The Island

by Peter Benchley

  Nelson hauled the log up to the stern.

  Steadying himself with a hand on a stern cleat, Dickie reached out with his left foot and flipped back an edge of the canvas. There, palm upward, as if mendicant, was a human hand.

  “Holy shit!” Dickie’s foot snapped back onto the platform. He held the cleat with both hands.

  For a moment, neither man spoke; each listened to his heartbeat. Then Nelson said, “More of him under there?”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “Maybe he’s alive.”

  “What he be doin’ out here alive? ’Sides, smell the bastard!”

  “Won’t know till you look.”

  “You look.”

  “I can’t look. I’m holdin’ the gaff.”

  Dickie gazed down at the hand, considering. He reached out, drew back, reached out again. “C’mon, chummy,” he muttered. “C’mon. Be nice and dead.” He touched the corner of the canvas and lifted it.

  He saw a wrist, circled by a crude, green metal bracelet, and part of a forearm.

  “C’mon,” Nelson said impatiently. “He ain’t gonna bite you.”

  “I can’t get a grip on him. Pull him in further.”

  “There ain’t no further. He’s hard against the transom now.”

  Holding his breath, Dickie leaned away from the stern, reaching with his left hand, clutching the cleat with his right. His fingers wrapped around the lifeless palm. He pulled.

  Suddenly, the hand was alive. Fingernails bit into Dickie’s wrist and yanked downward, tearing him away from the boat.

  The canvas heaved up and flew back.

  Dickie’s body hit the canoe, and a blur of gray hissed through the air, striking him above the left clavicle. Like a doll dismembered by an enraged child, Dickie’s head flopped loose from his body, connected only by threads of skin and sinew. A rush of air burst from his open trachea, blowing bubbles of blood. Nelson heard two splashes as body and head hit the water separately.

  The man was aboard before Nelson could unhook the gaff. Frantically, he tried to free it, but the hook was fast in the wood. He dropped the gaff and backed away.

  Nelson did not look at the man advancing upon him; he was mesmerized by the upraised ax, a crescent blade drooling with blood. As droplets fell to the deck, they glittered in the twilight. The ax spun in the man’s hand, and facing Nelson now was a tapered nick, a curved triangular spike. The pick jabbed at him. Nelson dodged.

  His eyes flickered away from the pick and saw—behind the man, behind the stern—the pirogue drifting away. If he could get overboard, if he could swim to the pirogue, then paddle it . . . where? Anywhere. Away.

  He feinted to his left, and the man swung at him, burying the pick in the bulkhead. Before the man could dislodge it, Nelson sprinted for the stern.

  But, in the shadows, he didn’t see the pile of liquor cartons until his shins hit them. He tried to stop, skidded on fish guts, and sprawled on the deck. As a last, reflexive defense, he covered his head, helplessly, with his hands.

  Manuel had the last of the bottles, two quarts of Armagnac, under his arm. His legs were beginning to cramp from crouching so long in the hold, and he scurried aft, hoping to be able to straighten up before a muscle knotted. Ahead, in the rectangle of light cast through the open hatch, the shadows of the bottles arrayed on the deck above were obscured by the shadow of a man.

  “I got the last of them, Mist’Dickie.”

  The Saviour’s Spokesman was bidding farewell: “Well, shipmates, the time has come to furl our sails here in the Haven of Rest . . .”

  It was the smell that Manuel noticed first, a heavy, putrid stench. He had smelled something like it once before, when a goat, killed and half eaten by dogs, had lain decaying in a neighbor’s field. He reached the hatch and held up the bottles, but no hand took them.

  The stench made his eyes water. He looked up, saw feet.

  “. . . until tomorrow, when we’ll raise our anchor and cruise together through the shoals of life . . .”

  Manuel stood in the hatchway, frozen. A drop of blood fell on the carpet before him.

  A hand withdrew from a broad leather belt a weapon unlike anything Manuel had ever seen. A thumb pulled back the hammer, and a shudder swept through Manuel’s body. He closed his eyes and heard, all in a fraction of a second, a click and a psst, then a resonant boom.

