“It’s been, hmm . . . ten days I think,” he said, figuring. “No, two weeks maybe?”
Of those days, however many there were, with the sharks pursuing him and the sun beating down, he’d probably slept a total of twelve hours. And that’s why he knew he was having hallucinations.
Watching the storm take over the sky, he took a break from the useless rowing and stirred in the supplies, withdrawing a can of Vienna Sausages. Greedily, he wolfed them right down, then ate an entire MRE, as well as two king-sized candy bars.
But on the jug of water, he sipped lightly—even though the storm promised to bring him more. Using caution with his supply, he made himself stop just as the last of the caramel’s saltiness was washed away.
“Who knows?” Edgar said to his dad, answering the previous question. “Who knows how long I’ve been floating in this boat?”
He bobbed gently up and down and lifted his nose to the air, beginning to feel the cool, electric vibe of the storm. He picked his teeth and watched the angry skies organizing overhead.
Death from above, death from below.
And then, like a bulldozer, the winds came surging in, and with them the rising swells. Like a rollercoaster, his tiny raft began to climb the multi-storied waves, as high as hills, and then plummeted down the other side. It was enough to make him instantly seasick.
As he clung to the raft’s sides, his fear ramping up with each lightening stike, he tried to remember to stay in the middle of the raft, to keep it balanced. As the rain came spattering in, and then in torrents, he opened his mouth wide and campaigned for a free drink of water.
It was getting darker by the minute. He glanced over the side and used the lightning to see, and when it flashed, he saw clearly the entire school of evil sharks lurking underneath like a photo shoot—a virtual army of them.
Whimpering, he reached into his pile of supplies and yanked out the big yellow raincoat. There, in the center of the boat, he grabbed the plastic handles on the raft and zipped up the coat, laying back to stare at the swirling skies.
Soon, when he saw the power of the storm and the state of the angry sea, he wondered how he would ever survive the night.
When the swells got to thirty feet—far higher waters than he’d ever seen before—he finally relented and screamed to the clouds.
“PLEASE! LEAVE ME ALONE! PLEASE!”
But his voice was nothing to the chaos building around him. And, as if an answer from God, a bolt of lightning popped the ocean just yards from his vessel, lifting the hairs on his neck, like static. Immediately following was a loud, soul shrinking crash of thunder, making Edgar jerk his head away and scowl.
As if things weren’t bad enough, terribly, his raft began to take on water. In moments the water was rising up the sides, so he scrambled to his knees and swept the water out frantically, using an empty water jug that he’d cut at the top with his Swiss Army knife.
He knew the raft wouldn’t last the night: who was he kidding? A three-hundred-dollar raft from Walmart that was only meant for lakes and pools? The plaything was already overburdened to its limit, and now it was taking on too much water, and enduring far too many violent waves.
Regardless, all night he clung to the feeble thing, riding each wave up and down in the center of a merciless ocean, praying aloud often, twisting his body against the swirling sea to prevent the waves from toppling him. The ocean was pitch black from the stormy night, so much that he was unable to see his hand in front of him. It was darker than the center of the Earth. Leaning over the edge, he shined his flashlight on the sea, but in all the driving, sideways rain, he could not even see below the top of the surface.
It made him wonder if the sharks were still following him with all the calamity on the surface.
Yeah, probably.
__________
All night he fought the storm and somehow stayed afloat.
The next morning, inexplicably, impossibly, the storm finally died down. Off in the gray distance there was a smudge of sunlight trying to break through the thick, black clouds, and as the rain slacked, so did the wind.
For once, Edgar began to believe that he might have just skirted death one more time. But just as he thought it, the terrible tempest unleashed one last, remaining blow, mercilessly launching him into a dire fight for his own survival.
A gargantuan wave—no less than forty feet high—came rolling like a bowling ball over the disrupted seas. Edgar, worn and beaten, watched it almost indifferently from the side of the raft as it came barreling forth. He knew he was in huge trouble because of the way the wave was cresting.
Suddenly, as if waking from a dream, he snapped to and fell to the raft floor, spreading out across the raft, distributing his weight, gripping the sides tightly and holding his breath, preparing for the blow.
It was going to be rough. This one was dangerous.
And then, as he looked up, it reached into the sky above him—like the watery hand of God Himself, then crashed down with the finality of a judge’s gavel. Suddenly the wave was on him and like nothing the tiny raft was flipped headlong into the sea, casting Edgar and all his supplies into the cold, dark, shark-infested Indian Ocean.
As he hit the water, he screamed bloody murder as the wave plunged him into the deep, bracing himself for the shark teeth he knew would be upon him any second. With eyes tightly shut and arms flailing all around, he fought for the surface of the sea. Each stroke he made for the top, he expected to be his last—expected at any moment the bites to come furiously and all over, but for some strange, wonderful reason, none came.
Finally, he opened his eyes as he continued to fight for the surface, and took a good look around in the freshly brightening dawn, slowly straining to see.
The sharks were gone. They were gone!
The storm had dispersed them.
