Castle of Water: A Novel(13)
Barry was not the only one who’d had an eventful afternoon. Sophie had been busy, as well, using the time alone to get their camp in order. She was, after all, a committed and serious architect, and even an island maroonment was no excuse for bad taste. And besides, keeping busy also meant keeping her mind off of étienne, whose loss she was still not prepared to cope with. Was it denial? Probably. Well, almost certainly. But what other option did she have? She could confront what had happened when she was back in Paris. She could deal with the emotional nightmare of burying her husband’s empty coffin in his family’s plot at Père Lachaise once she was home again. And she could begin sweeping up and dusting off the shattered pieces of her life as soon as the rescue plane had spirited her off this putain d’?le and away from that paunchy and bumbling imbécile d’américain. But in the meantime, she had things to do.
First, the shelter. It definitely needed work. Sophie took Barry’s ramshackle attempt down and began anew, with a far more suitable and aesthetically pleasing plan in mind. For while Barry had spent his summers on his family’s farm in Illinois, riding tractors and trolling for catfish, she had spent hers at her ancestral home in the Pyrenees, the Cirque de Gavarnie. Her grandfather, although retired at the time, had worked most of his life as a local guide and mountaineer. He would take Sophie and her younger brother on long hikes outside the village, showing them how to slice saucisson with their little Opinel knives, teaching them the words to bawdy peasant songs that their mother did not approve of in the least (“Le curé de Camaret” was without question their favorite), and, as it just so happens, giving them instructions on how to make a basic emergency shelter. Granted, his shelter had been intended to protect against Pyrenean blizzards and not Polynesian downpours, but she was certain it would serve its new purpose just as well. Remembering his lesson, she cut a length of the nylon rope from the survival kit and tied it securely between two carefully selected trees; she unfolded one of the three tarps and slung it over the rope, and using four small pieces of driftwood she had whittled with the utility knife, she staked down the corners. Voilà! A makeshift tent. She took a step back to appraise her work but still was not satisfied. No, the blue of the tarp was too garish, its artificial color too discordant with their primitive surroundings. She may have been the granddaughter of a peasant guide, but she was still a French architect. So she gathered up fallen fronds from the palm forest’s edge and arranged them over the tent in careful layers, creating after several passes a functional and actually quite charming thatched roof. The floor, however, was still nothing more than kicked-about sand, and that she did not care for. It was tedious work, but she managed to pull off some larger frond leaves and weave them together into a sort of tropical version of a tatami mat. She put this on top of a cushioning layer of banana leaves and was pleased with the end result. It would do for sleeping, at least until she was rescued.
Shelter complete, Sophie moved on to the hearth, circling their fire pit in rocks to establish a cooking area. As for a counter space, there weren’t a ton of suitable stones, but she was able to locate one larger, flat rock that she rolled through the sand to the edge of their fire pit. She found four smaller rocks, all of similar shape and size, and used those as legs, resting the flat slab upon them to create a very small but perfectly useful table.
Done. Well, almost done. There was one thing left she’d wanted to do before preparing for dinner, although she was concerned about the amount of rope it might take. She measured the coil and decided there was enough to spare; besides, they could always take it apart if needed. Using the survival kit utility knife, she began measuring out lengths, singing under her breath a bawdy mountain song that her grandfather had taught her and her brother years before, one that her mother did not approve of in the least.
Meanwhile, no longer quite so crestfallen but certainly discouraged, Barry trudged back to camp with his meager harvest of clams. Tremendous shafts of mango-colored sunlight came sloping in from the west, and the breezes whisked sea spray up from the whitecaps, spritzing the beach in a rainbow mist. Something jarringly out of place pricked at his ears; he froze for a moment to put his finger on the source.
“Sex Machine.” James Brown. No mistake about it, the wind was whipping strains of its funky rhythms from around the horn of the island. Baffled, Barry picked up his pace to a steady jog, rounded the bend that preceded the camp, and dropped his jaw to an unexpected sight: a perfect, palm-thatched shelter, a small table set for two, the shortwave radio from the survival kit doing its own tinny rendition of the Godfather of Soul, and, the icing on the cake, a rope hammock hanging daintily between two palms. Sophie, considerably cleaner and more composed than when he had left her, was crouched beside it, occupied with stripping a coconut of its husk.
“Wow,” Barry exclaimed. “You really fixed the place up.”
“It needed some work. You left it a mess.” Sophie paused to push back an errant strand of chestnut hair. “Did you catch a fish?”
“No, no fish,” he answered, choosing not to mention the beast that had stolen their dinner. “But I think I found some clams.” Emptying his bloated pockets, he dumped the two blue-tinted mollusks at her feet. She inspected them closely.
“?a 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.”