Lighthouse Island

by Paulette Jiles

  Well, damn, she said. The quality of the sound was not only grating but hollow in a scary kind of kids’ horror story way but she listened anyway. The nighttime music was selections from Boccherini. It seemed that it was now being broadcast from wherever the satellite had fallen, its orbit degraded, into the depths of some Magellanic cloud.

  In the morning she carried the radio back to the desk, made herself some hot water and citrus powder and picked up Edward and told him he was a good cat, to keep watch in the night as he had.

  She climbed the tower and pressed her face against the glass. She could see the little melonseed, tied up on the rail of the wreck, lifting and falling, riding the high and icy waves, snatched about by its painter. It appeared to be the size of a hazelnut shell.

  Now I see you, she said. I see your boat. Not yet in peril on the sea. At the sound of her voice the dials jumped once and then fell flat again, like her barred handheld counter that counted nothing, which she had used to pretend to be checking cable in that distant escape time, the flight through the endless city, which was not endless and which was actually only two months ago.

  As she came in the house she heard a crashing sound in the central hallway. Edward had trapped a large rat behind the radio and with screaming noises he flung himself into the narrow space where the rat had slithered. He knocked off a cup that spun and broke on the floor. Behind the radio the rat stood on its hind legs with that peculiar rodent wavering motion of its low-necked head trying to see where Edward was.

  At the last moment the rat shot out from behind the radio and scrambled up one of the supporting beams. Edward went up after him in a flash of orange and white and got him by the hindquarters. The rat turned, shrieked, and began to snap and they both fell nearly one story and landed hard. The rat got away. He raced across the floor and into the kitchen with surprising speed.

  Edward and the rat both flew into the woodbox fighting in a frenzy of screams and flying fuel pellets. A last shriek and Edward stood with the bloody rat hanging from his mouth. He wanted neither praise nor petting. He was Conan the Barbarian, he was Banu Shan the Warrior of the Golden Plains, deadly and merciless. He trotted away to the bathroom, where he ate it. He killed rat after rat all day with Nadia cheering him on. And she found herself stepping on small round things that proved to be rat eyeballs, popped out of their heads when Edward crushed their skulls.

  There he was, her first animal, slaughtering other animals.

  James worked in the boat shed with what tools he could find to construct a kind of cabin on the eighteen-foot skiff. He took off the splash guard and fitted in planks cut from the door of the junk room, planed on the edges and cut in graduated sizes to slide in the narrowing gunnels of the cuddy. He was going to have to try to sail to Saturday Inlet twenty miles to the north.

  Outside the shed, snow fell lightly in a kind of incredible purity he had never before seen. The snow slid off the roof of their house in long slanting shelves. Nadia came to the boathouse, carrying something hot wrapped in a blanket. The orange cat marched behind her for a few steps and then became alarmed by the snow and turned and ran back to the house.

  They sat together and drank hot steaming citrus-powder drink from a jug, passing it back and forth. The snow made the firs with their drooping limbs appear to have been quilled in white. It fell in layers along the launching trackway into the sea and the weak sun cast sparkling colors along the drifts.

  It won’t be long, he said. I should have this finished before long.

  I don’t want to leave, James, she said. She began to cry. It burst out of her in painful sobs and she was helpless to stop. She put her hands over her face and cried and could not stop herself. I don’t ever want to leave this island, not ever, not ever. Please.

  Baby, stop, he said. He slid his hand into her collar and caressed her neck. Darling. We have to.

  She took a handful of snow and pressed it against her eyes.

  He stirred the lanky dark-red hair from her face. She turned and looked at all the great fir standing in wings of white. Their island a snowy outpost of the continent surrounded by flooding surf the color of pearls charging up the rocks and a hissing sea where the snow spattered lightly and died in drifting columns.

  Chapter 46

  Far away to the east a great landmass called Siberia was throwing weather at Lighthouse Island and the northwest coast at velocities that were beyond description. Creeping acres of debris rose up on the waves and glistened with bodies, propane tanks, truck tires, barrels. Cliffs collapsed into the surf. The waves piled up to thirty and forty feet, streaming with foam, and struck the stone-bound coast in a haze of spray, and the atmosphere was dense and gray. Lethal surprises awaited them every mile.