He was energized and felt gleeful his whole body over, making for the surface like an Olympian, bursting into the wet, open air and gasping for breath. Then, drifting atop the bouncy sea, he paddled around in a circle in search for his raft.
But he didn’t see it anywhere. Where was his raft?! Had it sunk? Suddenly he began to think he’d come this far—surviving the whirlpool, the first group of sharks, the second group of sharks, the storm—just to drown. It didn’t seem fair.
But then, through the mist of the storm, there was a bright speck of orange drifting aimlessly beyond another huge wave. It was there!
Mustering all his strength to make a break for it, he lost sight of it immediately as it summited another wave, then retreated down the backside. Again he spotted it as it climbed a wave again, and again it was gone. Gulping mouthfuls of splashing seawater, knowing that soon this might be it if he didn’t make it to the raft and reel it in with muscles burning and chapped lips stinging—with all the feelings of futility swirling inside of him, like all his struggling had been for nothing, he fought.
When, suddenly, miraculously, a wonderful thing happened: from the opposite direction, out of nowhere, a counter-wave came spilling forth big as a tow boat, smashing against the wave currently lifting his raft twenty feet in the air, shifting the raft gloriously in his direction and, just for the moment, almost brought it within arm’s reach.
“PLEASE!” he screamed, with all his might disregarding the burn in his muscles and lungs and blistery hands, and Edgar swam like he’d never swam before.
“This is called the breaststroke!” shouted his father over the churning waters, swimming beside him in the sea. “This is the reason why the Olympians do it this way, because it’s the smartest way. It’s aerodynamic.”
“I know!” gurgled Edgar, as yet another wave plowed into him. And just when he thought he could swim no more, pausing to look up from the sea, there it was: his raft, only ten feet away now.
Kicking frantically in one final, frantic lunge, he somehow caught hold
of the plastic and in his wrinkled, outstretched fingers. And, before another wave could take it from him, he desperately climbed aboard and hugged the side walls like a bear.
“Thank you, God,” he panted.
Without a doubt, the raft had taken a grand beating. All its contents were long gone, tossed away into the sea: the water, the food, everything. Even the oars.
Once he’d caught his breath, he rose to his knees and scanned the ocean for any signs of them, and just a few feet away, he noticed the flash of something shiny on the surface.
It was one of the water bottles—its plastic was partially afloat, upheld by a small pocket of air at the top.
He scrambled for it, using his hands for paddles. It took a while to get himself there, fighting the still-raging sea, but finally he was there, leaning out over the choppy waters with a trembling hand. He stared down below the bottle as he reached for it, trying to see if the sharks were there, but it was just too murky and stirred up to see below. Finally, his trembling fingers touched the precious water bottle, but it slipped away, bouncing on the choppy waves. He tried again, this time straining even harder, reaching out as far as he possibly could, until finally, he snatched it by the handle, scooping it toward him, bringing it quickly to his chest, cradling it.
“Thank you, God,” he murmured again.
__________
All day, as the storm sputtered and spat and then died, he sat with the water bottle in his lap and tried to recover.
As weary as he felt, for some reason, he was still unable to sleep.
Later that afternoon, when the ocean had calmed and evened out to a slick sheen, he fell into a delirious sleep and awoke hours later, in the middle of the night, to a million, bright, twinkling stars that hung high in the sky above.
“The best skies are always after a storm,” his father who floated just off the raft, right on top of the water, explained. “Remember the sky right after hurricane Katrina? Remember that night?” he prodded. “The lights were off in the city because the power was out, remember? That sky was like a real planetarium.”
“Yeah,” admitted Edgar. “That was definitely a good sky.”
“Yes, sir,” corrected his father.
“Yes, sir,” said Edgar. “But this sky is better.”
__________
The hard sun returned the next morning beating down on him mercilessly, and soon his stomach began to growl, but what could he do?
“You can’t get blood from a turnip,” his floating dad informed.
Scanning all the horizons with wild, bloodshot eyes, he finally admitted to himself that if someone didn’t come along pretty soon . . .
He sat in the center of his tattered little boat, continuing to cradle the water bottle like it was life itself. Taking stock of his situation, he admitted to himself that he had no oar and no compass, no radio, no food, and no nothing. He was undeniably, miserably, and dangerously lost at sea.
Without a doubt, he was dead in the water.
Even still, it would be days before the real, deep hunger set in—the most troubling, profound hunger that he’d ever known before—to which he could only respond with fretting, searching the water for anything edible, and then, with sleep.
Starving became an acute sort of all-encompassing sensation that made his jellyfish sting seem like an unpleasant, long ago dream.
Sleeping all he could, sometimes, when he awoke with puffy eyes and blistered lips, he would measure out a tiny capful of water and bring it to his lips, sucking out every drop. After the sip, food would become his hourly preoccupation as he dreamed of his mother’s spaghetti, double bacon cheese burgers, steaks, potatoes—even the English peas and carrots and yams he’d turned his nose up to back in the pantry.
I’d tear a yam up, he admitted wearily, trying to be funny and light in his thoughts. But it didn’t help a bit.
