Red Sand (15 page)

It turned out none of them looked forward to rescue. Colin had run a ship into an island. He faced shame and possibly prosecution back home. Dragos went where Colin did. Like most Eastern Europeans his age, he lived life half-drunk, and anyplace is home in that condition.
 Mike, without the impending doom of returning to his wife, seemed almost delighted. Sammy, a former Tamil Tiger, knew how to survive anywhere. After the horrors of jungle warfare, he likened this experience to a resort. Angel didn't care what ground he stood on. He firmly believed there wasn't a force on earth that could kill him. "It's been tried," he said, and smiled his evil grin. Life was his for the taking. Ados never disclosed his intention to stay, but he hadn’t returned to Portugal for some time. He must have had his reasons. Moreover, he relished the scientific implications of an uncharted island.

Seven seemed like a lucky number. So, why not?
Fuck the world and their rules.
Here we live as kings and masters of our own fate. 

Braggadocio sounded good, but they had a lot of work ahead of them. He’d have to get all of that on shore with seven men and one working boat. No one would pay him for the ship, and no one would pay him for the scrap. That must have made him one of the poorest millionaires in the world.

What could he do but laugh?

“Sir?”

“Don’t call me Sir. I’m not a Captain if I don’t have a ship. Call me Tuk. That’s what my friends call me back home.”

He noticed, over the years that followed, this small act of bringing himself down to their level resulted in even more respect and admiration for him. It saddened him to see their trust misplaced, but he exploited it when he could. That simple, humble move from leader to friend cemented his authority for six years, until that little bitch Emily came along and ruined everything.

Carter couldn’t fly.

Bleeding into the grass of his parents’ front lawn, his eleven year old shin sprouted a freshly broken bone. His lifelong delusion ended. The leg would heal. His dream would not.

Not many eleven year olds practice transcendental meditation. Three hours a day for three months, alone in his room, he focused his center of gravity into a tiny, feathery ball near his heart. Yogis in India had, through their blogs, imparted upon him their knowledge of levitation.

Every night, he lay in his Superman sheets, wearing his Superman underpants, reading Superman comics or watching Superman videos on TV. Superman had dozens of amazing powers. He had laser eyes. He possessed superhuman strength. When he flew fast enough, he could reverse time. Then there were the standards: stopping bullets, crushing coal into diamonds, not to mention leaping tall buildings in a single bound.

Carter had no powers. Without his glasses, he couldn’t see past his hand. He couldn’t lift the family dog. When he ran he only lost time. At best, he could stop a dodge ball cold. On a good day he could escape recess without a black eye.

What he did possess in abundance was the faith in his own ability to achieve Superman’s most coveted power – flight. Not on an airplane. Not with feathers glued to his ass. No.

Through levitation.

If he studied long enough, concentrated hard enough, wanted it badly enough, he, Carter, could fly.  That was his power.

He stood on the roof of the garage, arms out, eyes closed in concentration, toes dangling over the edge. He had this. He believed it. He focused on his core weight, 87 pounds, brought it down to 0. Weightless. Nothing. Light as air.

Or not.

The brutal landing shocked his young life. What went wrong? How was he misled?

Later, retiring on the deck, his leg bound up in a great wooly cast, his skin crawling and impossible to scratch, he mourned as he watched hummingbirds flit effortlessly around the honeysuckle vines. Ponderous honeybees puffed past his head, laughing at physics.  Grasshoppers caromed off the fence in their own clumsy defiance of gravity. He cried.

He set about to study the matter more thoroughly, from a taxonomic approach. When his leg healed, he set up a collapsible net around the backyard bird feeder. He strained his patience for two hours, sipping root beer. At last, a starling fluttered carelessly toward the seed. He sprung the trap. The starling flapped precociously, beating its wings at the net. It had no hope of departure. It merely wished to infuriate Carter by flaunting what it had. Carter resented this. Extricating the bird in his crushing hands, he carried it back to his room. It did not struggle. It took pity on Carter. It would give up its secrets willingly.

A cork board lay across the desk. It used to hang on the wall, nearly invisible behind layers of tacked up Superman paraphernalia.  Immediately upon his return from the hospital, he replaced his idol with plain white sheets, white underwear, and Popular Science reading material. This cork board now served as his biology lab.

