The Island (10 page)

A man said, “I’ll have a look,” and he stood up.

“Stay there,” Katherine said. “I’ll do it.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Stay
there,
I said!”

The man did not argue. He sat down.

Katherine went to the boy and whispered, “Where’s Mary?”

“We were gathering eggs. She found a baby bird. Said she wanted to find its nest and put it back.”

Katherine passed the boy and went outside. She looked toward the cut, a narrow slash in the rocks that ended in a pocket of beach no more than twenty yards wide. She could see the island’s skiff careened on the sand.

The boat was a couple of hundred feet offshore, a dark smudge against the black water, angling slowly in toward the cut.

It could be a local boat, Katherine told herself, a fisherman caught at sea by an adverse breeze. Or a Haitian poacher, looking for a place to hide for the night.

But then the boat moved into a shaft of moonlight, and her hopes died. It was the same boat.

For the past ten months, she had striven—through force of will and devotion—to convince herself that the boat had not been real, that what had happened had not really happened. It had been a test, a grotesque metaphysical nightmare designed to further forge her faith. She had come almost to believe that. Now the only thought that came to her was, Have I sinned so much?

As she watched, the pirogue turned into the wind. The lateen sail luffed and was lowered. Paddles poked out from bow and stern and swept the water.

Katherine sprinted to the nearest corner of the star and searched the darkness for the missing child. She did not dare call out.

She went back inside and shut and locked the door.

Her heart was pounding. She took several deep breaths and said, as calmly and sternly as she could, “Listen to me, all of you. You must do exactly as I say. No time for questions. I’ll say only this: Anyone who disobeys is telling God, ‘The time has come to take me.’ ”

She pulled back the rattan rug. Underneath was a wooden trapdoor, flush with the cement floor. She lifted it and set it aside. A ladder led down into a black pit.

“Empty the table into here,” she said. “Everything.”

The table was cleared quickly and silently. Bowls and plates and cups made little sound as they landed in the sand at the bottom of the pit.

“Now . . . everybody down there. Fast. Don’t fall.” She helped a child locate the top rung of the ladder.

A man muttered testily, “I think we have a right to—”

“Shut your mouth!” Katherine said. “Unless you want to die, get in the hole.”

“But where’s Mary?” a woman whimpered.

“She’s in the brush. When you get down there pray to Almighty Merciful God that she stays away.”

When they had all descended into the pit, Katherine knelt on the floor and spoke to them. “Be very still. No coughs or sneezes. If you pray, pray silently.” She shut the trapdoor and replaced the rug.

She checked the table one last time, brushing away bread crumbs and mopping up drops of chowder with the hem of her dress. Then she unlocked the front door and stood on the rattan rug, her hands folded in front of her, praying.

Footsteps crunched on the sand, then scraped against the concrete steps. The door was pushed open.

There were two of them, black silhouettes against the starlit sky.

She could not see their faces, so did not know if they were the same ones who had come before. A breeze blew through the doorway, carrying their smell, and she trembled at the memory.

They did not speak.

As she knew they would, as they had the last time, they forced her onto the table and raped her, once each. They were not gratuitously brutal. Her feeble resistance was quietly accepted and easily overcome. The knife held to her throat was more a gesture than a necessity. She closed her eyes, so as not to see them, held her breath (as long as possible) so as not to smell them, and let her mind shout prayers so as not to hear their grunts.

It was all very matter-of-fact—they might have been service men come to read her meter—and when they were done, they helped her to her feet.

She grasped the edge of the table, swallowing bile and trying not to faint.

“Mercury,” said one.

She nodded. The last time, she had not known what they meant, and they had, as seemed to be their custom, tortured her while trying to explain. They had slashed the inside of her thighs with the point of a knife and had rubbed lemon juice and pepper into the incisions. Finally, by piecing together words and phrases, she had understood.

She led them to the refrigerator. The bottles of drugs were in boxes of twelve. She brought out a box of penicillin and two syringes. “This will spoil if it isn’t kept cold,” she said. “How many are sick?”

“Many.”

“Take it all.”

“Rum,” said the other.

“I have no rum.”

The man shoved her aside, reached into the refrigerator, and brought out a plastic quart bottle of isopropyl alcohol.

“Don’t drink that,” Katherine said. “It’ll make you very sick. I use it for ear problems.”

