Читать книгу Point of Direction - Rachel Weaver - Страница 13

6.

“LET’S GO check the shed to see if there’s anything that might help us with the skiff. Do you think there’s a winch out there?” I say. The low tide is still an hour out.

Kyle shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

When we step outside, the wind whips my hair into my face. I stop walking to gather it into a high, tight ponytail, feeling grateful for the one rubber band I still have. Kyle waits for me. A wind-shredded tarp catches my eye. “I wonder what’s under this?” The tarp is tied down over a shoulder high mound about ten feet long tucked up against the outside wall of the lighthouse.

“I’ll bet that’s the woodpile,” Kyle says. “Looks like we won’t have to haul…” He falls silent when I peel back the tarp. The wood is moldy and breaks apart in my hands. “Oh,” he says. “Looks like we’ll need something better than a tarp.”

I stare at the woodpile, thinking of all the work it took to cut this much, haul it, split it and stack it. And then to just leave it.

The shed sits down the small incline from the lighthouse, a rectangular wooden structure.

Inside, I wait for my eyes to adjust to the dim light. We are standing in a square room, thirty feet by thirty feet, packed tightly with anything that could ever possibly be used again: full tarps and pieces of other tarps, jerry jugs, oils, stacks and stacks of plastic containers full of who knows what, and lined up along one wall, scrap lumber, all neatly organized. There’s a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, a small generator to run power tools, several extension cords and a workbench.

Kyle walks over to the wall. “Plenty of wood to build a structure for the firewood.” He turns and surveys the rest of the room. “Not sure where a winch would be.”

I start on one side of the shed while he starts on the other. I wedge in between two tall stacks of plastic bins and reach up to pull the top one off. My foot bumps into something tucked up against the wall. In the half light, I make out a small bundle. I pick it up carefully with two hands. Small, hard parts under the towel rearrange themselves as I carry it. I set it down where there’s more light and peel back the towel.

“Look at this,” I say.

Kyle walks over. He leans in, keeps his hands at his sides.

Intact parts of the skeleton lay on top of a pile of clean bones, each a light shade of brown, some broken and jagged. I pick up the skull. “I think it’s a bird. Or was a bird.”

“What’s it doing in here?” Kyle asks.

I put the skull down and pick up the bones of a leg. “Somebody must’ve dried these bones out before they wrapped them up for them to be in such good shape now.”

I look up at Kyle.

“What kind of person saves the bones of a bird?” he says seemingly to himself as he looks over the rest of the contents of the shed. “I wonder what else is hidden in here.”

I carefully fold the towel around the bones and tuck it back into the space where I found it. “Didn’t the Coast Guard guy say the guy who lived here before disappeared? Have you heard any stories about him?”

“I don’t know,” Kyle mutters, still scanning the shed.

“You never heard anything around town? Or in Juneau?”

“Just that he disappeared.”

I look down at the bird in the dark corner and wonder if I should get rid of it. But someone took so much care with it, it seems wrong to throw it in the ocean. Kyle goes back to digging through crates and shelves without another word.

We don’t find a winch. I find a tattered rope. I cannot imagine how it will be helpful, but I bring it along anyway.

Down on the beach, low tide looks better, but not by much. There is fifty feet of water between us and the skiff instead of seventy-five. The wind has slowed, a cold rain taps lightly on the hood of my rain jacket. The early evening has the same quality of light that noon had, it won’t be dark until somewhere around 11pm. We watch the bow of the skiff along with the buoy it’s tied to, break the surface of the water every so often.

“It’s not that far.” Kyle keeps his eyes on the sloshing water.

“You can’t make it.”

“Anna, we can’t be out here with no skiff. And besides that, I can’t have the fishing fleet going by seeing our skiff hanging from the buoy like that.”

“Let’s try to pull it one more time,” I say.

We line up on the haulout rope and pull. It feels like we are trying to move a brick wall. My feet slip on the small flat rocks. I fall, feel a sharp rock gash my knee through my pants. Kyle drops the rope behind me. “It’s too heavy with the outboard still on,” he says.

“Let me think,” I say, walking toward a rock up by the path that is big enough to sit down on. Blood from my knee trickles down my shin and soaks into my sock.

I hear the splash and then the rhythmic pound of his bare arms against the surface of the water as he swims fast and hard toward the skiff.

“Kyle!” I scream. His clothes are in a pile under his raingear on the beach, his boots folded over so that rain won’t get into them. It takes him two minutes to get out to the skiff. I start to pace, hear the sound of wind against ice, feel the weight of a pack, see the way glaciers open, their dark insides exposed.

“Kyle!” I scream again. He is at the skiff. He takes a big breath and disappears under the water. Three minutes. The bow of the boat shakes violently. He comes back up, dives again. Four minutes, five minutes. I am not breathing. There is the sound of the rain and nothing else.

He surfaces between the skiff and the beach, swimming much slower. Six minutes. I watch his stroke, too many seconds between the slap of each arm.

I pull off my raingear, my boots. He switches to a breast stroke/dog paddle, is no longer lifting his head. I wade in to my waist, mussels cutting my feet. He gets his feet under him and stumbles toward me and the shore. His lips are blue, the skin of his arms, chest and legs, grayish-white. “We have to get inside right now,” I say struggling to get my boots back on over soaked socks and pants while Kyle slowly stands up. “You’re an idiot,” I add.

He bends for his clothes, but can’t hold on to the bundle.

I tuck in under his arm, balance his naked body against mine. “I’ll come back for the clothes.”

Inside, he sits in the rocking chair while I run up the stairs and grab the wool blanket. While Kyle wraps himself, I find a roll of paper towels in the curtained off area beneath the stairs, throw the whole thing in the woodstove and light it. I run out to the shed, feet squishing in wet boots, and grab the shortest pieces of two by fours I can find. They don’t fit in the woodstove. I leave the door open with three or four sticking out into the room. Kyle’s lips are still blue and he’s begun to shiver. He raises his eyebrows at me.

“A concrete room is not going to catch fire,” I say in response.

He scoots the rocking chair closer to the woodstove. “Your pants are wet. You n-n-need to warm up,” he says, stumbling through the sentence.