by Marni MacRae
Lucas cooked the fish and made me sip at one of the warm bottles of water I had made, and when we were finished eating, he carried me to our castle and tucked me into bed. We debated on bringing the mattress in for use as, well, a mattress, but we determined it was more valuable as a flotation device, and didn’t want to risk puncturing it. So he secured it on the beach, and we settled into our life vest pillows and I let sleep take me, to erase my headache and bring me into day twenty-one.
Chapter 21
The following day Lucas and I divided up the chores. Over our breakfast of aloe gel and now island-temperature water, we came to the conclusion that now that we had the ability to distill salt water, we would fill the three bottles we had, as well as the empty Mudslide and Piña Colada bottles. We also agreed we should fill the two beer bottles, and Lucas would carve corks for them. With this impressive hoard of hydration, we could embark, finally, to try and reach the southern end of the island chain. I had wracked my brain and scoured all of my Wiki tidbits, and I guesstimated that the diameter of the atoll was around twenty miles.
“Really, twenty miles? That’s a ton of water to cross Sophie, I know you have a strange mental trap for information, trivia, and anything regarding the cast of Lost, but twenty sounds pretty far for an atoll.”
“Well, that’s the number I keep coming back to. I know it’s almost twenty miles between this atoll and the Salomon Atoll because I had to do conversion math. Oh! That’s it, twenty kilometers … the islands are part of the U.K., so they use metric. So, how many miles is that, I forget the swappy conversion math.”
“Swappy conversion math? Didn’t you go to college?”
“Yes I did, mister. I can make diesel from coconuts, but soon after schooling, those conversions went A.W.O.L. from my brain. So remind me how many miles is one kilometer.”
“It wouldn’t be plural babe; it wouldn’t even be one. It’s a little over half a mile.”
“So that means it would be ten, maybe eleven miles from top to bottom. Given we aren’t at the peak of the circle or traveling a true diameter, we would only need to go about eight miles. That’s fantastic, right?”
Lucas put his knife in his sheath; he had carved two perfect wooden plugs for the beer bottles while we sat there calculating. “Well, it sounds way better than twenty, but if we don’t find a way to make this motor work for us, we'll be rowing that distance. Rowing eight miles will be very, very, very far from easy.”
“We can take shifts.” I was looking on the bright side. This was progress, the planner in me was fanning the flames of hope. “And you can fish while I row, and vice versa. How long do you think it would take?”
“With the motor, we might cover eight miles in an hour and a half or so, depending on if the engine liked the fuel. Rowing, going nonstop, five hours or two days. Hell, maybe a week, I just can’t know until I see you row.” He gave me a wink, and I tossed an empty coconut shell at him.
“Well, I’m off to the distillery. Let me know how it goes.”
Lucas planned on trying his last batch of coconut oil fuel. If it worked, we would make more. If not, we would make oars. Then we would patch Ducky and pack up the castle, load the rafts and head off to southern isles, and hopes of some tourist or security guard finding our stranded selves, so we could go home.
And plan a wedding. This thought I rarely let out. I was too excited about it. I kept the dream in reserves for when I was truly in need of cheering up. I didn’t want to wear out the shininess of it, the butterflies that tickled my stomach at the thought of walking down a country aisle toward Lucas. So I tucked the pretty scene away and set off for the metal can on the beach, and to hunt down more wood.
* * *
I had just topped off the last beer bottle and was wiping the sweat from my brow with burnt fingers when I heard it.
An engine.
I stood up quickly and ran down the beach, looking out at the clear water, my excitement and breathing momentarily blocking out the sound. I stopped running and stood very still, held my breath, and shaded my eyes. Where was it? Where was the sound coming from? Just as I pinpointed its location it stopped, puttering out softly and definitely. The jungle. Lucas had started the motor!
I tore back up the beach, huffing and puffing and kicking up sand behind me. Once in the trees I ran down the path we had forged over the last two weeks, racing toward our tiny palm castle. As I burst into the clearing, Lucas was there, striding toward me. His face was lit with a huge grin, and he was practically bouncing with excitement.
