by Susan Cooper
We clambered about, through the ruins of the plants and bushes. Lou was making little whimpering sounds now. He patted some of the fallen trees as if they were wounded pets. Looking at it all, I began to feel anger growing like a big lump in my chest, almost like a pain. I wanted to whack at whoever had done all this, to chop at him with his own machete.
Perhaps there had been more than one person. Perhaps two or three. They had done a very thorough job. Big feet had trampled all the young cabbages into the ground, and kicked holes in pumpkins and squash. The only things they’d left were the onions, which were under the ground and harder to hurt, and the pigeon pea bushes at the edges of the farm plot. But pigeon peas aren’t valuable; everyone grows them.
I said to Lou, “Let’s pick up all the tomatoes we can. Even the green ones—Grammie will make chutney.” I knew I had to telephone Grammie at the bank as soon as I could, but she wouldn’t have arrived there yet. So we filled our bags with tomatoes, and my lump of anger kept growing, especially when I looked across at the banana trees. There had been two or three big hands of bananas on every tree, but only half-grown yet, still small and green. The whole crop had been lost.
I called Grammie when we got back to the house. I was spluttering with rage, but she was quiet. “Oh my,” she just said, at first. “Oh my.” Then she told me we should go on rescuing what we could, and by the time we had gone back and filled our bags with tomatoes and green papayas a second time, a black police jeep came bumping along the trail to the plot, with a policeman inside it, and Grammie.
She got out, in her good bank dress and her good shoes, and Lou ran to her and clutched her.
“Lou and Trey,” she said, “this is Constable Morgan. He a good friend of your mother’s. I knew him when he was your age. He kindly came to inspect our poor farm.”
She looked at the mess, and I saw her chin quiver.
Constable Morgan had a perfectly round face, and his eyes grew even rounder as he peered at the splintered bushes and fallen trees. “Oh Lord,” he said. “Somebody sure had it in for you, Mistress Peel.”
There was nothing he could do, of course. No witnesses, no evidence, just a lot of ruined fruit and vegetables. He helped us pick some more tomatoes, and squash and green peppers, and Grammie sent him back to the police station with a bag of them for his wife.
Grand said, when he came home from Nassau, “Looks like somebody sent me a message. Stop making noise, James Peel, if you know what’s good for you.”
“Will you stop?” I said.
Grand smiled a little. “Child,” he said, “I gonna shout my big old head right off.”
SEVEN
Grand and his friends had managed to reach the right minister in government, armed with their petition, and they had a small success. Because the Sapphire Island Resort people were outsiders, and the petitioners all Bahamian, the minister put a one-month stop on development until she could look more closely at the whole case.
“But these people got good lawyers, and powerful arguments,” Grand said. “Now we have to work even harder.”
So the collecting of signatures went on, and there were more meetings, and posters began appearing all over the island, on walls and doors and tree trunks, saying, SAVE LONG POND CAY! Grand was spending all day and every day in town, or at his computer, organizing the protest. He did arrange for a couple of men to come in and clear up the damage at the farm, and Lou and I hung out with them to help, and watch them burn the trash, making a great plume of grey-white smoke.
Grand was leaving the running of his bonefishing business to other people too, for the time being, but all his bonefish guides were good men, and his chief guide, Will Torris, was one of his oldest friends. Besides, this was summer, and most of the visitors came to fish later in the year.
We liked Will; he was a tall, stooped man with a big quick smile and enormous hands and feet. But those big hands could tie the smallest fly onto a bonefish line, and he and Grand had been teaching us all we knew about fish and the sea and the islands, ever since we were babies. Lou and I kept our little dinghy down at an old jetty alongside the bonefish hut, with its smart little marina for the nine boats, and Grand and Will’s office under the neatly painted sign, JAMES PEEL: BONEFISHING.