  The Bargage Maru flew north six points off the wind with a sail like metal, hard, full of hurricane. Captain Gandy and a redheaded man whose face looked as if it had been boiled were seized on the wheel. Their feet skidded on the wheelhouse decking. Gandy was glad of the storms. He and his crew could live through them and Primary Cruisers could not. Primary’s charts were outdated but Gandy knew his way from shoal to cape and far beyond, and far beyond. They climbed up the striped waves living out the fearsome grammar of the sea with sliding, creaking cargo.

  Something came over the side riding a wave and struck the cookhouse and washed off the port side.

  What? Gandy shouted.

  Barrel!

  The sixty-foot schooner was a traveling junk yard, a floating thrift shop that sailed up and down the coast carrying anything Gandy could make a profit on, to all the little settlements both hidden and disclosed. Gandy had kinky blond hair and an earring made of woven gold wire. He was short. He had an underbite that made a fence of his lower teeth shining out of his beard. His hair sprang out of his head in corkscrews as if it had been wound up inside and then released. He would buy and sell almost anything and so on the deck of the Bargage Maru crates of stolen hair dye, twists of hard tobacco from the far south, expired pharmaceuticals and engine parts surged against their straps in the storms. A pile of scrap metal shrieked rust on rust and steel on steel. In the hold crates of stale rations and rope, bales of used clothing, illegal fish, and a contraband crate of rifle and shotgun parts slid and smashed at their bindings.

  The schooner tore north at ten knots, sank with the dropping motion of a boat in a following sea, and then she began to rise again. Wet men appeared out of the rolling white water, along with the engine parts, the stolen hair dye, the expired pharmaceuticals, and so on.

  The smell of fuel-pellet smoke; Gandy signaled another crewman to take his place and lifted his binoculars. They slid past the lighthouse on the small island. Gandy saw a man struggling along the elevated walkway in a blowing coat and his head down. He was pushing what looked like a wheelchair with a load of something. The man lifted his head; his face in the binoculars’ wallowing lenses was lean and the eyes deep shaded. Gandy thought he saw a figure moving about in the glassed-in cupola of the light tower. And then the Bargage Maru slid past and Lighthouse Island and its two sinister occupants disappeared in the tearing rain.

  How long have they been there? the mate shouted.

  Saw them last time, Gandy cried. There’s a directional antenna on top of the light tower.

  I know it, the mate yelled. Been there forever.

  They’re going to starve if they aren’t being resupplied.

  Inspectors for Primary. Spies.

  Maybe.

  They left the lighthouse behind and after an hour they passed the ruins of Left Hand Bay. Only the black chimneys were left standing on the gentle slope of a delta, running cascades of ashy water into the sea. A Primary gunship had shelled the place for noncompliance and assaults on inspectors two years past; ten dead, many injured. The men stared at it and one of them lifted his streaming watch cap and held it briefly to his heart and then put it back on.

  Another sc
rapper ship was coming past to windward on the opposite tack, a triangle of jib and a shortened mainsail. She trembled and sprayed and slid along on her side. Light flashed from her bow. It was the Closed Third, under Captain Britt Contreras. She signaled:

  Primary processor xx’d up on Goat Shoals R there people on Lighthouse Island?

  Confirm primary processor claim salvage Yes people on L.I. Cruise ship grounded Barkley Sound, per overland news, take it.

  Will not chance the graveyard. Light up at Sat Inlet. B.v.

  B.v.

  Bon voyage.

  Gandy went below and sat with Sparks at the VHF marine radio. Hot tea rolled out of their cups and scalded their knuckles. They drank it down like molten amber. Gandy dried his hands on a bunk blanket and rolled a cigarette. The air in the cabin was thick as a fabric with smoke and cooker fumes and wet hair.

  Did you pick up Primary?

  I think their dispatch station is washed out.