“Did you hear it? I got it started!”
“Yeah, I heard it all the way down to the beach, how did you manage it? That’s just amazing!”
“Well,” he started rattling off the process he had gone through as he grabbed my hand and tugged me toward the motor sitting propped against a log. “At first I thought it was a problem of condensation, the air here is no help at all. Then I thought maybe it was clogged with sediment, I mean that first batch I tried had been pretty cloudy, so I cleaned the whole damn thing out. The filter and the…”
“Lucas, just tell me, will it work?” I was squeezing his hand, kneeling down at the motor, stroking it lovingly, Oh baby, you are going to save me from so many blisters!
“Yes, Sophie, I think it will.” His excitement hadn’t abated. “Turns out I had been right, the oil needed to be filtered again, so I strained it and then spent almost a half an hour yanking on that damn rope, and, hey!” He pulled me up and hugged me.
I squeezed him back and gave him a congratulatory kiss. “Well done, island man, now we won’t have to row until our hands bleed.”
“Yeah, thank God for that, because I think I threw out my shoulder yanking on the rope.”
“Oh, poor baby.” I began rubbing his impressive sized shoulder and asked, “So what now?”
“Well, have you finished filling all the bottles?”
“Yep, all topped off, Cap’n.”
Lucas saluted, and I high-fived his upraised hand.
“Well then, I need the can, I'll have to get to crushing more coconut and straining the oil, but I need to store it in something. I don’t know how fast this oil will burn compared to diesel so we'll want to be prepared. It will take about three days, possibly four, to get enough to fill the tank, and then store some aside.”
“Oh wow, so I guess I can tackle the project of Ducky. Find the leaks, find something to patch it with and start blowing her up. That will take about four days too.” I rolled my eyes.
“You’ll be fine, you have great lungs.”
“Mm hm. Uh, those aren’t lungs.” I batted his hands away from my breasts. “Well, I'm super proud of you, cowboy. I never doubted you'd be the man who could make an engine run on hairy fruit.”
“Thanks, babe. Get to blowing. I’ll catch us some food.”
While Lucas went fishing, I rolled the yellow raft out on the sand. With my floppy hat securely on my head and my sunglasses on, I began visually scanning every inch of Ducky’s surface, looking for her mortal wound. There was nothing on the topside that seemed obvious, so I flipped her over and began my detailed perusal again. Finally, near her rump, I found it, an indented part of the plastic that had a tear the size of a half dime. It must have caught the reef at a shallow point, due to the drag of the motor and luggage and can, all being hauled behind her. If Lucas hadn’t wrapped himself in the rope and balanced out the weight distribution, she probably would have flipped over. Then the motor would have had a moisture problem.
I had enough Super Glue left to patch the small hole. I just needed to find a patch that would be waterproof. It was time to go shopping again.
I hunted down Lucas, who was off standing on a sand bar, two hundred feet from shore, his pole held out in front of him, his glasses propped on his head.
I whistled and raised a hand, he looked over, and I called out “Shopping!” and pointed in the direction toward the north end of the beach. He waved and went back to fishing, his mind probably still on
his achievement. It was impressive. I had so much respect for him and his ability to figure things out, make things. He was the perfect model of a man.
I always went to the north bend to shop. Less traffic, easy parking, and great deals. The ocean brought a ton of deliveries each day. If you were patient and sifted through the debris, you could always find something.
Today was a good shopping day. I found a gallon juice jug. Tropical fruit punch said the label that had half washed off, the other half bleached almost white from the sun. One side of the jug was pink from floating on the water, the other side was red, the original color the manufacturer had chosen for the jug that once contained fruit punch. “Well now you're a gas can, and they're usually red too, so you work perfectly. Don’t worry, you'll like being a gas can, you’ll smell like coconuts.”
