“Ça marche. I think we can eat them.”
“I think so, too. I’ll put them in the coals. They should cook pretty quickly, and we can have them with bananas.”
“I’d rather have them with this coconut.”
“Where did you find it?”
“There are just a few coconut palms on the end of the island. I saved the coconut water inside, we can drink it with dinner.”
“How did you get it down from the tree?”
Sophie picked up a hunk of volcanic rock and tossed it up and down in her palm. “Le fastball,” she said with a slight torque of the lips that verged on a smile.
Barry did smile and celebrated their small burst of good fortune with another Russian cigarette. Three quick flicks of the Bic and it was lit, filling their wild beachhead with at least a half-civilized smell.
“Why do you think the survival kit had cigarettes, anyway?”
Sophie shrugged. “To bribe local fishermen, I presume.”
Barry chuckled. “Like that would even work.”
“It worked with you, didn’t it?”
She had a point. Barry picked up the clams and arranged them in the coals. The palm fronds burned quick and hot and were certainly not ideal for creating coal beds, but the clams probably did not require all that much cooking. Once he was satisfied with their position, he tried out the hammock, settling gently into its web. “Sex Machine” had concluded, and a disc jockey announced the next song—“Lookin’ Out My Back Door,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival—in an Asian language he could not identify. He remembered hearing the song quite often on the car radio in Cleveland, on cold winter mornings when his father drove him to school. Sometimes they’d both sing along, Just got home from Illinois, locked the front door, oh boy . . .
“This hammock is great,” Barry remarked, locking his fingers behind his head, watching the waltz of the palm trees above.
“I’m glad you like it, because you’re going to be sleeping in it.”
“I am?”
“Of course. Tonight, anyway. Someone should stay outside with the flare gun for when the rescue planes come. They could pass by at night.”
“Okay. Sure.” The palm-thatched shelter did look inviting, but a breeze-rocked hammock wasn’t a bad alternative. Barry closed his eyes; he could smell the clams now, wow, a goddamn clambake on a desert island in the middle of the South Pacific. Who’d believe it?
“This all feels like a dream, doesn’t it?” Barry stated rather whimsically, pausing to tap a cap of ash from his Russian cigarette. “I mean, it’s all so surreal, you know, both of us here, alone on this—” A hard, twisting pinch to his rib cage yanked him from his philosophizing. “Ow, shit!”
“This isn’t a dream, putain de merde. So wake up and quit acting like a typical stupid American.”
Sophie glowered at him, tremendously perturbed by something he had said. Christ, thought Barry, this French girl. He rubbed at the fresh bruise and reconsidered the situation he was in. It certainly would make a good story someday, having survived a plane crash and swum to an island and spent a week, maybe less, with a pretty young castaway—and after that flotilla of steaming ships came to whisk them away, he thought, he’d never have to see her again.
Bananas, coconuts, pools of fresh rainwater, clusters of accessible clams—the supplies that the island provided may have struck Barry and Sophie as a convenient accident, but their existence owed far more to the prescience of Polynesians than to the generosity of Providence. Barry and Sophie did not yet realize it, but they were hardly the first visitors to land on the island—in fact, early Polynesians had beaten them to it by hundreds of years. For while medieval Europeans were still clinging like frightened children to the wading pool wall of the Atlantic, these bold and inventive people were venturing into the deep end of an entire Pacific hemisphere, landing their immaculately carved outrigger canoes in such far-flung places as Samoa, Easter Island, New Zealand, Hawaii, Tahiti—and, eventually, even the tiny island that Barry and Sophie came to call home.
To those ancient Polynesians, a three-thousand-mile voyage over open seas was nothing, a mere interstate road trip to see the grandparents in Illinois. But as is the case with any good road trip, a few rest stops were in order, to stretch the legs, relieve the bladder, and restock supplies. And with Motel 6 and Wendy’s still a ways in the offing, these Polynesian adventurers had to get creative. In effect, they created their own rest stops, and Barry and Sophie’s island had once been just such a place. No, the barren scrap of rock the Polynesians discovered was far too small for long-term habitation. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t plant a few banana trees, seed a few clam beds, release a few pigs and chickens, and stop there for the night when they needed a break. They even carved a pair of cisterns into the island’s central rock face, with channels carefully chipped away to coax in the rain. The island served its purpose wonderfully, becoming a regular Howard Johnson’s on the oceanic highway that connected a widely dispersed and highly peripatetic society for more than five hundred years.
Then, with the arrival of that first wave of colonially minded Europeans, all of that came to a grinding halt. By the time Gauguin landed in the Marquesas in the late nineteenth century, such times were largely forgotten, with a formerly seafaring people having become more or less sedentary in their habits and the uninhabited island in question erased from their cultural memory. It was last visited by Polynesians in the year 1762, when a Tahitian prince known to the history books as Tu-nui-ea-i-te-atua-i-Tarahoi Vairaatoa Taina Pomare spent a week there with his entourage on his way to visit distant cousins in Eiao, and last alighted upon by Westerners in 1767—Samuel Wallis of the HMS Dolphin dropped anchor there for the night while circumnavigating the globe, killing every wild pig and chicken on the island in the process. The coconuts, bananas, cisterns, and clam beds prevailed, however, dutifully awaiting the next batch of travelers in need of sanctuary—who, as we now know, happened to arrive almost two and a half centuries later in the form of one Barry Bleecker and one Sophie Ducel.
Not Providence, exactly, but providential indeed.
The night found the two fresh castaways in their designated positions—Barry cradled shirtless in the hammock, flare gun atop his belly, Sophie nested away in her shelter, trying to muffle her sobs. Barry considered checking in on her to see if she was all right but suspected such things would only result in another bilingual tongue-lashing. And frankly, he was a little afraid of her. Besides, he was an American, and a midwesterner at that—grief was far better suppressed than shared. So he remained in the hammock, staring quietly skyward, the moon above him a pearly chaperone to all manner of cosmic splendors, but sadly no blinking rescue planes or winking choppers. The closest thing was satellites, small reminders of civilized light, crawling their way through the tangle of constellations. Barry remembered them from the same Boy Scout camp that had taught him basic first aid and female anatomy. He’d received the astronomy merit badge following a full week spent under the night’s perforated ceiling, and his instructor had actually known each satellite by name. “G-47-X12 should be coming along,” and sure enough, a fleck of light would slip through the stars. And Barry found comfort in that, in their lingering presence, and he wished he knew their names as well.
At some late hour, he finally took out his contacts and surrendered to the darkness, closing his eyes, drinking in the breeze. But thanks to the roughness of the ropes and his evolving sunburn, he was unable to sleep. Itchy and restless, he decided to take a crack