Barren Island

by Carol Zoref

“Friends. I dunno. Maybe union.” Lying about them was easy, a pleasant surprise. And besides, what could I say? That they had fancy seats at the opera and a mahogany speedboat and drank fancy gin? Lois and Gray were Noah’s secrets for all the reasons people keep secrets.

  Dolores was working on a coat, Ray was ripping bandages, and I was packing tobacco. They made idle chatter; they gossiped. I had imagined serious conversations about Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia or the return of the Rhineland to Germany. People, it turns out, go about the business of being people no matter what. Nothing stops their blather: not illness, not earthquakes, not wars.

  “Anyone thirsty?” Dolores asked after a spell. Even after the worst of it ended, the heat that summer was nasty.

  How else to say this: the very first time that Ray and I were alone—I do not count the day Sofia had her abortion—he kissed me. He leaned over, pressed his lips to mine, then returned to the bandage he was rolling as if he kissed me every day. No warning. No nothing. My first real kiss.

  “You like that?” Ray asked.

  “Sure,” I said, though I was too surprised to feel much except surprise.

  “If you want me to kiss you again you gotta say so.” He spoke with such confidence that I smiled and just like that I kissed him back. It was hardly enough of a kiss to go crazy about. Who knew it took time to kiss right, never mind kiss well? Not that I am complaining. Some good things keep getting better. Like loving, you should pardon me. Every good time picks up where the last good time left off.

  “Your smile means yes?” he asked.

  I smiled again; he kissed me again. Imagine my surprise when my lips opened. Imagine my surprise that I could feel him pressing against me. That was surprise enough. I was glad for the cold lemonade that Dolores returned with minutes later. I was glad that Ray behaved like nothing had passed between us. Silly as it sounds, I needed time to recover.

  Later that week, in the first minutes of dawn when there was only a tinge of sunlight, I heard the boys moving about in the yard. What were they doing out there at 5:30 a.m.? I slipped into my dress and quietly followed them to the vacant side of the island. When they reached the water they dragged from the rushes the abandoned rowboat they had rescued from Barren Island. I dropped flat on the damp sand and watched them from behind a low dune. The gaping hole on the port side of the boat had been crudely patched with scrap wood and tar.

  Yorgos passed around a bottle of the whiskey and the boys each drank a ceremonial shot. Joey manned the oars and Noah launched them from shore with a push. There was some subdued hooting and whistling from the rowboat, a quiet celebration that was amplified as it traveled over water.

  They had not gone far when Joey pulled in the oars. As best I could tell, they were just bobbing along on the incoming tide, talking quietly. I stayed low behind the dune, my head propped on one arm, the cold dew clinging to my skinny legs. Nothing had happened yet that made it worth having left a dry, warm bed, but if I walked away now the boys would see that I had followed them. They would make me pay for that.

  A half hour passed before a garbage barge piloted by Captain Otis pulled into sight. Joey took the oars again and rowed a little closer. It seemed strange that the captain was alone on the barge without any scavengers but there it was, no one but Captain Otis and a flock of seagulls for company. Maybe someone else was supposed to be with him. Maybe the boys knew that Otis would be bringing the barge alone that day. They certainly knew they could count on him to be drunk. Noah never recounted all the details, not wanting to involve anyone else when things turned to trouble. Not that it made any difference, but it means something to have the facts.

  Yorgos and Noah stood up to hail the captain while Joey struggled to steady the rowboat. Who knows what Captain Otis made of their being there. Or how much he would have cared if he were not already drunk. A man who drinks that much is always just picking up where he left off. Yorgos offered Otis a bottle while Joey roped the rowboat to the barge. Noah hoisted himself aboard, followed by the others. The captain busied himself with the bottle as the boys relieved him of his command.

  Joey took the wheel while Noah jumped around to chase off the rats. Yorgos grabbed a launching pole and tied something to it. A breeze passed, unfurling what turned out to be a flag fashioned from a pillowcase. The symbol on the flag was...a horse? A cow? Whatever it was it was something on four legs. It was hard to tell now that the sunrise was glaring off the water.

