Castle of Water: A Novel(65)
The setting sun was pleasantly warm, and the breezes coming in off the waves were pleasantly cool, and a broadcaster was giving a rundown of world events in a lilting Mandarin, or maybe Cantonese, when the notion came to Barry. An idea. Back in the States, China had been considered the Far East, which it unquestionably was. Here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, however, it would have to be almost directly due west—precisely where the sun was setting. Barry began to think and stroke the scruff of his beard accordingly. He recalled during the cyclone how he had used the radio antenna to gauge roughly in which direction Tahiti was to be found. The signal had been slightly stronger when it was pointed in that general direction. Could the same be true for more distant signals? Barry worked the radio’s spoke of an antenna in a slow circle, provoking a symphony of crackles and whistles. But sure enough, the announcer’s voice became slightly crisper when the antenna was pointed in the direction of the sun. To the west, as it were. Where China ought to be.
Mental gears once again grinding, Barry fiddled with the tuning knob a little more; it took some time, but a signal from America eventually came through, a religious station droning on about some form of twangy salvation. Barry climbed to his feet, adjusted his breechcloth, and followed the blur of sand to the other side of the island, darker and cooler in the mountain’s long shadow. Again, the same—the signal strengthened ever so slightly when the antenna was pointed in the opposite direction, a touch north but mostly east.
With Barry’s suspicions confirmed—that signal strength could be used as a crude homing beacon of sorts—his intentions shifted in a more local direction. The Marquesas. The island chain they had been supposed to land upon at one twenty-five P.M. almost three years earlier, before the storm sent their Cessna veering tragically off course. He never had been able to receive a shortwave signal. But now, upon more thoughtful consideration, he suspected that was almost certainly due to the fact that the islands were simply too small to have a shortwave station. A few ham radios, sure, but no real broadcasts. And as for FM, there was no way those signals could travel the distance over all that ocean—modulated frequencies were great for the Doobie Brothers or Steely Dan at close range, but terrible for broadcasting outside of city limits. Standard AM signals, however … well, that was a possibility. As a boy, Barry recalled getting the occasional AM signal in Cleveland all the way from Quebec, that peculiar form of French trickling down from across the border. Could he have the same luck there in Polynesia? It was worth a shot. He’d never given the standard AM dial much attention, but perhaps something reasonably local could poke its way in.
It took him an hour, but he found it. Broadcasting not in French, as he expected, but in the native and vowel-rich Marquesan, faint as a whisper and just as mysterious. He couldn’t make out anything that was said beyond the names of several islands, but that was enough: Nuku Hiva, Fatu Hiva, Hiva Oa, Moho Tani. Music to his ears. He recognized them instantly; he had encountered them time and time again in his biographies of Paul Gauguin and stared at their position on the map for days before quitting his job at the bank and packing up his paintbrushes. They were somewhere out there.
Like the water witches his grandpa had once used in Macoupin County, Illinois, Barry executed the slow and patient walk of a diviner, his dowsing rod the antenna of a weather-beaten Grundig rather than a forked hazel twig. In his half-blind state, he stepped on sharp shells and stubbed his toes against rocks, but he hardly noticed. He was sure that he was on to something. And when the signal leapt enthusiastically at the island’s southeasternmost terminus, so did he. They were there. How far away, he had no idea, but islands occupied by humans could be found in that direction. Hot damn.
An entire week passed before he picked up the Marquesan AM signal again. But this time he was ready, with the magnetic compass from the survival kit in hand. In painstaking increments, he adjusted the antenna, with the radio resting atop a north-pointing marker he had scratched out in a patch of damp sand. He marked the second position off at the signal’s crescendo, comparing it with the degree markers on the compass and using his fingers to scratch out the numerals. Just as he suspected. The Marquesas were a little south, but mostly east. Around 110, maybe 120 degrees.
Based on that revelation, he decided to sit and wait until later in the afternoon for the shortwave station to come in from Tahiti. He knew by heart the frequency that harbored the station; it was simply a matter of time before the signal came through. When it finally did, he applied the same technique, positioning the antenna just right and marking its position off in the sand. Mostly south, but just a touch west. Around two hundred degrees.
Because of his eyesight, Barry was forced to crouch directly over his diagram and study it with a fierce squint. But something was coming together. Those two vectors he knew could form a triangle, with one of the vertices representing their current location. Obviously, the storm had blown their flight far off course, to somewhere vaguely northwest of the Marquesas. Just how far, he did not know. Barry did recall, however, that Tahiti and the Marquesas were a bit over eight hundred miles apart—the third side of that magic triangle, one that he began to delineate with a trembling finger. Bent over on his knees now, the sand only inches from his face, he studied the new diagram. Angles, hypotenuses, Pythagoras, sine, cosine, tangent … the answer had to be there somewhere. The formula that would allow him to calculate the distance to the nearest island. Only Barry couldn’t find it. For if he had been a poor student of Boy Scout first aid, he had been an even worse one of trigonometry.