Читать книгу Missile Paradise - Ron Tanner - Страница 9

ONE

Cooper anchors a good hundred yards from the pilings—because he doesn’t have the strength to tie up, much less negotiate the breakers. The island looks like an accident of nature, a thicket of palm trees on a hump of sand, hazy in the distance. Cooper can’t be sure how much of the haze is due to heat and salt spray and how much is a product of his alarming fever: 104 by the thermometer’s last warning. His right leg looks like a broiled side of beef, yellow-brown and bloated, a crusty custard of puss attracting all manner of flies on this windless afternoon.

His pain is a hot and humming thing, as if it had a life of its own. Like a teeming colony of red ants: always busy, always chewing.

Ahead he sees only a single, aged pier, which suggests that the island has few inhabitants and receives fewer visitors. He’s not completely ignorant about the mid-Pacific. He’s done some reading. He knows that these atolls are crowns of coral left by sunken volcanoes a million years ago. Some come and go with the surge of storms. Many have never been visited or have been visited only long enough to be deemed uninhabitable because there’s little fresh water out here. It’s tropical, yes, just north of the equator, but not rain-forest tropical. The rainy season crashes through every summer, sometimes a typhoon in the spring, but most storms are squalls, abrupt and short-lived, the sun breaking through to bake things dry within the hour. Always the relentless sun.

This afternoon’s squall won’t even reach him: he sees skyscraping thunderheads thresh the water a mile away. The clouds are trundling north, black as a nasty bruise. Behind him lies a silver gleaming, endless horizon. No wind today, so he couldn’t sail even if he had the strength. Which is why he put into this lagoon two days ago to find a landing. Since then he has been congratulating himself for this show of prudence.

The atoll’s name, he thinks, is Lili. Or, rather, he wishes it were Lili because the name reminds him of his ex-finacée, Lillian. Orange-haired Lillian, three inches taller than he (which accounts for her slight stoop); green-eyed Lillian, a collector of vintage pottery, which she displays on shelves and tables throughout her A-frame in Montara, just south of San Francisco; swan-necked Lillian, who leotards her yoga in front of the CD-player, with its music of Zen garden gongs, the A-frame resounding with eerily sonorous notes at eerie intervals: bong . . . bong . . . bong; cinnamon-scented Lillian, who bakes oatmeal-cinnamon-coconut-raisin granola for breakfast; speech-impeded Lillian, whose stutter makes even her anger sound charming.

“Must have been destiny,” she claimed of their first meeting. She was selling plants at the Saturday flea market in the sandy lot near the Half Moon Bay marina, where he moored his boat. He was living over the mountain in Palo Alto, spending every free hour—and every dollar he made—on rehabbing the Alberg 35, which was in the water but hardly ready to sail.

“Think I could use one of these on my boat?” he asked, raising a potted spider plant for an appraisal.

“You’d kill it,” she said. Not a criticism exactly, just flat fact.

The way she looked at him from her lawn chair behind the plant-ladened card table, her narrowed eyes peering over her wire-rim sunglasses, made it clear that she knew he was flirting. Because he was still sweaty, and his hands greasy, from a hard day of engine work; because his hair was flattened from leaning into tight places; because he needed a shave and was wearing his worst work clothes, paint-splattered and ragged, he thought he had nothing to lose.

It seemed she didn’t either. She was pretty—maybe too pretty for him—and had an oddly defensive manner, as if she were out to prove herself, though a woman over thirty shouldn’t have that need.

She put him on edge.

It didn’t help that to her right, in the shade of a pink-striped sunbrella, sat her thirteen-year-old daughter, eyeing him curiously—a squinting, shorter replica of her mother, except the girl was wearing a black loose-collared man’s shirt over a baggy black T-shirt that fell to her black-stockinged knees. She wore black Birkenstocks and her hair was dyed black-black and tied off in a dozen angry little knots as if to announce a protest.

What are you supposed to be? Cooper wanted to ask the girl, who now had his full attention.

Too predictably she was plugged into an iPod, nodding her head ever-so-slowly to a dirge-like noise that was hissing from her earbuds.

“Her name’s Bailey,” Lillian announced as if in warning. “She’s thirteen.”

Cooper was immediately embarrassed because he wasn’t looking at the girl that way. Anybody could plainly see he was simply put out by the pair, the stereotypical alien daughter and the slim, lovely youngish mother who could have been a Marin county debutante down on her luck.

But then, turning his stare again to the woman’s barely perceptible smile, he realized that her last comment was more bait, challenging him to make a come-back. And he did want to come back.

His thoughts scrambling like pilots for their grounded jets, he heard sirens wailing in the distance—fire trucks roaring past on Highway 1—and he was suddenly as nervous as he had been at his last job interview, which he thought would change his life. It did change his life, bringing him from the Baltimore-Washington corridor to sunny Palo Alto. He now belonged to a thirty-person team developing a 200 million dollar video game called Stone Deaf Death Rangers. It was the highest level work he’d ever done. And more money than he’d ever imagine making, which had enabled him to buy and rehab the vintage Alberg 35. Who’d have thought that he—a Chesapeake Bay skiff sailor—would become a Pacific blue water freak? Much had changed in two years.

So, facing down this attractive mom and her daughter, he was on: “This pot looks vintage, maybe the 1940s?” he said, hefting the blue-glazed thing in his hand.

“Good eye,” Lillian said. “Can you tell me the maker?”

“Without looking,” the daughter added, her eyes seeming to mock him: geek!

He said the only old pottery name he could think of—something he’d come across while searching for boat parts online: “McCoy?”

Lillian smiled her approval. “You w-w-win,” she said, betraying her stutter for the first time. Which made her more interesting because he could see that, like her daughter, she was defensive mostly because she wasn’t wholly sure of herself.

“Does this mean I can treat you both to an early dinner?” he asked, surprising himself.

“Get a life,” Bailey said.

It was nearly five on a Saturday afternoon, tourists crowding the nearby beach, the bay popcorned with sailboats, Highway 1 slow with traffic, and the sun hot on his already peeling forehead. Briefly he surveyed the table of plants. On the one hand it was touching that mother and daughter were spending time together; on the other hand it seemed sad that this was the best they could do. Did they need the money?

