The people who lived at the shoreline were nervous about him and did not like him but didn’t know what to do about it. And so he was called the Uncanny.
Four people finally hiked up the hill to help build the bottle house. Colin the Radio Guy; Oli the schoolteacher in her wide flowered skirts; the Toastmaster in his top hat; Everett bald and ink-stained and anxious. Boredom and idleness had worn them down to a chronic disquiet, a pointless unresting anxiety. Each one of them felt privately that he suffered from some kind of mental disease that had to be hidden from everyone else.
So they came up the hill and helped to lay in rank after rank of sparkling vodka bottles and whiskey bottles. They became entranced by the project. It was the pointless, happy play of children. It was like playing house. Nobody was making them do it nor were they being paid in credits or coupons. They cemented a bond among themselves just as they cemented bottles layer on layer until the walls rose over their heads. They found themselves laughing together with sticky hands among the crushed ferns.
Chan taught them how to weave nets, how to dig a pig trap. So from time to time they feasted and took in the sweet smell of a driftwood fire and said this was good, the hot shower device was good, and the roof planked with mill sidings and the fireplace and the stone floor. It was all good. As they worked they listened to Chan’s FM radio and the voices of Male and Female One, the immortal stories, the yearly round; Blood and Sand, Carton mounting to the scaffold, Akhmatova’s Requiem.
We don’t have a permit for this, said Everett.
So? Chan looked around at the bright new leaves of the alder brush and springing fern surrounding the bottle house, piles of chips, sludging cement waste, pig remains. He took up his ax to bring down saplings for the walls of a compost bin. It’s done already. Who is going to tear it down?
Maybe. Well, no one.
We got to get something going here, said Chan. People down there living on food deliveries, waiting for some year Primary realizes, Oh shit! Here’s the paperwork! Dock not fixed! Slap foreheads, look around, move those citizens! How many years? Let’s have a bonfire, roast something. Chan’s pronunciation of f and r was slightly off because of the deep scar through his upper lip. Oli, the former schoolteacher, noticed it. She found it appealing somehow.
Chan’s ax flashed and he made three expert slashes, three alder saplings down.
A Squid Fest! cried Oli. She gave a half turn that made her pieced bright skirts fly around her ankles. We will boil squid and sing. I know a song . . . “Adrian’s coming, over the sea . . .”
But nobody came to their Squid Fest. A clean spring night, a thin moon. But the people in the cinder-block houses were not used to the taste of shellfish and the squid looked like entrails and tasted like seawater. There was no reason to sit outside in the cold air when inside there was light and music and beautiful people and the soul-gripping new execution program. The camera shots that made them want to scream or flee but they did not.
The Five Companions with their hopeful fantasy name sat alone at the shore; Chan and Oli the schoolteacher, and Everett who longed to produce books, Colin with his homemade FM receiver and his father the Toastmaster who wore a top hat. Oli lifted her bright soprano voice in three lines of a remembered lament and then fell silent. The bonfire burned down and they were left with stars and waves in a lonely celebration by the sea.
They met again at Eastertime, when the fawn lilies bloom, and the blackberry and cloudberry are covered with minute, shattering blossoms, when the broom up on the naked mountains over the inlet is swept with yellow flowers, when Alice in Wonderland and segments of Lord of the Rings come on Big Radio, the time of fantasies and quests. From those departed voices stories flowed and ran in caverns measureless to man, beyond the sunless sea.
And so what if, there now? said Chan. A blackened kettle sat on the fire. Flamelight winked from all the bottle ends as he jammed a length of rebar in the coals, shifted a stick. What if? Look here. He held up a shining china egg in his hand. Here. Found on the long beach. Take it and speak and as long as it is in your hand, nobody will interrupt you or else. Say I. This is so your head can run loose, hey, a getaway car.
What if what? Everett wiped his balding head. You mean what if people came to a festlike gathering, a better one, something more kind of happy fun?
Affirmative. Nobody owns your head, said Chan. Nobody’s eaten your brains. Who will take it? The china egg shone in his hand and the kettle grumbled and spouted.
Yes, they have eaten our brains, my dear sir, said the Toastmaster. He lay down his net shuttle. Too late, too late. Long ago human beings could make up stories. He gestured at the radio with a bony old hand like a signpost pointing to a dead past. No more. They were different, sir, and possessed different brain lobes.
No, no, said Oli. She lifted one foot and stamped it on the floor. Imagine it, it’s free. Imagine a midsummer night festival and people who can sing; it would make echoes, and the bonfire light would shine on the waves. There. I just imagined it. She picked up her knitting needle and stared at her work through a slippery fall of hair come loose from its braid.
Colin the Radio Guy said, Make them up, why not? It’s just voices. I hear voices all the time.
Tell us stories about China, said Oli. Chan? China, across the sea. She did not look up from her knitting. She had unraveled old torn sweaters from the clothing bales. I have looked it up in my only volume of The World Book, which is C.
I’m Kazakhstani, said Chan. He handed Oli the egg. Go.
