28

E ach day I sat in a shaded niche in the boulders and let my gaze shift back and forth from the poorly made square of the raft to the waves. Even on a calm day, I kept picturing the raft broken, capsized. I would see Tex, Tsukino-san, and myself sinking through the vast volumes of salt water to the distant bottom.

In another scenario, far worse than the first, the raft remained afloat. After a week or more adrift beneath the burning sun, we would have to deal with Tex. Would we really butcher him? I could refuse, couldn’t I? But could I trust myself? Did I know to what lengths hunger and thirst might drive me?

Life on the island had to be better than facing such a quandary. Yet the island offered so little. Is it better to die on this barren outcrop? I had read enough of adventures on the high seas to know the unwritten law. If necessary for survival, human flesh could be consumed. Yet that law applied to shipwrecks, accidents, unforeseen tragedy, not premeditated murder. We could, after all, remain safely on land.

Tsukino-san visited often to sit with me for an hour or two. Small, wiry, browned by his years in the sun, he moved through the sweltering air with an ease that astonished me. He thought nothing of coming around midday, when the heat made the air tremble. He too had thoughts about how to improve the raft. One by one we discussed our ideas. I wanted us to be in agreement before we started the actual work. It wasn’t until the fifth or sixth day that he inquired about something other than the raft.

“Were you married?” he asked.

I considered his question. It seemed so long ago.

“Yes,” I answered.

He didn’t ask another question that day. We began to dismantle the raft. We’d started early in the morning, before the fiery warmth of midday. The sun rose above the volcano’s peak and cast its pink iridescence over the waves and the clouds in their hovering formations. We worked in a spot between two boulders that was shaded except during the middle of the day, when we’d break for several hours.

“Were you happy in your marriage?” he asked the next day as we finished unfastening the raft and began to rearrange its materials in a new shape. It would have a crude prow, a rudder, and, centered between them, a mast with a sail stabilized by a horizontal boom. This would give us some hope of moving with the winds and setting a course. It would be more difficult to construct, and require additional materials, but I believed that we could complete it within a week or ten days. Our first task was to set up log rollers so we could easily move it down the slope to the rocky embankment and slide it into the waves.

“Yes, for a time.”

“Only for a time?” he asked, straining to roll a tree trunk into position.

I went to help him.

“We divorced.”

He grunted. We pushed together and soon had the rollers in place so we could begin the raft itself.

“She disobeyed you?”

I wasn’t certain how to respond to this.

“No, not at all,” I finally replied.

“Why didn’t you want her?” he asked.

“I did want her. We were married for ten years. In the end, she didn’t want me.”

His lips pursed in disgust, as if he had eaten something bitter.

“She lived in your household,” he asserted. “Didn’t your mother instruct her?”

“My mother didn’t live with us. We lived by ourselves.”

We worked in silence for a while. I knew he came from another culture and another time. He didn’t ask more until we stopped at midday and moved deeper into the rocks to rest in the shadows.

“You had sex with your wife?”

“Yes.”

“You enjoyed it?”

“Yes, very much.”

“You did it often?”

“Yes.”

“For ten years?”

“Yes, for ten years.”

Tsukino-san sat with his legs crossed and his back erect like a monk in meditation. He closed his eyes. At first he’d seemed suspicious and quick to take offense, but he let go as we worked together. I could see the boy in this old man, a boy who had spent most of his life as far from the centers of civilization as one could imagine. I rested on my back, the humidity like a saturated cloth spread over my face.

“Did you have a son?”

I had fallen asleep. Often we napped and woke when the sun had moved behind the cliffs. He sat in the same posture. I raised myself on an elbow and pushed up to face him. The sleepiness remained with me. For a moment I was at a loss for how to answer.

“No.”

“A daughter?”

“No.”

“Could she have children?”

“Yes, I think so.”

We returned to our work. For the most part I focused on what we had to do and not on the journey we would attempt.

Much later that day, when the sun hovered over the scarlet rim of the ocean, Tsukino-san asked me another question.

“Did you have a job?”

“Yes.”

I expected him to ask what kind of job, but he didn’t. We had begun to position the logs we would fasten together for the deck. Stopping for the day, we took the short walk back to the cave. Tex sat by the entrance, his back against the stone. He grinned and raised a hand when he saw us coming.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“Fine,” I answered.

“How much longer?”

Tired from my labor, I sat beside him.

“Maybe a week, give or take a few days.”

“That’ll be good. The sooner the better.”

He said something like this every night when we came back. He wasn’t well enough to walk the short distance and check on our progress for himself. His face had a pallid cast despite his deep tan, and he kept his hand pressed to the ribs on the left side of his chest.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know.”

“You feel worse?”

He shook his head. “It’s about the same. I just want to make it on that raft.”

“What is it, then?”

“Now that I can’t move around much, all I do is think and daydream.”

“What are you daydreaming about?”