He said: “Bailey, you wouldn’t have to do anything but sit politely while we grown-ups conversed. What do you say?”

“Assuming that her m-m-mother has a-accepted the invitation,” Lillian answered.

“Which came first,” he asked to put her off her guard, “the old pots or the plants?”

“The p-p-plants aren’t old,” she said. “And the pots came first.”

“She’s a pot hag,” Bailey said.

“I bet you’re listening to Ozzie Osborn,” he said. It was almost a taunt.

“James Taylor,” the girl replied with a smirk. “Only the early stuff.”

“But she’s so Goth!” he said to Lillian in jest. “What’s the deal?”

Lillian smiled. “It’s a complicated world, isn’t it?”

He told them his name and Lillian surrendered her own. He helped them load the plants into the trunk of her Honda Element. Lillian said she’d be happy to meet him at the Pelican in Montara an hour later.

“You live in Montara, then?” he asked.

“Does it matter?” Bailey said before her mother could answer.

“Remember what I said about polite?” he reminded her.

“She’s not yours to correct,” Lillian reminded him.

This gave him a pause, like a spark of static at a light switch.

He said: “If she’s in the world, she’s subject to correction.” Then to Bailey with a wink: “Be sure to bring ‘Fire and Rain’ with you. Maybe we’ll have a sing-along.”

“You shouldn’t taunt her,” Lillian warned at dinner while Bailey was in the bathroom. “She’s at that age.”

Lillian was wearing an airy blue blouse with the same faded blue jeans she’d worn at the flea market, but also he detected a trace of fresh lip gloss and subtle eye-liner. For his benefit or was this simply her going-out face?

Her protectiveness of her daughter was a good trait, he decided. But he wasn’t about to let a thirteen-year-old dictate the terms of his engagement. He’d heard too many stories about failed relationships involving children from a previous marriage.

“I remember that age,” he said. “A little challenge builds character.” He didn’t like that this echoed his own father’s platitudes.

“You don’t remember that age as a girl, Cooper. It’s very d-d-different for girls.” Lillian forked her grilled tuna tentatively. She seemed alternately shy and petulant, as though she were fighting with herself over some difficult question. She said: “You don’t have children, I take it.”

This made the heat rise to his cheeks—it felt like sunburn. So she was interested in him, and already he was into the Interview?

“You assume I’ve been married,” he said.

“Hasn’t everybody our age been married? You’re what, thirty-five?”

“Four. And, yes, I was married. No kids.”

“Was that part of the problem?”

This was like getting caught sideways in a trough, the waves raking in one after the other. A little scary, a little exhilarating.

“There were many problems,” he said. “We were together for seven unlucky years. The child question was a topic of conversation but not the issue.”

“So you don’t blame her for the failure?”

“We both made our mistakes,” he said. “But she was the bigger fuck-up.”

Carefully, with a furtive glance, she asked: “Infidelity?”

Immediately he took the hint: “Your ex was unfaithful?”

“Very.” She reached for her white wine.

“But she still works for the bastard,” Bailey interjected, dropping herself into the chair between them.

Lillian frowned at her daughter. “Since when have you started calling your father a bastard?”

“I’m just channeling your anger, mom.”

“How long has it been?” Cooper asked.

“Two years and counting,” chirped Bailey.

“You work for your ex?” Cooper asked, this fact just now hitting home.

“I hardly ever see him,” Lillian said dismissively. “I work in the greenhouse. He’s in the field.”

“He owns Trumaine’s Nurseries and Landscaping,” Bailey explained, popping a French fry into her mouth. “You’ve seen the trucks.”

“No, I haven’t.” Maybe Bailey was warning him off—but this only made him more curious.

“Very classy trucks,” Bailey continued. “He makes tons of money.”

“Don’t eat with your mouth open, Bailey.”

Bailey grinned, potato mash on her teeth.

“I own the greenhouse,” Lillian said, her eyes now fixed on Cooper as if to assure him that she was no patsy, that she had her life well in hand.

“She owns one of the greenhouses,” Bailey corrected, her pretty eyes glinting at her mother. “Dad owns three.”

“Then why don’t you start your own business?” Cooper asked—because he wanted Lillian to be unencumbered and unbeholden.

“My ex’s business is too well established, the clientele too firmly tied to him,” she said. “If I were on my own, he’d put me out of business.”

Cooper shook his head in sympathy. Not healthy, he was thinking. Maybe this family was too tied up with itself and there would be no room for him. “I guess that’s the prudent thing to do then,” he said, feeling oppressed by the story.

“Sometimes I don’t like being prudent,” Lillian said, almost angrily. “But I’ve got a daughter to raise and a mortgage to pay.”

“That’s me,” said Bailey, “her ball and chain.”

“You know I don’t mean it that way, Bailey.”

“So you collect pots,” he said. “And you raise plants.”

“Ornamental bushes, actually.”

“Rhododendrons, philodendrons, tetrahedrons,” Bailey said in sing-song.

“Do you even know what a tetrahedron is?” Cooper asked.

“That’s right, he’s a programmer, Bailey, he knows all about math.”

“If you start dating my mother does that mean you’ll do my math homework?”

Lillian laughed nervously. And so it began for the three of them. Eight months of courtship, then the proposal—which Lillian made and Cooper, flattered and abashed, accepted. And then he moved into her Montara A-frame for a year’s trial run. During that year, he landed the job he’s headed for now, a job so prestigious, he felt obliged to take it after he passed the many interviews, and security clearances. It’s a 12-month contract to help study missile re-entries at the Ronald Reagan Test Site in the Kwajalein atoll. It became for him a challenge, a grand adventure. And Lillian was going to sail the 4500 miles with him, stay for a month on Kwajalein, then fly back to the States, while Bailey stayed with her father. But Bailey betrayed them, undermining their intimacy at every turn and ultimately finding ways to discredit Cooper until Lillian gave him up, refusing finally to go through with the trip whose highlight would have been their wedding in Honolulu.