He had some difficulty stapling the bird’s wings to the cork. The miniature steel bonds wouldn’t hold muscles accustomed to freedom. He resorted to long pins from his mother’s sewing kit inserted into the several joints of the wings and feet and then bent sideways along the back of the board. This incapacitated it, but the little starling could still move its head left and right, left and right, with lightning speed. The beak gasped opened and closed but made no sound. 

Now what? He inspected the tattered feathers with a magnifying glass. The botched stapling job had mussed up the mechanism. He hoped that didn’t interfere with his investigation. This was a lot of bother to go through again.

Unenlightened by his examination of the wings, and remembering his Yogi training, he decided the ability to fly must come from more than the bird’s appendages. It came from the soul. He would find that somewhere near the heart.

Without the foresight to steal a scalpel from the school science lab, he resorted to a pair of his sharpest scissors. Using the bird’s anus as a convenient entrance, he crunched up around the center of the bird’s chest. It twitched violently but remained immobilized. It bled and excreted a white mess on his cork board. This conflicted with his pure contemplation of the soul, but he pressed on.

Inside the hollow of the little bird’s chest, a tiny balloon fluttered. Each pulse shuddered the starling’s whole body. No soul presented itself. He gazed upon that beating heart for a long time. The interior of a bird struck him as uncannily similar to the interior of a human. He referenced a school anatomy book to be sure. The proportions varied, but each had the same mess of organs, bones, and blood you exposed in any horror movie. This brought on a strange sensation in Carter. He had stumbled onto a well-hidden avian secret.

If birds looked like humans on the inside, no doubt humans could fly. He was on the right track.

He continued to wonder about the soul. If he stopped this interminable shuddering, would he actually see the soul ascending? Had it been a good bird? He laughed at his own inane philosophy. A good bird indeed.

With one of the remaining pins, he pricked at the heart, first tentatively, then driving it straight through. Black blood gushed over the pink plastic head of the pin. The heart stopped almost immediately, but the twitching continued.

He waited.

The bird died. A silence fell on the room so thick the Superman alarm clock still lying in the garbage can ticked audibly for the first time in two weeks. The bird stopped moving.

Nothing.

No soul escaped the iridescent breast of this little starling.

At first, he suffered the suffocation of failure. The secret of flight remained hidden, the soul of flight a mystery. All he had done was kill the bird.

Where there was life, he ended it.

Thus he discovered his only power.

By Carter’s calculations, he’d survived two weeks on the island. Of the eighteen who arrived that first morning, only eight remained. Of Carter’s boat, only he and Mason lived. While they slept, Emily disappeared and Lauren’s hut collapsed. After that, no one asked questions about the disappeared.

The daily chores exhausted everyone beyond care. Three nights ago, Tuk threw another dinner party, complete with fresh vegetables and those delectable ribs, in order to “keep spirits high”. He insisted it wouldn’t be long before a ship came to rescue them all.

Carter did not expect one. If a lifeboat from this island could reach their sinking ship, they could leave at any time. If Tuk really wanted save them, he would rowed them out to the shipping lanes and waited for rescue. Instead he kept them here with promises and platitudes. Carter needed to know why.

In the meantime, he aimed to improve his living conditions. The comfort of life within the Great Wall appeared far superior to the cold nights of Departure Camp. Carter determined to earn a room. But how? To do so required solving a few mysteries. He felt the answers lay in the riddle of Paul.

Why wasn’t Paul’s hair white? Why did he not try to escape, given all day to do so? Why didn’t he work on the Flow? Paul never even entered the Great Wall. The first clue to the inner workings of Tuk’s political structure fell into place. Paul wasn’t allowed in, and neither were residents of Departure Camp, after hours. The walls only kept those
inside
safe. White Hairs. For some reason, they needed to know insiders from outsiders at a glance.

Carter knew exactly what they were hiding from. Unlike the others, he had seen it.

Either you moved inside the Wall and lived, or you stayed outside and died. Determined to earn his hair dye, he kept watch for any opportunity to prove his worth. He worked twice as hard as the others. He volunteered like a bitch. He kept track of who stood in Tuk’s favor and who did not. He was careful to disassociate himself from the latter, and this meant rarely speaking to Paul. He probably could have coaxed valuable information out of the embittered man but he couldn’t risk Paul mistakenly adopting him as a “friend”. He kept Paul at arm’s length, but he still hadn’t found his “in”.  

It wasn’t long before the opportunity found him.

