The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  Then old conversations would reecho—with this difference: This time the right answers would come to my Ups. I would say the things I might have said years ago. Strange that all this deep, dead, never-to-be-repeated past should come back to life in this God-forsaken corner of the world.

  I would half awaken to find myself in a cold sweat. I would start to mop my forehead, and that devilish left arm would sweep down across my face. I would recoil from my own touch, and come bolt upright, too wide awake to fall asleep again until the softening first light of dawn.

  “No one will ever find me here,” I began telling myself. “No one will ever come—and I’m glad. I’ll live on in this monstrous form, and never be seen or known by man. That’s the easiest way . . . the line of least resistance.”

  You may well imagine that one of the most fascinating features about this island was the crater of the volcano.

  You may have guessed that by this time I had explored every foot of the cone. Your guess is wrong. I hadn’t even once ascended to the summit.

  Why not?

  Well, I can only answer by comparing myself with the small boy who was told that there wouldn’t be another Christmas for a whole year; his supply of gifts would have to last him a long, long time. So, upon thinking the matter over, he decided he wouldn’t unwrap them all at once but would save some for a rainy day the next summer.

  Before I had been tramping around on this island a month I had started up the cone at least a dozen times. Each time I had stopped and turned off in another direction with that thought. I might be here for a long, long time. What this island offered in the way of novelty had best not be consumed in a few quick gulps.

  No; the crater could wait. Sometime, on some special occasion. Perhaps after I’d succeeded in catching that big green alligator gar—or whatever kind of mammoth fish it was that made his U-turns in Sutter’s Bay, I’d go on an exploring spree and treat myself to a first look down the mouth of the volcano.

  I wish I had started keeping track of time. Those first days or weeks that I slept away while recovering from my wound got me off to a bad start. Nevertheless, I did made a few score whacks in a dead log near the shore, one for each day. I kept it up until a storm came up and washed the log away. Then I cursed myself for my carelessness. Sad to say, there was little of the methodical Robinson Crusoe in my blood.

  The cavern beneath Camel Point gradually became my home. It was nearer my source of food; it was well hidden within the inner curve of the horseshoe-shaped bay. My fires could not be seen from the shore. My sleep, I was confident, would not be disturbed by any wandering Jap fishermen; and last, but not least, I had come to enjoy a certain companionship with the low groanings and rumblings of the volcano as it echoed up through the stone floor. To sleep with one’s ear to the ground, to hear the low, whispered, sullen mutterings of Mom Earth’s pent-up powers—it was much like the friendly feeling some people have for the voice of thunder or the roar of a pet lion in a good stout cage.

  I hoped that my volcano was in a good tight cage. But I doubted it. For many days I had wondered why this island had been deserted by the Japanese. Suddenly the answer came, as clear as day. They had read some unpleasant warnings in the coil of smoke above the volcano cone.

  I worked at the locked door from time to time, and one day the padlock fell off for me and I swung open the steel panel.

  What a combination! Biscuits and bombs!

  This was an occasion for a feast and a celebration.

  CHAPTER IV

  Not According to Movie

  I took an inventory of the packages of food concentrates and estimated that, barring a host of visitors, such as the Japanese army, I could guarantee that there would be three square meals a day on Sutter’s Island for the next sixty-two thousand days. Roughly, one hundred and seventy years.

  This was momentarily disheartening, to realize that I could never hope to encompass all that food. I half wished that Aunt Minnie and all her kids would drop in for a prolonged visit. What that wouldn’t do to a food surplus!

  This break was certainly not according to the movies. If my memory served me, I should have exhausted all the roots and berries on this desert island by the end of reel one; and if I found a cache of food in reel three, I should have had to weigh it in rations of ounces, so that by reel seven I would again be gnawing the bark of trees when the rescue ship hove in.

  Food for one hundred and seventy years. That was discouraging. I sure as hell wasn’t going to play Robinson Crusoe that long.