Lou was restless; I knew he wanted to go out in the dinghy. We both missed the water if we hadn’t been out there for more than a few days, or gone over on Long Pond Cay. But on the day I intended to go, Will Torris turned up at the door early in the morning, just as we were having breakfast.
I said, “Hi, Will!” through a mouthful of cereal, but he didn’t hear me; he was looking at Grand, very serious.
“James,” he said.
Grand offered him a mug of coffee.
Will shook his head, holding up his big hand. “James,” he said again, and stopped.
“What is it?” said Grand. He put down the coffee mug.
Will said unhappily, “Four of the boats are gone.”
“Gone?”
“Chains cut. Completely gone. All nine of them were there last night, tied up, chained up, batteries clipped down. I checked them myself. Somebody took four. Must have had good tools—the chains were cut through like butter. I sorry, sorry, James!”
“Good grief, it’s not your fault,” Grand said. He put his arm over Will’s broad shoulders, and they went out, down to the bonefish hut, followed by Grammie and me, and Lou hopping about like an agitated frog. Lou ran to our dinghy the moment we got there; I think he was more worried about that than about Grand’s fine boats, which were all a special design he’d bought the year before. They were all fiberglass, flat-bottomed, specially made for the slow quiet business of stalking bonefish.
Grand stood looking down at the four empty berths, and the cut chains. He played with his beard, frowning. “Makes no sense,” he said. “Why steal boats no good for anything but fishing on the flats—boats anyone can recognize?”
“For the motors?” Will said. “Batteries?”
“Then why not just take those?” He shook his head, and glanced up at us. “Anyone hear any noises last night?”
But we hadn’t, and when they asked us the same question at the police station, later, we had nothing helpful to say. Constable Morgan wasn’t on duty; there was another policeman, who didn’t know Grand. He wrote down all the details of the theft on a big pad, very carefully, but he didn’t seem to think there was much anyone could do. Grand gave him the identification numbers of the boats’ motors, and even a photograph of one of the boats.
“You got insurance, of course,” the policeman said.
“Thousand-dollar deductible,” Grand said. “Whoever did this is costing me four thousand minimum.”
The policeman whistled between his front teeth. “You got any personal idea who might have done it?”
Lou, beside me, started making an agitated humming sound like a kettle beginning to boil.
But Grand didn’t say anything, and I couldn’t bear it. I started to say, “It’s the people who—” and Grand kicked me. The policeman didn’t notice me or the kick; he couldn’t see me over his high countertop.
“Thank you for the report, Mr. Peel,” he said. “We’ll do what we can. Let us know if you find any of the boats.”
Outside the police station I said indignantly, “You know who stole them, it’s the people who want to shut you up, the people who wrecked the farm!”
“Did you see them, Trey?” Grand said. “Can you prove it?”
“No, but—”
“Let’s go see Grammie,” he said.
We walked to the bank in the baking sunshine, down the dusty road. It’s very hot in our islands in July, and there were hardly any people about, only a few chickens. The man who sells dollar bags of peanuts to tourists was propped against the wall of the market in the shade, asleep. Inside the door of the bank, the air-conditioning made the air wonderfully cool; it was like walking into a cold shower.
I love seeing Grammie behind the tellers�
� counter at the bank, looking all dressed up and dignified. She’s a different person, there; she smiles at us quietly, and it’s the other teller ladies who make a fuss of us. Or of Lou, really, because he’s still young enough to be thought cute, though I can imagine what he’d say about that if he could talk.
Grand was cashing a check, and Lou was being clucked at by the ladies, when I saw Mr. Abbott the bank manager coming out of his office, looking solemn and businesslike. With him were two of the men I’d seen on Long Pond Cay, the ones I thought were French. The men who wanted to turn it into Sapphire Island Resort.
Lou turned his head, the way he so often does when he senses something in my mind. He saw them too, and at once his eyes went wide and he began to gasp, in that scary rhythmic pattern that can be the start of one of his seizures. Mr. Abbott and the two men glanced across, hearing him, and the taller of the two men caught sight of Grand, and paused. He stared at him for a moment, and stepped forward.
