And the Sea Will Tell (10 page)

Wheeler led them inland along a narrow trail that had obviously been painstakingly chopped through the brush. What had looked like feathery greenery from the sea was actually quite a formidable hedgerow. Soon they came upon a strip of steaming-hot, pockmarked asphalt. Jennifer was jolted to realize that the pavement was alive with squirming, squawking birds, thousands of them. Buck’s dogs charged for the grounded birds as Jennifer scooped a frightened Puffer into her arms.

There was a great explosion of shrieks and flapping as the black-and-white terns rose in protest, hovering in squadrons ten or twelve feet in the air. Jennifer could now see why the birds refused to leave. The asphalt below them was covered with nests of helpless baby chicks.

“Buck!” Jennifer hollered.

Before Buck could react, Popolo, the pit bull, gripped a full-size tern in his jaws. Buck cuffed the dog on his head, and it dropped the bird. The bird flapped once or twice, then lay still. It had been bitten nearly in two.

“Oh, Popolo,” Jennifer said scoldingly. “Look what you’ve done.” Puffer’s whining seemed to echo her distress.

“Your dog that hungry?” Wheeler asked, not kindly.

“Nope,” Buck said, with eyes narrowed. “Just that ornery.”

Buck put his dogs on a length of rope he’d brought along and tied them to a coconut tree.

The tour resumed. “This is an old military airstrip,” Wheeler explained. “It was built back in the early forties. The damn thing’s a mile long, though you can’t tell now because of all the vegetation taking over. Those birds nest all the way down it.”

The three of them worked their way across the crowded runway, all—but especially Jennifer—walking gingerly to keep from stepping on eggs and chicks. Occasionally, an angry parent would dive-bomb the trio, brushing their heads at top speed.

“We’ve eaten some of the eggs,” Wheeler said, his voice nearly drowned out by the whoosh-whooshing of the frantic birds. “Kinda fishy-tasting, but not bad. To make sure they’re fresh, what you do is mark off a twenty-by-twenty-foot area here on the runway, clear it of eggs, and come back the next day. Any eggs inside the marked area are fresh ones.”

When they reached the other side of the runway, the racket calmed down. Wheeler led the way along another jungle footpath.

It was like walking in a huge greenhouse. The humidity and heat had become stifling. Jennifer was breathing with difficulty from the excitement and exertion. Buck dripped with sweat.

“Is it always this hot?” he asked.

“Never varies more than a few degrees, day or night.” Wheeler smiled dryly. “Even the rain is warm.” He enjoyed having the edge on these newcomers. It was the kind of authoritarian attitude Buck and Jennifer had hoped to leave behind.

There were only a few feet of visibility through the vegetation in any direction. The occasional chatter of brightly colored birds darting from tree to tree in the green canopy above was the only evidence of life, but Jennifer sensed that scores of unseen creatures were lurking out of sight, watching silently.

They came to a wide clearing that had recently been cut out of the underbrush. An old warehouse stood at the edge of the forest. Inside they found a dilapidated road grader, a ten-wheeler military truck, and an old boat with the letters “U.S.A.F.” on both sides of its hull. All showed the effects of more than three decades of neglect in a tropical climate, as well as vandalism.

“In the eleven years since we were last here, there’s been a lot of wanton destruction,” Wheeler said. “Look at all the slashed tires. And bullet holes.”

Jennifer was troubled by the jagged holes in the metal. Who would get their kicks shooting up an old truck? Whoever these trigger-happy cowboys were, she didn’t want them coming back while she and Buck were living here.

“You’d think sailing people would be a better sort,” Wheeler reflected.

He went over to the rescue launch. “They call this a drop boat because the Air Force would drop it into the water from a plane. It was equipped to take care of survivors who had to wait for a rescue. You know, fresh water, canned foods, first-aid gear, life jackets, that kind of thing. It was still running when I was here years ago and we used to play around with it in the lagoon. One time I used it for a real rescue. A Japanese trawler was tooting its whistle like crazy just outside the channel. I took the rescue boat out. One of the fishermen had been impaled by a swordfish.”

“What happened to him?” Jennifer asked in horror.

“Poor fella didn’t make it.” He turned away.

