Silence; they thought about it. None of them knew how to garden and it was too wet and too late in the year and there were no tools, there were no seeds. Where to get seeds? No goats or sheep or donkeys or cows or chickens and anyway they did not know how to feed animals or take care of them. They had no way to leave except on foot. They would have to fill out applications for travel permits to go anywhere. None of them knew what lay in the interior. And where was Primary now? Where were the inspectors? Who would accept their applications?
We don’t even know how to make soap, said Oli. How do you make soap?
With ashes, said Chan. He shoved the rebar poker into the coals again. Every time has its time and this time’s time is now. His hair drifted in frosted spirals in the heat of the fire. I imagine a dragon will come out of the sea and it will attack us but we will defeat it. We will set the dragon’s body on fire and out of the fire something mean and small screams and flies away. Nothing left but ashes.
Everett said to himself, Then the Companions set the dragon on fire.
Chan turned and stared at the other Four Companions and a gust of wind roared down the chimney and blew evaporating sparks out of the fireplace. He said, We are going to have to find out if Banefield is real because hey, news to you, otherwise we are going to starve.
Everett thought for a moment. His expression grew dreamy. He said, A journey by sea, to strange countries. He ran his hand over the flocking and garlands of the wallpaper pages, generic birds that flew from edge to edge and far beyond.
They handed around triangles of smoking bannock and ate them carefully. They considered Banefield, the mythical village of Barkley Sound. Oli had heard that it was called Barkley Sound either because of barking seals sliding from the rocks there, or because of a black-and-white dog that sat on a headland among the gorse flowers and barked at boats going past. It was some unknown distance to the south, on the edge of a dangerous coast called the Graveyard. It was there that scientists or perhaps magicians had saved all the old heirloom seeds and knew how to raise animals, the secret chemistry of yeast breads; they knew how to build cider mills and presses, which is to say, how to make a wheel roll on an axle.
Gandy says there are people on the island with the lighthouse, said Oli. We need more people than just us, don’t we?
Yes, said Colin, and I triangulated . . .
Exactly, said the Toastmaster. Sir, I know who they are. That Orotov man, the crippled one, is a cartographer, sir. He would know the way. The Toastmaster tied off the last warp string of the net and laid down the shuttle. The Shalamovs, talkative people that they were, told me all about the Orotov brothers when they shipped out of here. Said the Orotovs might come someday. Indeed, it must be them.
We can’t take a crippled man, said Chan.
Gandy said he saw the guy walking around, said Everett.
Let me speak, said Colin. He made a nervous gesture at his elderly father.
Chan jumped up and put the china egg in Colin’s hand and took the top hat from the Toastmaster’s silvery head, jammed it onto Colin’s, and said, Everybody shut up.
Colin said, The uplink to Big Radio is in the lighthouse tower. He returned the top hat to his father and sat down again with a determined look and crossed arms.
What? said Chan.
I triangulated it, said Colin. Yes, for sure.
Big Radio? In that lighthouse?
It is, it is, and there’s a transmitter that feeds through the satellite uplink. The woman there, probably the crippled man’s wife, must be messing with the radio transmitter. I think probably by mistake. She’s turned the mike on by mistake.
I thought it was down in Houston! Chan stared at him. Or what used to be called Houston.
Trust me, said Colin, and took off his taped-together glasses and wiped them. It would be so nice if somebody would.
Oli took the egg and said, The sea has many voices, many gods and many voices.
The Dry Salvages, said Everett.
Then, we go to the lighthouse and get them to come with us, said the Toastmaster.
Everett jumped up, clutching his book in his fingers stained with experimental ink. Why not? The television is dead, why not?
Why not! cried Oli. The inspectors will never get past the rockfall!
The inspectors are dead, said the Toastmaster. Squashed under the landslide!
Chan hesitated a moment and then said, Yes, the inspectors are dead.
They all began to yell and dance up and down. Oli cried out, in a fit of daring, We’ll just leave! I don’t care if I die, it would be worth it!