“I hear you not. I have an ear problem.” The man laughed aloud. He unscrewed the bottle cap, splashed alcohol in his ear, then took a great swig from the bottle. A tremor shook his chest. He coughed and sputtered. “Aye, that’s a noble hot.” He closed the bottle and tucked it inside his shirt.

“Go now.” Katherine shut the refrigerator door. She heard a sound—faint, indistinct. She could not tell where it came from, whether from the pit beneath her feet or from outside. She shuffled her feet noisily on the sandy floor.

“Aye. Good night, lady, and Lord love you.”

She waited, expecting them to depart.

Instead, they stood, listening.

And then she heard what they were hearing: light footsteps running in the sand, and a happy girl’s voice calling, “Look what I found!”

Katherine released a visceral wail of despair.

Mary was in the room before she saw the men. “A baby bird!” She cradled it in her hands. “Look . . . Oh!”

“Leave her be!” Katherine cried. “She’s a baby!” It was absurd, and Katherine knew it: Mary was twelve, tall for her age, and robust. But there was hope. It had been only ten minutes since the men had taken Katherine.

Mary backed against the wall. “Who are you?”

“A good question,” said one of the men. “Who are you?”

Mary whimpered, “Miss Katherine . . .”

Blindly, thoughtlessly Katherine hurled herself at the nearest man.

Barely troubling to look at her, the man stiff-armed Katherine in the throat and knocked her to the floor. He grabbed the bird from Mary’s hands, crushed it, and cast it aside, then took Mary’s elbow and led her to the door.

Mary panicked. She cried and struggled until the man slapped her across the face and said, “Be still, or as God is my judge I’ll cut your tongue out. You’ll come with us.”

From the floor, Katherine called, “Leave her, I beg you!”

The man holding Mary stopped at the door. “Leave her, missus? Aye, if you will.” He pulled Mary’s hair, yanking her head back, and put his cutlass to her throat. “In how many pieces, pray? In steaks or fillets?”

Both men laughed and, pushing Mary ahead of them, left the house.

Katherine lay on the floor and listened to the child’s shrieks recede into the night.

C H A P T E R
7

T
he plane was an ancient, ramshackle DC-3, the pilot an albino named Whitey. He had white curly hair, pink irises, and chalky skin. Because he could not endure sunlight, he wore long white trousers, a long-sleeved white shirt, a wide-brimmed hat, and sunglasses. Even this early in the morning, with the sun barely risen, he supervised the loading of the plane from the shade beneath the port wing.

Whitey directed Justin to the copilot’s seat and unfolded a canvas camp chair for Maynard. He set it on the deck just aft of the cockpit.

“No seat belt?” Maynard said.

“If you don’t carry passengers, you don’t need seat belts. Chickens don’t have to be strapped down.”

Behind Maynard, the plane was packed—crates of fruit, cases of canned goods, lockers of frozen meats, three cages full of live chickens, and one comatose pig. “You have to really knock them out,” Whitey explained. “I had a sow on one trip that woke up halfway down the Bahamas. The bitch began to root—you know, with her snout. She rooted up a bunch of deck plates, damn near rooted us into the drink. I finally shot her.”

“You carry guns aboard?”

“Heavens no!” Whitey smiled at Maynard. “But you never know what you’ll find if you look around an old crate like this.”

At the leeward end of the runway, Whitey revved his engines and checked his gauges and released the brakes. The plane surged forward.

Halfway down the strip, the plane was still on the ground. Gentling the stick back, Whitey talked to the plane: “Come on, honey . . . haul ass, baby . . . let’s go . . .” The plane did not rise. “Goddammit, get up!” Whitey said, and he jerked the stick back.

Slowly, laboriously, the plane left the ground, as the end of the runway flashed by.

Maynard looked at his palms, which glistened with sweat. He wiped them on his pants. Off to the right, in a marsh, he saw three or four crumpled airplane carcasses that had been bulldozed together in a pile. “What are those from?” he asked.

Whitey said, “We call ’em surprises. You’re going down the runway, and you think you’re gonna get off okay, and surprise! You don’t.”

Whitey banked to the left, eastward, into the glaring sun. He said to Justin, “There’s a thermos at your feet. Pour me a cup of coffee, will you?”

