Keeping Watch (16 page)

He got to his feet, watching lights from what looked like a fishing boat round the point and turn in his direction. The big motor slowed, grumbling down to a near idle and allowing Jerry to hear a stranger's voice raised to give orders. A spotlight touched the end of the dock, guiding the boat up to the bumpers, where it came to rest with a touch so light, he barely felt it through the boards. When the boat and the skiff it towed lay alongside the dock, Allen stepped down, a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a rope in his hand. The boat's engines reversed away from the landing, and Allen pulled the rope hand over hand until the skiff was against the side of the dock. He tied it up and turned toward the house, then stopped at the sight of his brother standing before him.

“The motor finally died on you?” Jerry asked.

“Yeah.”

“Who gave you a tow?”

“Ed.”

Ed De la Torre, Jerry identified. An established island character, although he'd only come to the San Juans ten or twelve years before. Ed lived on his boat, a converted trawler called the
Orca Queen,
and scrounged a living taking tourists out in the summer and making illicit deliveries in the winter. He was a scoundrel and a ladies' man, living proof that not all of society's anarchists were under thirty. A nice stable guy for someone in Allen's condition to make friends with, Jerry thought grimly.

“Where'd he find you?” he asked.

“Folly.”

“That would've been quite a row home, all right. You eat yet?”

“No,” Allen said, not sounding too certain. He was in his shirtsleeves, and Jerry thought he must be cold, even with the soft windless night.

“I made a pot of mac and cheese,” Jerry offered. Wordlessly, Allen flicked the burning cigarette stub into the water and walked toward the house. Jerry watched his brother's retreating figure and glanced up at the stars.
I wish I didn't feel like the parent here.

Although Jerry would not know it for some time, the day had been a turning point for his brother. Since Allen had left the house that morning, two things had shaken his world and stirred through the rubble, two events linked by the otherwise unimportant matter of a dead outboard motor. The events taken separately would have left no dent in the state he'd been in when he left the house that morning; following in such close succession, they set out the first steps of a path leading Allen Carmichael back to the realm of the living.

First of all, that was the day he rediscovered Sanctuary. This was a small, tree-covered, uninhabited island of about a hundred and fifty acres, the last of the San Juan chain before the Canadian border. The natives referred to it as Folly, after an idiosyncratic but long-derelict house that had once stood above its beach; the older Carmichaels tended to still call it Minke, its official name until Allen's grandfather sold it to a mainlander in the 1920s. Allen had forgotten all about the place until it rose up in front of the skiff's prow just past the end of San Juan; once he had steered the boat into the island's small cove—just about the only way onto the steep island—he cut the motor to gaze around him, wondering that anything once so important to him could possibly have slipped his mind. He and Jerry had practically lived out here as children, skinny-dipping, sunbathing, cooking hot dogs over driftwood campfires, staring up at the clouds and inventing elaborate ways of reestablishing Carmichael possession of the island. Sometimes they maneuvered to spend the night there, drinking cocoa under the stars and telling each other about the ghosts (here a faint memory of Vietnam passed over Allen's skin) that inhabited the weed-shrouded towers marking the demise of the house. Sometimes they had hiked the bald knob of mountain at the island's north end to survey the watery landscape that was their universe. And now, all those years later, Allen let the boat bump up to the narrow beach, not trusting the ancient dock, to splash ashore with the awe of a New World explorer.

He eyed the path that circled the overgrown remnants of the house and led to the island's heights, but he knew his legs would never make it all the way up and back. Instead, he set off along the more gentle path toward the island's once-magical warm springs. All the way there, following the rotting remains of the house's water system, he warned himself that things changed, that outsiders had no respect for one boy's memories, and he must brace himself to find the ugly hand of a vandal at the spring's perfection. But he was astonished to find the water serenely trickling down the rocks and through the summer-lush ferns to the crystal-clear pool. On a cooler morning, he thought, wisps of steam would still rise from the surface.