  Okay, then turn that off, said Gandy and Sparks reached for the FM dial where Big Radio was playing. Female Voice One was announcing the end of December’s Christmas Week with Charles Dickens. And so we move through the year to the short days of January, she said, and behind her voice was the sound of gulls and a murmuring. Another voice.

  What? Gandy grabbed Sparks’s hand. Listen.

  Sparks stared at the FM. What is that?

  It’s changed. Is there another voice in the background?

  They listened but the ship was noisy with wind and water. Gandy put his scarred hands into his armpits to warm them. The voice said, Now I see you. I see your boat. Not yet in peril on the sea.

  It sounded like Female Voice One but it was speaking behind Female Voice One.

  The bastards have grabbed Big Radio, Gandy said. They are breaking it up. Some other station is breaking in.

  Where’s the uplink? said Sparks. I thought it was down in the south of the world.

  You wonder, eh? You wonder.

  Chapter 47

  Saturday Inlet was a dwindling settlement of ten cinder-block houses. At the shoreline trash seethed and lifted in the wash of the sea. The houses, lined up at the water’s edge, held on to their roofs as if by the hat brims. They were the color of smoke and jittering light poured out of the small windows from television screens. Wind chargers spun in the hurricane winds, driftwood knocked with timid sounds at the ruined dock.

  Up on the steep sides of Saturday Inlet waterfalls spouted and roared and the streams ran around the cinder-block houses sweeping away oily liquid refuse. Nearly all the people had been moved here ten years ago from somewhere in the endless city to work on the dock but Primary Resources had misplaced the paperwork; the repair supplies never came and the foreman never arrived, so no one worked at repairing the dock. The people lived like lost domestic animals, slow and indifferent. They sat all day and watched scenes of hygienic people in designer interiors pour down refreshing drinks, somewhere far away in the great city and now the unbelievable new program where they executed criminals on live TV. It made them understand something deep and primitive about the agencies. Their paralysis grew.

  They survived on supplies delivered once every two weeks by truck. They regarded the landscape as alien, incomprehensible, treacherous. The mountains rose straight up all around them in a still and silent wrath, hackled with dead fern.

  It was said that once a woman walked up the mountainside and had met her double and was led away, and her body was not found for two years. A man had set an illegal net without applying for net privileges but when he pulled it from the water something charged out of it and took his leg off at the knee. So they heard from the truck driver. They stayed in their houses, close to shore. From time to time children shouted over the water at the far cliffs to hear the echoes, they climbed out on the collapsing dock, they set fire to the schoolhouse as if to make themselves a childhood out of charred boards, floating trash, broken metal; stories to tell in years to come, wild escapades. In the end the children went back inside and shut the door. The abandoned echoes called and called.

  Sometimes at night the people heard the voices of the great horned owls that sounded like a soft, otherworldly jeering. Steller’s jays shot like blue rockets down the inlet screaming and a river fell into the far end of the inlet in a series of furious, white cascades. Seals like silkies rose and stared at the lights onshore and sank again and when they were underwater they became magical beings. Fish both big and little and squid with wormy arms went creeping about the sea. A blacktail deer up in the mountains strolled among rusted and abandoned skidders with all the vanished rain forest shining in her eyes.

  Now great storms had arrived. They melted the soil, and rocks came tumbling down through thick stands of ferns, gorse, the whins and stubby alders, like rolling heads. The wind ripped off parts of the roofs and water drained into their beds. The truck had not come in for a month and hunger stared in their windows.

  And so the Five Companions met together to decide what was to be done.

  Colin the Radio Guy ran into the storehouse. Inside three others shifted from foot to foot to press water from their rubber shoes. The storage bins were empty and the tools gone except for a carpenter’s level and a come-along.

  What’s that you got, Colin? Hey, hey, Colin?

  Colin wiped rain from his glasses. It’s, um, a bannock.

  Where’d you get the flour?

  From that barrel in the battery shed.

  The inspector classified that as spoiled last trip.

  Well, we’ve got to eat something, you know. The road is out.

  I don’t believe you.

