Lighthouse Island: A Novel, page 34
Colin was an adept at lines of sight, a Druid of invisible talk. In his suffocating shack he put on his handmade headphones and smoked cheap tobacco. He ran his antenna up a hundred-foot Douglas fir that the loggers had missed, and then strung it sideways to another. It was powered by a jerry-built wind charger. His antenna swayed and sprayed rainwater as the Douglas fir was battered by winds.
Colin could receive but not reply to anyone, nor could he call for help or ask where the supply truck was or determine what was happening elsewhere or ask for local weather or find out who had charts. All FM and VHF radio traffic was coastal, broadcasting no more than thirty miles up and down the coast and nothing could reach the interior. This was because all FM traveled line-of-sight and so struck the sides of mountains and rebounded or was absorbed by wet bracken or eaten in flight by lightning. But Big Radio, from its satellite relay twenty thousand feet above, could reach all the coasts and the interior and all the ships at sea.
Chan sat patiently with his thick forearms on his thighs and his coat collar turned up. Outside the radio shack the winter bracken was starched with frost and the mountaintops sprinkled with their first winter snow. Colin’s wind charger purred like a cat. Chan listened and smoked. Colin turned his FM dial to 88.3 and Big Radio told them of the Christmas celebrations at Dingley Dell, but around and behind Male Voice One was another voice, barely audible. It sounded like Female Voice One, as if they were together.
Is that her?
Colin nudged the bar dial. That’s her. She’s breaking in, Chan. There’s a transmitter in that rig and she’s turned it on by mistake. The people living there. Her. She doesn’t even know it.
You’re amazing, said Chan.
Oh, thanks, said Colin.
You did this triangulation thing.
Yes, said Colin. And see, see, if we could get it, we could transmit. Oh, oh, transmit. Colin grabbed his own cheeks. I could die. Transmit.
Yes, and if a Primary gunship picks us up? Forty-millimeter mortars, right through the lighthouse tower.
And before they hit us I would say, “You are evil, we are going to kill you all, come to us, we are waiting for you.” Colin smirked a nerdlike murderous smirk.
You are bloodthirsty, said Chan.
I dream bloodthirsty things, said Colin. I want that uplink. In an avid, personal sort of way. If Forensics or Primary gets a fix on the tower, yes, then they’ll hit the base and the sea will roar past in white procession filled with wreck. He crushed out his cigarette in an oyster shell. Chan, where did you get that egg?
Chan smiled and punched Colin lightly in the shoulder. Son, I laid it.
The next night Chan jumped out of the rowboat into the surf that surged around the little island at the mouth of the inlet. Colin and Everett jammed the oars in sand as he fought his way through the freezing, sucking undertow and hung the light on one little juniper. It was a signal for Captain Gandy or Captain Britt Contreras. They hoped it would not be drowned out or blown out, and that one of the captains would see it.
Afterward Chan sloshed up the path through the dark and the lashing fern, the spiny gorse. He hoped his fire was not out. He slept alone and would always sleep alone because when some woman discovered the false charges that had sent him to the labor camps she would gasp and turn away. Door slam, so long, how could you? Beast. A tiny rose of light gleamed out of the streaming bottle house, the last of the fire.
The Five Companions sat at the table in the main cabin of the Bargage Maru. The schooner rocked on its lines at the collapsing dock in the noise of the beating sea. Chan and Colin had managed to net one sockeye as a gift for the lighthouse people and it thumped steadily in a tub.
Gandy regarded the pile of coins, the sack of coal, a new gillnet woven of some kind of stolen and valuable nylon line, a carpenter’s level, and a come-along.
Any of you get seasick?
None of them did or none of them would admit to it.
Gandy leaned forward and said, Miss Oli, are you the only woman?
I can sleep anywhere! she cried. She weltered anxiously in her bright layers. I don’t need a cabin!
Chan said, And Colin can fix your radios and there’s more coal if you want it to trade.