I set the jug deep into the sand where I could pick it up on my way back and kept shopping. I really needed a piece of rubber or heavy flexible plastic for my patch. I was sure the ocean would give it to me if I just looked hard enough. I poked at every tangle of seaweed with sticks, ignoring whatever bird corpse the mass held, and then strolled further to poke at the next pile.
As I approached a large mass of seaweed that lay pretty close to the tree line, I saw two strange things that didn’t compute at first. One was a glove. How could a winter glove be here where it was so warm? It must have had a very long trip, and also, why wasn’t it on the bottom of the ocean? It isn’t buoyant. The second strange item was a pillow that the seaweed had in its green grasp. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how a pillow could be there, and as I drew closer, I wondered how it could still be so white. It was pristine clean. Finally, just as I was ten feet from the glove, the pillow moved, and I let out a very girlish screech.
It was a bird. A bird that had been tangled in plastic, which was tangled in seaweed, and now it was here, looking like a pillow with its glove friend, feeling out of place. The bird flapped its wings at me and attempted to fly away, instinct trumping pain, but then it flopped back down, anchored to its instrument of death, plastic. I saw then that the bird’s leg was almost sawn in two. It wouldn’t survive if it did get free.
“I’m sorry, pretty pillow bird. You had a bad time of it, didn’t you,” I crooned to the pretty lady. I assume all birds are ladies until they tell me otherwise.
I sat down in the sand and as I looked at the bird, thinking of its predicament, trapped like I was, but with a shorter leash, I reached out for the glove. “Hey!” I spoke aloud, talking to the glove. (I had long since agreed with myself that I could talk to whatever I wanted as long as Lucas didn’t hear. If no one knew, then I wasn’t crazy, just friendly.) “You’re not a winter glove,” I admonished the not-winter glove. “You're a diver’s glove! Hey, do you have a friend, a blue raft, I bet you and Blue Ducky fell off the same yacht. I'll introduce you when we get back, but I am afraid your life will be short. I will be cutting you up for a patch.” I smiled at the glove and briefly wondered if I had scared it, but then realized that thought was crazy, so I turned to the bird.
“OK pretty bird, this is how it’s going to be. You are going to die there a miserable, painful, scary death. Or, you can let me come closer, and make it swift and painless, and you can go to the great father bird in the sky.” I decided not to tell pretty bird I planned on eating her. That was just mean. But I am a farm girl. I eat my chickens and their eggs. It’s the circle of life, and pretty bird would be a nice change from fish, and plus there was the added bonus that it wouldn’t be murder, it was actually a mercy.
The bird hunched down as I slowly crept forward. I murmured and hummed, and it tried at the last second to break free, fly away, but I caught her and folded her wings to her body. Kneeling in the smelly seaweed I petted pretty lady and said a brief prayer because suddenly, I felt really sad for her. I never felt sad for my chickens or even the cow when harvest time came. But I connected to pretty lady. She just wanted to go home.
Before I could cry and get too emotional to follow through, I reminded myself that I felt no remorse for the tuna, and I was being silly. I snapped the bird’s neck, and she lay limp, set free at last. I sent along another prayer and began untangling the trapped foot.
Glove, bird, and jug in hand, I rounded the northeast corner and headed back to camp. All in all, it was the best shopping trip yet, even better than the blue mattress, for we had a meal, we had a patch, and we had a gas can. A hat trick. I whispered a thanks to the universe, always one to be grateful, even when the universe is stingy. I mean a cruise ship would have solved all my problems, but I would take the bird, and the jug and the glove, and I would move forward, continue with the plan. Stay alive, get to the south island, and certainly there would be a yacht anchored there or a regular patrol for evildoers here in the preserve.
I was optimistic.
Lucas was in camp scaling a very interesting looking fish on a rock. “Hey cowboy, you feel like a chicken dinner?”
Lucas looked up, and upon seeing the bird his eyebrows rose. “Well, that sounds good, uh… it hasn’t been dead long has it?”
“About fifteen minutes.”
He looked at my face. “You killed it?”
“Yes, I did.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Can you pluck it?”
