As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth (19 page)

“¡B
uenas!”
said the island man to Ry. He spoke warmly.

“¿Están perdidos, o son estupidos, o locos?”

“Do you speak Spanish?” Del asked. “I think I understood ‘good’ and ‘stupid.’”

“I take it in school,” said Ry. “He wants to know if we are lost, stupid, or crazy.”

“Tell him, All three,” said Del. “All three, and even more.”

“Todos los tres, y mas,”
said Ry. His Spanish was not that smooth. But it was better than nothing. The island man laughed.

“¿Saben, dónde están?”
he asked.

“No,”
said Ry.
“No se.”

“
¿Tienen un mapa?” preguntó el hombre de la isla.

“He wants to know if we have a map,” said Ry.

“I’ll get it,” said Del. “Ask him how far it is to St. Jude’s.” He trotted back to the boat to retrieve the map and back while Ry tried to remember how to phrase the question.

“¿Como…cuánto distancio hay a St. Jude’s?”

“¿No tienen GPS?”

“No, no GPS.”

“Ah, OK,” dijo el hombre. “Por cierto, soy Alejandro.”

Aha! An easy one!

“Mucho gusto,” dijo Ry
, and shook Alejandro’s mano.
“Me llamo Ry; y se llama Del. Somos de los Estados Unidos.”
He hoped Alejandro would ask him how old he was, if he had any brothers and sisters, and what sports he liked. He could say all of those things.

“¡No me digan!” dijo Alejandro. “¿Cual fue mi primera pista?”
This meant, No kidding, what was my first clue? Though Ry didn’t get it.

Alejandro took one side of the map Del had brought over and pulled it open.

“Esto se llama St. Jeroen. Nosotros estamos aquí—esta isla se llama ‘Maceta,’ la ultima isla antes de llegar al océano, el Atlántico. Tienen suerte que pararon aquí. El mar es enorme y África está muy lejos.”

Roughly: This island is called Maceta (“flowerpot.”)
You are lucky you stopped here. It’s the last island before the Atlantic. It’s quite a large ocean—a long way to Africa.

“¿La ultima isla?”
asked Ry.

“Sí,” dijo Alejandro.

“¿Antes de Africa?”
asked Ry.

“Sí.”

Ry miró el mapa. Miró
at the dot Alejandro had pointed to. He pondered the wrench, the compass, and the finite-but-not-finite-enough Atlantic. He was pretty sure Del got the picture, but he felt compelled to say it anyway.

“We could have died,” he said. “We could have kept going out into the ocean and never landed.”

“But we didn’t,” said Del. “That’s what makes it a happy story instead of a sad story.”

He said it in a lighthearted, singsong way, as if he were speaking to a child.

“¡Ven conmigo!” dijo Alejandro. “Les indicaré dónde está su isla.”

Come with me. I’ll show you where your island is.

He gestured for them to follow.

T
hey climbed a path that traversed the face of the hillside, tacking sharply to the left and the right through profusions of trees and bushes and flowers to negotiate its steepness. Tiny lizards darted and paused. Creatures that seemed something between a squirrel and a prairie dog rose up out of shrubbery to watch them pass. Goats looked out at them through horizontal pupils but did not stop munching.

The path was wide enough for two of the three to walk abreast. It was only dirt, but it had been carved out and graded with some care. At the top of it, a cart waited. They squeezed past it into a generous clearing, a taming of the undergrowth. As well as the overgrowth.

A low stone wall meandered around the free-form perimeter. At one end a rounded lobe of the clearing held
a garden. The striped lighthouse towered from the other end. Midway between the two sat a whitewashed cottage with a red tile roof. In front of it, something roasted on a spit over a fire. Untroubled chickens, reddish brown and white and black-and-white ones, trolled picturesquely upon the green for bugs and worms, scratching and dipping, throughout the territory.

Alejandro led them over to the lighthouse, where they ascended a stairway carved into one of the boulders at its base. From there, they had an unobstructed view of…water and air. Sea and sky. It was a panorama that gave new meaning to the word
island
. Or the words
the ends of the earth
. They were standing on one of those ends.

Then Alejandro pointed and said,
“¡Miren! ¡Allí!”
Look, there. They
miraron
and
vieron otra isla
. Another island. A little bump rising from the sea.

Now Alejandro took the map from Del and opened it again. He pointed and used kindergarten-level words Ry could mostly understand, to show and tell them that the island they were looking for was on the other side of the island they could see.

“Ya casi están allí,”
he said. You are almost there.

“How far?” asked Del. “Ask him how long it will take us.”

“¿Cuánto tiempo por ir? ¿Cuántos horas?”
asked Ry. How many time to go? How much hours?

“Esta noche es demasiado tarde, pero mañana, al medio dia. Con buena suerte y viento fuerte,” dijo Alejandro.
It’s too late tonight. But tomorrow, by lunchtime. With luck and good wind.

“¿No lo podemos hoy? ¿Seguro?”
asked Ry. Not today? Sure? He could see that the sun was falling toward the horizon. And to be honest, he had no desire to jump back into the boat.

“¿Conocen bien las estrellas?” dijo Alejandro.
How well do you know the stars? And,
“Un sitio para descansar por una noche es preferible a uno permanente.”
A temporary resting place is better than a permanent one.