On salt detail. Carter stood in the middle of a saltern, bent double, scraping salt with a rake and shoveling it into buckets. The sun reflected off the gleaming red surface like a solar oven. Even though most of the water evaporated off, the salt remained wet. He felt the added weight in his shovel. By the afternoon, he felt it in his whole body. His feet sweated inside layers of waterproof plastic bags. He needed that sweat on his head. Granules caked the hairs on his arms like a cardigan. They percolated into his eyes and, when he wiped them, worked their way into the cracks in his hands.

Eddie and Mason’s gal-pal, Amy, toiled beside him. Carter recognized tension between Mason and Eddie, but he could never determine the cause. They were never to be found in the same place at the same time. On a small island, that took deliberate effort. Even when they filed out of the Great Wall, they stood at opposite ends of the line. Mason always stood behind Eddie, never the other way around. That told Carter that Mason was the weaker of the two and had something to fear.

Carter could have asked Eddie directly, but he remained wary. The man’s mind broke after the sinking. He muttered to himself as he worked with unintelligible, blasphemous words.  Amy once tried to make small-talk, but Eddie called her a slut. She left him alone after that. Everyone did. Eddie’s head darted upward whenever someone came near, as if he expected an assault. He moved in quick, short bursts, like a nervous bird.

Like a bird. Carter wanted some time alone with Eddie. If Mason was afraid of Eddie, Eddie’s fear was more valuable. It automatically made Carter the strongest of the three. 

Two White Hairs, Dragos and Colin, managed the salt detail.

Carter held a keen interest in Colin. Colin was the tongueless boatmen that brought him ashore. Though he couldn’t speak, his eyes burned. The young man fought internal battles that, in the absence of an outlet, festered within him. He never opened his mouth except to eat. When he did, it was better to look away or lose your own appetite. Colin held secrets Carter wished to know.

Dragos, on the other hand, wouldn’t shut up. No one was better for gossip. He complained bitterly. His topics took his full attention. He referred to himself in the third person, always the hero of his own tales.  He would stop working to save calories for his jaw. When overexcited, he sat down. When Dragos sat and talked for too long, Colin slapped him on the head to get him back to work.

“What you want to know, Dragos knows this, what you want to know… how does Dragos make his famous liquor? Where is still? How does he ferment? Well, today is your lucky day. Dragos will make it known to you.”

Dragos was always half-drunk. No one deprived him of his alcohol, because no one knew his personality without it.

“The truth is, Dragos misses his home country. He misses, especially,
kvass
. You know
kvass
? Like Coca-Cola, only better. On a hot day like this, a nice warm glass of
kvass
is what a man needs.  But we have no rye on this cursed island. How can Dragos make
kvass
without rye? So he improvise. He use potatoes.

“But Dragos make a mistake. He let it ferment too long. Ados kindly provide yeast from, well, disgusting places, and Dragos want to make sure it cooks very, very good. He cooks it so long, it becomes like beer.

“In your country, is called Pruno, yes? The criminals make it. Well, in my Romania, we make it, too, only we hide it someplace besides the back of toilets. Ow! Ok, Colin, Dragos works.”

Carter casually pressed him. “I bet you’d rather be in Romania right now.”

“Oh, yes. This place terrible. Six years too long. Dragos needs to go home. Especially now.”

“Why now, especially?”

Dragos paused before answering. This caught Carter’s attention. Dragos never paused. Colin stopped shoveling salt to stare Dragos in the eye, as if in warning. “Well, you know, especially with this hard work today.”

“No, that’s not it. You have a better reason. What is it?”

Dragos searched askance from Colin. “He has right to know, don’t you think?”

Colin went back to his work, giving tacit consent.

“It is because of your friend Emily, what she said, and why she is not here.”

Eddie and Amy stopped to listen. Dragos, for the first time, didn’t seem to appreciate the attention.

Eddie spoke. “You know what happened to Emily?”

“Well, no, not exactly. Only idea. Only speculation.”

“What’s your idea?”

Colin shook his head.

Eddie snapped. He waded across the pool, shovel raised. He took aim at Colin’s head.

Carter moved faster. He caught the shovel in mid-air.

Eddie raged. “That sonofabitch! We’re stuck on this godforsaken island, disappearing one by one, and this bastard knows why! Don’t get in my way!”

Carter liked it. As the only one calm, he had all the power. He spoke over his shoulder to Colin. “You’d better let Dragos talk now.”