  In addition, I now possessed enough bandages and first-aid equipment to take care of a minor accident a day and a couple of majors over every week-end for the rest of my natural life. This was awful.

  There was, I may add in all seriousness, a detail in connection with this first-aid equipment which really made my blood boil, as it would have any American’s. The goods bore a label which indicated that it had originally been sent to Japan from the United States some years before the war at a time of a disastrous earthquake. Our gift of mercy to unfortunate Japanese had been saved, then, for use by the Jap war machine, plotting its secret attacks.

  Finally there were these stores of satin gray Jap time-bombs, the like of which I had seen before not so many months ago. Enough of these to provide fireworks for many a Christmas, Fourth of July and Hallowe’en—not to mention a lifetime of birthdays if I cared to reestablish my calendar by guess.

  The supply of food was a tough psychological break, as I have explained; but all in all I took my discovery to be a very fine stroke of fortune. I celebrated.

  I celebrated with a climb to the summit of the mountain and looked down into the fire and brimstone crater, and listened to the more or less friendly rumbling and sputtering.

  My meddlesome left arm had wrapped itself around a couple of time-bombs before I’d closed the door on my new treasure down the mountainside. So now, for the hell of it, I set them for thirty seconds and tossed them into the pit to see if they’d blow the cap off and catapult me into the ocean.

  No such luck. They popped off with a couple of modest booms, and nothing happened. The dark column of volcano smoke continued to flow upward undisturbed. It was a cinch this was no well-trained movie volcano.

  The crater was quite small, I judged, not by movie standards but by what I’d read of such things. It was only sixty or seventy yards across, and so comparatively young in years, along with the rest of the island. (I had counted eighteen growth rings in the trunk of one of the larger trees not far from the three houses.)

  The fire blazed near enough to the top in the western corner of the crater that that portion of the rocky lip remained red hot. Here again I was guaranteed an endless supply of fire if I should grow careless and allow the hot coals in my cave to burn out.

  I descended the mountain with my nostrils well filled with lava smoke and my heart contented over what I’d seen.

  I feasted on food concentrates for the next three days—I mean gorged—and was sick for the next three weeks.

  The food was appreciated, however, by that big bumptious fish, the grayish monster with the green pennant fins who looked like an overgrown alligator gar from the Mississippi and who frequently nosed into my bay from the ocean to do his U-turns. He went for the jawbreaker biscuits I tossed him and came back the next day to beg for more.

  As for my own diet, I returned to the delights of crustaceans, and now and then for Sunday dinner I’d enjoy such delicacies as boiled octopus arms.

  Does this seem to you, as it did to me, that this might be a sort of cannibalistic tendency? I’ve heard that an octopus will, in a pinch, devour his own arms. A sordid thought. I hasten to assure the reader that it was not my own arm that I ate. Nor did said arm recoil or otherwise betray any twinges of conscience as I feasted. Before the war, octopus meat ranked high among the foods of the gourmets of fashionable Mediterranean cities, as you’ve doubtless read. And so it pleased me thus to live in style.

  By this time
you have pictured me as a lazy, unambitious, half-melancholy creature, half naked, wearing an octopus tentacle for a left arm; completely devoid of any purpose; a slightly crazed castaway out of touch with the world and its wars and its commerce and its cultural progress.

  You are quite right. A life of ease and indolence had been dumped into my lap. I came to accept as a fact that I would remain right here, alone and uncontacted by people to the end of my days.

  The months passed. Months—yes, seasons. Wars may have come and gone. And Marcia—

  Well, there were still those dreams of music and voices—echoes of long forgotten sounds. But I ceased to think of Marcia as anything more than a dream. Farther and farther away.

  “Walter Sutter is lost,” she had said to some strange man in one of my dreams. “He will never return . . . There, my tears are dried now . . . Yes, I will go to dinner with you . . . What, a ring? . . . An engagement ring? . . . Later, perhaps. . . We’ll talk of it later.”