Gandy said, I can use the coal. My radios are fine. He shifted in his chair and his waxed yellow slicker made cracking noises. His lower teeth gleamed in the blond beard of his undershot jaw. They say there was an old experimental station in Barking Sound but I always thought it was defunct a long time ago. Called Bamfield. Changed to Banefield. Maybe because it turned dangerous, like “bane.” Barking Sound is south of here, past Lighthouse Island. It’s just before that coast they call the Graveyard. I have no charts, just my rutter.
Just a rutter, said Chan. Oh man. Handmade, sea-level observation.
Yes. And if we pass the entrance to the sound by mistake in the night or in a fog, we end up in the Graveyard. The storms are pretty steady from the northwest now and they’ll drive us onto the coast. It’s all cliffs, straight up and down as a wall. It will smash us like a sawmill. So we cannot miss that entrance, eh? Beyond that, I have no word. I think this Banefield place is supposed to lie inside the sound to the northeast. You make your own deals at Lighthouse Island with this uplink, but I would give some vital part of my anatomy for charts.
The Toastmaster cried out, Well, sir, well now, the Shalamovs said the man on Lighthouse Island is supposed to be a cartographer as well as a demolition expert.
Ah, said Gandy. You don’t say.
Yes, the guy in the wheelchair.
He’s not, said Gandy. Or one of them isn’t.
So, we should find out, said Chan.
The Five Companions tried not to look at Gandy but at their hands or somewhere else for fear of a refusal. The Toastmaster turned his worn silk top hat around and around in his hands. He had carefully waxed the seams in all their shoes against the salt water and Oli had stitched travel bags for each of them out of pants legs with her avid, winking needle. The bags lay in a pile beside all the food they could collect, wrapped in a rubber sheet and tied. They had fashioned for themselves clumsy sea hats. Into each of the travel bags they had portioned out their treasures: matches, a metal mirror, a knife, a spoon, squares of chenille for towels, slivers of coarse brown soap. When they had pulled the drawstrings shut they felt like Argonauts.
Well then. Chan regarded the glow of his cigarette.
Finally Gandy said, I have a shotgun and a rifle. Are you prepared to shoot?
Chan said, Damn straight.
The others looked at one another nervously.
Captain Gandy spread his hand on the table. And what about the people here?
I showed them how to set nets, said Chan. And traps and where the pig trails are. He lifted his shoulders. They’ll do it if they got kids.
Gandy shook his head. Maybe, he said. He turned to Colin. You better take care of those glasses, he said. Because there’s a big breakdown in the city. Bad, bad flooding. There may never be any more eyeglasses.
Colin took off his glasses and wiped the lenses and stared at them thoughtfully.
Chan said, Then you’ll take us? Yes or no.
Yes.
The Toastmaster said, Gentlemen, and lady, we must all swear on something in immortal and gripping phrases.
And so they sailed away from Saturday Inlet and the long black schooner’s keel bit into salt water the color of jade and her patched sails filled with storm and tore her onward and south, her prow bursting into the cresting rollers.
Chapter 51
After a day and a night they came to Lighthouse Island. It was a clear, rainless day. The sun shone out between slats of clouds in ladders of radiance on which gulls and petrels sailed up and down, up and down. The lighthouse stood like a white shaft in the air, seen from the rise of a wave. They carried gaff-rigged sails on the two masts and the sails full as moons in the moderate wind. The Bargage Maru leaned to one side and a fountain of foam sprayed along her lee as she slid down the boiling scree of a long wave, sent by a storm surge from a distant tempest out in the Pacific, beyond sight except for a hard slaty bank of cloud far to the west.
When they came to the Outer Rocks, they saw at the top of some sea stairs a man and a woman watching. Sails hung out to dry on railings above them, belling in the wind, and the Savonius wind turbine blazed as it spun. The man lifted a pair of binoculars.
Well, he isn’t crippled, said the Toastmaster. He held to the rail with one hand and gripped his top hat with the other.
So which one is he? Oli’s bright headscarf flapped in the wind.
I think he used to be crippled.
The man and the woman seemed bleached as they stood there in their parkas and mufflers. They were people reduced by hunger and the salty wind to a pair of strange and faded angels. The man lowered the binoculars and then stood with a cane in one hand and the other jammed in his coat pocket.