He followed the stream downhill until he reached the edge of the sheer drop-off, peering cautiously down at the tiny spit of beach and trees far below. As a boy he'd gotten up and down that rock face without too many problems; given his current state, he might make it down without breaking his neck, but he'd never manage the return climb. So he went back to the boat, yanked the reluctant motor into life, and chugged out of the cove and around the western shore of the island.

Allen's mother had died when he was fourteen and Jerry seven. For reasons Allen had never understood, their father had chosen to split the boys up, taking Allen south and leaving Jerry to join an aunt's household. But in the summers he'd allowed Allen to come back. During those idyllic two months, he and Jerry would sail all over the islands, ignoring the set boundaries to their explorations. At first they had been in one boat, but in later years they'd had two, and could race.

Then in the first week of the third such summer Jerry, eager to show his superior skills to his exiled older brother, stove in his hull on the treacherous shoals to the west of Folly. In the process of picking his ten-year-old brother off the rocks, Allen had glimpsed what looked like the entrance to a cave, returning to explore it a day or two later, when he was alone: He shared more with his little brother than most kids his age did, but that beckoning darkness in the rocks had all the earmarks of a private space. Besides, he hadn't wanted the blame when the headstrong kid disappeared into it.

The low cedar branches that had hidden the entrance from public view on his last visit here a decade earlier still did their job—and more, they would conceal a skiff as well. As he pulled the boat into the shallow pool under the branches, he remembered how low the entrance actually was—at high tide a person got soaked; at plus tides, a vigorous wave would brush the entrance roof. Right now the tide was maybe an hour from its highest point, but the hole in the rocks was in no danger of disappearing. He secured the boat to a branch and waded up to the hole between the rocks.

No graffiti, no sign of disturbance. And, damn it, no flashlight. Allen patted his pocket to check that his Zippo lighter was there, then dropped down on all fours in the water. To his satisfaction, the entrance had grown no smaller—even seemed less snug, which surprised him until he remembered himself at eighteen, the same six foot one that he was now but packing a lot more muscle. The length, rise, and twists of the passage were as his body recalled; when he felt the walls fall away, he got to his feet—gingerly, in case the roof had shrunk or grown lumps. When he was upright, he dug out the lighter and snapped it to life.

Exactly the same. It was as astounding as if his mother had appeared before him, still vibrant and thirty years old. None of the strewn garbage and condoms the island's beach had collected, no spray-painted declarations of love or possession, no smells even, other than sea and rock. After the huge turmoil of the years since he'd last stood here, to find this space timeless and unchanged was deeply disorienting.

By the pale flickering light, Allen picked his way over to the corner where the first cave ended and the next in the series of three began. The cave system reached into the island perhaps seventy yards altogether, and was dry except for the steady trickle of mineral-laden but drinkable water down one wall of the front cave. The air was cool but remarkably fresh, just as it had been all those years before.

It was almost as if the cave had waited for him to return, he thought, and smiled.

Still, he had to make certain that it was not a trap.

He ducked back through to the main cavern, walked to the middle of its uneven floor, and deliberately thumbed the cover down over the lighter's flame.

Darkness snapped down around him; Allen waited, his senses tingling with apprehension, waited for the crawl of danger up the curve of his spine, waited for the ghostly click of a safety being flipped on to fire or the quick
tink
of a grenade handle snapping open, for the jingle of dog tags or the growing conviction that a blade was closing in on the side of his throat, for the back-of-the-neck certainty that he stood in someone's crosshairs, that the impenetrable darkness was a jungle that nurtured a platoon of silent assassins. In a minute—less—the stones would begin to whisper like wind through rice, then suddenly ring with the ghost of an agonized shriek; when he snapped the lighter back into life, the childlike deRosa would be dangling before him, raw fingers reaching for his shed skin, and behind him a heap of dead and dying infants and a man with ice blue eyes . . .

And so Allen waited, for the faint rumor of the cavern's freshwater trickle to transmute into the sound of rustling cloth, for the rhythm of the waves outside the entrance to become the wind's susurration through elephant grass, for the air moving through his nostrils to stutter to a halt so his ears might strain to hear movement. He waited.

