Potlendh

by David J. Wallis

  “Doc?” Tony tried to hurry things up.

  “Anyway,” their father continued, “Tony will be flying you both to the mainland where you’ll be safe. And after the storm has passed, I’ll ask Tony to fly you back here as soon as it’s safe. Okay?”

  “Aw, Dad. We’ve ridden out many storms,” Carl protested. He ignored Tony’s growing impatience. He was just trying to keep his father happy and lessen his worry.

  “No discussion,” Dr. King barked and then quickly felt bad for being so harsh. “You’re going, and that’s my final word. So, pack quickly and light.”

  “Pack?” Tony was almost apoplectic. “There’s no time!”

  “Not to worry, Tony,” Karen assuaged him. From behind a sofa, the twins pulled out two already packed suitcases. Their father’s face registered surprise.

  “When did you guys do this?” he demanded.

  “No time for explanations.” Tony rushed in, grabbed the suitcases, and whisked them out of the room. “Let’s go!” he called back over his shoulder. The room door slammed against the doorjamb behind him and opened again.

  Dr. King finally seemed to realize the urgency of the situation. “Okay. Let’s go. We can say our goodbyes at the plane. We shouldn’t tempt fate any longer and cut things too close.”

  Perhaps using the phrase “cutting things a little close” was quite apt in this situation. The precursor winds of the typhoon were really beginning to blow, and if the seaplane did not take off soon, it never would. Its propellers were already turning and yearning to go.

  As a precaution, Tony had the seaplane raised out of the water and onto the base deck. It was going to be a short take-off, but the choppy seas were just too high to use as a launch pad. He had already stored the baggage in the plane, roomy enough to accommodate four grown adults.

  Impatiently, he stood by as Dr. King escorted his children to the plane with very little sense of urgency. A gust of wind suddenly whipped around them, rocking the plane almost violently. As soon as the children were within reach, he opened the door and literally threw them in.

  “No times for goodbyes, Doc!” he shouted as he fairly leaped inside the cockpit and started revving up the engines. “See you on the other side!” He slammed the door shut.

  The children did not really get a chance to say goodbye to their father. They did not know that they would not be seeing him for a very long time. Tony glanced out the plane’s window and saw Dr. King give them all a quick wave. A gust of wind almost knocked him off his feet and then they saw him hurrying inside the tower block to safety.

  “Hang on, kids!” Tony yelled above the noise of the engine. “This is going to be a bumpy ride!” He revved up the engines to full power, released the brakes, and tried to will the aircraft into the air. The seaplane shuddered from the sudden infused energy and jumped down the length of the base, struggling to become airborne and not crash into the churning waves of the sea.

  To say something like “see you on the other side” might not have been the right thing for Tony to say. Usually, people say this when they are faced with a serious situation that might result in death.

  To write that Karen and Carl were not scared to death would be very far from the truth. One look at their faces turned white would confirm that. Besides, their hearts were thumping wildly in their throats. They barely had time to fasten their seatbelts when they were thrown against the back of their seats by the sudden thrust of the plane’s engines.

  The seaplane literally flew up into the air only to slam back down on the deck before launching itself a second time into the air. Then, it once again dove downward, this time towards the sea. Tony strained and struggled with the craft, fighting both the machine and the air currents.

  The twins felt like they were strapped into a mini-roller coaster car. The constant short ascent and heart-stopping descent: at some point they closed their eyes and prayed they would not empty their stomachs onto the seaplane’s deck.

  Just when the twins thought they could not hold it in any longer and embarrass themselves, the unpleasant and nauseating sensation was over. The seaplane was in the air. The only buffeting against the seaplane was the natural sensation of flight. Higher and higher, Tony coaxed the craft into the air, away from the churning ocean, away from the massive typhoon, and away from the twins’ father and the oceanographic platform.

  Looking back, the twins witnessed the platform being rapidly swallowed up by the billowing clouds.

  “Okay, guys! You can relax now. We’re safe,” Tony assured the twins.

  “Where are we going, anyway?” Carl asked. He and his sister were finally “getting away from it all.”

  “Your father wanted you to go to Guam,” Tony answered. Guam is a tiny Island in the Pacific.

  “Another Island,” Carl muttered unhappily.

  “But there is a storm around Guam, too. So, it looks like we’ll have to go to the Philippines.”

  “That’s an Island, too,” Karen reminded her brother when she saw a look of excitement cross his face.

  “Yeah,” Carl sighed. “But at least the big Island will seem like the mainland.”

  “You guys just sit back and enjoy the ride,” Tony advised. “We’re gonna be up here for quite a while. If I were you, I’d just take a nap. It’ll make you feel like the trip isn’t so long.”

  At the moment, the twins were not exactly tired or sleepy. But when they peered out the windows of the seaplane, there was little of interest to see. In fact, everything looked kind of monotonous. Clouds and even more clouds hid the ocean below. Sure, one can amuse oneself by imagining all of the different shapes of clouds into animals and faces, but after a while, even that becomes boring.