When Justin handed him the coffee, Whitey took his hands from the controls and said, “Hold her steady for me, that’s the boy.”

Justin obeyed happily, clutching the stick and craning to see out over the nose of the plane.

Whitey took a flask from his pocket and splashed liquor into the cup. He offered the flask to Maynard. “Eye opener?”

Maynard smelled bourbon. He shook his head. “You always fly . . . like this?”

“Gotta fly high, man. It’s a boring goddamn trip.”

Whitey replaced the flask and took a map from a pouch beneath his seat. He leaned back, put his feet up on the instrument panel, and opened the map. “Now . . . let’s see if we can find this bitch. From up here, they all look the same.”

Maynard took a deep breath and let it go. He said to Justin, “You okay?”

“Sure. This is neat.”

They flew across the Gulf Stream, to Bimini and Cat Cays, turned south over Andros, and continued down the Bahamas chain. The day was clear and cloudless, the water a dozen shades of blue and green: turquoise in the flats near shore, flecked with brown on the coral reefs, a warm blue seaward of the reefs, and dark—almost black—above the benthos.

Three hours out of Miami, Whitey leaned forward and squinted at the southern horizon. The line was unbroken, save for a single cloud that seemed to hover over the water. “That should be the Caicos there,” he said.

Maynard saw no land. “Where?”

“Under that cloud. The heat from the land rises and hits the cold air and makes a cloud.”

Soon a thin gray line appeared, shimmering. As they drew nearer, it solidified into the shape of an island.

Whitey nudged the stick forward, and the plane’s nose dropped. The altimeter needles spun slowly, in units of a hundred feet, from eight thousand feet down to four thousand. They passed over the barren island at three thousand feet.

Looking over Justin’s shoulder, Maynard saw a star-shaped building below. “What’s that?”

“Jesus freaks,” Whitey said.

“What do they do in this God-forsaken place?”

“Freak-out, I guess.” Whitey banked the plane to the right, and the island slid away behind them.

Miles away, to the east, Maynard saw several large islands. Remembering the chart, he guessed that one was Navidad, one North Caicos, one Grand Caicos. There were countless smaller islands to the west, uninhabited, covered with scrub, pounded by surf. Directly beneath were the Caicos Banks, an endless plain of sand and grass, no more than six feet deep. The western edge of the Banks ended abruptly, shelving to forty feet, then shearing down to five thousand feet.

Maynard recalled something Michael Florio had said: In the days of sail—especially the days of the cumbersome, unmaneuverable square-rigged ships—the Caicos Banks were among the most treacherous in the hemisphere. Ships storm-driven off course would seem to be in the relative safety of deep water. Their sounding leads would find no bottom. And then someone would hear, above the howl of the wind, a strange thunderous roar. It sounded like surf, but it couldn’t be surf, not in the open ocean. They would proceed ahead until, at last, a lookout—his eyes stinging from a film of salt—would see the impossible, an explosion of towering breakers dead ahead. It was too late. There would be recriminations and keening and prayers. The ship would hit the rocks and, within minutes, be gone. Most of it would be scattered across the Banks. Some pieces would float, and some survivors might cling to the floating pieces. Twenty-seven men had survived one such wreck, Florio had said. They had ridden a section of decking thirty miles over the Banks and had washed ashore on Grand Caicos. Twenty-one had died of thirst or exposure. Four had committed suicide, driven mad by bugs. Two had lived.

An airport lay ahead: Great Bone Cay. Whitey finished off his flask and banked hard right, then hard left, lining the plane up with the runway. “Flaps down,” he said to himself and pushed a switch. “Flaps down.” The plane slowed. “Wheels down.” Another switch. A light blinked on. “Wheels down.”

The plane hit the runway too hard, bounced, hit again, and settled. Whitey taxied up to a rectangular concrete building, where two pickup trucks and perhaps a dozen people, including two who carried clipboards and wore epaulets on their starched white shirts, were waiting.

Whitey shut off the engines and said to Maynard, “If you got any grass, dump it now. They are friggin’
lunatics
about grass, and the jail got no screens on it.”

“Not me,” Maynard said, feeling a rush of adrenaline and perspiration. He checked to make sure his jacket was buttoned, and he held his left arm close to his side. He slung his satchel over his left shoulder.