Windward Passage

by Jim Nisbet

  “True.” Huandyai gingerly teased a piece of fabric from beneath a succulent. “What’s this?”

  Crowder squinted. “Some kind of medallion. Or is it a high denomination—what did they call them?”

  “What did they call what?”

  “It’s the same word as—you know.”

  “If you know it, I definitely know it.”

  Huandyai snapped his fingers. “Insignificant public servants.”

  Crowder frowned. “Coins?”

  Huandyai snapped his fingers. “That’s it.”

  “That’s true. They outlived their derogatory nickname. It started out as a unit of money. There were lots of them. Many civilizations used them for, heck, a couple thousand years, I guess.” He fingered the object. “They called coins change, too. There were expressions like pocket change and chump change, for small or insignificant. People would rattle coins in their pockets when they were bored or distracted.”

  “This one’s kind of big, don’t you think?” Huandyai pointed out. “For a pocket, I mean?”

  “Must have been worth a lot.”

  Huandyai made with a regretful expression. “If we had your shoes, we could ask them.”

  “Oh, hey, that reminds me,” Crowder said. He turned and cast a glance down at the beach. “Look.”

  Huandyai followed the line of sight along which his friend pointed. “Our stuff? Our shoes?”

  “They’re about, I’d guess, one point five meters from the tide line.”

  “That was stupid.”

  “At least one of us noticed,” Crowder reminded him pointedly.

  “If we take this with us,” Huandyai said, “some archeologist is going to have a field day.”

  “I figure we got about ten minutes,” Crowder said, looking down at the beach.

  “I guess the skull would be the important part? Despite it’s missing the lower jaw?”

  Crowder shook his head. “We’re naked. We’ll never get it back to the beach.”

  Haundyai frowned. “How long do you think he’s been up here?”

  Crowder shook his head. “Long enough for the birds to have lost interest in him, I guess. How do you know it’s a him, anyway.”

  “Good question. Can you tell from bones?”

  “Maybe if you find the right ones. Or analyze the DNA.”

  “I’ll bet not all of him is here, come to think of it. The weaker scavengers probably flew away with the smaller stuff. Fingers and toes. Like that. Carried it off to all heck and gone. I’ll bet the wind blows hecka strong here in the winter, plenty strong enough to carry stuff away.”

  Huandyai crossed his legs, placed his chin in the palm of one hand, and surveyed the scene. The bone with the dangling watch lay on the ground in front of him, along with the large coin. Watch and coin were heavily corroded, and encrusted with an olive and orange colored mold that must enjoy growing on guano. Call it scatophitic fungi. But as he stared at it, thinking nothing in particular, he realized that there was an alphanumeric significance to certain raised parts of the surface of the coin. An embossment, perhaps. He turned his head slightly and was able to make out an eight, a one, and a six, which he read to himself, moving his lips, as was his wont when he read anything. Kind of a big number. Which made sense. It was a big coin. He knew that the ancients always put famous stuff on coins. Emperors and slaughters and dogs and such. He really wanted a dog.

  A particularly large swell broke against the seaward face of the rock and its spume lofted higher than the boys’ heads, so that airborne droplets twinkled between Huandyai and the late sunlight.

  “Wow!” Huandyai displayed the body of his tongue to the spangles and tasted salt.

  “Well,” Crowder announced from around the other side of the shoulder of the rock, “I found maybe a hand.”

  “What time is it?” Huandyai said, happily blinking in the dazzle.

  Crowder reappeared. “It’s like a puzzle.” In his cupped palms lay several phalanx and carpal bones amid a flat, warped box.

  Huandyai took it up. “What’s this?”

  “It was next to a whole pile of little bones. There’s more around the mouth of a hole.” Crowder didn’t mention that he’d been afraid to stick his own hand in the hole, and so he hadn’t.

  The box was some kind of warped plastic. That much they could tell. The UV had been very hard on it. If the plastic had once been transparent, the rays of the sun had clouded it to opacity and raised all sizes of bubbles in it, too. Neither boy had ever seen such a box before.

  They took turns handling the box, and they handled it gingerly, at first. But before long Huandyai, who was insatiably curious, had begun to pick at it, thinking maybe he could take it apart. But he didn’t have any tools, not even his inch-and-a-half pocket knife, which was as big as a boy his age was allowed to possess. He picked at the box, peered into it, picked at it some more, rapped it against a rock, held it up to the light.