  There was plenty to wonder about while the boys maneuvered the hijacked barge, yet it was the creature on the flag that held my attention. I crawled further up the dune for a better view. The arm I was resting my head on had fallen asleep but it suddenly woke, a thousand pin needles rousing it from its brief death. Was there really a difference if the flag had a horse or cow or dog or sheep or pig? Of course there was. Everyone wants to name what moves them.

  I spotted footprints in the dune where the plovers always nested. A thin shadow curled between a pair of them, a snake track that disappeared into the dune grass. At the edge of the grass was a long, narrow, pale piece of paper with pencil marks on it. I crawled closer, hoping to discover the details of the boys’ plot the way it was done in radio stories.

  Another breeze moved up the dune, raising the tail end of the paper and snaring it on a twig. I crawled closer and reached. The paper did not contain the boys’ secrets. It held, instead, the translucent traces of tiny scales on a perfectly intact two-foot-long snakeskin. Even the orbits and mandible were visible.

  I now imagined things in motion. The sun, having finally appeared on the horizon, revealed the great impatient rising light. The breeze lifted the snakeskin yet again, this time long enough to expose the nest of newborn snakes sleeping beneath it. You would have thought I would have learned by now to put up with the snakes on Barren Shoal.

  Next thing I was rushing to the shoreline. “No...ahhhh!” I hollered. “No...ahhhh!”

  “Marta?” he yelled back.

  “There’s a nest of snakes,” I hollered.

  Noah grabbed the pole with the homemade flag and waved it back and forth. “It’s independence day!” he roared, rousing the gulls from the surrounding trash.

  The barge sat idle for the better part of that summer morning before two Harbor Patrol police boats arrived. Neither vessel approached the barge. Perhaps this was their protocol. It is just as likely that they could not stand the stench that became steadily worse as the day warmed. Captain Otis, for his part, jumped ship the moment the police boats appeared, splunking right into those murky waters of Jamaica Bay. This created an unexpected problem for the boys. Turning the barge about had been easy enough for Joey in open water; docking, if and when they decided to, was a different challenge.

  It became a problem for Captain Otis as well when neither of the police boats moved in to rescue him. Instead, the men on the boats began clapping and whistling as if Otis was a racehorse they had placed bets on. The captain, who had finished the better part of the whiskey, had to swim for ten minutes before reaching the closest boat. Someone finally tossed out a life ring and dragged him aboard.

  “They’s pirates!” he blathered over and over.

  I could hear the boys laughing at that. I laughed too. Just imagine them as buccaneers on the high seas instead of some guys on a glue barge in Jamaica Bay!

  As if on cue, a swarm of seagulls took flight, drowning out Captain Otis. They made a spectacle of themselves, swooping and diving and circling again, inspecting the police boats for a possible meal. One of the cops pulled a gun on the gulls and shot a couple right out of the air. The bullets he used were large enough to shatter them.

  Sofia was out of breath when she found me on the beach.

  “Mr. Boyle says no barges get into the bay until the police figure out what’s going on. No work today. No pay. He says the police know it’s the boys. He didn’t say what else they know. Your father says don’t tell your mother. He says to tell you she’s unhappy that you and Noah were al
ready gone when she woke up.”

  “Where is he? My father?”

  “At the factory in case Mr. Boyle changes his mind and lets them in.” She described how the men spent the past hour outside the locked factory gates cursing the boys. “Mr. DeWitt is taking bets on whether another barge will be allowed to dock today. And Mr. Boyle says if the factory finally opens and the men aren’t waiting at the gate, they’re fired.”

  My father was not at the factory for long. Another police boat came and took him out to the boys, telling him to say what they were doing was driving my mother crazy. The police had not bothered to find out that my mother was long past the point of going mad. What she needed was the vestiges of madness driven from her.