Life is full of surprises, isn’t it? Today Cooper is surprised and a little frightened at his uncharacteristic fumbling as he tries to untether the yellow rubber dinghy from the back of the Lickety Split—the boat Lillian herself named. Once he gets the dinghy overboard, he falls flat-backed into it, his impact raising a splash that soaks his right shoulder. Upended, wallowing in the raft as if it were a hammock, his injured leg extended up and over the side, he watches the sky rocking in big see-saw swings.

He recalls how he was so lucky as a boy because motion never made him woozy, much less sick. Happily, triumphantly, he rode the local amusement park’s octopus, its swing ring, its rocket rocker while Teddy, his younger brother, watched with grave envy from a nearby bench.

And, later, as a teenager, Teddy stood on the shore and watched as Cooper skippered his 16-foot single-sail skiff into the choppy shallows of Baltimore’s back bay, dropping cages to catch crabs. It would take Cooper years to understand the difference between those who love land and those who love water. He, Cooper, belongs on water.

He sits up slowly, carefully, thankful that he hasn’t hit his throbbing leg. It takes great concentration to wrap the outboard’s nylon cord around his right hand, great focus to marshal strength in his biceps and steady himself with his left hand, then great effort to yank that cord decisively. But he does. And immediately the motor sputters, then whines its eagerness, the air abruptly smoky with gas fumes. Yes, this is good. Cooper drops the hand-sized prop into the water, which churns and bubbles. Then he is off, skittering over the surface, the swell of growing breakers propelling the raft, a hot wind in his face—the kind of breeze any sailor would welcome. It never ceases to surprise him how long it takes to arrive at landfall after the first sighting. There’s no sense of scale out here. The island, he assumes, is or was a coconut plantation, like so many of the outlying atolls. Which is to say that a hundred years ago the Marshallese—directed by their German conquerors—cleared the scrub away and planted trees. Harvesters visit once or twice a season to gather the fruit; a few rusted tin-roofed shacks stand at the island’s edge to house the harvest. What other industry the island offers Cooper can only guess. He tried to radio earlier but got only static. He was too embarrassed to send an S.O.S.

He would like to imagine the islanders crowding around him, rejoicing at his visit: What has this handsome stranger brought from the great world?

But only a shirtless boy, wearing denim shorts, watches him from the beach.

“Yokwe yuk,” Cooper calls. Greetings!

The boy arches his eyebrows in wonder and continues to stare.

As soon as the dinghy butts the sand, Cooper lurches forward and vomits, everything going yellow-green, his head tightening as if his scalp would pop. He feels better after he clears his mouth. Then he looks up at the boy, who must be about seven, skinny, missing a few teeth up front. The boy says, “You sick?”

Cooper hauls himself out of the dinghy, bad leg first—he feels his wound bubble and ooze: the bloody pus looks like hot wax. The boy gapes at his leg, which makes Cooper feel worse. Angry at himself, Cooper swats the flies away. “I need a doctor,” he says. Some small part of him—a penitent monk—sits in a dark cell and prays fervently for a miracle. The prayer includes a promise, I will never make this mistake again!

He sees the boy nodding his head yes, yes. The boy says, “We got a doctor.”

Cooper can hardly believe his luck. He hobbles after the kid. The palm-tops hover and bob over him, their frond-clatter like applause. Cooper knows this is a beautiful place but none of it registers—not the turquoise crescent of the lagoon, not the blinding white sand, not the mermaids singing from the tide pools. It is all he can do to will himself to keep moving. Stay conscious. He leans into the boy, who allows the sudden intimacy without a hint of distaste or discomfort. He imagines the boy sleeps in a shack with a mob of brothers and sisters.

The settlement is a clutter of unpainted hovels with corrugated tin roofs and, incongruously, late model Japanese motorcycles parked out front. Skinny dogs, whipping their tails and trotting a few paces behind, bark at Cooper gleefully. Other children crowd around, calling, “Hey, what-sup, man? What-sup!” Half delirious, stumping along on his hot ice-pick pain, the children’s chatter piercing to his ears, Cooper feels surly, stupid, and much too white. He’s tempted to fling a handful of change over the sandy road, let the children dive for it like pigeons after popcorn. But all he has in his pocket are keys to his boat. And a penknife.

Where are the adults on this island?

“Town meeting,” the boy says, as if reading his mind. He is pointing to a single-story, whitewashed cinderblock building that looks to Cooper like a run-down Laundromat. From here, he can see the outer edge of the island, the oceanside, where the swells are breaking with frothy crashes, having traveled thousands of Pacific miles unimpeded. Blacktip sharks are gliding in with the tide. Soon they’ll be dancing on the reef. With the mermaids.

It’s chaos out there.

Wouldn’t Lillian be sorry now, to see him like this? Wouldn’t she fold him in her arms and make up at last?

Maybe not. Didn’t she warn him? Didn’t she say, “You don’t know your limits—that’s why I’m scared.”

The whitewashed building is a Laundromat, Cooper discovers. And air conditioned. As cold as an ice chest. Six washers on one side of the room, six dryers on the other, none of them going. At the center of the room is a long, uncovered plastic table, the portable kind you might find at a bake sale. Around it sit the adults, who regard Cooper with mild surprise. These are short people of dark brown complexion, with broad noses and curly black hair, though their race has been diluted for a century by foreigners: first the Spanish, then the Germans, then the Japanese, and then the Americans. The men wear T-shirts, American baseball caps, baggy trousers and zori, rubber flip-flops. The women wear flowered, cotton shifts, no head covering. They are smiling reassuringly in his direction but not quite at him. A bashful people.

Curiously, a number of them have pinkish welts on their foreheads and forearms. Some kind of disease? Or more of Cooper’s hallucinations?

Just beyond the table, on the dirty, gold indoor-outdoor carpet, sits a craggy boulder as big as a bean bag chair. It must have taken five men to carry it. A rock of historical significance?

The room smells of . . . French fries, he decides. But the table is empty of food.