Colin stood by the FM radio, his hand on the bar dial.
Think of sea-journeys to unknown coasts and risk and discovery and all those in peril on the sea. Think of curious and vigorous people and the ridicule they have endured, now standing on the prow of a ship shaped like a raven skimming into the fog of Barking or Barkley Sound with a black-and-white dog running along a shoreline after them because the first shall be last and the last shall be first. Think of the brave crews and a person who has a chart and explosive thoughts and azimuth compasses and sextants, master of longitudes.
We have to go, said Oli. And I will not be left behind.
Then let’s start figuring this out, said Chan. Supplies, stuff to offer Gandy.
Something was gathering in the room, ghosts, or things of another world, bodiless visitors out of the storm or the people who had belonged to the Feet who had walked all the way over the ocean bottom to say, Now, now.
Chan said, To the lighthouse. And then to Barking Sound. The time has come. He stood up and spun an unlit cigarette between his fingers. They know it and we know it; the time has come for the kingdom of dreams to go on the offensive.
To Barking Sound, then, said Everett, with his blank book in his hands.
Colin the Radio Guy said, To Barking Sound.
Chapter 50
Colin lived for words and signals floating out of the stormy air and into his headphones, up on the mountain in his radio shack. He traded for point contact diodes, capacitators, and breadboards from the black market scrapper ships. Late at night he listened to the pirate station in Nootka and the TV audio and numbers stations with his thin shoulders hunched and his taped glasses askew. Once upon a midnight he had heard the legendary “Lincolnshire Poacher,” eight bars of a folk tune played over and over, coming from some distant place. He could not figure it out and so left it. He stalked Primary transmissions and handed on the information to the Five Companions. They had all cheered when he brought the news that the Primary Enforcer had gone down, and they gloated over her Mayday.
Colin was an adept at lines of sight, a Druid of invisible talk. In his suffocating shack he put on his handmade headphones and smoked cheap tobacco. He ran his antenna up a hundred-foot Douglas fir that the loggers had missed, and then strung it sideways to another. It was powered by a jerry-built wind charger. His antenna swayed and sprayed rainwater as the Douglas fir was battered by winds.
Colin could receive but not reply to anyone, nor could he call for help or ask where the supply truck was or determine what was happening elsewhere or ask for local weather or find out who had charts. All FM and VHF radio traffic was coastal, broadcasting no more than thirty miles up and down the coast and nothing could reach the interior. This was because all FM traveled line-of-sight and so struck the sides of mountains and rebounded or was absorbed by wet bracken or eaten in flight by lightning. But Big Radio, from its satellite relay twenty thousand feet above, could reach all the coasts and the interior and all the ships at sea.
Chan sat patiently with his thick forearms on his thighs and his coat collar turned up. Outside the radio shack the winter bracken was starched with frost and the mountaintops sprinkled with their first winter snow. Colin’s wind charger purred like a cat. Chan listened and smoked. Colin turned his FM dial to 88.3 an
d Big Radio told them of the Christmas celebrations at Dingley Dell, but around and behind Male Voice One was another voice, barely audible. It sounded like Female Voice One, as if they were together.
Is that her?
Colin nudged the bar dial. That’s her. She’s breaking in, Chan. There’s a transmitter in that rig and she’s turned it on by mistake. The people living there. Her. She doesn’t even know it.
You’re amazing, said Chan.
Oh, thanks, said Colin.
You did this triangulation thing.
Yes, said Colin. And see, see, if we could get it, we could transmit. Oh, oh, transmit. Colin grabbed his own cheeks. I could die. Transmit.
Yes, and if a Primary gunship picks us up? Forty-millimeter mortars, right through the lighthouse tower.
And before they hit us I would say, “You are evil, we are going to kill you all, come to us, we are waiting for you.” Colin smirked a nerdlike murderous smirk.
You are bloodthirsty, said Chan.