  The police would have taken Mr. Paradissis as well had they found him at the factory or at home. They did not look for him in the guardhouse, where he and Mr. DeWitt were still taking bets and arguing over whether to get word to Stanley Morrow or Mike Sierra. The boys needed help, but they could not decide whose. It was a good thing that the police did not find Mr. Paradissis, who could barely speak to his family without shouting, never mind a cop who wanted to arrest his son. Mr. Paradissis would have ended up in handcuffs.

  My father’s voice went back and forth across the water in a heated debate with my brother and his friends. First he sounded angry, then plaintive, then angry again. Whatever sway my father had meant nothing in the face of their resolve.

  “Ohmygod, there’s your mother,” said Sofia. “Oh god, there’s my mother too. Over there, Marta, on the dune. Look!” She waved so they would see us.

  My mother struggled to keep her balance through the dune grass. She had not been to the beach since Helen’s death. Who knows what doors of grief were being opened. I wished I were back in bed, dreaming any terrifying dream with its promise of being a dream from which the dreamer awakens.

  A fourth boat arrived, this one carrying newspaper reporters and photographers, some of them holding handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses. If they had been like the rest of us, if they had come to stay, they would not have made such a fuss about the smell. They would have pretended not to notice until, finally, they could stand it. The photographers were balancing their clunky 4x5 Speed Graphics, calling for the boys to look up for the camera. My mother, who was standing with us now, raised her arm slowly and waved as if they were calling to her. One of the photographers waved back. It was Mr. Aryeh, from my aunt and uncle’s building in Brooklyn.

  “Help them,” she cried. “Please help us!”

  “There’s nothing to do,” Mr. Aryeh yelled back. If there had been a way to help, he no doubt would have, but it was too late. There was no fixing Barren Island or Barren Shoal or anything else that needed fixing. The boys were in the middle of the bay. They had hijacked a barge. They were in trouble. These were facts.

  There was more confusion now, with Joey steering the barge in lazy circles and the police shouting at the boys to hold still, and the reporters and photographers cheering them on. Yorgos yelled for one of the cops to approach the barge alone.

  It was unclear what either side wanted in return for doing what the other asked.

  A tugboat entered the harbor bringing another barge captain who could take the wheel from Joey. Someone called out on a bullhorn.

  “Let him on now and we’ll call it a prank, boys,” shouted the officer.

  Yorgos cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered back. “What if we say no?”

  “We call it a crime.”

  The negotiation came to a quick deadline. We could hear the police talking across the water about leaving the boys on the barge until they ran out of food and water. The boys let it be known that they had jugs for rainwater, plenty of biscuits and bread, and fishing lines.

  To hear my father tell it, the hijacking opened floodgates for every disgusting joke a human being could make about another. Do you think my father shared the cops’ jokes with us?

  “Just imagine,” he said when the police returned him to the dock and he found us down by the beach. He declined to repeat them with Sofia and me around. “Imagine a cop telling a joke about a garbage boat hijacked by an Italian, a Greek, and a Jew.”

  “And you standing there,” said Mr. Paradissis, disgusted.

  “You think they cared?” asked my father. “So they maybe insulted me, insulted my family. You think this bothered them? Like they give a damn?”

  “Acch,” said Mr. Paradissis, spitting a great, wet glob into the water. “Where in hell is Stanley Morrow, the stinking bastard. What the hell they want with our boys? What the hell your brother-in-law and Morrow get out of this? Just a lot’a talk. A lot’a nothing.”

  “Like they got any better from Mike Sierra? What you think about that?”

  That evening we could see the fire over which the boys cooked fish. Joey, of course, made out fine. I am not being spiteful, just honest.

  By then the scene on the beach had turned into a carnival. Whole families came down after the men finished their suppers, the fathers smoking, the little ones splashing barefoot through the shallows, the older children told to mind the smaller ones so that the mothers could talk. It was more than my own mother could take.

  “Get us out of here,” she told my father. Yes, I know: it was the same plea as the one from the family trapped in Zyrmuny.

