it?

“This all feels like a dream, doesn’t it?” Barry stated rather whimsically, pausing to tap a cap of ash from his Russian cigarette. “I mean, it’s all so surreal, you know, both of us here, alone on this—” A hard, twisting pinch to his rib cage yanked him from his philosophizing. “Ow, shit!”

“This isn’t a dream, putain de merde. So wake up and quit acting like a typical stupid American.”

Sophie glowered at him, tremendously perturbed by something he had said. Christ, thought Barry, this French girl. He rubbed at the fresh bruise and reconsidered the situation he was in. It certainly would make a good story someday, having survived a plane crash and swum to an island and spent a week, maybe less, with a pretty young castaway—and after that flotilla of steaming ships came to whisk them away, he thought, he’d never have to see her again.