Читать книгу Pigs - Johanna Stoberock - Страница 8

Otis couldn’t stop crying even though he knew he was wasting whatever liquid his body had left. His eyes were full of sand. The tears washed the grit from his eyes, which was some consolation, but not enough. At least it restored vision, which after five days drifting on the lid of a packing crate at sea was a pretty big deal. If he lifted his head slightly from where it was wedged into the sand he could see the coast. Rocky. Dry. Dotted with bursts of purple flowers pushing out of cliffs. Maybe enough driftwood on the beach to build a shelter. There were birds—seagulls anyway. They stood in a line and looked at him. He could swear they were looking right at him. He thought he heard a dove.

Get up, he told himself. Move. Take responsibility for your life. You’re not a child. Nobody’s going to take responsibility for you.

He crawled away from the water, and his body left a long track behind him on the sand.

He had no idea how long it took to be able to stand up, but it happened. At one point his cheek was shoved against a rough pillow of sand and at the next he was standing with his knees shaking, the breeze from the ocean on his neck. Even though it had happened five seconds ago, he couldn’t say how he’d gotten from one position to the other. Something rubbed against his throat. He lifted his hand and felt the smooth surface of a metal pendant. A necklace? He remembered he’d had a necklace. The chain was heavy against his battered skin.

He dragged driftwood into a pile. He hobbled to the place where the sand stopped and vegetation began. He listened and heard a stream, and bushwhacked through thorny bushes until he found fresh water. Then, he got back down on his knees and stuck his face in and drank. Alice had once washed his hair under the bathtub faucet when he’d had the flu and was too sick to climb into the tub. It felt like that now, head in the stream, water in his mouth—it felt like someone loved him.

He thought he could drink that water forever.

But before too long he started to shake again and he thought, three hours without shelter, three days without water, three weeks without food. Where did he know that from? Boy Scouts? Had he really ever been a boy? He’d learned the rule during some kind of wilderness training. Was this the wilderness? Somehow he’d always imagined wilderness to be about trees. Shelter, water, food. He cupped his palm and lifted water to his mouth and took another swallow and realized he was doing everything in the wrong order. As usual. He hobbled back through the brambles to the beach.

He had more energy now. At least the water had given him that. He should stay close to the ocean so if a ship passed by, he’d see it. He needed to build a fire so if a ship did pass by, and he did see it, he’d have some way of letting it know he was there. A voice at the back of his mind told him no one would care. He tried not to listen. He’d always tried not to listen to what people told him about himself. That voice had been telling him to let go the whole time he’d been floating in the ocean, and look how wrong it had been. Look where he was. He even had fresh water.

The line of gulls stared at him and one turned her head and her eyeball glittered and he noticed that the sun was sinking low. Night was on its way, and he was hungry. He couldn’t decide what to do first. Shelter or food? Find more water or build a fire? There were too many choices; even the limited options were overwhelming. Life had always been that way for him. He’d never been able to make up his mind. He lifted his hand to the pendant at his throat and thought: this is what I do when I think. I hold this pendant. This is who I am. He fiddled with the pendant; found himself fumbling at a hinge. Not a pendant, he thought. A locket. I hold this locket and I flip its catch open and closed until I can make a choice.

He pulled the locket’s door open. Alice stared out at him, a smile on her long mouth, her light brown hair pushed back behind her ears. She was young in the picture—in her twenties, maybe. She was wearing a flowered shirt. He remembered that shirt. He’d called her his flower child when she wore it. Across from Alice, their son stared out from years ago, round baby eyes not yet a real color, a blue hat on his bald head. Otis shut the door. He opened it again. He shut it and opened it and shut it and opened it, trying to make a choice.

But there wasn’t really a choice. The rule of threes: it had to be shelter, and soon. He shoved a couple sticks together to make a kind of lean-to. It had gaps, but if he scooted his body inside, his head was covered and only his legs were exposed to the wind that was kicking up now from the water. He could sort of see the stars through the gaps when night really fell. The stars here were just as bright as they’d been when he’d clung to wood in the middle of the ocean, just as bright, if not brighter.

He couldn’t even tell himself how tired he was with that voice that chattered constantly in the back of his head—was it really telling him that his clothes were ruined? Was it really telling him he should have spent more hours at the gym? Really? Lying there, half-sheltered, half-exposed, he had the feeling of sinking into the ground. He used a nail he’d pulled from the crate in the ocean to notch a line into a board above him. A first day.

He fell asleep trying to remember methods for making fire without a match. Flint. Hand drill. Bow drill. Magnifying glass. There had to be other ways, he just couldn’t remember. The locket was cold on his skin.