Harry stops with the rocks. Barclay’s got to get some more of that copra off his docks, he says. He would jump up and down to see the boat again. Come on, the boat probably sank.
That’s not it, I say.
The sun is so far down our shadows almost touch six yards away. I look away from those shadows so close together. I get up and go to the water. I don’t see it, it’s only wet and then not, a warm shine on the sand. All I have to do is walk in. I’m walking in the way I have tried a few times before, to get rid of walking, to take in all that water, all that big O of an ocean, the naught of nothing, to just swallow it up and be done with it, I walk and I walk, I’m walking in almost to my neck when I walk into a bottle.
It’s not mine, the one I threw, but it’s close enough, some beer bottle. I catch it up and wade out, I smack it against a rock to get at the note that I see is inside.
I know it’s not from him. I know that.
What is it? asks Harry. Stop crying.
He takes the note away from me. I hate this place, he reads. I hate the whole seventh grade. Signed, Sheila.
What’s so sad? he asks.
I tell him.
I stop shaking when I tell him, even though I keep on crying. He holds me and holds me. Then I’m laughing, I’m leaning on his shoulder, with my eyes open and teary I start laughing, and I can’t stop laughing, not even when I point, when I say, There it is, and drop the note.
It? he says. It?
Part 3
The winds were headed straight at us for days before and during the test.
Glen Curbow, former Rongerik weather unit commander for BRAVO, the largest of the 300 H-bombs exploded over the Pacific
~ ~ ~
The dot is too far away to be Temu, even the way dots here mean nothing with the sky just more sea the neck bends to. Besides, Temu always floats in the lagoon. Ngarima hauls him back whenever he floats too close to the reef that his brother shot.
The dot is so far away it’s like an eye test.
I don’t see anything, says Harry.
Okay, so you don’t. There it is, I cry. This time I point with both hands. Isn’t it there?
Calm down, he says.
Big bullets of tears drop off my face and hit the sand. I turn away from the water. Sometimes, I say, I expect the sand to hiss back when I wet it.
Right. It’s not that kind of hot. He looks at me a long time, and then he goes over to another big rock right where a rock would block a ball if you were kicking it that way, and he digs at it with a stick.
The sun is late. When his shadow covers the beach part of the distance between us, I tell him it’s coral he’s digging, it grows there, he’s trying to pull out a tooth that’s rooted and not rotten.
I wonder why no one’s come to check on me this afternoon, he says.
It’s the boat, I say. They’re all getting ready for the boat.
He glances out into the dusk, where there’s no light, no sign of anything anymore. Come on, he says.
He takes my hand, brushes off the sand that I have clenched in it, and leads me down the beach into the dark, step by step, slow and slower. I can smell his sweat when he catches me teetering off an outcrop. It’s not here, he says. Get used to it. They tell you it’s coming because they think that will make you happy.
I don’t think that’s why, I say. But I don’t know why.
We walk along. More tiny crabs move invisibly in front of us. Things can live here, I say. We could start a pig farm, I say. Show these islanders how to raise them right.
You are insane, he says. He pulls me with his arm around my waist and then kisses me, moves his mouth over me from start to finish, sand and palm trash all over us. It is dark enough now to do that. But it is not so dark that I don’t see confusion in how he looks at me — or collusion? Don’t ask, he says, so I know what I’ve seen.
So what if I did imagine the boat, I say as we near the lagoon. I imagine my son every night, how he gets tucked into bed.
Women are always thinking of bed one way or another, he says as we round my spit. I’m sorry, he says.
My dreams are all dark.
We walk along.
In ads, all dreams are dark, I go on. Or swirly. Or at least badly lit. Good night, I say. That’s how it is.
He drops me off at my hole in the sand.
Hey, if there really is a boat out there, he says, remember me in the cigarette department, okay?
I hit him hard with the side of my hand, my best fake karate.
I am on Ngarima’s porch devouring the taro she put out for me, licking the tin of mackerel. She is wearing red because ghosts can’t see her when she wears red and it helps her cough. I had a dream your son’s boat came back, I lie to her. Ngarima is not like me, she likes to hear about her son any way she can. After I lie to her about the dream, she looks up from the taro she’s mashing for Temu, she coughs and says, That boat is Barclay’s.
Now I haven’t looked around to check on the boat. When the sun got too bright to keep my eyes shut, I rolled out of my hole and made my way through the cool dark of the bush toward food, a simple motion, the kind I can manage. I didn’t go back to where I saw that dot in the distance.
I couldn’t bear to.
She doesn’t say more about Barclay’s boat, and Barclay’s not around to ask I’m here because if he were, then there would be no boat. But since he’s elsewhere, I’m beginning to gather my hope, scattered and slow-walking away like all those small shells I tried to string.
An outboard cuts the island quiet.
Excuse me, I say, and I run, I trip over car parts, I run all the way to the end of the wharf, where I almost fall off, looking and running.
A boat, a real boat.
It’s not the boat I came on. Even while it’s wallowing outside the breakers I can see that, even after two months of not seeing a big boat, even after only a week’s passage. But why be so particular? If I wanted a boat, this is it.
There’s a staff and a snake on the smokestack. I make that out because it’s the same as the one on the lighter, the boat with the outboard that now guns through the reef with its shocking roar, unearthly or at least not-of-this-island loud.
Someone in a gray suit and hood holds binoculars in the lighter, trains them toward us, a clump of islanders with bags, and me all shaggy and staring. Beside the suit with binoculars sits Barclay, who holds a parcel out of which sticks an antenna.
I turn back to run and get my stuff. I’m not fast enough, who could be that fast, with the boat waiting or going or gone?
My bag I’ve hooked to a twisted branch over my hole. I scoop up shorts and sand and shells and papers with my name on them and fit them in. I don’t know whether that’s all there is, but it’s enough for the bag. I run back to the other side of the island, and I’m about to break from the bush to the wharf all out of breath, slashed raw from my run, when I see four men in gray suits, moonsuits I guess, the kind with hoods and plastic to see out of in front, securing the lighter with big mittened hands. On their moon-suited fronts these men wear big smiley faces behind white plastic tags that turn what other color? and on their moon-suited feet they wear slumber-party slippers, the kind that should be fluffy and pink but are smooth and the color of rats.
~ ~ ~