  This somewhat disillusioning dream out of my troubled subconscious I accepted as truth—as a natural development following my failure to return. I took it complacently.

  I was even complacent over the growing underground thunder of the volcano.

  There, again, I had the Hollywood myth to support me. No self-respecting volcano would ever think of popping off until some big dramatic moment was at hand, preferably after the wrath of the gods had been stirred to a white heat because some villainous white man had kicked the sacred taboos into the dust. Once hell broke loose, no mad volcano could be expected to quiet down until treated to a feast of the native princess’ tender young body parboiled in lava sauce.

  “Walter Sutter, you’re as safe as those sleepy snails crawling over your bare feet,” I said to myself. “This island has no native gods, and if it did have, there wouldn’t be a thing in the world for them to get sore about, because there’s sure as the devil no taboos around here. And no native princesses, darn it.”

  So I was complacent.

  And so the volcano went to work one cloudy day and blasted forth a goodly quantity of hell, and caught me unawares.

  I had by this time moved about three-fourths of the Jap time-bombs from their cache to my cozy cavern at Camel Point. When the uproar began my first thought was, “Time-bombs! There goes the last of them!”

  In this first gasp of excitement I was accusing my careless left arm of having mishandled a trigger. Those suction cups had a native cunning for getting into mischief, and I’d had to keep an eye on them during all those delicate bomb-carting maneuvers.

  But before this roar got well started I knew it wasn’t the mountainside cache, not my Camel Point cavern, but the big cone itself.

  It was all wrong, according to the movies. But this volcano had grown up under Japanese influence, and maybe it couldn’t help doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. Anyhow, the way it spouted off, a Tokyo propaganda broadcast would have been a two-cent firecracker by comparison. I flung my left arm over my back and raced for Sutter’s Bay.

  CHAPTER V

  Lava Burial

  Lava and white-hot rocks came pounding down in my direction. Thunder and lightning and a hail of smaller rocks and a storm of volcanic steam at once transformed the whole scene around me into a terrifying spectacle.

  I was caught among rocks, trapped there. The big, brownish red ledge that I had ducked under for momentary protection was sinking slowly. Sinking under the weight of an avalanche of rock that rushed down over the top of it.

  Camel Point was a stone’s toss beyond me, but the reversed head of the multi-humped camel had cracked off with the first explosion. My cave of explosive treasures, a few feet farther down, would doubtless be cut off from the world with the next wave of lava.

  Here it came, a great, hot layer like a giant blanket of yellow dough, inching its way, giving off steam and a crackle of sputtering noises, as if being poured out of hell’s oven. It weighed above my head with its massive folds, and the smell fairly choked me.

  I was caught by both feet. The rocks closed in against my knees. Suddenly the section of the cliff that had been sinking shook loose and plunged forward. For an instant I was thrown free into the water of the bay—free in the same sense that one is thrown momentarily free from his seat in a roller coaster. The cliff descended into the water with me. Then the vise of rock closed upon me again. Rock and water were everywhere around me—except for the slight cushioning of a live octopus which had, by chance, been hurled upward into this same trap.

  More arms than my own were being crushed against my body. The octopus, too, was fighting for dear life.

  Fortunately for me, or so I thought, the parrot-like jaws of this tentacled monster were away from me; otherwise I might have been cut through. Except for the tightening squeeze of its arms, I was thankful for it, for it cushioned my backbone against the rocks.

  But life could not last long, I was sure. The rocks were pressing tighter, the whole ledge was sinking, the great fold of sputtering, hissing lava was sagging lower, lower, inch by inch, stiffening into rock as it came on.

  My consciousness wavered.

  If I could only breathe—if I could only breathe water! A strange last thought. But in those awful moments I was a torrent of wild and uncontrollable impulses, a trapped beast unable to fight against death. What slight relief I got in those darkening moments came to me, strangely enough, through my tentacled arm. Although torn and bleeding, it had taken root upon a wound in the body of the octopus, and suddenly I knew that blood was flowing from that creature into me. The transfusion was bringing me new oxygen—oxygen that the octopus was able to inhale from the water.