  The twins tried to take their minds off the trip by talking about what they wanted to do when they arrive in the Philippines, what they wanted to see, what they wanted to buy, and things like that. That is, until they got tired of talking. In the end, they decided to take Tony’s advice and close their eyes to take a short nap.

  About an hour into their nap, the twins woke up with a start. It is like when you are having a good dream, then something strange changes the dream. You just want to wake up because it is so disturbing. When the children awoke, they thought there was something wrong with the seaplane. It was very dark both inside and outside the seaplane.

  “How long have we been asleep?” Karen asked no one in particular.

  “What’s going on, Tony?” Karl asked.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Tony lied. The sound of his voice let on that he was a little worried, himself.

  “Where are we?” Karen asked, leaning forward to look at the seaplane’s instruments, especially the compass. But at that moment, the compass was acting very strangely, turning one way one minute and the other way the next.

  “It’s the darndest thing,” Tony muttered. “I haven’t the foggiest idea. I mean, I’m not sure where we are. We’re like in the middle of the darkest cloud I’ve ever seen. And it was really weird, too. First, it wasn’t there. Then, all of a sudden, it just appeared all around us. I didn’t even see it until we were inside it!”

  “You know what else is weird?” Carl mentioned. “I can’t hear the engine.”

  Tony pointed at the instrument panel. “We have RPMs. So, we’re tuning the blades.” He moved his finger to the fuel gauge. “And, we’ve still got gas, too. A lot. So, I have no idea why we can’t hear anything. Hopefully, we’re not trapped in some kind of time warp.” If he was joking at the time, the children did not think it was very funny.

  “Do you think we should descend?” suggested Carl.

  “There’s nothing on the radar,” Karen noted.

  “True,” Tony agreed. “But if I can’t trust the compass, I don’t know if I can trust the radar either. I don’t want to run into a mountain out here.”

  “A mountain?” Carl repeated incredulously. He could not believe for an instant that a mountain could exist in the ocean.

  “There ar
e a lot of Islands out here in the Pacific,” Tony expounded. “And contrary to what you might believe, not all of them are charted on the map. But, I guess we could descend a little and hope that there are no mountains—Islands—above eight thousand feet.”

  Karen was about to question whether or not they could trust the altimeter if all of the other instruments were not working correctly. She decided not to speak when she realized that the altimeter was frozen at five hundred feet.

  Tony nosed the seaplane downward at a slight angle. The cloud seemed to descend with them, and their situation had not improved.

  “Let’s try a little more,” Tony said, and they all crossed their fingers.

  The cloud around them began to brighten a little. As it did so, the malfunctioning instruments began to act more normally.

  “Lower?” Tony suggested. [Now here is where it started to get a little weird.] When the seaplane leveled off at five hundred feet, the cloud completely disappeared.

  Before them sat a very interesting sight: a solitary, large Island appeared with a cone-shaped mountain rising up in the middle. On the south end of the Island—which faced them, by the way—an airstrip beckoned.

  “Looks like there’s your mountain,” Karen whispered loudly to Carl.

  “Shut up.” Carl tossed back to her, not unkindly.

  “Must be inhabited,” Tony surmised. “I can see what looks like a village to the right.”

  A new sound alerted them before they could react to this new observation. The engines coughed as if they had sucked water down the wrong pipe.

  “We’re gonna hafta land,” Tony observed, tapping the fuel gauge. “At least we have a good place to do it. So, everyone sit back. We’re about to land!”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE ISLAND

  The runway appeared a little short in length from the air—too short for Tony’s liking. But as Tony safely set the wheels down on the concrete, the runway seemed to become even shorter. Tony had to break pretty hard to slow the seaplane down before he ran out of concrete. At the edge of the runway, he managed to turn the aircraft around and slowly taxi towards a solitary building nestled close to the runway’s apron. This nondescript, squat, one-story, wooden structure looked like it was a hundred years old and ready to fall down into a pile of splinters at any moment.

  “It doesn’t look like anyone’s here!” a greatly disappointed Carl exclaimed. He had his nose pressed against the window glass.

  “Let’s hope that the natives weren’t expecting us,” Tony rejoined. He might have been thinking that there lived headhunters on this Island. “Maybe we’re just as much a surprise to them as seeing this Island is to us.”

  “No radar tower,” Karen noted. “No communication tower either.”

  “What if there is no fuel?” Carl voiced aloud his fear.

  “Fuel we got,” Tony reassured him. “It’s a mechanic I’d pray for if I can’t fix the engines.”

  “How are we going to contact anyone?” Carl sounded a little panicky. “How can we tell Dad that we’re okay? How are we going to get back to the platform?”

  Karen kicked her brother’s foot with her own.

  “Ow!” was his response.

  “Get a hold on yourself,” she hissed. “You’re embarrassing me. Besides, I thought you wanted to get away from the platform.”

  “So?” he shot back, his voice breaking into a high-pitch. “I didn’t want to go from one place that’s nowhere to another place that’s nowhere, too! Good grief! If we have to be stranded somewhere, I’d much rather be stranded in a place that feels at least a little like home. And right now it doesn’t look like we’ll even get back home.”

  Tony brought the seaplane to a stop in the middle of the apron, the propellers facing the building, and then he turned off the engine.

