Castle of Water: A Novel(40)
“I think I’m going to sleep,” Sophie pronounced with an exaggerated yawn. “Bonne nuit.”
“You’re going to bed already?”
Sophie nodded. “I am. But thank you again. It was the best birthday I’ve ever had.”
She kissed him on his one unbandaged cheek before ducking into their palm-thatched hut. Barry stood alone in the darkness for a sad and solitary minute, letting the breeze do the delicate work of drying his skin. Then he took a seat beside what remained of their fire and set the shortwave radio upon his knee. He clicked it on and turned the volume down low, scanning the same frequencies he had listened to before for some hint of a voice, something akin to what he had heard out at sea. But there was nothing. Had he picked up just a small snippet of a radio transmission, or even some snatch of a casual conversation between ships, he might have been able to make the case for inflating the raft and going back out there. Whatever transmissions he had detected before, however, were not repeated. In fact, even the Tahitian station had called it a night. Once again, nothing but those haunting whistles and the silver of static. Once again, sitting outside all alone beneath the stars. He clicked the radio off and leaned back against a palm tree, envisioning an alternate universe in which Sophie had never been married, a world in which sooty terns did not exist, and a place where ships did not pass in the night but actually took heed of your lonesome flares.
27
The night of Sophie’s birthday may have proved a romantic failure for Barry, but the sight of the terns did get him thinking. He had witnessed the birds dive for fish before—in addition to night feeding, they would swoop down just before sunset, when the slanted light caught the glitter of scales. But seeing the birds fish en masse out by the edge of the reef had put an idea in his head. From the flopping glints in their greedy mouths, he knew there must be fish aplenty on the cusp of the lagoon. Whole schools, judging by their consistent success, clustered out there by the encircling coral. The question was how to traverse the hundred yards of seawater to cast his line. Not that there were no fish to be had in the erstwhile Balthazar’s cove—there certainly were, and since Balthazar’s demise, Barry had been angling at the respectable rate of one or two good-sized catches a week (usually snappers that Sophie either baked in the coals or steamed in a banana leaf). That, together with the bananas, which had finally begun to grow back, proved just enough to keep them alive. But in the cove, it was a question of waiting for the occasional timid straggler to nose its way in. Out there by the reef, where the terns took their business, there appeared to be fish galore, ready and ripe for the picking. Barry was tired of hanging his hunger on fickle piscine whims. He wanted to go out and get them for a change, and if such a thing could be achieved, he knew the hard days of famine would be forever behind them. He had done it with Balthazar, why couldn’t he go after fish as well?
The life raft was a possibility, but not a horribly convenient one. Inflating it by mouth was an exhausting hour-long chore, and keeping it inflated left it at the mercy of all sorts of sharp shells and sea urchin spines. Seeing as it was their only means of escape from the island in the event of an emergency, Barry and Sophie had both agreed that it was best stowed away, carefully folded in the duffel bag with the survival gear for the day they might truly need it.
Which left Barry with only one option: If he wanted to ply the fish-rich waters that surrounded the reef, he would have to build and captain a boat of his own. Not the easiest task for a midwesterner whose nautical experience was limited to a few feckless hours on a summer camp Sunfish more than two decades prior, but not beyond the realm of possibility, either. And the inkling of an idea had already formed in his head. Barry had not forgotten the coconut log that had saved him in the storm. Its supine bulk was on the beach where he had left it—he passed it daily on his way to the cove. And each time he saw it, he started to wonder: Could he make a canoe from it?
Indeed he could. The outer trunk of a coconut palm, if stripped of its pulpy core, could be used to make a lightweight, seaworthy craft. In fact, in the Maldives—not so very far in oceanic terms from Barry and Sophie’s island—fishermen had been hewing their dhoni boats from coconut timber since time immemorial, traveling with ease from one atoll to the next. Of course, Barry didn’t know any of this. Aside from a few basement carpentry projects he had helped his father with as a boy, and apart from a trip to the South Street Seaport Museum in New York, he knew practically nothing of woodworking or shipbuilding. What he did possess, however, courtesy of a dusty display in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, was the knowledge that ancient indigenous peoples of the Midwest had used fire to make dugout canoes. He recalled that on a fifth-grade social studies field trip, a docent with a bad permanent had explained the entire process, describing how they burned out the middle with coals to hollow the log. Who was to say that same technique Ohio’s Paleo-Indians once used to fashion their water-going vessels couldn’t be applied to a massive coconut log on a Polynesian beach? After giving it some thought, Barry decided no one was to say. He discussed the idea with Sophie, who was initially reluctant to give up precious driftwood from their cooking stash for such a far-fetched plan. But after some cajoling, along with the promise of potentially unlimited fish down the line, she agreed it was at least worth a shot. A week or two of raw sushi wouldn’t kill them, and a future without a dependable food source beyond bananas just might.