Suddenly the men, five to seven of them, are at his side, grinning and shaking his hand limply. They smell sweetly of coconut oil, their hair wet with pomade. It seems they have been expecting him. “Welcome,” they are telling him, “sit, please, we have brought it for you, over here.” They are gesturing to the boulder, everyone excited. The women chatter among themselves in Marshallese. It is a language that comes from the back of the throat and resonates through the nose, high-pitched, adenoidal, filigreed with trilling r’s.

Painfully, Cooper sits, and yet no one remarks upon his leg. “I need help,” he says. “My little friend said there is a doctor here.” The children, he sees, are outside, peering through the Laundromat’s filmy plastic windows, hands cupped over their eyes.

“You are a doctor,” one of the men says. It’s not a question.

This man—is this the chief?—looks about Cooper’s age, has poor posture and a small bowl of a belly, his Diet Pepsi T-shirt stained from recent meals. He’s smiling, showing off a silver tooth up front, but the Marshallese always smile, Cooper has read. It is their heritage to be pleasant, anything to keep the peace on their tiny atolls.

“Are you the boss?” Cooper asks.

“I am the mayor,” the little man says. “Harold Van Horn the third.” The others look at him with admiration. He speaks English very well; only his staccato delivery and especially his elaborately rolled “r’s” betray his mother tongue.

“You’re kidding,” says Cooper.

“It’s Dutch.”

“Dutch,” someone echoes.

Cooper nods his understanding. “I’m not a doctor,” he tells them. “I need a doctor for my leg.”

It should be simple, he thinks. Surely, even a remote islet like this has penicillin.

Harold-the-mayor gazes down at his leg and shakes his head with concern. “It looks infected, your leg!”

Somebody places a plastic tumbler of orangeade in front of Cooper. Without thinking, he drinks it down. Its warmth and sweetness nearly make him gag. But he wants more of it. His ears are burning.

“You have a doctor?” he asks. Is there an ice machine nearby? he wonders.

“You mean Dr. Thomas, the American?” Harold-the-mayor says.

American! Cooper has never considered himself patriotic or chauvinistic or jingoistic—he’s been indifferent to America’s power and prestige. He’s not political. He’s never been political. Geeks don’t care about such things. Or so he has joked. But lately he has been feeling increasingly—and grudgingly—political, now that America has invaded Iraq and too many Americans are insisting that this is payback for 9/11, even though it’s clear—and has been clear—that Sadaam had nothing to do with 9/11. Cooper feels pained by the spectacle, like a hapless witness to a playground fight where the bully punches the wrong kid in the nose. And it’s looking bad: last year’s supposed end to the invasion (“Mission accomplished!” the president boasted from the deck of an aircraft carrier) has devolved into an agonizing, bloody, embarrassing war. It could drag on for years. Another Vietnam!

Whenever Cooper explains his work—anti-ballistic missile defense—nobody hears anything but “missile”: you make missiles? Cooper makes missiles that shoot down other missiles. Actually, he doesn’t even make missiles, he makes guidance systems. Actually, not the guidance systems themselves but the programs that constitute the brains of those systems. See how complicated this is? His is a necessary, a useful, job. He agrees that tyranny must be defeated. But he’s not fighting tyranny exactly. He’s not fighting at all.

And he’s not a “patriot.” It’s not like he has an American flag sewn onto his windbreaker or blazoned on the bow of his boat. Still, when he hears this Pacific islander say the word “American,” Cooper shudders with a chill of excitement and surging pride because, out here in the doctorless swelter of sandspeck islands, Americans are a godsend: Americans get things done! If you’re in trouble, you want the Americans on your side.

Without Americans, the world would not have become the big, beautiful modern mess that it is, with movie stars and rock and roll and men on the moon and V-8-propelled sports cars and brick-thick hamburgers and super-sized milkshakes and 120-channel TV and air conditioning in every room and cloud-piercing skyscrapers and all-night supermarkets and 3-D monster movies and virtual reality video games. It’s junk, most of it. But it’s also an expression of an irrepressible will to do better. It’s a celebration too of a restless, reckless drive to live fully. Isn’t that why Cooper took the risk to sail all this way alone? He was restless and wanted to feel things he could feel only if he were reckless.

Now, surrounded by the enthusiastic chatter of the dusky wide-eyed people, he is overwhelmed by the sweet scent of their coconut oil, overwhelmed by the impossible remoteness of their tiny island, overwhelmed by the fact that here, in the middle of nowhere, he will see another American.

Tears burn at the corners of his eyes. America, the beautiful, land of the free, home of the . . . . “Dr. Thomas, an American?” Cooper gasps.

“That would be me.”

Cooper turns to see the American’s approach from a room in the rear, which must be a kitchen because the man carries a platter of steaming French fries.

They must have seen Cooper coming! They must have set up all of this for his welcome!

The American is a big bearded man with a sunburnt face and black plastic-rimmed glasses. He wears a T-shirt that says, across the chest in multi-colored block print, “Fruit of the Loom.” His Bermuda shorts look like they could use a good wash.

As soon as he sets down the platter of fries, a flock of brown hands flutters to them.

“Marvin Thomas,” he says. He sits heavily across the table from Cooper. As formidable as a bull walrus, though far from obese, he’s one of those guys who looks big and fit but has never jogged a block or lifted a five-pound dumbbell. “Everybody here calls me Thomas.” He extends his paw, which Cooper tries to shake but ends up squeezing only two fat fingers. “I used to be with the Corps.”

“Marine?”

“Peace.”

“You’re a doctor?” Cooper asks.

“Of American literature. A Melville man, to be exact. I hope you like Melville.”

Cooper wants to groan in dismay but, instead, he hears himself asking, “Can you help me with my leg?”

Thomas glances over the table, arches his brows at Cooper’s leg, then says, “It’s infected.”

“I need penicillin.”