  He fell backward, striking his head on the edge of the hatchway, and collapsed in the bilge. He heard glass break, smelled alcohol and sulphur, felt pains in his head and a spasm in his bowels.

  And then he heard: “. . . and remember, shipmates, there’s always a fair wind when Jesus is your skipper.”

  C H A P T E R

  2

  As usual, Blair Maynard was late for work. He was due at the office at ten, but he had stayed up until two-thirty the night before, finishing a freelance piece for one of the airline magazines. He could knock off most such assignments in an afternoon or evening: movie or theater reviews, celebrity interviews, $750 for 1,000 or 1,500 words. He had struggled over this piece, though, for it was on a subject that interested him—recent discoveries of what were thought to be pre-Columbian stairways and paving stones, underwater in the out-island Bahamas, His conclusions, after analyzing the evidence, were unsatisfying: Nobody knew, for sure, what the stones were. In all probability, they had been formed and smoothed by nature. But maybe not. And the research into the past, into who might have made the stairways, and why, had been fun.

  But even if he hadn’t been working, Maynard would have found some excuse to stay up too late, and away from his apartment. Since his wife and son had moved out, taking most of the furniture, paintings, curtains, and carpets, the apartment had become a place he preferred to avoid. When it was furnished and cared for, it had been a characterless, yet livable, cluster of squares. Now, empty and unkempt, it was a hollow cell, constructed, Maynard concluded, of shirt-cardboards and spit.

  In the first two months after his wife walked out, he had spent fewer than a dozen nights in the place. He went instead to saloons, found leggy girls who would listen to him lament about how his apartment was full of unbearable memories. After a few scotches and some fictional anecdotes about his career as a journalist, he usually got an invitation to spend the night with the girl.

  But by now, his post-separation impulse to sleep with every female in Manhattan had about run its course. For a while, it had been thrilling to live the life of the clichéed roué, to awaken in strange beds beside women whose names he had forgotten and whose appetites gave full vent to his fantasies. But the thrill had faded with repetition.

  If he had been willing to pursue a relationship, something enduring might have resulted with one or two of the girls. But he was not yet ready to make any commitment to anybody, or, really, to anything. And so his life, and his sex life, drifted. Occasionally, he bumped into another drifting vessel, they coupled briefly, and drifted on again.

  As Maynard crossed Madison Avenue at Fifty-fifth Street, he glanced downtown and saw the clock atop the Newsweek building flick from 10:59 to 11:00. He entered the Today Publications building, exchanged pleasantries with the guard who monitored the banks of elevators, and rode up to the eighteenth floor. As he knew he would, he intercepted the woman who sold snacks from the Schrafft’s cart just as she was about to enter the service elevator.

  Maynard’s office was one of a dozen cubicles that overlooked Madison Avenue. Twelve feet square and painted aquamarine, it contained two desks (one for him, one for his researcher), two bookcases, two typewriters, two telephones, and a file cabinet. The only décor on the walls was a dozen Today covers, representing the cover stories Maynard had written in his decade at the magazine.

  He had had the same office for all ten years, yet his name had never been on the door. When he was entertainment editor, the plate on the door said “Entertainment.” Then it had said “Sports”; then (briefly) “The Sciences”; then (even more briefly) “The Visual Arts.” For
the past three years, the plate had said “Trends.” When the door was closed—that is, when Maynard was on the phone negotiating for a free-lance assignment—a passing naïf might have suspected that within labored a Madison Avenue Marshall McLuhan, or a budding Tom Wolfe, or, at least, a dynamo with his finger on the pulse of pop sociology. The naïf would hardly have envisioned Today’s “Trends” editor as he was: a lanky thirty-five-year-old who smoked Lucky Strikes, read history, and thought Frank Sinatra was the greatest song stylist of the last quarter century. He had sold off the gun collection he had inherited from his father only when threatened with imprisonment. He neither knew nor cared what the difference was between the Monkey Hustle and a Pet Rock.

