by Paul Griffin
“John doesn’t blame you, does he?”
“No, never.”
Dri nodded. “Maybe you’re right. I’m not talking about John’s dad. You’re wrong about that. You were in no way responsible. The only person responsible for the shooting is the shooter. I meant that maybe you were right about John. Maybe he is cool. He went with you to the bleachers to confront the psychopath. He stood by you. He had your back. Matthew, you can blame yourself for one thing only: being awesome. Your dad and Mr. Costello were right to be proud of you. That was beautiful, what you and John did.”
“It was reactive,” I said. “It wasn’t thought out. I gave in to my anger.”
“It was good anger. It was justified. You were giving in to your sense of compassion for the man who was being spit on. Somebody had to stand up to those idiots, and you and John did.”
Something shrieked. I looked to the sky, but why would an eagle be out here? We turned around and saw John at the mouth of the darker tent, just inside the edge of the shade. He was sitting cross-legged, facing us. He held the sharp end of the harpoon in his lap. He didn’t stop looking at us as he filed a notch into the harpoon tip with the side edge of a rusty wrench. Where the chrome plate had chipped away from the wrench the iron was gritty. The fiberglass screeched each time John sawed it. “Can you guys focus on where we are?” John said. “Why do you have to keep dragging it up, Matt? It was three years ago. It has nothing to do with the jam we’re in now.”
“It has everything to do with now,” Dri said. “You two were so brave. You were there for each other.”
“Hey,” John said to JoJo. “Your phone case. Is it waterproof?”
JoJo didn’t seem thrilled with being woken up so suddenly by John’s sawing. He mumbled in Portuguese and then said, “My phone case is waterproof, yes, boss. For surfing. Why?”
John nodded to Dri. “Let me see it.” She gave him JoJo’s phone. The person on watch duty always kept it in case she or he needed to flash the SOS.
John studied the plastic box that covered JoJo’s phone. He handed the phone back to Dri. “Can you program the flashlight app to flash once every thirty seconds or so?”
After she did that he looped the phone’s safety bracelet around his wrist and lowered the phone into the water.
“What are you doing?” JoJo said. He went right back to scratching himself.
“Fishing,” John said. He glared at me over his shoulder. “You think you could stop talking long enough to give me a hand here? Man the harpoon.” We leaned out off the front end of the boat. John lowered his voice. “You feel better now?” He was practically hissing at me. “You got it all off your chest?”
But I hadn’t. Not all of it. The phone flash lit up the empty water.
To: [email protected]
* * *
From: [email protected]
* * *
Subject: DAY 8
* * *
Date: Wednesday, August 25, 1:45 PM
* * *
Both Halloway and Costello were set up with counseling at their middle school after Costello’s father was killed. What they said is privileged information, obviously, but the school counselor was able to give me this much: Halloway stopped going after his third session. Costello walked out of the first session, not even five minutes into it, and he never came back.
August 26, late morning, the ninth day …
We’d run out of water the day before. The air was cold and damp, but we didn’t get any rain. We brushed the dew into the center of the tarp and sail with our hands and ended up with a mouthful each.
JoJo took a picture of himself against the fog. “You said the hunger would go away in a few days, but I’m hungrier than ever,” he said.
“John’ll catch something today,” Dri said. “He will.” She tried to stop JoJo from picking at his leg. He batted her hand away. His palm smacked hers so hard he knocked her off balance. That woke him up. He seemed to be as stunned as she was, as we all were.
“Dri, my God, I’m sorry,” he said.
Dri played cool, but I saw her pulse in her neck. “It’s okay.”
“No, seriously, sinto muito. I didn’t mean it.”
“I know you didn’t, sweetie pie. Jo, you can’t scratch anymore, okay? If you have to, pat it, like Matthew said.”
“Of course.”
“It’ll take the sting out.”
“Okay.”
“Matthew, maybe you better take another look at it,” Dri said.
The wound was beginning to smell. It was moist gray in the middle and red around the edges.
“Matt?” JoJo said. “Is it worse than yesterday?”
“Same.”
I’m sure he knew I was lying. All you had to do was take a look at it and you knew there was only one way this thing—a hole in his leg—could go. Deeper. I rebandaged it with the strips of towel I had used on Stef’s head. JoJo’s blood oozed through what was left of Stef’s. He mumbled in Portuguese.
“Matt, Dri, come here,” John said. He was at the back of the boat with the binoculars to his eyes. He handed them to Dri. He pointed to where the fog had burned off. “What is that?”
“Where?”
“Way out there. See?”
Dri handed me the binoculars. The water was dark green. Far off was a pale shadow. A pair of gulls circled it.
“Is it?” Dri said.
“Is it what? Please, Matt, let me see,” JoJo said. He grabbed the binoculars.
John was leaning over the side of the boat, trying to find the faint wake line. “We’re moving away from it.” He started the engine. The rumble was louder than I had remembered, the vibrations ringing the boat much more intense. They were wonderful, the sound and feel of a machine after nine days of nothing but wind and wave slaps. And movement. We were moving the boat instead of letting it be blown around. The pull of the engine rocked me backward, and I laughed.