Of which Ry understood “is better than” and “permanent.” It gave him the gist.

“¿Si están tan apurados, por qué viajan en velero?” preguntó Alejandro
. If you are in a hurry, why are you in a sailboat? And,
“La noche no será larga. ¿Que hay tan importante allá?”
The night is not long. What is so important there?

It was a reasonable question. Ry wasn’t sure his Spanish was up to it, so he just shrugged. But later, he tried to answer it as they sat chewing on roasted meat of
some kind. Which was not that bad. Actually, really good.

“My grandfather is lost. In the United States. My mother and father are here on a boat, or an island. We look for them.

“My grandfather’s head…” He couldn’t remember how to say that something
might
be happening. Or might have already happened.

“Danger,” he said. “We need to find him. My parents need…to know. To help.”

“¿Esta seguro que ellos estan por St. Jude’s?”
Are you sure they are on St. Jude’s?

Yes. I think that. I hope it.

The thing was, his days were getting mixed up now. What day it was, which day his parents had said they were leaving. He was pretty sure it was tomorrow that was the now-or-why-bother day.

“¿S
olamente usted vive aqui?”
asked Ry.
“¿En esta isla?”
Only you here? In this island?

The three of them sat on the porch of the little cottage, around a table which held the detritus of their meal. Ry was the interpreter. Piecing together a conversation with his level of Spanish skills was like building a bridge out of toothpicks and gumdrops. You wouldn’t want to put a lot of weight on it—yourself, for example—but it took your mind off your worries.

“Sólo yo y las ardillas de tierra,”
said Alejandro. Only me and the burrowing squirrels.

Ry didn’t know the words for burrowing squirrels.
“¿Ardillas de tierra?”
he repeated.
“¿Que son esas?”

Alejandro smiled. He held up a finger, then the palm of his hand, indicating that they should wait
uno
momento
, then disappeared into the house. He returned with a book, a notebook, and a pen. Ry and Del stacked the dirty dishes and pushed them aside to make a space on the table.

Alejandro opened the book to a photograph. Ry and Del recognized the squirrel/prairie dog they had seen so many of as they climbed up the hill. Through words, sketchy diagrams, and hand gestures, Alejandro told them that the
animalitos
had been brought to the island from another land, long ago. They were brought by a man who intended to raise them as livestock. As a gourmet delicacy. They were very tasty. As you already know, he added. Then some of them escaped. It was a jailbreak; they escaped by digging tunnels. Burrows. Because that was the kind of animals they were, burrowing animals. They started burrowing all over the island. It was their nature.

Part of the island was rock, solid, and they couldn’t burrow through that. But after a while, there were so many of them burrowing through the softer parts that whole chunks of the island became unstable and fell right off, into the sea.

The island used to be bigger, Alejandro said.
“Antes era más grande.”
People had lived here, then. Ry wondered
what would happen when the squirrels ran out of dirt. Alejandro thought maybe they would learn to swim and take over the ocean, too. Not really, he said. But when there were so many, they reminded you of
cucarachas
. Cockroaches. Pests.

“Wow,” said Ry.
“¡Caramba!”

“Sí,”
said Alejandro.

Allowing for the possibility that he had completely misunderstood or that Alejandro had just been alone on the island too long (though he seemed more rational and sane than Ry thought he himself would be in that circumstance), it was an interesting story. Creepy. In the crawly sense.

Trying to fall asleep on yet another sofa—this one was not much more than thin cushions on a bench—Ry imagined the island crumbling out from under them in the night. He cast back earlier into the day for a more sleep-friendly image. He came up with the boat. The little boat tipping and tilting in the big ocean. The wrench and the compass. He cast back further. The homemade airplane. Nothing much in recent history was soothing.

“It’s cool that you know some Spanish.” Del’s voice came from just a few feet away. He was bedded down,
or up, in a hammock. “My brain can barely manage English.”

“Your brain does lots of other things, though,” said Ry. “You’re like the ninja cowboy fix-it man.” He knew somehow that Del was smiling in the dark. So he went on. “You’re like, ‘Howdy, ma’am, do you have any broken appliances? Excuse me while I rewire your toaster quick-a-minute.’ Zipzapzoop, blow on your fingers, walk into the sunset. ‘Oh, you need a ride to the other side of the world? I was just going there.’”

A stray moonbeam found the way through a window and fell in a faint square on the faded carpet, leaving the darkness around it blacker and more velvety. Soft, mild air moved almost imperceptibly in and out of the room. With it floated the gentle traces of ocean salt, flower and vegetation scents, earthy essences, campfire smoke molecules, lingering aromas of roasted foods, effable evidence of human exertion (meaning sweat), all dissolved in great quantities of fresh pure washed air to make a soporific mélange. Sleep Potion Number Nine.

The next island was visible from here. That is, it would be, come morning. There was only one more island after that. Del would get them there. It would all work out.

“And how do you even know how to sail a sailboat?”
Ry mumbled into the lullaby of stillness close by and breakers harmonizing rhythmically down below. “You live in Montana. How do you know about the rocks that look like a French warship?”

His words drifted invisibly away from him like seed fluff on the night air. There was no answer from Del. Ry wouldn’t have heard it anyway.