“I've plucked many a chicken and a few turkeys, so yeah, I'll start heating some water.” I turned to retrace my steps back toward the beach.
“Hey, Sophie.”
“Yeah.” I stopped and turned back to him.
“Well done, pumpkin.” He nodded to pretty lady.
I didn’t smile. I knew I would enjoy the meal, and the circle of life was something I accepted, but I didn’t feel like I should be praised for it. At least, not today. So I just nodded back and tossed him the jug. “Gotcha a gas can. It was on sale.” Then I went to pluck our dinner.
Chapter 22
Instead of four, it only took two days to get ready to go.
The next morning, I patched Ducky. Lucas cut a square from the glove, and I used the last of our Super Glue.
I spent the rest of the morning blowing up the yellow raft through the emergency tube that looked like a rubber straw poking out near the back. I took a good many breaks as I began feeling light headed after exhaling a few lungfuls, but I sat in the shade with my chore and drank an entire bottle of water. Now that I possessed water-making skills, I intended to stay as hydrated as possible. Toward late morning, my yellow friend was completely inflated, and I was very dizzy. I took a few minutes to admire my lungs’ efforts and then went in search of Lucas.
A little further into the jungle past our camp, Lucas had set up his fuel refinery. That is to say, he smashed coconuts there.
When I walked into the refinery, I was surprised at the giant pile of coconuts he had amassed.
“Have you been playing monkey all day?” I waved at the pile and sat down on the ground across from him.
“Oh, those,” He looked up from his smashing and shook his head. “No, most of those I've been collecting the last two weeks, I only topped it off today.” He went back to his crushing chore. Literally. The method for achieving oil from these hard nuts was to dig out the white meat and pound the coconut as fine as possible. The crushing action released the oils from the meat; then, he would strain the oil from the debris of white pulverized mass, and drain that oil into a plastic bottle.
The most precious and awesome find on the island yet was what Lucas used to pulverize the coconut in. A large tortoise shell. It would hold about six gallons of water if I so chose to fill it up. We had come across it on the first day we took a picnic to traverse the circumference of the island. It sat high up the beach near the trees; Lucas had spotted it, and we went to investigate.
It was smooth and picked clean from birds and insects, and appeared to have been there for some time, not a hint of flesh or turtle was left. It was truly beautiful and very useful.
“What’cha up to?” Lucas glanced up at me and contin
ued with his rhythmic pulverizing.
“Well, Ducky had a full recovery, the doctors said she's cleared to float again.”
“Hey that’s fantastic news, I hope the hospital bills don’t bankrupt us.”
I chuckled and waved my hand around his refinery lab. “So how can I help?”
“Well,” He nodded to the pile of coconuts, “open those and dig out the meat. If I can get a good amount crushed, we can set it out to dry, and in the morning I'll work on extracting the oil.”
Lucas had discovered that trying to get the oil out before the meat dried polluted the oil with the coconut water contained in the nuts, which I call milk even though it isn't white, and Lucas calls it water. We both drank it happily though. It's full of electrolytes and was the only thing that had kept us from collapsing when water was scarce. The meat, though, we had cut way back on.
“OK, be right back.” I went back to the beach and grabbed the now-very-well-used metal can. I had scrubbed it furiously the night before after dunking pretty lady in hot water to loosen her feathers so I could pluck her. I didn’t want any bird diseases, so I had sat in the water with a fist full of sand scrubbing away all traces of germs.
This morning I had boiled some water, enough to refill the two water bottles Lucas and I had drank, and now I intended to use the can to collect the coconut water. Our diet of fish and palm and aloe and one bird was severely lacking in vitamins. I planned to mix the coconut milk in our water supply and be grateful for any antioxidants it offered. Sports stars paid big bucks for coconut water/milk in the States, I wasn’t going to waste a drop if I could help it.
That afternoon, Lucas and I sat in companionable silence while I smacked coconuts, collected their juice in the can, scraped out their meat with the screwdriver on my multi-tool, and added to the ever-growing pile of crushed coconut in the tortoise shell.