“Terra?” JoJo said. A tear wiggled through a patch of dried salt on his cheek. “Terra.”
Land.
To: [email protected]
* * *
From: [email protected]
* * *
Subject: REQUEST TO SHIFT SEARCH FOCUS FROM LAND TO SEA, ASAP
* * *
Date: Thursday, August 26, 11:51 AM
* * *
The local police department’s call database for August 17 lists an unfounded complaint about a Windsurfer in the vicinity. The complainant’s ID was PRIVATE, but I just ran the number. It was Driana.
Here’s why I ran the number: Scott Pierce, Gonzaga’s neighbor, reported just now that his Windsurfer was stolen, along with his boat. Coast Guard has been notified.
Noon …
The land seemed to fade each time we went over a wave. “Is it a mirage?” JoJo said.
“Not if we all saw it,” John said.
“John, I’m sliding back into I-really-want-to-like-you-but-can’t mode,” Dri said. “Can you just be sweet to him? Or how about this: Can you not be nasty?”
The land had vanished, all right, but that was because a wave was blocking our view. Once the wave rolled past the boat, I saw it again. At first I thought it was a few miles away, but it was much closer. The head wind was strong, and the engine groaned as the boat struggled to chop through the waves. We were burning a lot of gas.
The closer we came to the land, the stranger and smaller it looked. It was flat and treeless. When we got even closer I saw it was moving toward us with the waves. They seemed to lift it, a whitish stain in the water. I was pretty sure it was dead seaweed.
It was plastic, a soupy bobbing island of it, bags mostly, soda bottles, laundry detergent containers, all the same bleached gray. I’d read that in the Pacific, patches of this stuff stretch out for hundreds of miles. They’re decades old and just beneath the surface. You can’t see them from the water. You need
satellites to find them. This patch was much smaller, and most of the bottles were intact and floated on the surface. This was a fresh spill. Not fresh enough, though. The ship that dumped the stuff wasn’t anywhere in sight. The sun and salt and wind and currents had melded the bags into ropes and clumps. I remembered my textbook for the first responder class. The picture of a body after a head-on car crash. The victim had been ejected from the vehicle, and the intestines hung like streamers from his abdomen.
This was the exact moment JoJo started to turn mean.
He bent over and retched. He didn’t have anything in there to throw up. He punched the side of the boat and cursed himself for hurting his hand, and then he punched the fiberglass harder. He glared at John. “We just wasted all that gas. Why are you smiling?”
“We didn’t waste it. Look.” John pointed to a dead fish caught in the plastic. It was maybe two feet long. I could have been looking at a fresh pizza. I’d been feeling queasy since we left land the week before, but now it was kicking in, that survival instinct John was talking about, the one that could make you do things you didn’t think you were capable of, like eating a fish that looked rotten. By the time the carcass hit the floor of the boat a clicking sound had started up in my gut. My own stomach didn’t want to be part of me anymore—an alien tired of being locked up in my rib cage. It wanted to crawl up my throat and drop out of my mouth, onto the meat.
My stomach wasn’t the only one doing strange things. JoJo’s moaned, a ghost from an old movie. He pulled a long scab off his forearm and bled as he watched John size up the fish. “What are you waiting for?” JoJo said.
“It’s been dead awhile,” John said. “Look at the eyes.” They were milky. Scummy threads collected in the gills.
“You’re thinking we should throw it back?” I said.
“We’re not throwing it back,” JoJo said.
“But if we get food poisoning,” Dri said.
JoJo cut her off. “Give me the knife.”
John eyed JoJo a little too long. He drew the knife he’d made from the Windsurfer’s crossbar. He didn’t give it to JoJo. He cut into the fish. He worked carefully. We watched him. The skin on John’s shoulders had burned, but it was healing now. The blisters had dried and begun to flake away. The patches of new skin were dull reddish brown. His eyes were just as shiny as they always had been, just as black. “I think it might be okay,” he said. A half inch in, the meat was pink and then dark red. John trimmed away the rot. The skin and scales were tough, and cutting them away took time.
“This is ridiculous,” JoJo said. He elbowed John away from the fish. He grabbed the knife and hacked a chunk out of the fish’s belly. He popped it into his mouth and chewed. “It’s fine. You’ve never had sashimi before? Of course you haven’t. I forgot whom I was talking to here. Sashimi. Raw fish. You would pay handsomely for this at Kura, if you could afford to go there. Yes, Kura, one of the finest Japanese restaurants in your very own New York City. Never heard of it? Then you will just have to take my word for it.” He chopped the fish and pushed pieces at each of us.
“We need to clean away the bad parts,” John said. “Only the deep meat is any good. I was going to say I would test it first, until you grabbed yourself a mouthful. I was going to eat a little piece and wait to see if it settled, or if it would make us sick.”
“I said it’s fine. Eat it.” He hacked at the fish and divvied it up. He popped another hunk into his mouth as he worked.
“You need to slow down there, JoJo,” John said. “You haven’t eaten in more than a week. If you keep gobbling it down like that, it’ll come right back up.”