  The names of the boys were in the newspapers that Miss Finn sent the over the next day. A photograph of the barge, credited to Mr. Aryeh, ran in The Post. The other papers ran photographs of the police boats and the man with the bullhorn. He was wearing a suit, it turned out, not a uniform. The boys were described as “suspected anarchists or communists, with ties to the Wobblies, the Italian Fascists, and the international Zionist movement.” The newspapers kept referring to them as immigrants, even though Yorgos was the only one born in a foreign country. As for Noah and Joey, being the sons of immigrants made them foreign enough.

  Later that afternoon, Gray and Lois showed up in the mahogany runabout. Gray throttled down as they approached the barge, the engine put-puttering to an idle.

  “Don’t get any closer,” ordered the man with the bullhorn.

  “We know these boys,” Gray called across the water. “We can talk sense into them.” He and Lois had seen the pictures in the newspapers.

  “Back away or I’ll take you in for conspiring to receive stolen goods.”

  What kind of stolen goods? Dead horses?

  Gray piloted the runabout over to the Harbor Patrol, where we could see him and Lois trying to reason with the officers. Lois had her wide-brimmed hat pulled low and was holding her handkerchief to her nose. Gray pulled out his own handkerchief and wiped his brow. Lois raised both of her arms, palms to the sky, as if to say, We’re trying to help! Let us help! This was followed by more finger-pointing at the barge, more gesturing towards the shore, more palms raised to the sky.

  Gray motored away from the barge and closer to the beach where my parents were standing with Mr. and Mrs. Paradissis, Sofia, and me. I have no idea where Joey’s brothers were; I do not remember seeing them that day. My mother walked into the water as they approached. Gray throttled down completely.

  “What are you doing?” cried my father.

  My mother kept walking until she was waist-deep in the bay.

  Miss Finn, who was tracked down at her sister’s house by Mr. Boyle, successfully reasoned with them to give in after winning from the police a guarantee that the boys would not be arrested nor lose their jobs. The boys handed over control of the barge the next afternoon. I had hoped that Ray would come with her, but no luck. I had not seen him since that day he kissed me. Nor had I told anyone, not even Sofia. Everyone had their secrets; I had mine.

  Miss Finn managed to win a pledge for a face-to-face meeting with Commissioner Moses. She did this with the help of Jane Shaw, the Barren Island schoolteacher who had that small success with him about her school. But who in hell did Miss Finn think she was dealing with, you should pard
on me?

  Yorgos was fired right away despite all guarantees to the contrary. It was a lucky thing that Mr. Paradissis’ ribs were pretty much mended. He was strong enough to return to work, even if he was still wincing and cursing when he belched or sneezed. Mr. Boyle took him back, saying he did not want the bother of breaking in someone new. Noah was fired as well from the job he had barely started. On top of that, there was still talk from the police about coming over to arrest them. To our amazement, no one mentioned the brawl at Union Square. We had been so afraid for Noah; it turned out they did not even know he had punched that cop. For the time being, at least, none of the authorities seemed worried about the boys escaping the island. Who in their right minds would help them?

  There was no meeting with Robert Moses, of course. He probably knew nothing about the episode other than what he read in the papers. If that. Noah and the boys, not even Miss Finn—none of them understood how little they were, how insignificant they were to anyone not directly affected by the biggest thing they had ever done in their lives.

  Mr. Morrow sent word to Noah that the union wanted nothing to do with them anymore. Noah showed me the note that came over by barge: “Who the hell you think you are, trying some lame-brained scheme without running it past the local. Nothing but lug-headed, punk kids who need to learn how to follow orders.” So much for all those years Noah followed Morrow around like a puppy. If the boys heard anything from Mike Sierra, they kept it to themselves. No one came to help them; not then, not ever.

  There was talk about firing Joey too, but without Yorgos and Noah there to lead him by the nose, he could do no harm. At least not to the factory. Before Joey went back to work, his brothers beat the crap out of him—not slapping him around, mind you, but beating him good—at Mr. Boyle’s behest. They bragged about it, as if to say that they were tight with Boyle. One of Joey’s eyes remained half closed forever, the nerves in the eyelid permanently damaged. Boyle made a point of telling everyone that the Passara brothers had been glad to oblige.