  We were submerged now, and the hiss and roar of the angry world dulled in my ears. Blackness . . . blackness . . . a faint that would not be staved off . . . One last thrust of my head in a fight for a gasp of that lava-stenched air. Then my body went cold under the choking of rocks and tentacles, and I was out, out with the certainty that this was death . . .

  CHAPTER VI

  I Take Up Arms

  I was hungry. Hunger pangs were the first dizzy sensation that returned to me. Somehow I knew that much time had passed since sleep had engulfed me. The blur of what had happened held over me. As my eyes began to see, dimly, through the foggy gray waters, I realized that my many arms were working. I was groping along the water-filled crags searching for shells.

  Three of my arms were moving me along slowly. The funnel at my neck would push a little of the surrounding water away to propel me forward.

  Presently one of my tentacled arms fastened itself upon a creeping shell. Up to my head it came, and my tight jaws opened. Whatever it was that lived in that shell was quickly killed from the poison I spewed upon it from my saliva. Then I ate the creature—it and two more—and the gnawing hunger within my body was gone.

  My body was stiff and sore and sick, and so I made myself comfortable among the rocks a few feet below the surface and went back to sleep.

  Sleep beneath the water—and the strangest dreams—This was not death! Not death! This was a transformation to a new life—

  My new body was becoming less painful, more limber.

  The waves swept gently against the graceful curves of my arms. The wet sand was good to the touch. My new instinctive desires claimed these watery caverns for home.

  What a gorgeous new world, with white sand sifting along the ocean floor, and sea fans of purple and orange waving as if in a breeze! My fine new eyes were seeing everything now—the bright angel fish that hovered like painted leaves, the wily eels poking their heads out of holes in tiie rocks, the myriad tiny transparent fish standing in schools trying to hide themselves against the brown rocks.

  This was my new world. I was at home. The hidden gills beneath my mantle breathed freely. I was confident—yes, wary, and highly charged with an instinct for dangers—but as confident as if this comer of the ocean were all mine.

  The illusion was short-lived. My old friend and biscu
it-eater, the alligator gar, shot into view, and all these various smaller fellows who had been respectfully timid at my approach were put in a panic.

  The alligator fish gave me the cynic’s eye as he darted away, and I detected enough arrogance in his manner to know he had no fear of creatures such as I.

  That set me to thinking—I could think, in about the same way as always, I was happy to note. Or was there a difference in my thinking, now that I was an octopus?

  I still thought as a man. The chief difference was that I was in one devilfish of a situation.

  It was somewhat alarming to realize that I had not completely escaped an uncomfortable past. I could still recall that there was—or had been—a war; that I was within the range of Japanese fishing boats; that I was, in short, a human mind in the body of an octopus. Although I could still appreciate the value of money or a good book, my wants and desires and hopes and objects of interest were fast being shifted under the impact of a new set of instincts contained in this wriggling, water-loving new form of mine.

  Persuading myself that this new life was delightful and satisfying was a tough assignment. I was an octopus. I could like it. Or I could resent it. To make things easier I fed myself some powerful propaganda to sell my physical self to my mental self.

  And part of the time it worked.

  Imagine my creeping along through the water on three or four arms, winking my big eyes at the bright angel fish who thought they were smart because they could stay out of my reach. And all the time I’d be talking to myself.

  “This body is all right. This body will do. This body is mine. I’m comfortable in it. No one will ever find me. They may visit. They may search. I am hidden.”

  As if I could make a lie the truth by repeating it a hundred thousand times.

  “These crabs and fishes are my world. I no longer belong to the race of men. Why wasn’t I killed by the volcano? Because some strange power hidden within the mysteries of Nature came to my rescue and saved my life in the only way possible—by compressing my body into the casing of the octopus. This is Nature’s mercy that has kept me from death.”