She took it from his big, scarred hand slowly so that she could feel his hand on her own if only for a moment. Oli’s hair was a rich, sliding brown and she was not much over thirty and her rubber shoes, squamous as they were, were laced with bright ribbons.
What if we called ourselves the Five Companions? she said. And sang every night? Well, once a week. Oh, if only we had a tuning fork! She handed the egg to Colin.
What if I asked Gandy to bring me a dog? said Colin.
My son, said the Toastmaster. You would have to hide it. It would bark. They bark.
No interrupting, said Chan. No disagreeing, because then everything turns into an argument. He got up and rolled a teacup between his battered hands and then lifted the kettle. You got to get a grip on how this works, fellow companions. We did it in labor camp. Common in labor camp, relief, hope which springs eternal in April, usually. Chan turned to see the caution in their faces. Yeah, labor camp. He reached down and took the crackled china egg. Listen, I imagine a system of justice that is just. Hearty men who rise at night to the sound of a bell to take up arms. I imagine a snowy night and a bottle of wine. Cloudberry wine. You don’t think we can do it?
We can do it.
They met night after night and passed the egg from one to another and it clattered on Oli’s copper rings, it made a dry sound in the hands of the Toastmaster, Colin tossed it in the air and caught it again as he spoke of a new antenna and voices from other continents. Everett brooded over it before speaking, like a hen. They invented a village of people who made their own houses. They gestured from hard uncushioned chairs and said, What if there were chickens and we could get a shipment of chickens? What if we built a fish smoker? What if houses could not be entered by Primary inspectors without permission? Imagine that people came together and cleaned up the trash. What if we had a map of the interior showing where the roads go? They spoke their new thoughts and shells broke loose from their wits like the casts of nameless sediments. They imagined daring journeys and distant kingdoms, lights on the water sent out in quavering lines from midnight ships, voyages to splendid coasts, courage and bravery, people who sang.
Oli imagined people building their own houses up the mountain on seven levels and that every level had a name. That spotted dogs sat upon roofs and barked up and down at one another. That the lights that shone out of rainy windows were the golden lights of lamps. Through t
he umber and rust colors of alder brush and broom, in the steep up-and-down world of leafy odors and glinting rainy roofs and ochre nap of bracken, glimpses of the shining sea, people would file down the seven levels, carrying lanterns, singing, to come to a festival at the new-made dock. She imagined a schoolhouse with a mossy roof whose teacher had old books with maps that showed the polar snows and the drainage area of the Columbia River and the palms of California.
Everett dreamed of printing books. The only one he possessed was stitched together from wallpaper. He would record the stories of old people. He invented the old people. Everyone has a story they must tell, everyone has lived through events they have not chosen but they must make of these events the plots of their lives and Everett would record them all. He imagined his book in people’s hands, all the people of the coast sinking down into their beds at night with candles lit and moths circling like planets and they would read and read and read.
The elderly Toastmaster had found his top hat and tuxedo among the used clothing carried in on the supply truck and had always thought of himself as a celebration arranger. Now he spoke his dreams aloud and planned spectacular Squid Fests where he would be master of ceremonies and tell jokes, convincing everyone to donate to those in need.
His son, Colin, reached for the china egg to invent technological tales of radio waves but then Colin saw them squint and brace themselves for imaginings they could not understand. Well, he said. I imagine a message board on air. Where people can radio in and say, Apples for sale. The salmon are running. A Primary gunship is on its way to Nootka. Now hear this, Nootka: Get together at the dock and chop their lines when they tie up. Tear up their applications. Set their ship on fire.
The other four Companions stared at him in shocked silence.
Where will this lead? cried Everett.
We’re getting wild here, said Chan. He rolled a cigarette and lit it, took two puffs and threw it in the fire.
Chapter 49
Then the hurricanes arrived, typhoons of wind that did not stop. Winds drove white-topped waves up the inlet in violent ranks and they could no longer set nets or make a way through the whipping bracken on a pig hunt. Like everyone else, they were hungry. Like everyone else, they were unnerved by the news that the Facilitator had been executed. It was not broadcast because of his rank but the people in the cinder-block houses had now seen at least five executions and so they knew. They could imagine. In fact they could not unimagine it.
The new Facilitator, Standford West, was supposed to be reassuring but he was suspect, probably a computer-generated image.
Chan the Uncanny stared out his window at the tempest and when electrical storms struck, the bottle house was filled with an illumination like the methylated spirits of lightning decanted throughout the rooms.
Then in the middle of the night a shock of stunning thunder roared down the inlet with a force that shook the windows. The next morning Chan went up the road on foot to see what had happened, slogging foot by foot through the mud, head down against the wind. At the end of the inlet, as Old Number Four Road began its climb upward, he came upon the site where an avalanche had come down along with half the mountain. The rains had loosened the scree on the treeless mountainside and the road ended in a great rockfall, spattered with the wiglike bracken torn up by the roots. They were out of food and cut off from any deliveries and Chan knew that no more would come. He stood at the foot of millions of tons of fallen rock with his ax in his hand.