  “Well, guys. It looks like we might have to be here for a while. So, let’s make the best of it, shall we?”

  Carl started to grumble as he fumbled for his suitcase in the narrow baggage space behind his seat. Under his breath, Karen could hear snatches of words like “no video games” and “no movies” and “probably not even a good place to sleep.” She didn’t want to say anything, because she was just as disappointed. Obviously, there were no opportunities to do any shopping. Even though she had stared at the small village from the air, it looked as drab and uninhabited as this airport building.

  “Leave the bags, Carl,” Tony told him. “Let’s find out where we are first. No need to start dragging things around if we have to leave here in a hurry.” He opened the door and climbed out onto the apron.

  Carl followed with Karen just behind him. He felt downright dejected. This was not the “get away from it all” he had been hoping for. There was a strange but not unpleasant odor in the air. It was definitely not from the sea: more like someone had been cooking something for a long, long, long time and then forgot to eat it.

  “Sure looks deserted, doesn’t it,” his sister declared quietly, moving up beside him. She shaded her eyes with her left hand as she surveyed the land.

  “Have you ever seen anything more lonely in all your life?” Carl moaned in agreement.

  “Well, actually I have. But then again, I haven’t.” The new voice made all three of them jump and turn around to face a strange, old man who stood about three feet high and leaned heavily on a gnarled staff. To describe him as being gnarled would ascribe to him to be more like a tree, I suppose, but then that was the first impression the twins had of this old gentleman. His skin was dark like oak bark, wrinkled, and kind of stretched thinly over his bony frame—almost as if he had once been a tree that had taken human shape. He had this wisp of a beard that really only covered the bottommost his chin and barely reached down to his collarbone. His beach sand colored hair, which was the same color as his beard, by the way, was also very thin, and he had allowed it to grow all the way down to his shoulders. Karen recalled later that she wanted to run a comb through the old man’s hair because it just looked so tangled and unkempt, like your hair might look like after you woke up in the morning. She also thought he might look a bit more presentable besides.

  “Welcome to Lonely Field,” he greeted them after a moment, seeing that his visitors were not going to say anything.

  “Who are you?” Tony asked a little impolitely. You cannot blame Tony for his bad behavior, because he was just as frightened by the sudden appearance of the native stranger as the children were.

  “Who,” answered the old man.

  “Right,” Tony replied. “Who are you?”

  “Who,” the old man repeated.

  “And?” Tony was feeling a little angry.

  “Who.”

  “You!” Tony almost exploded with frustration. “Who are you, and you’d better be quick with an answer!”

  “Not Yu. Who.”

  “What is your name?” Carl asked quickly.

  “Who.”

  “You. What is your name?” This time Carl pointed at the old man.

  “Not Yu. Who.” And this time, the old man smiled, showing all three of his teeth.

  “This guy is daffy!” Carl complained to his sister.

  Karen suddenly had an idea. “I think Who is his family name.”

  Carl looked at her kind of bug-eyed. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Well, you know how we have met some people from China and Korea whose names are Yu and Me? Maybe on this Island there are people with the last name Who.”

  At this the old man nodded his head very excitedly in agreement.

  “So, you’re saying that you are Who,” Tony asked the old man to confirm.

  “Yes,” the old man responded cheerfully.

  “That’s funny,” Carl whispered to his sister. “Doesn’t look like he came out of any Dr. Seuss’ books to me.”

  “And, would you have any other interesting names?”

  “I Am.”

  “You mean, ‘I do,’” Carl tried to correct the old man.


  “No. I am.”

  “Hold it!” Karen interrupted before she envisioned another comedic routine with English. “This gentleman here is trying to tell us that his name is I Am Who.”

  “No. Not entirely correct,” the old man burst out rather jovially. “My correct name is Who I Am.”

  “Well, gee,” Tony whistled, taking off his pilot’s cap and scratching his head. “I’m sure glad your parents didn’t name you Who Am I. That would have been real confusing.”

  “Ah! You know my brother?” the old man grinned.

  “Look, before this goes any further,” Tony gritted his teeth, “is there a radio anywhere around here? The one in the seaplane doesn’t seem to be working.”

  “Sorry. No telephone or radio or anything. Don’t believe in them. No one comes here anyway. And when they do, they don’t want to leave.”

  “You mean, there are others here? Here, on this Island?”

  “Of course. The airport might be lonely, but the Island most certainly isn’t.”

  “Then why is this place called Lonely Field?” Carl asked impatiently.

  “This isn’t an airport,” Tony muttered to himself. “This is a lunatic asylum.” Of course, he was referring to a special kind of hospital where people who kind of lost or misplaced their sense of reality live to recover.

  “Mr. Who,” Karen addressed the old man. “We have kind of lost our way, and we were wondering if you might be able to help us.”

  The old man walked over to the seaplane. “You have a strange bird for a friend.”

  “This is not a bird, Mr. Who,” Karen tried to explain. “It’s called an airplane—or in this case, a seaplane because you can land on the ocean or on land.”

  “Birds never get lost. How come your bird got lost?”