In the daytime, as the unrelenting sun punished his overly tanned skin, Edgar, with no way to block it, could only resign to sitting there and taking it.
After all, there was no way he was jumping underneath the raft for a bit of a shady reprieve; there was no way he was jumping in for any reason.
He’d swum in this sea for the absolute last time.
__________
One afternoon he heard a sound and listened intently. “Thunder?” he uttered hoarsely. “Is that another storm?”
Weakly, he rose to his knees and scanned the billowy clouds, hoping that it might actually be rain. If so, he could fill his almost-empty water bottle a little. But when he saw it, he realized it was far better than rain. It was the most wonderful sight he’d ever seen.
Gazing out over the sea with his empty, almost pupil-less eyes, he discovered that just below the line of cloud cover, there circled a small, passenger-style airplane. Edgar watched it descend and fly very low to the sea, as if it were searching for someone.
As if it were searching for him.
“HEY!” he screamed wildly, leaping to his feet, bouncing up and down in the beaten raft and waving his arms like a lunatic.
“I’m HERE!” he screamed at the sky, but to his absolute heartbreak and interior deterioration, suddenly, mercilessly, the plane veered west. When it dawned on him that he had not been seen and he would not be saved, his eyes filled with demoralized, painful tears, and he was left only to watch as the plane flew away, toward the horizon, the hum of its engines silencing with the growing distance.
When it was finally gone, he collapsed onto the hot vessel and wept harder than he’d ever wept before.
__________
By the end of the next day, his last sip of water was gone.
He tapped the last of the drops from it and then began to bite and claw through the top of the plastic, to make a container of it—just in case it rained again.
If it rained again, maybe he could catch some rainwater—if it rained again. He knew that the awful sea he battled and its propensity to give him exactly the opposite of what he actually needed would make water a rare commodity.
His new pastime became scanning the skies for signs of clouds around the clock—and, for airplanes. But there was always nothing at all in the brutal, continuous blue—nothing but relentless drought, same as it was back in Mount Lanier.
One merciless drought replaced by another.
When his tongue began to swell from thirst and heat, without saliva, his cracked lips split open and bled. Around the clock, he began to hallucinate now, making him gaze out to sea several times and witness a spattering of oil rigs across in the Indian Ocean, and oil spills, and always, oily, dead animals.
“Have I ever told you,” confessed his father, “that I’m so sorry about the oil spill? I know that must have been tough on you, son.” Edgar was resting his head against the side wall and woozily waved it off, shaking his head forgivingly.
“Nah, Dad, it’s not a problem,” he whispered. “I got through it—I got here, didn’t I?”
“Well,” said his father, “I am sorry. I just wanted you to know. And another thing. You should know your mom is fine. Just know she misses you a lot.”
“Man. I miss her too,” he said, a big lump rising in his throat.
__________
One day he woke with a strange sense of clarity. After so many days of deliriousness and fuzziness in his head, it felt weird to be so sober and alert—weird, but good.
He glanced to the back of the boat and expected to see his dad back there, but no. Which was good. It meant he wasn’t loony for the moment.
Stirring from the bottom of the raft, he took advantage of his apparent second wind and began to paddle furiously with stinging, blistered hands toward the east—still ever-pressing for the French Southern and Antarctic Lands.
He paddled for hours—at first vigorously, then tiring out over time, until, eventually, he slumped to the side wall
of the raft and collapsed. With bloodshot eyes and a thoroughly broken spirit, he leaned over the edge and vomited into the sea, but nothing came out. Through hot, straining tears, he stared deeply into the waters and horrorstruck, it occurred to him that he was floating once again on a sea of black oil.
Belly-up carcasses of so many animals of the deep bobbed around him, their dead eyes glazed over with rot.
“Help!” a voice screamed from nearby, and Edgar rose up to see who had said it
He just couldn’t believe it. It was Flounder.
“Flounder?” whispered Edgar. “What are you doing here?”
“Edgar!” Flounder screamed again, from the back of a small boat just yards beyond Edgar’s bow. In the boat with Flounder was Chris Weedy, who, obviously, like a pirate, was holding Flounder hostage.
Weedy beamed at Edgar as he manned the motor, drifting around Edgar’s beaten raft.
“My boat has a motor,” he bragged. “Isn’t that fantastic? I bet you wish you had a motor, huh?”
“Weedy?” asked Edgar. “Don’t you ever just stop?”
“Edgar,” Weedy answered, a broad smile on his face. “Why did you always fight with me? You always felt like you had to put me down, didn’t you? Like crashing me in Nitro Streak, or making me look like a fool in Van Rossum’s class. You should have never come to Mount Lanier! You should have asked to stay in Bon Secour! Remember when your grandmother offered to take you in so you could finish high school back home? Where everything was familiar and you could have gone to that private high school where all your friends were, and joined the high school fraternity there, and you could have gone to college—and in all of that you could have played it safe, and had a normal life. You could have stuck with the familiar.” Weedy beamed at him. “You wouldn’t be where you are right now.”
The Secret Island of Edgar Dewitt Page 24