And sounds did emerge from the dark, but they were not those that he had dreaded. Standing blind with the cool air brushing his hair and the darkness pressing close against his skin, his ears began to shape the sounds of children. But the cries and voices his mind summoned were not the usual accompaniment to his nights, those choking screams and sobs of the dying. These ghostly voices were more like playground noises, nonsensical but clearly joyous rhythms: the shouts of a ball game, the cries of recess, the regulated chaos of games.

Allen waited, head down and listening intently. He stood in that position for a long time, but the sounds of the cave remained innocent, holding no menace, none at all. He sensed no VC lurking in unseen corners, no trip wires humming their siren song, calling for him to brush close. He stood unmoving in the dark belly of the island, listening to his own steady breath and the beating of his heart; as slow as the dawn, it gradually came to him that in this place, there would be no threat. Here, at long last, was one small corner of the earth that had never known VC.

He thumbed the Zippo alight, half expecting to see his cave transformed into an Aladdin's grotto of jewels and Oriental carpets. But no: only rock. He held his arm high and turned around, staring upward, like a somewhat tipsy Statue of Liberty welcoming himself to the promised land. He wanted to sing a new song, or to shout like a kid in a tunnel; instead he said aloud, “Open sesame,” then giggled at the intoxicating silliness of it.

Carpets wouldn't be a bad idea, he thought—or at any rate, a sleeping bag. With supplies, a person could take shelter here for some time. The world would never know.

He extinguished the light again and followed the daylight glow to the outer cave. At the small pool formed by the constant drip, he dropped to his knees and sank his hands into the silky water, feeling the texture, intensely aware of how cool it was. He raised a double handful to his face, bathing his skin from hairline to neck; dipped again, and drank. Then he got back to his feet and went over to the low, light-filled entrance, surprised that the sun was still out. He would not have been astonished to discover that it was the following day—or century, such had been the dreamlike quality of the cave. He crawled on hands and knees through the slick rocks toward daylight, noting as he passed that the tide had risen to its high mark and begun to retreat while he was inside. He squeezed through the final barrier, climbed to his feet under the protective cedar tree, and filled his lungs with the fragrant air. He felt ten feet tall and bursting with muscle. He felt like spreading his arms and shouting. He felt like a different person from the lost soul who'd crept between the rocks two hours before. He felt like . . .

He felt like talking to his brother.

Allen carried the cave with him as he loosed the skiff's tie and negotiated out from under the branches of the tree. The cave seemed to fill him, its hollow spaces expanding to take up all the edges of his person, leaving no room for the jagged emptiness of rage. And when the skiff's outboard spluttered and died as soon as he cleared Folly's cove, abandoning him to a whole lot of open water and an enthusiastic ebb tide, he could only laugh at the absurd melodrama of his dilemma. He was too taken up with the inner vision of all that rotund potential, and the absence of menace, and the echoes of playing children, to worry about the minor threat of being swept out to sea.

The approach of Ed De la Torre's
Orca Queen
seemed almost comically inevitable. And although her owner seemed to know who Allen Carmichael was—at any rate, Ed never inquired how to reach the skiff's home dock—at first sight Allen's rescuer did not make much of an impression on a mind still wrapped entirely around the spaces of the Sanctuary cave, merely: longhaired guy in an old boat with a sweet-sounding engine. Ed came alongside the skiff, where Allen was rowing just enough to ease his craft in the direction of the last solid ground before the Pacific Ocean, and asked if Allen might want a hand. In reply, Allen shipped his oars.

While Allen was drawing in the anchor he'd let out to slow his progress, Ed rearranged the cartons of toilet paper and peanut butter on the
Queen
's deck. He glanced at his soon-to-be-passenger, looking from him to the nylon line that ran off the back end of the trawler, then shrugged, stripped his jacket and shirt over his head, and reached down to haul in the wet thing at the end of the line. It was a weighted waterproof box, large enough to hold ten pounds of flour or any other substance that needed to stay dry, some substance that the boat's captain might find necessary to jettison with one quick flick of a knife. He set the box on the deck, then tossed its unoccupied line down to Allen.