  Colin stepped to the doorsill to run out into the cold rain, out of this dank storehouse with hungry people running spoons along the floor of the bins to scrape up grains of quinoa and grits. Septic tanks had overflowed in their sodden graves and blue sewage with fibrous wavering tissues slid in sheets among the houses.

  Nobody believes me, said Colin.

  Why do you meet up there? a woman said. You’re going to get us in trouble. She splashed from foot to foot. Why don’t you fix the door so the rain don’t come in? You Five Companions. What a stupid name. Do something besides give yourselves stupid names.

  Fix it yourself, said Colin.

  With what, said the man. All the tools traded off to Gandy. He’s a hard man. I wouldn’t have taken a place’s only tools.

  But you traded them, didn’t you.

  Well, I wish we hadn’t. And you up there messing with a radio. This place is going to get a reputation. We’re going to end up in reports, here. Then the man shifted his padded coat collar closer around his neck. His damp white breath poured out. God, God, God, what are we going to do?

  You could get fish, then, said Colin. Set nets.

  That was tried, said the woman. A man tried it once. She stared down into her steel bowl and its handful of semolina. So I don’t know.

  Colin bolted through the rain and wind clasping the bannock under his coat. It was warm against his heart. He scrambled uphill on a path like a running stream and far above him the bottle house winked with light through alder leaves. It was a clean light shining and chased with ferns. Sweet wood smoke rolled out of the chimney and downhill under the whip of the wind. Up there were friends, there was light and talk and a hot drink. Colin, Colin, where have you been?

  Chapter 48

  The Five Companions had begun to meet together three years ago after the failure of the midnight Squid Fest. Each of them had been sent to Saturday Inlet from some other place except Chan. It was understood that Chan had escaped from a labor camp somewhere far inland because his hands were blocky and stiff from years of heavy work and a puckered scar ran down one forearm, and his upper lip on the right side had been deeply cut. He had appeared one morning sitting on the dock, without a ration card or an ID or work assignment papers.

&n
bsp; People came out of their houses in the early morning and stared at him.

  Fell off a processor, he said. Swam ashore. You never saw me.

  Right, they said, and sat on their doorsteps for a smoke and tea and looked the other way.

  When Chan first arrived in Saturday Inlet he lived under a rock up on the mountain for a while. He was a broad, strong man with curling black hair frosted with gray from hard times and hunger. He hiked up the mountain and from there he saw a long white beach and beyond that an island with a lighthouse. He came back down to Saturday Inlet with a backpack load of bottles that had washed up on the white-sand beach and then went back for more. Before long he had enough to start the walls of a bottle house. The cinder-block people watched him stride off into the unknown mountains and come back alive.

  Chan sang aloud and wrapped his broad head and curly black-and-gray hair in a pirate’s bandanna. He traced out pig paths in the thick undergrowth. He walked up the south arm of the inlet, a jutting cape, and stood on the gleaming black of a coal seam and watched clouds in lengthy rafts skimming the sea and its foils and its shining. On the distant horizon he saw a Primary Resources heavy cruiser plowing through the rollers, throwing spray. He saw the supply truck lurching down the switchbacks at the head of the inlet with its load of supplies. Chan held out his palms to the sun.

  Lord, he said. Great and powerful Lord, help me kill my enemies.

  He fished without a permit and gathered driftwood. He came down through the bracken, the parchment-colored fern, through the spiny gorse, carrying a backpack of coal and cloudberries in season, traded some to Captain Gandy for an FM radio. He made pig traps and butchered what he caught; their blue guts rang with chiming flies. He roasted the piglets slowly, lovingly. He wove nets and lifted them streaming from the sea rocks. He searched the long white beach where the waves came all the way from the Sea of Okhotsk and were choked into the Aleutian Trench and then rolled into the gyre that circled the North Pacific so that net floats set sail from Japan and came to the scattered inhabitants of the northwest coast like happy rubber unbirthday presents. Many things washed up in Saturday Inlet and Chan knew how to make something useful from all of them except the Feet. For some unknown reason they were always left feet.