Take care, said Gandy. He has a weapon.
Chan saw the man and the woman staring with the intensity of people who had lost all idea of their own appearance before others, the way animals are who have no sense of how they themselves look, whose minds live only in their eyes and what it is they see. In human beings it is an odd and dangerous look. So the sea beat and spangled on the gray volcanic shelves and threw sequins into the air and overhead the gulls sailed and watched.
The Five Companions climbed into a small skiff and were lowered into the water and came threading through the Outer Rocks with a crewman at the helm. Colin leaned over the side and was seasick, making horrible animal noises. Oli brought with her a canvas carrier with gift food and the salmon.
Permission to come ashore! yelled Chan.
The man handed the binoculars to the woman and put down his cane. Chan thought, He wants to appear stronger than he is. Then Chan shouted, Are you Orotov?
Yes! The man put his hands around his mouth and shouted, Who are you?
I am Chan the Uncanny! he called out. We are from Saturday Inlet!
Oli gestured with the salmon, which shone like metal. The Toastmaster lifted his disreputable top hat and bowed. Beside him Everett, bald and ink-stained, held up his large book of wallpaper. Chan shoved his bandanna more tightly around his thick, curling salt-and-pepper hair and his gold earring sparkled.
Orotov and his wife now appeared alarmed. Chan had to admit to himself that the Five Companions looked like lunatics. He shouted again, Permission to come ashore!
Orotov turned to the auburn-haired waif beside him. Their coats were marked with charcoal and salt scum and they were as thin inside these coats as clothes poles.
What do you want? shouted Orotov.
Your help! Charts! Demolition! We are going to Banefield!
There was a long pause as Chan the Uncanny hung on to the tossing gunwale and rose and fell with the chop.
How do you know of us? the man shouted.
Long story! Chan bellowed.
The Shalamovs! screamed the Toastmaster.
And finally Chan shouted, Well, there’s more, then!
What?
Now the woman came down three steps to stand behind Orotov; she carried a chair leg.
The uplink! The uplink to Big Radio is in that light tower! Somebody has turned on a mike and you are transmitting!
Nadia stared at them. She was silent and blank for a moment and then said, I was transmitting? Transmitting what?
Come ashore, said James. He remained at the top of the steps. Get out of the boat and come ashore.
One of Gandy’s crewmen jumped out onto the lower steps and tied onto the bollard and so they all got out one after the other as James watched with the dart gun held openly in one hand. They sloshed up the steps and at last they reached the top gasping for breath and all that they wore blew in the wind while behind them on the sea the dark schooner rode up and down with bare poles and on the horizon was the coming storm.
Chan lifted a flat palm. He said, Peace.
Likewise, said James. He lifted the dart gun and pointed the short barrel at Chan’s face. And so tell us all about yourselves.
And so, said Chan. Right now we’re travelers. From Saturday Inlet, like I was screaming at you out there in the boat, then. Which is a Primary work station up on the coast.
Okay, said James. I know it from my chart. Nadia stood behind him with the chair leg and now it embarrassed her but she didn’t know what to do with it.
A chart! said Everett. He turned to Chan. You see, he has a maritime chart.
Chan crossed his thick arms. We need your charts. Saturday Inlet is all out of food and out of ideas. I hope you weren’t counting on sailing up there for steak and eggs.
Actually, yes. We were just about to leave.
Nah, forget it, supplies delivery stopped a month ago, no more soy cheese and so, cheeseless, we five here decided to save ourselves and try for a place called Banefield. So put the gun away. We need you.
James lifted his head to the Pacific behind them. Is that your ship?
No, no, said Colin. That’s Captain Gandy, he’s a scrapper and a trader, like, illegal, sort of black market, we kind of hired him and it was me, okay? And you are transmitting. He waved both hands in the air like brushes as if to scrub the air of all doubts. It was me, I triangulated on the tower there; it’s the uplink to Big Radio and it transmits. Colin then pointed both forefingers at the light tower.
Big Radio? Nadia was stunned into blankness. Her big yellow parka beat like a tent in the wind. From the tower?