Cooper tells him about the 45-pound bluefin. It pissed him off, how the blue refused to succumb after he’d fought the thing for a good half hour, after he’d played and pulled it to the boat finally, after he’d hauled it on deck and hammered it with his Louisville slugger. After all that, the beautiful bastard bucked, gills yawning, dorsal fins arcing at him, sun glinting from the yellow-blue of its gorgeous scales. It spooked Cooper, the life in the thing, and for a moment he wondered if he should kick it overboard because sometimes it’s better that way. Letting it go would have been a sign of respect.

At that moment, his heel on the blue’s bloody gills, the gaff got him and tore a searing thirteen-inch gash down the calf of his right leg. He can’t remember if it was the tuna that slammed it home or his own carelessness as he dodged the fish’s formidable tail. In anger, he batted the tuna until his forearms ached. Then, disgusted with himself, and disappointed that a great catch had become so ugly, he dragged the bludgeoned blue into the cooler below, then he tended his bleeding wound, flushing it first with peroxide. He dressed it with anti-bacterial salve and sterile gauze. He knew it’d be inflamed for a few days but he didn’t imagine it’d get like this. He used three bottles of peroxide on it, wasted his one bottle of rubbing alcohol, then his last bottle of vodka, but the gash only got worse.

“It’s the polyps,” Thomas says. “Coral’s in the air. Everything gets infected if you don’t soak it in hot salts.”

For three days Cooper debated whether or not to put in at the nearest lagoon. He’s five days east of the International Date Line—not more than a week from Kwajalein Atoll, where he’s supposed to start work in 15 days. Brad, his former supervisor, told him it was a stupid idea, sailing the Pacific alone like this, especially since Cooper knew only coastal sailing: “Doesn’t matter how much time you’ve logged in a boat, Cooper, it’s a whole other world once you lose sight of land, for pity’s sake—and you’ve got a new job to think about.”

There is some similarity between sailing and the work he does, computing alone in a cubicle: the necessary self-absorption, the surrounding emptiness, the charting of a course among the known variables. The major difference is that computing can’t kill you. Even a bayshore weekender like Brad could appreciate that much. Cooper assured him that as long as the mast holds, a sailor can tie off the wheel, flag the staysail, trawl a storm drogue, then go below, batten the hatch and ride it out. Cooper has done just that twice already, tossed and tumbled like a sock in a washing machine. Something to be proud of.

But now to have fucked up while fishing, on a calm day, so close to his destination? It’s too ironic.

Thomas looks at him with some concern, though Cooper isn’t convinced this is for his sake. The big man says, “You’re not our geologist then?”

This question sounds more like an announcement. It puts an abrupt halt to the others’ robust eating of the fries. The Marshallese now stare expectantly at Cooper.

Cooper sees that he is about to disappoint them all. “You were expecting a geologist?”

“To examine the meteorite,” says Thomas, nodding to the big rock.

“Meteorite,” a few of the others repeat.

“Biggest in the world!” says Harold-the-mayor, and this starts all of them talking excitedly in Marshallese.

“Probably among the biggest in the world,” Thomas corrects. His boom-box voice silences the others. Then he explains: last week there was a meteor shower, thousands of tiny stones raining from the early morning sky while the men were out fishing. This accounts for the small welts on their foreheads and forearms.

The rain of rocks was preceded by an immense white flash.

“Like a million camera lights,” Harold-the-mayor says. “Dorean thought it was another bomb.” He points to Dorean, a young man wearing a T-shirt that says “The Rolling Stones,” it tongue-and-lips logo faded to a pale pink. “His grandfather was burned by fallout in nineteen fifty-four.”

Dorean nods gravely.

“Then we hear the rocks falling. Like fish.”

Someone makes a rapid slapping noise that truly sounds like fish hitting water.

“It was two-ten AM,” Harold-the-mayor says. “Benjamin was wearing his chronometer.”

“Rocks falling all over, man.”

“Scared me shitless.”

Laughter.

“Meteor shower!”

“More likely a comet or piece of comet,” Thomas says. He radioed the tracking station at Kwajalein, which would neither confirm nor deny his conjecture. “They don’t care shit about anything but spying on the Chinese, the Russians, and the towelheads. You know they got a radar on Roi-Namur so big it can track a wrench floating away from the space shuttle?”

“Yes, I know!” Cooper says—because, by God, he’s going to be among them shortly, the most elite group of civilian programmers and engineers in the world.

“Helene found the meteor yesterday when she was collecting ni,” Harold-the-mayor continues. He looks with pride to small stout woman with a streak of gray at her right temple.

Helene smiles all around, then says quietly, “I thought it was a egg.”

The others laugh. “Egg!”

Cooper regards the black-brown boulder beyond the table’s end and thinks of the egg of the Roc, the house-sized bird-beast from the tale of Sinbad the sailor. Anything seems possible out here.

He struggles to his feet, wavers a moment in the tight grasp of pain, then declares: “I’ve got a fever. I’ve got an infection!” He hears his voice crack. “I’m asking for help!”

Only now does he realize how desperate he has become. The next inhabited island, with or without a doctor, could be days away. His leg has been oozing pus for two. How soon before gangrene?

The islanders stare kindly at him, nodding agreeably as if encouraging him to make a speech.

“Why don’t you lie down and we’ll see what we can do,” Thomas says. He motions for someone to clear away the empty fry platter.

“You can do something?” Cooper asks.

“I don’t know.” Thomas shrugs. “Maybe cast a spell, say a prayer, cut off your leg.”

“Not funny,” Cooper says with a croak of weariness.

“Sorry.” Thomas grins at him and Cooper sees for the first time that the man has nearly no teeth. This appalls Cooper. What doesn’t rot out here?

In the month before he set sail, he lived on his boat, moored at the Half Moon Bay marina, where anchorage was more than he liked to pay. Lillian wouldn’t see him, wouldn’t even let him in the house. So, twice a week, he drove south to see his therapist, a woman who might once have been a hippie. Though homey and hempy, she asked hard questions, which gratified Cooper because they made him feel he was getting somewhere, doing something concrete to win Lillian back and get his life in order.