Jennifer’s uneasy feeling about Palmyra was growing stronger. The lagoon was postcard-quality but full of sharks. Catching fish was apparently a snap, but some of them were poisonous. Though the island, from a distance, suggested the fertile South Seas paradise created by the genius of Gauguin, the empty, crumbling structures and rusting hardware left by the military from a time gone by gave a ghostly feel to the place.

“This is my third trip,” Wheeler said. “First time was back in ’57.”

They had stopped under the shade of a tree for relief from the broiling sun. Jennifer tried to fan herself with a palm frond, but the splintery leaves couldn’t capture and push much air. Buck was too uncomfortable to interact much with the others. Wheeler, utterly at home on Palmyra, seemed oblivious to the sultry, unyielding heat, although his tan cotton shirt, drenched with perspiration, stuck to his back like the wrapper of a melting Hershey bar.

“I had a job with Scripps, the oceanography institute, during the international geophysical year,” Wheeler chattered on. “The wife and I spent fifteen months here. I was taking upper-air weather observations, monitoring the tide, stuff like that. We like it here. It kinda grows on you. There’s lots of exploring to do. The wife and I and the kids found an underground bunker once. Enough goodies to open a war surplus store.”

“You sure know your way around,” Buck said, wiping sweat from his eyes. Jennifer sensed he might be trying to set the older man up. But for what?

“Yeah.” Wheeler grinned widely. “Like I told you, I call myself the unofficial mayor of Palmyra. We know the Fullard-Leos, the owners. Say, how long you guys staying?”

“Awhile,” Buck said cautiously. He looked exhausted, but he was on full alert.

“Well—what did you say your name was?”

“Roy Allen. And my wife is Jennifer.”

“We were thinking of planting a garden,” Jennifer interjected. “Maybe live off the land for awhile.”

Wheeler thought about that for a moment. “If you folks are planning to stay, you should write the owners for permission, seeing as how it’s private land and all. I’m here as their representative this trip. They want me to get the airstrip in shape so planes can land. I don’t know, though. All those birds are a real problem, if you ask me. But my son and I are doing what we can to clear the strip.”

“I’ll give you a hand,” Buck said. He had decided how to play the hand fate had dealt them. Who knew? If he ingratiated himself with this officious “old bore,” as he would later refer to Wheeler, a situation might arise where he could use Wheeler’s help.

Wheeler seemed to consider Buck’s hefty shoulders and taut muscular arms. “A couple more strong arms would be good,” he agreed. “We start around dawn and knock off before the hottest part of the day.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” Buck said.

Rested, they resumed the tour, but Wheeler soon stopped under a palm tree and rummaged around for something. “Here’s another good thing to know,” he intoned, still coming on strong. “See this here coconut? It’s the beginning of a new tree. Sends out a little sprout on the top when it’s ready to start growing.” He pointed out the burgeoning root. “At the same time, the insides of it change.” He slipped his machete from its sheath on his belt and hacked open the coconut’s husk by making parallel gashes, then stripped off the sections between. Then he cracked the inner nut with one blow, revealing a white pudding-like substance. “The milk on the inside turns solid. It’s called spoonmeat. It’s supposed to be the new tree’s food.” He cut the spongy stuff in two and gave the halves to Jennifer and Buck. “Go ahead,” he urged. “Try it.” The offer sounded more like a challenge than a gift.

Jennifer compliantly bit into her piece and was rewarded with a pleasantly cool sweetness. “Oh, yes. That’s delicious,” she said, inwardly laughing at the charge this old-timer beachcomber so obviously got from disclosing the lore of life on a tropical island.

Buck just grunted.

Wheeler beamed. “And it can be fried or baked. Comes out tasting somewhere in between squash and yams. I’m going to leave the rest of the coconut here. We’ll come back in a few minutes and check on it.” He made this announcement with an odd expression.

Once again, they moved on and Wheeler continued to lecture enthusiastically. He demonstrated how to cut out the heart of a palm tree by slicing the trunk in two right below the lowest fronds. He praised it as great for salad, as if this were not generally known.

“The owners don’t like us to cut mature trees down,” he explained. “So we look for the small ones coming up that are two or three feet high. I wouldn’t even call them trees yet. It’s okay to thin them out. Most of them wouldn’t grow up anyway because they’re so close together.