“It’s never one thing, but part of it’s not very pleasant.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Today, about the war, the training, my buddies, the planes, some of the missions, and being shot down. I go over that again and again. Places I went that I had never heard of when growing up in Brownfield. Then,” he gave a bashful smile, “about girls, the girls I knew back in high school mainly. I see them like they’re standing in front of me. Sometimes I think I even smell them. And my mom. I remember her hugging me good-bye in the mornings before school. I’d grown too big to want her to kiss me, but she kissed me anyway. Every day. I’d hug her now if I could, you can bet on that. And working on the farm with my dad, the cattle, the fields, the pens. My mom cried when I enlisted. She hugged me and wouldn’t let me go. My dad shook my hand and looked into my eyes. That’s stayed with me always, that look. Today I got to thinking about where they’re buried. I’ve thought about it before, but it was strong today. There’s only one cemetery where they’d want to rest. It’s in Brownfield. The entrance has brick pillars. Then it’s flat, with grass that gets scorched and a bunch of trees that don’t give enough shade. I imagined tramping through the old markers till I found my mom and dad side by side.”

“Not the happiest thoughts,” I said.

“That was the good part.”

“What was the bad part?”

“Well … ” Tex looked down and cleared his throat, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “I hardly know if I ought to say this, but somehow I want to. You know the way daydreams can be.”

“Yes?”

“Well, the cave is pitch black at night, but we know how to find things in the dark. While you sleep, I reach up on the ledge and take Tsukino-san’s knife. Then I rest my hand on your chest.”

“In the dream,” I said, not liking how easily this might have actually happened.

“I feel your heart beating, throbbing against my palm. There’s a place where a knife can slip through the ribs and right into the heart. I hold the knife over that place and wait. I hear your breath going in and out. I hear Tsukino-san’s breathing too, just a little distance from us. You know how dark the cave is. I can’t see at all, just feel and hear. I smell sulfur. Taste it in my mouth. It’s coming off the volcano or leaking out of the rock walls. I don’t have a thought in my mind. Then I press the knife down. I hear a little sound, like a pop, then gurgling. I don’t know if you bleed a lot. I run outside. I want to launch the raft and get away from here without you or him.”

I couldn’t answer when he finished. Tex seemed such a gentle man, but was this fantasy a warning?

“I told you it was pretty bad,” Tex observed when I didn’t say anything. “I should have kept my big trap shut.”

“Why would you have a fantasy like that?” I asked.

“How should I know?” Tex answered. “Dreams have a mind of their own.”

“I’m willing to stop working on the raft,” I said.

“I know.”

Tex didn’t meet my eyes. He looked at the sand and brushed his free hand aimlessly back and forth.

“If that’s what you want, you only have to say the word.”

I was as willing to stop as I was to continue. I found it curious that I didn’t feel more strongly either way. I wanted to join them in a community of shared interests and hopes. If they wanted to leave, then I wanted to help them. If they wanted to stay, then I would stay and never have to condone taking Tex’s life on the high seas.

“No,” he finally answered, “I want you to finish that raft as quickly as you can.”

“You’re sure?”

He looked up at me.

“As sure as I’ve been about anything.”

Tex’s daydream made me work even harder during the days that followed. I wanted to leave the island as soon as possible. Tex remained friendly, but I worried about the emotions he might be concealing from me and perhaps even from himself. I convinced Tsukino-san to leave his samurai knife at the raft so it would always be available for our work. It made me feel safer.

The raft slowly took on the shape we had imagined. It had a prow and a mast. Since we had no navigational instruments, we would rely on the position of the sun and the stars to set our course. We built up the raft’s outer edges so they would extend down below the waterline as a precaution against capsizing and be high enough to keep out the waves. Whatever fresh water and other supplies we took, such as our rudimentary tools and scraps of clothing to protect us from the sun, would be covered with branches and tied to the deck to keep them from washing away in heavy seas. Life preservers frequently washed ashore. We left three loose, to take on deck, and lashed the rest to the outside of the raft for flotation.

From time to time, Tsukino-san returned to his leisurely cross-examination.

“Did you live in a house?”

“As a child. Now I live in a building in the city.”

“A building,” he repeated as if inhaling the scent of a rare blossom.

To my surprise, Tsukino-san brought out the parachute that saved Tex’s life more than sixty years before. The thick fabric was stiff and hard to shape, but in the sand we made a pattern for the sail and used the samurai blade to cut what we needed. Then we trimmed strips to fasten it to the mast and the boom. It was makeshift, but we did our best with what we had at hand. In a storm we would be able to untie the sail from the boom and fasten the fabric around the mast.

“Did you have running water?” Tsukino-san asked when we finished attaching the sail.

“Yes.”

“A bathroom?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Did it have a bathtub?”

He had stopped working and leaned against the side of a boulder.

“Yes, it did.”

“Electricity?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Gas?”

“For cooking on the stove.”

“And heat. Did you use wood?”

“No, oil. It heated the whole building.”

I finished tying the thick strips of cloth in place and looked up to find Tsukino-san in a reverie. His dark eyes looked through me to somewhere in the distance.

“What a glorious life,” he said at last, focusing his gaze on me. “How you must miss it.”