As Chan looked at the barricade, a man in a uniform came climbing down the tipped and smoking stone. He was soaked dark and his lips were white. He was netted all over with thin streams of blood as if he had been hit with rat shot. The wind shrieked among thin edges of slabs and boulders freshly broken and pale as doves. The man’s khaki pants were torn at the knees and elbows. He paused on a slab, looking down.
You, he said. Rain cascaded all around him, stone to stone.
They stared at each other.
What? said Chan.
I know you. I know your face. It’s on the flyers. Escapee.
Yes, said Chan.
You low-life shit. You scum. Important big man higher-up. Convicted of abusing children. I read it.
They made it up, said Chan. His face was expressionless and he leaned on the ax handle, casual in the tearing rain.
Yeah, yeah. Get up here and help me with Inspector Grandin. He’s injured. The truck is smashed. It’s on the other side of the rockfall. We barely escaped it.
No, said Chan.
Yes, you will, asshole. You’re under arrest. That ax is classified as a weapon. Put it down.
Come and take it, said Chan.
There were no more fuel pellets, no soap or citrus-drink powder, tobacco, or baking powder or the heavy flour from unknown grains. The children were hungry and a father sat behind his leaking cinder-block house and wept into his hands. What could you do, what could you do?
Others in the leaking houses could hear him and their hearts ached for him but that night was the trial of James Orotov and his accomplice, Sendra Bentley, the sexual brigand. They sat riveted; it was something to take your mind off images of the Facilitator in handcuffs, the flooding. Sendra Bentley had escaped from a maximum-security prison by shoving a guard into a giant clothes dryer and turning it to “permanent press.” She and Orotov had been arrested while trying to board an expensive and luxurious private jet in a tony higher-up estate. The crime was so serious there was extreme pressure from the watching public for their televised execution. James Orotov bent forward in his wheelchair and put his hands in his face and cried out, You can’t imagine the things she knows how to do. I was her slave!
And Sendra Bentley in a beret and tight sweater and red lipstick struck him and said, Shut up, you fool.
After that, the television failed. It winked several times and the picture shrank to a point of blue light and went dead.
Colin stood in the doorway and handed the bannock to Oli and then hung his dripping coat on a nail. Best I could do, he said.
Everett the printer wrote on the first page of his wallpaper book: The Five Companions met on the 25th day of continual storm. I suppose this is a kind of chronicle now, he said. It seems a little overambitious. I mean, are we that important?
Yes, said Oli. We’re alive and we have souls. She laid the bannock to one side of the fire to warm it and then turned back with a whirl of her skirts, stitched together from the brightest scraps she could find in the used-clothing bales. You matter to yourself anyway, don’t you? The stone floor gleamed with water and mud.
“The Chronicle of the Five Companions.” Everett hesitated. This was supposed to be for my interviews with old people.
We don’t have any old people, said Oli. So just go ahead and keep a chronicle of . . . She paused. Well, of us.
I’m old, said the Toastmaster. He slipped the shuttle into the net weave, his tatty coat shining with stiff nap. But, sir, I would be willing to not be counted as old. Verily, I forgo the honor.
We just made ourselves up, said Everett. He was still hesitant and a deep layer of doubt writhed about in his mind over the audacity of making yourself up. It was kind of a little clandestine amusement.
But we are the Five Companions, said Oli. She draped her wet shawl on a chair back and turned it toward the flames. Because we say so. We get to say. She laid her hand on Everett’s steaming sleeve. Have courage.
It could be found, said Everett. My handwriting could be identified.
They sat in silence.
We could assign somebody to throw it in the sea, said Colin.
I will, said the Toastmaster. If it came to that. And me with it.
It was another night of hammering wind and the surf whipped into volcanoes of snowy water hurling boards and barrels and roofs at the shoal rocks at the mouth of the inlet. Chan held the egg in his hand as if it were one
of those Celtic eggs that had inside it a falcon and inside the falcon’s beak a ring and engraved on the inside of the ring some magic word. He revolved the egg between two palms and said that the time was upon them to both pray and do.
We have to leave, he said. The five of us. Or starve.
To where? said Everett. Where is there?
Banefield, said the Toastmaster. The agricultural station at Banefield.
How? said Oli.
Chan said, We hire Gandy. We hire his ship.
He isn’t a taxi, sir, said the Toastmaster. And he’s a hard man.
What have we got to pay him with? Chan sat with his thick forearms across his knees. We must have something he needs. Listen up. There is great peril facing us. Chan slapped the egg from one palm into the other. They could hear the booming of the surf beyond the windows as it tore the old dock to pieces. Great peril and starvation. We have to imagine striking out, onto the land, or the sea.
There may be limits to thinking things up, said Everett. I don’t know what they would be but they’re probably there.
Chan said, So let them come and confiscate my imagination, go for it, bring it on.
The Toastmaster gripped the arms of his chair. They’ll do worse than that, my dear sir, he said. Take care what you say.
Bring it on, said Chan. His Oriental eyes were fixed on the leaping flames, the deep scar through his lip was outlined and his expression was hard. Here I am, I’ll tell them my name, that’s my front door. We can sit here and do this huddling thing. But if we think and plan and move, I tell you we will dance before the gates of our enemies.
Lighthouse Island Page 33