James didn’t look up at the tower. He kept his eyes on the group in front of him. I thought so, he said. I couldn’t get up the steps.
I was transmitting, said Nadia. Oh my God. And you thought so. And you didn’t tell me.
It doesn’t matter! said Oli and gave a little leap. It doesn’t! Where is Primary now? Lost, no orders. And television is dead.
So, said James.
Long story short, said Chan, we decided to form a company and hire that ship.
We are the Five Companions, said Oli, presenting the fish.
We imagine things, sir, said the Toastmaster, and lifted his top hat.
I build radios, said Colin. So we can hear radio talk and, so, be encouraged, then.
A better life, said Everett holding his wallpaper book. “And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” Fahrenheit 451.
They built a fire of driftwood and looked at one another’s faces in the endlessly altering radiance. Light speaks to us and holds us, flames or glowing TV screens, moving illuminated shapes seize human minds, a gift, a ball and chain. They spoke and explained themselves to one another, a tortuous process because they had all spent a lifetime in a suspect world of overlords and beautiful celebrities, and now bloody and terrifying scenes on the screen; a world of deaf, opaque social structures and contaminated language crushed by fear and boredom and awareness weeks. They were just people. They had no script.
Oli brought out her flour and baking powder and made bannocks and the salmon lay upon the coals. Gulls hung overhead as if suspended on wires, turning their yellow eyes from one person to another as they spoke and interrupted one another and explained and then the gulls cried out as the red salmon was torn apart and handed around. The air was full of gull cries, hungry, always hungry.
And so tell me about transmitting, said Nadia. She stared at them with her gray-green eyes fringed in wet black lashes, as if she were guilty of some grave social error, which she was, having muttered death wishes against Earl Jay Warren in the imagined privacy of the light tower, muttered only, she told herself, a mere whispering muttering.
Couldn’t hear! cried Colin. I swear! All people heard sounded like murmuring and the birds!
No indeed, said everybody else.
Be easy, young woman, said Chan. And eat. Here, take another bannock.
Still, her murmuring had gone out all over the Western Cessions, but who now would care? She lifted her head to the light tower, now something other than it was, something more than it was, far more, radiating all the great stories to a drowning world.
The flames raveled like neon threads and streamed southeast and threw sparks and old nails glowed in the timbers as they talked and ate. And so these strangers on an island in the North Pacific sat down together on the magnetic lines of dire necessity, a collection of jesters gathered at the far border of the Western Cessions in top hats and oversized parkas.
Now, said Nadia. She went to the house and brought out the bottle of wine. There was enough for one drink each. They clinked their enamel cups together and said, To Barking Sound.
On January fifth the Companions started for Barking Sound, Everett whispered to himself. He must go on and write the chronicle as if they were a kind of royalty, founders of kingdoms. Their faces were turned to the beckoning wind that came out of the drowning megacities and then over the bare mountains, out of the dissolving tundra. It blew from the remote country known as Japan or Kamchatka, come over the sea to sing to them. In all directions were danger and hunger but also things unexpected. Things that would astonish them. The world unrolling like a scroll or a map of the unexplained and within that another maplike thing equally inexplicable, like the beyonding compulsion that seizes people as they stand looking at an unknown shore with a ship out on the sea waiting for them, and the smell of salt water and rain.
As they tipped up their heads and drank they heard the report of a shotgun. James grasped his cane and stood up and saw a puff of smoke at the rail of the schooner.
That’s the signal, said Chan. We’ve got to board in under an hour. The storm is coming.
Chapter 52
Colin, who had been seasick from the hour they left Saturday Inlet, would stay behind and work in the light tower to build a relay transceiver that would transmit on one frequency and receive on another. He had already found the hyperzipped CDs of all the readings, moving with infinite slowness inside the green battery units at the bottom of the tower and was carefully taking the console apart. They agreed that he would transmit whatever information he had at ten o’clock every night. For food he had a pallet of the expired foodstuffs from Gandy’s hold, mussels, and the net contributed by Gandy and set in the slot. For company he had Edward the Cat.