“Now, if you want to do some exploring by yourselves later on, there’s a barracks out yonder,” he said, stopping to point to a section of jungle indistinguishable from the rest. “Still has odds and ends of furniture and stuff. And there’s a path through the trees that takes you out on the island’s north shore, where you’ll find more old buildings, concrete ammo dumps, gun-battery housings, and machinery all over the place left by the Navy. There’s a few drums of old gas, too. It works fine. You can help yourselves.”

That got Buck’s attention. “We can use it for a little generator we’ve got,” he said.

“Hey, if you’ve got a portable generator, you’ll want to know about the ice cream parlor. It’s back this way.” Wheeler once again forged ahead, explaining en route exactly how they could make “ice cream” from coconuts.

Soon they spied a flat-roofed concrete bunker nestled in the undergrowth. Next to one outside wall sat an outmoded refrigerator with an extension cord snaking inside the building through a barred window. Inside the small freezer section of the refrigerator was a container of coconut ice cream. “The wife just made it this morning,” Wheeler explained. “Have a taste.”

Jennifer dipped a finger into the frosty, rich mixture and licked it clean. It sure wasn’t Baskin Robbins, but it was good.

Buck declined. He was tiring of this road show.

“Not sure what the Navy used this building for,” Wheeler spouted on, “but I keep my generator inside. Feel free to use the fridge. Cools your beer, keeps your ice cream and fish, even makes ice cubes. Guess you’ll inherit the fridge when we leave. You can hook up your own generator to it and be in business. Now,” he paused dramatically, “let me show you the bathtub.”

“
Bathtub?
” Jennifer practically screeched.

“A freshwater bath at that,” Wheeler said triumphantly. “The military left behind a big tank that collects rainwater. The water is no good for drinking ’cause of all the algae that’s growing inside the tank. But it sure feels good.”

“A real bath sounds like heaven,” she said.

On their way to the bathtub, they passed by the tree under which Wheeler had left the coconut shell, and Jennifer was flabbergasted. In the short period of time they’d been gone, the shell had filled completely with small crabs fighting with comic ferocity over the remnants of the coconut meat.

“Hermit crabs,” Wheeler explained. “They’re the garbagemen of the island. Them and the rats, they clean up everything.”

“I haven’t seen any rats,” Jennifer said, hoping against hope. Her love of small animals didn’t extend to rodents.

“You leave food out, you’ll see ’em,” Wheeler promised. “Big ole wharf rats. Compliments of the U.S. Navy.”

The image made Jennifer’s skin crawl, and she began to watch more carefully where she stepped.

Arriving back at the lagoon, they encountered an old wharf and a barnlike warehouse. At the front was a dock where wartime supply ships had unloaded cargo. Behind the warehouse, there was a twelve-thousand-gallon water tank. “It doesn’t have a top on it anymore,” Wheeler noted. “With all the rain showers we get around here, we don’t have to worry about it getting empty.”

Someone had set up an old four-legged porcelain bathtub with a hose running off a tap from the tank.

“Guess you guys will want to be getting your towels,” Wheeler said, grinning like a schoolboy.

“I can hardly wait,” Jennifer said. She had to give him credit. He had saved the best for last.

But when she and Buck skipped off to the
Iola
, their plan for an immediate bath was postponed by another offer. A crewman on the
Caroline
hollered an invitation for a drink. On board, they downed rum mixed with coconut milk, accepted (and smoked) a joint from one of the younger crewmen, and swapped sea stories with their hosts. Briggs and his crew were shepherding a group of amateur radio operators who, like obsessed Boy Scouts, spent their every waking hour ashore tinkering with their transmitters and receivers. The next destination was nearby Kingman Reef, which occasionally bared a strip of sand a foot or two out of the water. “The radio boys want to set a record for establishing the most remote radio station in the world,” the charter skipper explained, rolling his eyes skyward to show what he thought of the idea.

An hour or so later, Jennifer gathered their soap and towels, and taking Buck’s hand, headed for the bathtub. They were merrily tipsy, and the cool bathwater added to their delight. Between deep soulful kisses, they splashed each other like kids running under a sprinkler on a summer day, and returned to the boat feeling tinglingly clean, refreshed, and optimistic.

Back aboard the
Iola
, Buck fiddled with the outboard motor while Jennifer began cooking a hunk of fish Jack Wheeler had brought over for them. They had it for dinner that night. The fresh fish was tender and delicious. After a poignantly lovely sunset, they wordlessly went below and made love by candlelight. Their floating cocoon rocked gently to their shared rhythm.