Nobody’s life is in order, he has decided. Most people are simply good at hiding their private chaos. The biggest surprise of his growing older—and now, at 36, he feels he can say he is “older”—the biggest surprise is this: most people don’t really get wiser or more mature with age. Meredith, his ex-wife, is a stunningly beautiful and fucked-up example. Lillian seemed the exception.

“Still no traction?” his therapist asked. She was old enough to be his mother—Cooper liked that—but she was much tougher than his mother. And, better still, Sarah was a sailor. Her office was the front room of her houseboat.

With a sigh, Cooper dropped himself into his usual seat, the bulky leather chair near the window. “She must have been really frightened,” he said.

“Nice of you to be so understanding.” Sarah’s smile was cautionary. Sitting cross-legged on her battered sofa, she wore a bulky sweatshirt, paint-spattered jeans, and no shoes. Her toenails were painted pink.

“Oh, I understand,” said Cooper. He heard the teakettle beginning to hiss in the galley behind Sarah. “Bailey could have drowned!”

“But she didn’t.”

“You don’t sound so understanding,” he joked.

“Didn’t you say that Bailey made all of this happen? That she was a conniving little brat who manipulated her mother?”

“She’s just a kid.”

“Fifteen.” Sarah got up to fetch the tea. “Stay put,” she said when Cooper rose to help. “You’ve got three weeks before you’re supposed to set sail and Lillian’s not talking to you, so what do you think will happen?”

He glanced out the window. The boat bobbed gently on the wake of a passing cabin cruiser. A 5,000-gallon tank of diesel will take you across the Pacific. Cooper could think of nothing more boring than chugging through the chop in a boat like that. Sailing, on the other hand, was a head-spinning thrill because it was all about problem-solving, looking for wind, then making the most of what you could catch.

He had learned this as a boy. By the time he was fifteen, he owned a gorgeous little 13-foot skiff made of cedar, with a mahogany backbone and a 24-inch steel centerboard. It had cedar spars and a single sail. As he fished and crabbed in the shallow backwaters of the Chesapeake, he learned about wind and waves but it never occurred to him that he should try deeper waters. He loved the fishy stink of the tidelands, the clouded view to the sandy bottom, the buck and roll of waves as he set his line and angled for stripers. The fight to reel fish into his boat often humbled him and the time alone, the waiting and watching, made him extremely patient.

But the roots of his passion for deep-water sailing predate his teen years on the water. It goes back to a game he played by himself as a child. He’d lay a blanket on the floor, then with a tiny plastic man in a tiny boat made of Legos, he’d set off across that fabric ocean. Every wrinkle of the blanket offered a new dilemma, another potential calamity. Again and again, he found his way through the trouble. As much as anything, it was this solitary pursuit that gave him practice for the programming he would enjoy years later and then, to his surprise, prepare him for deep-water sailing.

When he looked back to Sarah, she was smiling, handing him a mug of green tea. He thanked her, then blew across the steamy surface and thought of mist rising from morning water. “What will happen, you ask? I expect Lillian will snap out of it. Our little accident triggered something—some issue about safety and I don’t know, it really threw her.”

“Is that what she said—it threw her?”

“She’s not talking to me, remember?” He took a sip and winced as he burned his tongue. Again he glanced out the window. Sarah’s boat was charming, as far as houseboats go, a two-story cabin painted moss green, with a striped canvas awning over the portside deck, potted ferns and lots of sunlight in the front room, a creaky cedar floor with a rosy patina, a stained glass transom over the front door—a tidy, arty little house, not really a boat. He preferred his Alberg with its aged, amber-colored paneling, its graceful lines, its readiness for sea. There was nothing ready about Sarah’s old boat.

What do you need to be ready for? Lillian had teased him more than once. He tried to explain: you can’t take good weather for granted, not when you’re on water. You owe it to your boat to keep it always in top form. If a storm blows in suddenly, you can get away from the dock quickly and moor in open water.

Oh, my sweet pea, Lillian said, I didn’t realize Meredith had damaged you that much! You’re so cautious!

Was he so cautious, he who would sail the Pacific alone? He who nearly drowned Bailey?

“Why don’t you like Lillian?” he asked Sarah.

“I’ve never met her, how could I dislike her?” She cupped her steamy mug with both weathered hands. Cooper liked that Sarah was always working on her boat.

“It seems you’re pushing me to get angry at her.”

Sarah arched her bushy eyebrows. “You’re not angry?”

“I’m frustrated. I’m confused. I’m hurt,” he said. “I don’t know that anger is part of it.”

“Not even when you recall Lillian blaming your for the fiasco with Bailey?”

Cooper slouched in his chair and tried to let the gentle bob and rock of Sarah’s house sooth him.

What about pirates? Lillian had asked him.

Pirates?

I’ve been doing research on line. They say you should travel with a grenade launcher to ward off any approaching boats in the open seas.

We’re not going to see any pirates, Lil, not where we’re going.

But there are pirates!

Well, sure, and sharks too. And water spouts. And giant squids.

Are you trying to scare me?

Come on, you’re pulling my leg, right?

Then Lillian laughed and he was relieved. She said, If any brigands board, I’ll cut their gizzards out with me kitchen knife! He loved her for that.

Was it all an act, playing brave because that’s what you do in love until intimacy or circumstance outs you and, at last, you’re exposed for the coward you know you’ve always been?

“I thought she was excited about our adventure,” Cooper said. “But now I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s just cold feet?”

“It’s your adventure, Cooper, not hers, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but she loves me and wants to share it. I’ve got a twelve month contract. Then I’m back stateside. Sailing out there isn’t really a big deal.”

“For you.”

“I signed a contract,” he said. “I can’t break it. This is the chance of a lifetime.”

“Taking the trip or taking the work?”

“Both!”

“You could take the work without sailing out there, couldn’t you?”

“Oh, I see,” he said. “Lillian wants to dump the sailing adventure and jet out there?”

“No, I don’t think that’s it,” Sarah said. “It sounds like she wants to dump you.”

“Whoa! How’d you come to that?”

“You leave in three weeks and she’s not talking to you? She says you nearly drowned her daughter? She says you don’t know your limits—isn’t that how she put it?”