  One social phenomenon Maynard was interested in, however, was his researcher. Her name was Dena Gaines. She was in her mid-twenties and was, by any generation’s standards, stunning. She had high cheekbones, a sharp, positive nose, fair skin, and black hair that hung to within inches of her waist. She was always manifestly clean. Everything about her—her skin, her hands, her clothes, her hair, her scent—was impossibly clean. She was gentle, modest, soft-spoken, intelligent, and hard-working. She was also very fond of Maynard, not sexually (though that side of both their personalities was repressed in the office and neither had suggested unleashing it after hours), but in the affectionate, sisterly, caring way.

  None of these qualities had anything to do with Maynard’s fascination with Dena. What interested him about her was that she was the only woman (only person) Maynard knew who was an admitted, practicing, proselytizing (though shyly) sadomasochist. She had been working for him for only two weeks when she first told him, quietly but candidly, that she was a votary of the cult of pain, and periodically since then she had offered to convince him that agony was the true path to sensual awareness and self-knowledge. He had never consented, but neither had he been able to quench his curiosity about the particulars of her life. He justified his more lubricious daydreams by telling himself that it was part of his job to investigate the fringes of American mores.

  When he entered the office, Dena was checking a story he had written for next week’s issue, examining every fact and underlining each in red pencil when she was satisfied with its source.

  “Good morning,” he said as he crossed to his desk.

  She looked up. “Are you okay?”

  “Sure. Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “No reason, I guess. I just worry about you when you’re this late. I always think something might have happened to you.”

  “Don’t worry. The most exciting thing that happens to me is when I have a nightmare and fall out of bed.” She smiled. Maynard took a sip of coffee and noticed that Dena was wearing a high-necked dress and, above the collar, a scarf. “What’s under the scarf?”

  Dena blushed. “Nothing.”

  “Come on. You know the only kicks I get in life are from you.”

  Dena hesitated, then said, “Bites.”

  “You mean hickeys?” Maynard tried to sound disappointed. “Everybody gets those once in a while.”

  Challenged, Dena turned her head to him and pulled down the scarf. “Bites.”

  Maynard could see distinct puncture wounds. “Judas priest!” Maynard recoiled. “That must have hurt like hell.”

  “I’ll say.” Dena smiled, replaced the scarf, and turned back to her work.

  Maynard fetched copies of the Daily News, The Wall Street Journal, and The Christian Science Monitor from the bookcase and spread them out on his desk. He had read the Times at home, and now he scanned the headlines in the other papers in search of potential “Trends” stories. It was always easier to convince his editor that a story was worth doing once it had appeared—even as a parenthesis—somewhere else. Original ideas were suspect, a situation Maynard called the Confirmation Paradox: He was paid $40,000 a year to come up with original ideas for the “Trends” section, but (so the paradox went) if a story truly merited space in a weekly magazine, surely it would already have been covered by one of the wealthier, better-staffed wire services or daily papers.

  A year ago, during a trip to Florida, Maynard had discovered that an outfit specializing in scuba-diving tours was, in violation of all industry procedures, accepting customers who had no training at all. He had suggested the story to his editor, who had turned it down despite evidence that two people had drowned from inexperience and unfamiliarity with scuba equipment. Unwilling to let the story go unreported, Maynard had given all his research to a friend at the Times. When the story finally appeared in the Times, Maynard’s editor had urged him to write the piece for Today—using the Times story, of course, as his primary source material.

  Maynard dumped the News into the wastebasket and turned to the front page of the Journal.

  As inspirational material for “Trends” ideas, the Journal was useless. The long feature stores on columns one, four, and six of the front page were often about “Trends” subjects, but they were so comprehensive, so exhaustively reported, that there was nothing a newsweekly could add to them. Maynard admired the stories and envied the reporters who wrote them, for they were sometimes detached for up to a month to do a single piece. The Reader’s Digest might condense a Journal story, but Today couldn’t plagiarize one.

  He was about to move on to the Monitor when he noticed a short item at the bottom of the “What’s News” column on page one.

  “MISSING:” said the slug, and the item read, “A luxury sport-fishing cruiser was reported several days overdue at the tropical island of Navidad. The Marita, registered in Grand Bahama, was scheduled to pick up its captain and a charter party on Tuesday.