JoJo tossed a piece of fish at John. It hit him in the cheek. “Stop talking and start eating your share, before I eat it for you.”
“JoJo,” Dri said.
“What, Driana? What? I’m growing tired of this John here. Why do you always feel you can tell me what to do, John? I mean why do we all listen to you? Why are you in charge? Honestly now, Driana, why have we let him take charge?”
“He knows what he’s doing, Jo,” Dri said.
“He’s a grease monkey. Is that how you say it? Yes, a grease monkey. So if I need my car fixed, I’ll summon him. Meanwhile, John, I don’t need you to direct me. In fact, let me give you some direction. Back off. Be like your friend here and learn your place.”
“So it’s like that now,” John said.
“It was always like that,” JoJo said.
“Okay then,” John said. “I see.”
“No, you don’t,” JoJo said. “You don’t see at all. You think you see. Watch yourself, John. You’re making me angry.”
“Okay,” Dri said. “Let’s all just take a deep breath.”
“No, let’s not,” JoJo said. “This isn’t your meditation yoga class, Driana, with lattes after on the Upper East Side.” He nodded to me. “Advise your friend there to leave me alone. You understand me, John?”
“JoJo, please,” Dri said. “It’s okay. We understand. We do.”
“I wasn’t talking to you, Driana. Hey, monkey, I said do you hear me? Then say it.”
“I hear you.”
“Good. Now keep your mouth shut.” He licked the red pulp from his fingers and finished divvying up the fish. He kept a much bigger pile for himself. “I’m twice as big as any of you,” he said. “I need more. Here.” He tossed the knife near John. “You want it back, right? I’m sure you do.” He gathered his meat and slid down the bench, away from us, to the engine, which he used as a table. His skin had become scaly over most of his back and arms. His left shoulder could have been clawed by a bear. His leg was swollen to the point that the skin was about to split along the lines where he’d torn into it, up the length of his shin.
“Should we try it?” Dri said.
We eyed the meat JoJo had left us. John trimmed out the reddest parts. “You know what milk tastes like when it nears the expiration date, just the littlest bit sour?” John said. “If you get a hint of that feeling, make yourself throw up.”
We ate. The meat tasted like metal and dirt, but it was fresh enough. I understood why JoJo had wolfed it down. My body wanted the blood in the meat. There was this internal scream happening, a pull in every one of the tens of trillions of cells that had woven together to make me. It was magnetic, my DNA reaching out for the iron in the blood. I forced myself to eat slowly, to chew, to suck out the blood. Pretty soon I wasn’t shaking anymore. I’d felt chilled the last few days, no matter how hot it was out there, but now I just felt the heat. My fingers weren’t cold anymore. The skin under my fingernails had been pale blue all week. Now it was pink.
A half hour of slow chewing later the meat was gone. John saved the rotten parts and the rest of the carcass and wrapped them in plastic. “Bait,” he said. He tucked it into the bottom of one of the cabinets.
“The flies,” Dri said.
“No flies out here,” John said. “They would have been on the fish already.” He lowered his voice. “Or on him.” He nodded at JoJo.
“The gulls then,” I said. “They’ll be dive-bombing us for that stuff.”
They hovered high up, directly overhead. John almost smiled at them. “I hope so,” he said.
Dri watched the gulls. “Maybe we’re near land,” she said. “What’s their flying range? Anybody know?”
Nobody knew.
JoJo burped. He’d been burping since he started gobbling the fish. He was lying on his back now, under the tarp. He sat up. He leaned over the bow and vomited.
John and I pulled him back in. “Into the boat,” I said. “Throw up into the boat.”
“Get off me,” JoJo said between heaves.
“You’re throwing away the meat,” John said.
JoJo pounded the bottom of the boat and cursed.
“It’s okay, Jo,” Dri said.
“Will you stop saying that?” JoJo said.
“I just don’t want to see you beat yourself up.”
“I’m madder at him than a
t myself.” He nodded John’s way. “I’m furious with him for being right. This is insanity. How can it be that I am the first one to fall apart here?” He scratched his shin, and the sore opened up. He screamed but kept digging at the wound. “I’m on fire,” he said. “My leg is on fire.” Dri reached out to stop him, but I grabbed her arm and eased her away. JoJo slipped into the water and floated on his back. He muttered and cursed and swam off. The wind had pushed the boat away from most of the plastic. A few laundry-soap containers bobbed here and there. I did a double take on a Clorox jug to be sure it wasn’t a shark’s head.
Dri called to JoJo, but he ignored her. She reached into one of the cabinets for a life vest.
“Wait, I’ll go,” I said.
“No way,” Dri said. “He’s not feeling either one of you at the moment.”
“Now why would you say that?” John said.
“I know how to calm him down,” Dri said. “I know what he needs to hear.”
“And what’s that?” John said. “That he’s not about to turn into a raging psychopath any minute now?”
“That you’re not going to hurt him,” Dri said. She grabbed another life vest from the cabinet and lowered herself into the water. She swam to him, but not too close. She treaded water. She didn’t say anything. He didn’t look at her. He stopped cursing and started crying. “I’m staying here,” he said.