“She was angry when she said those things.” Cooper set down his tea. He was sweating, trickles streaming down his spine and rib cage. “She loves me!”

Sarah nodded an irritating, knowing nod, as if to say, What does anybody truly know of love?

“What the fuck, Sarah?”

“We’ll call the Army,” Thomas says.

“You mean on Kwajalein?”

Kwajalein, a three-mile crescent with an airfield at one end: it took the Marines four days of bloody hand-to-hand combat to wrest the Island from the Japs in 1945. Now it’s home to a civilian community of engineers and programmers like Cooper, all of them working on missile defense systems.

“The U.S. Army controls everything out this way,” Thomas is saying. “I imagine they can do a difficult rescue.”

Rescue? Only now in this unreal world, as the Marshallese stare at him curiously, is Cooper’s humiliation becoming real to him. Eventually Lillian will hear of his failure, his need of rescue, and she’ll shake her head in dismay and perhaps pity too, reassured that she made the right choice in dumping him.

And Cooper, well, he had no choice but to sail without her. But it was for the wrong reasons—he sailed away with anger and bitterness and the selfish satisfaction of leaving her behind. By the second week, far from landfall, the Lickety Split roller-coasting on twenty-foot swells, nothing in sight but a silver-blue sky, he heard himself whimpering like a wounded animal.

He longed for the chatter and crowd of people in his daily life: he missed humanity, and Lillian most of all. He was no recluse! Already he was talking to himself nonstop—loudly and with great animation, as if he were on stage. Surely somebody was watching, the sky nothing more than the single open eye of God. It was too easy to see how a lone sailor could go mad. You had to be careful. You had to ration your interior resources. Don’t panic! That was the first thing he told himself. It rang in his head like a mantra.

From the footlocker in his cabin, he fished out one of his T-shirts that Lillian had worn. Burying his face in it, he could smell her honeysuckle perfume and the mild mushroomy odor of her sweat. It was like dope! He tied the T-shirt around his neck and wore it day and night, wiping his face with it, weeping into it, kissing it, clutching it, until it was in tatters and still he wouldn’t let it go.

Occasionally he would spy a ship plying the horizon: a delicate, white miniature that looked like a cake decoration. The sight of it would make him catch and hold his breath and stifle the urge to wave and yell.

When seven birds, small as tea cups, found him and roosted for two days on the wire lifeline, he sat near them and derived some comfort from their clucks and yawning trills. One afternoon he fed a gull his dinner of ramen just to keep the creature near. It flew off when he tried to talk to it.

But he didn’t panic. No, he didn’t panic! He sailed on, he sailed hard, alternately terrified and exhilarated, and the farther he sailed, the bolder he grew because, after the third week, a dizzying kind of fatalism took over. He saw himself as a mote of dust carried on the wind. It made him feel that he fit in somehow. At night the canyon of the cosmos wheeled over him and he was stunned by its depth and light. And below, the ocean was another sky, riven by luminescent whitecaps and surprised by blue-flamed fields of tiny fish and constellations of jellyfish that floated by like ghostly green nebulae.

At some point he threw off Lillian’s tattered T-shirt and settled in at last to the rhythm of long days. The noise of waves and wind drove mainland thoughts from his head. His charted trajectory, and his minute adjustments to stay within one degree of that line, became his obsession. The horizon fascinated him: he couldn’t stop staring into the distance because he knew that, eventually, he’d see something.

All that changed when he injured his leg. Close now to his destination and threatened by an imminent illness, maybe even death, he was disgusted with himself and took to calling himself “asshole”: What is it now, asshole? Is the pain inconvenient?

“It won’t be cheap,” Thomas says.

Cooper wakes abruptly from his thoughts. “Cheap?”

It feels like he’s grilling his leg over white-hot coals.

“They’ll charge you, you know, for the rescue. Are you rich, Cooper?”

Cooper notices the islanders watching him with renewed interest. A rich American might buy their meteorite.

“No,” he says. “I’m not rich. Everything I have is in that boat.”

“Don’t worry about your boat,” says Thomas. “I’ll take care of that.”

“I’m not leaving my boat!” says Cooper.

“You’ll leave your boat or you’ll die,” says Thomas. “The choice is yours.”

“I don’t want to die!” says Cooper, sounding like a petulant child.

“Then let’s go make that call.”

It seems the entire village follows them to Thomas’s shack. Two men help Cooper make the short walk.

There is little inside the pandanus-leaf hut to distinguish this as the American’s place except a GE refrigerator crowded with books. Cooper notices the books when Thomas opens the fridge for a beer.

“It’s the only place they don’t mildew,” Thomas explains. He hands Cooper an Olympia in a can. “This is my Melville collection. What’s left of it.”

Cooper drinks down his beer in two long draughts. Then he sits wearily on a plastic milk crate, sucking air through his teeth, willing himself to abandon the pain, just leave it behind like a bad thought.

The islanders crowd at the open door, whispering and smiling and nodding among themselves, as if they were preparing to vote on something.

“Doesn’t anybody have work to do around here?” Cooper says in exasperation.

“That sounds like a complaint.” Thomas is fiddling with a shortwave that sits on a rusted oil drum in one corner of the shack. The place is no bigger than Lillian’s kitchen. Doorless. A dirt floor. A translucent green rectangle of corrugated fiberglass for a roof. A rickety cot. A netted hammock full of clothes.

In the confined space, Cooper can smell the big man’s sweat: like a wet wool blanket.

Every time Cooper opens his eyes and looks to the door, he sees the islanders smiling encouragement and kindness.

“They want to know who you are,” Thomas says. He’s wearing a headset. His glasses are nearly opaque with dust and salt spray.

“Who?” Cooper asks.

“I got the Army on the line, man.” Thomas sounds irritated. “They need some info.”

“I’ve got papers,” Cooper says. “Tell them I’m an DataCell programmer—I’ve got clearance.”

Cooper turns and says to one of the nearby children—the boy who met him on the beach: “Do you know how hard it is to get clearance in the post 9/11 world?”