  “You know,” Crowder said at last, looking over the back side of the rock, “we really need to get out of here.” He turned and looked west. The sun had about two hours to go. “And I mean, really out of here. Otherwise, there will be an Incident. If there’s an Incident, we’ll be in the fourteenth grade before they allow us to come back out here again, and by then we’ll be too mature to think it worthwhile. Not to mention, there will be little if any time budgeted for idle adventure.”

  Huandyai grunted. He held the little rectangular box next to his ear and shook it. “Huh.” There was a slot along one of the narrow edges, and for maybe the dozenth time he tried to see into it while he shook the box. “There’s something in here,” he said, squinting.

  “You mean, like a life form?” Crowder said.

  Huandyai inverted the box so that the slot was downward and struck it twice against the palm of his hand. Scraps of a thin material the color of cinnamon cascaded out of the slot. He quickly turned the slot away from his hand, but the things didn’t seem to be alive any more. Mummified, dried up or desiccated, maybe, but not alive. They were all brownish, angular, and all kinds of different shapes. Many featured a pair of parallel edges. None of them was more two centimeters long, all were virtually weightless, altogether ephemeral, light as air, with a substantial surface area relative to its weight, so that the onshore breeze easily carried them away as they tumbled out of the box, airborne as spider floss. If either of the boys had ever blown the down off a dandelion, he might have compared the effect. But neither of them had ever seen a dandelion. The things scattered through the air above the beach like a hatch of winged insects. And, in fact, a snake doctor appeared, nailed one of the brown entities, let it go, and nailed another.

  “Heckaheck!” Huandyai said. “Did you see that?”

  “Corydalus cornutus,” Crowder said. “It doesn’t seem to like them.” He indicated the little box. “Maybe at one time they were nutritious?”

  Huandyai waved the box over his head. More little brown things came out of it, to be carried off by the wind. The snake doctor bore off and away, however, soared over the beach and quickly out of sight. “Yeah,” Huandyai said thoughtfully. “Do you think they were that guy’s food?”

  Crowder shrugged. “Not anymore.”

  Huandyai closed his hand around the box. “I’m going take it with me. Maybe your shoes will know what it is.”

  Crowder bit his lip. He didn’t want to admit that he was suddenly superstitious, but … “Do you think we should disturb this place?” he asked. “Any more than we already have, I mean?”

  “Didn’t you say there is a bunch of these containers? Or seedpods? Or whatever?”

  Crowder nodded. “Yeah. But.”

  “Nobody will miss just this one,” Huandyai suggested, a slight edge of pleading in his voice.

  “Sure,” Crowder decided after a moment. “Just the one. Let’s go.” He moved his head toward the edge. “You better go first.”

  On the way down, Huandyai slipped and fell head first into about two mete
rs of water.

  Huandyai hadn’t even disappeared beneath the surface before Crowder launched himself off the last three meters of rock and landed between his friend and the open sea. He grabbed the boy by the hair and clambered ashore with him, more than a little surprised and alarmed by the violence of the waves as they receded from the steep and rocky beach. In no time at all he’d worn himself out getting the two of them, scratched and panting, above the advancing tide line, along with all their stuff.

  They rested. Huandyai was very quiet. It had been a close call, perhaps, but here they were, winded and wringing wet. It was difficult to imagine that anyone would take any other than a dim view of it, and so they would keep the adventure to themselves for a long time, even after they’d begun to share confidences with girls.

  The two boys were halfway back to Tennessee Valley, high atop Coyote Ridge, before Huandyai remembered the little plastic box.

  “Where is it?” Crowder asked him.

  “I dropped it when I fell.” Huandyai looked back along the ridge toward Pirates Cove, now completely hidden from sight. “I forgot all about it.”

  “Well, that one’s gone,” Crowder consoled him. “But there’s a whole pile of them on top of that rock.” He flicked a hand at Huandyai’s shoulder. “We’ll get another one next time we come out here.”

  “Sure,” Huandyai agreed half-heartedly, still looking back down the trail. The gullies and arroyos behind them were already dark with shadow, and the air had cooled considerably. “Sure we will.”

  As it turned out, the boys were very late, and an Incident had been filed. But they worked it out. Neither of them told anybody what they had seen that day. But it was, as Crowder had predicted, a full eleven years before Huandyai returned to Pirates Cove. He made the trip alone for, at that point, it had been several years since Crowder disappeared.

  By then, no trace of Officer Few or his cassette tapes remained.