“Mr. James Peel,” he said, in his accented English. “Our adversary, I believe.”
“Good day, James,” said Mr. Abbott nervously.
Lou was hooting and gasping, and I dragged him toward the door.
Grand nodded at Mr. Abbott, smiling. Then he looked at the Frenchman, and his smile dropped away. “Good morning,” he said.
The tall man was wearing dark slacks, and a floppy white shirt that looked silky and expensive. He said easily, “I am Pierre Gasperi, and I am so sorry you do not approve of us. Mr. Abbott here will tell you that we are very sound people, financially. We shall be good for these islands, Mr. Peel.”
“No, you will not,” said Grand.
Mr. Gasperi’s voice rose a little. “We are a force of nature, my friend.”
Grand said, “No. Nature is a force against you.”
Mr. Gasperi took a pair of dark glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on, as if he were setting a barrier between himself and Grand. He said softly, “If you are a wise man, you will change your mind.”
And I don’t know what Grand said to that, because Lou was making such a racket that I had to open the door and take him outside. He was better, once he was away from the Sapphire Island people.
I’ve never forgotten Mr. Pierre Gasperi’s voice. It was very quiet and gentle, and really scary.
Grand said hardly anything all the way home, and when we got back he stopped the truck at the jetty, to look again at the cut chains of the lost boats. Lou jumped down and ran to our dinghy. He looked back at me and made his soft hooting sound. It was very clear what he wanted.
I said, “Grand, can we go out in the boat for a while?”
Grand glanced automatically at the sky, at his watch, and at the level of the tide. He said, “You got water in the boat?”
“Yes.”
“Okay then. Back before dark.” He gave me a small tight smile. “If you find a bonefish boat, bring it home.”
But we saw no sign of the four missing boats, though we were both looking out for them. The water was very low, and all the white sandy shoals in the cut were exposed, with channels running between them. Even in our tiny dinghy it was easy to find yourself stuck, and I had to keep clear of our usual landing-place. It was a relief to be back at Long Pond Cay, after the things that had been happening.
I hadn’t talked to Lou at all about the Otherworld. In a way, there wasn’t much point. Not just because he can’t talk, but because there was nothing to say. We both knew what had happened; we both knew nobody would believe it. And we both knew it would happen again. Now that we were really truly on our own, in a way we could be only in the boat, I said, as I watched for the channel, “Lou?”
He was sitting in the bow, holding the anchor-line. He looked back at me over his shoulder.
“Lou, did the tree really talk to you? Did it tell you what to do?”
Lou shifted round a bit and looked at me cautiously, even though I was the person he trusted most in the whole world. After a moment, he nodded.
I wished, for the millionth time in my life, that he could speak.
“Was it an accident, our going there?”
He shook his head firmly.
“Did they . . . call us?”
Lou nodded.
“D’you know why? D’you know what they want?”
Cautiously still, he made an oddly grown-up side-to-side movement with one hand: the gesture that means “sort of, a little bit, so-so.”
I shook my head helplessly. “There’s no way you can tell me, is there?”
Lou tried. He pointed ahead, at Long Pond Cay, with his eyes fixed on me to make sure I was watching. Then he pointed up at the sky, his arm stiff, straight up, pointing as high as he could. Then, because I still looked baffled, he reached out and gave me a little reassuring pat on the leg, and he grinned. It was such an open, happy, infectious grin that all the worry went out of me, and I laughed. It was as if our ages were suddenly reversed, and I was the little one and Lou the big kid.
We puttered up through the deeper blue-green water to the far end of the broad curving beach, and came inshore there, where an old buttonwood tree groped its branches out over the sand.
When the boat was anchored right we went up across the powdery white sand of the beach. It was littered with the leavings of the tide: pieces of purple sea fan, bits of wood and broken sponge, and scraps of hairy rope, colored turquoise and a very bright blue. Casuarina needles lay in scribbles on the sand.