The boy flashes the peace sign.

“Yeah, that’s right,” says Cooper.

“I’ve got one of your people here,” Thomas says into his rusted microphone. “A programmer. Cooper Davies. He’ll die for sure if you don’t pick him up.”

Then: “It’s his leg. Looks like gangrene.”

Then: “I know gangrene when I see it. I said he’s one of yours—he’s got clearance. If you leave him here, we’re just gonna dump the body in the lagoon. . . . I said the lagoon.”

Thomas turns to wink at Cooper. “I’m exaggerating.”

Then Thomas nods some more at the radio. “Let me read you the coordinates. We can’t waste any time.”

“Do they know who I am?” Cooper asks.

Thomas sets down the microphone, then swivels to Cooper: “How do you like that? They’re on their way!”

Some of the onlookers repeat the announcement like momentous news: “They’re on their way!”

“A big helicopter!” Thomas crows. Then he grins, showing off his few brown teeth.

The onlookers repeat the magic word: helicopter!

“Holy shit,” Cooper gasps. “I’m gonna be saved?”

Thomas smirks at him. “Rescue isn’t the same thing as salvation.”

Cooper wonders if this is a Melville quote.

Thomas shoos the onlookers. “Go away. Look for the helicopter!”

Reluctantly, the villages drift away. Then Thomas sits on the dirt floor in front of Cooper, who can barely keep his eyes open. Thomas is still wearing his old-fashioned headset, pulled away from his big reddened ears.

“How much do you think your boat is worth?” he asks.

Cooper feels an icepick of dread pierce his heart. He squints hard at Thomas. “Are you gonna sell my boat?”

Thomas seems to beam at the thought. “I’m just asking, man.”

“Are you, like, a pirate or something? Where the fuck is this place?” It occurs to Cooper that he might never find this island again.

“This place?” Thomas smiles slyly. “Do you know how many islands are in the Marshalls?”

“More than a thousand,” says Cooper. “I’ve done my homework.”

“Good for you, my man. It’s easy to get lost out here. That’s what I like about it.”

“I can’t lose my boat. It’s all I got.”

“Is that self-pity I hear?”

“It’s the simple truth, Thomas. I’ll pay you for keeping it safe. I’ll pay you whatever you want.”

“So you do have money,” says Thomas with satisfaction. “They pay you programmers well, don’t they?”

“You talk like a pirate, not a do-gooder from the Peace Corps.”

“The Corps was long ago, my friend. As for doing good, that’s always a matter of opinion. I don’t know that I did anybody good when I was encouraging the so-called natives to join the modern world.”

“You came out here looking for the great white whale, didn’t you?”

“Oh, you’re one to cast aspersions, my little Sinbad. You’ve made the amateur’s mistake, getting an infection like that.”

“I might be a fuck-up but I’m no thief.”

“Are you calling me a thief? I just saved your life!”

“At a cost.”

“Drive into an emergency room with that leg—you don’t think it’s going to cost you?”

“Okay, how much?”

Thomas shrugs. “Let’s wait to see if you survive.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say!”

“I thought you’d like the simple truth.” He pats Cooper’s good knee, then stands. “The world will look different to you once you’re recovered. You may think of me in a better light.”

Cooper ties off the wheel of his drifting mind and now stands on the foredeck, the swells rolling past like the great backs of whales, his sloop nosing through the chop, the cloudless sky as blue as hope—soon he will sight land, he tells himself. Soon.

“I’m sorry,” Cooper says. “I’m unreasonable, aren’t I?”

“You’ve got an attitude, I’ve noticed.” Thomas upends his can of beer, so tiny in his hand, drains it, then smacks his lips.

“Is the Army really coming to rescue me?”

“You think I want a dead American on my little island?”

“So this is your island?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would you get serious for one second?” Cooper asks. “Just one serious second?”

The big man sighs, glances out the doorway, pats his beard absently, then seems to confess: “Sometimes I wonder how serious I truly am. I don’t know what happened to me any more than I can explain what happened to my Melville collection—I used to have 28 books. Right here in my fridge. Now there are fifteen.”

Cooper feels himself sinking slowly into a too-warm bath of delirium. If only he could sleep through this or wake up. He feels his head nod; the empty can of beer drops from his hand.

“You better not die on me, Coop old buddy. Come on, you’re almost home.”

Gasping, nearly weeping, Cooper sucks in a lungful of air, his head booming. Home? Where would that be?

But then, sure enough, he hears a familiar sound like something from home: the putter of a distant lawnmower.

“Who’s cutting the grass?”

“That’s your ride,” Thomas says. He steps into the sunlight.

“There’s no airstrip,” Cooper says hoarsely. He limps out. Thankfully his damaged leg now feels numb. “No way they can get to me.”

“Oh, they’ll think of something.”

It’s a military plane. A-48? Y2K? 40.08? Cooper sees a white star on its tail. Everyone is waving now. The plane circles, then circles again in the too-blue sky. The silver-white clouds look like frosty sea horses.

Cooper takes another step expectantly but somehow misses the ground and collapses. Sea horses bob over him like carousel steeds.

Then a dog hungrily licks his face. Another sniffs with a cold nose at his injured leg.

Thomas waves them away. Kneeling next to Cooper, he says in a low voice, “Your boat’s in good hands, stop looking so injured, man.” Then he stabs at the sky with one fat finger. “There’s your ride!”

Cooper sees something black blossom abruptly from the plane’s tail. A parachute? Breathlessly, he watches as it drifts lazily over the island in small, agonizingly slow circles. The islanders gaze at it with reverence, as if they beheld the approach of an ancestor’s spirit. With growing terror, Cooper regards his oozing leg and recalls that he could have pulled into a different lagoon and found a different island; he could have caught a different fish or let the big blue go; he could flown out here and been safe. A wave of nausea slams him like a crushing breaker. You can’t go under, he coaches himself, not yet. The figure falling from the sky—this could be anything: maybe not the stealthy emissary of Death; maybe, instead, a behemoth bird come to carry him away. Or maybe the smiling angel of God come to deliver him another chance.