I dream bloodthirsty things, said Colin. I want that uplink. In an avid, personal sort of way. If Forensics or Primary gets a fix on the tower, yes, then they’ll hit the base and the sea will roar past in white procession filled with wreck. He crushed out his cigarette in an oyster shell. Chan, where did you get that egg?
Chan smiled and punched Colin lightly in the shoulder. Son, I laid it.
The next night Chan jumped out of the rowboat into the surf that surged around the little island at the mouth of the inlet. Colin and Everett jammed the oars in sand as he fought his way through the freezing, sucking undertow and hung the light on one little juniper. It was a signal for Captain Gandy or Captain Britt Contreras. They hoped it would not be drowned out or blown out, and that one of the captains would see it.
Afterward Chan sloshed up the path through the dark and the lashing fern, the spiny gorse. He hoped his fire was not out. He slept alone and would always sleep alone because when some woman discovered the false charges that had sent him to the labor camps she would gasp and turn away. Door slam, so long, how could you? Beast. A tiny rose of light gleamed out of the streaming bottle house, the last of the fire.
The Five Companions sat at the table in the main cabin of the Bargage Maru. The schooner rocked on its lines at the collapsing dock in the noise of the beating sea. Chan and Colin had managed to net one sockeye as a gift for the lighthouse people and it thumped steadily in a tub.
Gandy regarded the pile of coins, the sack of coal, a new gillnet woven of some kind of stolen and valuable nylon line, a carpenter’s level, and a come-along.
Any of you get seasick?
None of them did or none of them would admit to it.
Gandy leaned forward and said, Miss Oli, are you the only woman?
I can sleep anywhere! she cried. She weltered anxiously in her bright layers. I don’t need a cabin!
Chan said, And Colin can fix your radios and there’s more coal if you want it to trade.
Gandy said, I can use the coal. My radios are fine. He shifted in his chair and his waxed yellow slicker made cracking noises. His lower teeth gleamed in the blond beard of his undershot jaw. They say there was an old experimental station in Barking Sound but I always thought it was defunct a long time ago. Called Bamfield. Changed to Banefield. Maybe because it turned dangerous, like “bane.” Barking Sound is south of here, past Lighthouse Island. It’s just before that coast they call the Graveyard. I have no charts, just my rutter.
Just a rutter, said Chan. Oh man. Handmade, sea-level observation.
Yes. And if we pass the entrance to the sound by mistake in the night or in a fog, we end up in the Graveyard. The storms are pretty steady from the northwest now and they’ll drive us onto the coast. It’s all cliffs, straight up and down as a wall. It will smash us like a sawmill. So we cannot miss that entrance, eh? Beyond that, I have no word. I think this Banefield place is supposed to lie inside the sound to the northeast. You make your own deals at Lighthouse Island with this uplink, but I would give some vital part of my anatomy for charts.
The Toastmaster cried out, Well, sir, well now, the Shalamovs said the man on Lighthouse Island is supposed to be a cartographer as well as a demolition expert.
Ah, said Gandy. You don’t say.
Yes, the guy in the wheelchair.
He’s not, said Gandy. Or one of them isn’t.
So, we should find out, said Chan.
The Five Companions tried not to look at Gandy but at their hands or somewhere else for fear of a refusal. The Toastmaster turned his worn silk top hat around and around in his hands. He had carefully waxed the seams in all their shoes against the salt water and Oli had stitched travel bags for each of them out of pants legs with her avid, winking needle. The bags lay in a pile beside all the food they could collect, wrapped in a rubber sheet and tied. They had fashioned for themselves clumsy sea hats. Into each of the travel bags they had portioned out their treasures: matches, a metal mirror, a knife, a spoon, squares of chenille for towels, slivers of coarse brown soap. When they had pulled the drawstrings shut they felt like Argonauts.
Well then. Chan regarded the glow of his cigarette.
Finally Gandy said, I have a shotgun and a rifle. Are you prepared to shoot?
Chan said, Damn straight.
The others looked at one another nervously.
Captain Gandy spread his hand on the table. And what about the people here?