  “According to Coast Guard statistics, 610 vessels of 20 feet or more have disappeared in the Caribbean, Bahamas, and Gulf Coast areas in the past three years, with a loss of at least 2,000 lives.”

  Maynard read the item twice, concentrating on the second paragraph. How could 610 boats just disappear?

  Carrying the Journal, Maynard walked down the hall to the corner office. The door was open, and Leonard Hiller, the senior editor in charge of several sections of the magazine, including “Trends,” was arguing with somebody on the telephone. Maynard hesitated outside the door until Hiller’s secretary said, “You can go in. He’s just having one of his fits because they killed the Woody Allen cover.”

  “For what?”

  “Some civil war, I think.”

  As Maynard slouched in the chair opposite Hiller’s desk, Hiller raised his eyebrows and puffed his cheeks, conveying the frustration he felt at being thwarted by the people he referred to as “the Philistines on the seventeenth floor,” who ran the magazine.

  “I know it isn’t funny!” Hiller shouted into the phone. “It isn’t supposed to be funny! The man is making a serious film. He’s a serious artist, probably the only serious artist in American film today.” He paused, listening. “So what else is new? South Africa’s been about to explode for the past twenty years. Who gives a damn?”

  Maynard stopped listening. It was a routine he had heard time and again, between successions of senior editors and managing editors. The subjects changed, but the complaint was always the same: A back-of-the-book cover story, on which the editor, a writer, several researchers, and, probably, two or three bureau chiefs had worked for weeks, was falling victim to an unforeseen national or international crisis. The back-of-the-book editor thought the crisis was overblown: the national- (or international-) affairs editor thought the back-of-the-book cover story was irrelevant. The hard-news advocates always won, because the final, irrefutable argument was, “We’re a news magazine.”

  Though he didn’t like Hiller much. Maynard felt sorry for him. He was only thirty-three and had been promoted to senior editor—a dead end for a writer—over the heads of people for whom he had once worked, people who had turned down the job before it had been offered to Hiller. Maynard had refused it twice, preferring the more relaxed pace of his present job and the opportunity it offered him for unlimi
ted free-lancing. Senior editors had a lot of responsibility and little authority, were blamed for much and praised for little, and had to coddle the dozen delicate egos who wrote for them while at the same time placating the three Olympian egos to whom they reported.

  When, after the last executive shuffle, it came to pass that Maynard would report to Hiller, he had tried to establish a relationship with him that would demean neither man. But from his first day in the corner office, Hiller had acted the role of boss, claiming for himself vast expertise in each of the news areas for which he was responsible. To Maynard, Hiller had fast become a pain in the ass.

  “Okay, okay,” Hiller said into the phone. He had lost, as Maynard knew he would. “How long do you want it, then?” He ran a pencil down a sheet of paper on his desk. “I guess so, but that’ll mean killing two columns of ‘Books’ and . . . I can’t kill ‘Sports.’ Just a sec.” He looked up at Maynard. “Does ‘Trends’ have anything that won’t wait till next week?”

  Maynard shook his head. “Does it ever?”

  “I’ll kill ‘Trends.’ That’ll leave me eight for Woody Allen. Yeah . . . okay.” He hung up the phone and said to Maynard, “Sorry.”

  Maynard shrugged. “What’s going on in South Africa?”

  “Another riot in Soweto. Christ, they riot in Soweto every odd Tuesday. It’ll be another forecast-of-Armageddon cover that won’t amount to squat.”

  “Did you see this?” Maynard passed the Journal across the desk. He had circled in red grease pencil the item about the hundreds of missing boats.

  Hiller glanced at the item. “So?”

  “So? Six hundred and ten boats? Gone? Where the hell did they go?”

  “It’s a misprint.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Then they sank,” Hiller said “The world is full of idiots who buy boats they don’t know how to drive and take them places they don’t know anything about. My brother has a big Bertram that he bought just to wreck marinas with. I wouldn’t trust him to take me for a ride on a moped.”