Lou ran ahead of me, inland, toward the lagoon, and I followed him through the tall stringy grass, between hard black patches of marl, and fleshy-leaved clumps of scrub set with little yellow daisy-like flowers. Over on the smooth sand near the lagoon there were hundreds of the faint star-shaped patterns that the little ghost crabs leave, when they dart in and out of their holes. It was quiet, quiet, with only the small distant splash of a fish jumping somewhere in the lagoon, and the cheeping of tiny birds in the casuarina pines.
But Lou was running ahead of me, the wet sand sucking at his sneakers, water rising up out of it to fill his footprints, and suddenly I realized what he had been wanting, why he had asked to come here now, at this particular moment. It was the time between tides again, when the sea had gone down and not yet started to come back. It was the time for crossing between the two worlds, and Lou wanted us to cross over. Perhaps he had heard the Otherworld calling him.
I saw him stop, head up, listening. Once more the air was beginning to shimmer, and I could hear the breathing of the wind in the casuarina needles, even though no wind blew.
Lou flung his arms wide, welcoming, and the Other-world rose before us again and took us in.
But there was a difference, this time.
We were in a kind of wasteland, a huge flat open place, and the air was filled with a distant growling hum. We stood on grass, but all around us was bare concrete, with a few small tufts of green sprouting bravely out of a crack here and there. The sky was a weird brownish color, lighter overhead, but dark and hazy near the horizon. Far away there were buildings of some sort, though the haze made it hard to see what they were.
Lou was looking all around him, puzzled, as if he had expected to find himself somewhere else. I stared all around too. I didn’t know which way to go; we were miles away from anything. It was like being in the middle of a desert.
Then the noise in the background began to grow, very fast, into a deep snarl rising to a roar, and I saw lights coming toward us out of the haze. Closer, closer they came, and the roar grew louder, louder. We stood there staring, motionless as lizards, and over the flat land an enormous airplane came hurtling straight at us.
It was so fast and so huge that I knew we couldn’t escape it; I was certain it was going to hit us. I grabbed Lou, and we both dropped flat on the ground. Grass prickled my face; I pressed against the earth as if I could disappear into it. The noise was earsplitting, filling the world, swallowing us—and then at the last moment it changed, as the plane rose over us, climbing into the
sky.
Lou let out his breath in a husky squeak, and we sat up and looked at each other—and laughed. It wasn’t funny, goodness knows, but I suppose we were delighted to find ourselves still alive. I knew now that we must be on some vast airfield, but I still couldn’t figure out where to go.
Before we’d really collected our wits, another plane came hurtling at us. This time we watched the lights growing as it came, and saw it rise into the air at the last moment, though we still ducked as it roared overhead. Lou tugged at my hand, his face screwed up with pain at the noise, and we scrambled up and ran over the grass, heading away, out of the airplanes’ path. A third plane came thundering down the runway as we went; there must have been less than a minute between each of them.
Someone had seen us, even out there in the middle of nowhere. As we ran across the grass, another set of lights appeared ahead of us, smaller than the plane’s, and a car was coming at us fast, with red and blue lamps flashing on its roof, and a high-pitched siren wailing. There wasn’t much point in dodging; where could we go? I called to Lou and we stopped and stood there, waiting.
The car came so fast that it skidded sideways as it stopped. It wasn’t really a car but an odd kind of van, with SECURITY written on it in big letters. The doors at its rear swung open and two people in dark red uniforms jumped out, a man and a woman. The man got to us first, glaring, and grabbed my arm.
“What the hell d’ you think you’re doing? How did you get out here?” He had thick eyebrows and a black mustache; they seemed to be bristling with anger.
The woman took Lou’s hand; her voice was softer, but just as urgent. “Get in the van, quick, before you get killed!”