I showed them how to set nets, said Chan. And traps and where the pig trails are. He lifted his shoulders. They’ll do it if they got kids.
Gandy shook his head. Maybe, he said. He turned to Colin. You better take care of those glasses, he said. Because there’s a big breakdown in the city. Bad, bad flooding. There may never be any more eyeglasses.
Colin took off his glasses and wiped the lenses and stared at them thoughtfully.
Chan said, Then you’ll take us? Yes or no.
Yes.
The Toastmaster said, Gentlemen, and lady, we must all swear on something in immortal and gripping phrases.
And so they sailed away from Saturday Inlet and the long black schooner’s keel bit into salt water the color of jade and her patched sails filled with storm and tore her onward and south, her prow bursting into the cresting rollers.
Chapter 51
After a day and a night they came to Lighthouse Island. It was a clear, rainless day. The sun shone out between slats of clouds in ladders of radiance on which gulls and petrels sailed up and down, up and down. The lighthouse stood like a white shaft in the air, seen from the rise of a wave. They carried gaff-rigged sails on the two masts and the sails full as moons in the moderate wind. The Bargage Maru leaned to one side and a fountain of foam sprayed along her lee as she slid down the boiling scree of a long wave, sent by a storm surge from a distant tempest out in the Pacific, beyond sight except for a hard slaty bank of cloud far to the west.
When they came to the Outer Rocks, they saw at the top of some sea stairs a man and a woman watching. Sails hung out to dry on railings above them, belling in the wind, and the Savonius wind turbine blazed as it spun. The man lifted a pair of binoculars.
Well, he isn’t crippled, said the Toastmaster. He held to the rail with one hand and gripped his top hat with the other.
So which one is he? Oli’s bright headscarf flapped in the wind.
I think he used to be crippled.
The man and the woman seemed bleached as they stood there in their parkas and mufflers. They were people reduced by hunger and the salty wind to a pair of strange and faded angels. The man lowered the binoculars and then stood with a cane in one hand and the other jammed in his coat pocket.
Take care, said Gandy. He has a weapon.
Chan saw the man and the woman staring with the intensity of people who had lost all idea of their own appearance before others, the way animals are who
have no sense of how they themselves look, whose minds live only in their eyes and what it is they see. In human beings it is an odd and dangerous look. So the sea beat and spangled on the gray volcanic shelves and threw sequins into the air and overhead the gulls sailed and watched.
The Five Companions climbed into a small skiff and were lowered into the water and came threading through the Outer Rocks with a crewman at the helm. Colin leaned over the side and was seasick, making horrible animal noises. Oli brought with her a canvas carrier with gift food and the salmon.
Permission to come ashore! yelled Chan.
The man handed the binoculars to the woman and put down his cane. Chan thought, He wants to appear stronger than he is. Then Chan shouted, Are you Orotov?
Yes! The man put his hands around his mouth and shouted, Who are you?
I am Chan the Uncanny! he called out. We are from Saturday Inlet!
Oli gestured with the salmon, which shone like metal. The Toastmaster lifted his disreputable top hat and bowed. Beside him Everett, bald and ink-stained, held up his large book of wallpaper. Chan shoved his bandanna more tightly around his thick, curling salt-and-pepper hair and his gold earring sparkled.
Orotov and his wife now appeared alarmed. Chan had to admit to himself that the Five Companions looked like lunatics. He shouted again, Permission to come ashore!
Orotov turned to the auburn-haired waif beside him. Their coats were marked with charcoal and salt scum and they were as thin inside these coats as clothes poles.
What do you want? shouted Orotov.
Your help! Charts! Demolition! We are going to Banefield!
There was a long pause as Chan the Uncanny hung on to the tossing gunwale and rose and fell with the chop.
How do you know of us? the man shouted.
Long story! Chan bellowed.
The Shalamovs! screamed the Toastmaster.
And finally Chan shouted, Well, there’s more, then!
What?
Now the woman came down three steps to stand behind Orotov; she carried a chair leg.
Lighthouse Island Page 34
